The Earth In Peril Read online

  She ran to Braddick and shook him anxiously.

  “Wake upl Quickl Please/”

  He opened his eyes and was instantly awake.

  “What’s the matter? The air?”

  “No! Come to the vision screens!”

  It had taken her perhaps a ship minute to realize what she saw, to run to him, and to have him back in the con-trol-room with her. In the interval, events had progressed on the vision screen as they advanced in the sixtieth of a second in normal time.

  Half the wall of the construction-shed was down. A girder floated with seeming leisureliness toward the spaceship. But its mass relative to the spaceship in its time field was enormous. Its impact would be slow, but irresistible.

  “They’re bombing!” said Bradick sharply. “Hamlin signaled them something—probably about you—and they’ve just had time to get orders and drop bombs, or maybe they had orders anyhow! And the drive isn’t working yet! I’ve got to threaten Thom into fixing it for me.”

  “It is working,” said Jane, very pale “Try it. I did. I looked at the arrangement and saw what you meant to do. So I adjusted the bow field to increase mass instead of discreasing it, and—try it!”

  He thumbed the pump switch in. He touched the field switch. The ship stirred. It dragged forward. Braddick reached to other switches. A tiny vane in the drive tube thrust out.

  The ship lifted a little. It swept lightly to the end of the shed. The rear view scanners showed the monstrous steel girder float slowly and deliberately through the space the ship had just left.

  “The whole thing will be coming down,” said Braddick through set teeth. “I didn’t build this ship to stand bombing, and I can’t smash out through normal time stuff while we’re in a time field! I’ve got to get out through that blast-hole!"

  His hands touched controls here and there. They fitted into his hands as if by long practice. He had more than long practice. He had made every particle of the ship. Gyros hummed somewhere. The ship backed, swung lightly and maneuvered delicately through a slow-motion catastrophe.

  It was a nightmare. The vision screen glowed sullen, tawny red. Only the outlines of objects appeared. But even in those outlines it was obvious that Braddick’s laboratory was ruins.

  There were three centers of motion visible even at this time-rate, which meant three simultaneous explosions. The dwelling was a slowly swirling mass of debris. The tool shop was already flattened to earth. Above the warehouse in which were stores for any conceivable type of experimentation, a slender, deadly thing seemed to hang poised. But'it was descending, though with a startling slowness. It was another bomb.

  “There’s Mr. Hamlin!" said Jane shakily.

  They saw the frozen, rust-colored image which was Hamlin. He cringed from the destruction from above. He had signaled to the planes overhead, telling them something upon which Atomic Power should act. The action was destruction —including destruction of himself.

  “I’m a fool,” said Braddick angrily, “I’m risking too much! But-”

  The spaceship settled quickly. He turned to the girl.

  “When you hear me yell, turn off the main time field. When I yell again, turn it on again—and fast!”

  Shaking, Jane seated herself in the control-chair. She heard Bradick fumbling at Hie airlock door. There was the rush of air into the vacuum she. had made in the lock for testing. He went in.

  “Turn it off!"

  She could see everything in the vision screens. As she flicked off the main time field, the spaceship reverted to a normal time rate. Colors leaped into view, with a dazzling effect. Instantly the slow motion of retarded action became infinitely swift and deadly destruction.

  The spaceship rocked with the savage crash of explosives. But Jane watched the middle right screen. She saw Braddick leap into view out of the airlock, seize the petrified, horror-struck Hamlin and leap back into the airlock with him.

  “Turn it onl”

  Instantly the screens were tawny red again. The girl thrust in the lift control and the forward drive, and the spaceship was again silent save for the hum of gyros. It rose swiftly and sped forward. The airlock closed. Braddick came forward, breathing heavily.

  "Good girl!” he said. “I don’t know why I wanted to save him. I risked too much to do it. I was a fool!"

