Part 2 (1/2)

If Moose Mordan had had time to get set, he might have had a chance. His thought processes, however, were lamentably slow; and Barbara Deston was very, very fast. She reached him before he even realized that this pint-sized girl actually intended to hit him; thus his belly- muscles were still completely relaxed when her left fist sank half-forearm-deep into his solar plexus.

With an agonized ”WHOOs.h.!.+” he began to double up, but she scarcely allowed him to bend. The fingers of her right hand, tightly bunched, were already boring savagely into a spot at the base of his neck. Then, left hand at his throat and right hand pulling hard at his belt, she put the totalized and concentrated power of her whole body behind the knee she drove into his groin.

That ended it. To make sure, however-or to keep Barbara from knowing that she had killed a man?-Deston and Jones each put a bullet through the falling head before it struck the floor.

Both girls flung themselves into their husbands' arms. ”Oh, I killed him, Carl!” Barbara sobbed. ”And the worst of it is, I really meant to! I never did anything like that before in...”

”You didn't kill him, Barbara,” Adams said.

”Huh?” She raised her head from Deston's shoulder; the contrast between streaming eyes and dawning relief was almost funny. ”Why, I did too! I know I did!”

”By no means, my dear. Nor did Bernice kill Newman. Fists and knees and chairs do not kill instantly; bullets through the brain do. The autopsies will show, I'm quite certain, that these four men died instantly of gunshot wounds.”

With the gangsters out of the way, life aboards.h.i.+p settled down, but not into a routine. When two s.p.a.cemen and two grounder girls are trying to do the work of a full crew, no routine is possible. Adams, much older than the others and working even longer hours, became haggard and thin.

”But this work is necessary, my dear children,” he informed the two girls when they remonstrated with him. ”This material is all new. There are many extremely difficult problems involved and I have less than a year left to work on them. Less than one year, and it is a task for many men and all the resources of a research center.”

To the officers, however, he went into more detail. ”Considering the enormous amounts of supplies carried; the scope, quant.i.ty, and quality of the devices employed; it is highly improbable that we are the first survivors of this type of catastrophe to set course for a planet.”

After some discussion, the officers agreed with him. ”While I can not as yet a.n.a.lyze or evaluate it, we are carrying an extremely heavy charge of an unknown nature; the residuum of a field of force which is possibly more or less a.n.a.logous to the electromagnetic field. This residuum either is or is not dischargeable to an object of planetary ma.s.s. I am now virtually certain that it is; and I am of the opinion that its discharge is ordinarily of such violence as to destroy the stars.h.i.+p carrying it.”.

”Good G.o.d!” Deston exclaimed. ”Oh-that was what you meant by fantastic precautions'?”

”Precisely.”

”Any idea of what those precautions will have to be?” ”No. This is all so new... and I know so little... and am working with pitifully inadequate instrumentation... however, we have months of time yet, and if I an unable to derive a solution before arrival-I don't mean a rigorous a.n.a.lysis, of course; merely a method of discharge having a probability of success of at least point nine-we will remain in orbit around that sun until I do.”

The Procyon bored on through s.p.a.ce at one gravity of acceleration; and one gravity, maintained for months, builds up to an extremely high velocity. And, despite the Einstein Effect, that acceleration was maintained, for there was no lack of power. The Procyon's uranium driven Wesleys did not drive the s.h.i.+p, but only energized the Chaytor Effect engines that tapped the total energy of the universe.

Thus, in seven months of flight, the s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p had probably attained a velocity of about six-tenths that of light.

The men did not know the day or date or what their actual velocity was, since the brute-force machine that was their only clock could not be depended upon for either accuracy or uniformity. Also, and worse, there was of course no possibility of determining what, if anything, the Einstein Effect was doing to their time rate.

At the estimated midpoint of the flight the Procyon was turned end for end; and, a few days later, Barbara and Deston cornered Adams in his laboratory.

”Listen, you egregious clam!” she began. ”I know that Bun and I both have been pregnant for at least eight months and we ought to be twice as big as we are. You've been studying us constantly with a hundred machines that n.o.body ever heard of before and all you've said is blah. Now, Uncle Andy, I want the truth. Are we in a lot of trouble?”

”Trouble?” Adams was amazed. ”Of course not. None at all. Perfectly normal fetuses, both of them. Perfectly.” ”But for what age?” she demanded. ”Four months, maybe?”

”But that's the crux!” Adams enthused. ”Fascinating; and indubitably supremely important. A key datum. If this zeta field is causing it, that gives me a tremendously powerful new tool, for certain time vectors in the generalized matrix become parameters. Thus certain determinants, notably the all-important delta-prime-sub-mu, become manipulable by... but you aren't listening!”

”I'm listening, pops, but nothing is coming through. But I'm awfully glad I'm not going to give birth to a monster,” and she led Deston away. ”Carl, have you got the foggiest idea of what he was talking about?”

