Tulan by C. C. MacApp (red white and royal blue hardcover txt) 📖

silence, and Tulan turned, uncertainly, looking at the bare spot where Jezef ought to be standing. He buzzed for Communications. "Connect me with Captain Rhu. Rhu; I'm advancing you in rank and leaving you in charge here. I'm going down to accept the surrender and find out what this man's talking about."

Kliu was gaunt and middle-aged, wearing, to Tulan's surprise, the gray of Coar's First Level of Science. He was neither abject nor hostile, agreeing impatiently to turn over the secret of Coar's weapon and to assist with a token occupation of the planet. Again Tulan had the unreal, let-down feeling, and judging by Kliu's amused expression, it showed.

Tulan sent couriers to get things started, then turned back to the scientist. "So you have had a change of government. What did you mean, about the race?"

Kliu watched him for a moment. "How much do you know about the weapon?"

"Very little. That it projects matter through hyperspace and materializes it where you want it."

"Not exactly; the materialization is spontaneous. Mass somehow distorts hyperspace, and when the projected matter has penetrated a certain distance into such distortion, it pops back into normal space. The penetration depends mainly upon a sort of internal energy in the missile; you might think of it more as a voltage than as velocity. You've made it very hard for us to get reports, but I understand we successfully placed stuff in Sennech's crust."

"Yes; causing volcanoes. Our scientists speculated that any kind of matter would do it."

"That's right. Actually, we were projecting weighed chunks of rock. When one bit of matter, even a single atom, finds itself materializing where another already is, unnatural elements may be formed, most of them unstable. That's what blew holes in your crust and let the magma out."

Tulan considered the military implications of the weapon for a few moments, then pulled his mind back. "I see; but what about the radiation? It wasn't more than a trace when I left."

Kliu looked away for a while before answering. "When we learned you'd defied your government, our own military got out of hand. They had a couple of days before the sun cut us off completely, and they began throwing stuff as soon as it could be dug and hauled to the projectors. They used high energies to get it past the sun. As we realize now, a lot of it hit the planet deeper than at first, below the crust. Under such pressure a different set of fissionables was formed. Some of them burst out and poisoned the atmosphere, but most of them are still there." He leaned forward and eyed Tulan hard. "We've got to get an expedition out there to study things. Will you help?"

There was another of the palpable silences, and when he spoke Tulan's voice sounded unnatural. "I—yes; we'll help. Whatever you want. Is ... Sennech finished?"

Kliu smiled tightly. "Sennech, for sure; and she may take the rest of us with her. Nobody conceived what this might come to. A lot of those deep materializations produced pockets of dense fissionables, and they're converging toward the center under their own weight. When they get to a certain point, we'll have a fine monument to Man's ingenuity. A planet-size nova." He stood up. "I'll start organizing."

Tulan existed someway through the preparations, and when they were in space again the solid familiarity of his ship helped. His staff was carrying on wonderfully; shielding him, he suspected, from considerable hostility. Discipline held up.

A technology that had spanned five orbits and probed beyond was at bay, and the expedition was tremendous. Hardly an art or science was unrepresented. If need be, whole ships could be built in space.

A beam from Teyr as they passed told of refugees by the hundreds of thousands, dumped in the wilderness with a few ships still trickling in. Tulan would have traded everything he could command to hear a word of Jezef or the family, but Teyr wasn't concerned with individuals and he didn't ask.

Sennech was dull gray in the telescopes, showing, as they neared, flecks of fire. They went in fast, using her gravity to help them curve into a forced orbit as they strained to decelerate. Thermocouples gave readings close to the boiling point of water; that, probably, was the temperature of the lower air.

Roboscouts went down first, then, as conditions were ascertained, manned ships. Tulan took the flagship down once. Her coolers labored and her searchlights were swallowed in murk within a few feet. Sounds carried through the hull; the howl of great winds and the thumps of explosions. Once a geyser of glowing lava spattered the ship.

