The Space Opera Megapack: 20 Modern and Classic Science Fiction Tales

by John W. Campbell

  He raised his eyes toward the far-off horizon, where a great yellow star flamed brilliantly against the black velvet of space. He thought of that planet where the sky had been blue—an atmosphere of such intensity that it colored the sky!

  Thoughtfully he gazed at the flaming yellow point.

  He had much to consider now. They had met a new race, barbarians in some ways, yet they had not forgotten the lessons they had learned; they were not decadent. Between his eon-old people and their new home stood these strange beings, a race so young that its age could readily be counted in millennia, but withal a strong, intelligent form of life. And to a race that had not known war for so many untold ages, it was an unthinkable thing that they must kill other living, intelligent beings in order that they might live.

  They had no need of moving, Tordos Gar and many others had argued; they could stay where they were forever, and never find any need for leaving their planet. This was the voice of decadence, Taj Lamor told himself; and he had grown to hate that voice.

  There were other men, men who had gone to that other solar system, men who had seen vast oceans of sparkling water, showering from their ruffled surfaces the brilliant light of a great, hot sun. They had seen towering masses of mountains that reached high into the blue sky of a natural atmosphere, their mighty flanks clothed with green growth; natural plants in abundance.

  And best of all, they had fought and seen action, such as no member of their race had known in untold ages. They knew Adventure and Excitement, and they had learned things that no member of their ancient race had known for millennia. They had learned the meaning of advancement and change. They had a new ardor, a new strength, a new emotion to drive them, and those who would have held them back became enthusiasts themselves. Enthusiasm may be contagious, but the spirit of their decadence was rapidly failing before this new urge. Here was their last chance and they must take it; they would!

  They had lost many men in that battle on the strange world, but their race was intelligent; they learned quickly, the small ships had been very hard targets, while their big ships were too easy to strike. They must have small ships, yet they must have large ships for cargo, and for the high speed driving apparatus. The small ships were not able to accelerate to the terrific speed needed. Once their velocity had been brought up to the desired value, it was easy to maintain it with the infinitely small friction of space as the only retarding force; one atom per cubic inch was all they must meet. This would not hold them up, but the great amount of fuel and the power equipment needed to accelerate to the desired speed could not be packed into the small ship. Into the vast holds of the huge ships the smaller ones were packed, long shining rows of little metal projectiles. Tiny they were, but they could dart and twist and turn as swiftly as could the ships they had met on that other world—tiny ships that flashed about with incredible suddenness, a target that seemed impossible to hit. These ships would be a match for those flashing motes of the Yellow Sun. Now it might be that their great transport and battle ships could settle down to those worlds and arrange them for their own people!

  And they had discovered new weapons, too. One of their mightiest was a very old apparatus, one that had been forgotten for countless ages. A model of it was in existence in some forgotten museum on a deserted planet, and with it long forgotten tomes that told of its principles, and of its consequences. Invisibility was now at their command. It was an ancient weapon, but might be exceedingly effective!

  And one other. They had developed a new thing! They had not learned of it in books, it was their invention! They did not doubt that there were other machines like it in their museums, but the idea was original with them. It was a beam of electrical oscillatory waves, projected with tremendous energy, and it would be absorbed by any conductor. They could melt a ship with this!

  And thus that great field had been filled with Giants of Space! And in each of these thousand great warships there nestled three thousand tiny one-man ships.

  Here was a sight to inspire any race!

  Taj Lamor watched as the last of the working machines dragged its slow way out of the great ships. They were finished! The men were already in them, waiting to start, and now there was an enthusiasm and an activity that had not been before; now the men were anxious to get that long journey completed and to be there, in that other system!

  Taj Lamor entered his little special car and shot swiftly down to the giant cruisers. He stepped out of his little craft and walked over to the tube conveyor ready for the trip to the nose of the great vessel. Behind him attendants quickly moved his car to a locked cradle berth beside long rows of similar vehicles.

