The Black Star Passes

by Jr. John W. Campbell

  VI

  Arcot lifted the _Solarite_ at once high into the air, and startedtoward the point on the border, where the plane had been seen crossing.In a short time Wade relieved him at the controls while he dressed.

  They had been flying on in silence for about an hour, when suddenly Wademade out in the distance the great bulk of the plane, against the dullgray of the clouds, a mile or so above them. It seemed some monstrousblack bat flying there against the sky, but down to the sensitivemicrophone on the side of the _Solarite_ came the drone of the hundredmighty propellers as the great plane forged swiftly along.

  Just how rapidly these giants moved, Arcot had not appreciated until heattempted to overtake this one. It was going over a mile a second now--aspeed that demanded only that it move its own length in aboutfive-eights of a second! It made this tremendous speed by streamliningand through sheer power.

  The _Solarite_ hovered high above the dark ship at length, the roar ofthe terrific air blast from its propellers below coming up to them as amighty wave of sound that made their own craft tremble! The hundredgigantic propellers roaring below, however, would distribute their gasperfectly.

  "We're going invisible," Arcot exclaimed. "Look out!" There was a clickas the switch shut, and the _Solarite_ was as transparent as the airabove it. Arcot drove his ship swiftly, above and ahead of the mightycolossus, then released the gas. There was a low hiss from the powerroom, barely detectable despite the vacuum that shut them off from theroar of the Kaxorian plane. The microphone had long since beendisconnected. Out of the gas vent streamed a cloud of purplish gas,becoming faintly visible as it left the influence of the invisibilityapparatus, but only to those who knew where to look for it. The men inthat mighty plane could not see it as their machine bore down into thelittle cloud of gas.

  Tensely the Terrestrians waited. Moments--and the gigantic planewobbled! There was a sudden swerve that ended in a nose dive, straighttoward Venus seven miles below.

  That the ship should crash into the ground below was not at all Arcot'splan, and he was greatly relieved when it flattened its dive and startedto climb, its incalculable mass rapidly absorbing its kinetic energy.Down from its seven mile height it glided, controlling itself perfectlyas Arcot released the last of the first four containers of the liquidgas makers, putting to sleep the last man on the ship below.

  In a long glide that carried it over many miles, the great shipdescended. It had sunk far, and gone smoothly, but now there loomedahead of it a range of low hills! It would certainly crash into therocky cliffs ahead! Nearer and nearer drew the barrier while Arcot andthe others watched with rigid attention. It might skim above those lowhills at that--just barely escaping.... The watchers cringed as head on,at nearly two thousand miles an hour, the machine crashed into therocks. Arcot had snapped the loud speaker into the circuit once more,and now as they looked at the sudden crash below, there thundered up tothem mighty waves of sound!

  The giant plane had struck about twenty feet from the top of a nearlyperpendicular cliff. The terrific crash was felt by seismographs inSonor nearly two thousand miles away! The mighty armored hull plowedinto the rocks like some gigantic meteor, the hundreds of thousands oftons crushing the rocky precipice, grinding it to powder, and shakingthe entire hill. The cliff seemed to buckle and crack. In moments theplane had been brought to rest, but it had plowed through twenty feet ofrock for nearly an eighth of a mile. For an instant it hung motionless,perched perilously in the air, its tail jutting out over the littlevalley, then slowly, majestically it sank, to strike with areverberating crash that shattered the heavy armor plate!

  For another instant the great motors continued turning, the roar of thepropellers like some throbbing background to the rending crashes as thetitanic wreck came to rest. Suddenly, with a series of roaringexplosions, the bank of motors in the left wing blew up with awfulforce. There was a flash of indescribable brilliance that momentarilyblinded the watching Terrestrians; then there came to the microphonesuch waves of sound as it could not reproduce. From the rock on whichrested the fused mass of metal that they knew had been the wing, rose agreat cloud of dust. Still the motors on the other side of the shipcontinued roaring and the giant propellers turned. As the blast of airblew the dust away, the Terrestrians stared in unbounded amazement. Upfrom the gaping, broken wing lanced a mighty beam of light of suchdazzling intensity that Arcot swiftly restored them to visibility thatthey might shut it out. There was a terrific hissing, crackling roar.The plane seemed to wobble as it lay there, seemingly recoiling fromthat flaming column. Where it touched the cliff there was intenseincandescence that made the rock glow white hot, then flow down in asluggish rivulet of molten lava! For five minutes longer this terrificspectacle lasted, while Arcot withdrew the _Solarite_ to a saferdistance.

