Masters of Space | Page 3

error, Your Loftiness?"

"Silence, fool! Stretts do not commit errors!"
* * * * *
As soon as it was clear that no one had been injured, Sawtelle
demanded, "How about it, Hilton?"
"Structurally, it was high-alloy steel. There were many bulges, possibly
containing mechanisms. There were drive-units of a non-Terran type.
There were many projectors, which--at a rough guess--were a hundred
times as powerful as any I have ever seen before. There were no
indications that the thing had ever been enclosed, in whole or in part. It
certainly never had living quarters for warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing
eaters of organic food."
Sawtelle snorted. "You mean it never had a crew?"
"Not necessarily...."
"Bah! What other kind of intelligent life is there?"
"I don't know. But before we speculate too much, let's look at the tri-di.
The camera may have caught something I missed."
It hadn't. The three-dimensional pictures added nothing.
"It probably was operated either by programmed automatics or by
remote control," Hilton decided, finally. "But how did they drain all our
power? And just as bad, what and how is that other point source of
power we're heading for now?"
"What's wrong with it?" Sawtelle asked.
"Its strength. No matter what distance or reactant I assume, nothing we
know will fit. Neither fission nor fusion will do it. It has to be
practically total conversion!"

II
The Perseus snapped out of overdrive near the point of interest and
Hilton stared, motionless and silent.
Space was full of madly warring ships. Half of them were bare, giant
skeletons of steel, like the "derelict" that had so unexpectedly blasted
away from them. The others were more or less like the Perseus, except
in being bigger, faster and of vastly greater power.
Beams of starkly incredible power bit at and clung to equally capable
defensive screens of pure force. As these inconceivable forces met, the
glare of their neutralization filled all nearby space. And ships and
skeletons alike were disappearing in chunks, blobs, gouts, streamers
and sparkles of rended, fused and vaporized metal.
Hilton watched two ships combine against one skeleton. Dozens of
beams, incredibly tight and hard, were held inexorably upon dozens of
the bulges of the skeleton. Overloaded, the bulges' screens flared
through the spectrum and failed. And bare metal, however refractory,
endures only for instants under the appalling intensity of such beams as
those.
The skeletons tried to duplicate the ships' method of attack, but failed.
They were too slow. Not slow, exactly, either, but hesitant; as though it
required whole seconds for the commander--or operator? Or remote
controller?--of each skeleton to make it act. The ships were winning.
"Hey!" Hilton yelped. "Oh--that's the one we saw back there. But what
in all space does it think it's doing?"
It was plunging at tremendous speed straight through the immense fleet
of embattled skeletons. It did not fire a beam nor energize a screen; it
merely plunged along as though on a plotted course until it collided
with one of the skeletons of the fleet and both structures plunged, a
tangled mass of wreckage, to the ground of the planet below.
Then hundreds of the ships shot forward, each to plunge into and

explode inside one of the skeletons. When visibility was restored
another wave of ships came forward to repeat the performance, but
there was nothing left to fight. Every surviving skeleton had blinked
out of normal space.
The remaining ships made no effort to pursue the skeletons, nor did
they re-form as a fleet. Each ship went off by itself.
* * * * *
And on that distant planet of the Stretts the group of mechs watched
with amazed disbelief as light after light after light winked out on their
two-miles-long control board. Frantically they relayed orders to the
skeletons; orders which did not affect the losses.
"Brain-pans will blacken for this ..." a mental snarl began, to be
interrupted by a coldly imperious thought.
"That long-dead unit, so inexplicably reactivated, is approaching the
fuel world. It is ignoring the battle. It is heading through our fleet
toward the Oman half ... handle it, ten-eighteen!"
"It does not respond, Your Loftiness."
"Then blast it, fool! Ah, it is inactivated. As encyclopedist, Nine,
explain the freakish behavior of that unit."
"Yes, Your Loftiness. Many cycles ago we sent a ship against the
Omans with a new device of destruction. The Omans must have
intercepted it, drained it of power and allowed it to drift on. After all
these cycles of time it must have come upon a small source of power
and of course continued its mission."
"That can be the truth. The Lords of the Universe must be informed."
"The mining units, the carriers and the refiners have not been affected,
Your Loftiness," a mech radiated.
"So I see, fool."