Man of Two Worlds Page 30

  When the normal light of day had come again, the projector was gone as was the mesh and one of the generators—Alva’s. The two machines had destroyed each other simultaneously.

  It was a victory, but to Ketan it was at terrible cost in the sacrifice of a man he knew and liked.

  He turned away. It was time to carry the battle to the Statists. He spoke to the position operators again. “Throw Unit 9 into Dan-fer.” He knew that other projectors would come to Kronweld but he hoped to beat them to the attack and create sufficient confusion in Danfer to hamper their operation.

  The thought of the thirty generators playing their beams at random in Danfer made him more than a little sick with nausea. He wondered if it had the same effect on these others. Not ten percent of the entire colony of Restorationists were first-generation Kronweldians. There was not a single one in the Operations Center besides himself. He could not betray his weakness to them. They moved so precisely and cold-bloodedly to carry out the assignments that he doubted if they considered that men and women were being killed, blasted into living flares by the battle waging about them.

  Unit 9 was moving into position now. They waited with power plants at peak potential. And then the fantastic illusion of a great doorway seemed to open beside them. It was as if a chasm swallowed them. They vanished and were in Danfer.

  The setting had been off a trifle because the operators had not risked a preliminary check by opening the Gateway. The generators were within a half mile of the Statist citadel when they came through. Ketan watched them. In perfect formation they oriented themselves and drove in ponderous might towards their goal. The wheels crushed the concrete of the roads and ground it to powder with the weight of the monsters. Where they crossed sections of dirt path, they sank the depth of their thick, tapering rims.

  But Ketan’s eyes were upon the bystanders, the commoners of Danfer. They stood beside the road, staring at the nightmare machines that had suddenly appeared.

  Some of them screamed and ran. Some stood in horror that froze all movement. Many of them would be killed by the generators.

  Ketan expected that the Statists would move one or two of their projectors to the vicinity of the citadel to prevent its destruction. But not a single one of the weapons (appeared.

  An ominous, unrecognizable presentiment invaded Ketan.

  The thirty generators ground the pavement to dust in a wide and ragged line about the structure. They held their protective screens in readiness, but no attacking beams sought them out. At a signal from the Unit commander they let go simultaneously with the full force of the belly full of atomic power plant that each of them held.

  The sight was one that Ketan had tried in vain to imagine, an entire Unit with all its beams blasting at once. It seemed as if he were looking suddenly into the face of Earth’s sun. The atomic forces exhibited by that mighty ring of generators were a fair match for the sun’s.

  He cut down the reception a thousandfold until the turrets of the generators were visible. The Director was gone now, Ketan thought. It seemed strange that it had been so easy, but the Statists had been too sure of their invincibility. Defense had never entered their plans.

  Overtones of regret went through Ketan’s mind. He would have liked to have seen the Director once more, to have learned something about the creature’s mind.

  He scaled the reception down still further to see, if possible, the ruin that was once the Statist citadel, but the screen was almost a solid rectangle of white flame.

  He was about to turn away when the light dimmed as if the Unit commander had ordered a reduction of power to view the ruins himself.

  Ketan looked back and it was as if he were looking through a sparkling crystal globe, gigantic, dwarfing the generators. Down the sides of that globe there washed and splashed the torrent of mortal fire from the generators still operating. Inside the sphere the Statist citadel was unharmed.

  All Ketan’s precepts seemed to shatter that incomprehensible vision. It was theoretically impossible that a screen could be built to withstand the force of a full Unit. But no screen was evident at all. There was nothing. Nothing but that spherical boundary beyond which the lethal radiation would not go.

  He turned the view to the line of generators pouring out their mordant energies. He looked beyond—to the rows . of blackened corpses that lay wilted by the reflected rays.

  “Unit 10 to reinforce Unit 9,” he ordered in a .voice that carried across the room.

  Despite their discipline, every man looked up a bare fraction of an instant. The significance of that order sent a wave of insidious, fearful doubt through them. No mesh had been built by them that was capable of standing up to the full force of a generator Unit. If the Statists had such a screen—

  Unit 10 appeared in the streets, its thirty gray monsters rumbling forward to interspace themselves between those of Unit 9. As one their unendurable beams joined the others in a blaze of incandescence that forced Ketan to turn the screen away.

  Over the city, half-crazed inhabitants sought refuge in the deepest cellars and behind the thickest walls. They cursed and were glad and died in the same instant, for they knew that a power had come to challenge the tyranny of their oppressors. Whether it were benevolent or a more enslaving rule they did not know or care. If it were anything less than the Statists, it would be more endurable; if more, it would only kill them more quickly.

  That mighty radiation of the generators filtered through the earth and found them in their warrens. It passed through the walls and behind the wreckage of centuries that hid them. They felt it coming like a warm glow of sunshine that soothed them and warmed their burdened bodies and put them to sleep by mercifully burning out their nerve cells before it baked their bodies to lumps of carbon.

