Harry Harrison - Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers

"Glad you are back, sir," the alien said. "That spy team you sent to track the Lortonoi is back and, boy, do they have a story to tell!"

"All right, don't ruin the punch line, just send the commander in here on the double."

The commander turned out to be Pipa, his green skin now taut and smooth since he was eating better, his familiar grin splitting his wide head from earslit to earslit.

"Hi, Jerry," he croaked. "Long time no see, not since the dustup in the DnDrf mine. Those were the good old days-"

"Look!" John ordered. "Report first, reminisce later if you don't mind. You tracked the fleeing Lortonoi?"

"That we did, sir, like the hound of hell, tracking them as they fled down through the light-years. Their track ended in a star cluster out on the galactic rim, or rather at one star in particular that is called Diesun. This star has a rather unusual planet or satellite or whatever the hell you want to call it. Sorry, chief, but my powers of description fail me. Let me flash a slide on the screen, and then I'll fill in the details. You're not going to believe this, I know we didn't. Could I have the first slide, please?"

A solidograph picture instantly appeared in midair before them, and they gasped in unison.

"I don't believe it," John said. "What kind of funny games you up to, you miserable toad?"

"Please, have patience, I beg! I can get the rest of the crew in, and we'll swear loyalty and truth on bended knee and take a polygraph test, the works. This is what we found out there."

This was a thing like a hula hoop in space. It could have been a discarded hunk of machinery or something like that until you looked at the scale. For that sphere of light floating in its center was a sun. Or rather a 'sun'. This whatchmacallit in space was floating, rotating, around the sun like an immense wheel without spokes.

"I know what they've done," Jerry said, snapping his fingers loudly. "It was in the astronomical literature a couple of years back, a real mad idea. But this proves that no idea is so mad that there isn't someone – or something somewhere just mad enough to try it."

"Would you kindly tell us just what the hell you are talking about?" John snapped.

"Happily. Here is what you do if you have unlimited energy and plenty of time. Say you got a solar system like our own solar system. You've been mining the habitable planets, namely, Earth, for a long time, drilling wells and that kind of thing. So what happens? You know what happens. You start nmning out. The wells run dry, the minerals are all used up, and things begin to look poorly. Of course you can send spaceships to other planets to open mines, but there is a problem in logistics and getting the stuff back and so forth. So what you do, if you are set up for it, and somebody really was if we can believe this slide, you rearrange the whole solar system. You bash all the planets and moons together, which melts them up, and then you extrude this molten gunk through a large orifice until you get a long tube of the stuff, and then you flatten the tube so you have like a long plank or maybe a ribbon in space. After that, all you have to do is join the ends of the ribbon together so they stick and you got a big hoop which rotates around the sun."

"What have you been drinking – or smoking?" John asked suspiciously.

"Come on! You asked for the theory, so I'm giving it to you. I'm not telling you how to do it, just what to do. So, you have this hula hoop floating around the sun, and after a while it cools down so you can land on it and plant trees and bring the people and the animals and such back and you have a real nifty world. You build the thing at the correct distance from the sun so the temperature is just right, and all the time the same since there is no night and day since the thing doesn't rotate but spins instead. You've also arranged so that all the minerals are easily available and can be dug up by strip mining. What resources you have! A planet like Jupiter has maybe a million times as much minerals as poor old Earth. So with plenty of raw materials, sunshine, peace, and prosperity you can throw away the birth control pills and just let the population grow. This hula hoop world will have like a billion times the surface available for population, so it will be a long time before you fill it up. All in all it may sound like a nutty idea, but if you can get it to work, you have a good deal going."

"Or the Lortonoi have a good deal going," John mused, looking at the slide, and a sudden chill passed over them all.

What mischief those monsters could create if they controlled a hoop world like this one! The same black thought, possessed them all at the same time, and an aura of gloom obsessed the room. It was John who finally broke the dark silence, and there was a cheery note to his words.

"Cheer up, guys! It's always darkest before the dawn!"

"Piss off, you pollyannaish sod," Jerry muttered, wishing they had thought to bring the brandy with them.

"I mean it. Aren't we forgetting this?" He took the tiny golden sphere from his shirt pocket and tossed it, glinting, into the air. "Things have to get worse before they can get better. So let us hope that the Lortonoi are really up to some loathsome piece of nastiness out there, something so awful that we can report to the Chachkas and get Krakar to polish them off once and for all. I hate to sound like a warmonger, but the worse things get now, the better they will be in the long run."

Jerry laughed aloud. "You're right, you know. So let's fire up our entire fleet of battle cruisers and space battleships and go out there and see if we can cause some real trouble!"

It was a mighty armada of space the likes of which had never been seen before in the lenticular galaxy, or in the nearby spiral galaxy, or in any galaxy for that matter. Representatives of a thousand races were here, sentient creatures who were physically different in every way; rocklike Felsenig from the ten gravity world of Felsen, fairylike Guntzel-pogue from the tenth gravity world of the same name, snakelike Slangeorm, vegetablelike Karotene, sluglike Caracoller – and thousands more. If you were to put them in the same room together – it would have to be a rather large, air-conditioned room – it really would be a kind of loathsome sight. But what is beauty except in the eye of the beholder, and some of these things, aliens rather, didn't even have eyes. But they had loved ones and mates, sometimes up to sixteen when there were that many sexes, as with the Jigajig, who did almost nothing except that because it was so complicated. They knew the heights of elation, the depths of despair. They were free. Well, most of them were. And the despots were usually kind despots. But what mattered was that each one of these free races were living their lives in the way they wanted and were not being ruled by outsiders. They had joined together under the banner of freedom to fight against the loathsome Lortonoi, who would have ruled and crushed them all.

At the heart of the immense fleet was the former space armada of the Hagg-Loos, donated by the Hagg-Inder, who had won the final battle and instantly stripped their insane relatives of all capacity to wage further war. Stretching out on both sides, and back into the distance as far as the eye could see, were the spacers of all the other races. Here they were, the volunteers from worlds who had known the terror of the Lortonoi and would do anything to fight that galactic menace, spaceships from free worlds that knew you could not subdivide liberty and were willing to fight for that cause, great thundering spacers from other free worlds who wanted to stay free and "voluntarily" donated a few spacers to the fleet when it hovered above their planets. They were all here – and what a heterogeneous sight it was! Mile-long gray metal battleships, fast, needlepointed scouts, great lumbering gunships made of small planetoids on which giant space cannon had been mounted.