Inventors -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Weapons -- Fiction
Looking through the gyro's window made me feel like a schizophrenic
drunkard with a set of mirror-image screamies, watching impossibly
elastic nightmare shadows flickering across a crazy-house
looking-glass. There was an upside-down horizon that heaved like a bowl
of phosphorescent jelly, a scattering of what might have been animated
buildings and, close at hand, a great flurry of helical Blazers,
circling like mad about something I _did_ recognize.
It was a huge orange strain-bubble, a space-warp set up by whatever
sort of generator that Blazers had made to pierce our dimension.
There wasn't a chance of making any real sense of what I saw. It would
have been easier for a flea on a camel's back to describe what went on
in a three-ring circus.
But the strain-bubble was what I had come to see. The rest didn't
matter too much.
"Warm up the model," I said. My voice had a thin, windy sound and I
couldn't keep it steady. "From the way they're flitting around that
bubble they've got troubles of their own--and they're going to have
more!"
Dora understood then what I had in mind. "Their generator is weakening
the barrier to the dimension above this one!" she said. "Jerry,
something is trying to break through, isn't it?"
Our little Di-tube model gave a tentative sizzle, and it sounded
pitifully weak. Using it was like tackling a grizzly with a hatpin--but
there was no help for that now.
"They aren't zipping around that space-blister for exercise," I said.
"Maybe they don't know exactly what is on the other side, but they're
worried."
That was the whole crazy million-to-one chance that had brought me
there. It stood to reason that the Blazers' Di-tube generator would
create a strain-warp similar to ours in their own dimension. If we
could puncture their weak spot as they had punctured ours....
* * * * *
The two-inch beam of our little Di-tube shot out, boring wide of the
outlandish blob that was the Blazers' generator. I swung it back,
correcting my aim, and the heat went on.
The Blazers dropped their work instantly and whirled up toward us. But
for once they were slow--our little Di-shaft sliced through and beyond
them. And touched the strain-bubble.
There was a searing flash and a soundless jarring concussion, and the
thing went up in a blinding shower of orange sparks.
It was over as quickly as that. The Blazers swarming toward us
whipped back to man the breach we had made and they had unexpected
reenforcements--they must have alerted their party on Earth already
because the wavering Di-tube was suddenly crowded with returning
fire-worms, zipping back home to superspace.
I swung our gyro toward the fading Di-shaft, gave it full throttle and
prayed. Dora was gripping my arm and crying something in my ear but I
didn't understand a word of it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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