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Operation Interstellar

<h2>CHAPTER 17</h2> The courier spacecraft dropped down out of supervelocity and emitted an overwhelming blast of radio signal. One half of the output tube operating life went into Eternity in one half minute of intense power. Minutes later space stations picked up the radio blast and had radiogoniometers pointing the angle; which when correlated with other space stations bracketed the courier spacecraft nicely. A telemeter beam fingered out and caught the radio-controlled circuits of the courier and the courier turned obediently and started to blast towards Terra. It landed in a screaming arc and came to rest, smoking both outside and inside, for the driving circuits had been running at overload for nearly four months. Technicians at Great Lakes Spaceport trundled the courier along a runway and dunked the whole thing into Lake Michigan where they watched the clouds of steam boil up and then subside as the hull cooled. They waited, and then they breached the message hull, which was a separable nose. Accustomed to finding tons of mail, they were shocked to find only one officially sealed envelope addressed to the President of Terra. They put it on a mail speedster that arched high into the stratosphere and into black space itself in a vast segment of ellipse to drop into the hands of the Capitol's techs within a matter of minutes. Here the official envelope by-passed any number of official channels.... President Bennington heard the diffident rap on his bedroom door and grunted unhappily. Then he came awake and realized that nothing less than an official Affair of State would cause his Aide to rap on his door. Bennington snapped the light on near his bed and went to the door in his pajamas. "What's up, Phil?" he asked as he opened the door. Phillip Vanderveer smiled apologetically. "I don't know," he said honestly. "But when a courier spacecraft comes from Neoterra with only one piece of mail labeled 'Private, Important,' and addressed to you, it must be both private and important. So—" Bennington smiled. "Cigarette?" he asked. "Here, sir." "Come in," said Bennington, accepting the smoke. "But—er—" "M'Lady is sawing wood. This may be important enough for fast action, Phil. Come on in and for—" Bennington opened the envelope with a thumb and spread out the pages. He looked and then found a magnifying glass and went to work on the micro-typewritten pages. "Phil," he said slowly, "forget about this until three days from now. Then see to it that Chadwick Haedaecker is summoned here for a—" Bennington went on to peruse a calendar and then a clock, "—an official session!" The following day Phillip Vanderveer reported that Haedaecker was out on some tour of the Galactic Network and was not expected back for some time. That was too bad, but not a bar to the future actions of President Bennington. He spent the next two days closeted with his aides writing a flowery speech of fancy phrases that would do the trick. He decided finally to make his speech from America's White House, and went with the First Lady to Terra to that shrine where Free Men were first welded into a Strong State, because there in America the seeming incompatibility between Freedom and Empire had been favorably resolved. Bennington prowled the mansion, looked at the shrined artifacts, and was he, himself, impressed once again. Somewhere in the middle of the road there was the right path between the extremes of anarchy and tyranny. To be really Free, every man must be released from any governing, which would make him a unit weak enough to be assailed by any grouped force. To rule men meant they had too little to say about their own lives. Bennington slept in a bed once slept in by Andrew Jackson. It was midnight of the third day. The shrined White House was a blaze of lights. Newsmen and radio technicians trod the revered halls and strung their wires. The connection to Z-wave Central had been made, first. The other lines to the rest of the world were ready. The lines to Z-wave Central were ready to bring the message to the planets of Sol—and all that remained was the final connection that would bring President Bennington's address to the worlds of Neosol. Bennington sat at his desk with a fountain pen altering the long speech. He was not entirely satisfied with it. It contained flowing passages calculated to jog the emotions, words carefully selected because of their syllables to cause a ringing cadence which would cause an emotional reaction. It was flowery and forceful. It was long; starting on a slow measure and rising to a proper climax, completely a mathematico-musico-psychologico compilation intended to sway emotions and minds in the right direction. He stood up from time to time and delivered portions of it. Playbacks returned both his voice and his appearance to him, and Bennington worked on slight faults of either until his delivery was perfect. Outside of his room, bustling technicians checked their circuits and Washington itself was alive with the tenseness of waiting. Tired—and with hours to wait yet—Bennington laid down on a couch to relax. His slumber was fitful, dozing interrupted by vivid dreams, by slight noises, by quick flashes of intense thought by his mind, which was not convinced of the necessity for relaxation. Finally he drifted off