  A short while later those who were to remain on the dark planet saw the first of the monsters of space rise slowly from the ground and leap swiftly forward; then as methodically as though released by automatic machinery, the others leaped in swift pursuit, rushing across half a world to the tremendous space lock that would let them out into the void. In a long, swift column they rushed on. Then one at a time they passed out into the mighty sea of space. In space they quickly formed and set out.

  As though by magic, far to the left of their flight, there suddenly appeared a similar flight of giant ships, and then to the right, and above them, another seemed to leap out of nothingness as the ships of other planets came into sight. Quickly they formed a vast cone about their leader’s ship, a protecting screen, yet a powerful offensive formation.

  Endlessly, it seemed, they sped on through the darkness. Then as the yellow star flamed brighter and brighter before them, they slowed their ships till the small fliers could safely be released into space.

  Like a swarm of insects flying about giant birds of space the little ships circled the mighty masses of the battle cruisers. So huge were they, that in the combined mass of the fleet there rested sufficient gravitational attraction to force the little fliers to form orbits about them. And so they sped on through the void, the vast conical fleet with its slowly circling belt of little ships. A fleet whose counterpart had never entered the Solar System.

  It was well beyond the orbit of Pluto that the first of the Solarian scouts detected the approaching invasion fleet. The tension that had gripped Earth and Venus and their guardian ships for so long a time suddenly snapped; and like a great machine set into sudden motion, or a huge boulder, balanced, given the last push that sends it spinning with destructive violence down a slope, the fleet went into action.

  It was merely a little scout, a ten-man cruiser, that sent in the message of attack, and then, upon receiving headquarters’ permission, went into action. Some of the tacticians had wanted to try to get the entire fleet into battle range for a surprise attack in power; but others felt that this could not possibly succeed. Most important, they decided, was the opportunity of learning if the invaders had any new weapons.

  The Nigrans had no warning, for a ten-man cruiser was invisible to them, though the vast bulk of their own ships stood out plainly, lighted by a blazing sun. No need here to make the sun stand still while the battle was finished! There was no change out here in all time! The first intimation of attack that the Nigrans had was the sudden splitting and destruction of the leading ship. Then, before they could realize what was happening, thirty-five other destructive molecular motion beams were tearing through space to meet them! The little ten-man cruiser and its flight of speedsters was in action! Twenty-one great ships crumpled and burst noiselessly in the void, their gases belching out into space in a great shining halo of light as the sun’s light struck it.

  Unable to see their tiny enemies, who now were striking as swiftly, as desperately as possible, knowing that death was practically certain, hoping only to destroy a more equal number of the giants, they played their beams of death about them, taking care to miss their own ships as much as possible.

  Another ship silently crumpled, and suddenly one cruiser right in the line of the flight was brought to a sudden halt as all its molecules were reversed. The ships behind it, u
nable to stop so suddenly, piled up on it in chaotic wreckage! A vast halo of shining gas spread out fifty thousand miles about, blinding further the other ships, the radiance about them making it impossible to see their tiny enemies.

  Now other of the Solarian ships were coming swiftly to the attack. Suddenly a combination of three of the ten-man cruisers stopped another of the great ships instantaneously. There was another soundless crash, and the giant mass of wreckage that heaped suddenly up glowed dully red from the energy of impact.

  But now the little ships of the invaders got into action. They had been delayed by the desperate attempts of the dreadnoughts to wipe out their enemies with the death rays, and they could not cover the great distances without some delay.

  When a battle spreads itself out through a ten-thousand mile cube of space—through a thousand billion cubic miles of space—it is impossible to cover it instantaneously with any machine.

  Already nearly a hundred and fifty of the giant liners had gone into making that colossal mass of junk in space. They must protect the remaining cruisers! And it was that flight of small ships that did protect them. Many of the Solarians went down to death under their rays. The death rays were exceedingly effective, but the heat rays were not able to get quite as long a range, and they were easily detected by the invisibility locators, which meant certain destruction, for a molecular motion ray would be there in moments, once they had been located.

