The Earth In Peril Read online

  They needed to maintain their velocity. Their speed gave them mass. Their mass gave them invulnerability. An object with the mass of twelve suns will not be injured by collision with a meteorite or even an asteroid.

  A plunge through a planet the size of Earth itself would hardly be noticed—but the planet would explode after the Thing had gone on.

  There were thousands more Things on the way. After the scouts came the advance guard. The main body was behind even that.

  Ill

  Treason!

  JUST three men and a girl were at work to save the Earth. One of the men was quite useless, and one was condescendingly unbelieving, but he did. make mass time units of the size and power Braddick dictated. The third man was Braddick, who got things done.

  In the center of the big shed, the plastic constructor worked tirelessly. It was an ungainly contrivance with an awkward-seeming arm mounted on a truck with motors and pumps and a long hose trailing from it. A cable led to a table at the side of the shed* where vivid lights showed upon drawings pinned in the vision-range of scanners.

  The arm made clumsy but precise gestures, following the drawings off to one side. It had begun by putting a blob of magnetronic plastic on a stout upright at the end of its steel track. Then, for a while, it made gradually enlarging circles about that spot.

  The result was rather remarkable, because plastic flowed through the hose to the end of that moving arm, and as it came out of the end it was shaped and hardened. It formed a cone. The forming-arm, in fact, simply poured out plastic as it described a circle, and the plastic was hardened as it emerged.

  A cone resulted when the circles widened, and the arm drew back. The process was exactly that of an insect spinning a cocoon, save that the result was no mass of gummed-together threads, but a solid wall of glass-hard plastic, strong as steel, but vastly lighter. It was, moreover, practically a non-conductor of heat and electricity.

  Presently the shape became more complex. The growing object ceased to be merely a cone. Guided by drawings under the harsh light of scanning-lamps, the constructor built on. The cone swelled and curved.

  The movements of the moving arm became more complicated. It sealed off the cone with a solid wall. Interior walls started from that. There were openings in some of them. In three hours, fifteen feet of the length of a rounded hull had been made.

  Braddick stopped the constructor and fitted items of machinery into place. The constructor took up its task again and sealed the machines in as it built on further. The hull swelled still more. Its interior design became more complicated and more detailed.

  The forming object grew more slowly. It took six hours to make the second fifteen feet. But the interior fittings and supplies were in place for all the completed section. From then on, the hull grew more slowly still.

  Braddick’s handling-machines brought heavy objects and put them in place. Thorn argued tolerantly and then condescendingly installed first one and then the second of the small mass time fields Braddick demanded.

  They consisted simply of tiny generators and a circular cable in which the field was formed. When fifty feet of the hull was completed—nearly thirty-six hours after the start —Braddick was red-eyed and gaunt from weariness, but he went on doggedly.

  It was then that Hamlin broke out with angry complaints. Braddick stopped work to listen to him.

  “Yes,” he said tiredly. “I did put on the locks so you can’t go out of the laboratory. I did cut off the visiphone so you can’t call anybody. I did shut off the broadcast phone so you can't even receive. I don’t want to be interrupted on this job.”

  Hamlin sputtered. He began to threaten.

  “You act,” said Braddick, “as if you were aching to tell somebody about Jane, and you deny that you know anything about her. She doesn’t want to be bothered. I don’t know why, or care. She’s a good assistant.

  “But she means something to you, and I suspect she wouldn’t like you to tell anybody she’s here. So I’m going to keep her from being bothered as long as possible. Especially since she’s helping in an emergency.

  “If you want something to think about, you might watch that contrivance over there. And if it starts to register, it would be a good idea to pray.”

  He waved his hand at an improvised gravitometer. It was a bulky iron sphere in a cup of diamagnalloy—that artificial diamagnet which repels all magnetic substances as powerfully as even alnico magnets attract them.

  The iron sphere remained at rest, free of physical contact with any other object except for infinitely thin threads which led to amplifiers. It would register any variation of gravity of even the fraction of a dyne.

  The moon’s pull when overhead—which makes a difference of a twentieth of an ounce in barometric pressure-turned the appropriate dial needle one hundred points on the scale.

  The sun’s gravitational pull was clearly evident.

  But they would not ring the alarm, because that was adjusted to show a trace of gravitational pull only from another direction—the direction of the North Star. Braddick hoped to get as much as four hours’ notice of the approach of an interstellar object with a mass of twelve sols, even though its velocity was near to that of light.

  He went doggedly back to his work. He was installing oxygen tanks—clumsy and absurdly heavy, but available. Racked in place by a handling machine, they became surrounded by plastic and were then a part of the hull.

  He adapted a small gas-liquefying unit to work intermit-tantly, freezing carbon dioxide out of part of the ship’s air, ejecting it and restoring the heat and moisture to the purified air, with an addition of oxygen equal to the ejected carbon dioxide. It would keep the air breathable.

  It was an enormous task that he had set himself. There was food and a robot kitchen to be installed. There were power units to be put in place—not atomic ones. There were instruments and mathematical tables and calculating machines and volumes of astronomical data and vision-com-municators.

