Everything was ordinary. Men worked in factories and fields. Women were shopping. Children were at school. Then came the four-minute warning. Wires hummed madly between heads of governments. Just before the massive retaliation went into the air the world realised that no-one had despatched the first rocket. The retaliation was checked with seconds to spare. Experts examined the ruined city. There was something else besides radiation. Deadly bacteria from an unknown source spread across the planet. More alien bombs followed the first. But there was no real pattern in the attacks, if they were genuine attacks. At last the detectors found the alien ships. They were fighting among themselves and earth was the battle-area. Could the remnants of humanity interfere? What would be the result if they did?
Release date:
January 30, 2014
Publisher:
Gateway
Print pages:
320
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GORVAX was surveying the space that extended around his ship for incalculable distances in all directions. At the moment it was pleasantly empty, but he knew that the emptiness, and the pleasantness of the emptiness were in themselves deceptive. Gorvax threw a tentacle round the computer operation plate, and his delicate suction pads moved against the plate to produce a probability card. The probability card snapped out of the bottom of the computer almost before he had been able to uncoil his tentacle, from the operating plate. He extended another tentacle casually and picked the card up. He held it balanced delicately between two of his sucker pads and tried to analyse the information that the card contained.
According to the probability card it would not be terribly healthy for Gorvax and his anti-spirationist forces to remain in this particular sector of the galaxy. There was no knowing where Kanaline was, and like all good anti-spirationists, Gorvax had a powerful dislike of the pro-spirationists—a feeling which was entirely mutual between the two groups.
He flicked the card into the mouth of the garbage disintegrator, which was a modified, low-frequency version of the disintegrator beams with which Gorvax’s ship was armed. She was not only armed with disintegrator beams, she carried a number of old-fashioned, but highly effective, rockets, some of the latest energy blasters and radiation directors, and some medium and long-range heat-rays. Gorvax and his colleagues were past-masters of the manipulation of those rather jolly little toys, and his particular group of anti-spirationists had sent more than one spirationist ship into that limbo of forgotten things, which the sentiences of the universe call Eternity, and from which there is, apparently, no return.
Gorvax pressed more plates with his tentacles, not computer plates this time, but plates which would turn the computer’s advice into executive action. The anti-spirationist ship shuddered very slightly, as a horse hesitates at a jump, then it suddenly wallowed into a trough of greyness. The greyness filtered in through the observation ports, through the walls of the ship itself. The whole atmosphere seemed to be nothing but greyness. Gorvax was not particularly worried, he had been in the greyness a thousand times before. Maybe it was a hundred thousand times before. The veteran anti-spirationist had lost count. It was the greyness of hyper-space that he was in. There was a strange sensation of absolute isolation. It was as though hyper-space was, by its very nature, the fringe of Eternity, as though it was a warning from the Power that was older than the Universe itself, the Power that had created, the Power that sustained, that with all their scientific knowledge, the intelligent beings that peopled the Universe, whatever their shape, whatever their creed, whatever their politics, whatever their warfare, were as nothing, and less than nothing, in the presence of the Greatness in whose hand the Universe rested like a speck of infinitesimally small dust. Hyperspace was something that you could never get familiar with, reflected Gorvax. He placed two tentacles above his single, bright red eye. It felt pleasantly cool; the equivalent of what a humanoid would have called his brow was at that moment hot and feverish. There was no knowing where the spirationists were going to strike.
The ship emerged from hyperspace. The greyness evaporated like morning mist in powerful sunlight.
The sensitive panels on the hull of the ship were stimulated by the new environment. Automatically they fed information impulses to the computer. Gorvax watched while the computer pulsed with the new information. They were getting well out towards the Rim. There was a small yellow star with nine rather miserably insignificant planets, none of which had been charted. Two, three and four were all capable of supporting life, according to the first assay that the computer had been able to make, based on the very meagre information available at this distance. They went closer, using orthodox drive. As they approached, so the data being fed to the computer increased rapidly both in volume and accuracy. The earlier, long-distance impressions which were partially erroneous had been discarded in favour of the new data. The third planet emerged as by far the most favourable. They were close enough for the supersensitive perception panels on the hull to discern broad outlines of culture patterns. The computer had reached an interim decision about the culture. There was a very strong possibility that it was humanoid, although as yet extremely primitive …
The computer suddenly interrupted the flow of decision cards on the planet they were approaching and flashed up a six-line warning. One of the observation panels had picked up something that was suspiciously pro-spirationist. Gorvax threw tentacles around various panels and the senior officers propelled themselves from their various parts of the ship and assembled in the computer cabin in which Gorvax lived and moved and had his being.
There was no need for Gorvax to communicate with his immediately subordinate executives. The computer was telling its own story with frightening clarity. The computer was ratifying its original suspicions. The computer was apparently becoming increasingly confident with every passing second that the tell-tale ‘blip’ which had been picked up by the hyper-sensitive, long-range panel just athwart the bows had been evidence indeed of a pro-spirationist ship in the area. Other panels were picking up details which meant nothing by themselves but which, fitted together, linked up with one another, forming nexus after nexus to produce a deadly pattern of apprehension. The second senior officer of Gorvax’s vessel placed his communication tentacle on Gorvax’s brain-case, immediately above the Captain’s great red eye. Thoughts bowed through the electric impulses jabbing along a wire. It was a thousand times faster than the kind of conversation which humanoids had to put up with when they wished to exchange ideas; the thoughts were almost independent of language. Humanoid minds still think in words, sometimes in pictures; but there is, in higher races, a form of thought stenography, a kind of cerebral shorthand, in which neither words nor pictures are necessary.
Their communications over, the second officer began passing Gorvax’s orders to the other ship’s executives. It looked as if they were in for a battle, and if—as the computer seemed to be suggesting—the ship that was approaching was Kanaline’s own ship, then they might not be as successful as they had been in the past …
Kanaline
THE greyness melted into the cool, clear, starlight of space. Kanaline and his pro-spirationists peered through complicated voidoscopes with their compound eyes. Kanaline and this particular group of pro-spirationists were handsomely gleaming, reddish-brown characters. Kanaline’s great head was well over four feet in diameter. His antennae extended for six or seven feet above the broad head, and his thorax was about the size of a four-poster bed, including all the draperies. The abdomen, gleaming like polished mahogany below the thorax, was about the same size as a medium-price family saloon car, of 20th century Earth. Kanaline was, of course, unaware of the similarity of his dimensions to the objects which have just been described, for as far as Kanaline knew, the planets which had just appeared on the voidoscope had no names. Complicated data-receiving and analysing equipment hummed and purred into action …
The first of the nine planets coming into view was too hot to be inhabitable. Two, three and four looked about the best bet, and three seemed the most attractive. There was a sudden jarring, warning note on the alarm system. Kanaline clicked his jointed, segmented limbs rather angrily. His crew hurried to various action stations. It looked as if, either by chance or by accident, some of the anti-spirationist group had reached this odd little corner of the galaxy. Kanaline had not really been expecting to find any. . .
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