deep, completely relaxed for the first time in three days. They counted—afterwards—that President Bennington had only a total of nine hours sleep in seventy-two. Then a bell rang. A siren wailed. A blast of salute-cannon shook the city, and the radio across Terra blasted into life. People across the worlds of Sol awoke; they had been sleeping lightly, awaiting The Moment and now it was here! Radio sets left running burst into life, waking people everywhere among the planets of Sol at the same instant. The Galactic Z-wave had come to life! Light years across the galaxy towards Neosol, Paul Grayson talked into a microphone. And on the planets that were Sol's Children, a thousand million loudspeakers thundered forth his voice! "President Bennington! President Bennington!" Bennington awoke from his fitful nap with a start. The door to his room opened. Phillip Vanderveer stood there looking in, he approached. Marian Bennington smiled quietly. "This is it!" Bennington looked at her queerly. His wife. Somehow strangely unimpressed by the solemnity of it all; peculiarly self-serene among all of the importance of the moment. His wife, greeting him with a slightly amused expression. Greatness, of moment or of person seemed a bit remote. Bennington gulped at her and smiled. "Take it easy Hal," she said. She kissed him gently as he leaned towards the microphone. "President Bennington speaking." "This is Paul Grayson riding the Latham Alpha IV beam towards the station. Thank God you're ready!" "What—?" "We're fifteen light minutes out from Contact. Huston is fighting to keep the Station alive; Hoagland is trying to kill it!" "Fighting?" "Space battle!" "Dammit man—Oh God, it's four or six months flight time there, isn't it?" "Yes," said Paul. "Just stick around. We'll win!" "Grayson, you've got to win!" The ice cap was dotted with craters. Tiny spots of black among the sea of glittering white were men struggling in the icy cold to reach the fight for the final link between Mother Earth and her distant Daughter. In the sky above, Isolationist and Coalitionist fought with nerve and iron to separate versus maintain the original solidarity of the galaxy. Paul, riding the front of the incoming radio beacon beam, had no idea of how the fight was going. But of Huston's hundred ships and one hundred and seventeen of Hoagland's only nine were left with Huston and seven left with Hoagland. The collected survivors in the relay station numbered thirty souls—determined souls of the same determination of the men who stood at Concord Bridge. The plain around the station was a mess of bomb craters; desperation measures but all misses. The glass dome itself was holed with a half-gross of shells fired into the station, and three of the big parabolic antenna-reflectors were drilled with four-inch holes but still electrically functional. Master fighters now because they were survivors, Nine and Seven faced one another cautiously. They raced in, faced one another harshly, like frigates sailing in to receive a heavy broadside, clashed, and came on through as Five and Three. Huston's crew circled in a mad melee, five of them in overwhelming odds now. They herded the Three high, caught them in an englobement, and made a flaming kill a hundred miles above the planet, then raced forward as Hoagland started to flee for his life, his campaign defeated. With the ice cap dotted with death and wreckage, Huston's command ship left the other four to guard the Upper Sky while he scouted the surface, using his power ruthlessly to cow Hoagland's separated survivors into abject surrender. Then, in complete victory, Huston raced his command ship in a vast circle around the damaged but still running Relay Station. It would go deadly-hard with anyone who tried to interfere at this instant. Huston's engineer snapped in the Z-wave. "Grayson! Grayson! Are you—are you?" The Z-wave receiver in Paul's ship brought this call. He snapped the toggle and said: "Huston? I'm riding the radio beam down to Alpha IV." "Bennington?" "I've got him on the Z-wave!" "Let me—connect me—" Paul reached for a cable with a double-ended plug and shoved both ends home in his patch-panel. "Mister President, here is Mr. Huston!" "Bennington! Bennington! You're ready?" On Terra, President Bennington nodded and said: "Any time." Huston said "Good. Thank God. Grayson, can we—?" Paul considered. "Can you get in touch with the Latham Alpha IV Station direct?" "Take some doing, but—" "President Bennington, the Galactic Link is almost complete. It's Z-wave via radio contact from Terra to me. It's Z-wave from me to Huston; and from Alpha IV to Neoterra it is again Z-wave via radio contact. As soon as Huston taps the radio beam from Alpha IV, we can get you through to—" A flash of fire—white-hot and vicious—blinded Huston and his crew. It killed all the men on Alpha IV friend and foe alike. The sound— The sound was a flat and completely-gone silence. The contact had been destroyed before the link could convey any sound. Down from the black sky a single ship had driven at velocities too high for the radar to catch. It had come at near-light velocity from somewhere, had passed Alpha IV at a tangential altitude of a thousand miles—and had loosened something. The "Something" had been unbelievable tons of lithium hydride, neatly tamped and packed around a fissionable detonator. The super bomb