Somehow he felt no doubt whatever. The five of them walked onto
the corroded metal plate together, and the sky faded and ghosts of
tube-lights appeared and became brilliant, and they stepped off the
plate into a corridor one section removed from the sending-transposer
which had translated them all, successively, to wherever they had been.
And everything proceeded matter-of-factly. The three men went to the
room where metal globes by hundreds waited for the defenders of the
fortress to make use of them. They were completely practical, those
globes. There were even small footholds sunk into their curving sides
so a man could climb to their tops and inspect or change the apparatus
within.
On the way, Burke explained to Keller. The globes were designed to
be targets, and targets they would remain. They'd be set out in the
path of the coming Enemy ships, which could not vary their courses.
Their circuits would be changed to treat the suddenly increasing
gravitational fields as radiation, so that they would first project
back a monstrous field of the same energy, and then dive down it to
presumed collision with the ships. There was a distinct possibility
that if enough globes could be gotten out in space, that at the
least they might hit one enemy ship and so wreck the closely orbited
grouping. From that reasonable first possibility, the chances grew
slimmer, but the results to be hoped for increased.
Keller nodded, brightly. He'd used the reading helmets more than
anybody else. He understood. Moreover, his mind was trained to work in
just this field.
When they reached the room of the many spheres he gestured for Burke
and Holmes to wait. He climbed the footholds of one globe, deftly
removed its top, and looked inside. The conductors were three-inch bars
of pure silver. He reached in and did this and that. He climbed down
and motioned for Burke and Holmes to look.
It took them long seconds to realize what he'd done. But with his
knowledge of what could be done, once he was told what was needed,
he'd made exactly three new contacts and the globe was transformed to
Burke's new specifications.
Instead of days required to modify the circuits, the three of them
had a hundred of the huge round weapons changed over within an hour.
Then Keller went up to the instrument-room and painstakingly studied
the launching system. He began the launchings while Holmes and Burke
completed the change-over task. They joined him in the instrument-room
when the last of the metal spheres rose a foot from the stony floor of
the magazine and went lurching unsteadily over to the breech of the
launching-tube they hadn't noticed before.
"Three hundred," said Keller in a pleased tone, later. "All going
out at full acceleration to meet the Enemy. And there are six
observer-globes in the lot."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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