  There was a control-board to be wired to handle a space drive as yet untried, and which had been installed by a technician who tolerantly explained that it could not possibly work.

  Thom informed Braddick kindly, that the drive mechanism was simply an assembly of machinery which would run without having any result whatever. And besides all this, there were doors which had to be airtight, scanners to be mounted outside the ship and high-altitude suits to be modified.

  It could not possibly be done. Braddick had a deadline which was simply any attainable time less than the minimum time possible. He worked without rest for three days. His cheeks were hollow. He moved stiffly. His eyes were dull. Then Jane caught him by the arm.

  “Wake up!” she cried fiercely. “Wake up!”

  He looked apathetically down at her.

  “I’m awake,” he said heavily. “I’m working.”

  “You’re working in your sleep!” she cried. “And Mr. Hamlin is out in the courtyard signaling to some helicopters overhead!”

  Braddick pulled himself together. He had closed the circuit of his laboratory buildings—of which the dwelling was a part—so that Hamlin could not possibly get out. It had been his thought that the space drive mechanism would be so clear to the Atomic Power technician that he would try to report it immediately to the corporation.

  And then, almost certainly, Atomic Power would try to keep it as secret as the mass time fields, and by the same methods. They would involve an immediate “accident” which would be fatal to Dirk Braddick.

  His thought had been wrong, as it turned out. Thom knew one thing by rote and was filled with a vast complacency which made it seem unnecessary for him to learn or understand anything else. He did not understand the space drive. But there was also Hamlin’s desperate excitement at the sight of Jane, his furious protests over his inability to communicate some discovery to his superiors. The discovery of Jane was the only thing of importance so far. It was probably that, and Braddick was determined to protect Jane until h
e had time to find out about her for himself.

  But now Hamlin had helicopters overhead to signal to. Braddick went stiffly to a doorway to the courtyard. Hamlin waved his handkerchief wildly in an ordered but varying pattern—evidently some company code.

  Braddick glanced upward. He was so tired that he had trouble focusing his eyes. Then he looked down, and Hamlin had finished. He seemed to preen himself. He looked enormously triumphant, as if he had achieved something which would send him far in the service of the company.

  Then he saw Braddick, and Braddick looked at him with dull eyes, having to drive his brain by sheer will power to the contemplation of something other than the completion of the spaceship.

  Hamlin went white. He shivered in terror. Braddick did look formidable.

  But then the gravitometer alarm rang stridently within the shed. It was, of course, much more important than treason or anything else. Braddick went heavily and looked at the dials. The three needles moved perceptibly.

  There was a new source of gravitational pull acting upon the iron ball. So far, the effect was so minute that only an instrument so delicate would have recorded it. The pull was less than a hundred thousandth of the gravitational pull of the earth.

  But it increased detectably as he watched. And it came from an unprecedented direction. This new, infinitesimal drag was in the direction of the north star—Polaris. It might be a mass of twelve sols or more at a distance of multiple astronomical units, upon a course bound for the Southern Cross. By the rate of increase of the field, it must be traveling nearly at the speed of light.

  “This,” said Braddick, “is it. Thom, can we test the main time field now?”

  “Oh, surely,” said Thom, with tolerant condescension. He was fresh. He had worked the hours prescribed for technicians of the Atomic Power Company. He had rested and read |nd blandly ignored the fact that there was no broadcast reception in the laboratory.

  And he had very conscientiously installed the mass time field units where Braddick wanted them and with the properties Braddick had desired. But he was aloof, with an air of bland superiority to a mere independent experimenter who was not employed by a giant corporation like Atomic Power. The ringing of the alarm-bell meant nothing to him.

  IV

  Into the Void

  BHADDICK dismissed Hamlin’s treachery from his mind. He surveyed the long, eighty-foot hull of plastic. He was unbearably tired, and he wondered dully if anything had been forgotten. In preparation for just such a premature warning, he had loaded materials for the completion of the spaceship inside the hull as it was built.

  Less than an hour since, the constructor had sealed off the bow. The hatches were tight. There was as yet no work-ing-drive, but the whole ship could be put into a mass time field by the main field-cable wrapped around its middle. That, though, was all.

  “What do you want done?” asked Jane, tugging at his arm. “Tell me, and I’ll do it!”

  “We’ll test the time field,” said Braddick heavily, “and I think I’ll take a nap. We’ve all the time in the world, now.”

  It sounded like delirium. Braddick motioned Jane to the ladder. Thom mounted after them. Braddick closed the outer airlock door. The inner one opened. They were in the spaceship.

  It was extraordinarily unfinished. Every cubicle was piled with materials loaded in while construction went on. Braddick went to the control-room and switched on the scanners outside the hull. The interior of the shed became visible on the screens.

  “All set, Thom?” demanded Braddick wearily.

  “Of course,” said Thorn smugly.

  Braddick set the calibrated switch at thirty-six hundred and threw it. There was an odd sensation as of a sudden chill. Then everything was normal again within the spaceship—everything but the image on the vision screens. Those images swirled violently as the fixed-brightness amplfiers reacted.

