Invaders from the Infinite - John W. Campbell (the top 100 crime novels of all time .txt) 📗

the time-field and electric field fought. But the time-field, because of its very nature, could work faster, and they won through undamaged, though the enormous current seemed flowing for many minutes as they drifted slowly past it. Slowly⁠—at fifty miles a second.

Out in space, free of the atmosphere, Arcot shot out to the point where the Thessians were congregating. The shining dots of their ships and the discs of the forts were visible from Earth save for the air’s distortion.

They seemed a miniature Milky Way, their deadly beams concentrated on Earth.

Then the Thessians discovered that the terrestrial fleet was in action. A ship glowed with the ray, the opalescence of relux under moleculars visible on its walls. It simply searched for its opponent while its relux slowly yielded. It found it in time, and the terrestrial ship put up its screen.

The terrestrial fleet set to work, everything they had flying at the Thessian giants, but the Thessians had heavier ships, and heavier tubes. More power was winning for them. Inevitably, when the Sun’s interference somewhat weakened the ray shield⁠—

About that time Arcot arrived. The nearest fort dived toward the further with an acceleration that smashed it against no less than ten of its own ships before they could so much as move.

When the way was clear to the other fort⁠—and that fort had moved, the berserk fort started off a new tack⁠—and garnered six more wrecks on its side.

Then Thett’s emissaries located Arcot. The screen was up, and the Negrian attractive ray apparatus which Arcot had used was working through it. The screen flashed here and there and collapsed under the full barrage of half the Thessian fleet, as Arcot had suspected it would. But the same force that made it collapse operated a relay that turned on the space control, and Thett’s molecular ray energy steamed off to outer space.

“We worried them, then dug our hole and dragged it in after us, as usual, but damn it, we can’t hurt them!” said Arcot disgustedly. “All we can do is tease them, then go hide where it’s perfectly safe, in artificial⁠—” Arcot stopped in amazement. The ship had been held under such space control that space was shut in about them, and they were motionless. The dials had reached a steady point, the current flow had become zero, and they hung there with only the very slow drain of the Sun’s gravitational field and that of the planet’s field pulling on the ship. Suddenly the current had leaped, and the dials giving the charge in the various coil banks had moved them down toward zero.

“Hey⁠—they’ve got a wedge in here and are breaking out our hole. Turn on all the generators, Morey.” Arcot was all action now. Somehow, inconceivable though it was, the Thessians had spotted them, and got some means of attacking them, despite their invulnerable position in another space!

The generators were on, pouring enormous power into the coils, and the dials surged, stopped, and climbed ever so slowly. They should have jumped back under that charge, ordinarily dangerously heavy. For perhaps thirty seconds they climbed, then they started down at full speed!

Arcot’s hand darted to the time field, and switched it on full. The dial jerked, swung, then swung back, and started falling in unison with the dials, stopped, and climbed. All climbed swiftly, gaining ever more rapidly. With what seemed a jerk, the time dial flew over, and back, as Arcot opened the switch. They were free, and the dial on the space control coils was climbing normally now.

“By the Nine Planets, did they drink out our energy! The energy of six tons of lead just like that!”

“How’d they do it?” asked Wade.

Torlos kept silent, and helped Morey replace the coils of lead wire with others from stock.

“Same way we tickled them,” replied Arcot, carefully studying the control instruments, “with the gravity ray! We knew all along that gravitational fields drank out the energy⁠—they simply pulled it out faster than we could pump it in, and used four different rays on us doing it. Which speaks well for a little ship! But they burned off the relux on one room here, and it’s a wreck. The molecs hit everything in it. Looks like something bad,” called Arcot. The room was Morey’s, but he’d find that out himself. “In the meantime, see if you can tell where we are. I got loose from their rays by going on both the high speed time-field and the space control at full, with all generators going full blast. Man, they had a stranglehold on us that time! But wait till we get that new ship turned out!”

With the telectroscope they could see what was happening. The terrific bombardment of rays was continuing, and the fleets were locked now in a struggle, the combined fleets of Earth and Venus and of Nansal, far across the void. Many of the terrestrian, or better, Solarian ships, were equipped with space distortion apparatus, now, and had some measure of safety in that the attractive rays of the Thessians could not be so concentrated on them. In numbers was safety; Arcot had been endangered because he was practically alone at the time they attacked.

But it was obvious that the Solarian fleet was losing. They could not compete with the heavier ships, and now the frequent flaming bursts of light that told of a ship caught in the new deadly ray showed another danger.

“I think Earth is lost if you cannot aid it soon, Arcot, for other Thessian ships are coming,” said Stel Felso Theu softly.

From out of the plane of the planetary orbits they were coming, across space from some other world, a fleet of dozens of them. They were visible as one after another leapt into normal time-rates.

“Why don’t they fight in advanced time?” asked Morey, half aloud.

“Because the genius that designed that apparatus didn’t think of it. Remember, Morey, those ships have their time apparatus connected with their power apparatus so that the power