  There was an astounded babbling behind them. Thom had waked with the cataclysmic roar of the explosions. It had taken him seconds to become thoroughly awake, and then he saw Hamlin—who had not been in the ship at all —in a state of gibbering panic before him.

  “Thom,” said Braddick drily, “has just realized that things are happening. Here, now, sit down in this chair. The control-room swings, you remember. I’m going to put on -the power.”

  The feeling of weight, even in the time field, had been normal. Now the sensation of heaviness increased slightly. The images in the vision screens revolved, and there was a slight shock as the drive went on to full power.

  Almost instantly thereafter there were tiny, unwinking specks of light in most of the vision screens and the background behind them went dark. But there was a tawny-red mass astern and an angry-seeming dark-red disk with projecting streamers .off to the right.

  The tawny mass behind was Earth. The specks were stars, the disk the sun. The spaceship was out in open space, already beyond the atmosphere.

  V

  “It Can’t Be!”

  THEBE was the curious sensation of a mass time field collapsing, and the vision screens adjusted to give the effect of normal brightness. The normal sky appeared again, all around the ship. The stars were infinitely tiny specks, unwinking and of surprisingly diverse colorings.

  The spaceship headed toward Polaris, the north star, at right angles to the plane on which all the planets lie. The northern polar cap of Earth lay below, with the northern hemisphere curiously foreshortened at the edges of the globe. It looked singularly unfamiliar.

  “I’m going to get oriented and a good fix on our course," said Bradick, “before we go back into the time field. We can’t make speed in a normal time rate. We couldn’t make contact with what we’ve got to hit, either—not to mention that we couldn’t live half a second if we did.”

  There was a feeling of unusual weight. The drive of the spaceship adjusted somewhat to its mass. There was an acceleration of about two gravities, which in normal time rate meant discomfort—bearable, but unpleasant.

  As Braddick worked delicately at the control-board, there were frantic shouts from below. Hamlin was half-crazed by shock and terror. After three days of restless impatience in the laboratory, unable to communicate with his superiors, he’d seen helicopters hovering overhead.

  Their app'earance meant that Atomic Power officials wanted to know what was going on. He’d signaled the single important bit of news he knew. He had felt triumphant, because it was very important indeed.

  The helicopters hovered just long enough for his news to be relayed to high officials of the corporation and for orders to come back. Then bombs fell. It was the one thing Hamlin had not anticipated, but it was the most natural thing in the world.

  There had been an extraordinary series of accidents to everybody who had tried to make unauthorized experiments with mass time fields. It appeared that when a man set to work to duplicate Atomic Power fields, they invariably caused terrific explosions which killed the experimenter and destroyed his apparatus.

  The reason was now clear. And there had been a curious, unexplained explosion which had apparently wiped out all the direct heirs of the founder of the Atomic Power company. As a result of the disaster, ownership of the majority stock was now tied up in court proceedings which would go on for years—and the officials of the company had a free hand.

  But to Hamlin, cringing and screaming as tiny black dots dropped toward him, there came despairing knowledge that the secret police of Atomic Power had become a sort of Gestapo or Okhrana, destroying all those who opposed the company or who knew too much. And Hamlin k
new too much.

  But he couldn’t adjust to his new understanding. He had been with the company all his life. He couldn’t believe that it had meant to kill him.

  And despite the fact that he was alive only because Braddick had risked his own life—and very much more—to drag him into the spaceship and away, Hamlin was hysterically resolute to prove to the company that his loyalty was unquestionable and his services of infinite value.

  He began to climb to the control-room, and the ship went back into normal time. The sudden extra weight tore loose his grip on the hand holds along the wall of what had been a corridor. He fell back on Thom and bore him to the bottom of the central well. Both men yelled as they tumbled.

  Thom shook himself and climbed purposefully again. He had no great native intelligence, but Hamlin’s half-gibbered explanations had filled him with apprehension. He meant to find out what was actually toward.

  But neither had the faintest idea that the spaceship actually worked, or had left the earth’s atmosphere behind.