  Ketan saw them cringing and dying in the depths of the city and called a halt.

  “We can’t touch that screen,” he called to Zeeter. “Didn’t anyone have any information at all on this?”

  The man shook his head and swept back his graying locks. “There was no hint of it. We thought we had developed the most powerful screens that theory indicated were feasible. What do you plan now? Hameth’s outline prepared for no such possibility—if only he were here now! That he should have left at this time!”

  A warning flash appeared upon the map beside them. Then another blazed forth. “Two breakthrough !” Ketan exclaimed. “Abandon the attack in Danfer temporarily. Watch these two projectors. I’m going to send Units 9 and 10 to the bases of these two projectors. If they are forced to return, we may be able to destroy them there.”

  From the previous attack, the Restorationists had gained experience in handling the sudden appearance of the projectors. But the Statists were using new tactics now. They sent the two projectors into adjacent squares formed by the generators. That meant reducing the power in each square by one eighth unless spare generators were hurried into the weak spot.

  Ketan gave the order and the spot was remedied. But a swift and perilous doubting of their own invincibility swept over Ketan. Surely the mighty Igon had prepared better than this if his plans had been maturing for almost a century.

  The forces were so evenly matched that it seemed that victory for either would inevitably mean the ruin of Kronweld. Ketan tried to watch the two locales of action at once on different plates. He swung another to the streets of Kronweld. The scene there was one of panic and blind hysteria. In front of the hall of the Karildex there milled an angry, crying mob. The outside of the building was fused into globs of metal that hung like clusters of some fantastic fruit. The roof was open to the sky and the top of the great machine projected through.

  With utter illogic, streams of Seekers were pouring into the ruined building, climbing over fallen wreckage and grotesque mounds i of stone and metal that had dripped from the walls and hardened. They went in and stood before the ruined keyboards, pecking frantically for some explanation for the : catastrophe. But the boards were
dead, their power gone.

  He swung the view to the Temple of Birth. There, more hundreds were gathered before the ruined shrine. They cried aloud to the God asking explanations and mercy. Frantic in the unanswering silence, some flung themselves across the still-powered purple line guarding the Temple’s approaches, Across the sky, smoke clouds that were not from Fire Land covered the twin globes and hid the dim sky streamers.

  It was a picture of a dying city. With a fierce and mighty conviction that Igon had been wrong, Ketan cursed his name and a ruthless joy swept through him as he thought of that enfeebled brain perishing beneath the wheels of the generator. It should have died long ago.

  This was no way to bring the worlds together. All the Seeking of the Restorationists and the science of Earth could have found a better way. Elta had been right in this part of her views, he acknowledged.

  But now that it was begun it would only be brought to an end by greater and greater blows of death. There was no stopping, no turning back. Perhaps this would be the final end of the vast struggle that had merely paused in Richard Simons’ day.

  Ketan turned to the attack upon the two projectors that were in the city, They were locked in stalemate with the generators surrounding them, and they kept moving from square to square so that it was impossible to bring up sufficient power to destroy them.

  Power—applied in the right place —that was what they needed. The blast of a single generator upon the unprotected surface of the projector should be able to pierce the bare metal.

  Pie left the viewing panels and approached the lead positioning operator.

  “You were pretty far off when you set them down in Danfer. How close would you guarantee to come at considerably shorter range?”

  The man answered without moving his eyes from his instruments. “The discrepancy in Danfer was due to the fact that we did not open up for a look before we shoved the generators through. If we can see where we’re going, we need allow for no error whatever.”

  “Could you, for example, set a single machine down inside the mesh around one of those projectors out there?”

  “Inside— !” The operator looked up incredulously for an instant and

  then his eyes swept back to his controls. “Of course, anything you require—”

  Ketan backed away under the wondering gaze of Zeeter and the others who crowded about the scale map impotent to break the stalemate. He spoke into the general communicator and addressed the drivers of the generators not yet in use.

  “Two volunteers for suicide missions !” he called.

  An instant response from not only all of the waiting drivers, but those already positioned in the city jammed his communicator for a moment.

  “Thanks,” he murmured. The thunderous response he had not expected even though he knew the fierce ambition of the Restorationists. He tried to imagine a cause for which that many Kronweldians would have offered their lives and could think of none.

  For an instant he wondered if his wild scheme were worth two Res-torationist lives. It had to be, he decided; if it weren’t those two it might be two thousand others.

  “Why don’t you lift the screens and let them fight it out?” Zeeter suggested. “We aren’t making any progress.”

  “Half the city would be wiped out before the battle was decided.” “If our generators could get in a vital blow, it would be quick.” “We’ll try this first. We won’t have to lift the screens if it will work.” He stepped to the huge files that gave the data on every man available for combat. He looked among the generator drivers for two men with sufficiently high response and reflex indexes to do the job. He found the two highest.

