Clifford Simak - Empire

Wherever they touched, holes appeared. They drifted through the inversion screen easily and began drilling into the inner screen of anti-entropy. Eating their way into the anti-entropy ... into a state of matter which Russ and Greg had thought would resist all change !

For seconds both men stood transfixed, unable to believe the evidence of their eyes. But the ameba things came on in ever-increasing throngs, creatures that gnawed and slobbered at the anti-entropy, eating into it, flaking it away, drilling their way through it.

When they pierced the anti-entropy, they would cut through the steel plates of the Invincible like so much paper!

And more were coming. More and more!

With a grunt of amazement, Greg slammed a beam straight into the heart of the amebas. They ate the beam and vanished as mistily as before, little glowing things that ate and died. But there were always more to take their place. They overwhelmed the beam and ate back along its length, attacked the screen again.

They ate through walls of force and walls of metal, and a rush of hissing air began to flame into ions in the terrific battle of energies outside the Invincible .

Russ was crouching over the manual of the televisor board. His breath moaned in his throat as his fingers flew.

"I have to have power, Greg," he said. "Lots of power."

"Take it." Greg replied. "I haven't been able to do anything with it. It isn't any use to me."

Russ's thumb reached out and tripped the activating lever. The giant engines shrieked and yowled.

Something was happening on the television screen ... something terrifying. Craven's ship seemed to retreat suddenly for millions of miles ... and as suddenly the Invincible appeared on the screen. For a single flashing instant, the view held; then it was gone in blank grayness. For seconds nothing happened on the screen, unnerving seconds while the two men held their breath.

The screen's grayness fled and they looked into the control room of the Interplanetarian . Craven was hunched in a chair, intent upon a series of controls. Behind him and to one side stood Stutsman, a heat pistol dangled from his hand, his face twisted into a sneer of triumph. There was no sign of Chambers.

"You damn fool," Craven was snapping at Stutsman. "You're cheating us out of the only chance we ever had of getting home."

"Shut up," snarled Stutsman, the pistol jerking in his hand. "Have you got that apparatus on full power?"

"It's been on full power for minutes now," said Craven. "It must be eating holes straight through Manning's ship."

"See you keep it that way. I really don't need you any more, anyhow. I've watched and I know all the tricks. I could carry on this battle single-handed."

Craven did not reply, merely hunched closer over the controls, eyes watching flickering dials.

Greg jogged Russ's elbow. "That must be the apparatus over there, in the corner of the room. That triangular affair. A condenser of some sort. That stuff they're throwing at us must be super-saturated force fields and they'd need a space-field condenser for that."

Russ nodded. "We'll take care of that."

His fingers moved swiftly and a transport beam whipped out, riding the television beam. Bands of force wrapped around the triangular machine and wrenched viciously. In the screen the apparatus disappeared ... simply was gone. It now lay within the Invincible's control room, jerked there by the tele-transport.

The flood of dazzling light reaching out from the Interplanetarian snapped off and the little green ameba things were gone. The shrill whistle of escaping air stopped as the eaten screens clamped down again, sealing in the atmosphere despite the holes bored through the metal plates.

In the television screen, Craven leaped from his chair, was staring with Stutsman at the place where the concentrator had stood. The machine had been ripped from a welded base and jagged, bright, torn metal gleamed in the control room lights. Snapped cables and broken busbars lay piled about the room.

"What happened?" Stutsman was screaming. They heard Craven laugh at the terror in the other's voice. "Manning just walked in and grabbed it away from us."

"But he couldn't! We had the screen up! He couldn't get through!"

Craven shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know how he did it, but he did. Probably he could clean out the whole place if he wanted to."

"That's a good idea," said Russ, judiciously.

He stripped bank after bank of the other ship's photo-cells from their moorings, wrecked the force field controls, ripped cables from the engines and left the ship without means of collecting power, without means of using power, without means of movement, of offense or defense.

He leaned back in his chair and regarded the screen with deep satisfaction.

"That," he decided, "should hold them for a while."

He hauled the pipe out of his pocket and filled it from the battered leather pouch.

Greg regarded him with a quizzical stare. "You sent the televisor back in time. You got it inside the Interplanetarian before Craven had run up his screen and then you brought it forward."

"You guessed it," said Russ, tamping the tobacco into the bowl. "We should have thought of that long ago. We have a time factor there. In fact, the whole thing revolves around time. We move the televisor, we use the tele-transport, by giving the objects we wish to move an acceleration in time."

Greg wrinkled his brow. "Maybe that means we can really investigate the past, or even the future. Can sit here before our screen and see everything that has happened, everything that is going to happen."

Russ shook his head. "I don't know, Greg. Notice, though, that we got no screen response until the televisor came up out of the past and actually reached the point which coincided with the present. That is, the screen and the televisor itself have to be on the same time level for them to operate. We might modify the screen, even modify the televisor so that we could travel in time, but it will take a lot of research, a lot of work. And especially it will take a whale of a lot of power."

"We have the power," said Greg.

Russ moved the lighter back and forth over the tobacco, igniting it carefully. Clouds of blue smoke swirled around his head. He spoke out of the smoke.

"Right now," he said, "we better see how Craven and our other friends are getting along. I didn't like the way Stutsman was talking or the way he was swinging that gun around. And Chambers wasn't anywhere in sight. There's something screwy about the entire thing."

"What are we going to do now?" demanded Stutsman.

Craven grinned at him. "That's up to you. Remember, you're the master mind around here. You took over and said you were going to run things." He waved a casual hand at the shattered machines, the ripped-out apparatus. "Well, there you are. Go ahead and run the joint."

"But you will have to help," pleaded Stutsman, his face twisted until it seemed that he was suffering intense physical agony. "You know what to do. I don't."

Craven shook his head. "There isn't any use starting. Manning will be along almost anytime now. We'll wait and see what he has in mind."

"Manning!" shrieked Stutsman, waving the pistol wildly. "Always Manning. One would think you were working for Manning."

"He's the big shot out in this little corner of space right now," Craven pointed out. "There isn't any way you can get around that."

Stutsman backed carefully away. His gun came up and he looked at Craven appraisingly, as if selecting his targets.

"Put down that gun," said a voice.

Gregory Manning stood between Stutsman and Craven. There had been no foggy forerunner of his appearance. He had just snapped out of empty air.