The Galaxy Primes, page 9
On the other hand, the Arpalones were madly, suicidally determined to break through that vortex wall, to get into the "eye," to wreak all possible damage there. Group after group after group of five jet–fighters each came driving in; and, occasionally, the combined blasts of all five made enough of opening in the wall so that the center fighter could get through. Once inside, each pilot stood his little, stubby–winged craft squarely on her tail, opened his projectors to absolute maximum of power and of spread, and climbed straight up the spout until he was shot down.
And the Arpalones were winning the battle. Larger and larger gaps were being opened in the vortex wall; gaps which it became increasingly difficult for the Dilipics to fill. More and more Arpalone fighters were getting inside. They were lasting longer and doing more damage all the time. The tube was growing narrower and narrower.
All four Galaxians perceived all this in seconds. Garlock weighed out and detonated a terrific matter–conversion bomb in the exact center of one of the largest vessels of the attacking fleet. It had no effect. Then a larger one. Then another, still heavier. Finally, at over a hundred megatons equivalent, he did get results—of a sort. The invaders' guns, ammunition, and missiles were blown out of the ship and scattered outward for miles in all directions; but the structure of the Dilipic ship itself was not harmed.
Belle had been studying, analyzing, probing the things that were coming down through that hellish tube.
"Clee!" She drove a thought. "Cut out the monkey–business with those damn firecrackers of yours and look here—pure, solid force, like ball lightning or our Op field, but entirely different—see if you can analyze the stuff!"
"Alive?" Garlock asked, as he drove a probe into one of the things—they were furiously–radiating spheres some seven feet in diameter—and began to tune to it.
"I don't know—don't think so—if they are, they're a form of life that no sane human being could even imagine!"
"Let's see what they actually do," Garlock suggested, still trying to tune in with the thing, whatever it was, and still following it down.
This particular force–ball happened to hit the top of a six–story building. It was not going very fast—fifteen or twenty miles an hour—but when it struck the roof it did not even slow down. Without any effort at all, apparently, it continued downward through the concrete and steel and glass of the building; and everything in its path became monstrously, sickeningly, revoltingly changed.
"I simply can't stand any more of this," Lola gasped. "If you don't mind, I'm going to my room, set all the Gunther blocks it has, and bury my head under a pillow."
"Go ahead, Brownie," James said. "This is too tough for anybody to watch. I'd do the same, except I've got to run these cameras."
Lola disappeared.
Garlock and Belle kept on studying. Neither had paid any attention at all to either Lola or James.
Instead of the structural material it had once been, the bore that the thing had traversed was now full of a sparkling, bubbling, writhing, partly–fluid–partly–viscous, obscenely repulsive mass of something unknown and unknowable on Earth; a something which, Garlock now recalled, had been thought of by the Arpalone Inspector as "golop."
As that unstoppable globe descended through office after office, it neither sought out people nor avoided them. Walls, doors, windows, ceilings, floors and rugs, office furniture and office personnel; all alike were absorbed into and made a part of that indescribably horrid brew.
Nor did the track of that hellishly wanton globe remain a bore. Instead, it spread. That devil's brew ate into and dissolved everything it touched like a stream of boiling water being poured into a loosely–heaped pile of granulated sugar. By the time the ravening sphere had reached the second floor, the entire roof of the building was gone and the writhing, racing flood of corruption had flowed down the outer walls and across the street, engulfing and transforming sidewalks, people, pavement, poles, wires, automobiles, people–anything and everything it touched.
The globe went on down, through basement and sub–basement, until it reached solid, natural ground. Then, with its top a few inches below the level of natural ground, it came to a full stop and—apparently—did nothing at all. By this time, the ravening flood outside had eaten far into the lower floors of the buildings across the street, as well as along all four sides of the block, and tremendous masses of masonry and steel, their supporting structures devoured, were subsiding, crumbling, and crashing down into the noisome flood of golop—and were being transformed almost as fast as they could fall.
One tremendous mass, weighing hundreds or perhaps thousands of tons, toppled almost as a whole; splashing the stuff in all directions for hundreds of yards. Wherever each splash struck, however, a new center of attack came into being, and the peculiarly disgusting, abhorrent liquidation went on.
"Can you do anything with it, Clee?" Belle demanded.
"Not too much—it's a mess," Garlock replied. "Besides, it wouldn't get us far, I don't think. It'll be more productive to analyze the beams the Arpalones are using to break them up, don't you think?"
Then, for twenty solid minutes, the two Prime Operators worked on those enigmatic beams.
"We can't assemble that kind of stuff with our minds," Belle decided then.
"I'll say we can't," Garlock agreed. "Ten megacycles, and cycling only twenty per second." He whistled raucously through his teeth. "My guess is it'd take four months to design and build a generator to put out that kind of stuff. It's worse than our Op field."
"I'm not sure I could ever design one," Belle said, thoughtfully, "but of course I'm not the engineer you are …." Then, she could not help adding, "… yet."
"No, and you never will be," he said, flatly.
"No? That's what you think!" Even in such circumstances as those, Belle Bellamy was eager to carry on her warfare with her Project Chief.
