by Perry Rhodan
• • •
Bell had miscalculated. The tremendous explosion created by Ivan Goratschin which had whirled them like feathers in all directions, caused them to feel as tired and beaten after each movement as if they had marched a whole day. The strain of crawling the distance to the space-disk Betty had put asunder was the last effort their bruised bodies could make without a pause for rest.
They had barely covered one-quarter of the distance to, the next ship when Bell had to order a halt because they simply were unable to go on. They reclined where they had stopped and promptly fell asleep.
When they woke again from a deep slumber, 5 hours had passed. Marshall raised his head and murmured: "For Pete's sake, what's going on?"
Bell looked around but noticed nothing out of the ordinary. He had slept like the dead and now felt more frisky than ever before on Gom.
A few moments later Betty was startled from her sleep, uttering a half-suppressed fearful cry. She sat up and asked, her wide eyes expressing terror: "What's the matter!"
Bell looked at Marshall. "What the devil has happened now?"
Marshall shook his head and gazed into the grey sky. "Everything seems to have gone to hell!" he muttered. "Goms in overwhelming masses! If there's such a thing as telepathic ether, it must be exploding with all these thoughts!"
"And what are they thinking?"
Marshall helplessly shrugged his shoulders. "You know I can't understand them unless they formulate their thoughts especially for me."
Bell waved his hand nonchalantly. "Oh, forget it! What are you worrying about? The Goms have saved us from the storm. As far as I'm concerned they can bunch up by the millions."
"That's what you think!" Marshall countered. "How do you know that the Goms haven't changed their mind?"
Bell had a scornful riposte on the tip of his tongue but swallowed it at the last moment. He remembered that Marshall had been right before about the Goms.
It was after all not impossible that the Goms had a change of heart. Nobody could really tell for sure what took place on Gom. and neither could they claim to understand the Goms. "Oh well!" Bell snorted. "Then we'll try to get to the ship as quick as we can. If the Goms have made a turnabout we can thumb our noses at them."
Marshall couldn't agree more. The disturbance of the telepathic ether, as he had called it, was extremely disquieting. They resumed their crawling and now made much better time than before. The saucer-like ship came visibly closer.
During their advance Marshall paused every so often to listen. He kept Bell abreast of the telepathic turmoil in the surroundings which grew by leaps and bounds. "I get the impression," he explained a little breathlessly, "that a huge strike force of Goms is assembling not far from here. I wish I knew what they're up to."
They reached the spaceship 2 hours after their last stop. Spurred on by the dire situation, Bell wasted no time investigating whether the ship was empty or not. He found the sole airlock after a short search and not much later the mechanism operating the hatch.
The hatch slid open and exposed an airlock which was roomy enough to hold 5 Bios and therefore more than big enough for Bell and his 4 stragglers. The only difficulty was how to reach the 3-foot-high threshold and to drag their exhausted bodies over it.
They finally made it with the help of Goratschin, whose robust physique had suffered least under the harsh rigors of the past hours. But they needed half an hour of precious time to recover from the strain. During that time, Marshall informed them, the telepathic disturbance of the ether had swelled to an uproar.
"I'm afraid," Marshall confessed, "if their preparations are intended against us, we'll perish like mankind in the deluge. We don't have adequate defenses to combat it."
Bell had already mulled over the dilemma. For awhile he had thought they were immune to the danger as long as Ivan Goratschin was on his toes and prepared to unleash his stupendous might when the threat became too ominous. The Goms consisted of organic substances mostly of the same material the Bios were made of. Ivan had the power to trigger a C or Ca fusion in the bodies of the Goms and to destroy them. But if the Goms had really formed such a tremendous combination as Marshall suspected, Ivan's explosion could exterminate himself, his companions and perhaps the whole planet.
