Ames Leland had been tormenting him, and in his cry now there was a note promising savage vengeance. Kuda had a petty, senile mind, and in it there was a black fury.
NORVELL collared Leland and shook him with all his strength. “You utter, abysmal idiot!” he hissed. “Get out of here! Go to your quarters!”
He emphasized his words with a solid kick to Leland’s posterior. So there was no further argument. Leland left. Now he was in alcoholic tears.
“I guess we’d better rouse the camp, hadn’t we, Frank?” Arla said nervously. “Kuda’s blazing mad. No telling what he’ll do.”
“Yeah,” Norvell answered. “His mind is dimmed with age, but I’ll bet he remembers some devilish scientific tricks!”
The robot-brain had vanished, as it proved. For a while, in the awakened camp, there was an ominous waiting, men asking each other questions under the bleak stars.
Then came a low, crescendoing drone from deep underground and a gradual, thrusting sensation, as of mighty movement—acceleration. As though the terrific mass of QM-1 was speeding up—going somewhere.
“Now what?” Big Jack Leland growled. “That noise sounds like driving engines of some kind! That fool nephew of mine! Why can’t he spend his sprees on something innocent, like breaking his own neck? Norvell, I want to apologize for being bull-headed. There is something wrong with this asteroid!”
“Skip it, Chief,” Norvell responded. “Here comes Saunders, our physicist. What’s the good word, Saunders?”
The little bald-headed man looked slightly wild.
“According to my instruments,” he said, “QM-1 is moving sunward. We seem to be on a curved path that will bring us close to Earth. Our acceleration is fairly high, though there’s hardly been time to determine its exact rate and direction.”
“What do we do now, Norvell?” Big Jack Leland asked.
“Try to stop those engines, or whatever they are, I suppose,” Norvell replied grimly. “See if we can learn what this is all about. Find the point on the surface of QM-1 where the droning is loudest, and start digging. That should be the first step.”
The sound was much louder near the burrow from which Kuda had first emerged, before his capture; so the site for the excavating was easily localized. The crew began to work with large neutron-blast projectors.
There were furies of blazing energy, as the streams of neutrons bit into the soil and the meteoric iron underneath, turning it to incandescent vapor. In the moss-forest, tiny, terrified rodents scampered away, squealing.
In a very short time, the excavating had gone down fifty feet. But there the obstacles stiffened. There was a layer of yellow alloy of obvious artificial origin. And in it was that strange door, whose edges were barely discernible—the door that had been hidden at the bottom of Kuda’s burrow.
“It’s hopeless to try to figure out the combination of that,” Norvell decided. “Kuda probably came this way to go below and start the machinery; but anyhow, he probably locked himself down there from the inside. So keep on with the blasters!”
It proved a slow, gruelling job. That thick and stupendously resistant yellow alloy was no slight barrier even to neutron streams. The night passed, and progress was scant. Still that gradual, mighty acceleration of QM-1 kept on.
There was no special strain to it for human bodies to endure. It was just a matter of a few feet per second according to Saunders, the physicist. But as the hours went by, it built up slowly to a stupendous velocity that covered miles of empty space in the interval of a heartbeat.
“And we are on a curved path, taking us toward Earth!” Saunders offered ominously.
SO THE workers redoubled their efforts to pierce that alloy door, and the vast layer of alloy around it.
Two thirty-hour days passed like that. Ames Leland sometimes watched the toil haggardly, with a hunted, guilty look in his eyes. But he did nothing to help.
“What's happening?” he kept muttering. “Whose game is this?” There was stark terror of the unknown in his voice.
Once Frank Norvell lost control of his own somewhat frayed nerves at Leland’s bothersome presence. He knocked him down. But there was little satisfaction in that. And an hour later, Big Jack Leland's nephew was found dead, horribly clawed, in his quarters.
“Kuda did that,” was his uncle’s comment. “There must be other hidden exits from the underground. But how would we ever find them in the moss-forest? Kuda sallied forth and got his revenge on Ames. But I guess he means to take it out on all of us.”
