The Atom Hell of Grautier

by Perry Rhodan

  Since the blaze raged only along the ground and was not spreading into the atmosphere, that meant the Arkonides had not set the bombs to elements seven and eight—nitrogen and oxygen, The bombs affected heavier elements.

  Judson felt his breath threatening to give out on him. The pain in his chest became unbearable.

  I must! was the only thing he could still think about. He stumbled onwards, no longer knowing if he were still going in the right direction or not.

  After an endlessly long time the flat remains of a building appeared in front of him. He recognized it: it had been one of the mess halls. From here on he had to move to the left, straight for the yellow wall of flame. He had gone too far to the east. The portion of the wall still standing served him as a welcome support. As long as he walked along it, he saved his strength and was even able to move a little faster ahead.

  Fifty meters still remained to the bunker entrance. Judson did not think of how the temperature of the area rose with each step he took. Nor did he think that the suit he was wearing would give up the ghost when the temperature was in excess of a certain level. He thought only of the 50 meters and that he had to cross them.

  Gasping, sweating and groaning in pain, he worked his way through a world in which chaos raged and yet was completely silent. He was no longer aware of the irreality of the situation. He was possessed by the thought of reaching the bunker and warning Perry Rhodan. He no longer looked at the blazing nuclear firewall advancing across the ground towards him, nor did it penetrate his consciousness that the temperature of the firewall was high enough to cause dangerous things to happen: like, for example, melting together two formerly separated catalyst halves of Uranium.

  When Judson had put behind him 25 or 30 of the remaining 50 meters, his strength was exhausted. He could not take another step. He simply fell forward and braced himself with the rest of his strength against the murderous storm threatening to blow him away.

  Only a few moments, he thought. Then I'll go on. Only a few moments.

  Reason triumphed over his body. Judson got up again and staggered on, even though he hardly had enough strength left to move his legs and fight the storm.

  He saw the small shed housing the bunker entrance emerge from the gloom of the radioactive dust ahead. The consciousness of being so close to his goal gave him new strength. Stumbling, panting and reeling, he worked his way forwards, meter by meter, foot by foot. Then a glowingly hot gust of wind hit him and threw him 20 meters back. He fell heavily to the ground and lost consciousness on impact.

  Just in time to avoid seeing the inferno breaking out at that moment over the Grautier base—which would swallow up Judson, too, in a few seconds.

  • • •

  At 1249 hours, Terrania Time, the wall of flame ignited by an Arkon Bomb rolled over Missile Post 17 at the northern edge of the landing field. Just half an hour before, one of the missiles had been readied for takeoff and was made 'live' and ready to explode. Then Lt.-Col. Judson's order for putting on spacesuits had been given. Then men obeyed the order, leaving the missile where it stood. When they had put on their suits, the men boarded one of the waiting transport ships.

  No one concerned himself about the 'live' missile any more.

  The fire melted the two halves of the catalyst together, uniting the two pieces of uranium into critical mass. Amid temperatures of millions of degrees, the missile's fusion warhead exploded.

  A fiery ball of nuclear force rose above the Grautier landing field, for a few seconds rendering even the radiant brilliance of the yellow atomfire pale in comparison.

  At 1249 hours Terrania Time, the Terran base on Grautier ceased to exist.

  2/ HELLWORLD HOLOCAUST

  When the shockwave of the atomic bomb explosion shook the bunker, Perry Rhodan knew that he had lost the game on Grautier. The Arkonides were attacking. They had not missed their target. And the base had not been equipped with an effective defense or even designed for one. Its most important weapon had been the secrecy in which its galactic position had been shrouded. One tiny, ridiculous chance event, a defect in a small device—the damper aboard the Rigel —had knocked this weapon out of the Terrans' hands. Grautier was being given up almost defenseless to the overpowering enemy attack. And the Terran fleet stood 500 light-years away—too far away to be able to intervene in the events with any chance of success.