So Ivan was out. Their hope shrank to the small rayguns they carried and the ship on which they had clambered. The gravity inside the ship was the same as outside. Their expectation that they could move around easier in the vehicle than on the rocky plain was soon disappointed. Near the end of their strength, the group entered the cabin through the airlock and discovered what Tako had found out 20 hours ago: there was no provision for piloting the vehicle internally.
The shock was so enervating that they remained flat on the floor after they had crawled in.
Bell's courage was the first to buck up again. It was courage born of sheer willpower and mixed with the fury of a man driven into a corner. Bell soon drew the same conclusion as Tako before him: "There must be an engine in here," he rasped. "It's probably remote-controlled but we should be able to take it apart and put it together again so that we can use it. Don't hang your heads, boys! Remove the plates from under the bench. Get the lead out, guys! Or do you plan to remain in a stupor forever?"
True enough—no sensible exhortation could have accomplished it but Bell's bellowing voice jarred them out of their lethargic state. They sat up with a wan hopeless smile. Then they took their rayguns and detached all plates under the bench with a low-energy beam.
• • •
The remote control relay-station on Laros had monitored the fact that someone had returned after 20 hours to the second of the space-disks dispatched to Gom. This time, however, the station took no action of its own; it merely made a report to the command center and received instructions to leave the ship where it was.
At this point the time was so ridden with tension due to the imminent decisions which had to be made by the Aras that nobody was in the mood to worry about an expendable little ship with one or two Bios who might have escaped the holocaust.
In contrast to the Aras who were awaiting a momentous decision, the Springers acted totally unperturbed. So unperturbed, indeed, that they issued orders to start the rest of the fleet under the command of the Mounders that had remained behind on Laros after most of the Springer patriarchs had departed.
The Aras were rather pleased to see the Springers leave. They could expect no help from the Springers for their battle on Gom and they preferred anyway that the Springers learned as little as possible about the trouble the handful of fugitives had caused them.
The Aras were anxious to be regarded as equal partners in their negotiations with the Springers and this claim for equality would have been seriously prejudiced if the Springers had been cognizant of how easily the Ara base on Laros could be jeopardized.
• • •
Aboard the Titan the departure of the remainder of the Mounders fleet presented the first change after a succession of dull days and endless waiting. At first Perry Rhodan was skeptical. He figured that another fleet would replace the one leaving Laros. However after the space structure disturbances of the transitioning ships had been duly registered and no other disturbances were monitored anywhere else, he surmised that the great conference on Laros was finally finished and that the time had come to go to the rescue of those stranded on Gom.
Talamon, who had left Laros with Topthor's fleet, had sent no more word. Rhodan, who trusted Talamon up to a degree, took this as a sign that the Springers hadn't merely relieved their guard on Laros but had left the moon for good. The precaution Rhodan had taken when he dispatched the Ganymede together with a heavy cruiser of Talamon's fleet from the Arkon system into hyperspace in order to feign the departure of two Terranian spaceships seemed to have paid off. Neither the Aras nor the Springers suspected that any danger lurked in their vicinity.
However there could be little doubt that the Titan would be spotted when it got clos
e to Gom. The protection of the anti-detection field was not complete.
But Rhodan was not intimidated by the patrol ships in the system of the Aras.
• • •
Bell's contingent had worked for 10 hours straight but they were at least twice that much away from their goal. The trouble was that only one man could work at any one time on the connections and switching units of the engine assembly so that the fact that they were 5 didn't help much.
Marshall had for awhile kept watch with his telepathic sensory perception to find out what developed in the neighborhood. But all he could determine was that the number of Goms out there continued to grow.
Finally he started to work on a unit which ordinarily served to transmit position signals to the relay-station. Since the space-disk was used only for routes in the lunar system of Gom, the signal transmitter consisted merely of the usual electromagnetic frequency modulator.
Ras Tschubai assisted Marshall with his work. Bell's eyes smarted and his hands failed to obey him after 10 hours. When he realized that he was still far from achieving his purpose, Marshall and the African had already converted the sender to emitting signals of variable wavelengths.
