The Space Opera Megapack

by John W. Campbell

  “This is an outrage!” he bellowed, hammering with his fist on Avengord’s desk. “A stupid, high-handed violation of the rights.…”

  Belle silenced him and straightened him up.

  “High-handed? Yes,” she admitted quite seriously. “However, from the Galaxian standpoint, you have no rights at all and you are going to be extremely surprised at just how high-handed I am going to be. I am going to read your mind to its very bottom—layer by layer, like peeling an onion—and everything you know and everything you think is going down in Mr. Avengord’s Big Black Book.”

  Belle linked all four minds together and directed the search, making sure that no item, however small, was missed. Avengord recorded every pertinent item. Fram Kimling memorized and correlated and double-checked.

  Soon it was done, and Basil, shouting even louder about this last and worst violation of his rights—those of his own private mind—was led away by two men and “put away where he would keep.”

  “But this is a flagrant violation of law.…” Miss Kimling began.

  “You can say that again!” her boss gloated. “And if you only knew how tickled I am to do it, after the way they’ve been kicking me around!

  “But I wonder…are you sure we can get away with it?”

  “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 would. 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 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 could 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 probably are 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 thought 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 the pants off of me.”

  “You and me both, my ripe and old. We’re a long ways from home.”

  * * * *

  Jumping went on; and, two or three planets later, they encountered an Arpalone Inspector who did not test them for 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, surely?” 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 fighting. 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,” came the surprising answer. “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 ever 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 re-peopled.”

  “Let’s go down,” Garlock said. “I want to get all of this on tape.”

  They went down, over what had been one of that world’s largest cities. The air, the stratosphere, and all nearby space were 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, with 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 or so 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, blindingly 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 fab
ric 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 hedge-hoppingly close to ground. Each Dilipic unit seemed 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—along?—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 driving in; and, occasionally, the combined blasts of all five made enough of 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 it 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.

  All 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 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 outward for miles in all directions; but the structure of the Dilipic ship itself was not harmed.

  Belle had been studying, analyzing, probing the things that were coming down through that hellish tube.

  “Clee!” She drove a thought. “Cut out the monkey-business with those damn firecrackers of yours and look here—pure, solid force, like ball lightning or our Op field, but entirely different—see if you can analyze the stuff!”

  “Alive?” Garlock asked, as he drove a probe into one of the things—they were furiously-radiating spheres some seven feet in diameter—and began to tune to it.

  “I don’t know—don’t think so—if they are, they’re a form of life that no sane human being could even imagine!”

  “Let’s see what they actually do,” Garlock suggested, still trying to tune in with the thing, whatever it was, and still following it down.

  This particular force-ball happened to hit the top of a six-story building. It was not going very fast—fifteen or twenty miles an hour—but when it struck the roof it did not even slow down. Without any effort at all, apparently, it continued downward through the concrete and steel and glass of the building; and everything in its path became monstrously, sickeningly, revoltingly changed.

  “I simply can’t stand any more of this,” Lola gasped. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to my room, set all the Gunther blocks it has, and bury my head under a pillow.”

  “Go ahead, Brownie,” James said. “This is too tough for anybody to watch. I’d do the same, except I’ve got to run these cameras.”

  Lola disappeared.

  * * * *

  Garlock and Belle kept on studying. Neither had paid any attention at all to either Lola or James.

  Instead of the structural material it had once been, the bore that the thing had traversed was now full of a sparkling, bubbling, writhing, partly-fluid-partly-viscous, obscenely repulsive mass of something unknown and unknowable on Earth; a something which, Garlock now recalled, had been thought of by the Arpalone Inspector as “golop.”

  As that unstoppable globe descended through office after office, it neither sought out people nor avoided them. Walls, doors, windows, ceilings, floors and rugs, office furniture and office personnel; all alike were absorbed into and made a part of that indescribably horrid brew.

  Nor did the track of that hellishly wanton globe remain a bore. Instead, it spread. That devil’s brew ate into and dissolved everything it touched like a stream of boiling water being poured into a loosely-heaped pile of granulated sugar. By the time the ravening sphere had reached the second floor, the entire roof of the building was gone and the writhing, racing flood of corruption had flowed down the outer walls and across the street, engulfing and transforming sidewalks, people, pavement, poles, wires, automobiles, people-anything and everything it touched.

