transformed from a dangerous fighting machine to a crippled hull with part of her crew dead or injured. The blaster whipped along the hull destroying its integral strength, and in another second was trained on the second s.p.a.ceship. The screens of the second s.p.a.ceship were still up.

Nothing happened. The second mining blaster was trained on the s.p.a.ceship, still nothing happened.

A minute pa.s.sed with the s.p.a.ceship in the full fire of both blasters before it acted. A single hot beam reached out and destroyed first one, then the other of the blasters. Then it swept along the first s.p.a.ceship, melting it down until only slag remained!

Harv watched the second s.p.a.ceship as it moved up over the peak. 'YOU ... SLIMY ... SNAKE!' he said angrily.

'I disabled that ship, and you destroyed it rather than chance that any of the survivors might talk.'

Harv was very busy by the time Pete returned from connecting in the second allotropic iron generator. He had figured out how to operate the console in front of him. The central computer was providing data, displays, and suggestions in response to his moving light pen. 'Our fighting unit is currently out-numbered eight to one,' Harv reported. 'I'm waiting for all of them to get into the mine field on the ramp. There!' Harv closed a switch which set the electromechanical triggers of the mines. Almost immediately one of the enemy's fighting units tripped the trigger of a mine.

It didn't go off. Instead it waited as the ma.s.s of the unit moving over it increased. Then, when the ma.s.s started to decrease, it let go. The fighting unit was literally blown to bits as the shaped charge tore into it. Two of the fighting units moved off the ramp. The rest stopped. Harv activated another mine field, and a moment later both fighting units were blown up.

Pete sat down at the console, and after a moment's searching found the ON b.u.t.ton. The console displayed the status of the atomic missile launch sites in the walls of the surrounding craters on the scope face. Pete moved to the next console. It was marked 'Local Defenses - Mayer Major' and turned it on.

'Hey, did you know that there's a charge of explosive in the crater wall next to those s.p.a.ceships out there?' Pete asked.

'Use it!' Harv said. 'Their fighting units are working their way through my mine field with their blasters!' He hit another switch. Ports were blown open in the crater wall face, and a salvo of explosive-carrying rockets were launched at the oncoming fighting units. The electronically controlled blaster beams aboard the fighting units flickered from the ramp, where they were cutting a pathway through the mine field, and disintegrated the rockets.

Pete closed the switch. In the crater wall overlooking the s.p.a.ceships a sheet of high explosive went off. The jolt of the shock wave rocked even their Combat Control Center over a mile away. A solid wall of rock erupted out against the shields of the s.p.a.ceships lying on the floor of the crater. One of the four s.p.a.ceships was still inertialess and somehow survived. To those who realized that something was happening it seemed as if the wall jumped out to meet them. The screens of the s.p.a.ceships flashed briefly as they were overloaded by the sheer ma.s.s of matter smashing into them. The s.p.a.ceships were crumpled, and then crushed under the tons of rock which came down on top of everything. A small cloud of dust hung over the spot where the s.p.a.ceships were buried for almost a minute as the pieces of rock settled into new positions on top of what were now inert chunks of metal. The remaining five fighting units hesitated while one of the two surviving s.p.a.ceships took over control, then they came on steadily.

Pete stood up and looked over the remaining battle consoles.

Of the ten in the room, one bore the t.i.tle 'Local Defense - s.p.a.ce and Internal.' Pete moved.

'Copernicus Control wants to know what is happening over here,' the moon creeper reported through the spy-ray relay.

'Tell them,' answered Pete. He started turning on weapons and again the lights dimmed. 'd.a.m.nation, those must be big weapons.'

'I've got four that are charged now, and four on charge,' reported Harv.

'I've got four on charge,' Pete reported. 'Two inside the front entrance, and two covering the peak. What kind of weapons are they?'

Harv gave Pete a calculating look, but didn't say anything.

Pete caught it and stopped. 'What are they?' he asked.

'Lasers.'

Pete froze.

Lasers had gone out with the first Jovian War. They were inefficient wasters of energy. With the advent of multiplex projectors, which were so efficient because they could convert their own heat losses back into usable, transmittable energy, lasers as weapons were abandoned. To be portable, an ultra powerful weapon required ultra efficiency. If you use 1020 watts of power in your 99.999 per cent efficient weapon, how do you get rid of the lO15 watts of raw heat released inside your 7778

own ship in the insulation of a vacuum? No ship can use a really big laser, but a base on a planet or moon can, because it has whole world to soak up the thermal losses. But once more efficient weapons were available, what base would want to go to the trouble of preparing and maintaining the paths for those thermal losses.

'We've had it,' Pete said.

'I'm glad you realize that,' a Voice broke in. One of the s.p.a.ceships had found the spy-ray relay and had tapped it to find the Combat Control Center. 'I gather that you would like to surrender?'

