by Earl
“Here I am!” he whispered weakly. “Can’t kill me off so easy!”
Shelton shook his head. “You’re alive, though you shouldn’t be. The pilot’s cupola cracked into it first. You should have been ground to a powder.”
Traft sat up, vitality once again flowing through his veins.
“Call it a miracle,” lie said simply. “All I know is the Universe cracked open and I fell through. The Grim Reaper just didn’t call my number, though”—his eyes went bleak—“he reaped plenty!” His fists clenched. “Darrin that Lorg!” he snarled. “If there ever was a fiend—”
“A scientific fiend!” put in Hugh Benning hopelessly. “With superscience at his command. We’re trapped now, completely?”
NONE of them could deny that. Shelton realized that the big, heavy ETBI-14, undermanned, could never leave if the Ranger ship couldn’t. Their radio signals were blocked. Not a thing more could be done. It was simply a matter of riding away with the moving satellite, away from Saturn, away from the Sun, out to the—unknown.
It was a terrifying feeling, like sinking to the bottomless depths of a dark ocean. Already huge Saturn had dwindled to a tiny moon with a bright ring around it. The Sun’s light grew steadily fainter. What breathless velocity was taking them from the empire of man, receding behind them?
“Let’s check our velocity,” suggested Shelton.
Traft, in the pilot’s cupola, angled the Sun, Saturn, and a fixed star.
“Five thousand miles a second!” he said at last, incredulously. “Iapetus has been accelerating constantly all this time!”
Shelton tried to think of the Titanic powers necessary to accelerate this great bulk, millions of times larger and heavier than Earth’s hughest freighter, but stopped in dismay. It was, as Benning had said, super-science.
The radio signal blinked in his eyes. “Lorg, I suppose,” he muttered, snapping the stud.
The Alien Superior’s reptilian features shone in the screen.
“Are you convinced, Dr. Rodney Shelton?” He spoke austerely. “I watched the crash of your other ship, with an optical instrument of mine that pierces matter. It was a futile attempt. The Warp is impenetrable. I warned you. But you disbelieve—at the cost of ten lives!”
“Nine, damn you—only nine!” Shelton yelled back, taking a small, twisted pleasure in that denial. “One lived. But you’ll pay for those other lives!”
“A few lives!” scoffed the alien. “What of the lives of my people that you and your men took? But I do not hold it against you. There is much more at stake than a few lives.” His eyes glistened. “Planets, worlds, are the prizes I want!”
“You will not find it so easy,” Shelton grimly retorted. “You will have to war against all our forces. You will never win!”
The Torm leader smiled cryptically. “Indomitable spirit!” he mused. “Murv is right in that.” He raised his voice. “I am busy. I will contact you later. You understand fully now that you are my—guests?”
With a mocking glance, his image vanished from the screen.
Shelton writhed internally. Helpless captives in the hands of a ruthless intelligence! Yet it was not that so much. His personal welfare was unimportant. It was the thought of not being able to warn Earth.
He tried the radio again, full power, calling out a time-honored SOS for attention. But there was only a continuous Niagara of howling static, through which no wave could work. In desperation he tried every conceivable wave-band. Everywhere, the drowning static. . . .
No. wait! His pulses leaped. At Micro-wave Nine the hiss of a strong carrier-wave came through. Microwave Nine—the Space Scientist! He must be near, near enough to batter through—and perhaps trying to make contact!
HOPEFULLY, Shelton tuned the vernier and let out a triumphant cry as the Space Scientist’s masked head ghosted into the screen.
“Space Scientist!” he cried eagerly. “Shelton calling—Dr. Rodney Shelton!”
Apparently startled, the Space Scientist seemed to be staring, speechless for the moment. Then he said:
“Dr. Shelton! You—”
“Listen to me!” Shelton hurriedly burst in. “I’m caught on Iapetus, can’t leave or radio Earth. There are aliens here, somehow motivating Iapetus. They threaten war on the Empire—want planets! Can’t explain more now. You’re last hope. You must radio Rhea ships to follow. Hurry! Lorg might hear—send ships after you!”
