The Best of Clifford D. Simak

by Clifford D. Simak

  Russ, standing beside Greg at the control panel, looked out into space and marveled. They were flashing through space, their speed building up at a breath-taking rate, yet they had no real propulsion power. The discovery of the gravity concentrator had outdated such a method of driving a spaceship. Instead, they were falling, hurtling downward into the yawning maw of an artificial gravity field. And such a method made for speed, terrible speed.

  Jupiter seemed to leap at them. It became a great crimson and yellow ball that filled almost half the vision plate.

  * * *

  The Invincible's speed was slacking off, slower and slower, until it barely crawled in comparison to its former speed.

  Slowly they circled Jupiter's great girth, staring out of the vision port for a sight of Craven's ship. They were nearing the position the little mechanical shadow had indicated.

  "There it is," said Russ suddenly, almost breathlessly.

  Far out in space, tiny, almost like a dust mote against the great bulk of the monster planet, rode a tiny light. Slowly the Invincible crawled inward. The mote of light became a gleaming silver ship, a mighty ship--one that was fully as large as the Invincible!

  "That's it all right," said Greg. "They're lying behind a log out here raising hell with our television apparatus. Maybe we better tickle them a little bit and see what they have."

  Rising from the control board, he went to another control panel. Russ remained standing in front of the vision plate, staring down at the ship out in space.

  Behind him came a shrill howl from the power plant. The Invincible staggered slightly. A beam of deep indigo lashed across space, a finger suddenly jabbing at the other ship.

  Space was suddenly colored, for thousands of miles, as the beam struck Craven's ship and seemed to explode in a blast of dazzling indigo light. The ship reeled under the impact of the blow, reeled and weaved in space as the beam struck it and delivered to it the mighty power of the screaming engines back in the engine room.

  "What happened?" Greg screamed above the roar.

  Russ shrugged his shoulders. "You jarred him a little. Pushed him through space for several hundred miles. Made him know something had hit him, but it didn't seem to do any damage."

  "That was pure cosmic I gave him! Five billion horsepower--and it just staggered him!"

  "He's got a space lens that absorbs the energy," said Russ. "The lens concentrates it and pours it into a receiving chamber, probably a huge photo-cell. Nobody yet has burned out one of those things on a closed circuit."

  Greg wrinkled his brow, perplexed. "What he must have is a special field of some sort that lowers the wave-length and the intensity. He's getting natural cosmics all the time and taking care of them."

  "That wouldn't be much of a trick," Russ pointed out. "But when he takes care of cosmics backed by five billion horsepower... that's something else!"

  Greg grinned wickedly. "I'm going to hand him a long heat radiation. If his field shortens that any, he'll have radio beam and that will blow photo-cells all to hell."

  He stabbed viciously at the keys on the board and once again the shrill howl of the engines came from the rear of the ship. A lance of red splashed out across space and touched the other ship. Again space was lit, this time with a crimson glow.

  * * *

  Russ shook his head. "Nothing doing."

  Greg sat down and looked at Russ. "Funny thing about this. They just sat there and let us throw two charges at them, took everything we gave them and never tried to hand it back."

  "Maybe they haven't anything to hand us," Russ suggested hopefully. "They must have. Craven wouldn't take to space with just a purely defensive weapon. He knew we'd find him and he'd have a fight on his hands."

  Russ found his pipe was dead. Snapping his lighter, he applied flame to the blackened tobacco. Walking slowly to the wall cabinet, he lifted two other boxes out, set them on the table and took from them two other mechanical shadows. He turned them on and leaned close, watching the spinning dials, the quivering needles.

  "Greg," he whispered, "Chambers and Stutsman are there in that ship with Craven! Look, their shadows register identical with the one that spotted Craven."

  "I suspected as much," Greg replied. "We got the whole pack cornered out here. If we can just get rid of them, the whole war would be won in one stroke."

  Russ lifted a stricken face from the row of tiny mechanisms. "This is our big chance. We may never get it again. The next hour could decide who is going to win."

