Wade triggered his molecular projector, and a pale beam reached out
toward the cliff. Instantly, the cliff leaped ten miles into the air,
whining and roaring as it shot up through the atmosphere. Then it
started to fall. Heated by its motion through the air, it struck the
mountaintop as a mass of red hot rock which shattered into fragments
with a terrific roar! The rocks rolled and bounced down the
mountainside, their path traced by a line of steam clouds.
Then, at Arcot's order, the heat beams were all turned on the mountain
at full power. In less than a minute, the peak began to melt, sending
streamers of lava down the sides. The beams began to eat out a crater in
the center, where the rock began to boil furiously under the terrific
energy of the heat beams.
Then Arcot shut off the heat beams and turned on the molecular ray.
The molecules of the molten rock were traveling at high velocities--the
heat was terrific. Arcot could see that the rock was boiling quite
freely. When the molecular beam hit it, every one of those fast moving
molecules shot upward together! With the roar of a meteor, it plunged
toward space at five miles a second!
It had dropped to absolute zero when the beam hit it, but at that speed
through the air, it didn't stay cold long! Arcot followed it up in the
_Ancient Mariner_. It was going too slowly for him. The air had slowed
it down and heated it up, so Arcot hit it with the molecular ray again,
converting the heat back into velocity.
By the time they reached free space, Arcot had maneuvered the lump of
rock into an orbit around the planet.
"Tharlano," he thought at the Astronomer, "your planet now has a new
satellite!"
"So I perceive!" replied Tharlano. "Now that we are in space, can we use
the instrument you told me of?"
Arcot established the ship in an orbit twenty thousand miles from the
planet and led them back to the observatory, where Morey had already
trained the telectroscope on the planet below. There wasn't much to see;
the amplification showed only the rushing ground moving by so fast that
the image blurred.
He turned it to Sator. It filled the screen as they increased the power,
but all they could see was billowing clouds. Another poor subject.
Morey showed Tharlano, the Astronomer, how to use the controls, and he
began to sweep the sky with the instrument, greatly pleased with its
resolving ability and tremendous magnification.
The Military Leader of the Three pointed out that the Satorians still
had a weapon that was reported deadly, and they were in imminent danger
unless Arcot's inventions were applied at once. All the way back to
Nansal, they spent the time discussing the problem in the _Ancient
Mariner_'s Library.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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