  The fifty motors of the remaining wing seemed slowing down now--thensuddenly there was such a crash and towering flash of light as no humanbeing had ever seen before! Up--up into the very clouds it shot itsmighty flame, a blazing column of light that seemed to reach out intospace. The _Solarite_ was hurled back end over end, tumbling, falling.Even the heavy gyroscopes could not hold it for an instant, but quicklythe straining motors brought them to rest in air that whirled and whinedabout them. They were more than twenty miles from the scene of theexplosion, but even at that distance they could see the glow of theincandescent rock. Slowly, cautiously they maneuvered the _Solarite_back to the spot, and looked down on a sea of seething lava!

  Morey broke the awed silence. "Lord--what power that thing carries! Nowonder they could support it in the air! But--how can they control suchpower? What titanic forces!"

  Slowly Arcot sent the _Solarite_ away into the night--into the kindlydarkness once more. His voice when he spoke at last was oddlyrestrained.

  "I wonder what those forces were--they are greater than any man has everbefore seen! An entire hill fused to molten, incandescent rock, not tomention the tons and tons of metal that made up that ship.

  "And such awful forces as these are to be released on our Earth!" For aninterminable period they sat silent as the panorama of hills glided byat a slow two-hundred miles an hour. Abruptly Arcot exclaimed, "We_must_ capture a ship. We'll try again--we'll either destroy or captureit--and either way we're ahead!"

  * * * * *

  Aimlessly they continued their leisurely course across a vast plain.There were no great mountains on Venus, for this world had known no suchviolent upheaval as the making of a moon. The men were lost in thought,each intent on his own ideas. At length Wade stood up, and walked slowlyback to the power room.

  Suddenly the men in the control room heard his call:

  "Arcot--quick--the microphone--and rise a mile!"

  The _Solarite_ gave a violent lurch as it shot vertically aloft attremendous acceleration. Arcot reached over swiftly and snapped theswitch of the microphone. There burst in upon them the familiar roaringdrone of a hundred huge propellers. No slightest hum of motor, only thevast whining roar of the mighty props.

  "Another one! They must have been following the first by a few minutes.We'll get this one!" Arcot worked swiftly at his switches. "Wade--strapyourself in the seat where you are--don't take time to come up here."

  They followed the same plan which had worked so well before. Suddenlyinvisible, the _Solarite_ flashed ahead of the great plane. The titanicwave of rushing sound engulfed them--then again came the little hiss ofthe gas. Now there were no hills in sight, as far as the eye could see.In the dim light that seemed always to filter through these gray cloudsthey could see the distant, level horizon.

  Several dragging minutes passed before there was any evident effect; themen from Earth were waiting for that great ship to waver, to wobble fromits course. Suddenly Arcot gave a cry of surprise. Startled amazementwas written all over his face, as his companions turned in wonderment tosee that he was partially visible! The _Solarite_, too, had become amisty ghost ship about them; they were becoming visible! Then in aninsta
nt it was gone--and they saw that the huge black bulk behind themwas wavering, turning; the thunderous roar of the propellers fell to awhistling whine; the ship was losing speed! It dipped, and shot down abit--gained speed, then step by step it glided down--down--down to thesurface below. The engines were idling now, the plane running more andmore slowly.

  They were near the ground now--and the watchers scarcely breathed. Wouldthis ship, too, crash? It glided to within a half mile of theplain--then it dipped once more, and Arcot breathed his relief as itmade a perfect landing, the long series of rollers on the base of thegigantic hull absorbing the shock of the landing. There were smallstreams in the way--a tree or two, but these were obstacles unnoticed bythe gargantuan machine. Its mighty propellers still idling slowly, thehuge plane rolled to a standstill.

  Swooping down, the _Solarite_ landed beside it, to be lost in the vastshadows of the mighty metal walls.

  Arcot had left a small radio receiver with Tonlos in Sonor before hestarted on this trip, and had given him directions on how to tune in onthe _Solarite_. Now he sent a message to him, telling that the plane hadbeen brought down, and asking that a squadron of planes be sent at once.

  Wade and Arcot were elected to make the first inspection of the Kaxorianplane, and clad in their cooling suits, they stepped from the_Solarite_, each carrying, for emergency use, a small hand torch,burning atomic hydrogen, capable of melting its way through even theheavy armor of the great plane.

