she was invulnerable to any one ship of the Fleet as long as her generators could be fed.
Nevertheless” Captain Malcolm was well content. He was making the Dresden burn plenty of irreplaceable fuel,
and his generators and projectors would last long enough. His ship, his men, and his weapons could and would carry
the load until the fresh attackers should take it over; and carry it they did. Carried it while Stone and his over-driven
crew finished their complicated mechanisms and flew out into space toward the eleven nearest battleships of the
Fleet.
They carried it while the computers, grim-faced and scowling now, jotted down from minute to minute the
enormous and rapidly-increasing figure representing their radial velocity. Carried it while Earth’s immense armada,
manned by creatures incapable of even the simplest coherent thought or purposeful notion, plunged sickeningly
downward in its madly hopeless fall, with scarcely a measurable trace of tangential velocity, toward the unimag-
inable inferno of the sun.
Eventually, however the shielded lifeboats approached their objectives and expanded their screens to enclose them.
Officers recovered, airlocks opened, and the lifeboats, still radiating protection, were taken inside. Explanations
were made, orders were given, and one by one the eleven vengeful super-dreadnoughts shot away to join the
flagship in abating the Menace of the Machine.
No conceivable structure, however armed or powered, could long withstand the fury of the combined assault of
twelve such superb battle craft, and under that awful concentration of force the screens of the doomed ship
radiated higher and higher into the ultra-violet, went black, and failed. And, those mighty defenses down, the end
was practically instantaneous.
No unprotected metal can endure even momentarily the ardor of such beams, and they played on, not only until
every plate and girder of the vessel and every nut, bolt, and rivet of its monstrous crew had been blasted out of all
semblance to what it had once been, but until every fragment of metal had not only been liquefied, but had been
completely volatilized.
At the instant of cessation of the brain-scrambling activities of the automatons the Communications Officer had
begun an insistent broadcast. Aboard all of the ships there were many who did not recover-who would be helpless
imbeciles during the short period of life left to them but soon an intelligent officer was at every control and each
unit of the Terrestrial Contingent was exerting its maximum thrust at a right angle to its line of fall.
And now the burden was shifted from the fighting staff to the no less able engineers and computers. To the engi-
neers the task of keeping their mighty engines in such tune as to maintain constantly the peak acceleration of three
Earth gravities; to the computers that of so directing their ever-changing course as to win every possible centi-
meter of precious tangential velocity.
Chapter IV
The Sun’s Gravity
Ferdinand Stone was hollow-eyed and gaunt from his practically sleepless days and nights of toil, but he was as
grimly resolute as ever. Struggling against the terrific weight of three gravities he made his way to the desk of the
Chief Computer and waited while that worthy, whose leaden hands could scarcely manipulate the instruments of his
profession, finished his seemingly endless calculations.
“We will escape the sun’s mighty attraction, Doctor Stone, with approximately half a gravity to spare,” the
mathematician reported finally. “Whether we will be alive or not is another question. There will be heat, which our
refrigerators may or may not be able to handle; there will be radiations which our armor may or may not be able to
stop. You, of course, know a lot more about those things than I do.”
“Distance at closest approach?” snapped Stone.
“Two point twenty-nine times ten to the ninth meters from the sun’s center,” the computer shot back instantly. “That
is, one million five hundred ninety thousand kilometers-only two point twenty-seven radii-from the arbitrary
surface. What do you think of our chances, sir?”
“It will probably be a near thing-very near,” the physicist replied, thoughtfully. “Much, however, can be done. We
can probably tune our defensive screens to block most of the harmful radiations, and we may be able to muster
other defenses. I will analyze the radiations and see what we can do about neutralizing them.”
“You will go to bed,” directed Martin, crisply. “There will be lots of time for that work after you get rested up. The
doctors have been reporting that the men who did not recover from. the robots’ broadcast are dying under this
acceleration. With those facts staring us in the face, however, I do not see how we can reduce our power.”
“We can’t. As it is, many more of us will probably die before we get away from the sun,” and Stone staggered away,
practically asleep on his feet.
Day after day the frightful fall continued. The sun grew larger and larger, more and ever more menacingly intense.
One by one at first, and then by scores, the mindless men of the Fleet died and were consigned to space-a man
must be in full control of all his faculties to survive for long an acceleration of three gravities.
The generators of the defensive screens had early been tuned to neutralize as much as possible of Old Sol’s most
fervently harmful frequencies, and but for their mighty shields every man of the Fleet would have perished long
since. Now even those ultra-powerful guards were proving inadequate.
Refrigerators were running at the highest possible overload and the men, pressing as closely as possible to the dark
sides of their vessels, were availing themselves of such extra protection of lead shields and the like as could be
improvised from whatever material was at hand.
Yet the already stifling air became hotter and hotter, eyes began to ache and burn, skins blistered and cracked under
the punishing impact of forces which all the defenses could not block. But at last came the long-awaited an-
nouncement.
“Pilots and watch-officers of all ships, attention!” the Chief Computer spoke into his microphone through parched
and blackened lips. “We are now at the point of tangency.
The gravity of the sun here is twenty-four point five meters per second squared. Since we are blasting twenty-nine
point four we are beginning to pull away at an acceleration of four point nine. Until further notice keep your
pointers directly away from. the sun’s center, in the plane of the Ecliptic.”
The sun was now in no sense the orb of day with which we upon Earth’s green surface are familiar. It was a gigantic
globe of turbulently seething flame, subtending an angle of almost thirty-five degrees, blotting out a full fourth of
the cone of normally distinct vision.
Sunspots were plainly to be seen; combinations of indescribably violent cyclonic storms and volcanic eruptions in
a gaseously liquid medium of searing, eye-tearing incandescence. And everywhere, threatening at times even to
reach the fiercely-struggling ships of space, were the solar prominences-fiendish javelins of frenziedly frantic
destruction, hurling themselves in wild abandon out into the empty reaches of the void.
Eyes behind almost opaque lead-glass goggles, head and body encased in a multi-layered suit each ply of which was
copiously smeared with thick lead paint, Stone studied the raging monster of the heavens from the closest
viewpoint any human being had ever attained-and lived. Even he, protected as he was, could peer but briefly; and,
master physicist though he was and astronomer-of-sorts, yet he was profoundly awed at the spectacle.
Twice that terrifying mass was circled. Then, air-temperature again bearable and lethal radiations stopped, the
grueling acceleration was reduced to a heavenly one-and-one-half gravities and the vast fleet remade its formation.
The automatons and the sun between them had taken heavy toll; but the gaps were filled, men were transferred to
equalize the losses of personnel, and the course was laid for distant Earth. And in the Admiral’s private quarters two
men sat together and stared at each other.
“Well, that’s that-so far, so good,” the physicist broke the long silence.
“But is their power really broken?”, asked Martin” anxiously.
“I don’t know”” Stone grunted, dourly. “But the pick of them-the brainiest of the lot-were undoubtedly here. We beat
them. . . .
Martin interrupted.
“You beat them, you mean,” he said.
“With a lot of absolutely indispensable help from you and your force. But have it your own way-what do words
matter? I beat them, then; and in the same sense I can beat the rest of them if we play our cards exactly right.”
“In what way?”
“In keeping me entirely out of the picture. Believe me, Martin, it is of the essence that all of your officers who
know what happened be sworn to silence and that not a word about me leaks out to anybody. Put out any story you
please except the truth-mention the name of anybody or anything between here and Andromeda except me.
Promise me now that you will not let my name get out until I give you permission or until after I am dead.”