The globed head shook. “I do not take commands from you, Dr. Shelton!” he declared frigidly. “I am not concerned with the Empire’s affairs!” Shelton choked. Was the man still playing his childish part, in the face of this?
“But this is something vital!” he roared. “Something bigger than your paltry ideas of isolation and independence. The Empire is in danger! Can’t you understand?” Suddenly remembering, Shelton’s face grew livid. “You knew of this before! You warned me not to come to Iapetus! You knew of the aliens. But you would not tell me. You would not warn Earth! Unless”—he ground his words out vehemently, glaring with fierce accusation at the Space Scientist—“you have renounced ail claim to your human birth, you’ll inform the Rhea ships—redeem yourself to that extent, at least!”
“No!” The word came flatly. “Man, you can’t calmly stand by!” cried Shelton, aghast. “When the least little word from you—”
“Enough!” snapped the Space Scientist. “Emotions do not move me. Iapetus and the aliens are an interesting problem to me, and to my theory—no more. Their relation to the Empire of Earth is irrelevant!”
“But you were trying to contact me!” groaned Shelton. “Why? To taunt me? You—”
At that moment, on the screen, a second view superimposed itself over the Space Scientist. The latter’s figure vanished instantly. Lorg’s features, suspicious, stared out of Shelton’s opti-screen.
“To whom were you talking?” the alien demanded.
“None of your business,” retorted Shelton, snapping off.
Shelton turned away from the radio with sagging shoulders.
“That was our last hope!” he muttered bitterly. “And it had to hang on the mad ego of a monomaniac!”
“He’s inhuman!” Myra whispered. “A man who thinks himself a god!”
“He’s lower than the aliens!”
snapped Traft. “I just wish I had him here for one minute. I’d change his mind about some things!”
Shelton shrugged. He looked out at receding Saturn, now scarcely displaying a disk.
“Too late now. Lorg and his Torms have succeeded in stealing a whole satellite from under the Empire’s nose. All we can do now is wait and see what develops.” He sighed, and went on in a monotone. “As far as we ourselves go, we’re in no immediate difficulty. We have oxygen and food enough here in the ETBI-Fourteen for a month.”
But he knew that before the month was up, stupendous things were to happen.
CHAPTER XV
Outward to Pluto
EIGHT hours later Saturn had taken its place in the starry backdrop of space as another of the pinpoint host. The Sun had dimmed and shrunk proportionately. Traft, hoarsely, had announced their velocity as twenty thousand miles a second!
Four humans riding a runaway satellite at a prodigious velocity that could barely be matched by Earth’s fastest and lightest ships! Fantastic dream! An entire world, whose mass measured a staggering total of earthly tons, hurtling away from its age-old orbit, like a gigantic cannon-ball. The engine to drive it must produce forces comparable to the smoldering giant that at times on Earth had laid Waste its crust. Colossal power was in play, whose designation in horsepower would require reams of paper to record.
Shelton had fallen into a sort of shock-proof calm. Facts had to be accepted. Now that the initial excitement had died down, he began pondering. Why had this been done? An entire satellite ripped from its orbit, flung toward the outer reaches? Their destination was Pluto, obviously.
What was to be done there? What were Lorg’s cryptic plans?
> Shelton tried to anticipate a little, but made no headway. So far it was inexplicable.
THE radio signal hashed. Shelton knew it would be Lorg, the Alien Superior. His hatefully confident features peered out of the screen, his large, unlidded eyes aglow.
“A complete success!” Lorg chortled in triumph. “The Great Machine which drives this satellite has come up to all our expectations. We worked on it many years. It would have been a sad blow if it had failed. But our engineers and scientists performed nobly. You have perhaps noticed, Dr. Shelton, that we have achieved the velocity of twenty thousand miles a second. I think you will agree with me that it is A marvelous feat—a product of super-science?”
Shelton remained stonily silent, “But let me show you this Great Machine of which I am so proud,” Lorg went on imperturbably. “I will relay views of it through to you. Just one moment.”