  As they stood beside it, looking up at the gigantic wall of metal thatrose sheer beside them hundreds of feet straight up, it seemedimpossible that this mighty thing could fly, that it could be propelledthrough the air. In awed silence they gazed at its vast bulk.

  Then, like pygmies beside some mighty prehistoric monster, they madetheir way along its side, seeking a door. Suddenly Wade stopped shortand exclaimed: "Arcot, this is senseless--we can't do this! The machineis so big that it'll take us half an hour of steady walking to go aroundit. We'll have to use the _Solarite_ to find an entrance!"

  It was well that they followed Wade's plan, for the only entrance, asthey later learned, was from the top. There, on the back of the giant,the _Solarite_ landed--its great weight having no slightest effect onthe Kaxorian craft. They found a trap-door leading down inside. However,the apparatus for opening it was evidently within the hull, so they hadto burn a hole in the door before they could enter.

  What a sight there was for these men of Earth. The low rumble of theidling engines was barely audible as they descended the long ladder.

  There was no resemblance whatever to the interior of a flying machine;rather, it suggested some great power house, where the energies of halfa nation were generated. They entered directly into a vast hall thatextended for a quarter of a mile back through the great hull, andcompletely across the fuselage. To the extreme nose it ran, andthroughout there were scattered little globes that gave off an intensewhite light, illuminating all of the interior. Translucent bull's-eyesobscured the few windows.

  All about, among the machines, lay Venerians. Dead they seemed, theillusion intensified by their strangely blue complexions. The twoTerrestrians knew, however, that they could readily be restored to life.The great machines they had been operating were humming softly, almostinaudibly. There were two long rows of them, extending to the end ofthe great hall. They suggested mighty generators twenty feet high. Fromtheir tops projected two-feet-thick cylinders of solid fused quartz.From these extended other rods of fused quartz, rods that led downthrough the floor; but these were less bulky, scarcely over eight inchesthick.

  The huge generator-like machines were disc-shaped. From these, too, aquartz rod ran down through the floor. The machines on the further rowwere in some way different; those in the front half of the row had thetubes leading to the floor below, but had no tubes jutting into theceiling. Instead, there were many slender rods connected with a vastswitchboard that covered all of one side of the great room. Buteverywhere were the great quartz rods, suggesting some complicated watersystem. Most of them were painted black, though the main rods leadingfrom the roof above were as clear as crystal.

  Arcot and Wade looked at these gigantic machines in hushed awe. Theyseemed impossibly huge; it was inconceivable that all this was but thepower room of an airplane!

  Without speaking, they descended to the level below, using a quiteearthly appearing escalator. Despite the motionless figures everywhere,they felt no fear of their encountering resistance. They knew theeffectiveness of Wade's anesthetic.

  The hall they entered was evidently the main room of the plane. It wasas long as the one above, and higher, yet all that vast space was takenby one single, titanic coil that stretched from wall to wall! Into it,and from it there led two gigantic columns of fused quartz. That thesewere rods, such as those smaller ones above was obvious, but each wasover eight feet thick!

  Short they were, for they led from one mighty generator such as they hadseen above, but magnified on a scale inconceivable! At the end of it,its driving power, its motor, was a great cylindrical case, into whichled a single quartz bar ten inches thick. This bar was alive withpulsing, glowing fires, that changed and maneuvered and died out overall its surface and through all its volume. The motor was but five feetin diameter and a scant seven feet long, yet obviously it was drivingthe great machine, for there came from it a constant low hum, a deeppitched song of awful power. And the huge quartz rod that led from thetitanic coil-cylinder was alive with the same glowing fires that playedthrough the motor rod. From one side of the generator, ran two objectsthat were familiar, copper bus bars. But even these were _three feetthick_!

  The scores of quartz tubes that come down from the floor above joined,coalesced, and ran down to the great generator, and into it.

  They descended to another level. Here were other quartz tubes, but theseled down still further, for this floor contained individual sleepingbunks, most of them unoccupied, unready for occupancy, though some weremade up.

  Down another level; again the bunks, the little individual rooms.

  At last they reached the bottom level, and here the great quartz tubesterminated in a hundred smaller ones, each of these leading into somestrange mechanism. There were sighting devices on it, and there wereports that opened in the floor. This was evidently the bombing room.