'I saw what you did out there to your own people.' Harv said.

'Surely...'

Pete slapped the switch of the spy-ray relay off with an angry gesture. 'Have we got a chance?' he asked Harv.

'I don't know.'

The s.p.a.ceship captain in Mayer A had apparently had enough. They now knew where the Combat Control Center was, and he had decided to destroy it. The s.p.a.ceship trained a blaster beam on the side of the crater wall and started cutting down through the material between it and the room where Pete and Harv waited. A plume of superheated rock vapor shot backward out of the hole and engulfed the outside of the s.p.a.ceship's screens. Clouds of evaporated rock came out of the hole as the s.p.a.ceship's ravening beam cut inward. Lava was streaming out of the sides of the hole like water.

Pete watched for a few moments, and then commented. 'If he's going to try to dig us out by evaporizing all the rock down to us, we've got about half an hour.'

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than the s.p.a.ceship put down three pressor beams to anchor itself, while with a tractor beam it bailed out the hole the blaster beams had dug.

'Five minutes, maybe,' Pete said, revising his estimate.

A minute later Harv reported that all eight of his projectors were charged. 'I can elevate four beams high enough to hit the southern-most s.p.a.ceship. Now that he's moved, I can't bring any to bear on the one who's cutting in.' The lights had brightened noticeably.

'I'll need another two minutes to finish charging my units,' Pete reported. 'Do we have it?'

'Yes, but not much more,' Harv answered. He picked up the portable spy-ray unit to watch the progress of the hole being cut.

'It's three thousand feet away!'

'Two thousand!'

'A thousand !'

'Full up!' Pete shouted with relief. 'Ready! Set! FIRE!!'

As the Black Fleet dashed past Luna communications at Copernicus Control started to become sporadic. A guided missile with an atomic warhead had gotten past the north rim blaster batteries and destroyed the lead-ins of the antenna system of Earthside Communications.

A controller announced that Maintenance had just successfully broached one of the auxiliary control vaults of a south rim blaster battery and it was now manned. Too late.

An instant later, before they could put up its screens, six black light-cruisers flashed past in an attack. Their beams shot down, striking the sites of both the north and south rim implacements.

The southern batteries, unprotected by screens, were instantly volatilized into incandescent displays of hot vapor.

The northern batteries, prepared for battle, roared back, their violent daggers of force as strong as the full output of a superdreadnaught. The attacking cruisers' screens flashed into the far violet and they retreated behind the high point of the rim that marked the point directly over Copernicus' Dome.

In retaliation all six fired directly at the Rodebush-Bergenholm field covering Copernicus. The full output of six cruisers was directed, point blank, at a single spot. Nothing happened. The field quietly drank the energy poured into it.

Copernicus Control switched to small whip-antennas which telescoped out of large concrete blocks spotted at random around the perimeter of the slots.

'Our satellite relay system has been destroyed,' an operator reported. The presentation in the tank was updated using coded data from GFHQ and visual information.

The Hill on Tellus was taking a pounding such as had never before been inflicted on a fortress anywhere in the material universe. The flash of atomic and radiative weapons on its surface and the vicinity was bright enough to be seen with the unaided eye on Luna as a flickering light. Yet it endured!

The blaster batteries of Copernicus, not being able to target in on the black cruisers, continued to pick off missiles and ships of the enemy as they pa.s.sed on their way toward Tellus. Ron Love's boast that they commanded the region half a million miles into s.p.a.ce was not lightly made. More 7879

than one scout, and even a few light cruisers, ended in the ferocious energies of those blaster battery beams.

'Attention, Copernicus Control,' a voice came over one channel. 'Either you cease your efforts or we will start destroying the vessels in your crater.'

One of the controllers answered him. 'You would kill unarmed men, women and children in the commercial ships to enforce your demands?'

'When it comes to a choice between my people or yours, yes!' the answer came back.

The ships huddled in the crater had their screens up and fully powered, but they would have been no match for the destructive power of six battlecruisers, and they didn't have a beam among them hot enough to light a firecracker. They were helpless prey to the black fleet.

'All right, we'll stop ... for awhile,' Copernicus Control answered. Even as the words were being spoken, GFHQ had been notified of the enemy's presence and had in turn detailed 12 lightcruisers and a heavy cruiser to help defend the crater. Within a minute they arrived, sweeping in from the south to pin the blacks between themselves, and the north rim blaster batteries.

Outnumbered, the Black commander ordered his group to retreat at maximum speed. They disappeared at inter-stellar velocity eastward across the crater, without bothering to fire at the commercial ships on the ground below. The Patrol ships followed them in hot pursuit.