  The main fleet of the Solar System was already on its way, and every moment drew closer to this running battle, for the great ships of the Nigrans had, although they were entering the system cautiously, been going at a very high speed, as interplanetary speeds are measured. The entire battle had been a running encounter between the two forces. The Solarian force, invisible because of its small size, was certainly getting the better of the encounter thus far, but now that the odds were changing, now that the small ships had come into the fray, engaging them at close range, they were not having so easy time of it.

  It would be many hours before the full strength of the Solarian fleet could be brought to bear on the enemy. They were not able to retire and await their arrival, for they must delay the Nigran fleet. If even one of those great ships should safely reach the two planets behind them—!

  But within a half hour of the original signal, the Rocket Squad had thrown itself into the battle with a fervor and abandon that has given that famous division a name that will last forever.

  The small fliers of the Nigrans were beginning to take an appalling toll in the thinning ranks of the Solarians. The coming of the Rocket Squad was welcome indeed! They were able to maneuver as swiftly as the enemy; the speedsters were harder to spot than the Solarian ten-man and thirty-man boats. The Solarian speedsters were even smaller than the comparable Nigran craft, and some of these did a tremendous amount of damage. The heat ray was quite ineffective against the ten-man ships, even when working at full capacity, when produced by the small generators of the Nigran one-man boats. The cruisers could absorb the heat and turn it into power faster than the enemy could supply it. Beams from the monster interstellar liners were another matter, of course.

  But the one-man speedsters had a truly deadly plan of attack against the liners. The plan was officially frowned upon because of the great risks the pilots must take. They directed their boats at one of the monster ships, all the power units on at full drive. As close to target as possible the man jumped from his ship, clothed, of course, in an altitude suit equipped with a radio transmitter and receiver.

  Death rays could not stop the speedsters, and with their momentum, the invaders could not make it less deadly with their heat beam, for, molten, it was still effective. A projectile weighing twenty-two tons, moving a hundred miles a second, can destroy anything man can lift off a planet! Their very speed made it impossible to dodge them, and usually they found their mark. As for the risk, if the Solarian forces were victorious, the pilots could be picked up later, provided too long a time had not elapsed!

  In the midst of the battle, the Solarians began to wonder why the Nigran fleet was decreasing so rapidly—certainly they had not caused all that damage! Then suddenly they found the answer. One of their ships—then another—and another fell victim to a pale red ray that showed up like a ghostly pillar of luminosity coming from nowhere and going nowhere! The answer? The invaders’ ships were becoming invisible! The invisibility detectors were being overloaded now, and the hunt was hard, while the Nigrans were slipping past them and silently destroying Solarian ships! The molecular motion rays were quite effective on an invisible ship—once it had been found. They were destroying the Nigrans as rapidly as they were being destroyed, but they were letting some of them slip past! The luminous paint bombs and bullets were now called into play. All enemy ships were shot at with these missiles, and invisibility was forestalled.

  At long last the dark bulk of the main fleet approached, a scarcely visible cloud of tiny darting metal ships. The battle so far had been a preliminary engagement. The huge ships of the Nigrans were forced to stop their attack, and releasing the last of the fliers, to retire to a distance, protected by a screen of small ships, for they were helpless against the Solarian speedsters. Invisibility fell into disfavor, too, now that there were plenty of Solarian ships, for the Nigrans were more conspicuous when invisible than when visible. The radio detector could pick them out at once.

  The entire Nigran fleet was beginning to reveal the disorder and uncertainty that arose from desperation, for they were cornered in the most undesirable position possible. They were outside the Solarian fleet, and their ships were lighted by the glare of the sun. The defenders, on the other hand, were in such a position that the enemy could see only the “night” side of them—the shadowed side—and, as there was no air to diffuse the light, they were exceedingly hard to find. In the bargain, the radium paint was making life for the Nigrans a brief and flitting thing!