The spaceship manufacturer showed no sorrow over the loss of his nephew. Only a faint disgust.
The velocity of QM-1 was something in the hundreds of miles per second now, having had so long a time to build up by that continuous acceleration. A speed like that can cross even huge interplanetary distances in a hurry.
The orbits of the straggling, fragmentary asteroids already lay far behind. The path of Mars had been crossed. Earth lay ahead, a small, greenish crescent, ominously in QM-1’s line of flight.
Ultimate developments would come in only a matter of hours now.
“Get all spaceships ready to take off!” Big Jack Leland ordered through a loudspeaker system. “We may have to evacuate QM-1 in a hurry!”
Not many minutes later, Norvell took a moment off from his gruelling work to talk to Arla Manly. He was blistered and scorched, and utterly tired. The girl had tears in her eyes.
“Frank,” she choked. “Saunders says QM-1 is almost sure to collide directly with the Earth. QM-1 is only twenty-five miles in diameter—small for a world. But at the speed it’s going, and with the weight it’s got, it’ll ram its way right down to Earth’s center.
“There’ll be terrible storms, tidal waves, earthquakes! Millions of people will be killed! Can’t somebody do something—get those engines, or whatever they are, stopped in time? Are we going to fail?”
“We’re almost through the alloy shell, I think,” Norvell replied, taking Arla comfortingly in his arms. “We’ll reach those engines. Now you get yourself ready, in case we have to evacuate—and don’t you worry. We’re doing ail we can.”
But as he went back to work, his hopes were scant, indeed. Even if those mysterious Mercurian motors which drove QM-1 like a gigantic spaceship could be reached, was time left to check that awful velocity or change that deadly course, bound into a rigid groove by terrific inertia?
And what was the gigantic enigma, here—the real purpose of QM-1? The mystery of its unknown past? The asteroid couldn’t be just an oversized spaceship. It weighed far too much—was evidently far too solid. Spaceships were comparatively light, being mostly hollow, habitable compartments. While QM-1 was so fearfully heavy that it must have a star-metal core!
Suddenly there was a rumbling sound in that huge excavation dug there in the moss-forest. A ragged cheer went up from the toilers. They’d gotten through the alloy barriers!
THE roof of a huge, cavernous room had collapsed. In it throbbed those gigantic motors, which perhaps found traction in the structure of space itself, to drive QM-1. They were great cylindrical drums of yellow alloy.
“Come on!” Frank Norvell yelled.
In his excitement, he failed to notice that Arla had disobeyed his orders and was close behind him. If there was to be danger, she did not wish him to face it without her.
Following Norvell, the men climbed down into the huge room, holding their neutron guns ready. Kuda, the robot-brain, crouched there at some odd controls.
Under the muzzles of many weapons, he stood his ground.
“Earthians!” he screamed poisonously.
His withered brain, visible through the crystal window in his metal body, pulsed angrily. No music could soothe him now. With a movement of his gleaming arms, he shifted levers. The gigantic machinery whistled to a stop.
“He’s mocking us,” Big Jack Leland grated. “He knows that the crash with Earth is inevitable. Even if the engines here were put into reverse, it’s too late. And defl
ection—steering aside—must be about equally impossible.
“It would take millions of miles of room to turn the mass of this runaway planetoid as much as one degree from its course, now, at this speed!”
Cursing the necessity of doing what had to be done, Norvell drew his neutron gun. And in that moment, a soft breath on his neck caused him to swing about, eyes widening.
“Arla!” he exclaimed. “You darn little fool. Get back!”
He thrust out his arm protectingly, then fired a stream of dazzling energy from his neutron gun. The robot-thing burst apart. The brain of Kuda, last remnant of the once mighty Mercurian race, was dead.
Perhaps he’d been a noted scientist once—a member of the group of Mercury people who had originally built and planned on QM-1 so long ago. No one would ever be sure of his personal history.