Within hours the picture began to form. The surface was a boiling sea broken only by transient mountain peaks which tumbled down in quakes or were washed away by the incessant hot rain. It would have been hard to find a single trace of the civilization that had flourished scant hours before.

The slower job was learning, by countless readings and painful deduction, what was going on inside the planet. Tulan occupied himself with organizational tasks and clung to what dignity he could. After an eternity Kliu had time for him.

"She'll blow, all right," the scientist said, sinking tiredly into a seat. "Within half a year. Her year."

"Twenty thousand hours," Tulan said automatically. "How about the other planets?"

"Coar has one chance in a hundred, Teyr possibly one in ten."

Tulan had to keep talking. "The outer satellites. We can do a lot in that time."

Kliu shrugged. "A few thousand people, and who knows what will happen to them afterward? It's going to be a long time before the System's inhabitable again, if ever."

"Ships ... people can live a long time in ships."

"Not that long."

"There must be something! The power we've got, and this hyperspace thing."

Kliu shook his head. "I can guess what you're thinking; we've been all over it. There's no way to get to the stars, and no way to move a planet out of its orbit. Don't think we haven't been pounding our skulls, but the figures are hopeless."

Tulan stared at the ulcerous image on the screen, built up by infra-red probing through the opaque atmosphere. "She looks ready to fall apart right now. How much of her could you blast off?"

Kliu smiled wearily and without humor. "We've worked that idea to the bone, too. If you could build a big enough projector, and mount it on an infinitely solid base, you could push something deep enough and accurately enough to throw off stuff at escape velocity, but it's a matter of energy and we can't handle one percent of what we'd need. Even if you could generate it fast enough, your conduits would melt under the current." He got up and walked a few steps, then sat down again. "Ironic, isn't it? All we can do is destroy ourselves."

Tulan's mind couldn't accept it; he was used to thinking that any amount of energy could be handled some way. "There must be something," he repeated, feeling foolish as he said it.

He went over the figures he knew so well; the acceleration and the total energy necessary to drive a ship to the nearest stars. Even a ship's Pulsors, pouring energy out steadily, were pitiful compared to that job. Schoolboys knew the figures; mankind had dreamed for generations ...

He sat up abruptly. "This hyperspace; didn't you tell me there were such things as velocity and momentum in it?"

Kliu's eyes focussed. "Yes; why?"

"And that a projector could be built to put an entire ship into hyperspace?"

Kliu stared at him for a second. "Kinetic energy! Built up gradually!" He jumped to his feet. "Come on! Let's get to the computers!"

Several hundred hours later Tulan lay watching the pinpoint on his viewscreen that represented Sennech. He'd been building up speed for a long time; he ached from the steady double-gravity. The ship, vastly beefed up, was moving at a good fraction of the speed of light. It wouldn't be much longer.

The cargo of carefully chosen matter, shifting into hyperspace at the right instant, would be taken deep into Sennech by the momentum he'd accumulated in normal space. If the calculations were right, the resulting blast would knock a chunk completely out of the planet. Each of the thousands of other ships tied to him by robot controls would take its own bite at the right time and place. Providing the plan worked.

The Solar System would have a few hot moments, and would be full of junk for a long time, but the threatening fissionables inside Sennech would be hurled far apart, to dribble away their potence gradually. Kliu admitted no one could calculate for sure even how much, if any, of Sennech would remain as a planet, but Teyr, at least, with her thick atmosphere, should withstand the rain of debris.

He wondered about his family, and Jezef. Kliu had tried to get word, but the tragically few refugees were scattered.

He smiled, recalling how severely he'd had to order his staff to abandon him. He was proud to remember that much of the fleet would have come along, if he'd let them; but live men were going to be at more of a premium on Teyr than heroic atoms drifting in space. Machines could handle this assault. He himself had not had to touch a single control.

The indicators began to flash, and, sweating with the effort, he hauled himself erect to attention. It was good to be winding up here in his own command room, where he'd lived his moments of triumph. Still, as the red light winked on, he couldn't help thinking how very quiet and lonely it was without Jezef and the staff.

THE END