"That's exactly what I think—and I'm so close to knowing it for a fact that the difference is indetectible."
Belle almost—but not quite—blew up. "Well, what are you going to do?"
"Unless and until I can figure out something effective to do, I'm not going to try to do anything. If you, with your vaunted and flaunted belief in the inherent superiority of the female over the male, can dope out something useful before I do, I'll eat crow and help you do it. As for arguing with you, I'm all done for the moment."
Belle gritted her teeth, flounced away, and plumped herself down into a chair. She shut her eyes and put every iota of her mind to work on the problem of finding something—anything—that could be done to help this doomed world and to show that big, overbearing jerk of a Garlock that she was a better man than he was. Which of the two objectives loomed more important, she herself could not have told, to save her life.
And Garlock looked around. The air and the sky over the now–vanished city were both clear of Dilipic craft. The surviving Arpalone fighters and other small craft were making no attempt to land, anywhere on the world's surface. Instead, they were flying upward toward, and were being drawn one by one into the bowels of, huge Arpalonian space–freighters. When each such vessel was filled to capacity, it flew upward and set itself into a more–or–less–circular orbit around the planet.
Around and around and around the ruined world the Pleiades went; recording, observing, charting. Fifty–eight of those atrocious Dilipic vortices had been driven to ground. Every large land–mass surrounded by large bodies of water had been struck once, and only once; from the tremendous area of the largest continent down to the relatively tiny expanses of the largest islands. One land–mass, one vortex. One only.
"What d'you suppose that means?" James asked. "Afraid of water?"
"Damfino. Could be. Let's check … mountains, too. Skip us back to where we started—oceans and mountains both fairly close there."
The city had disappeared long since; for hundreds of almost–level square miles there extended a sparkling, seething, writhing expanse of—of what? The edge of that devouring flood had almost reached the foot–hills, and over that gnawing, dissolving edge the Pleiades paused.
Small lakes and ordinary rivers bothered the golop very little if at all. There was perhaps a slightly increased sparkling, a slight stiffening, a little darkening, some freezing and breaking off of solid blocks; but the thing's forward motion was not noticeably slowed down. It drank a fairly large river and a lake one mile wide by ten miles long while the two men watched.
The golop made no attempt to climb either foot–hills or mountains. It leveled them. It ate into their bases at its own level; the undermined masses, small and large, collapsed into the foul, corrosive semi–liquid and were consumed. Nor was there much raising of the golop's level, even when the highest mountains were reached and miles–high masses of solid rock broke off and toppled. There was some raising, of course; but the stuff was fluid enough so that its slope was not apparent to the eye.
Then the Pleiades went back, over the place where the city had been and on to what had once been an ocean beach. The original wave of degradation had reached that shore long since, had attacked its sands out into deep water, and there it had been stopped. The corrupt flood was now being reinforced, however, by an ever–rising tide of material that had once been mountains. And the slope, which had not been even noticeable at the mountains or over the plain, was here very evident.
As the rapidly–flowing golop struck water, the water shivered, came to a weirdly unforgettable cold boil, and exploded into drops and streamers and jagged–edged chunks of something that was neither water nor land; or rock or soil or sand or Satan's unholy brew. Nevertheless, the water won. There was so much of it! Each barrel of water that was destroyed was replaced instantly and enthusiastically; with no lowering of level or of pressure.
And when water struck the golop, the golop also shivered violently, then sparkled even more violently, then stopped sparkling and turned dark, then froze solid. The frozen surface, however, was neither thick enough nor strong enough to form an effective wall.
Again and again the wave of golop built up high enough to crack and to shatter that feeble wall; again and again golop and water met in ultimately furious, if insensate, battle. Inch by inch the ocean's shoreline was driven backward toward ocean's depths; but every inch the ocean lost was to its tactical advantage, since the advancing front was by now practically filled with hard, solid, dead blocks of its own substance which it could neither assimilate nor remove from the scene of conflict.
Hence the wall grew ever thicker and solider; the advance became slower and slower.
Then, finally, ocean waves of ever–increasing height and violence rolled in against the new–formed shore. What caused those tremendous waves—earthquakes, perhaps, due to the shifting of the mountains' masses?—no Tellurian ever surely knew. Whatever the cause, however, those waves operated to pin the golop down. Whenever and wherever one of those monstrous waves whitecapped in, hurling hundreds of thousands of tons of water inland for hundreds of yards, the battle–front stabilized then and there.
All over that world the story was the same. Wherever there was water enough, the water won. And the total quantity of water in that world's oceans remained practically unchanged.
"Good. A lot of people escaped," James said, expelling a long–held breath. "Everybody who lives on or could be flown to all the islands smaller than the biggest ones … if they can find enough to eat and if the air isn't poisoned."
"Air's okay—so's the water—and they'll get food," Garlock said. "The Arpalones will handle things, including distribution. What I'm thinking about is how they're going to rehabilitate it. That, as an engineering project, is a feat to end all feats."
"Brother! You can play that in spades!" James agreed. "Except that it'll take too many months before they can even start the job, I'd like to stick around and see how they go about it. How does this kind of stuff fit into that theory you're not admitting is a theory?"
