The Atom Hell of Grautier

by Perry Rhodan

  What would happen if the transmitter no longer worked? was the only thing he could think in that moment.

  Then he raised his hand decisively and pressed the green button in the lower right corner of the plate. The button lit up instantly and the high-pitched hum of the device seemed to all who heard it like the most pleasant sound they had heard since the day before.

  There was not much more to do. As Rhodan did not have any way of directing the minicom antenna in the manner of a directional beam towards the point at which the Terran Fleet had assembled for the attack on Arkon, he could only broadcast a signal that radiated in all directions The distress call was encoded, specially programmed into the sender. A second press of the button was enough to release the signal and send it on its way.

  It clicked softly as Rhodan pressed the button, then clicked again as he let if spring back. "It'll be another 30 to 80 minutes," he said dully. "They should be here by then."

  • • •

  Andre Larchalle was a young man with a firmly anchored inferiority complex. In the opinion of his teachers he was almost a genius; in his own opinion he had never accomplished anything very well, with the exception of attaining the rank of Lieutenant in six semesters instead of the usual eight.

  Andre Larchalle was the officer on watch in one of the communication rooms aboard the Drusus. As was his custom, he was operating a machine himself instead of sitting back in the comfortable watch officer's seat and waiting until his shift was over.

  When the signal came in, Andre Larchalle was on his feet in a single leap. Even before the grey-haired sergeant sitting at the computing devices three places farther down had noticed that anything had happened at all, Andre Larchalle was behind him, demanding: "Quick! What are you waiting for? What's the evaluation?"

  The sergeant stared unhappily at the machine. "The evaluation of what, sir?" he asked, unruffled. Simultaneously a row of lights in front of him lit up.

  "Of that!" Larchalle answered angrily, "Hurry up! It might be the signal from Grautier."

  That signal. It could only mean one thing: Help! Come pick us up! For more than half a day, the entire Drusus had been waiting for that one signal.

  The grey-haired sergeant needed no more than a second to change from his sleepy comfort to a maximum activity. His fingers sped amazingly fast over the rows of calculator keys. From inside the machine before which he sat came a clattering and clicking noise. A small positronicon was on hand to digest the information delivered by the spherical antenna and draw the important conclusions from it.

  Then the positronicon had the data. Andre Larchalle grabbed the tape with the results on it impatiently out of the sergeant's hand and ran three places farther on to give the tape to a young corporal who with nimble fingers shoved it through the narrow slit of a small box firmly screwed into the countertop in front of him. Then the corporal pulled a few switches installed in the counter itself at the base of the box and leaned back.

  "How long will that thing take?" Larchalle asked.

  The question was completely superfluous for he knew the answer himself: between 10 and 2,000 minutes, according to how good that section of the catalog was that dealt with the data from the evaluation.

  Andre Larchalle returned to his seat and forced himself to be calm.

  He considered whether or not he should inform the control room—even before the signal's point of origin had been determined. Just as he was on the verge of pushing the intercom call button, he considered it once again. At that moment the signal chime sounded. With one bound he was by the side of the young corporal, ripping from his hands the plastic sheet on which the catalog positronicon had printed its answer.

  Only a few numbers stood out on the small sheet, reading:

  Myrtha System, Orbit 6, ±1,225,000 meters

  Now that Andre Larchalle held the result in his hand and saw that it was what he had been hoping for, all his excitement suddenly dissipated. He glanced around and his men, looking at him expectantly, saw that his eyes were shining. "We have it, men," he announced. "Proof that somebody's still alive on Grautier."

  Then he went back to his seat and notified the control room.

  • • •

  Even here, the ground vibrated.

  Inside the mountain ring, the storm still possessed only a fraction of the strength with which it was raising hell outside.

  They had left the ship to go out in the darkness. When the spaceship came, they would be able to get on board quicker if they were on foot than if they attempted docking with it in the Quad. Of the 30 minutes in which they could expect rescue at the earliest, 15 had gone by. They would have been happy, rejoicing in the coming rescue, but they recognized in the trembling of the ground that the atomfire had already reached the roots of the island. They did not know if disaster would allow them another quarter of an hour before breaking loose or not.

  Rhodan had slung the minicom strap over his shoulder and connected a wire from the receiver to his helmet. He waited for an answer although he knew that he would not get one if the commander of the spaceship racing to their rescue was not an utter idiot. In a situation like this one, even minimum radio traffic was risk enough.

  Nevertheless, Rhodan waited.

  They hardly spoke to one another. They sat on the boulders scattered through the brushland, their feet braced against the ground, and listened to the trembling rumbling coming from the depths below. The exterior temperature lay just under the boiling point. Rhodan glanced at his watch. Twenty-five minutes had now gone by. In five minutes he would send out a second signal to guide the ship.

  He let his arm sink and began to count the seconds. He had reached 32 when something knocked the stone he was sitting on into the air. Like a hard-kicked football, Rhodan flew away. He vaguely saw the shadows of the bushes coming towards him. He stretched out his arms to break his fall. Then he fell into a confusion of cracking branches, twigs and hard leaves, which served to moderate his impact. He ripped the bush that had caught him into two parts. He was only slightly numbed. In two seconds he was back on his feet, trying to find the direction in which he had come.

