Part 8 (1/2)
”Comet-gas! You can't scare me!” ”I can't? That's nice.”
”Who'd want to shoot the whole wad at once? One at a time; one day apart. Tomorrow morning I seal New York s.p.a.ceport so tight a c.o.c.kroach can't get in or out.”
”And we'll open it. Here's your one and only warning. Before we send our freight-copters in...”
Just how do you think you'll get any copters off the ground?”
”Wait and see. Before a copter lofts we'll come in on the ground. East on Carter Avenue. Through Gate Twelve. Along Way Twelve to the Cygnus. I'm telling you this because I don't want our machines to kill anybody. They'll be fully automatic, so programmed that we won't be able to stop them ourselves. Hence any goons along that designated route who can't get out of the way in time will be committing suicide. If you shoot down any of our copters your gun-crews will be killed. That is all.”
”Hot-dog!” Grimes gloated. ”Drawing us a map-handing it to us on a platted What you'll run into along..”
Miss Champion flipped a switch and the screen went blank.
Carter Avenue became a very busy street. The biggest and heaviest trucks available, loaded to capacity with broken concrete and rock, were jammed into that avenue, blocking it solidly-pavement, parkway, and sidewalk-from building wall to building wall for one full mile. Riflemen with magnums sat at windows; fifty-caliber machine-guns and forty-millimeter quick-firing rifles peered down from roofs; anti-tank weapons of all kinds commanded every yard of that soon-to-be-disputed mile.
Grimes and his strategists had expected a fleet of heavy tanks. What appeared, however, exceeded their expectations by ten raised to a power. They were-in a way-tanks; but tanks of a size, type, and heft never before seen on Earth. There were only two of them; but each one was twenty feet high, sixty feet wide, and a hundred and eighty feet long. They were not going fast, but when they reached the barricade, side by side and a couple of feet apart, they did not even pause. Both front ends reared up as one, but they did not climb very high. Under that terrific tonnage the blocking trucks were crushed flat; the steel of their structures and the concrete and stone of their loads subsided noisily to form a compacted ma.s.s only a few feet thick.
Guns of all calibers yammered and thundered, but there was nothing to shoot at except blankly invulnerable expanses of immensely thick high-alloy armor-plate. Flames-throwers, flammable gels, and incendiaries were of no avail. Inside those monstrosities there was nothing of life, nor anything to be harmed by any ordinary heat. Nor did those monstrous tanks fight back-then. Gate Twelve was narrower than the avenue; its anchorages were eight-foot-square pillars of reenforced concrete. Nevertheless the two super-tanks did not slow down; and, after they had pa.s.sed, the places where those hugely ma.s.sive abutments had been were scarcely to be distinguished from the rest of the scarred and beaten way.
Suddenly there was a terrific explosion, followed by horizontal sheets of fiercely-driven pulverized pavement and soil. Then another, and fifteen more. But not even the heaviest mines could stop those land-going superdreadnoughts. They wallowed a little in the craters, but that was all. They were simply too big and too heavy and too stable to lift or to tip over; their belly armor was twelve inches thick and was b.u.t.tressed and braced internally to withstand anything short of atomic energy. Nor could their treads be blown; since all that was exposed to blast were their stubby, sharply pyramidal, immensely strong driving teeth.
Along Way Twelve the strike-breakers rumbled, and up to GalMet's subs.p.a.cer Cygnus. They stopped. A GalMet copper began to descend, to pick up its load of copper. There was a blast of anti-aircraft fire. The copper disintegrated in air.
This time, however, GalMet struck back. Gun-ports snapped open along the nearer behemoth's grim side and a dozen one-hundred-five-millimeter sh.e.l.ls lobbed in high arcs across the few hundreds of yards of intervening distance. They exploded, and a few parts recognizable as arms, legs, and heads, together with uncountable grisly sc.r.a.ps of flesh and bone, were mingled with the shattered remains of the anti-aircraft battery.
That ended it.
In Maynard's conference room this time there were, in addition to the GalMet men, Lansing and DuPuy of Warner Oil, Hatfield and Spehn of Interstellar, and seven other men. With Grimes and his minions, were, as before, Deissner and Wilson of WestHem.
Secretary of Labor Deissner looked once at the fourteen men seated at Maynard's table and his ruddy complexion paled.
”Have you had enough, Grimes, or do you want to go the route?” Maynard asked. ”You may be able to hold your Drivers after this one beating, but one more will plow you under.”
”You're murderers now and you'll hang!” Grimes snarled.
”What will you use for law, fat-head?”
”To h.e.l.l with law. I've got WestHem's law in my pants pocket and you'll hang higher than...”
”Close your fat mouth, Tony,” Deissner said, bruskly. ”With WarnOil, InStell, and all the labor of the outplanets in on this, it may be a little...” He paused.
”You're wrong, Deissner, it'll be much worse,” Smith sneered. ”Your computations will all have to be recomputed.”
After a short silence Maynard said, ”Mr. Secretary; besides Warn Oil and InStell, I see that you recognize the presidents of the seven largest organizations of the Planetsmen. Mr. Bryce, President of the Metalsmen, has something to say.”
