The Black Star Passes Part 15

The hall they entered was evidently the main room of the plane. It was as long as the one above, and higher, yet all that vast s.p.a.ce was taken by one single, t.i.tanic coil that stretched from wall to wall! Into it, and from it there led two gigantic columns of fused quartz. That these were rods, such as those smaller ones above was obvious, but each was over eight feet thick!

Short they were, for they led from one mighty generator such as they had seen above, but magnified on a scale inconceivable! At the end of it, its driving power, its motor, was a great cylindrical case, into which led a single quartz bar ten inches thick. This bar was alive with pulsing, glowing fires, that changed and maneuvered and died out over all its surface and through all its volume. The motor was but five feet in diameter and a scant seven feet long, yet obviously it was driving the great machine, for there came from it a constant low hum, a deep pitched song of awful power. And the huge quartz rod that led from the t.i.tanic coil-cylinder was alive with the same glowing fires that played through the motor rod. From one side of the generator, ran two objects that were familiar, copper bus bars. But even these were _three feet thick_!

The scores of quartz tubes that come down from the floor above joined, coalesced, and ran down to the great generator, and into it.

They descended to another level. Here were other quartz tubes, but these led down still further, for this floor contained individual sleeping bunks, most of them unoccupied, unready for occupancy, though some were made up.

Down another level; again the bunks, the little individual rooms.

At last they reached the bottom level, and here the great quartz tubes terminated in a hundred smaller ones, each of these leading into some strange mechanism. There were sighting devices on it, and there were ports that opened in the floor. This was evidently the bombing room.

With an occasional hushed word, the Terrestrians walked through what seemed to be a vast city of the dead, pa.s.sing sleeping officers, and crewmen by the hundreds. On the third level they came at last to the control room. Here were switchboards, control panels, and dozens of officers, sleeping now, beside their instruments. A sudden dull thudding sound spun Arcot and Wade around, nerves taut. They relaxed and exchanged apologetic smiles. An automatic relay had adjusted some mechanism.

They noted one man stationed apart from the rest. He sat at the very bow, protected behind eight-inch coronium plates in which were set ma.s.ses of fused quartz that were nearly as strong as the metal itself.

These gave him a view in every direction except directly behind him.

Obviously, here was the pilot.

Returning to the top level, they entered the long pa.s.sages that led out into the t.i.tanic wings. Here, as elsewhere, the ship was brightly lighted. They came to a small room, another bunk room. There were great numbers of these down both sides of the long corridor, and along the two parallel corridors down the wing. In the fourth corridor near the back edge of the wing, there were bunk rooms on one side, and on the other were bombing posts.

As they continued walking down the first corridor, they came to a small room, whence issued the low hum of one of the motors. Entering, they found the crew sleeping, and the motor idling.

"Good Lord!" Wade exclaimed. "Look at that motor, Arcot! No bigger than the trunk of a man's body. Yet a battery of these sends the ship along at a mile a second! What power!"

Slowly they proceeded down the long hall. At each of the fifty engine mountings they found the same conditions. At the end of the hall there was an escalator that led one level higher, into the upper wing. Here they found long rows of the bombing posts and the corresponding quartz rods.

They returned finally to the control room. Here Arcot spent a long time looking over the many instruments, the controls, and the piloting apparatus.

"Wade," he said at last, "I think I can see how this is done. I am going to stop those engines, start them, then accelerate them till the ship rolls a bit!" Arcot stepped quickly over to the pilots seat, lifted the sleeping pilot out, and settled in his place.

"Now, you go over to that board there--that one--and when I ask you to, please turn on that control--no, the one below--yes--turn it on about one notch at a time."

Wade shook his head dubiously, a one-sided grin on his face. "All right, Arcot--just as you say--but when I think of the powers you're playing with--well, a mistake might be unhealthy!"

"I'm going to stop the motors now," Arcot announced quietly. All the time they had been on board, they had been aware of the barely inaudible whine of the motors. Now suddenly, it was gone, and the plane was still as death!

Arcot's voice sounded unnaturally loud. "I did it without blowing the ship up after all! Now we're going to try turning the power on!"

Suddenly there was a throaty hum; then quickly it became the low whine; then, as Arcot turned on the throttle before him, he heard the tens of thousands of horsepower spring into life--and suddenly the whine was a low roar--the mighty propellers out there had became a blur--then with majestic slowness the huge machine moved off across the field!

Arcot shut off the motors and rose with a broad, relieved smile, "Easy!"

he said. They made their way again up through the ship, up through the room of the tremendous cylinder coil, and then into the power room. Now the machines were quiet, for the motors were no longer working.

"Arcot, you didn't shut off the biggest machine of all down there. How come?"

"I couldn't, Wade. It has no shut-off control, and if it did have, I wouldn't use it. I will tell you why when we get back to the _Solarite_."

At last they left the mighty machine; walked once more across its broad metal top. Here and there they now saw the ends of those quartz cylinders. Once more they entered the _Solarite_, through the air lock, and took off the c.u.mbersome insulating suits.

As quickly as possible Arcot outlined to the two who had stayed with the _Solarite_, the things they had seen, and the layout of the great ship.

"I think I can understand the secret of all that power, and it's not so different from the _Solarite_, at that. It, too, draws its power from the sun, though in a different way, and it stores it within itself, which the _Solarite_ does not try to do.

"Light of course, is energy, and therefore, has ma.s.s. It exerts pressure, the impact of its moving units of energy--photons. We have electrons and protons of matter, and photons of light. Now we know that the ma.s.s of protons and electrons will attract other protons and electrons, and hold them near--as in a stone, or in a solar system. The new idea here is that the photons will attract each other ever more and more powerfully, the closer they get. The Kaxorians have developed a method of getting them so close together, that they will, for a while at least, hold themselves there, and with a little 'pressure', will stay there indefinitely.

