they waste on us the quicker we can take them; but I don’t want much more of that
beam, I’ll tell the world—I just about had heart failure before they cut off!”
The massive heptagon was now drifting back toward Jupiter at constant velocity.
The hexans were apparently hoarding jealously their remaining power, for their wall
screens did not flash on at the touch of the visiray. Through unresisting metal the
probing Terrestrial beams sped, and the scientists studied minutely every detail of the
Vorkulian
armament; while the regular observers began to make a detailed photographic
survey of every room and compartment of the great fortress. Much of the
instrumentation and machinery was familiar, but some of it was so strange that study
was useless—days of personal inspection and experiment, perhaps complete
dismantling, would be necessary to reveal the secrets hidden within those peculiar
mechanisms.
“They’re trying to save all the power they can—think I’ll make them spend some
more,” Brandon remarked, and directed against the heptagon a heavy destructive
beam. “We don’t want them to get back to Jupiter until after we’ve boarded them and
found out everything we want to know. Come here, Quince—what do you make of this
?”
Both men stared at the heptagon, frankly puzzled; for the screens of the strange
vessel did not radiate, nor did the material of the walls yield under the terrible force of
the beam. The destructive ray simply struck that dull green surface and
vanished—disappeared without a trace, as a tiny stream of water disappears into a
partially-soaked sponge.
“Do you know what you are doing?” asked Westfall, after a few minutes’ thought.
“I believe that you are charging their accumulators at the rate of,” he glanced at a meter,
“exactly thirty one thousand five hundred kilofranks.”
“Great Cat!” Brandon’s hand flashed to a switch and the beam expired. “But they
can’t just simply grab it and store it, Quince—it’s impossible!”
“The word ‘impossible’ in that connection, coming from you, has a queer sound,”
Westfall said, pointedly, and Brandon actually blushed.
“That’s right, too—we have got pretty much the same idea in our cosmic intake
fields, but we didn’t carry things as far as they have done. Huh! They’re flashing us
again . . . but those thin little beams don’t mean anything. They’re just trying to make us
feed them some more, I guess. But we’ve got to hold them back some way—wonder if
they can absorb a tractor field?”
The hexans had lashed out a few times with their lighter weapons, but, finding
the Sirius unresponsive, had soon shut them off and were stolidly plunging along toward
Jupiter. Brandon flung out a tractor rod and threw the mass of his cruiser upon it as it
locked into those sullen green walls. But. as soon as the enemy felt its drag their
screens flared white, and the massive Terrestrial space-ship quivered in every member
as that terrific cable of force was snapped.
“They apparently cannot store up the energy of a tractor,” commented Westfall,
“but you will observe that they have no difficulty in radiating when they care to.”
“Yeah, those two ideas didn’t pan out so heavy. There’s lots of things not tried
yet, though. Our next best bet is to get around in front of him and push back. If they can
wiggle away from more than fifty percent of a pressor, they’re really good.”
The pilot maneuvered the Sirius into line, directly between Jupiter and the
pentagon; and as the driving projectors went into action Brandon drove a mighty
pressor field along their axis, squarely into the center of mass of the Vorkulian fortress.
For a moment it held solidly, then, as the screens of the enemy went into action, it
rebounded and glanced off in sparkling, cascading torrents. But the hexans, with all
their twisting and turning, could not present to that prodigious beam of force any angle
sufficiently obtuse to rob it of half its power, and the driving projectors of the pentagon
again burst into activity as the backward-pushing mass of the Sirius made itself felt. In a
short time, however, the wall-screens were again cut off—apparently more power was
required to drive them than they were able to deflect.
Although even the enormous tonnage of the Terrestrial cruiser was insignificant
in comparison with the veritable mountain of metal to which she was opposed, so that
the fiercest thrust of her driving projectors did not greatly affect the monster’s progress;
yet Brandon and his cohorts were well content.
“It’s a long trip back to where they came from, and since they wanted to drift all
the way, I think they’ll be out of power before they get there,” Brandon summed up the
situation. “We aren’t losing any power, either, since we are using only a part of our
cosmic intake.”
In a few hours the struggle had settled down to a routine matter—the Sirius being
pushed backward steadily against the full drive of her every projector, contesting
stubbornly every mile of space traversed. Assured that the regular pilots and lookouts
were fully capable of handling the vessel, the scientists were about to resume their
interrupted tasks when one of the photographers called them over to look at something
he had discovered in one of the lowermost and smallest compartments of the heptagon.
They crowded around the screens, and saw pictured there the winged, snake-like form
of one of the original crew of the Vorkulian vessel!
“Dead?” Brandon asked.
“Not yet,” replied the photographer. “He is twitching a little once in a while, but
you see he’s pretty badly cut up.”
“I see he is . . . he must have a lot of vitality to have lasted this long—maybe he’ll
live through it yet. Hold him on the plate, and get his exact measurements.” He turned to
the communicator. “Doctor von Steiffel? Can you come down to the control room a
minute ? We may want you to operate upon one of these South Jovians after while.”
“Himmel! Es ist der . . .” The great surgeon, bearded and massive, stared into the
plate, and in his surprise started to speak in his native German. He paused, his long,
powerful fingers tracing the likeness of the Vorkul upon the plate, then went on: “I would
like very much to operate, but, not understanding our intentions, he would of course
struggle. And when that body struggles — schrecklichkeit!” and he waved his arms in a
pantomime of wholesale destruction.
“I thought of that—that’s why I am talking to you now instead of when we get to
him, two or three days from now. We’ll give you his exact measurements, and a crew of
mechanics will, under your direction, sink holes in the steel floor and install steel bands
heavy enough to hold him rigid, from tail-fins to wing-tips. We’ll hold him there until we
can make him understand that we’re friends. It is of the utmost importance to save that
creature’s life if possible; because we do not want one of their fortresses launched
against us— and in any event, it will not do us any harm to have a friend in the City of
the South.”
“Right. I will also have prepared some kind of a space-suit in which he can be
brought from his vessel to ours,” and the surgeon took the measurements and went to
see that the “operating table” and suit were made ready for Kromodeor, the sorely
wounded Vorkul.
It was not long until the projectors of the heptagon went out and she lay inert in
space, power completely exhausted. Knowing that the screens of the enemy would
absorb any ordinary ray, the scientists had calculated the most condensed beam they
could possibly project, a beam which, their figures showed, should be able to puncture
those screens by sheer mass action — puncture them practically instantaneously,
before the absorbers could react. To that end they had arranged their circuits to hurl
seven hundred sixty five thousand kilofranks—the entire power of their massed
accumulators and their highest possible cosmic intake—in one tiny bar of superlative
density, less than one meter in diameter! Everything ready, Brandon shot in the
prodigious switches that launched that bolt—a bolt so vehement, so inconceivably
intense that it seemed fairly to blast the very ether out of existence as it tore its way
along its carefully predetermined line. The intention was to destroy all the control panels
of the absorber screens; parts so vital that without them the great vessel would be
helpless, and yet items which the Terrestrials could reconstruct quite readily from their
photographs and drawings.
As that irresistible bolt touched the Vorkulian wall-screen the spot of contact
flared instantaneously through the spectrum and into the black beyond the violet as that
screen overloaded locally. Fast as it responded and highly conductive though it was, it
could not handle that frightfully concentrated load. In the same fleeting instant of time
every molecule of substance in that beam’s path flashed into tenuous vapor — no