Young Frank Norvell tried not to notice the event of Kuda’s death, for he was studying the machines and apparatus here in this gigantic compartment. He noted things. There was a kind of sighting device, such as might be used for a giant gun. Cables went down into the floor suggestively.
Besides the engines, there were many things here, vaguely familiar, for they dealt with neutrons—as in an ordinary Earthly neutron weapon. Norvell was an engineer. Neutrons—neutronium.
Neutronium was composed of solidly packed neutrons—those tremendously heavy and inconceivably small particles which form part of the nuclei of ordinary atoms. Neutrons were deadly. Directed in streams from projectors, they could transmute elements—destroy the structure of matter!
And now, looking around this weird control and power room, Norvell thought he understood the riddle of QM-1. It fairly made his heart leap into his throat with sheer terror. He remembered again the asteroid belt and the Martian legends. And he decided now that the Mercurians might have actually built QM-1—in space!
A hundred years, the job might have taken. But they had been desperate, ready to go to any lengths. They’d provided it with an artificial atmosphere, to make their work easier.... And in later ages, settling cosmic dust had given it a soil—so that it looked like a real, natural world.
“Bring explosives!” Norvell shouted hoarsely. “Everything we’ve got, rocket fuel included, except enough for the ships to blast off with. All ships leave with their crews, as soon as possible. All except Big Jack Leland’s cruiser, which will evacuate the final fifty of us!”
“What’s the idea?” Leland wanted to know.
“Never mind!” Norvell answered.
ANXIOUS workers came, bringing drums of high explosive. Swiftly the drums were unloaded into that vast and now roofless room. Then the spaceships darted out into the void.
“If you’re thinking of saving Earth from a collision by trying to smash QM-1 with a charge as comparatively light as this, you’re crazy, Norvell!” Big Jack Leland grumbled.
“Stop talking!” Norvell ordered, fixing a time-fuse. “All set. So let’s beat it— Arla! Are you still here?”
Five minutes later they were far out in the void, in the Leland cruiser. To the right, QM-1 tore on, intent on burying itself in the vitals of Terra, now looming comparatively near. Norvell knew that if that crash ever occurred, the death of a million people would seem like nothing at all.
In fifteen minutes, the Question Mark Asteroid, moving at a fearsome rate, had gone far ahead of Leland’s spaceship.
Then came a blast beyond all description. It was a terrific, unbelievable detonation that temporarily half blinded vision, even at a distance of a quarter-million miles. There was no sound in the voidal vacuum—only that intense, blue-white sunburst, surging outward at incredible speed.
Big Jack Leland gasped.
“That wasn’t just our little dab of explosive going up!” he stated. “For a second I thought QM-1 really hit the Earth. But there must have been at least two hundred thousand miles to spare.”
Norvell gave a fervent sigh of relief, and hugged Arla closer to him.
“That’s over!” he breathed. “In safety, thank God— No, it wasn’t our explosive.”
“What was it then?” Arla asked.
“It looks as though, in those past ages, the Mercurians had a big war with another planet,” Norvell explained. “They themselves were wiped out with gas, or with plague germs or something. But it seems now that they finished off their adversaries even more spectacularly.
“You know, there’s a theory that all the asteroids once formed a single planet—call it X for unknown. QM-1 isn’t an asteroid, of course. It was designed as a special pill by the Mercurians—one of at least two. QM-1 was an extra, or spare—whatever you want to call it.”
“Hunh?” Big Jack Leland grunted.
“Arla and I want to get married,” Norvell went on imperturbably. “But that will be a comparatively small interruption.... You can get a concession to build spaceships on the Moon or Mars, Chief.
“Well,” he grinned, “I might as well explain that the explosive charge we laid on QM-1 served only as a sort of primer cap, like for an ancient cartridge.
“You wouldn’t have cared to operate a spaceship factory built on a twenty-five-mile-in-diameter neutron bomb, designed for blowing up planets—would you, Big Jack?”