And fiery little Bryce said it. ”This Committee of Seven, of which I am the chairman, represents the Planetsmen, the organized production and service personnel of the ninety five planets of the Galactic Federation. Our present trip has two purposes. First, here on Galmetia, to tell you Tellurians that the organized personnel of the planets-not the nut-planets, you will note, but the planets-will not support the purely Tellurian inst.i.tution of serf labor. We do no featherbedding and we will not support the practice anywhere. We welcome any innovation that will produce more goods or services at lower cost by using our brains more and our muscles less.
”Our second objective is to let the people of Tellus know that there is plenty of room on the planets for any of them who want to advance by using their brains and their abilities instead of being coddled, protected, and imprisoned from the cradle to the grave.”
There was a moment of tense silence; then Maynard said, ”That was very well put, Egbert; thanks. Now, Grimes, as to your having WestHem s law in your pants pocket. You haven't, but the hoodlums, gangsters, and racketeers who are your bosses do have it in theirs. We Galaxians-the combined personnel and capital of the planets-know exactly what WestHem's law is: a hood-bossed, hood-riddled mob of abysmally corrupt snolly- gosters. We also know that static, greedy capital is as bad as-yes, even worse than-serf labor. Therefore we Galaxians have formed a new government, the Galactic Federation; that, among other things, will not-I repeat, NOT -permit any spiral of inflation.”
But some inflation is now necessary!” Deissner protested.
”It is not. We're not asking you; we're telling you. If you do not stabilize the dollar we will stabilize it for you.” ”Delusions of grandeur, eh? How do you think you can?”
”By isolating Earth until the resulting panic puts the dollar back where it belongs. Earth can't stand a blockade. The planets can, and would much rather have a complete severance from Earth than have a dollar that will not mail a letter from one town to the next. Hence we of the Galactic Federation hereby serve notice upon the governments and upon the peoples of Earth: it will be either a stable dollar or a strict blockade of every item of commerce except food. Take your choice.”
”Serve notice!” Deissner gasped. ”Surely you don't mean... you can't possibly mean...”
”We do mean. Just that.” Maynard smiled; a thin, cold smile. ”This has not been a secret meeting. You tell 'em, Steve.”
And Stevens Spehn, Executive Vice-President of vast Interstellar, told them. ”This whole conference has been on every channel, line, wavelength and station that InStell operates-ether and subether, radio and teevee, tri-di and flat, in black-and-white and in color.” And Miss Champion flipped her switch.
Chapter 9 RHENIA FOUR.
Far out in deep s.p.a.ce although the Procyon was, her communications officers monitored all four of the most important channels, and everything that came in on ”I-S One” was taped off. Thus, even though the ”Battle of New York s.p.a.ceport” and the conference that followed it took place in the middle of the stars.h.i.+p's ”night”, both were played in full on the regular morning news program. So was one solid hour of bi-partisan and extremely heated discussion by the big-name commentators of Earth.
To say that this news created a sensation is the understatement of the month. Nor was sentiment entirely in favor of GalMet, even though all the men aboard except Deston, and many of the women, were salaried employees and the whole expedition was on MetEngeDesDes business.
”Shocking!” ”Outrageous!” ”Cold-blooded murder!” ”Who murdered first?” ”Land-mines, Seventy fives, and Bofors!” ”Shot down the copter and killed everybody aboard!”
”But they should have settled the strike!” ”GalMet was utterly lawless!”
”I suppose it's lawful to use land-mines and antiaircraft guns and make a full-war-scale battlefield inside New York City?”
And so on.
The top echelon was, of course, solidly in favor of Maynard, and Captain Jones summed up their att.i.tude very neatly when he said, ”What the hoodlums are bellyaching about is that they were out-guessed, out-thunk, and outgunned in the ratio of a hundred and five millimeters to seventy five.”
”But listen,” Bernice said. ”Do you think, Babe, that there were any men aboard that copper?”
”One gets you a thousand there weren't. Maynard didn't say there were any.”
”He didn't say there weren't any, either,” Barbara argued, ”like he did for the tanks. What makes you so sure?”
”He knew what was going to happen-he let them think it was manned, probably as a deterrent-so you can paste it in your Easter bonnet, pet, that the only brains aboard that copper were tapes.”
Time wore on; the strife on Earth, which did not flare into the news again, was just about forgotten. Deston found several enormous deposits of copper. He found all the other most-wanted metals except rhenium in quant.i.ty sufficient to supply even the most extravagant demand. But of rhenium he still found only insignificant traces.
Each tremendous deposit of metal had been reported as soon as it was found. Crew after crew had been sent out. Plant after plant had been built; each one of which would be not only immensely profitable, but also of inestimable benefit to humanity as a whole, since all those highly important metals would soon be on the market at a mere fraction of their former high prices.
Still rhenium did not appear. ”I don't believe there is any such d.a.m.n thing, anywhere in the whole galaxy,” Deston said, over and over, but he did not give up.
The stars.h.i.+p bored along on its hugely helical course, deeper and deeper into unexplored s.p.a.ce toward the Center. Until, after weeks of futile seeking, Deston did find rhenium. After a quick once-over, without waiting to get close enough to the planet for the physical scientists to make any kind of survey, he called Galmetia and Miss Champion.
”Hi, Doris!” he greeted her happily. ”I've got some good news for you at last. We found it.”