It had been Marshall's idea that this might enable them to get in touch with the Titan. The spaceship was 20 light years away and the radio signals would require that many hours to reach the Titan. Still slow communication would be better than none at all. He wanted to consult Bell about it when he crawled out of the engine compartment, flopped down on the floor and groaned miserably.
Before Marshall could open his mouth an external inhuman thought struck him with such force that the pain nearly split his head and bowled him over, groaning pitifully. It was the same with Betty but, her capacity being greater than Marshall's she felt only a moderate headache and she understood the external message that was beamed to her. Bell became alarmed. He crawled over to Marshall and helped him to sit up.
"The Goms...!" Marshall gasped with frightened eyes, "they say they're going to attack us now."
Bell narrowed his eyes. "Attack us? After they saved us from the storm?"
Marshall only nodded.
"He's right, sir!" Betty piped up with a tremulous voice. "That's exactly what they said."
"Well then," Bell counseled, much calmer than he really felt, "we'll give them a hot reception. We can't get the engine going anyway. We've got to fight back!"
"But we've got the sender!" Marshall pointed out. "We can call the Titan."
This was news to Bell and Marshall had to tell him all about it in a few words. "I won't stop you from sending your message," Bell consented sceptically. "It'll take 20 hours to reach the battleship and then it'll be very questionable if anybody aboard the Titan pays attention to Morse signals."
Marshall and Ras Tschubai put the finishing touches on their work and tapped out the Morse call: "SOS... IN MORTAL DANGER ON GOM... NORTHERN HEMISPHERE TWILIGHT ZONE, SEVERAL MILES FROM BORDERLINE. BELL."
He sent the message 3 times. When he repeated it for the 4th time he heard a horrified scream from the outer airlock where Bell stood guard and bellowed: "It's not only the Goms, there's a whole army of Bios on the march! Grab your guns, men, and get out of here!"
Tako Kakuta couldn't remember that he ever had worked so long without a break. He had the advantage over Bell, who was also trying at that time to solve the same problem, that in his space disk the equivalent of the gravitation of Laros had been restored since it left Gom. Otherwise Tako could never have achieved his task. But now he was ready to operate the engine and put the 2 disintegrators into service as well. Meanwhile the craft had made considerable headway toward Gom. Spurred by the strong pull of the big planet, it had reached a velocity of 3 miles per second in the direction of its center of gravity. Tako accelerated this speed with a few bursts from the engine and was ready for the diving manoeuvre as soon as the ship touched the outer limit of the atmosphere which extended far out into the void.
• • •
Driven by a trail of white-hot particles, the space disks emerged from the grey sky and landed in the same neighborhood where the first taskforce of the Bios had been exterminated by Ivan Goratschin.
If Bell still held any doubts that the Goms were in cahoots with the Aras, they were now totally put to rest. The Bios landed so that they encircled their victims in cooperation with the Goms.
The tactic of the Bios was identical with that of their previous attack. They disembarked from their vehicles and bore down on the ship where Bell's fighters were lying in wait. But this time there were 400 of them and no sign of a storm to bail out the beleaguered detachment.
After the roar of the ships' motors had died down, they heard from the opposite side a steadily growing rumble which made the ground tremble. The Goms were on the march. The shaking ground proved to Bell that Marshall had been dead right: there were indeed countless masses.
However Bell was not overly worried about the Bios. Now Ivan Goratschin was wide awake. Bell summoned him to the hatch and showed him the rows of marching monsters. Both heads of the mutant broke into a ferocious grin. A few moments later a brilliant explosion spread over the right flank of the Bios and sent a glowing white cloud of smoke up into the air, consuming the artificial lives of 100 aggressors.
Ivan Goratschin zeroed in on the center of the column but at the same instant Ras Tschubai, who was stationed at the highest point of the disk, shouted: "The Goms are coming! I can see them!"