  Greg rose from the chair and stood before the control board. Grimly he punched a series of keys. The engines howled again. Greg twisted a dial and the howl rose into a shrill scream.

  From the Invincible another beam lashed out... another and another Space was speared with beam after beam hurtling from the great ship.

  Swiftly the beams went through the range of radiation, through radio and short radio, infra-red, visible light, ultra-violet, X-ray, the gammas and the cosmics--a terrific flood of billions of horsepower.

  Craven's ship buckled and careened under the lashing impacts of the bombardment, but it seemed unhurt!

  Greg's face was bleaker than usual as he turned from the board to look at Russ.

  "We've used everything we have," he said, "and he's stopped them all. We can't touch him."

  * * *

  Russ shivered. The control room suddenly seemed chilly with a frightening kind of cold.

  "He's carrying photo-cells and several thousand tons of accumulator stacks. Not much power left in them. He could pour a billion horsepower into them for hours and still have room for more."

  Greg nodded wearily. "All we've been doing is feeding him."

  The engines were humming quietly now, singing the low song of power held in leash.

  But then they screamed like a buzz saw biting into an iron-hard stick of white oak. Screamed in a single, frightful agony as they threw the protecting wall that enclosed the Invincible all the power they could develop.

  The air of the ship was instantaneously charged with a hazy, bluish glow, and the sharp, stinging odor of ozone filled the ship.

  * * *

  Outside, an enormous burst of blue-white flame splashed and spattered around the Invincible. Living lightning played in solid, snapping sheets around the vision port and ran in trickling blazing fire across the plates.

  Russ cried out and backed away, holding his arm before his eyes. It was as if he had looked into a nova of energy exploding before his eyes.

  In the instant the scream died and the splash of terrific fire had vanished. Only a rapidly dying glow remained.

  "What was it?" asked Russ dazedly. "What happened? Ten engines every one of them capable of over five billion horsepower and every one of them screaming!"

  "Craven," said Greg grimly. "He let us have everything he had. He simply drained his accumulator stacks and threw it all into our face. But he's done now. That was his only shot. He'll have to build up power now and that will take a while. But we couldn't have taken much more."

  "Stalemate," said Russ. "We can't hurt him, he can't hurt us."

  "Not by a damn sight," declared Greg. "I still have a trick or two in mind."

  He tried them. From the Invincible a fifty billion horsepower bolt of living light and fire sprang out as all ten engines thundered with an insane voice that racked the ship.

  Fireworks exploded in space when the bolt struck Craven's ship. Screen after screen exploded in glittering, flaming sparks, but the ship rode the lashing charge, finally halted the thrust of power. The beam glowed faintly, died out.

  Perspiration streamed down Greg's face as he bent over a calculator and constructed the formula for a magnetic field. He sent out a field of such unimaginable intensity that it would have drawn any beryl-steel within a mile of it into a hard, compact mass. Even the Invincible, a hundred miles away, lurched under the strain. But Craven's ship, after the first wild jerk, did not move. A curious soft glow spread out from the ship, veered sh
arply and disappeared in the magnetic field.

  Greg swore softly. "He's cutting it down as fast as I try to build it up," he explained, "and I can't move it any nearer."

  From Craven's ship lashed out another thunderbolt and once again the engines screamed in terrible unison as they poured power into the ship's triple screen. The first screen stopped all material things. The second stopped radiations by refracting them into the fourth dimension. The third shield was akin to the anti-entropy field, which stopped all matter... and yet the ten engines bellowed like things insane as Craven struck with flaming bolts, utilizing the power he had absorbed from the fifty billion horsepower Greg had thrown at him.

  There was anger in Greg Manning's face... a terrible anger. His fists knotted and he shook them at the gleaming ship that lay far down near Jupiter.

  "I've got one trick left," he shouted, almost as if he expected Craven to hear. "Just one trick. Damn you, see if you can stop this one!"

