one, but they did not climb very high. Under that terrific tonnage the blocking trucks were
crushed flat; the steel of their structures and the concrete and stone of their loads
subsided noisily to form a compacted mass only a few feet thick.
Guns of all calibers yammered and thundered, but there was nothing to shoot at except
blankly invulnerable expanses of immensely thick high-alloy armor-plate.
Flames-throwers, flammable gels, and incendiaries were of no avail. Inside those
monstrosities there was nothing of life, nor anything to be harmed by any ordinary heat.
Nor did those monstrous tanks fight back-then. Gate Twelve was narrower than the
avenue; its anchorages were eight-foot-square pillars of reenforced concrete.
Nevertheless the two super-tanks did not slow down; and, after they had passed, the
places where those hugely massive abutments had been were scarcely to be
distinguished from the rest of the scarred and beaten way.
Suddenly there was a terrific explosion, followed by horizontal sheets of fiercely-driven
pulverized pavement and soil. Then another, and fifteen more. But not even the heaviest
mines could stop those land-going superdreadnoughts. They wallowed a little in the
craters, but that was all. They were simply too big and too heavy and too stable to lift or
to tip over; their belly armor was twelve inches thick and was buttressed and braced
internally to withstand anything short of atomic energy. Nor could their treads be blown;
since all that was exposed to blast were their stubby, sharply pyramidal, immensely
strong driving teeth.
Along Way Twelve the strike-breakers rumbled, and up to GalMet’s subspacer Cygnus.
They stopped. A GalMet copper began to descend, to pick up its load of copper. There
was a blast of anti-aircraft fire. The copper disintegrated in air.
This time, however, GalMet struck back. Gun-ports snapped open along the nearer
behemoth’s grim side and a dozen one-hundred-five-millimeter shells lobbed in high arcs
across the few hundreds of yards of intervening distance. They exploded, and a few
parts recognizable as arms, legs, and heads, together with uncountable grisly scraps of
flesh and bone, were mingled with the shattered remains of the anti-aircraft battery.
That ended it.
In Maynard’s conference room this time there were, in addition to the GalMet men,
Lansing and DuPuy of Warner Oil, Hatfield and Spehn of Interstellar, and seven other
men. With Grimes and his minions, were, as before, Deissner and Wilson of WestHem.
Secretary of Labor Deissner looked once at the fourteen men seated at Maynard’s table
and his ruddy complexion paled.
“Have you had enough, Grimes, or do you want to go the route?” Maynard asked. “You
may be able to hold your Drivers after this one beating, but one more will plow you
under.”
“You’re murderers now and you’ll hang!” Grimes snarled.
“What will you use for law, fat-head?”
“To hell with law. I’ve got WestHem’s law in my pants pocket and you’ll hang higher than .
. .”
“Close your fat mouth, Tony,” Deissner said, bruskly. “With WarnOil, InStell, and all the
labor of the outplanets in on this, it may be a little . . .” He paused.
“You’re wrong, Deissner, it’ll be much worse,” Smith sneered. “Your computations will all
have to be recomputed.”
After a short silence Maynard said, “Mr. Secretary; besides Warn Oil and InStell, I see
that you recognize the presidents of the seven largest organizations of the Planetsmen.
Mr. Bryce, President of the Metalsmen, has something to say.”
And fiery little Bryce said it. “This Committee of Seven, of which I am the chairman,
represents the Planetsmen, the organized production and service personnel of the ninety
five planets of the Galactic Federation. Our present trip has two purposes. First, here on
Galmetia, to tell you Tellurians that the organized personnel of the planets-not the
nut-planets, you will note, but the planets-will not support the purely Tellurian institution of
serf labor. We do no featherbedding and we will not support the practice anywhere. We
welcome any innovation that will produce more goods or services at lower cost by using
our brains more and our muscles less.
“Our second objective is to let the people of Tellus know that there is plenty of room on
the planets for any of them who want to advance by using their brains and their abilities
instead of being coddled, protected, and imprisoned from the cradle to the grave.”
There was a moment of tense silence; then Maynard said, “That was very well put,
Egbert; thanks. Now, Grimes, as to your having WestHem s law in your pants pocket.