"Not worth a damn. However, it's a datum—and, as I've said before and may say again, if we can get enough data we can build a theory out of it."
Then it began to rain. For many minutes the clouds had been piling up—black, far–flung, thick and high. Immense bolts of lightning flashed and snapped and crackled; thunder crashed and rolled and rumbled; rain fell, and continued to fall, like a cloud–burst in Colorado. And shortly thereafter—first by square feet and then by acres and then by square miles—the surface of the golop began to die. To die, that is, if it had ever been even partially alive. At least it stopped sparkling, darkened, and froze into thick skins; which broke up into blocks; which in turn sank—thus exposing an ever–renewed surface to the driving, pelting, relentlessly cascading rain.
"Well, I don't know that there's anything to hold us here any longer," Garlock said, finally. "Shall we go?"
They went; but it was several days before any of the wanderers really felt like smiling; and Lola did not recover from her depression for over a week.
CHAPTER 5
Supper was over, but the four were still at the table, sipping coffee and smoking. During a pause in the casual conversation, James suddenly straightened up.
"I want an official decision, Clee," he said, abruptly. "While we're out of touch with United Worlds you, as captain of the ship and director of the project, are Boss, with a capital B. The Lord of Justice, High and Low. The Works. Check?"
"On paper, yes; with my decisions subject to appeal and/or review when we get back to Base. In practice, I didn't expect to have to make any very gravid rulings."
"I never thought you'd have to, either, but Belle fed me one with a bone in it, so …."
"Just a minute. How official do you want it? Full formal, screens down and recorded?"
"Not unless we have to. Let's explore it first. As of right now, are we under the Code or not?"
"Of course we are."
"Not necessarily," Belle put in, sharply. "Not slavishly to the letter. We're so far away and our chance of getting back is so slight that it should be interpreted in the light of common sense."
Garlock stared at Belle and she stared back, her eyes as clear and innocent as a baby's.
"The Code is neither long enough nor complicated enough to require interpretation," Garlock stated, finally. "It either applies in full and exactly or not at all. My ruling is that the Code applies, strictly, until I declare the state of Ultimate Contingency. Are you ready, Belle, to abandon the project, find an uninhabited Tellurian world, and begin to populate it?"
"Well, not quite, perhaps."
"Yes or no, please."
"No."
"We are under the Code, then. Go ahead, Jim."
"I broke pairing with Belle and she refused to confirm."
"Certainly I refused. He had no reason to break with me."
"I had plenty of reason!" James snapped. "I'm fed up to here—" he drew his right forefinger across his forehead, "—with making so–called love to a woman who can never think of anything except cutting another man's throat. She's a heartless conniver."
"You both know that reasons are unnecessary and are not discussed in public," Garlock said, flatly. "Now as to confirmation of a break. In simple pairing there is no marriage, no registration, no declaration of intent or of permanence. Thus, legally or logically, there is no obligation. Morally, however, there is always some obligation. Hence, as a matter of urbanity, in cases where no injury exists except as concerns chastity, the Code calls for agreement without rancor. If either party persists in refusal to confirm, and cannot show injury, that party's behavior is declared inurbane. Confirmation is declared and the offending party is ignored."
"Just how would you go about ignoring Prime Operator Belle Bellamy?"
"You've got a point there, Jim. However, she hasn't persisted very long in her refusal. As a matter of information, Belle, why did you take Jim in the first place?"
"I didn't." She shrugged her shoulders. "It was pure chance. You saw me flip the tenth–piece."
"Am I to ignore the fact that you are one of the best telekineticists living?"
"I don't have to control things unless I want to!" She stamped her foot. "Can't you conceive of me flipping a coin honestly?"
"No. However, since this is not a screens–down inquiry, I'll give you—orally, at least—the benefit of the doubt. The next step, I presume, is for Lola to break with me. Lola?"
"Well … I hate to say this, Clee …. I thought that mutual consent would be better, but …." Lola paused, flushing in embarrassment.
"She feels," James said, steadily, "as I do, that there should be much more to the sexual relation than merely releasing the biological tensions of two pieces of human machinery. That's hardly civilized."
"I confirm, Lola, of course," Garlock said; then went on, partly thinking aloud, partly addressing the group at large. "Ha. Reasons again, and very well put—not off the cuff. Evasions. Flat lies. Something very unfunny here—as queer as a nine–credit bill. In sum, indefensible actions based upon unwarranted conclusions drawn from erroneous assumptions. The pattern is not clear … but I won't order screens down until I have to … if the reason had come from Belle …."
"Me?" Belle flared. "Why from me?"
" … instead of Jim …." Ignoring Belle's interruption, Garlock frowned in thought. After a minute or so his face cleared.
"Jim," he said, sharply, "have you been consciously aware of Belle's manipulation?"
"Why, no, of course not. She couldn't!"
"That's really a brainstorm, Clee," Belle sneered. "You'd better turn yourself in for an overhaul."
"Nice scheme, Belle," Garlock said. "I underestimated—at least, didn't consider carefully enough—your power; and overestimated your ethics and urbanity."
"What are you talking about, Chief?" James asked. "You lost me ten parsecs back."
