John W. Campbell The Mightiest machine

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.They had been moving at terrific speed, and they swept in, in a solid front.At a thousand miles they began to illuminate Tefflan hulls, splotches of blinding radiation.The great battleships of the Tefflan fleet were almost indestructible, but Page 45ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmlbefore the terrible lashing attack of thousands of thermite bombs, the searing flame of the transpon beams, and the crippling attack of the gravity bombs, even the greatest might be beaten down.The cruisers, the destroyers, and the lighter craft vanished under the attack of swift-darting spy ships and scouts.Here, for the first time, the scout ship became a prime instrument of war, for, loaded with aggie coils, and equipped with the invisible transpon beams, they were so tiny as they darted about, without lights and black in black space, that they could actually wander in among the cruisers and destroyers of the enemy, and with their deadly transpon beams, they were capable of ripping a destroyer open.The Tefflan destroyers carried disintegrating, or fatigue-ray apparatus, but not powerful enough to operate against anything larger than a scout ship, and the scout ships were far speedier, far harder to find.The Tefflan destroyers retired in haste, and were wiped out completely by scout ships they could not locate.Their own scout and spy ships were destroyed utterly by the little two-man spy ships of the Magyan forces.Equipped with aggie coils and momentum drive, the one thousand new spy ships could maneuver far more swiftly.The torpedoes and shells of the enemy were useless, as the magnetic atmosphere stopped them, and the scout ships of Tefflan carried no death ray or fatigue ray.The battle was fought at long range, by mutual consent.Tefflan lost her destroyers, her spy and scout ships.What destroyers were not accounted for by the hundreds of thermite bombs, or- by a well-placed gravity or magnetic bomb, or ripped open by a transpon beam, escaped under the sacrificial cloud of scout and spy ships.But the great cruisers, and even the light cruisers, were proof against the scout ships, and the battleships were not even annoyed by them.The light cruisers made it their duty to seek out and destroy the somewhat dangerous scout ships.Their armor would glow and sputter under the combined attack of four or five transpon beams, a cloud of gas would be released to make the beam visible, and then a fatigue ray would shoot back along it.The main battle, though, was between the battleships of each side, for Magyan battleships could stand a short exposure to the fatigue ray.No damage was done until the actual weakening suddenly and spontaneously occurred.It was a process of building up molecular-crystal vibrations till the crystals finally snapped, and until that point was reached there was no damage.Then, there was all damage.The enormous mass of a battleship wall absorbed a tremendous amount of energy, and only when several beams got in perfect phase was the result quick.Too, by using the screen for a brief part of a second, the interruption, coming once every hundredth of a second, was able to weaken the effect, as the vibrations damped out in the protected period, and the exposure meant only a mild, steady torture to the men within the ship.Thirty great battleships formed the front, against twenty-nine whole Tefflan battleships, but there were no less than eleven half ships in action, and each of these was fully half as deadly as a full battleship.The Tefflan beams reached out-but weakened by distance.Similarly, the deadly transpon beams were weakened in distance.But the transpon beams could heat the great battleships slowly, if they held, and that meant unbearable conditions within.The trouble lay in the fact that the men aboard the Magyan ships were tortured with jerking muscles, as the supersonic waves struck them, just mildly, but enough to make their control poor, their aim bad.The Sunbeam hung far back.She had no walls thick and strong enough to withstand even a momentary attack of the beam if applied on the right frequency.Instead, she was occupying herself in sending bombs."I think," said Aarn softly, "this battle will go to Magya [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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