drilled into the planetary crust a full quadrant South—at the Equator of Alpha IV—and exploded. Slowly and majestically, Alpha IV expanded. The crust separated along the fault-lines to expose the planetary magma. Ice met molten lava in a riot of exploding steam; mountain range fell into the sea, livid streamers of tortured matter flared forth, and the surface heaved, bubbled, and collapsed and the smoke and dust and soil of Alpha rose into the atmosphere to mingle with the clouds of vaporized metal and superheated steam that roiled and blasted away from the planet into space. Latham Alpha IV contracted into a boiling mass of energy, distributed and re-distributed and re-re-distributed throughout the planetary mass. Gone was the ice cap. Forever lost were the men who battled face to face and gun to gun to keep the Relay Station running. Then Latham Alpha began to expand. Slowly and majestically it grew, as the volatile material became gaseous with the energy hurled into it. The flaming-white glow died into a furious orange-red as the localized areas of energy spread out and the whole of the planet began to radiate dully. Across space, heading into a boiling planetary surface that had no receiver to collect it, came the Galactic Radio Beam. It entered the roiling planet and died, and what missed the planet either splashed aside from the space-stressed energy or went on and on and on through space unchecked and unheeded. Huston's spacecraft, hurled upwards by the force of flaming gases, bounced around viciously until Huston's pilot snapped the high drive briefly, first on and then off. "Grayson?" "Huston! What has happened?" "Super-atomic." "God!" "But the Relay—The Network?" Paul thought a moment. "I've still got Bennington," he said. "And—" here Grayson's voice paused for a moment. Grayson's ship had been at One Light velocity, following the Beam towards Alpha IV. Now as he sat at the console of his ship's drive, he reached for a switch that swerved the ship aside in its course by just a few milliseconds of arc. Seconds later he passed the boiling ruin of Alpha IV by a half-million miles, still following the head of the Galactic Survey Beam. As Paul passed the planetary ruin, he snapped another switch, picked up the microphone and cried: "Al Donatti! Al Donatti!" And down from Neoterra came the reply. "Grayson? You've got Bennington?" "On the other end!" Back in the White House, President Bennington sat before the broad desk, looking at the microphone with an odd expression on his face. Somehow flowery speeches and fancy, well-calculated words seemed a bit pale and unconvincing in the face of men who lived and died for a Grand Principle. He looked up at the wall. He saw a bronze plaque. "President Bennington! Speak up!" Bennington started. It was Madison—Was it Madison or Jackson?—who said that an American could tell the President to Go To Hell, and all the President could do was to argue with him—or go fishing? Bennington tore his carefully prepared speech down the middle. He stood up and looked at the bronze plaque, and began to read it: "Fourscore and seven years ago—" Across space to Latham's Triplets went the Z-wave, connected at long last by the original Radio Linkage. Across from Grayson's spacecraft it went to the completed Z-wave link to Neoterra, to come bursting forth from a thousand million loudspeakers across the worlds of NeoSol: NeoTerra heard it, and NeoVenus listened. The isolated colonists on NeoGanymede cheered and the folks on far NeoPluto nodded their heads knowingly. "—engaged in a great civil war to determine whether That Nation or any other nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure—" "Grayson!" came the whispering of the radio—a mundane instrument of no great interest to anyone—"Grayson—we've caught him." "Who?" "Your pal Haedaecker. He bombed Alpha IV!" "But—?" "We'll twist his arm, Grayson. Maybe he'll explain the guy who tried to shoot you to bits on Proxima I. Maybe a lot of other things. Anyway, he's the joker in this deck." Stacey eyed Paul with a glitter, "D'ye mind if I start going home to my wife?" Paul snapped off the communications panel entirely. "They've made it," he said. "It'll be complete from now on. And we'll criss-cross this galaxy with radio beacons from star to star and bit by bit until the Z-wave contact is complete between Mother Sol and any of her Colonies." "Let's take Stacey home," suggested Nora. Paul turned to the panel and set some switches, adjusted some dials, and threw in the main switch. The floor surged below them and Paul put his eye to the spotting telescope as his ship began to move. Paul yawned as the minutes passed and the ship gained speed towards Sol, aimed by his watchful eye. Time passed, and Paul, finally released from all of the trouble and worry, began to hum. Eventually he began to sing, in that off-key voice: <div class="poetry"> <div class="stanza"> <div class="verse">"Round and round and round go the deuterons!</div> <div class="verse">Round and round and round the magnet swings 'em!</div> <div class="verse">Round and round and round go the deuterons—"</div> </div></div> Nora interrupted Paul with the final line of The Cyclotronist's Nightmare: "Aw, let's turn the damned thing off and go to bed!" THE END <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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