"What's wrong with it?" challenged Stutsman.
"Nothing," said Craven calmly. "Absolutely nothing at all ... except that we may never reach the Solar System!"
Stutsman seemed to sag. The wolfish snarl on his lips drooped. His eyes stared. Then with an effort he braced himself.
"What do you mean? Why can't we?" He gestured toward the vision plate, toward the tiny yellow star between the two brighter stars.
"That," said Craven, "isn't our Sun. It has planets, but it isn't our Sun."
Chambers stepped quickly to Craven, reached out a hand and hoisted him from the chair, shook him.
"You must be joking! That has to be the Sun!"
Craven shrugged free of Chambers' clutch, spoke in an even voice. "I never joke. We made a mistake, that's all. I hadn't meant to tell you yet. I had intended to get in close to the star and take on a full load of power and then try to locate our Sun. But I'm afraid it's a hopeless task."
"A hopeless task?" shrieked Stutsman. "You are trying to trick me. This is put up between the two of you. That's the Sun over there. I know it is!"
"It isn't," said Craven. "Manning tricked us. He started off in the wrong direction. He made us think he was going straight back to the Solar System, but he didn't. He circled and went in some other direction."
The scientist eyed Stutsman calmly. Stutsman's knuckles were white with the grip he had upon the gun.
"We're lost," Craven told him, looking squarely at him. "We may never find the Solar System!"
CHAPTER TWENTY
The revolution was over. Interplanetary officials and army heads had fled to the sanctuary of Earth. Interplanetary was ended ... ended forever, for on every world, including Earth, material energy engines were humming. The people had power to burn, to throw away, power so cheap that it was practically worthless as a commodity, but invaluable as a way to a new life, a greater life, a fuller life ... a broader destiny for the human race.
Interplanetary stocks were worthless. The mighty power plants on Venus and Mercury were idle. The only remaining tangible asset were the fleets of spaceships used less than a month before to ship the accumulators to the outer worlds, to bring them Sunward for recharging.
Patents protecting the rights to the material energy engines had been obtained from every government throughout the Solar System. New governments were being formed on the wreckage of the old. John Moore Mallory already had been inaugurated as president of the Jovian confederacy. The elections on Mars and Venus would be held within a week.
Mercury, its usefulness gone with the smashing of the accumulator trade, had been abandoned. No human foot now trod its surface. Its mighty domes were empty. It went its way, as it had gone for billions of years, a little burned out, worthless planet, ignored and shunned. For a brief moment it had known the conquering tread of mankind, had played its part in the commerce of the worlds, but now it had reverted to its former state ... a lonely wanderer of the regions near the Sun, a pariah among the other planets.
Russell Page looked across the desk at Gregory Manning. He heaved a sigh and dug the pipe out of his jacket pocket.
"It's finished, Greg," he said.
Greg nodded solemnly, watching Russ fill the bowl and apply the match.
Except for the small crew, they were alone in the Invincible. John Moore Mallory and the others were on their own worlds, forming their own governments, carrying out the dictates of the people, men who would go down in solar history.
The Invincible hung just off Callisto. Russ looked out at the mighty moon, saw the lonely stretches of its ice-bound surface, saw the silvery spot that was the dome of Ranthoor.
"All done," said Greg, "except for one thing."
"Go out and get Chambers and the others," said Russ, puffing at the pipe.
Greg nodded. "We may as well get started."
Russ rose slowly, went to the wall cabinet and lifted out a box, the mechanical shadow with its tiny space field surrounding the fleck of steel that would lead them to the Interplanetarian. Carefully he lifted the machine from its resting place and set it on the desk. Bending over it, he watched the dials.
Suddenly he whistled. "Greg, they've moved! They aren't where we left them!"
Greg sprang to his side and stared at the readings. "They're moving farther away from us ... out into space. Where can they be going?"
Russ straightened, scowling, pulling at the pipe. "They probably found another G-type star, and are heading for that. They must think it is old Sol."