  Then a harsh flash of light blinded him. A fraction of a second later the thunder of a huge explosion roared in the loudspeakers, making his ears ring. He reached for his helmet and turned down the exterior microphones. A violent shockwave swept towards him but in the brilliance of the yellow glare he saw the bushes moving like ocean waves and got himself under cover just in time.

  Something threw rocks and chunks of soil at him, almost covering him. Thorny bushes scratched their way over his spacesuit. Something struck him heavily on his left shoulder, awakening the old pain.

  Rhodan raised himself up and began to shout, screaming the names of his companions. From somewhere came an answer. But he could not understand it.

  To the right, not one kilometer away, a glowing column climbed into the black sky. It roared and raged, propelled by the force of hundreds of thousands of degrees, shooting gas and plasma into the air, ripping the earth apart even further and breaking new openings from which other fiery streams spewed.

  The atomfire had reached the island. The island was bursting apart!

  Rhodan stopped where he stood. There was no more point in it. There could be no rescue now.

  Someone was still screaming. Rhodan paid no attention.

  This is the end, you old fool, he thought grimly. You thought you could make the Earth into the Milky Way's leading power inside of 80 years. Well, here's the bill for it. You have to pay it. There's no way out now.

  He looked around calmly, almost idly, as he had done for his entire lifetime.

  From the one plasma column which had begun the island's destruction there had grown 20, 40, 100.

  In the middle of the island there was still a narrow, longish spot that so far had been spared from the calamity. The bushes there were burning but the ground seemed quiet. Should he run over there and extend his life by a few more miserable seconds?


  While he was still pondering the matter he saw a crouching, running figure appear between the bushes, moving in a grotesque manner. He was making springs of four meters at a time, whoever he was—Bell or Atlan or Lloyd. He had turned on his suit's antigrav and thus reduced his weight. He Was running towards the place the chaos had not yet reached.

  It surprised Rhodan. What use was it to run for your life if you were doomed anyway? He narrowed his eyes so the glare would not bother them and in that moment he saw it. Illuminated from below, shining, powerful and indistinct in the haze.

  The spaceship!

  • • •

  Gen. Deringhouse did not have to be awakened. He had vowed to be awake all the time that there was any hope left of saving someone from Grautier.

  Deringhouse was at the intercom himself when Andre Larchalle gave his report. With the matchless speed his men admired him for Deringhouse made the Drusus ready for action.

  The Drusus took off at top speed. The radars remained quiet. There seemed to be no Arkonide ships in the area but Deringhouse had been in his profession too long to trust appearances. He urged his radar crew to maintain utmost vigilance. He knew how difficult it was during a swift flyby to spot a ship lying quietly a few million kilometers away with its engines still and giving off no radio signals.

  It was Deringhouse's suspicion that saved the Drusus from destruction. The giant ship had approached within 2,000,000 kilometers of Grautier when Arkonide spaceships began to burst forth from the inky darkness. The radar picked them up as they began to accelerate in the direction of the Drusus. Within a few minutes they had reached firing range.

  It was a fleet of about 100 units. Deringhouse clenched his teeth and gave the order to fire. No matter how many Arkonides stood in his way—he had to reach Grautier!

  • • •

  Perry Rhodan began to run. He switched on the small antigrav unit and felt his weight lessen immediately.

  He leaped with all his strength from the ground, described a wide are over a deep chasm suddenly opening up in the earth below, and landed five meters away. He made a second leap, then a third. As he was readying for a fourth, the spaceship extended its telescopic landing legs and pressed them firmly into the shaking ground.

  From the left stumbled and ran two more figures. They reached the oval-shaped area, less than 100 meters long, which the cataclysm had so far spared, at the same time as Rhodan. The spaceship had landed in its center. The cover for the bottom hatch opened up, the opening was no more than four meters wide but it offered rescue. It was five meters above the ground, much too high for anyone to reach it in a single jump. The man whom Rhodan had first seen running stood with outspread arms beneath the hatch and looked up at it. The front of a rollband appeared in the opening, slid out and came down.

  When the band reached the ground, all four stood together: Rhodan, Atlan, Bell and Lloyd. Suddenly, after all their haste, they had time to glance encouragingly at one another. The cavalry had arrived in the nick of time.

  One after another, they stepped onto the narrow band which carried them upwards. It took them through the hatch opening and set them down inside. Then it tipped upwards, rapidly sliding into a slot in the floor that served as the rollband's resting place. The outer hatch lid closed.

  They were saved!

  They fell into each other's arms, stammering senseless words.

  They had escaped death at the penultimate moment. Some minutes went by before they recovered from the first onrush of overpowering joy and they began to realize that they did not want to spend the entire trip in the lower airlock; they wanted to go up into the control room and thank the commander, whoever he might be.

  They started towards the inner hatch door and had not yet reached it when it opened of its own accord. In the doorway stood a colossus robot.

