Empire Part 22

"We're not worrying about Chambers," Greg told him. "We're not worrying about anyone. You're the one who had better start doing some."

Scorio cringed.

"Let me tell you about a place on Venus," said Greg. "It's in the center of a big swamp that stretches for hundreds of miles in every direction.

It's a sort of mountain rising out of the swamp. And the swamp is filled with beasts and reptiles of every kind. Ravenous things, l.u.s.ting for blood. But they don't climb the mountain. A man, if he stayed on the mountain, would be safe. There's food there. Roots and berries and fruits and even small animals one could kill. A man might go hungry for a while, but soon he'd find the things to eat.

"But he'd be alone. No one ever goes near that mountain. I am the only man who ever set foot on it. Perhaps no one ever will again. At night you hear the screaming and the crying of the things down in swamp, but you mustn't pay any attention to them."

Scorio's eyes widened, staring. "You won't send me _there_!"

"You'll find my campfires," Greg told him, "if the rain hasn't washed them away. It rains a lot. So much and so drearily that you'll want to leave that mountain and walk down into the swamp, of your own free will, and let the monsters finish you."

Scorio sat dully. He did not move. Horror glazed his eyes.

Greg signed to Russ. Russ, pipe clenched between his teeth, reached out his fingers for the keys. The engines droned.

Manning walked slowly to a television control, sat down in the chair and flipped over a lever. A face stared out of the screen. It was strangely filled with anger and a sort of half-fear.

"You watched it, didn't you, Stutsman?" Greg asked.

Stutsman nodded. "I watched. You can't get away with it, Manning. You can't take the law into your own hands that way."

"You and Chambers have been taking the law into your hands for years,"

said Greg. "All I did tonight was clear the Earth of some vermin. Every one of those men was guilty of murder ... and worse."

"What did you gain by it?" asked Stutsman.

Greg gave a bitter laugh. "I convinced you, Stutsman," he said, "that it isn't so easy to kill me. I think it'll be some time before you try again. Better luck next time."

He flipped the switch and turned about in the chair.

Russ jerked his thumb at the skylight. "Might as well finish the ship now."

Greg nodded.

An instant later there was a fierce, intolerably blue-white light that lit the mountains for many miles. For just an instant it flared, exploding into millions of brilliant, harmless sparks that died into darkness before they touched the ground. The gangster ship was destroyed beyond all tracing, disintegrated. The metal and quartz of which it was made were simply gone.

Russ brought his glance back from the skylight, looked at his friend.

"Stutsman will do everything he can to wipe us out. By tomorrow morning the Interplanetary machine will be rolling. With only one purpose--to crush us."

"That's right," Greg agreed, "but we're ready for them now. Our ship left the Belgium factories several hours ago. The _Comet_ towed it out in s.p.a.ce and it's waiting for us now. In a few hours the _Comet_ will be here to pick us up."

"War in s.p.a.ce," said Russ, musingly. "That's what it will be."

"Chambers and his gang won't fight according to any rules. There'll be no holds barred, no more feeble attempts like the one they tried tonight. From now on we need a base that simply can't be located."

"The ship," said Russ.

_CHAPTER FOURTEEN_

The _Invincible_ hung in s.p.a.ce, an empty, airless hull, the largest thing afloat.

Chartered freighters, leaving their ports from distant parts of the Earth, had converged upon her hours before, had unloaded crated apparatus, storing it in the yawning hull. Then they had departed.

Now the st.u.r.dy little s.p.a.ce-yacht, _Comet_, was towing the great ship out into s.p.a.ce, 500,000 miles beyond the orbit of the Moon. Slowly the hull was being taken farther and farther away from possible discovery.

Work on the installation of the apparatus had started almost as soon as the _Comet_ had first tugged at the ponderous ma.s.s. Leaving only a skeleton crew in charge of the _Comet_, the rest of the selected crew had begun the a.s.sembly of the mighty machines which would transform the _Invincible_ into a thing of unimaginable power and speed.

