Science fiction; Space ships -- Fiction; Space warfare -- Fiction
Seaton's flashing glance swept once around the room, cataloguing and
classifying the heterogeneous collection. Then, while Radnor looked on
in a daze of incredulous astonishment, that quasi-solid figure of force
made tangible wrought what was to the Valeronian a scientific miracle.
It darted here and there with a speed almost impossible for the eye to
follow, seizing tubes, transformers, coils, condensers, and other items
of equipment, connecting them together with unbelievable rapidity into
a mechanism at whose use the bewildered Radnor, able physicist though
he was, could not even guess.
The mechanical educator finished, Seaton's image donned one of its sets
of multiple headphones and placed another upon the unresisting head
of his host. Then into Radnor's already reeling mind there surged an
insistent demand for his language, and almost immediately the headsets
were tossed aside.
"There, that's better!" Seaton--for the image was, to all intents
and purposes, Seaton himself--exclaimed. "Now that we can talk to
each other we'll make those jelly brains hard to catch. They'll think
they've got hold of a wild cat by the tail pretty quick now, and
they'll be yelling for help to let go."
"But the Chlorans are watching everything you do," protested Radnor,
"and we cannot block them out without cutting off our gravity entirely.
They will therefore be familiar with any mechanism we may construct and
will be able to protect themselves against it."
"They just think they will," was the grim response. "I can't close the
gravity band without disaster, any more than you could, but I can find
any spy ray they can use and send back along it a jolt that'll burn
their eyes out. You see, there's a lot of stuff down on the edge of the
fourth order that neither you folks nor the Chlorans know anything
about yet, because you haven't had enough thousands of years to study
it."
While he was talking, Seaton had been furiously at work upon a small
generator, and now he turned it on.
"If they can see through _that_," he said, "they're a lot smarter
than I think they are. Even if they're bright enough to have figured
out what I was doing while I was doing it, it won't do them any good,
because this outfit will scramble any beam they can send through that
band."
"I must bow to your superior knowledge, of course," Radnor said
gravely, "but I should like to ask one question. You are working
a full materialization through less than a quarter of the gravity
band--something that has always been considered impossible. Is there no
danger that the Chlorans may analyze your patterns and thus duplicate
your feat?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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