Page:Stirring Science Stories, March 1942.djvu/10

 Damned good things you put racing motors into my scow—otherwise you wouldn't be hearing this. For that matter, maybe you aren't. I'll get on.

"Those of my instruments that weren't chasing their tails because of the freak fields floating around there told me that I was being followed twist for twist. They had a tracer of some kind on me, because they didn't know where I was—just where I was going. Which isn't good. I stayed perfectly quiet, waiting for them to show up so I could shoot a torpedo at them. Show up they did. They had a funny craft, Barty—damned funny.

"It was open to space—just a skeleton ship. Not very big, either. Twenty times my length, about. Couldn't get any details, but there was something awfully peculiar about it. Anyway, I fired my torpedo, which was a mistake. It was a magnetic, and since the fields were thrown out of kilter it buzzed around, skinned past me once, and lost itself in space. Then they got gay and began throwing things at me—odd design, all of them. There was a skeleton-shell, like their ship, that packed an awful wallop when it exploded on time a thousand to my starboard. And they have rays.

"Yes, honest-to-God rays, like you read about in the storybooks! Not having the experience of an Aarn Munroe or the ray-screens of a Richard Seaton, also like you read about in the story-books, I just ran like a scared rabbit. And then it occurred to me to open that mysterious package you handed me. I did so. What did I find? Another mysterious package inside it, with the note: 'So you think this is a tough spot? Think it over again before opening this.'

"It was a dirty trick, Barty, but it worked. I gave 'em the old one-two. 'One' being a cloud of smoke thick enough to confuse any tracer, 'two' being the space-mines you so thoughtfully shoved onto my scow at the last moment over my protests that I didn't want to be a flying powder-keg.

"I scattered the mines like bird-shot through the fog, and later had the intense satisfaction of seeing the ship that was on my tail explode in several pieces. That must make the first blood for our side in this war.

"I figure that blood-drawing saved my life for the moment, because exactly three hours later I was taken in tow by five more of their ships, same pattern and size. And that was where your little joke began to wear thin, because I opened the second box and found inside it another box and another note, which said: 'And this too shall pass away. Don't open this one unless the going's really bad. Cheer up; the worst is yet to come.' Who the hell do you think you are—Elbert Hubbard?

"As I was saying, they must have taken me prisoner to find out how I had managed to knock off one of their boys. I couldn't see a thing except the skeletons of the ships and buggy creatures crawling around on the beams. Disgusting sensation, really.

"They landed me on one of Arided's planets, considerately one with an atmosphere. I got out in cold blood. My God! Barty, you never saw such a place! I don't know what it was like before; the usual colony-planet, I suppose, with labor-barracks and factories and semi-detached homes. But what I saw! Towers, Barty—all towers, spiring into the heavens like mountain peaks! I'll swear that most of them went way above the atmosphere line. And there was machinery, machinery, machinery—the ground was solid with it, heaving pistons, reaction jets like volcanoes. You don't know what I'm talking about, Barty. You have to see it. I'm sneaking in these last words under very trying circumstances—undergoing what the tinny brutes call purification. I'm going to see the master after being kept waiting for months, and whatever he decides to do with me goes on this world. They—"

The replay broke off. That was all. There weren't any soundeffects, not even the customary strangled wail, and glad enough Bartok was for that. Apparently she had been caught using the transceiver, and it had been smashed. Bartok straightened himself out tiredly. He'd kept the world fairly well up while the invasion was going on; there were others capable to take over now that the real crisis was past and there was nothing to do but wait for the taking-over by whatever the incredibly soulless creatures were that could ray all the life of a planet out of existence without a qualm.

He was getting old anyway. Time to make room for younger men. He might have a fling now as any time at applied mortality. He was going to build himself a cruiser and streak out to Arided and Babe.

IS EXPERIENCE with the invaders was substantially the same as Babe's, though he reasoned—and correctly—that they would adjust for detection of a minefield layed in a smoke-screen. Therefore he trotted out something so antiquated in concept that the invaders would surely have forgotten it, if ever they had known the device.

In the neighborhood of the first invasion port, the star in Cygnus, he encountered the phenomena Babe had described—utterly scrambled fields. Experimentally he held an electromagnet to a bit of steel. First there was no reaction, then the steel slid to the magnet. Then it hurled away from it like a bullet!

Throughout his experiments he hadn't failed to keep a lookout. The chime that signalled foreign bodies rang just once, and he trotted out his modernized version of the ancient Greek fire, fore-runner of explosives. He squirted the blazing stuff through his rear jets in a