The Greatest Works of E. E. Smith. E. E. Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ you? . All mopped up—come and get the dope!”

      The specialists, headed by Master Technician LaVerne Thorndyke, had been waiting strainingly for that word for minutes. Now they literally flew at their tasks; in furious haste, but following rigidly and in perfect coordination a pre-arranged schedule. Every control and lead, every bus-bar and immaterial beam of force was traced and checked. Instruments and machines were dismantled, sealed mechanisms were ruthlessly torn apart by jacks or sliced open with cutting beams. And everywhere, every thing and every movement was being photographed, charted, and diagrammed.

      “Getting the idea now, Kim,” Thorndyke said finally, during a brief lull in his work. “A sweet system .”

      “Look at this!” a mechanic interrupted. “Here’s a machine that’s all shot to hell!”

      The shielding cover had been torn from a monstrous fabrication of metal, apparently a motor or generator of an exceedingly complex type. The insulation of its coils and windings had fallen away in charred fragments, its copper had melted down in sluggish, viscous streams.

      “That’s what we’re looking for!” Thorndyke shouted. “Check those leads! Alpha!”

      “Seven-three-nine-four!” and the minutely careful study went on until:

      “That’s enough; we’ve got everything we need now. Have you draftsmen and photographers got everything down solid?”

      “On the boards!” and “In the cans!” rapped out the two reports as one.

      “Then let’s go!”

      “And go fast!” Kinnison ordered, briskly. “I’m afraid we’re going to run out of time as it is!”

      All hands hurried back into the Brittania, paying no attention to the bodies littering the decks. So desperate was the emergency, each man knew, that nothing could be done about the dead, whether friend or foe. Every resource of mechanism, of brain and of brawn, must needs be strained to the utmost if they themselves were not soon to be in similar case.

      “Can you talk, Nels?” demanded Kinnison of his Communications Officer, even before the air-lock had closed.

      “No, sir, they’re blanketing us solid,” that worthy replied instantly. “Space’s so full of static you couldn’t drive a power-beam through it, let alone a communicator. Couldn’t talk direct, anyway—look where we are,” and he pointed out in the tank their present location.

      “Hm . . . m . . . m. Couldn’t have got much farther away without jumping the galaxy entirely. Boskone got a warning, either from that ship back there or from the disturbance. They’re undoubtedly concentrating on us now . One of them will spear us with a tractor, just as sure as hell’s a man-trap .”

      The fledgling commander rammed both hands into his pockets and thought in black intensity. He must get this data back to Base—but how? HOW? Henderson was already driving the vessel back toward Sol with every iota of her inconceivable top speed, but it was out of the question even to hope that she would ever get there. The life of the Brittania was now, he was coldly certain, to be measured in hours—and all too scant measure, even of them. For there must be hundreds of pirate vessels even now tearing through the void, forming a gigantic net to cut off her return to Base. Fast though she was, one of that barricading horde would certainly manage to clamp on a tractor—and when that happened her night was done.

      Nor could she fight. She had conquered one first-class war-vessel of the public enemy, it was true; but at what awful cost! One fresh vessel could blast his crippled mount out of space; nor would there be only one. Within a space of minutes after the attachment of a tracer the Brittania would be surrounded by the cream of Boskone’s fighters. There was only one chance; and slowly, thoughtfully, and finally grimly, young Lieutenant Kinnison—now and briefly Captain Kinnison—decided to take it.

      “Listen, everybody!” he ordered. “We must get this information back to Base, and we can’t do it in the Britannia. The pirates are bound to catch us, and our chance in another fight is exactly zero. We’ll have to abandon ship and take to the lifeboats, in the hope that at least one will be able to get through.

      “The technicians and specialists will take all the data they got—information, descriptions, diagrams, pictures, everything—boil it down, and put it on a spool of tape. They will make about a hundred copies of it. The crew and the Valerian privates will man boats starting with Number Twenty One and blast off as soon as you can get your tapes. Once away, use very little detectable power, or better yet no power at all, until you’re sure the pirates have chased the Brittania a good many parsecs away from where you are.

      “The rest of us—specialists and the Valerian non-coms—will go last. Twenty boats, two men to a boat, and each man will have a spool. We’ll start launching when we’re as far as it’s safe to go. Each boat will be strictly on its own. Do it any way you can; but some way, any way, get your spool back to Base. There’s no use in me trying to impress you with the importance of this stuff; you know what it means as well as I do.

      “Boatmates will be drawn by lot. The quartermaster will write all our names—and his own, to make it forty even—on slips of paper and draw them out of a helmet two at a time. If two navigators, such as Henderson and I, are drawn together, both names go back into the pot. Get to work!”

      Twice the name of “Kinnison” came out together with that of another skilled in astronautics and was replaced. The third time, however, it came out paired with “vanBuskirk,” to the manifest joy of the giant Valerian and to the approval of the crowd as well.

      “That was a break for me, Kim!” the sergeant called, over the cheers of his fellows. “I’m sure of getting back now!”

      “That’s throwing the oil, big fellow—but I don’t know of anybody I’d rather have at my back than you,” Kinnison replied, with a boyish grin.

      The pairings were made; DeLameters, spare batteries, and other equipment were checked and tested; the spools of tape were sealed in their corrosion-proof containers and distributed; and Kinnison sat talking with the Master Technician.

      “So they’ve solved the problem of the really efficient reception and conversion of cosmic radiation!” Kinnison whistled softly through his teeth. “And a sun—even a small one—radiates the energy given off by the annihilation of one-to-several million tons of matter per second! SOME power!”

      “That’s the story, Skipper, and it explains completely why their ships have been so much superior to ours. They could have installed faster drives even than the Brittania’s—they probably will, now that it has become necessary. Also, if the bus-bars in that receptor-convertor had been a few square centimeters larger in cross-section, they could have held their wall-shield, even against our duodec bomb. Then what? . They had plenty of intake, but not quite enough distribution.”

      “They have atomic motors, the same as ours; just as big and just as efficient,” Kinnison coagitated. “But those motors are all we have got, while they use them, and at full power, too, simply as first-stage exciters for the cosmic-energy screens. Blinding blue blazes, what power! Some of us have got to get back, Verne. If we don’t, Boskone’s got the whole galaxy by the tail, and civilization is sunk without a trace.”

      “I’ll say so; but also I’ll say this for those of us who don’t get back—it won’t be for lack of trying. Well, better I go check my boat. If I don’t see you again, Kim old man, clear ether!”

      They СКАЧАТЬ