The End
*********************************
Bluff Play,
by Raymond Z. Gallun
Thrilling Wonder Stories Dec.1950
Short Story - 4547 words
When an enemy nation reaches the planets
ahead of the United States, does it mean
the curtain will ring down on freedom?
WE'D seen some photographs. Now we saw the reality. Out there to the north—north of Alaska and across the pole in Asia—was where the little darts of incandescence came from. They streaked upward like inverted meteors, going out into space instead of falling from it. Two of them now...
Young Copeland was at the theodolite. After the specks of fire had vanished into the sunset glow of midnight in mid-summer we waited tensely for his answer—though we knew just about what it would be....
"I make out their rate of climb at approximately nine miles per second,” he drawled. “Two miles per second above the velocity of escape from the Earth. Considering that their takeoff point is probably about two thousand miles away....”
I guess it was pretty corny for me, Joe Palmetier, to say, “Space-ship,” then.
But it was almost as corny for Ted Brand, our leader, to retort in his hard tones, “What did you expect? This is 1955, man!”
“Only 1955,” somebody else put in.
There were no doubters among us. Certainly not on the basis of reasoning. Nobody knew better than we that our own Air Force labs had done the job too. And we knew just how far advanced the actual secret construction work was back there in the underground assembling rooms in Colorado. Twenty big space-ships with nuclear power—better than these—theirs—must be.
But emotion is less flexible and more primitive than reason—sometimes it doesn’t quite keep up with the swift advancement of science. “Space-ship” was a word that had been in the language, long before there was a reality for it to name. It had been with us all as a dream, as a glamorous unattainable, since we could read.
It was natural for a few such interplanetary bugs as ourselves to inherit the job of making the dream true, wasn’t it? Because each man should go into the line of work that interests him most. But now the truth was a little awesome and tough to grasp and accept, deep down, even for us.
This was a trivial point, mentionable only as the dawn of a new time. Like a certain dawn, just ten years ago, over a Japanese city called Hiroshima. And that was where the pleasurable awe of it was converted instantly into a dark and poisonous murk.
We’d been sent flying north to Alaska to get the facts about the rumors—about the nearly proven certainty. Well, now we had those facts beyond dispute.
I stuck out my neck again, putting the main and obvious idea into words. “For on
ce,” I said, “they’re a little ahead of us in technical achievement. Maybe a month ahead. We’re building our first space fleet. They’ve already got theirs in action.
“Ever since World War Two they’ve been hoping to be a little ahead of us so that they could knock us silly, swiftly, and without fear of serious reprisal. Well, now’s their short-term chance.”
I think Ted Brand hated me some just then for saying it. He glared at me briefly, almost with contempt. Then, saying nothing, he looked toward the northern sky. Everybody else except young Copeland did the same. Young Copeland was a strange cool likable sort. He just went on making calculations on a little pad, computing what he already knew in round numbers. None of us spoke.
THE northern sky of the midsummer sub-arctic was a beautiful soft green, above the orange streak of the sun gliding just beneath the rocky horizon. Nothing could have seemed more peaceful—not even a painting. But it was the pendent peace of waiting for the axe to fall.
A feeling of helplessness brought a furious lump to my throat. Memories of history that I had known, came to my mind. Most of our leaders had really tried. Some people had made mistakes. Maybe we should have struck with all our might, long ago. Who knew?
Relations hadn’t yet been broken off. Maybe it was sad farce comedy, like a lot of comedy that had gone before.... But what did that mean to our cities, bombed from space by ships that, in a month’s time, we could never strike back at? We’d never get caught up soon enough.
And now the barrier of fear of us, that had kept us safe, was down. We were gone geese. We were like a few cancer patients that find out about themselves. Let the hundred and eighty million others keep as much of their blessed ignorance as possible, even when the population dispersal—of limited value—was ordered for city and town.
So we all just stood there, looking at the northern sky where the darts of fire had vanished. And we were waiting too for Fred Nichols’ return in his tiny scout plane. He had gone across the Pole for a closer look. He was due back now—if he was ever coming.
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