The Secret of the Ninth Planet Part 16

"I don't think they did. They're firing at us--the rocket sh.e.l.l only happened to be between," snapped Haines.

"Ferrati," he called into his mike, "fire a shrapnel sh.e.l.l at them when I say the word. Advise me when ready!"

Ferrati's voice snapped back. "Right you are, sir. Here it is now, one minute--okay, on target!"

While Ferrati and Boulton were readying their shot from the lower cargo port near the tail of the ship, Haines and Burl had been fitting the largest of their sh.e.l.ls into their own launcher. They aimed it carefully at the front-most sphere of the enemy.

"Ferrati, fire!" cried Haines, and then slowly counted to five and pressed the stud of his own launcher.

There was a momentary flicker as Ferrati's rocket sh.e.l.l raced forth below. Then, after a definite time lapse, the exhaust of Haines' heavy sh.e.l.l appeared.

"The shrapnel sh.e.l.l is segmented and doesn't have a proximity guide,"

Haines explained. "As soon as it's on its way, the nose comes apart into a dozen small sh.e.l.ls, each with a standard explosive charge. The sh.e.l.l we used has an atomic bomb warhead and is on proximity guide. It'll chase that ship to the ends of the system if they don't blast it first."

He paused. There was another bolt of raw energy from the dumbbell-shaped craft, and this time a series of flares in the s.p.a.ce between--the shrapnel charges had been touched off. Burl held his breath.

"I figure it takes them a while to recharge their gun," said Haines.

"Our own blockbuster should get there before they fire again."

Then suddenly there came a sharper flare of brilliant light. For an instant Burl was blinded by the glare. When he recovered, he peered avidly through the telescopic sighter. He saw the ship, but where there had been a golden sphere there was now only a shattered fragment of twisted metal.

The enemy ship changed before his eyes. The remaining silvery sphere glowed brighter, and took on a golden hue. Then it seemed as if the ship were growing smaller. He realized finally that it was retreating.

Burl gave an involuntary shout, and in his earphones he heard the same shouts of triumph from every voice on the ship.

Although it might have been possible to pursue the battered enemy ship, the _Magellan_ did not try. They were still on course for Saturn and were not going to deviate.

They reached Saturn after several more days. Matching their great speed with that of the ringed world in its...o...b..t took time, and then they began their survey.

As they had suspected, the Sun-tap station was on one of the moons. The moon was called Iapetus, the third largest of Saturn's family. It was about eight hundred miles in diameter and the next to the farthest satellite from Saturn. Russ was disappointed that they hadn't picked t.i.tan, the biggest moon of all. t.i.tan was over two thousand miles wide and appeared to have an atmosphere of methane.

The view of Saturn was awesome, even from Iapetus' orbit two million miles away. Burl knew it would be a sight unparalleled in the system.

The great broad rings, composed of innumerable tiny particles of metal, stone, and possibly ice, encircled it as if held there by an invisible hand. They were, he knew, the particles of a moon that had either come too close to Saturn's great gravitational pull to hold its shape, or else had never escaped far enough to congeal as one solid ma.s.s.

Iapetus was a solid world, though. A rocky body, it had a dull gleam, and was streaked here and there with layers of white and yellow, where veins of frozen gases lay forever upon the frigid surface. No atmosphere veiled the surface nor softened the harsh, jagged mountains and clefts of this forbidding little subplanet.

The Sun-tap station stood in plain sight on a high plateau near a polar region. The _Magellan_ hovered over it while Lockhart held a council of war.

"I don't see what's to be gained by attempting a landing party," he said. "We've taken all the readings and pictures of the other stations--and we've had a couple of narrow escapes. They've probably mined this one, and they have had plenty of time to prepare a trap. I'm in favor of simply dropping an H-bomb on it and leaving."

After a brief discussion, with only perfunctory objections from Clyde and Oberfield who, as astronomers, wanted to land to take other readings, the decision was carried.

The _Magellan_ swung up a couple of hundred miles above the Sun-tappers'

plateau. Haines and his crew loaded the bulky H-bomb into the main launcher in the tail of the ship. Then the _Magellan_ aimed itself at the target, and the rocket-driven bomb roared out.

Down it sped, zeroing in on the wall of the station. There was a blinding flash, a glare as brilliant as that of the Sun itself, as it hit square on the mark. This time Burl watched through carefully shielded viewscreens. The scene was obscured by a wide-flung cloud of white--tens of thousands of cubic feet of satellite rock turned instantaneously into dust particles. After the dust cleared away, they saw only a gaping crater where the plateau had been--a volcanic hole, miles wide and glowing red, from which spread vast, deep cracks throughout the entire visible hemisphere of the moon.

