Chapter Sixteen
THE city of the Engineers lay in ruins, but above it, fighting desperately,
battling valiantly to hold off the hordes of Hellhounds, the tiny remnant
of the Engineer battle fleet still stood between it and complete
destruction.
The proud towers were blasted into dust and the roadways and parks were
sifted with the white cloud of destruction, the powdered masonry smashed
and pulverized to drifting fragments by the disintegrator rays and the
atomic bombs. Twisted bits of wreckage littered the chaotic wastes of
shattered stone – wreckage of Engineer and Hellhound ships that had met in
the shock of battle and plunged in flaming ruin.
Gary glanced skyward anxiously. “I hope they can hold them off,” he said,
“long enough for the energy to build up.”
Caroline straightened from the bank of instruments mounted upon the roof
outside the laboratory.
“It’s building up fast,” she said. “I’m almost afraid. It might get out of
control, you know. But we have to have enough energy to start with. If the
first stroke doesn’t utterly destroy the Hellhounds, we won’t have a second
chance.”
Gary’s mind ran over the hectic days of work, the mad scramble against
time. He remembered once again how Kingsley and Tommy had gone out to the
edge of the universe to create a huge bubble of space-time, warping the rim
of space into a hump, curving the time-space continuum into a hypersphere
that finally closed and divorced itself from the parent body, pinching off
like a yeast bud to become an independent universe in the inter-space.
It had taken power to do that, a surging channel of energy that poured out
of the magnetic power transmitter, crossing space in a tight beam to be at
hand for the making of a new universe. But it had taken even more power to
“skin” a hypersphere, to turn it through a theoretical fifth dimension
until it was of the stuff that the inter-space was made of – a place where
time did not exist, a place whose laws were not the laws of the universe, a
mystery region that was astonishingly easy to maneuver through space once
it was created. It wasn’t a sphere or a hypersphere – it was a strange
dimension that apparently did not lend itself to measurement, or to
definition, or to identification by any of the normal senses of perception.
But whatever it was, it hung there above the city, although there was no
clue to its existence. It couldn’t be seen or sensed – just something that
had been created from equations supplied by the last man living out his
final days on a dying planet, equations that Caroline had scribbled on the
back of a crumpled envelope. An envelope, Gary remembered, that had carried
an irate letter from a creditor back on Earth who felt that be should have
long since been paid. “Too long overdue,” the letter had said. Gary
grinned, Back on Earth the creditor undoubtedly still was sending him
letters pointing out that the account was becoming longer overdue with the
passing of each month.
Outside the universe that tiny, created hypersphere was bumping along,
creating frictional stress, creating a condition for the creation of the
mysterious energy of eternity – an energy that even now was pouring into
the universe and being absorbed by the fifth-dimensional frame that poised
above the city.
A new, raw energy from a region that had no time, an energy that was at
once timeless and formless, but an energy that was capable of being
crystallized into any form.
Kingsley was standing beside Gary, his great head bent, staring upward. “An
energy field,” he said, “and what energy! Like a battery, storing up that
energy from interspace. I hope it does what Caroline thinks it will.”
“Don’t worry,” said Gary. “You saw the mathematics that she brought back.”
“Sure, I saw the mathematics,” Kingsley said, “but I couldn’t understand
them.”
He shook his head inside the helmet.
“What’s the universe coming to?” he asked.
Caroline spoke quietly to the Engineer.
“There’s plenty of energy now,” she said. “You may call them down.”
The Engineer, headphones clamped upon his skull, apparently was giving
orders to the Engineer fleet, but the Earthlings couldn’t catch his
thoughts.
“Watch now,” chirped Herb. “This is going to be a sight worth seeing.”
High above the city a ship dropped, flashing downward, like a silver
bullet. Another dropped and still another, until the entire Engineer fleet,
blackened and ripped and decimated, was in full retreat, flashing back
toward the ruined city. And in their wake came the triumphant Hellhounds, a
victorious pack in full cry, determined to wipe out the last trace of a
hated civilization.
The Engineer had snatched the headphones off, was racing to the set of
controls. Gary, glancing from the battle scene above, saw his metal fingers
reach out and manipulate controls, saw Caroline pick up an ordinary
flashlight.
He knew that the Engineer was shifting the fifth-dimensional mass into a
position between them and the screaming fleet of death above them, shifting
that field of terrible energy into the Hellhounds’ path.
The last of the Engineer fleet had reached the city, was shrieking down
between the shattered towers, as if fleeing for its very life.
And only a few miles above them, in what amounted to a mass formation, the
Hellhound fleet was plunging down, guns silent now, protective screens
still up, grim and ghastly ships running their quarry to the ground.
Gary’s body tensed as he saw Caroline’s arm swing up, clutching the tiny
flashlight, pointing it at the on-driving fleet.
He saw the flash of light burn upward, pale in the light of the sinking
suns – a tiny, feeble, ineffective beam of light stabbing at the oncoming
ships. Like taking a swipe at a grizzly bear with a pancake turner.
And then the heavens seemed to blaze with light and a streamer of
blue-white intensity whipped out toward the ships. Protective screens
flared briefly and then exploded into a million flashing sparks. For the
space of one split second, before he could get his hand up to shield his
eyes against the inferno in the sky, Gary saw the gaunt black skeletons of
the Hellhound ships, writhing and disappearing in the surging blast of
energy that tore at them and twisted them and finally, in the snapping of
one’s finger, utterly destroyed them.
The sky was empty, as empty as if there had never been a Hellhound ship.
There was no sign of the fifth-dimensional mass, no hint of ship or gun –
just the blue of the sky, ashing into violet as the three suns swung below
the far-off horizon.
“Well,” said Herb, and Gary could hear his voice sobbing with excitement,
“that’s the end of the Hellhounds.”
Yes, that was the end of the Hellhounds, thought Gary. There was nothing in
the universe that could stand before such a blast of energy. When the
light, the tiny, feeble beam from the ridiculous little flash had struck
the energy field, the energy, that timeless, formless stuff, had suddenly
crystallized, had taken on the form of the energy that it had encountered.
And in a burst of light it had struck at the Hellhounds, struck with
terrible effectiveness – with entire lack of mercy, had wiped them out in
the winking of one’s eye.
He tried to imagine that blast of light moving out into the universe. It
would travel for years, would flash its merciless way for many thousands of
light-years. In time its energy would wane, would slowly dissipate, would
lose some of its power in the vast spaces of intergalactic space. And
perhaps the day would come when all its energy would be gone. But meanwhile
nothing could stand in its way, nothing could resist it. In years to come
great suns might explode into invisible gas as the frightful beam of power
reached them and annihilated them and then passed on. And some astronomer,
catching the phenomena in his lens, would speculate upon just what had
happened.
He turned slowly around and faced Caroline. “How does it feel,” he asked,
“to win a war?”
The face she turned to him was strained and worn. “Don’t say that to me,”
she said. “I had to do it. They were a terrible race, but they were alive –
and there is so little life in this universe.”
“You need some sleep,” he said.
He saw the tragic lines of her mouth.
“There is no sleep,” she said. “No rest at all. We have just started. We
have to save the universe. We have to create more and more of the
fifth-dimensional frameworks, many of them and larger. To absorb the energy
when the universes meet.”
Gary started. He had forgotten the approaching universe. So absorbed had
they become in ending the Hellhound attack that the edge of the real and
greater danger had been dulled.
But now, brought back to it, he realized the job they faced.