  The mass time field was on. The ship and everything within it had acquired a time-rate thirty-six hundred times normal. Time was telescoped within the mass time field, so that thirty-six hundred seconds inside the field exactly equaled one second outside.

  While a clock ticked once in the shed or the rest of the laboratory, the clocks in the spaceship showed an hour to have passed. And of course, the frequency of the light by which the shed was visible in normal time was much too low to affect the speeded-up vision-scanners on the hull.

  Only the hardest of X-rays—bordering upon cosmics— had a frequency which would give the effect of visible light. The interior of the shed was shadowless. There were no variations in color. Everything seemed a single, sullen shade of red. And the metal wall-panels seemed mistily transparent.

  Braddick nodded exhaustedly. He had worked three days on the spaceship hull without rest.

  "We’ve got to test our air-supply,” he said heavily, “and a few other things. There’s a third cosmoquake on the way, so we’ll have to do everything on time field from now on. Eight hours of this time will take eight seconds of normal time. We’ll know how the air works by then, anyhow.”

  He leaned against a wall, trying to summon energy to go on. But Jane spoke fiercely:

  “You need to rest! I can test the airl You sleep, and you’ll be fresher to work! We have to wait for the air-test anyhow and you can do your work after sleeping just as well or better I”

  Braddick considered slowly. He was worn out.

  “Maybe you’re right. But I don’t know what Hamlin signaled to Rogers. Maybe it was about you, Jane. They can’t do much in eight or ten seconds, though. Wake me if anything goes wrong.”

  He stumbled to one to the cubicles that had been intended as a cabin. He unrolled a bundle of bedding which had been tumbled in there as the ship was built. He dropped on the bundle and slept instantly.

  After a little, Jane looked in on him. He had not laid down, he had dropped. She went in to put a pillow under his head. As she moved him, a flash pistol fell out of his pocket. She looked at it oddly and put it back.

  Time passed. At intervals the air machine worked, freezing carbon dioxide out of the air and returning it to circulation rewarmed and with its oxygen replenished. The air was in-termittantly diluted, thus, with a batch of purified air, which was vastly more practical than a continuous air-puri-fication process.

  The girl glanced at the air-purity indicators from time to time. Thom, the Atomic Power technician, strolled condescendingly through the ship, yawned and blandly investigated the few books on board. There was nothing in his line. He sat down and complacently went to sleep.

  More time passed, and more. The girl lunched in the robot kitchen. There was no sound anywhere but the gentle, self-satisfied snores of Thom. Braddick slept like a dead man. The girl had designed the ship, in a sense.

  At any rate, she had translated Braddick’s sketches into working drawings the constructing machines could use. When she finished lunch she restlessly went over the whole interior. It occurred to her to put a pump on the airlock. A vacuum in the airlock chamber would check the seals on the two doors. They were tight.

  Presently she regarded the cryptic mechanism Braddick had said would be a space drive. It was utterly simple and apparently utterly useless. There was a powerful turbo-pump designed to produce pressures up in the thousands of atmospheres. It was installed to pump a slightly compressible liquid to the bow end of a straight, strong tube running lengthwise of the ship.

  There were two mass time field-generators alongside the tube. The field-cables were inside the tube. When the liquid had passed through both of them, it would go back to the pump to be forced back to the bow again.

  The power of the pump seemed futile. The thing was not a space drive. It was just an elaborate system of pumping water through a pipe.

  Jane sat down and thought it over. Nothing could result from pumping a liquid through a pipe, however often and at however high a pressure. But Braddick had seemed sure. Jane had worked from his sketches in designing the ship, and she knew how accurately hi
s brain worked. There must be something. The oddities about the set-up were the two mass time field-generators.

  Suddenly her eyes opened wide. An expression almost of shock came to her face. She got up and went to the cubicle in which Braddick slept. She regarded him ‘respectfully. Then she went back to the useless drive, hesitated an instant and carefully and deliberately opened the case containing the field generating unit at the bow end of the tube.

  She looked at the inside of the generator without surprise or curiosity. She deftly and deliberately reversed two leads. Then she took two sections of cable and as deliberately—and very proficiently—cross-connected one part of the stem field generator to a similar part of the bow unit.

  These, of course, were the small field units. They were inside the ship and they were not in operation. They were in the field generated by the master time field unit, which held the whole ship in accelerated time.

  She went back to the control-room, moistened her lips .and started the giant pump at slow speed. For a bare instant she touched the switch which now handled both of the small mass time fields.

  The whole spaceship stirred and was still again.

  She sat at the control-board and looked at nothing, with shining eyes.

  A long time later she rose to check the air-supply again. She glanced almost automatically at the dull-red images on the vision-screens. She blinked. There was a change in the look of things outside.

  A great hole gaped in the shed outside the spaceship. Steel girders were bent and broken. Some floated in midair. She stared at them, but their apparent motion was slowed thirty-six hundred times by the time field which enclosed the spaceship.

  The picture was like that of an instantaneous photograph of an explosion. But the explosion was still taking place! With seemingly infinite slowness, to be sure, but with irresistable force, she saw more of the side-wall of the shed bending in to be shattered in the slowest of slow motion.