  What was more, Perry Rhodan now did not even have the possibility of calling on the fleet: the large hypercom connecting Grautier with the universe at large had broken down with the explosion of the atomic bombs. There were still a number of smaller units but they were scattered somewhere through the supply rooms and offices.

  The single unit belonging to the bunker's emergency equipment was not powerful enough to penetrate the almost one-kilometer-thick layer of ground above the bunker.

  Fifteen minutes after the beginning of the attack, Rhodan learned from the radar officer that a yellowish wall of flame was advancing towards the landing field from the northwest. The officer expressed the same suspicion to Rhodan that he wrote down on a sheet of paper for Mike Judson a few minutes later: the Arkonides had dropped Arkon Bombs.

  From that moment on, there was no more hesitation. If the bombs dropped had been set to include Element 14, silicon, in the fusion process, then the atomfire would eat its way into the ground and within a shortime reach even the deepest part of the bunker.

  The only thing to do now, was escape, and if the fire was coming from the northwest the most logical direction of flight was to the southeast. There was an exit from the bunker leading in that direction, coming to the surface 15 kilometers from the south edge of the landing field. That was far enough to be safe from the reach of the atomfire for at least an hour.

  Reginald Bell expressed his considerations. He had promised Mike Judson to come to his aid. Thereupon Perry Rhodan personally attempted to reach Lt.-Col. Judson over the intercom and tell him that the battle was lost. The men of the base were to be instructed to get away from the landing field or to leave Grautier in the small transporters, if any had withstood the explosion of the first bomb.

  No one replied. Reginald Bell had witnessed for himself during his conversation with Judson how the shockwave of the explosion had flattened the Lt.-Col.'s small command post. The connection had been broken off and Judson had saved himself in the open air, as the radar men knew. It had to be assumed that he had given the order for evacuation on his own. Nothing more could be done for Judson and the men on the base. If Rhodan and his companions did not want to be caught in the atomfire, they would have to get to safety by their own efforts. With the same calm prudence that made him stand out among other men in such situations, Rhodan collected from the bunker's emergency supplies everything that a four-man team would need on an atomfire-devastated planet—above all, a minicom, a few measuring instruments, food and weapons.

  Then they made their way upwards, quiet and pensive. A swift transport band took them through deserted corridors to the southeast elevator shaft and the lift climbed the 950 meters to the surface in less than three minutes.

  The elevator shaft ended 20 meters below the actual exit, opening onto, the ring corridor that connected all the bunker exits with a number of rollbands of different speeds. Even the ring corridor was deserted. The men who had been here when the alarm sounded for the appearance of the Arkonide fleet had gone to their posts above at the missile ramps or gunposts. The bunker was empty and its last four inhabitants, to whom it had up to now given protection from the murderous power of the Arkonide bombs, were also in the process of leaving it.

  The escalator leading up to the exit was still functioning. Inside the small exit shed a row of vidscreens and loudspeakers relayed a picture of the outer world: a hurricane of unheard of strength blasted across the grassland eastwards down to the jungle. The wind ripped an impenetrable barrier of dust and smoke along with it and nothing more of the bright sun was to be seen. An inferno of noise raged in the loudspeakers.


  The men closed their helmets. In spite of the violent storm they had to go out. There was only one destination available: the deserted settlement of Greenwich, which lay about four kilometers away, on the bank of the Green River. There were vehicles there which the settlers had left behind when they emigrated. If the men did not succeed in reaching Greenwich, they might as well head directly towards the firewall, pushing towards them from the west and let themselves be engulfed by it.

  As they opened the door, the wind blew it out of their hands. Rhodan went out first, hesitated a bit, then took a long step and disappeared. Bell and Atlan let out a cry of surprise but Fellmer Lloyd, radarite and telepath raised his hand reassuringly.

  "Nothing's happened," he said calmly. "He's up ahead somewhere. The storm blew him along with it a ways."