  He set up the pattern on the board and punched the activating lever. The ten engines thrummed with power. Then the howling died away.

  Four times they screamed and four times they ebbed into a gentle hum.

  "Get on the navigation controls!" yelled Greg. "Be ready to give the ship all you've got."

  Greg leaped for the control chair, grasped the acceleration lever.

  "Now," growled Greg, "look out, Craven, we're coming at you!"

  Greg, teeth gritted, slammed the acceleration over.

  Suddenly all space wrenched horribly with a nauseating, terrible thud that seemed to strain at the very anchors of the Universe.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Jupiter and the Jovian worlds leaped suddenly backward, turned swiftly green, then blue, and faded in an instant into violet. The Sun spun coldly through space, retreating, dimming to a tiny ruby-tinted star.

  The giant generators in the Invincible hummed louder now, continually louder, a steel-throated roar that trembled through every plate, through every girder, through every bit of metal in the ship.

  The ship itself was plunging spaceward, streaking like a run-away star for the depths of space beyond the Solar System. And behind it, caught tight, gripped and held, Craven's ship trailed at the end of a tractor field that bound it to the space-rocketing Invincible.

  The acceleration compensator, functioning perfectly, had taken up the slack as the ship had plunged from a standing start into a speed that neared the pace of light. But it had never been built to stand such sudden, intense acceleration, and for an instant Russ and Greg seemed to be crushed by a mighty weight that struck at them. The sensation swiftly lifted as the compensator took up the load.

  Greg shook his head, flinging the trickling perspiration from his eyes.

  "I hope their compensator worked as well as ours," he said.

  "If it didn't," declared Russ, "we're towing a shipload of dead men."

  Russ glanced at the speed dial. They were almost touching the speed of light. "He hasn't cut down our speed yet."

  "We threw him off his balance. His drive depends largely on the mass of some planet as a body to take up the reaction of his ship. Jupiter is the ideal body for that... but he's leaving Jupiter behind. He has to do something soon or it'll be too late."

  "He's getting less energy, too," said Russ. "We're retreating from his main sources of energy, the Sun and Jupiter. Almost the speed of light and that would cut down his energy intake terrifically. He has to use what he's got in his accumulators, and after that last blast at us, they must be nearly drained."

  As Russ watched, the speed needle fell off slightly. Russ held his breath. It edged back slowly, creeping. The speed was being cut down.

  "Craven is using whatever power he has," he said. "They're alive back there, all right. He's trying to catch hold of Jupiter and make its gravity work for him."

  The Invincible felt the strain of the other ship now. Felt it as Craven poured power into his drive, fighting to get free of the invisible hawser that had trapped him, fighting against being dragged into outer space at the tail-end of a mighty craft heading spaceward with frightening speed.

  Girders groaned in the Invincible, the engines moaned and throbbed. The speed needle fell back, creeping down the dial, slowly, unwillingly, resisting any drop in speed. But Craven was cutting it down. And as he cut it, he was able to absorb more energy with his collector lens. But he was fighting two things... momentum and the steadily decreasing gravitational pull of Jupiter and the Sun. The Sun's pull was dwindling slowly, Jupiter's rapidly.

  The needle still crept downward.

  "What's his point of equality to us?" demanded Greg. "Will we make it?"

  Russ shook his head. "Won't know for hours. He'll be able to slow us up... maybe he'll even stop us or be able to jerk free, although I doubt that. But every minute takes him farther away from his main source of power, the Solar System's radiation. He could collect power anywhere in space, you know, but,the best place to collect it is near large radiant bodies."

  Russ continued to crouch over the dial, begrudging every backward flicker of the needle.

  This was the last play, the final hand. If they could drag Craven and his ship away from the Solar System, maroon him deep in space, far removed from any source of radiation, they would win, for they could go back and finish the work of smashing Interplanetary.

  But if Craven won--if he could halt their mad dash for space, if he could shake free--they'd never have another chance. He would be studying that field they had wrapped around him, be ready for it next time, might even develop one like it and use it on the Invincible. If Craven could win his way back to the Sun, he would be stronger than they were, could top them in power, shatter all their plans, and once again the worlds would bow to Interplanetary and Spencer Chambers.

