MALCOLM JAMESON: Science Fiction Collection - 17 Books in One Edition. Malcolm Jameson

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      CHAPTER XXI

       Force Meets Force

       Table of Contents

      Again Winchester stuck his periscope up through the cleft in the glazed wreckage of the east wall. He could see the advancing Mongoloid hordes distinctly now, looking more like an army of goblins than of men. They were feeling their way across the bare Lunar plane, and dragging with them huge portable projectors.

      It required hundreds of straining tractors to haul the mighty engines of destruction and their cumbersome generators. But in time the Mongoloids would reach the weakest point of the rebels' defenses — the shattered east wall.

      "It won't be long now," Winchester warned over the loudspeaker system. "Be ready on the right and left, but do not open up until I order."

      He settled to his vigil. The massed enemy was not yet in range. But their army already was deploying under the partial cover of several thick clumps of Lunar brush.

      Winchester had been given a long breathing spell since the first battle. It had enabled him to patch up his defenses. Immediately after the destruction of the Khan's fleet, he had found a couple of televisors still working. This enabled him to do some scouting inside the Mongoloid strongholds, before they discovered his prying eye and demolished the scanners wherever they were.

      The flashes Winchester had of conditions in Lunar Base, in the gutted Central Station, in Cosmopolis and elsewhere were comforting. The enemy was badly rattled, and uncertain what to do.

      Since their air power was gone, except for a few small units beyond the orbit of Mars, and their police virtually nonexistent, they could not attack from above nor within. They must make a frontal assault. To do that, they had drawn to Lunar Base every soldier on the Moon, and the reserves from Earth. Now that attack was coming, but it had taken them a week to prepare.

      Winchester had not been idle. He had sent scores of men as propaganda agents to all the centers of the Moon abandoned by the police. Their job was to inform the docile workers of what was taking place, prepare them for the overturn that was soon to come.

      Thousands of other men had been dispatched to the now deserted Botanical Gardens, to bring up certain materials Winchester planned to use in his defense strategy. They took with them many tractor locomotives and long strings of trailers, and were escorted by a heavy body of armed men.

      Heim took charge of the local repairs. He had managed to dismount some of the undamaged projectors from the west wall. They had been reset in pits in front of the ruined eastern barrier.

      The last of the work was finished and the stage cleared. Winchester made a minor adjustment to his focus and looked at the enemy again. Now he saw what he had been expecting for some time. It was the black and gold-banded space yacht of Prince Lohan, gliding down out of the void above. It circled, just out of range, and settled on a spiny knob to the south of the battlefield.

      Lohan had come to direct the assault in person. Winchester grunted in contentment. Let it be so. This was the final duel. It would be but a matter of minutes until they would know who was the stronger.

      Winchester stiffened with new alertness. The Mongoloid columns were coming ahead again. In a moment they would enter the bushes. A half mile this side they would advance into the range of his concealed projectors.

      But doom struck many of them long before that. A ripple of flashes ran along the plain from the northern to the southern horizons. The vanguard had marched boldly into the thicket of transplanted floribombs, and the explosive plants were detonating in chain-style.

      Fragments of men and parts of tractors flew skyward in a hail of flung gravel. Where regiments had been an instant before, there was now a string of ragged craters into which the oncoming projectors plunged and overturned.

      "That worked!" called Heim, over their private line.

      "And how," exulted Winchester.

      But the ambush was not the lucky accident it seemed. It had been planned that way. Winchester knew his plants; knew, too, that the floribombs were due soon to come to maturity. His experts had selected them with care, had had them transplanted by the trainload. Results of years of experimentation had furnished the plants' rate of development, almost by the hour.

      Their growth could be expedited СКАЧАТЬ