  * * * *

  The globe went on down, through basement and sub-basement, until it reached solid, natural ground. Then, with its top a few inches below the level of natural ground, it came to a full stop and—apparently—did nothing at all. By this time, the ravening flood outside had eaten far into the lower floors of the buildings across the street, as well as along all four sides of the block, and tremendous masses of masonry and steel, their supporting structures devoured, were subsiding, crumbling, and crashing down into the noisome flood of golop—and were being transformed almost as fast as they could fall.

  One tremendous mass, weighing hundreds or perhaps thousands of tons, toppled almost as a whole; splashing the stuff in all directions for hundreds of yards. Wherever each splash struck, however, a new center of attack came into being, and the peculiarly disgusting, abhorrent liquidation went on.

  “Can you do anything with it, Clee?” Belle demanded.

  “Not too much—it’s a mess,” Garlock replied. “Besides, it wouldn’t get us far, I don’t think. It’ll be more productive to analyze the beams the Arpalones are using to break them up, don’t you think?”

  Then, for twenty solid minutes, the two Prime Operators worked on those enigmatic beams.

  “We can’t assemble that kind of stuff with our minds,” Belle decided then.

  “I’ll say we can’t,” Garlock agreed. “Ten megacycles, and cycling only twenty per second.” He whistled raucously through his teeth. “My guess is it’d take four months to design and build a generator to put out that kind of stuff. It’s worse than our Op field.”

  “I’m not sure I could ever design one,” Belle said, thoughtfully, “but of course I’m not the engineer you are.…” Then, she could not help adding, “…yet.”

  “No, and you never will be,” he said, flatly.

  “No? That’s what you think!” Even in such circumstances as those, Belle Bellamy was eager to carry on her warfare with her Project Chief.

  “That’s exactly what I think—and I’m so close to knowing it for a fact that the difference is indetectible.”

  Belle almost—but not quite—blew up. “Well, what are you going to do?”

  “Unless and until I can figure out something effective to do, I’m not going to try to do anything. If you, with your vaunted and flaunted belief in the inherent superiority of the female over the male, can dope out something useful before I do, I’ll eat crow and help you do it. As for arguing with you, I’m all done for the moment.”

  Belle gritted her teeth, flounced away, and plumped herself down into a chair. She shut her eyes and put every iota of her mind to work on the problem of finding something—anything—that could be done to help this doomed world and to show that big, overbearing jerk of a Garlock that she was a better man than he was. Which of the two objectives loomed more important, she herself could not have told, to save her life.

  And Garlock looked around. The air and the sky over the now-vanished city were both clear of Dilipic craft. The surviving Arpalone fighters and other small craft were making no attempt to land, anywhere on the world’s surface. Instead, they were flying upward toward, and were being drawn one by one into the bowels of, huge Arpalonian space-freighters. When each such vessel was filled to capacity, it flew upward and set itself
into a more-or-less-circular orbit around the planet.

  Around and around and around the ruined world the Pleiades went; recording, observing, charting. Fifty-eight of those atrocious Dilipic vortices had been driven to ground. Every large land-mass surrounded by large bodies of water had been struck once, and only once; from the tremendous area of the largest continent down to the relatively tiny expanses of the largest islands. One land-mass, one vortex. One only.

  “What d’you suppose that means?” James asked. “Afraid of water?”

  “Damfino. Could be. Let’s check…mountains, too. Skip us back to where we started—oceans and mountains both fairly close there.”

  The city had disappeared long since; for hundreds of almost-level square miles there extended a sparkling, seething, writhing expanse of—of what? The edge of that devouring flood had almost reached the foot-hills, and over that gnawing, dissolving edge the Pleiadespaused.

  * * * *

  Small lakes and ordinary rivers bothered the golop very little if at all. There was perhaps a slightly increased sparkling, a slight stiffening, a little darkening, some freezing and breaking off of solid blocks; but the thing’s forward motion was not noticeably slowed down. It drank a fairly large river and a lake one mile wide by ten miles long while the two men watched.

  The golop made no attempt to climb either foot-hills or mountains. It leveled them. It ate into their bases at its own level; the undermined masses, small and large, collapsed into the foul, corrosive semi-liquid and were consumed. Nor was there much raising of the golop’s level, even when the highest mountains were reached and miles-high masses of solid rock broke off and toppled. There was some raising, of course; but the stuff was fluid enough so that its slope was not apparent to the eye.

  * * * *

  Then the Pleiades went back, over the place where the city had been and on to what had once been an ocean beach. The original wave of degradation had reached that shore long since, had attacked its sands out into deep water, and there it had been stopped. The corrupt flood was now being reinforced, however, by an ever-rising tide of material that had once been mountains. And the slope, which had not been even noticeable at the mountains or over the plain, was here very evident.