"In that huge coil and cylinder we found there we saw the main power storage tank. That was full of gaseous light-energy held together by its own attraction, plus a little help of the generator!"

"A little help?" Wade exclaimed. "Quite a little! I'll bet that thing had a million horsepower in its motor!"

"Yes--but I'll bet they have nearly fifty pounds of light condensed there--so why worry about a little thing like a million horsepower? They have plenty more where that comes from.

"I think they go up above the clouds in some way and collect the sun's energy. Remember that Venus gets twice as much as Earth. They focus it on those tubes on the roof there, and they, like all quartz tubes, conduct the light down into the condensers where it is first collected.

Then it is led to the big condenser downstairs, where the final power is added, and the condensed light is stored.

"Quartz conducts light just as copper conducts electricity--those are bus bars we saw running around there.

"The bombs we've been meeting recently are, of course, little knots of this light energy thrown out by that projector mechanism we saw. When they hit anything, the object absorbs their energy--and is very promptly volatilized by the heat of the absorption.

"Do you remember that column of hissing radiance we saw shooting out of the wrecked plane just before it blew up? That was the motor connection, broken, and discharging free energy. That would ordinarily have supplied all fifty motors at about full speed. Naturally, when it cut loose, it was rather violent.

"The main generator had been damaged, no doubt, so it stopped working, and the gravitational attraction of the photons wasn't enough, without its influence to hold them bound too long. All those floods of energy were released instantaneously, of course.

"Look--there come the Lanorians now. I want to go back to Sonor and think over this problem. Perhaps we can find something that will release all that energy--though honestly, I doubt it."

Arcot seemed depressed, overawed perhaps, by the sheer magnitude of the force that lay bound up in the Kaxorian ship. It seemed inconceivable that the little _Solarite_ could in any way be effective against the incredible machine.

The Lanorian planes were landing almost like a flock of birds, on the wings, the fuselage, the ground all about the gigantic ship. Arcot dropped into a chair, gazing moodily into emptiness, his thoughts on the mighty giant, stricken now, but only sleeping. In its vast hulk lay such energies as intelligence had never before controlled; within it he knew there were locked the powers of the sun itself. What could the _Solarite_ do against it?

"Oh, I almost forgot to mention it." Arcot spoke slowly, dejectedly. "In the heat of the attack back there it went practically unnoticed. Our only weapon beside the gas is useless now. Do you remember how the ship seemed to lose its invisibility for an instant? I learned why when we investigated the ship. Those men are physicists of the highest order. We must realize the terrible forces, both physical and mental that we are to meet. They've solved the secret of our invisibility, and now they can neutralize it. They began using it a bit too late this time, but they had located the radio-produced interference caused by the ship's invisibility apparatus, and they were sending a beam of interfering radio energy at us. We are invisible only by reason of the vibration of the molecules in response to the radio impressed oscillations. The molecules vibrate in tune, at terrific frequency, and the light can pa.s.s perfectly. What will happen, however, if someone locates the source of the radio waves? It'll be simple for them to send out a radio beam and touch our invisible ship with it. The two radio waves impressed on us now will be out of step and the interference will instantly make us visible. We can no longer attack them with our atomic hydrogen blast, or with the gas--both are useless unless we can get close to them, and we can't come within ten miles of them now. Those bombs of theirs are effective at that distance."

Again he fell silent, thinking--hoping for an idea that would once more give them a chance to combat the Kaxorians. His three companions, equally depressed and without a workable idea, remained silent. Abruptly Arcot stood up.

"I'm going to speak with the Commander-in-Field here. Then we can start back for Sonor--and maybe we had better head for home. It looks as though there is little we can do here."

Briefly he spoke to the young Venerian officer, and told him what he had learned about the ship. Perhaps they could fly it to Sonor; or it could be left there undestroyed if he would open a certain control just before he left. Arcot showed him which one--it would drain out the power of the great storage tank, throwing it harmlessly against the clouds above. The Kaxorians might destroy the machine if they wanted to--Arcot felt that they would not wish to. They would hope, with reason, they might recapture it! It would be impossible to move that tremendous machine without the power that its "tank" was intended to hold.

VII

Slowly they cruised back to Sonor, Arcot still engrossed in thought.

Would it be that Venus would fall before the attack of the mighty planes, that they would sweep out across s.p.a.ce, to Earth--to Mars--to other worlds, a cosmic menace? Would the mighty machines soon be circling Earth? Guided missiles with atomic warheads could combat them, perhaps, as could the molecular motion machines. Perhaps these could be armored with twenty-inch steel walls, and driven into the great propellers, or at miles a second, into the ship itself! But these ships would require long hours, days, even weeks to build, and in that time the Kaxorian fleet would be ready. It would attack Earth within six days now! What hope was there to avert incalculable destruction--if not outright defeat?

In despair Arcot turned and strode quickly down the long hallway of the _Solarite_. Above him he could hear the smooth, even hum of the sweetly functioning generator, but it only reminded him of the vastly greater energies he had seen controlled that night. The thudding relays in the power room, as Wade maneuvered the ship, seemed some diminutive mockery of the giant relays he had seen in the power room of the Kaxorian plane.

He sat down in the power room, looking at the stacked apparatus, neatly arranged, as it must be, to get all this apparatus in this small s.p.a.ce.

Then at last he began to think more calmly. He concentrated on the greatest forces known to man--and there were only two that even occurred to him as great! One was the vast energies he had that very night learned of; the other was the force of the molecules, the force that drove his ship.