The battle in general now was beginning to thin out. The Patrol had destroyed two of the Black's three capital ships and was chasing the third. The odds were generally lengthening from a small superiority to a very large one. The battle continued in general until about 80 per cent of the attacking robot-guided missiles had been destroyed, either by Patrol action or by impacting their target, The Hill. Nor was this the only thing The Hill had thrown at it. Several black ships, including an inert heavy cruiser, traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light, had struck it without effect other than to spread another extremely thin layer - itself - across a considerable portion of the protected surface.

The rout became general as the odds increased to two-to-one and then three-to-one. The Patrol gave chase but was unable to catch up to any but the disabled ships, which promptly destroyed themselves. None of the men of the Black Fleet were taken alive. Nothing of any use in determining any information about the fleet, its personnel or its origin was recovered. It would only be after another engagement many months later that any information would be gained.

On the surface above the Moon Base twelve concealed weapon ports slid back revealing the working ends of laser weapons fully ten feet in diameter. Below, the television screens went blank as high density filters covered the camera lenses. For a moment Harv and Pete thought something had gone wrong, or burned out. And then the lights flickered as the weapons came on.

These were no polite blaster beams radiating only a small portion of their controlled energy until they struck something. These were solid ten-foot beams of raging, raw light energy, searing their way to their target. Even a television camera could not view them unaffected. Four beams caught a fighting unit just before it entered the cavern. Its screens flashed so rapidly as they went down that a human observer couldn't have separated them. The fighting unit was vaporized, as was the one behind it an instant later.

Six computer controlled laser beams, sharpened to daggers, hit the same point on the screens of the southernmost s.p.a.ce ship. Its outer screen flashed as it was overloaded by myriads of megawatts of visible, incandescent energy. As did the second and the third. The wall shield held for almost two seconds as the full power supplies of the s.p.a.cecraft energized it against the searing, visible energy for which it was not designed, and then it, too, failed and collapsed. Abruptly only droplets and vapor of the s.p.a.cecraft were left as the beams fanned out.

Pete now turned his two external beams onto the remaining s.p.a.cecraft, which had been cutting into the crater toward them. The outer screen of the s.p.a.cecraft went down. By now the power being used to energize the s.p.a.ceship's offensive efforts was being diverted into holding the screens. After a little delay the second screen turned opaque and then went down. But the third layer held.

'All done,' Harv said, turning from mopping up the last fighting unit. 'How's the s.p.a.ceship? Oh!'

'I don't know how much longer these beams will last,' Pete said.

'Put four more on charge...'

The s.p.a.ceship disappeared.

'I guess he decided that he couldn't reduce us, so he went before we could bring more power to bear.' Pete said.

'More likely enough heat energy was leaking through his shields that he couldn't stand it. any longer.'

The lights went out.

'Oh, oh ! What did he do to us?'

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'I don't know,' Harv said, turning on his vacuum suit lights. 'Let's check next door.'

'We're out of iron. The generators must have used up their supply. That s.p.a.ceship quit just in time,' Harv reported. He picked up a small bar of iron in his gloved hand and dropped it into one of the hoppers. The lights came on, flickered and went off. 'You might turn off a couple of beams,' Harv said to Pete. The next load of iron kept the lights on. Harv filled the generators, in case of emergency.

Back in the Combat Control Center they made arrangements for the newly victorious Galactic Patrol to take over the moon base, Harv turned to Pete, 'All right, Ace. Now for some unfinished business,' he said. 'Where's that flask of brandy I ordered?'

This gave Pete a chance to display some of the new words he had learned from Harv.

At Copernicus Control, Lensman Larry McQueen didn't really care. The Battle of The Hill was over.

Word had come from Harv Reinfield that the moonbase he had been sent out to find had been secured.

Rog Philips would be all right. It was 6 o'clock in the morning and he was beat. Copernicus was safe, The Hill had proved impregnable. The fleet was victorious. Civilization would continue. The sun was in the sky. The lark on the wing. And everything was on the green.

He headed back to the hotel. It was only when he stood before his door that he remembered the unfinished business he had left on the other side. Yes, his probing told him, she was still asleep. He made his decision.

He went inside and untaped her. He wrote a quick note explaining that he was called away, and left. He Lensed Hanovich where she was and asked him to have her watched. To call him if she tried to leave Copernicus.

Then he got another room. As he went inside, it occurred to him that being a Lensman had certain inherent disadvantages and that lack of sleep was probably going to one of them.

A Beginning Footnotes

* Detet - The distance at which one s.p.a.ceship can detect another. EES. {Back} *The numbers that characters in this story throw off so casually are converted from the metric system for the American reader's convenience. In most cases calculations consist of single whole number multiplications, or simple decimal point shifts - simple in the metric system where everything is in powers of 10 - difficult in theex-) English system with its 12 inch feet and 5280 foot miles. WBE. {Back}