You haven’t, but the hoodlums, gangsters, and racketeers who are your bosses do have
it in theirs. We Galaxians-the combined personnel and capital of the planets-know exactly
what WestHem’s law is: a hood-bossed, hood-riddled mob of abysmally corrupt snolly-
gosters. We also know that static, greedy capital is as bad as-yes, even worse than-serf
labor. Therefore we Galaxians have formed a new government, the Galactic Federation;
that, among other things, will not-I repeat, NOT -permit any spiral of inflation.”
But some inflation is now necessary!” Deissner protested.
“It is not. We’re not asking you; we’re telling you. If you do not stabilize the dollar we will
stabilize it for you.” “Delusions of grandeur, eh? How do you think you can?”
“By isolating Earth until the resulting panic puts the dollar back where it belongs. Earth
can’t stand a blockade. The planets can, and would much rather have a complete
severance from Earth than have a dollar that will not mail a letter from one town to the
next. Hence we of the Galactic Federation hereby serve notice upon the governments
and upon the peoples of Earth: it will be either a stable dollar or a strict blockade of
every item of commerce except food. Take your choice.”
“Serve notice!” Deissner gasped. “Surely you don’t mean … you can’t possibly mean . . .”
“We do mean. Just that.” Maynard smiled; a thin, cold smile. “This has not been a secret
meeting. You tell ’em, Steve.”
And Stevens Spehn, Executive Vice-President of vast Interstellar, told them. “This whole
conference has been on every channel, line, wavelength and station that InStell
operates-ether and subether, radio and teevee, tri-di and flat, in black-and-white and in
color.” And Miss Champion flipped her switch.
Chapter 9
RHENIA FOUR
Far out in deep space although the Procyon was, her communications officers monitored
all four of the most important channels, and everything that came in on “I-S One” was
taped off. Thus, even though the “Battle of New York Spaceport” and the conference that
followed it took place in the middle of the starship’s “night”, both were played in full on
the regular morning news program. So was one solid hour of bi-partisan and extremely
heated discussion by the big-name commentators of Earth.
To say that this news created a sensation is the understatement of the month. Nor was
sentiment entirely in favor of GalMet, even though all the men aboard except Deston, and
many of the women, were salaried employees and the whole expedition was on
MetEngeDesDes business.
“Shocking!” “Outrageous!” “Cold-blooded murder!” “Who murdered first?” “Land-mines,
Seventy fives, and Bofors!” “Shot down the copter and killed everybody aboard!”
“But they should have settled the strike!” “GalMet was utterly lawless!”
“I suppose it’s lawful to use land-mines and antiaircraft guns and make a full-war-scale
battlefield inside New York City?”
And so on.
The top echelon was, of course, solidly in favor of Maynard, and Captain Jones summed
up their attitude very neatly when he said, “What the hoodlums are bellyaching about is
that they were out-guessed, out-thunk, and outgunned in the ratio of a hundred and five
millimeters to seventy five.”
“But listen,” Bernice said. “Do you think, Babe, that there were any men aboard that
copper?”
“One gets you a thousand there weren’t. Maynard didn’t say there were any.”
“He didn’t say there weren’t any, either,” Barbara argued, “like he did for the tanks. What
makes you so sure?”
“He knew what was going to happen-he let them think it was manned, probably as a
deterrent-so you can paste it in your Easter bonnet, pet, that the only brains aboard that
copper were tapes.”
Time wore on; the strife on Earth, which did not flare into the news again, was just about
forgotten. Deston found several enormous deposits of copper. He found all the other
most-wanted metals except rhenium in quantity sufficient to supply even the most
extravagant demand. But of rhenium he still found only insignificant traces.
Each tremendous deposit of metal had been reported as soon as it was found. Crew
after crew had been sent out. Plant after plant had been built; each one of which would
be not only immensely profitable, but also of inestimable benefit to humanity as a whole,
since all those highly important metals would soon be on the market at a mere fraction of
their former high prices.
Still rhenium did not appear. “I don’t believe there is any such damn thing, anywhere in