The airlock faced the direction from which the Bios approached. In Bell's judgment the danger threatening from the Bios was—despite their formidable weapons—not as critical as that from the Goms. Therefore he sent his men up to Ras Tschubai's vantagepoint and instructed Betty: "You better stay inside, little girl! We'll have a hot time out here."
But Betty flashed her angry eyes. "I can stand the heat, sir, and I don't want anybody to call me a coward!"
And before Bell could stop here, she slipped past him and climbed up the outside of the ship to join the others. There was nothing left for Bell to do but to follow her. Before he had reached the top, Ivan Goratschin had blown up a second quarter of the stubbornly advancing Bios in a roaring detonation.
From above he could see that the Goms approached at a speed of about 12 miles per hour. This was slower than they had moved after the storm and Bell couldn't help notice the implications. The frontal line of the immense expanse of Goms, which stretched as far as the eye could see, was only 2 miles away, leaving Bell and his valiant troop only 10 more minutes.
"You see," Bell mentioned to Marshall, "right now your message to the Titan has traveled one-hundredth of the way. Do you think we'll still be alive after the other 99-hundredths?"
But then he quickly gave his orders. "We'll start shooting as soon as we get them as close as half a mile. Our guns will reach just about as far as that"
• • •
When Marshall sent his call to the Titan , the battleship was already on its way. It approached Gom from the side where it had least to fear detection by the Aras. Marshall's message in Morse took really no more than a minute and a half to reach the Titan. However some time elapsed before they paid attention to it. It had been registered and recorded by the automatic receiver, but it was at first mistaken for a radio disturbance.
Until somebody went to the trouble of analyzing the dots and dashes and recognized they were Morse signals.
Perry Rhodan was immediately notified and he stepped up the speed of the ship at once. He had no illusions as to the difficulty of finding his men with nothing more to go on than the vague clue that they were located along a line stretching over 30,000 miles.
• • •
"Fire, everybody, Fire!" Bell shouted defiantly.
They aimed at the mass of the Super-Gom and began to blast away when the front had approached within half a mile. At this distance their little rayguns would not have had much effect on a solid target such as a Bio or a man but the thin film of the Goms was
easily consumed by the energy rays. The center of the front line was thus prevented from advancing whereas both flanks kept pushing forward and formed a semi-circle around the defenders.
For awhile Bell had weighed the idea of sending Ras Tschubai, who had meanwhile regained his teleporting ability, to the left and the right flanks but he realized that Ras could guess the accurate distance separating them from the mass of Goms no better than himself. If he miscalculated his jump and landed amidst the Goms, he would be finished.
In the meantime Ivan Goratschin had taken care of many more Bios. Right now there were only 50 left alive but they were also far more dispersed and when Ivan exploded one of them, the others got away. The wholesale killing had become an individual hunt and the remaining Bios closed in too fast for Bell's comfort.
"Don't go to sleep, you. two!" Bell bawled out the two-headed mutant. "We don't have time galore for the Bios!"
The older Ivan groaned loudly. "We can't work any faster, sir!" he protested. "We need time to focus on each one separately."
Bell knew that he was right. He turned halfway around and suspiciously eyed the drawn-out line of Bios.
He wanted to caution Ivan that a Bio had ventured too far forward but at this moment the Bio seemed to be seized by an invisible force and hurled high up into the air. He plumped down again hard and fast and remained motionlessly on the ground.
Bell let out a scream of surprise: "Ivan..."
"Yes, sir, that's..."
A second Bio was lifted from the ground, propelled into the air and plummeted back. He, too, seemed to be shattered by the impact and failed to bestir himself. Bell was dumbfounded. He looked at Betty, who was busy working the Goms over with her thermo-beamer. She obviously was unable to spare the time for telekinetic tricks. But who else...? At this time about 20 Bios deserted their covers together. Bell observed with breathless wonder how they threw down their weapons and turned around to head back to the row of space-disks.