  Russ watched the meter. The speed was little more than ten miles a second now and dropping rapidly. He sat motionless, hunched, sucking at his dead pipe, listening to the thrumming of the generators.

  "IF we only had a margin," he groaned. "If we just had a few more horsepower. Just a few. But we're wide open. Every engine is developing everything it can!"

  Greg tapped him on the shoulder, gently. Russ turned his head and looked into the face of his friend, a face as bleak as ever, but with a hint of smile in the corners of the eyes.

  "Why not let Jupiter help us?" he asked. "He could be a lot of help."

  Russ stared for a moment, uncomprehending. Then with a sob of gladness he reached out a hand, shoved over a lever. Mirrors of anti-entropy shifted, assumed different angles, and the Invincible sheered off. They were no longer retreating directly from the Sun, but at an angle quartering off across the Solar System.

  Greg grinned. "We're falling behind Jupiter now. Letting Jupiter run away from us as he circles his orbit, following the Sun. Adds miles per second to our velocity of retreat, even if it doesn't show on the dial."

  The cosmic tug of War went on, grimly--two ships straining, fighting each other, one seeking to escape, the other straining to snake the second ship into the maw of open, hostile space.

  The speed was down to five miles a second, then a fraction lower. The needle was flickering now, impossible to decide whether it was dropping or not. And in the engine rooms, ten great generators howled in their attempt to make that needle move up the dial again.

  Russ lit his pipe, his eyes not leaving the dial. The needle was creeping lower again. Down to three miles a second now.

  He puffed clouds of smoke and considered. Saturn fortunately was ninety degrees around in his orbit. On the present course, only Neptune remained between them and free space. Pluto was far away, but even if it had been, it really wouldn't count, for it was small and had little attraction.

  In a short while Ganymede and Callisto would be moving around on the far side of Jupiter and that might help. Everything counted so much now.

  The dial was down to two miles a second and there it hung. Hung and stayed. Russ watched it with narrowed eyes. By
this time Craven certainly would have given up much hope of help from Jupiter. If the big planet couldn't have helped him before, it certainly couldn't now. In another hour or two Earth would transit the Sun and that would cut down the radiant energy to some degree. But in the meantime Craven was loading his photo-cells and accumulators, was laying up a power reserve. As a last desperate resort he would use that power, in a final attempt to break away from the Invincible.

  Russ waited for that attempt. There was nothing that could be done about it. The engines were developing every watt of power that could be urged out of them. If Craven had the power to break away, he would break away... that was all there would be to it.

  An hour passed and the needle crept up a fraction of a point. Russ was still watching the dial, his mind foggy with concentration.

  * * *

  Suddenly the Invincible shuddered and seemed to totter in space, as if something, some mighty force, had struck the ship a terrific blow. The needle swung swiftly backward, reached one mile a second, dipped to half a mile.

  Russ sat bolt upright, holding his breath, his teeth clenched with death grip upon the pipe-stem.

  Craven had blasted with everything he had! He had used every last trickle of power in the accumulators... all the power he had been storing up.

  Russ leaped from the chair and raced to the periscopic mirror. Stooping, he stared into it. Far beck in space, like a silver bauble, swung Craven's ship. It swung back and forth in space, like a mighty, cosmic pendulum. Breathlessly he watched. The ship was still in the grip of the space field!

  "Greg," he shouted, "we've got him!"

  He raced back to the control panel, snapped a glance at the speed dial. The needle was rising rapidly now, a full mile a second. Within another fifteen minutes, it had climbed to a mile and a half. The Invincible was starting to go places!

  The engines still howled, straining, shrieking, roaring their defiance.

  In an hour the needle indicated the speed of four miles a second. Two hours later it was ten and rising visibly as Jupiter fell far behind and the Sun became little more than a glowing cinder.