Roysland and Kiffer spent most of their time with the big, complex
projectors that were cradled in the hull blisters.
When Kiffer first saw them, he turned to Roysland and tried to keep
from looking bewildered. "They're subelectronic projectors of some
kind. But _what_ kind?"
"That's what we've got to find out," Roysland told him. "We'll have to
find out what they do on a physical level first. From there, we'll go
on to the physiological level; then we may--just _may_--be able to go
on to the psychological effects."
Kiffer Samm looked up at the great frame of his superior, and grinned
sardonically. "O.K. Now we've got the effect and the weapon that causes
it. Can we correlate the two?"
Roysland shrugged his broad shoulders. "Sure we can. But how long will
it take us?"
* * * * *
The laws of the universe may not differ from place to place, but
the methods of using them do; and the particular laws that may be
discovered in one place aren't necessarily the same ones that are
discovered in another. No two human beings think alike; two different
evolutionary branches of intelligence, stemming from totally different
beginnings, certainly can't be expected to reason similarly. The
amazing thing about the Enlissa was not the ways in which they differed
from humanity, but the ways in which they were similar.
So it wasn't to be wondered at that the Special Weapons technicians
couldn't figure out for the life of them what the projectors from the
Enlissa ship did, or why they worked. If they had been the type of men
to be stymied by seemingly-unbreakable barriers, they would have gone
off their collective rockers in the first three weeks.
One by one, Roysland Dwyn called in the best analysts from every sector
of the human-controlled galaxy. And slowly the information began to
build up.
The first firing test of the enemy weapon was conducted on Syndor, the
outermost and smaller of the two satellites of Kandoris VI. Roysland
had the thing taken to the subnucleonics lab there because he felt that
there was no need to subject the population of Kandoris to any danger
from the backwash--if any. And only God knew how much territory the
effective field might cover.
The Special Weapons group had dismantled one of the projectors from the
ship and loaded it carefully on the X-69, along with the Enlissa-built
generator that powered it.
On Syndor, Roysland watched the unloading. He stood on the broad,
airless stretch of the landing field and watched the grapples lower the
big, tubular weapon to the deck of the field. The blue-white glare of
the distant sun splashed off the metallic sides of the ship, forcing
Roysland to narrow his eyes, in spite of the heavy polarized filter in
the helmet of his spacesuit.
The thing floated down under the control of the grapple beams until it
was only a few feet from the surface.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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