The men on the _Magellan_ were awed and silent. The thought occurred to each of them, beyond his capacity to deny it: what if this had happened on Earth?

"Of course," said Ferrati slowly, "the low gravity of Iapetus accounts for the greater extent of the disaster. If this had been Bikini or...."

But under the glares of the rest of the crew, his sentence trailed off weakly.

Lockhart turned away from the viewer. "Mr. Oberfield," he said, unexpectedly formal and official, "you may chart our course for Ura.n.u.s."

"Aye, aye, sir," said that usually dour personage, with alacrity.

With forced smiles, the rest of the crew drifted away to their duties.

The _Magellan_ pulled away from Saturn, heading out again toward the limits of the solar system, but it was several days before everyone had quite managed to dismiss the vision of the H-bomb from his mind.

Chapter 15. _Ice Cold on Oberon_

Nevertheless, from that point on, a different spirit seemed to animate everyone aboard the _Magellan_. There was the feeling that they had closed with the enemy and found themselves not wanting. There was the feeling that they possessed powers not inferior to those of their unknown enemies. The thought had been haunting them all along that they were in the position of a backward people facing an advanced invader--something like the problem of the Aztecs when faced with the gunpowder and armor of the conquistadors.

Now they knew that though the Sun-tappers' weapons were different and indeed advanced beyond Earthly technology, they themselves were not without resources equally deadly to the foe.

After the memory of the H-bomb's powers had been finally absorbed, the crew's activities began to indicate that the ship was coming into the crucial phase of its journey. Haines and Boulton were going over the list of military supplies with sharp, calculating eyes and slight grins at the thought of retribution to come. Ferrati was overhauling the rocket planes and land traveling devices, making them shipshape.

Russell Clyde and Burl surveyed the sky, anxious to be the first to spot what they hoped would be the limping body of the battered and fleeing dumbbell ship, a little atingle at the hope of spotting another such ship--feeling now almost like the hunting dog that has finally spotted the fox.

Lockhart himself reflected this mood of growing excitement. He prowled the ship, examining the mighty purring engines, querying Caton, Shea and Detmar as to how it could better its performance, how fast it could be made to shift speed and directions. He studied the orbits and locations of the remaining planets.

"Ura.n.u.s is not too far off our path to Pluto," he announced one day.

"We'll make it in time to wipe out their plant there. But Neptune, whose orbit is between those of Ura.n.u.s and Pluto, is away off our track, a third of the way around the Sun. We're going to skip it, hit directly for Pluto and their main base--the end of their line. I don't want to give them too much time to make repairs or to get any reinforcements. I think they're limited in numbers--and we ought to slam them while they still are."

There was no dissent at this. And as the days rolled past, the men of the _Magellan_ began to chafe in their repressed desire to finish the matter. At last Ura.n.u.s came into sight--a large globe, very much like Saturn and Jupiter in that it was of low density and great dimensions.

Roughly, sixty-four times the size of Earth, its density was barely above that of water and it probably had no solid surface to speak of. An inhospitable ma.s.s of unbreathable gases, at temperatures fantastically lower than the freezing point of water.

As they drew close to the planet, they could see that it also was banded, pale green bands alternating with lighter ones--indicating that some sections of its atmospheric belt moved faster than others. It had five moons which rotated in the opposite direction from those of any other satellite system.

It was on the farthest moon, Oberon, a sphere six hundred miles in diameter, that the Sun-tap station revealed itself. They swung down to observe it and to place their bomb. Not an H-bomb though--they recognized that they had erred in thinking they needed such a powerful explosive.

Oberon was without an atmosphere, a rocky world with streaks of frozen gases, and here and there the sheen of a lake of ice--ice that would never melt--that on this world would be a permanent, hard-as-metal material. There was, nonetheless, something about the surface that seemed to bother Russ.

"Do you notice what seems to be a sort of shifting movement?" he asked Burl. Burl looked, and sure enough, he saw that in places there seemed a flickering of lights.

"Yes," he said, "I see it. What do you suppose it is?"

"I don't know," said Russ, "But I'm going to ask Lockhart to put the ship down and let me take a look."

Lockhart at first demurred, but finally decided that they could afford the brief halt. The _Magellan_ approached the surface, safely distant from the Sun-tap station.

Burl and Russ descended in the two-man rocket plane, while the teardrop-shaped ship hung half a mile above them. They landed on a narrow plain, bordered by low ridges of mountains shining with streaks of frozen hydrogen. A layer of cosmic dust hung over the rocks.

Wearing insulated s.p.a.ce suits, they left the rocket plane. It was Burl who made the first discovery. He pointed dramatically at the ground.