Part 2 (1/2)
The point was, of course, to get bombloads aboard planes with no chance of suspicion by spy or traitor of the actual use intended for them.
Meanwhile, Bors flew in an atmosphere-flier which looked like a private s.h.i.+p and explained his intentions to the pilot, so that the small plane did not go directly to the spot five miles offsh.o.r.e that the mysterious visitors had mentioned, to make an examination of the sea bottom.
Instead, it flew southward. It did not swing out to sea for nearly fifty miles. It went out until it was on a line between a certain small island where many well-to-do people had homes, and the airport of the planet's capital city. Then it headed for that airport.
It flew slowly, as civilian planes do. By the time the sandy beaches of a cape appeared, it was quite convincingly a private plane bringing someone from a residential island to the airport of Kandar City. If a small object trailed below it, barely above the waves, suspended by the thinnest of wires, it was invisible. If the plane happened to be on a course that would pa.s.s above a spot north-northeast from the tip of the cape, a spot calculated from information given by Talents, Incorporated, it seemed entirely coincidental. n.o.body could have suspected anything unusual; certainly nothing likely to upset the plans of a murderous totalitarian enemy. One small and insignificant civilian plane shouldn't be able to prevent the murder of a s.p.a.ce-fleet, a king and the most resolute members of a planet's population!
Captain Bors flew the s.h.i.+p. The official pilot used an electron camera, giving a complete and overlapping series of pictures of the sh.o.r.e five miles away with incredible magnification and detail.
The magnetometer-needle flicked over. Its findings were recorded. As the plane went on it returned to a normal reading for fifty fathoms of seawater.
Half an hour later the seemingly private plane landed at the capital airport. Another half-hour, and its record and pictures were back at the air base, being examined and computed by hungry-eyed men.
Just as the pretty Morgan girl had said, there was a shack on the very tip of the cape. It was occupied by two men. They loafed. And only an electron camera could have used enough magnification to show one man laughing, as if at something the other had said. The camera proved--from five miles away--that there was no sadness afflicting them. One man laughed uproariously. But the rest of the planet was in no mood for laughter.
The magnetometer recording showed that a very large ma.s.s of magnetic material lay on the ocean bottom, fifty fathoms down. Minute modifications of the magnetic-intensity curve showed that there was electronic machinery in operation down below.
Bors made no report to the palace. King Humphrey was a conscientious and doggedly resolute monarch, but he was not an imaginative one. He would want to hold a cabinet meeting before he issued orders for the destruction of a s.p.a.ce-s.h.i.+p that was only technically and not actually an enemy. Kandar had received an ultimatum from Mekin. An answer was required when a Mekinese fleet arrived off Kandar. Until that moment there was, in theory, no war. But, in fact, Kandar was already conquered in every respect except the landing of Mekinese on its surface. King Humphrey, however, would want to observe all the rules. And there might not be time.
The air force agreed with Bors. So squadron after squadron took off from the airfield, on courses which had certain things in common. None of them would pa.s.s over a fisherman's shack on Cape Farnell. None could pa.s.s over a spot five miles north-north-east magnetic from that cape's tip, where the bottom was fifty fathoms down and a suspicious magnetic condition obtained. One more thing unified the flying squadrons: At a given instant, all of them could turn and dive toward that fifty-fathom depth at sea, and they would arrive in swift and orderly succession.
This last arrangement was a brilliant piece of staff-work. Men had worked with impa.s.sioned dedication to bring it about.
But only these men knew. There was no sign anywhere of anything more remarkable than winged squadrons sweeping in a seemingly routine exercise about the heavens. Even so they were not visible from the cape.
The horizon hid them.
For a long time there was only blueness overhead, and the salt smell of the sea, and now and again flights of small birds which had no memory of the flight of their ancestors from ancient Earth. The planet Kandar rolled grandly in s.p.a.ce, awaiting its destiny. The sun shone, the sun set; in another place it was midnight and at still another it was early dawn.
But from the high blue sky near the planet's capital, there came a stuttering as of a motor going bad. If anyone looked, a most minute angular dot could be seen to be fighting to get back over the land from where it had first appeared, far out at sea. There were moments when the stuttering ceased, and the engine ran with a smooth hum. Then another stutter.
The plane lost alt.i.tude. It was clear that its pilot fought to make solid ground before it crashed. Twice it seemed definitely lost. But each time, at the last instant, the motor purred--and popped--and the plane rose valiantly.
Then there was a detonation. The plane staggered. Its pilot fought and fought, but his craft had no power at all. It came down fluttering, with the pilot gaining every imaginable inch toward the sandy sh.o.r.e. It seemed certain that he would come down on the white beach unharmed, a good half-mile from the fisherman's shack on the cape. But--perhaps it was a gust of wind. It may have been something more premeditated. One wing flew wildly up. The flier seemed to plunge crazily groundward. At the last fraction of a second, the plane reeled again and crashed into the fisherman's shack before which, from a distance of five miles, a man had been photographed, laughing.
Timbers splintered. Gla.s.s broke musically. Then there were thuds as men leaped swiftly from the plane and dived under the still-falling roof-beams. There were three, four, half a dozen men in fleet uniforms, with blasters in their hands. They used the weapons ruthlessly upon a civilian who flung himself at an incongruously brand-new signalling apparatus in a corner of the shattered house. A second man snarled and savagely lunged at his attackers; he was also blasted as he tried to reach the same device.
There was no pause. Over the low ground to the west a flight of bombers appeared, bellowing. In ma.s.s formation they rushed out above the sea.
Far to the right and high up, a second formation of man-made birds appeared suddenly. It dived steeply from invisibility toward the water.
Over the horizon to the left there came V's of bomber-planes, one after another, by dozens and by hundreds. More planes roared above the shattered shack. They came in columns. They came in ma.s.ses. From the heavens above and over the ground below and from the horizon that rimmed the world, the planes came. Planes from one direction crossed a certain patch of sea.
They were not wholly clear of it when planes from another part of the horizon swept over the same area, barely wave-tip high. Planes from the west raced over this one delimited s.p.a.ce, and planes from the north almost shouldered them aside, and then planes from the east covered that same mile-square patch of sea, and then more planes from the south....
They followed each other in incredible procession, incredibly precise.
The water on that mile-square s.p.a.ce developed white dots, which always vanished but never ceased. Spume-spoutings leaped up three feet, or ten, or twenty and disappeared, and then there were others which spouted up one yard, or two, or ten. There were innumerable temporary whitecaps.
The surface became pale from the constant churning of new foam-patches before the old foam died.
Then, with absolute abruptness, the planes flew away from the one square mile of sea. The late-comers climbed steeply. Abruptly, behind them, there were warning booms. Then monstrous ma.s.ses of spray and bubbles and blue water leaped up three hundred feet, four hundred feet, five....