"That sounds like it," said Greg. "We spun all over the map to throw Craven off and looped several times so he'd lose all sense of direction. Naturally he would be lost."
"But he's evidently got something," Russ pointed out. "We left him marooned ... dead center, out where he didn't have too much radiation and couldn't get leverage on any single body. Yet he's moving—and getting farther away all the time."
"He solved our gravitation concentration screen," said Greg. "He tricked us into giving him power to build it."
The two men looked at one another for a long minute.
"Well," said Russ, "that's that. Craven and Chambers and Stutsman. The three villains. All lost in space. Heading for the wrong star. Hopelessly lost. Maybe they'll never find their way back."
He stopped and relit his pipe. An aching silence fell in the room.
"Poetic justice," said Russ. "Hail and farewell."
Greg rubbed his fist indecisively along the desk. "I can't do it, Russ. We took them out there. We marooned them. We have to get them back or I couldn't sleep nights."
Russ laughed quietly, watching the bleak face that stared at him. "I knew that's what you'd say."
He knocked out the pipe, crushed a fleck of burning tobacco with his boot. Pocketing the pipe, he walked to the control panel, sat down and reached for the lever. The engines hummed louder and louder. The Invincible darted spaceward.
"It's too late now," said Chambers. "By the time we reach that planetary system and charge our accumulators, Manning and Page will have everything under control back in the Solar System. Even if we could locate the star that was our Sun, we wouldn't have a chance to get there in time."
"Too bad," Craven said, and wagged his head, looking like a solemn owl. "Too bad. Dictator Stutsman won't have a chance to strut his stuff."
Stutsman started to say something and thought better of it. He leaned back in his chair. From his belt hung a heat pistol.
Chambers eyed the pistol with ill-concealed disgust. "There's no point in playing soldier. We aren't going to try to upset your mutiny. So far your taking over the ship hasn't made any difference to us ... so why should we fight you?"
"It isn't going to make any difference either," said Craven. "Because there are just two things that will happen to us. We're either lost forever, will never find our way back, will spend the rest of our days wandering from star to star, or Manning will come out and take us by the ear and lead us home again."
Chambers started, leaned forward and fastened his steely eyes on Craven. "Do you really think he could find us?"
"I have no doubt of it," Craven replied. "I don't know how he does it, but I'm convinced he can. Probably, however, he'll find that we are lost and get rid of us that way."
"No," said Chambers, "you're wrong there. Manning wouldn't do that. He'll come to get us."
"I don't know why he should," snapped Craven.
"Because he's that sort of man," declared Chambers.
"What you going to do when he does get out here?" demanded Stutsman. "Fall on his neck and kiss him?"
Chambers smiled, stroked his mustache. "Why, no," he said. "I imagine we'll fight. We'll give him everything we've got and he'll do the same. It wouldn't seem natural if we didn't."
"You're damned right we will," growled Stutsman. "Because I'm running this show. You seem to keep forgetting that. We have power enough, when we get those accumulators filled, to wipe him out. And that is exactly what I'm going to do."
"Hell," stormed Stutsman, "that doesn't make any difference. I'll find my way back there some way."
"You're afraid of Manning," Chambers challenged.
Stutsman's hand went down to the heat pistol's grip. His eyes glazed and his face twisted itself into utter hatred. "I don't know why I keep on letting you live. Craven is valuable to me. I can't kill him. But you aren't. You aren't worth a damn to anyone."
Chambers matched his stare. Stutsman's hand dropped from the pistol and he slouched to his feet, walked from the room.
Afraid of Manning! He laughed, a hollow, gurgling laugh. Afraid of Manning!
But he was.
Within his brain hammered a single sentence. Words he had heard Manning speak as he watched over the television set at Manning's mocking invitation. Words that beat into his brain and seared his reason and made his soul shrivel and grow small.
