going to be hard to crack. He can suck in any radiant vibration form, any space vibration. He can shift them around, break them down and build them up. He can discharge them, direct them. He’s got a vibration plant that’s the handiest little war machine that ever existed.”
Greg suddenly wheeled and walked to a wall cabinet. From it he took a box and, opening it, lifted out a tiny mechanism.
He chuckled deep in his throat. “The mechanical shadow. The little machine that always tells us where Craven is—as long as he’s wearing his glasses.”
“He always wears them,” said Russ crisply. “He’s blind as a bat without them.”
Greg set the machine down on the table. “When we find Craven, we’ll find the contraption that’s blanketing Jupiter and its moons.”
Dials spun and needles quivered. Rapidly Russ jotted down the readings on a sheet of paper. At the calculator, he tapped keys, depressed the activator. The machine hummed and snarled and chuckled.
Russ glanced at the result imprinted on the paper roll.
“Craven is out near Jupiter,” he announced. “About 75,000 miles distant from its surface, in a plane normal to the Sun’s rays.”
“A spaceship,” suggested Greg.
Russ nodded. “That’s the only answer.”
The two men looked at one another.
“That’s something we can get hold of,” said Greg.
He walked to the ship controls and lowered himself into the pilot’s chair. A hand came out and hauled back a lever.
The Invincible moved.
From the engine rooms came the whine of the gigantic power plant as it built up and maintained the gravity concentration center suddenly created in front of the ship.
Russ, standing beside Greg at the control panel, looked out into space and marveled. They were flashing through space, their speed building up at a breath-taking rate, yet they had no real propulsion power. The discovery of the gravity concentrator had outdated such a method of driving a spaceship. Instead, they were falling, hurtling downward into the yawning maw of an artificial gravity field. And such a method made for speed, terrible speed.
Jupiter seemed to leap at them. It became a great crimson and yellow ball that filled almost half the vision plate.
*
The Invincible’s speed was slacking off, slower and slower, until it barely crawled in comparison to its former speed.
Slowly they circled Jupiter’s great girth, staring out of the vision port for a sight of Craven’s ship. They were nearing the position the little mechanical shadow had indicated.
“There it is,” said Russ suddenly, almost breathlessly.
Far out in space, tiny, almost like a dust mote against the great bulk of the monster planet, rode a tiny light. Slowly the Invincible crawled inward. The mote of light became a gleaming silver ship, a mighty ship—one that was fully as large as the Invincible!
“That’s it all right,” said Greg. “They’re lying behind a log out here raising hell with our television apparatus. Maybe we better tickle them a little bit and see what they have.”
Rising from the control board, he went to another control panel. Russ remained standing in front of the vision plate, staring down at the ship out in space.
Behind him came a shrill howl from the power plant. The Invincible staggered slightly. A beam of deep indigo lashed across space, a finger suddenly jabbing at the other ship.
Space was suddenly colored, for thousands of miles, as the beam struck Craven’s ship and seemed to explode in a blast of dazzling indigo light. The ship reeled under the impact of the blow, reeled and weaved in space as the beam struck it and delivered to it the mighty power of the screaming engines back in the engine room.
“What happened?” Greg screamed above the roar.
Russ shrugged his shoulders. “You jarred him a little. Pushed him through space for several hundred miles. Made him know something had hit him, but it didn’t seem to do any damage.”
“That was pure cosmic I gave him! Five billion horsepower—and it just staggered him!”
“He’s got a space lens that absorbs the energy,” said Russ. “The lens concentrates it and pours it into a receiving chamber, probably a huge photo-cell. Nobody yet has burned out one of those things on a closed circuit.”
Greg wrinkled his brow, perplexed. “What he must have is a special field of some sort that lowers the wave-length and the intensity. He’s getting natural cosmics all the time and taking care of them.”
“That wouldn’t be much of a trick,” Russ pointed out. “But when he takes care of cosmics backed by five billion horsepower ... that’s something else!”
Greg grinned wickedly. “I’m going to hand him a long heat radiation. If his field shortens that any, he’ll have radio beam and that will blow photo-cells all to hell.”
He stabbed viciously at the keys on the board and once again the shrill howl of the engines came from the rear of the ship. A lance of red splashed out across space and touched the other ship. Again space was lit, this time with a crimson glow.
*
Russ shook his head. “Nothing doing.”
Greg sat down and looked at Russ. “Funny thing about this. They just sat there and let us throw two charges at them, took everything we gave them and never tried to hand it back.”
“Maybe they haven’t anything to hand us,” Russ suggested hopefully.
“They must have. Craven wouldn’t take to space with just a purely defensive weapon. He knew we’d find him and he’d have a fight on his hands.”
Russ found his pipe was dead. Snapping his lighter, he applied flame to the blackened tobacco. Walking slowly to the wall cabinet, he lifted two other boxes out, set them on the table and took from them two other mechanical shadows. He turned them on and leaned close, watching the spinning dials, the quivering needles.
“Greg,” he whispered, “Chambers and Stutsman are there in that ship with Craven! Look, their shadows register identical with the one that spotted Craven.”
“I suspected as much,” Greg replied. “We got the whole pack cornered out here. If we can just get rid of them, the whole war would be won in one stroke.”
Russ lifted a stricken face from the row of tiny mechanisms. “This is our big chance. We may never get it again. The next hour could decide who is going to win.”
Greg rose from the chair and stood before the control board. Grimly he punched a series of keys. The engines howled again. Greg twisted a dial and the howl rose into a shrill scream.
From the Invincible another beam lashed out ... another and another. Space was speared with beam after beam hurtling from the great
