Pattern for ConquestSmith, George O. (George Oliver)
Science
Pattern for Conquest
Smith, George O. (George Oliver)
Science fiction
Perhaps never before has a stranger object traversed interstellar
space. Not by a stretch of the imagination could any race have
designed a spacecraft resembling the squat housing adorned above with
the battery of projectors. In the first place, it was all wrong for
spacecraft design, being built to sit flat on a planet where the normal
gravitic urge was down--or rather normal to the flat bottom. Spacecraft
are tall, ovoid shells that travel vertically, parallel to their long
axis, and the decking extends from side to side, at right angles to the
ship's course. And the projectors should not be all on one side. That
would leave the strange craft at the mercy of an attacking enemy from
below. Spacecraft armaments consist of one turret in the top, or nose,
one similar turret below, and several at discrete intervals about the
center of the ship for side protection.
Of infinitely more trouble than the problem of traversing space in
superdrive with an engineering project instead of a spacecraft was the
decision of which way to go.
Being lost in the depths of interstellar space without a star map and
with no idea of their position, and no one to call for a "fix," there
was no way of determining which of the stars were the closer. They all
stood there, twinkling against their background of stellar curtain, and
one looked as close as the next. Brightness was no criterion. Deneb,
four hundred light-years from Terra is brighter than Alpha Centaurus,
four light-years away.
Yet, with superdrive, they could cross quite a bit of space in a short
time. Hitting it off in any direction might bring them to within
deciding distance of a star in a short time or it might be that the
course went between stars for many hundred light-years.
It was Hendricks who solved the problem. "Get a hemisphere picture--and
we'll superdrive for one hour and take another. Superimposing them one
a-top the other should give us a reasonable parallax on the nearer
stars. One that we could see with the naked eye."
With the fates obviously laughing up their sleeves, the second plate
was never exposed. At fifty-one minutes of superdrive, the stellar
detector indicated stellar radiation within one quarter light-year.
Planet-locating plates were exposed as the project swept through the
star's neighborhood. There was quite an argument as to which of the
seven planets to choose, and for no other reason than sentimental
reasons--and the fact that the physical constants were right for
them--the group finally fixed their desire on the third planet.
The engineering project started to head for Planet III.
"Better name it, Billy," smiled Hendricks. "You found it."
"I found it? O.K.," grinned Thompson, "we'll call it Eureka."
"Eureka III?"
"Too cumbersome. Since we'll possibly not chart the system let's just
call the planet Eureka and forget about the stellar classification."
"Well, Eureka it is."
Jack Rhodes opened the door. "Better call it Money," he suggested.
"Why?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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