Manning talking to Scorio. Talking to him matter-of-factly, but grimly: "I promise you that we'll take care of Stutsman!"
Manning had taken Scorio and his gangsters one by one and sent them to far corners of the Solar System. One out to the dreaded Vulcan Fleet, one to the Outpost, one to the Titan prison, and one to the hell-hole on Vesta, while Scorio had gone to a little mountain set in a Venus swamp. They hadn't a chance. They had been locked within a force shell and shunted through millions of miles of space. No trial, no hearing ... nothing. Just terrible, unrelenting judgment.
"I promise you that we'll take care of Stutsman!"
"Craven's only a few billion miles ahead now," said Gregory Manning. "With our margin of speed, we should overhaul him in a few more hours. He is still short on power, but he's remedying that rapidly. He's getting nearer to that sun every minute. Running in toward it as he is, he tends to sweep up outpouring radiations. That helps him collect a whole lot more than he would under ordinary circumstances."
Russ, sitting before the controls, pipe clenched in his teeth, watching the dials, nodded soberly.
"All I'm afraid of," he said, "is that he'll get too close to that sun before we catch up with him. If he gets close enough so he can fill those accumulators, he'll pack a bigger wallop than we do. It'll all be in one bolt, of course, for his power isn't continuous like ours. He has to collect it slowly. But when he's really loaded, he can give us aces and still win. I'd hate to take everything he could pack into those accumulators."
Greg shuddered. "So would I."
The Invincible was exceeding the speed of light, was enveloped in the mysterious darkness that characterized the speed. They could see nothing outside the ship, for there was nothing to see. But the tiny mechanical shadow, occupying a place of honor on the navigation board, kept them informed of the position and the distance of the Interplanetarian.
Greg lolled in his chair, watching Russ.
"I don't think we need to worry about him throwing the entire load of the accumulators at us," he said. "He wouldn't dare load those accumulators to peak capacity. He's got to leave enough carrying capacity in the cells to handle any jolts we send him and he knows we can send him plenty. He has to keep that handling margin at all times, over and above what he takes in for power, because his absorption screen is also a defensive screen. And he has to use some power to keep our television apparatus out."
Russ chuckled. "I suppose, at that, we have him plenty worried."
The thunder of the engines filled the control room. For days now that thunder had been in their ears. They had grown accustomed to it, now hardly noticed it. Ten mighty engines, driving the Invincible at a pace no other ship had ever obtained, except, possibly, the Interplanetarian, although lack of power should have held Craven's ship down to a lower speed. Craven wouldn't have dared to build up the acceleration they had now attained, for he would have drained his banks and been unable to charge them again.
"Maybe he won't fight," said Russ. "Maybe he's figured out by this time that he's heading for the wrong star. He may be glad to see us and follow us back to the Solar System."
"No chance of that. Craven and Chambers won't pass up a chance for a fight. They'll give us a few wallops if only for the appearance of things."
"We're crawling up all the time," said Russ. "If we can catch him within four or five billion miles of the star, he won't be too tough to handle. Be getting plenty of radiations even then, but not quite as much as he would like to have."
"He'll have to start decelerating pretty soon," Greg declared. "He can't run the chance of smashing into the planetary system at the speed he's going. He won't want to waste too much power using his field as a brake, because he must know by this time that we're after him and he'll want what power he has to throw at us."
Hours passed. The Invincible crept nearer and nearer, suddenly seemed to leap ahead as the Interplanetarian began deceleration.
"Keep giving her all you got," Greg urged Russ. "We've got plenty of power for braking. We can overhaul him and stop in a fraction of the time he does."
Russ nodded grimly. The distance indicator needle on the mechanical shadow slipped off rapidly. Greg, leaping from his chair, hung over it, breathlessly.
"I think," he said, "we better slow down now. If we don't, we'll be inside the planetary system."
"How far out is Craven?" asked Russ.
"Not far enough," Greg replied unhappily. "He can't be more than three billion miles from the star and that star's hot. A class G, all right, but a good deal younger than old Sol."