The doors were closed and sealed and the air, already stored in the ship's tanks, was released. The slight acceleration of the _Comet's_ towing served to create artificial weight for easier work, but not enough to handicap the shifting of the heavier pieces of apparatus. An electric cable was run back from the little yacht and the _Invincible_ took her first breath of life.

The work advanced rapidly, for every man was more than a mere engineer or s.p.a.cebuster. They were a selected crew, the men who had helped to make the name of Gregory Manning famous throughout the Solar System.

First the engines were installed, then the two groups of five ma.s.sive power plants and the single smaller engine as an auxiliary supply plant for the light, heat, air.

The acc.u.mulators of the _Comet_ were drained in a single tremendous surge and the auxiliary generator started. It in turn awoke to life the other power plants, to leave them sleeping, idling, but ready for instant use to develop power such as man never before had dreamed of holding and molding to his will.

Then, with the gigantic tools these engines supplied ... tools of pure force and strange s.p.a.ce fields ... the work was rapidly completed. The power boards were set in place, welded in position by a sudden furious blast of white hot metal and as equally sudden freezing, to be followed by careful heating and recooling till the beryl-steel reached its maximum strength. Over the hull swarmed s.p.a.cesuited men, using that strange new power, heat-treating the stubborn metal in a manner never before possible.

The generators were charging the atoms of the ship's beryl-steel hide with the same hazy force that had trapped and held the gangster ship in a mighty vise. Thus charged, no material thing could penetrate them. The greatest meteor would be crushed to drifting dust without so much as scarring that wall of mighty force ... meteors traveling with a speed and penetrative power that no gun-hurled projectile could ever hope to attain.

Riding under her own power, driven by the concentration of gravitational lines, impregnable to all known forces, containing within her hull the secrets of many strange devices, the _Invincible_ wheeled in s.p.a.ce.

Russell Page lounged in a chair before the control manual of the tele-transport machine. He puffed placidly at his pipe and looked out through the great sweep of the vision panel. Out there was the black of s.p.a.ce and the glint of stars, the soft glow of distant Jupiter.

Greg Manning was hunched over the navigation controls, sharp eyes watching the panorama of s.p.a.ce.

Russ looked at him and grinned. On Greg's face there was a smile, but about his eyes were lines of alert watchfulness and thought. Greg Manning was in his proper role at the controls of a ship such as the _Invincible_, a man who never stepped backward from danger, whose spirit hungered for the vast stretches of void that lay between the worlds.

Russ leaned back, blowing smoke toward the high-arched control room ceiling.

They had burned their bridges behind them. The laboratory back in the mountains was destroyed. Locked against any possible attack by a sphere of force until the tele-transport had lifted from it certain items of equipment, it had been melted into a ma.s.s of molten metal that formed a pool upon the mountain top, that ran in gushing, fiery ribbons down the mountain side, flowing in gleaming curtains over precipices. It would have been easier to have merely disintegrated in one bursting flash of energy, but that would have torn apart the entire mountain range, overwhelmed and toppled cities hundreds of miles away, dealt Earth a staggering blow.

A skeleton crew had taken the _Comet_ back to Earth and landed it on Greg's estate. Once again the tele-transport had reached out, wrapped its fingers around the men who stepped from the little ship. In less than the flash of a strobe light, they had been s.n.a.t.c.hed back to the _Invincible_, through a million miles of s.p.a.ce, through the very walls of the ship itself. One second they had been on Earth, the next second they were in the control room of the _Invincible_, grinning, saluting Greg Manning, trotting back to their quarters in the engine rooms.

Russ stared out at s.p.a.ce, puffed at his pipe, considering.

A thousand years ago men had held what they called tournaments. Armored knights rode out into the jousting grounds and broke their lances to prove which was the better man. Today there was to be another tournament. This ship was to be their charger, and the gauntlet had been flung to Spencer Chambers and Interplanetary Power. And all of s.p.a.ce was to be the jousting grounds.

This was war. War without trappings, without fanfare, but bitter war upon which depended the future of the Solar System. A war to break the grip of steel that Interplanetary acc.u.mulators had gained upon the planets, to shatter the grim dream of empire held by one man, a war for the right to give to the people of the worlds a source of power that would forever unshackle them.