”Not the foggiest-that was over my head like a cirrus cloud-but if you gals' slowness in producing will help the old boy lick this thing I'm all for it, believe me.”

Months pa.s.sed. Two perfect babies-Theodore Warner Deston and Barbara Bernice Jones-were born, four days apart, in perfectly normal fas.h.i.+on. Adams made out birth certificates which were unusual in only one respect; the times, dates, and places of the births were to be determined later.

A couple of weeks before arrival Adams rushed up to Deston and Jones. ”I have it!” he shouted, and began to spout a torrent of higher-very much higher-mathematics.

”Hold it, Doc!” Deston protested. ”I read you zero and ten. Can't you delouse your signal?”

”W-e-I-I.” The scientist looked hurt, but did abandon the high math. ”The discharge is catastrophic; energy of the order of magnitude of ten thousand average discharges of lightning. I do not know what it is, but it is virtually certain that we will be able to discharge it, not in the one tremendous blast of contact with the planet, but in successive decrements by the use of long, thin leads extending downward toward a high point of the planet.” ”Wire, you mean? What kind?”

”The material is unimportant except in that it should have sufficient tensile strength to support as many miles as possible of its own length.”

”We've got dozens of coils of hook-up wire,” Deston said, ”but not too many miles and it's soft stuff.”

Jones snapped his finger. ”Graham wire!”

Of course,' Deston agreed. ”Hundreds of miles of it aboard. We'll float the censer down on a Hotchkiss...” ”Tear-out,” Jones objected.

”Bailey it-and spider the. Bailey out to eighteen or twenty pads. We can cannibal the whole Middle for metal.”

”Sure. But surges-backlash. We'll have to remote it.” No, problem there; servos all over the place. To Baby Two.”

”Would you mind delousing your signal?” Adams asked caustically.

” Scuse, please, Doc. A guy does talk better in his own lingo, doesn't he? Graham wire is used for re-wrapping the Grahams, you know.”

”No, I don't know. What are Grahams?”

”Why, they're the intermediates between the Wesleys and the Chaytors... okay, okay; Graham wire is one-point-three-millimeter-diameter ultra-high-tensile alloy wire. Used for re-enforcing hollow containers that have to stand terrific pressure.”

”Such wire is exactly what will be required. Note now that our bodies will have to be grounded very thoroughly to the metal of the s.h.i.+p.”

”You're so right. We'll wrap up to the eyeb.a.l.l.s in silver mesh and run leads as big as my arm to the frame.” They approached their target planet. It was twice as ma.s.sive as Earth; its surface was rugged and jagged; its mountain ranges had sharp peaks over forty thousand feet high.

”There's one more thing we must do,” Adams said. ”This zeta field may very well be irreplaceable. We must therefore launch all the lifecraft except Number Two into separate orbits, so that a properly-staffed and properly-equipped force may study that field.”

It was done; and in a few hours the Procyon hung motionless, a thousand miles high, directly above an isolated and sharp mountain peak.

The Bailey boom, with its spider-web-like network of grounding cables and with a large pulley at its end, extended two hundred feet straight out from the Procyon's side. A twenty-five-mile coil of Graham wire had been mounted on the remote-controlled Hotchkiss reel. The end of the wire had been run out over the pulley; a fifteen-pound weight, to act both as a ”sensor” and to keep the wire from fouling, had been attached; and the controls had been tested.

Now, in Lifecraft Two-as far away from the ”business district” as they could be.-the human bodies were grounded and Deston started the reel. The whole coil ran out, as expected, with no action. Then, slowly and carefully, Deston let the big s.h.i.+p float straight downward. Until, suddenly, it happened.

There was a blast beside which the most terrific flash of lightning ever seen on Earth would have seemed like a firecracker. Although she was in what was almost a vacuum, the Procyon was hurled upward like the cork of a champagne bottle. And as for what it felt like-the sensation was utterly indescribable. As Bernice said, long afterward, when she was being pressed by a newsman, ”Just tell 'em it was the living end.”

The girls were unwrapped and, after a moment of semi-hysteria and after making sure that the babies were all right, were as good as new. Then Deston aimed his plate and gulped. Without saying a word he waved a hand and the others looked. The sharp tip of the mountain was gone: it had become a seething, flaming lake of incandescent lava.

”And what,” Deston managed, ”do you suppose happened to the other side of the s.h.i.+p?”

The boom was gone. So were all twenty of the grounding cables that had fanned out in all directions to anchorages welded to the vessel's skin and frame. The anchorages, too, were gone; and tons upon tons of steel plating and of structural members for many feet around where each anchorage had been. Many tons of steel had been completely volatilized; other tons had run like water.

”Shall I try the subs.p.a.ce radio now, Doc?” Deston asked.

”By no means. This first blast would of course be the worst, but there will be several more, of decreasing violence.”