  “Drivers 381 and 396,” he ordered. “You will be taken to the maneuver area where you are to orient your machines due north and set your beams at full intensity. We will attempt to set you inside the mesh so that your beams will be aligned with the enemy projectors. There is small chance that this alignment will be correct. You must be ready to act instantaneously before the Statist realizes what has happened.”

  The two men understood the strategy. They understood that they must be successful or it would not be likely to succeed on a second attempt.

  A position operator picked out their two machines and swung them into the barren plains far from the city. Every eye in Operations Center was upon them as their disrupting beams leaped out into the darkness ahead of them.

  “Now!” Ketan commanded.

  The operator touched his controls. The machines vanished from the plain.

  From another vision screen a cas—cade of light poured into the room blinding all whose eyes were directly upon it.

  The metal of one mesh instantly vanished as the projector within it was blasted by the beam of the generator that appeared beside it. The force of shattered atomic nuclei turned the attacking generator and the man within it to vapor that burned and leaped like a solar prominence towards the smoky heavens above.

  The force of the blast rocked the twelve nearby generators and warped their facings. Three were turned completely over, the force of their shields the only thing that saved their drivers from being crushed.

  But the second generator that appeared beside its projector created no such cataclysm. The two of them simply vanished.

  Ketan leaped to another vision screen. He sensed what had happened. He focused upon the two Units he had sent to Danfer to surround the launching bases of the two projectors. At the instant the generator appeared beside the projector both machines had been carried back to Danfer—into the inferno at the focus of thirty generator beams.

  In the path of the resulting holocaust was a deep crater in the earth where two generators lay warped and half-buried. Eighteen of the others were thrown on their sides, their great jagged wheels still clawing the air.

  A projector materialized almost instantly in their midst and began sweeping the helpless machines ,with its mordant beams. Unable to (move their turrets the overturned generators lay in the blanket of force fields created by their screens which turned aside the attacking beams for the length of time that it would have taken to determine an even combat, then they began to go down.

  The terrific energy they were absorbing warmed and then began to melt the circuits within the generators and the shields went down. One by one, the generators vanished in pools of molten fire.

  The ten machines that were still upright were warped and flung away from the crater, but they lumbered forward now to give battle.

  One of them was completely buried in the debris of a building through which it had crashed, and out of the pile it sent a violet beam straight to the head of the projector. The screen of the machine was hastily flung up and flamed white in a scintillating mantle of light. It was a hurriedly created thing to defend the projector where no defense had been thought necessary, and it only partially turned aside the generator’s beam.

  Apparently disconcerted by the strange attack, the projector operator began sweeping the landscape with his beams. They swept into nearby buildings, sending them crashing into the street amid smoke and flame. The destroying fingers reached widly above the city and fired the hills beyond with a long arc of flame then came back and turned the mass of rubble from which the attack came into a smoldering, molten mass that slowly dribbled and sank, exposing the generator.

  Without wavering his aim upon his target, the driver moved’ out of the ruin, Avatching the Statist screen flame and grow black under his fire.

  The other machines were attacking from behind, now. Their beams, like the pent-up fury of all the lost generations, sprayed the projector with death. In a ring about the head of it, they swiftly beat down the screen. In the single instant it died the projector became a miniature, radioactive lake of molten metal.

  In Operations Center Zeeter put a hand on Ketan’s back and gave him a warm smile of admiration. “Hameth would have liked that,” he said. “With twelve generators attacking through the screen, the one inside
the mesh was enough to throw the balance in our favor. That accounts for one third of their force if our information is correct.”

  Ketan did not respond. He knew that the destruction of the two projectors meant exactly nothing. The destruction of all six of the Statist weapons would mean little more.

  It was the Statists, not their weapons, that must be destroyed, A few masses of metal reduced to gaseous or atomic forms meant nothing. The only decisive factor in this conflict would be the utter annihilation of the brains responsible for it.

  And those brains were locked safely in the impenetrable citadel of the Statists.

  XXVIII.

  “Will you want more volunteers for the next appearance of the projectors?” Zeeter asked.

  Ketan leaned over the map and shook his head slowly. “We won’t need them. The Statists will not give us a chance to repeat that performance, you may be sure.”

  He turned and walked behind the long row of position operators. Back and forth they swung their Gates, searching the terrain of Earth and Kronweld for the four remaining projections which the Statists held in reserve.

  The men were nervous, Ketan thought. They had been schooled too long in the conceit of invincibility. They had thought their defeat of the Statists would be a matter of striding out and shouting “Beware the Restoration!” and every Statist in the sound of their voices would fall to the ground. Igou had not prepared them for retreat, much less for possible defeat. Perhaps, too, that was all part of the plan. Defeated, the Restora-tionrsts would have no reason for existence.

  “Those four projectors have disappeared completely,” the chief operator said.

  “If that were true, we could stop worrying about them, Keep searching. I—”

  He was cut off by a hoarse exclamation from Zeeter who was watching a plate showing Kronweld.

  “Look!”

  The man was shaking violently as he pointed a finger at the plate. Ketan followed his stare.