Shelton almost snapped off the opti-screen, enraged at the Torm’s smug boastfulness. But then he stayed his hand. It might be well to know as much of the aliens’ doings as possible.
The Alien Superior’s face was replaced in the screen by another picture. It was meaningless at first, a jumble. But suddenly its perspective leaped out, as finer tuning smoothed the general haziness.
Shelton gulped as the impression of great depth smote him. It was an aerial view of a Cyclopean chamber. The walls were studded with little boxes—no, big transparent boxes in each of which sat an alien. They were manipulating controls. Strange beams stabbed outward toward the thing in the center.
And the thing in the center was a truly amazing object—a gigantic coil of glasslike material, uprearing from floor to ceiling. It surrounded a thinner coil that in turn surrounded narrower coils, dozens of them. Finally the core was a thick laminated post that lost itself in the screen, evidently piercing the roof and continuing.
It was hard to estimate dimensions. Shelton conservatively placed the largest, outside coil as a thousand feet long and at least a hundred wide. Its glasslike, glistening cable was perhaps five feet thick. But there was no sign of a support. The thing upheld its own tremendous weight. Earth’s best steel would never do that, as a coil.
A purling violet glow surrounded the coils, deepening toward the core. Electrical power, in one form or another. But Shelton was certain, look as he might, that there wasn’t a pinhead of metal in the place! Plastics? That must be the only answer.
Lorg’s voice came, as though he were a commentator lecturing tourists.
“The Great Machine!” he informed. “From its coils springs the world-moving force that motivates Iapetus. It is simple. Electricity is fed through the coil matrix and transformed thereby into space-warping energy. When space is warped, gravitational forces arise. I believe your scientist Einstein postulated that, a century ago.” The alien nodded slightly, as though giving unvoiced commendation to Einstein. He went on.
“We warp space in the direction opposite that in which we wish to go. A negative gravitational field results, repelling the gravity of Iapetus. Iapetus moves, since space is fixed. It is that warp beyond which your radio calls cannot penetrate, and that your Ranger ship so unfortunately crashed into. It is a solid wall of bent space!” Shelton was thunderstruck, but to control himself he asked:
“How do you produce the great amount of electricity needed?”
The alien smiled. “We need but little electricity. We have taken advantage of a simple fact. The lower the temperature of a conductor, the less resistance to the flow of electricity. The electrons move more easily. As some of your Earth scientists know, a slight current in a coil of wire near absolute zero will continue for hours, even days, without diminishing.
“At the absolute zero itself, the current would continue forever! This chamber is enclosed, artificially cooled, and is as close to absolute zero as we can achieve. Perhaps it is a few millionths of a degree above. My workers there are in sealed suits. We have only to feed in tiny amounts of electricity, now and then, to make up for small losses. But the original current put in is still there, circuiting endlessly, producing the great world-moving forces for us like a faithful, undying slave!”
The Earth people stared at the great coils, trying to understand. A pulsating current rippled silently through, never dying, never wearing out!
“It’s impossible!” Shelton found himself muttering. “Absolutely impossible!”
“Then we do the impossible—in your conception?” the alien said pointedly. “Notice the coils themselves. They are not metal; they are of plastic composition. It is also true that poor conductors become good conductors at low temperatures. We are masters of low temperature methods, Earthman, and of plastics.
“Our life, our environment, exists at much lower temperatures than yours. We know little of heat methods. Therefore we have never been able to utilize metals, furnaces, and all those processes that are the life of your civilization.”
The picture of the Great Machine had flicked away, and Lorg’s face once again greeted them.
“We do not use explosives, guns, since we have no metal industry,” he went on. “Instead of rocket ships, we have gravity ships whose engines are miniatures of the Great Machine. We have developed plastics to serve all our needs. We have a greater number of varieties, serving all purposes, than you have alloys! Thus you see we are not handicapped. We handle greater powers, in fact, than you, as you have just seen. Our civilization and science will prove themselves superior—in the coming events!”