  When Hamlin climbed after the technician, he had only one real thought in his mind, which was that somehow he must prove himself afresh to the company officials who would have let him be murdered with Braddick and Jane.

  They reached the control-room. Its fittings had swung about to the seeming of the vertical. Braddick was making finicky adjustments of the controls so that Polaris would center on two cross hairs on the forward vision screen. As the two others climbed into the control-room Braddick was talking.

  “Of course we haven’t good calibration, Jane. We couldn’t have. But we’ve nothing very close to aim at anyhow. We only know the approximate course.”

  Thorn was struck speechless by the stars and sun and earth—all visible together—that he saw in the vision screens. Hamlin took one look, and the breath—and all immediately desperate resolution—went out of him. He moaned softly. But Thom presently managed to take his eyes off the- incredible sight outside.

  “Look here, Mr. Braddick,” he said uneasily—his air of condescension gone for once—“Mr. Hamlin has been telling me—”

  His eyes strayed back to the screens and he was unable to speak, again. The sun was off to the right. The earth was

  below—so far below that it had long since ceased to have the look of a flat plain. It was a ball. The spaceship was at least four thousand miles up and still rising fast, now with an acceleration of two gravities.

  “Oh, yes,” said Braddick. "The helicopters bombed the lab. They blew it to bits. But we got out—on time field—and we’re headed for where we’ve got to go.”

  “But—” Thom made a little choking sound and jerked his eyes away from the screens, ‘This—this can’t be right, Mr. Braddickl Something’s happened to the scanners!"

  “Of course,” said Braddick drily. “They’ve been moved out into space. So have we. We’re moving away from Earth.” “But we can’t be!" protested Thom. He grew almost hysterical in his effort to hold to sanity by clinging to the teachings of the technical department of Atomic Power. "I assure you, as a technician who understands the mass time field thoroughly, that it cannot possibly serve as a space drive!” “All right,” said Braddick. “Hold the thought. Meanwhile, I’m using it for one. I’m going back on time field now.”

  He threw over the master time field switch and the feeling. of excess weight vanished. It is one of the oddities of the field that acceleration within it is entirely different from gravitation. A person in a time field, on earth, feels that he weighs exactly as much as before.

  The amount of substance in his body is exactly the same as before—despite his loss of mass—and therefore it is attracted as before. But its inertfa—its resistance to gravitational acceleration—is decreased so that its response to gravitational pull is faster.

  Since in normal time a man will fall at a certain, speed, in accelerated time, he will fall the time rate times faster, and his feeling is the same as that of normal impact of his feet upon the ground.

  Under mechanical drive in free space, the resistance to acceleration is due only to any remaining mass. The mathematics may be found in any book on space navigation, but in a time field of thirty-six hundred it will be found that an acceleration in feet per second equal to sixty gravities is needed to maintain the sensation of normal weight.

  Earth, turned a tawny red again by the operation of the time field, drifted visibly behind. Braddick punched a locking key and turned to the others.

  “I’m going to shut off power presently and float free,” he said composedly. “Better come down to the kitchen and have your lunch. Will you come, Jane?”

  Jane stood there a moment, waiting to see if the discussion were finished. As shq turned to go, she knew there was plenty more to be said, judging by the unsatisfied expression on Thorn’s face. These technical arguments never did seem to come to any conclusive end.

  Thom spoke in a curiously nerve-racked fashion:

  “But it’s impossible, Mr. Braddickl The mass time field is not a space drivel In all the years it has been in use, with all our research, nothing of the sort has been foundl It can’t be!”

  "Only it is. Still,” said Braddick comfortingly, “by the terms of my deal with Atomic Power, its use as a space drive belongs to them even if they did try to blow me up. You can content yourself with that!”

  He followed Jane down the ladder-like handholes on the side of the main corridor. She stepped off into a doorway arid nodded at the robot kitchen. It had swung sidewise and now hung in a serviceable position, though what had been a side-wall as the ship was built was now the floor. She smiled faintly at Braddick.