"We'll let them know we've arrived," grinned Greg. He sent a stabbing beam of half a billion horsepower slashing at the Interplanetarian.
The other ship staggered but steadied itself.
"They know," said Russ cryptically from his position in front of the vision plate. "We shook them up a bit."
They waited. Nothing happened.
Greg scratched his head. "Maybe you were right. Maybe they don't want to fight."
Together they watched the Interplanetarian. It was still moving in toward the distant sun, as if nothing had happened.
"We'll see," said Greg.
Back at the controls he threw out a gigantic tractor beam, catching the other ship in a net of forces that visibly cut its speed.
Space suddenly vomited lashing flame that slapped back and licked and crawled in living streamers over the surface of the Invincible. The engines moaned in their valiant battle to keep up the outer screen. The pungent odor of ozone filtered into the control room. The whole ship was bucking and vibrating, creaking, as if it were being pulled apart.
"So they don't want to fight, eh?" hooted Russ.
Greg gritted his teeth. "They snapped the tractor beam."
"They have power there," Russ declared.
"Too much," said Greg. "More power than they have any right to have."
His hand went out to the lever on the board and pulled it back. A beam smashed out, with the engines' screaming drive behind it, billions of horsepower driving with unleashed ferocity at the other ship.
Greg's hand spun a dial, while the generators roared thunderous defiance.
"I'm giving them the radiation scale," said Greg.
The Interplanetarian was staggering under the terrific bombardment, but its screen was handling every ounce of the power that Greg was pouring into it.
"Their photo-cells can't handle that," cried Russ. "No photo-cell would handle all that stuff you're shooting at them. Unless ..."
"Unless what?"
"Unless Craven has improved on them."
"We'll have to find out. Get the televisor."
Russ leaped for the television machine.
A moment later he lifted a haggard face.
"I can't get through," he said. "Craven's got our beams stopped and now he has our television blocked out."
Greg nodded. "We might have expected that. When he could scramble our televisors back in the
Jovian worlds, he certainly ought to be able to screen his ship against them."
He shoved the lever clear over, slamming the extreme limit of power into the beam. The engines screamed like demented things, howling and shrieking. Instantly a tremendous sheet of solid flame spun a fiery web around the Interplanetarian, turning it into a blazing inferno of lapping, leaping fire.
A dozen terrific beams, billions of horsepower in each, stabbed back at the Invincible as the Interplanetarian shunted the terrific energy influx from the overcharged accumulators to the various automatic energy discharges.
The Invincible's screen flared in defense and the ten great engines wailed in utter agony. More stabbing flame shot from the Interplanetarian in slow explosions.
The temperature in the Invincible's control room was rising. The ozone was sharp enough to make their eyes water and nostrils burn. The vision glass was blanked out by the lapping flames that crawled and writhed over the screen outside the glass.
Russ tore his collar open, wiped his face with his shirt sleeve. "Try a pure magnetic!"
Greg, his face set and bleak as a wall of stone, grunted agreement. His fingers danced over the control manual.
Suddenly the stars outside twisted and danced, like stars gone mad, as if they were dancing a riotous jig in space, some uproariously hopping up and down while others were applauding the show that was being provided for their unblinking eyes.
The magnetic field was tightening now, twisting the light from those distant stars and bending it straight again. The Interplanetarian reeled like a drunken thing and the great arcs of electric flame looped madly and plunged straight for the field's very heart.
The stars danced weirdly in far-off space again as the Interplanetarian's accumulators lashed out with tremendous force to oppose the energy of the field.
The field glowed softly and disappeared.
"They have us stopped at every turn," groaned Russ. "There must be some way, something we can do." He looked at Greg. Greg grinned without humor, wiping his face. "There is something we can do," said Russ grimly. "We should have thought of it long ago."
He strode to the desk, reached out one hand and drew a calculator near.
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