Shelton felt suddenly chilled. What would those coming events be? That question stabbed through his mind, crowding out the amazing superscience he had glimpsed.
“You are taking Iapetus to Pluto,” he stated as a feeler. “For what purpose? Is Pluto your home world? Why—”
He stared quizzically at Lorg, waiting.
The Alien Superior smiled enigmatically. “You will find out all those things in due time,” he said noncommittally. “We will reach Pluto in thirty-six hours. I suggest”—he glanced mockingly from one to another of their haggard faces—“that you get some sleep. You cannot escape, and you are safe. Incidentally, here’s a little bedtime entertainment for you, relayed from a ship just beyond the warp.”
The loud speaker crackled for a moment, then blared forth with an excited Earth commentator’s voice. The Earth people leaned forward tensely.
“—that utterly vanished a few hours ago. This eighth moon of Saturn has apparently slipped out of its orbit, incredible as it sounds, and lost itself. Earth astronomers are searching feverishly with their telescopes, but so far it has not been located. The Titan Ranger patrol has been out searching through and around Saturn without result. Iapetus is gone!
“No one knows how it happened. Astronomers say it is impossible for a moon to wander off. No official statement has been issued yet by the Government. Something startling will probably be the answer, but official channels have not revealed a thing. All official posts at Titan and Rhea are under a seal of silence. It is hoped that wayward Iapetus will soon be found somewhere around Saturn and thus end this unprecedented mystery. This is the central—”
The voice was clipped off. With his mocking leer Lorg said, “Au revoir,” and his image faded.
“They’re looking around Saturn!” said Shelton bitterly. “We’re past the orbit of Uranus already. If only somebody knew before—”
“Before what?” queried Traft. “What do you figure the aliens are going to do when we’ve reached Pluto?”
Shelton shook his head. “Let’s get some sleep,” he said.
Lying in his bunk, a little later, he thought of Iapetus at Pluto, being loaded like a bomb with ships and aliens. A movable war base! It could rumble into the Solar System, disgorging its fighting forces anywhere needed. He could almost picture the scene, a moon looming in one of the planet’s skies, ships plunging down to attack, earthly forces taken unawares.
Was this what Lorg planned? Shelton’s sleep was troubled by the tailings of these ominous conjectures.
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CHAPTER XVI
Impossible World
DAY had become permanent on their side of Iapetus, since the anti-gravity force was projected backward from their position on the satellite. It was a queer sky they saw, stationary, immovable, with the planets and Sun slowly fading.
The bright dot of Earth had drawn in so close to the Sun, as its orbit shrank, that it was obscured. They could not see Pluto, with the bulk of the satellite between, but they knew it must be getting bright, expanding into a disk.
The party aboard the grounded expedition snip had slept, or tried to, for a few hours. Since then they had waited in an air of portentous gloom, eating a little, as the hours passed. Finally they felt an increased throbbing under their feet, as the satellite quivered with decelerating forces. Their weight became noticeably greater as inertia pressed them groundward.
“We must be arriving at Pluto,” Traft surmised. “Slowing down now. Well, they did it!”
Shelton nodded reluctantly. He was forced to admire the achievement, if not the achievers. A tremendous, world-sized bulk, driven by namelessly supreme energies across three billion miles of space! Never in the annals of Earth science had such a thing been dreamed possible. The aliens had touched a height, in this direction at least. It was something to be respected.
After awhile, the pressure vanished, and subtly they felt a new motion that Iapetus had taken.
“We’re revolving around Pluto,” predicted Hugh Benning.
“And rotating,” added Traft, indicating the stars which had begun to wheel up from one horizon and down the opposite.
Shelton dashed for the radio.
“Maybe they’ve turned the warp off!”
But the roaring static greeted him as before. Lorg was not making any slips.
Presently, in their sky, a dark, shrouded bulk shouldered up between two peaks at the “east.” It rose like a brooding monster, barely lighter than the black void behind it, lit by a starlike Sun four billion miles away.