  “You thought of everything!” she said.

  “Not quite.” He pressed the buttons which would cause two ready-prepared meals to be heated and served. “I had the fills for the kitchen on hand, of course. What I didn’t think of was that—well—anybody but Thom would be able to fix that bow time field for me. I begin to think he would have considered it sacrilege.”

  She took the tray the service robot handed her.

  “It’s a beautiful solution!” she said warmly. “How did you ever think of it?”

  He looked at her for an instant before he took his own tray. Then he shrugged.

  “Oh, I imagined how nice it would be to have something of the sort. The trouble with rockets is that they throw away the stuff that drives them. This way, we pump a liquid into the pipe. It goes into the first time field, which makes it much heavier. We push it astern, and get a forward reaction. Then when it gets to the stern mass-field, all the extra weight is taken out again, and the sternward reaction takes place, of course, but with much less mass. Consequently it isn’t equal and we go ahead. It uses up a lot of power, but—”

  “No,” said the girl. She looked at her plate. “I—cross-connected the two units. Putting mass into the water to push astern consumes power. But taking it out again yields it. I put the two circuits together. The second field furnishes the power to run the first one.”

  VI

  Contact!

  DIRK BRADDICK PUT DOWN HIS KNIFE AND FORK.

  “This hurts,” he said vvrily. “Look! You know all about those fields, and nobody but technicians for the company are supposed to know, and they’re all men. You say you don’t know who you are—but it doesn’t bother you. And Hamlin was enormously excited when he saw you.

  “I think it at least possible that his signaling was to tell the helicopters who you were, and the bombs were meant to kill you instead of me. Certainly he couldn’t have told them anything about me that would have made them want to smash my laboratory before they’d looked it overl Would you mind telling me—”

  “I ought to know about them,” said Jane quietly. “I’m Jane Brent. Didn’t you know? You guessed my first name right.” “It fitted you,” said Braddick. Then he stared, realizing. “You’re supposed to be dead! You and your cousins were killed in an explosion, and the ownership of Atomic Power is tied up in the courts.”


  “We found out how the company was being run,” she said as quietly as before. “We decided to clean house. But a good many of the higher officials didn’t want to lose their jobs and power. So—”

  She spread out her hands.

  “I wasn’t killed,” she added bitterly. “I woke up in what was supposed to be a small private insane asylum. Actually, it was a prison for people Atomic Power found dangerous and didn’t want or dare to kill.

  “By the death of my cousins I actually have come to own control of the company. I imagine it was intended to let the court action drag out as long as possible and then produce me—by which time I’d have become—amenable.

  “But something happened, and one of the prisoners escaped. They were afraid the place would be investigated. I was packed into a plane to be taken to some other place, and I managed to jump over with a parachute. You know the rest.”

  Braddick considered, and slowly resumed his meal. “Mmm—Yes,” he said, reflectively. “They’d be hunting for you. But you were supposed to be dead, so if you told me who you were I’d have thought you crazy and at least insisted on getting a doctor.

  “You could have been kidnaped. Anyhow—I see why you were willing to stay in my lab. Even to work for me. It was the safest place—you thought!”

  “Wasn’t it?” she demanded challengingly. “The instant you talked to me I knew”—she stopped, went on—“that I’d be all right with you.”

  He made a gesture around him.

  “I’ve brought you out between the stars,” he said drily. “But if I’m right nobody’s particularly safe unless we can do something about those cosmoquakes. I guess it’s all right. I shan’t turn around and take you home anyhow.”

  She watched his face a moment, and then spoke pleadingly-

  “It won’t make any difference, will it? I mean—that I’m rich?”

  He grinned at her.

  “My dear! You’re not rich if your employees’ secret police get hold of you. They’re a tough gang! And besides, just how much will Atomic Power be worth if the whole solar system is smashed?”