  With an occasional hushed word, the Terrestrians walked through whatseemed to be a vast city of the dead, passing sleeping officers, andcrewmen by the hundreds. On the third level they came at last to thecontrol room. Here were switchboards, control panels, and dozens ofofficers, sleeping now, beside their instruments. A sudden dull thuddingsound spun Arcot and Wade around, nerves taut. They relaxed andexchanged apologetic smiles. An automatic relay had adjusted somemechanism.

  They noted one man stationed apart from the rest. He sat at the verybow, protected behind eight-inch coronium plates in which were setmasses of fused quartz that were nearly as strong as the metal itself.These gave him a view in every direction except directly behind him.Obviously, here was the pilot.

  Returning to the top level, they entered the long passages that led outinto the titanic wings. Here, as elsewhere, the ship was brightlylighted. They came to a small room, another bunk room. There were greatnumbers of these down both sides of the long corridor, and along the twoparallel corridors down the wing. In the fourth corridor near the backedge of the wing, there were bunk rooms on one side, and on the otherwere bombing posts.

  As they continued walking down the first corridor, they came to a smallroom, whence issued the low hum of one of the motors. Entering, theyfound the crew sleeping, and the motor idling.

  "Good Lord!" Wade exclaimed. "Look at that motor, Arcot! No bigger thanthe trunk of a man's body. Yet a battery of these sends the ship alongat a mile a second! What power!"

  Slowly they proceeded down the long hall. At each of the fifty enginemountings they found the same conditions. At the end of the hall therewas an escalator that led one level higher, into the upper wing. Here
they found long rows of the bombing posts and the corresponding quartzrods.

  They returned finally to the control room. Here Arcot spent a long timelooking over the many instruments, the controls, and the pilotingapparatus.

  "Wade," he said at last, "I think I can see how this is done. I am goingto stop those engines, start them, then accelerate them till the shiprolls a bit!" Arcot stepped quickly over to the pilots seat, lifted thesleeping pilot out, and settled in his place.

  "Now, you go over to that board there--that one--and when I ask you to,please turn on that control--no, the one below--yes--turn it on aboutone notch at a time."

  Wade shook his head dubiously, a one-sided grin on his face. "All right,Arcot--just as you say--but when I think of the powers you're playingwith--well, a mistake might be unhealthy!"

  "I'm going to stop the motors now," Arcot announced quietly. All thetime they had been on board, they had been aware of the barely inaudiblewhine of the motors. Now suddenly, it was gone, and the plane was stillas death!

  Arcot's voice sounded unnaturally loud. "I did it without blowing theship up after all! Now we're going to try turning the power on!"

  Suddenly there was a throaty hum; then quickly it became the low whine;then, as Arcot turned on the throttle before him, he heard the tens ofthousands of horsepower spring into life--and suddenly the whine was alow roar--the mighty propellers out there had became a blur--then withmajestic slowness the huge machine moved off across the field!

  Arcot shut off the motors and rose with a broad, relieved smile, "Easy!"he said. They made their way again up through the ship, up through theroom of the tremendous cylinder coil, and then into the power room. Nowthe machines were quiet, for the motors were no longer working.

  "Arcot, you didn't shut off the biggest machine of all down there. Howcome?"

  "I couldn't, Wade. It has no shut-off control, and if it did have, Iwouldn't use it. I will tell you why when we get back to the_Solarite_."

  At last they left the mighty machine; walked once more across its broadmetal top. Here and there they now saw the ends of those quartzcylinders. Once more they entered the _Solarite_, through the air lock,and took off the cumbersome insulating suits.

  As quickly as possible Arcot outlined to the two who had stayed with the_Solarite_, the things they had seen, and the layout of the great ship.

  "I think I can understand the secret of all that power, and it's not sodifferent from the _Solarite_, at that. It, too, draws its power fromthe sun, though in a different way, and it stores it within itself,which the _Solarite_ does not try to do.

  "Light of course, is energy, and therefore, has mass. It exertspressure, the impact of its moving units of energy--photons. We haveelectrons and protons of matter, and photons of light. Now we know thatthe mass of protons and electrons will attract other protons andelectrons, and hold them near--as in a stone, or in a solar system. Thenew idea here is that the photons will attract each other ever more andmore powerfully, the closer they get. The Kaxorians have developed amethod of getting them so close together, that they will, for a while atleast, hold themselves there, and with a little 'pressure', will staythere indefinitely.