  A few seconds later, Rhodan himself was heard from. They did not see him in the darkness but they heard his voice over their receivers.

  "First of all, don't even try to walk upright. We're going to crawl to Greenwich!"

  • • •

  Even Gen. Deringhouse was taken aback by the series of more than a thousand different impulses picked up by the receivers aboard the flagship Drusus. He had not concerned himself with the first impulse but the series meant that an entire fleet was in motion somewhere. Terran ships could not be involved because the Earth did not possess 1000 warships in addition to those which had quietly assembled in space. So they had to be Arkonide.

  Naturally if was possible that the Robot Regent was relieving a portion of its blockade ships or else reinforcing the blockade fleet but something about the matter did not seem right to Deringhouse. Perhaps it was the previous single impulse that led him to the thought that out there a lone ship was being followed by a whole pack of Arkonide units.

  After some hesitation he had a brief coded message sent to Grautier and when he did not receive a reply he knew that something else had developed than was foreseen in the plans of the Terran Fleet.

  Grautier did not answer.

  Gen. Deringhouse came to his decisions instantly. He transferred command of the waiting fleet over to the next officer in line aboard another spaceship and had the Drusus prepared for transition. The astrogation sector was instructed to cross the distance to Grautier in a single transition. Fifteen minutes before transition Deringhouse sounded the alarm, he took five minutes to explain to the crew that the Drusus would probably materialize in the middle of an Arkonide fleet and that the men of the ship were to destroy as many enemies as possible without being hit themselves. He made no secret of the fact that the base on Grautier had in all probability been lost.

  The one matter he kept to himself was that Perry Rhodan had been on Grautier at the time of the attack—assuming there had been an attack at all. If all the other indications proved correct, then so was the one that Perry Rhodan had paid for the ambush with his life.

  At 1251 hours on 23 October, Terrania Time, they reached the minimum velocity necessary for transition and disappeared from Einstein Space. In the same minute they emerged from hyperspace a few astronomical units from the star Myrtha. The spring had been calculated precisely. Grautier was so close that the ship's telescope could make out details on its surface. They saw the shining mushroom cloud of a gigantic nuclear explosion, the yellow expanse of the atomfire and the spreading dense smoke which was well on its way to engulfing the entire dayside of the planet.

  They saw something else: the tiny gleaming points that were more than 600 ships, dispersed over the planet's surface, openly waiting at a safe altitude for the atomfire to devour all Grautier.

  Conrad Deringhouse gave the order for attack. He knew that even a ship like the Drusus could not engage more than 1000 robot units of the Arkonide fleet in battle with any hope of success. But it was a kind of psychological necessity to undertake a lightning attack and pay the enemy back in kind, at least to a limited extent, for what had been done to Grautier, to say nothing of the fact there might still be survivors on the planet below for whom a blitz attack by the Drusus would be a source of renewed courage, convincing them that they had not been given up.

  Conrad Deringhouse was in a state of gloomy depressed anger as he issued the order to strike.

  Up to now no one besides the highest officers aboard the flagship had known that Perry Rhodan had remained behind on Grautier when the Terran Fleet was assembling at the prearranged place for the blow against Arkon. But from mysterious sources came a rumor that spread among the crewmen that more had been lost on Grautier than just a base. The order to attack the nearest Arkonide ship was taken as a proof of the rumor’s veracity.

  The Arkonides did not give any sign of having noticed the Terran ship. They stayed in the waiting positions,seeming to have nothing more in mind than to stay put until the end of the burning planet.

  The calm was deceptive, however. When the Drusus neared the nearest ship at high speed and came within 2,000 kilometers of it, its defense screens began to glow under the defensive fire of the Arkonide ships. The Drusus shot towards the enemy as a flaming ball of concentrated energy, shaking off the fire of 20 enemy ships cannons like troublesome flies, firing in its turn only when it had reached the minimum distance from the opposing ship.

