‘Certainly,’ Belle put in. ‘We Galaxians are doing it, not your government or your Secret Service. We’ll start you clean – but it’ll be up to you to keep it clean, and that will be no easy job.’
‘No, it won’t; but we’ll do it. Come around again, say in five or six years, and see.’
‘You know, I might take you up on that? Maybe not this same team, but I’ve got a notion to tape a recommendation for a re-visit, just to see how you get along. It’d be interesting.’
‘I wish you could. It might help, too, if everybody thought you’d come back to check. Suppose you could?’
‘I’ve no idea, really. I’d like to, though, and I’ll see what I can do. But let’s get on with the job. They’re all in what you
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call the “tank” now. Which one do you want next?’
The work went on. That evening there was of course a
reception; and then a ball. And Belle’s feet did hurt when she
got back to the Pleiades, but of course she would not admit the
fact – most especially not to Garlock.
Exactly at the expiration of the stipulated seventy-two
hours, the Galaxians began to destroy military atomic plants;
and, shortly thereafter, the starship’s crew was again ready to
go.
And James rammed home the red button that would send them – all four wondered – WHERE?
It turned out to be another Hodell-type world; and, even with the high-speed comparator, it took longer to check the charts than it did to make them.
The next planet was similar. So was the next, and the next. The time required for checking grew longer and longer.
‘How about cutting out this checking entirely, Clee?’ James asked then. ‘What good does it do? Even if we find a similarity, what would we do about it? We’ve got enough stuff now to keep a crew of astronomers busy for five years making a tank of it.’
‘Okay. We’re probably so far away now, anyway, that the chance of finding a similarity is vanishingly small. Keep on taking the shots, though; they’ll prove, I think, that the universe is one whole hell of a lot bigger than anybody has ever though it was. That reminds me — are you getting anywhere on that N-problem? I’m not.’
‘I’m getting nowhere, fast. You should have been a math prof in a grad school, Clee. You could flunk every advanced student you had with that one. Belle and I together can’t feed it to Compy in such shape as to get a definite answer. We think, though, that your guess was right – if we ever stabilize anywhere it will probably be relative to Hodell, not to Tellus. But the cold fact of how far away we must be by this time just scares me to death.’
‘You and me both. We’re a long way from home and mother, believe me.’
Jumping went on; and, two or three planets later, they encountered an Arpalone Inspector who did not test them for
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compatibility with the humanity of his world.
‘Do not land,’ the creature said mournfully. ‘This world is dying, and if you leave the protection of your ship, you too will die.’
‘But worlds don’t die,’ Garlock protested. ‘People, yes – but worlds?’
‘Worlds die. It is the Dilipic. The humans die, too, of course, but it is the world itself that is attacked, not the people. Some of them, in fact, will live through it.’
Garlock drove his attention downward and scanned.
‘You Arpalones are doing what looks like a mighty good job of righting. Can’t you win?’
‘No; it is too late. It was already too late when they first appeared, two days ago. When the Dilipics strike in such small force that none of their – agents? devices? – whatever they are – can land against our beaming, a world can be saved; but such cases are very few.’
‘But this thought, “Dilipic”?’ Garlock, asked, impatiently. ‘It is merely a symbol – it doesn’t mean anything – to me, at least. What are they? Where do they come from?’
‘No one knows anything about them, not even their physical shape – if they have any. Nor where they come from, or how they do what they do.’
‘They can’t be very common,’ Garlock pondered. ‘We have never heard of them before.’
‘Fortunately, they are not,’ the Inspector agreed. ‘Scarcely one world in five hundred is every attacked by them – this is the first Dilipic invasion I have seen.’
‘Oh, you Arpalones don’t die with your worlds, then?’ Lola asked. She was badly shaken. ‘But I suppose the Arpales do, of course.’
‘Practically all of the Arpales will die, of course. Most of us Arpalones will also die, in the battles now going on. Those of us who survive, however, will stay aloft until the rehabilitation fleet arrives, then we will continue our regular work.’
‘Rehab?’ Belle exclaimed. ‘You mean you can restore planets so badly ruined that all the people die?’
‘Oh, yes. It is a long and difficult work, but the planet is always repeopled.’
‘Let’s go down,’ Garlock said. ‘I want to get all of this on
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tape.’
They went down, over what had been one of that world’s largest cities. The air, the stratosphere, and all nearby space was full of battling vessels of all shapes and sizes, ranging from the tremendous globular spaceships of the invaders down to the tiny, one-man jet-fighters of the Arpalones.
The Dilipics were using projectile weapons only – ranging in size, depending on the size of the vessels, from heavy machine-guns up to seventy-five-millimeter quick-firing rifles. They were also launching thousands of guided missiles of fantastic speed and of tremendous explosive power.
The Arpalones were not using anything solid at all. Each defending vessel, depending upon its type and class, carried from four up to a hundred burnished-metal reflectors some four feet in diameter, each with a small black device at its optical center and each pouring out a tight beam of highly effective energy. It was at these reflectors, and particularly at these tiny devices that the small-arms fire was directed, and the marksmanship of the Dilipics was very good indeed. However, each projector was oscillating irregularly and each fighter-plane was taking evasive action; and, since a few bullet-holes in any reflector did not reduce its efficiency very much, and since the central mechanisms were so small and were moving so erratically, a good three-quarters of the Arpalonian beams were still in action.
There was no doubt at all that those beams were highly effective. Invisible for the most part, whenever one struck a Dilipic ship or plane everything in its path flared almost instantly into vapor and the beam glared incandescently, blind-ingly white or violet or high blue – never anything lower than blue. Almost everything material, that is; for guns ammunition, and missiles were not affected. They did not even explode. When whatever fabric it was that supported them was blasted away, all such things simply dropped: simply fell through thousands or hundreds of thousands of feet of air to crash unheeded upon whatever happened to be below.
The invading task force was arranged in a whirling, swirling, almost cylindrical cone, more or less like an Earthly tornado. The largest vessels were high above the stratosphere; the smallest fighters were close to ground. Each Dilipic unit seemed
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madly, suicidally determined that nothing would get through that furious wall to interfere with whatever it was that was coming down from space to the ground through the relatively quiet ‘eye’ of the pseudo-hurricane.
On the other hand, the Arpalones were madly, suicidally determined to break through that vortex wall, to get into the ‘eye’, to wreak all possible damage there. Group after group after group of five jet-fighters each came diving in; and, occasionally, the combined blasts of all five made enough of an opening in the wall so that the center fighter could get through. Once inside, each pilot stood his little, stubby-winged craft squarely on her tail, opened his projectors to absolute maximum of power and of spread, and climbed straight up the spout until he was shot down.
And the Arpalones were winning the battle. Larger and larger gaps were being opened in the vortex wall – gaps which became increasingly difficult for the Dilipics to fill. More and more Arpalone fighters were getting inside. They were lasting longer and doing more damage all the time. The tube was growing narrower and narrower.
The four Galaxians perceived all this in seconds. Garlock weighed out and detonated a terrific matter-conversion bomb in the exact center of one of the largest vessels of the attacking fleet. It had no effect. Then he tried a larger one – then another, still heavier. Finally, at over a hundred megatons equivalent, he did get results – of a sort. The invaders’ guns, ammunition, and missiles were blown out of the ship and scattered upward for miles in all directions; but the structure of the Dilipic ship itself was not harmed.