  Rhodan, foremost member of the group, stopped dead in his tracks as though rooted to the ground. Half in a trance, he watched the robot open its hideous mouth and he heard the words of its mechanical, inhuman voice saying in Arkonese:

  "Welcome aboard the LanZour, a ship in the fleet of his eminence the Regent of Arkon!"

  • • •

  The Drusus moved at high speed through the ranks of enemy ships coming at it from all sides. There was not one Arkonide ship which matched the size of the Drusus and that meant a single enemy vessel could not have any destructive effect on it. Only the combined fire of a number of ships would be able to damage the Terran flagship. The defense screens of the Drusus lit up in an unending storm of captured energy discharges but Gen.

  Deringhouse and his men were never in any serious danger. On the other hand, the flagship gunposts shot down 10 of the enemy ships like ducks in a shooting gallery and damaged another 25 so badly that they would never be able to leave the Myrtha system under their own power.

  The Drusus ' most effective defense lay in its enormously high velocity. Deringhouse paid no more attention to the rules that governed the movement of large spaceships through a planetary system. Trusting his equipment completely, he pulled everything out of the engines they were capable of. He did not have a second to lose. Grautier stood on the verge of breaking apart.

  The Arkonide ships, on the other hand, were piloted by robots. The robots had their instructions as to what manoeuvres they could risk in the immediate vicinity of a large planet. So the Arkonide units remained an entire order of magnitude slower than the Drusus —which the organic beings surviving the battle were to remember as a fire-spewing monster bringing death and destruction with it. To fight against it was hopeless.

  Deringhouse hardly noticed that the barrage gave way and finally ceased altogether. He was in constant communication with the communications center, seeing on the vidscreen before him Andre Larchalle's face glowing with eagerness as the two of them waited for the survivors on Grautier to send their first tracking signal. One of Larchalle's radiomen were unceasingly broadcasting appeals for Grautier to come in. If there were someone down there with a hypercom unit, he would certainly hear the appeals and respond to them.

  But it could hardly be imagined that someone was still alive on the glowing globe that had expanded to one and one-half times its original size. As the Drusus braked at full power so that it would not rush into the overheated atmosphere at an interstellar velocity, the scale of destruction became evident.

  There was still a slight hope that somewhere down there a small piece of solid ground had endured and someone equipped with a spacesuit had managed to stay alive on it up to now.

  But the receivers remained silent. They did pick up peculiar, unheard of noises from a wide range across the frequency bands but as they were hyper-electromagnetic shockwaves emitted by an exploding planet in it's last moments, they had no coherency. They did not come from a transmitter operated by a thinking being.

  The Drusus penetrated the glowing gas masses. Engines howling, it ploughed through the chaos, leaving behind it a glowing trail of ionized gases that shone brighter than even the columns of plasma shooting into the sky.

  Deringhouse did not give up. Somewhere down there men had still been alive and called for help 40 minutes before.

  Five times the Drusus orbited the dying planet, making each circuit at a different angle in relation to the polar axis. Even if down below there were a sender that had lost 99% of its transmitting power, the com center would have heard it.

  But it heard nothing.

  Deringhouse wanted to go into a sixth orbit—when Grautier blew up. The instruments registered the suddenly sharply increasing pressure of the gas masses. Deringhouse correctly interpreted the signs and switched off the course stabilizers. The Drusus left the orbit it had been following at three times escape velocity and which it could maintain only with additional stabilizing and moved off at a tangent away from Grautier into open space. The watch posts continued to keep a lookout for the Arkonides.

  In the control room the panoramic screens showed a monstrous yellowish-white gas bubble ex
panding constantly. Red tongues of fire stabbed out from the depths of the gas sea and the excited hydrogen atoms in the uppermost levels of the atmosphere contributed a bright greenish tinge. Other colors were mixed in and Grautier died in a glaze of fabulous colors of an intensity never before witnessed by human eyes.

  Deringhouse ordered a withdrawal. While Grautier's iridescent globe shrunk on the stern vidscreens, the ship reached transition velocity and with a short transition it left the system.

  The Drusus rematerialized in Einstein Space in its former waiting place. Deringhouse ordered the ship to remain there for two hours. He wanted to see what would happen now in the Myrtha system.

  He knew that there was no more point in it. No one was left alive on Grautier and whatever the Arkonides might do in the vicinity was no longer interesting for him.

  After the din of voices and the uncountable orders that had been issued in the last 45 minutes, it was quiet once more in the control room. Deringhouse's officers knew that they had lost a battle, although many people, judging from the number of ships that had been shot down might have been of a different opinion.

  4/ OUT OF THE FRYING PAN...

  Reginald Bell was the first one to say anything. "Damn!" he grumbled. "I should have noticed it right off. This ship isn't 200 meters in diameter and it isn't 500. It's some kind of intermediate size which we don't have in our fleet."

  The robot waited patiently.

  As if that were still important now, Rhodan thought tiredly.

  He looked around. Fellmer Lloyd was staring at the floor but Atlan openly returned his glance.

  "Well," Rhodan said, "it looks like you're going to be seeing your old home pretty soon."

  "This isn't quite the way in which I'd hoped," Atlan answered, barely moving his lips.