  "In that huge coil and cylinder we found there we saw the main powerstorage tank. That was full of gaseous light-energy held together by itsown attraction, plus a little help of the generator!"

  "A little help?" Wade exclaimed. "Quite a little! I'll bet that thinghad a million horsepower in its motor!"

  "Yes--but I'll bet they have nearly fifty pounds of light condensedthere--so why worry about a little thing like a million horsepower? Theyhave plenty more where that comes from.

  "I think they go up above the clouds in some way and collect the sun'senergy. Remember that Venus gets twice as much as Earth. They focus iton those tubes on the roof there, and they, like all quartz tubes,conduct the light down into the condensers where it is first collected.Then it is led to the big condenser downstairs, where the final power isadded, and the condensed light is stored.

  "Quartz conducts light just as copper conducts electricity--those arebus bars we saw running around there.

  "The bombs we've been meeting recently are, of course, little knots ofthis light energy thrown out by that projector mechanism we saw. Whenthey hit anything, the object absorbs their energy--and is very promptlyvolatilized by the heat of the absorption.

  "Do you remember that column of hissing radiance we saw shooting out ofthe wrecked plane just before it blew up? That was the motor connection,broken, and discharging free energy. That would ordinarily havesupplied all fifty motors at about full speed. Naturally, when it cutloose, it was rather violent.

  "The main generator had been damaged, no doubt, so it stopped working,and the gravitational attraction of the photons wasn't enough, withoutits influence to hold them bound too long. All those floods of energywere released instantaneously, of course.

  "Look--there come the Lanorians now. I want to go back to Sonor andthink over this problem. Perhaps we can find something that will releaseall that energy--though honestly, I doubt it."

  Arcot seemed depressed, overawed perhaps, by the sheer magnitude of theforce that lay bound up in the Kaxorian ship. It seemed inconceivablethat the little _Solarite_ could in any way be effective against theincredible machine.

  The Lanorian planes were landing almost like a flock of birds, on thewings, the fuselage, the ground all about the gigantic ship. Arcotdropped into a chair, gazing moodily into emptiness, his thoughts on themighty giant, stricken now, but only sleeping. In its vast hulk lay suchenergies as intelligence had never before controlled; within it he knewthere were locked the powers of the sun itself. What could the_Solarite_ do against it?

  "Oh, I almost forgot to mention it." Arcot spoke slowly, dejectedly. "Inthe heat of the attack back there it went practically unnoticed. Ouronly weapon beside the gas is useless now. Do you remember how the shipseemed to lose its invisibility for an instant? I learned why when weinvestigated the ship. Those men are physicists of the highest order. Wemust realize the terrible forces, both physical and mental that we areto meet. They've solved the secret of our invisibility, and now they canneutralize it. They began using it a bit too late this time, but theyhad located the radio-produced interference caused by the ship'sinvisibility apparatus, and they were sending a beam of interferingradio energy at us. We are invisible only by reason of the vibration ofthe molecules in response to the radio impressed oscillations. Themolecules vibrate in tune, at terrific frequency, and the light can passperfectly. What will happen, however, if someone locates the source ofthe radio waves? It'll be simple for them to send out a radio beam andtouch our invisible ship with it. The two radio waves impressed on usnow will be out of step and the interference will instantly make usvisible. We can no longer attack them with our atomic hydrogen blast, orwith the gas--both are useless unless we can get close to them, and wecan't come within ten miles of them now. Those bombs of theirs areeffective at that distance."

  Again he fell silent, thinking--hoping for an idea that would once moregive them a chance to combat the Kaxorians. His three companions,equally depressed and without a workable idea, remained silent. AbruptlyArcot stood up.

  "I'm going to speak with the Commander-in-Field here. Then we can startback for Sonor--and maybe we had better head for home. It looks asthough there is little we can do here."

  Briefly he spoke to the young Venerian officer, and told him what he hadlearned about the ship. Perhaps they could fly it to Sonor; or it couldbe left there undestroyed if he would open a certain control just beforehe left. Arcot showed him which one--it would drain out the power of thegreat storage tank, throwing it harmlessly against the clouds above. TheKaxorians might destroy the machine if they wanted to--Arcot felt thatthey would not wish to. They would hope, with reason, they mightrecapture it! It would be impossible to move that tremendous machinewithout the power that its "tank" was intended to hold.