  The invaders began to pay an awful toll in this their first real engagement. They lacked the necessary power to cover the entire Solarian fleet with their death rays, and their heat weapons were of little help. The power of the small ships did not count for much—and the big liners could not use their weapons effectively for their small fliers must be between them and their adversary. Despite this, however, the Nigrans so greatly outnumbered the Earth-Venus forces that it looked as though a long and costly war lay ahead.

  At last the Solarian generals tried a ruse, a ruse they hoped would work on these beings; but they who never before had to plan a war in space, were not sure that their opponents had not had experience in the art. True, the Nigrans hadn’t revealed any especially striking generalship—had, in fact, committed some inexcusable blunders—but they couldn’t be sure. Though they didn’t know it, the Solarians had the advantage of thousands of years of planetary warfare to rely on. This stood them in good stead now.

  The Nigrans were rallying rapidly. To their surprise, the forces of the Solarians were dwindling, and no matter how desperately this remnant fought, they could not hold back the entire force of the Nigran fliers. At last it appeared certain that the small ships could completely engage the Solarian fleet!

  Quickly the giant cruisers formed a great dense cone of attack, and at a given signal, the fliers cleared a hole for them through the great disc-shaped shield of the defenders. And with all their rays fanned out in a 100% overlap ahead of them, the Nigran fleet plunged through the disc of ships at close to four hundred miles per second. They broke through—were on their way to the unprotected planets!

  The Solarian ships closed the gap behind them, and eighteen of the giant ships burst into wreckage as powerful beams found them, but for the most part the remnant of the defending forces were far too busy with the fliers to attack the large ships. Now, as the monster engines of destruction raced on toward the planets still approximately two billion miles away, they knew that, far behind them, their fliers were engaging the Solarians. They had left their guard—but the guard w
as keeping the enemy occupied while they were free to drive in!

  Then from nowhere came the counterattack! Nearly five thousand thirty-man ships of Earth and Venus, invisible in the darkness of space, suddenly leaped into action as the dreadnoughts sped past. Their destroying rays played over the nigh-helpless giants, and the huge ships were crumbling into colossal derelicts. With the last of their guard stripped from them, they fell easy prey to the attackers. Faster than they could keep count they were losing their warships of space!

  The ruse had worked perfectly! Nearly all of the ten-man and one-man ships had been left behind them in the original disc, while all the thirty-man light cruisers, and a few hundred each of the ten-man and one-man crafts sped away to form a great ring twenty thousand miles farther back. The Nigran fleet had flown blindly into the ambush.

  There was only one thing left for them to do. They were defeated. They must return to their far-off black star and leave the Solarians in possession of their worlds. For all battle purposes their great force was nearly wiped out, only the fliers remained in force; and these could no longer be carried in the remnant of the great liners. Swiftly they fell back, passing again through the disc, losing thirty more vessels, then raced swiftly away from the fleet of their enemies.

  The Solarians, however, were not content. Their ships were forming in a giant hollow cylinder, and as the sphere of the Nigrans retreated, their beams playing behind them, the cylinder moved forward until it surrounded them, and they raced together toward the distant lightless sun. The Solar end of the cylinder swiftly closed, blocked by a group of huge ships which had taken no visible part in the battle. The Nigrans had stopped using their rays; and the Solarians followed in armed readiness, not molesting as long as they were not molested.

  Many days this strange flight lasted, till at last the great yellow sun, Sol, had faded in the distance to an unusually brilliant star. Then, suddenly visible out of the darkness, a strange black world loomed ahead, and the Nigran ships settled swiftly toward it. Through the airlocks the great liners settled to their planet. No action was taken so long as the Solarian ships were not menaced, but for eight long months the darting ships hung above the four englobed worlds of Nigra.