  The Arkonide ship was an average-sized vessel, hopelessly inferior to the Drusus. Its defense fields made useless efforts to absorb the vast energies of the disintegrator and thermoray blasts; the ship blew up after three seconds, disappearing in the glowing white fireball of a nuclear explosion.

  As he watched the Arkonide ship explode, Gen. Deringhouse felt a grim sense of satisfaction. Coolly and deliberately, as though involved in nothing more than a training mission, he had the Drusus speed 10,000 kilometers past the target, accelerating continuously so that it could finally go into transition and disappear from the Arkonide range of action.

  But the satisfaction did not endure. What was one ship in exchange for Perry Rhodan? Besides, it had probably been a robot ship. Conrad Deringhouse did not even have a reason to be proud of his success. The ship had been considerably outclassed by the Drusus and, when one looked at it objectively, fishing it out of the middle of a powerful fleet had been more tactical stupidity than an admirable feat.

  Deringhouse forced himself to be calm. It cost him some effort to realize that his was not a situation which could be considered from the standpoint of feelings alone. True, Perry Rhodan was presumably dead, and the death of a friend makes everyone mourn. But here, neither Perry Rhodan nor Conrad Deringhouse's sadness were at stake: at stake was the safety of the Earth. New instructions had to be issued. At the moment, an attack on Arkon was out of the question. More reasonable would be a massive attack on the Arkonide fleet besieging Grautier.

  What would be the point of the latter? To wreak revenge? Could any of those who died on Grautier be restored by an act of revenge?

  No Deringhouse rejected that plan as well. And in the middle of his ponderings he became conscious of something he had overlooked up to now: he alone was from now on responsible for the Terran Fleet. There was no one left whom he could ask for advice and no one whose inborn genius could set right any mistakes he would make in these circumstances.

  Deringhouse was on his own. At least until things had been rearranged on Earth.

  There was only one thing he could do for the moment: wait at a safe distance from Grautier and see if at least one person had survived the unexpected attack and was hoping for rescue before the planet dissolved into a glowing cloud of plasma. If he had a minicom or even a larger hypercom unit, that person would send out a distress call.

  The Drusus assumed a waiting position five light-hours from Grautier. The rumor that an important man had remained behind on the planet, possibly even Perry Rhodan himself, thickened almost into certainty.

  Conrad Deringhouse impatiently watched the hours tick by. Nothing happened. Grautier was silent. Deringhouse knew that he need wait no longer than three days. If no one called by then, then no on
e was alive. The atomfire would need no more than three days to finish its work of annihilation.

  • • •

  The weight of the spacesuits almost crushed them but it was their only defense against the raging storm threatening to blow them away. The suits were equipped with antigrav generators, which allowed the wearer to reduce his own weight and that of the suit to a certain degree. Feeling smashed down by the weight of the suit, Reginald Bell had switched on the generator for only one short second. The storm picked him up and blew him 50 meters away. Bell lay unconscious for 15 minutes, then needed another half hour to find his way back to his companions in the almost impenetrable darkness.

  Perry Rhodan crawled at the head of the little group. The thick clouds of smoke driven from the west caused such a complete gloom in even the middle of the day, Rhodan could barely see one step ahead. He laboriously tried to orient himself to every small detail in the landscape remaining in his memory from previous days but the farther they went away from the base, the sparser those memories became, and finally Rhodan had no choice but to take care that they proceeded straight ahead and did not veer off into a curve or even more in a circle.

  Perhaps they would have missed their destination anyway but as they had covered about half the distance something happened that Rhodan had not counted on: they encountered a kind of roadway that connected the base spaceport with the settlement Greenwich. The road crossed the path Rhodan and his companions were following almost at a right angle. The proved that in spite of all their precaution they had in fact veered off in the wrong direction. Now the question was whether they should go right or left along the road. Rhodan chose to go right and a few hours later was proved to have made the right decision.