First Lensman · Chapter 7 (3/3)

“Bolivar! Himalaya!” Clayton barked savagely. “Get him!” He wanted intensely to join the chase, but he couldn’t. He had to stay here. And he didn’t have time even to swear. Instead, without a break, the words tripping over each other against his teeth: “Chicago! Johannesburg! Europa! Act at will against heaviest craft left. Blast ’em down!”

He gritted his teeth. The scouts and light cruisers were doing their damndest, but they were outnumbered three to one⁠—Christ, what a lot of stuff was getting through! The Blacks wouldn’t last long, between the Hill and the heavies⁠ ⁠… but maybe long enough, at that⁠—the Patrol globe was leaking like a sieve! He voiced a couple of bursts of deep-space profanity and, although he was almost afraid to look, sneaked a quick peek to see how much was left of the Hill. He looked⁠—and stopped swearing in the middle of a four-letter Anglo-Saxon word.

What he saw simply did not make sense. Those Black bombs should have peeled the armor off of that mountain like the skin off of a nectarine and scattered it from the Pacific to the Mississippi. By now there should be a hole a mile deep where the Hill had been. But there wasn’t. The Hill was still there! It might have shrunk a little⁠—Clayton couldn’t see very well because of the worse-than-incandescent radiance of the practically continuous, sense-battering, world-shaking atomic detonations⁠—but the Hill was still there!

And as he stared, chilled and shaken, at that indescribably terrific spectacle, a Black cruiser, holed and helpless, fell toward that armored mountain with an acceleration starkly impossible to credit. And when it struck it did not penetrate, and splash, and crater, as it should have done. Instead, it simply spread out, in a thin layer, over an acre or so of the fortress’ steep and apparently still armored surface!

“You saw that, Alex? Good. Otherwise you could scarcely believe it,” came Kinnison’s silent voice. “Tell all our ships to stay away. There’s a force of over a hundred thousand G’s acting in a direction normal to every point of our surface. The boys are giving it all the decrement they can⁠—somewhere between distance cube and fourth power⁠—but even so it’s pretty fierce stuff. How about the Bolivar and the Himalaya? Not having much luck catching Mr. Black, are they?”

“Why, I don’t know. I’ll check⁠ ⁠… No, sir, they aren’t. They report that they are losing ground and will soon lose trace.”

“I was afraid so, from that shape. Rodebush was about the only one who saw it coming⁠ ⁠… well, we’ll have to redesign and rebuild⁠ ⁠…”

Port Admiral Kinnison, shortly after directing the foregoing thought, leaned back in his chair and smiled. The battle was practically over. The Hill had come through. The Rodebush-Bergenholm fields had held her together through the most God-awful session of saturation atomic bombing that any world had ever seen or that the mind of man had ever conceived. And the counter-forces had kept the interior rock from flowing like water. So far, so good.

Her original armor was gone. Converted into⁠ ⁠… what? For hundreds of feet inward from the surface she was hotter than the reacting slugs of the Hanfords. Delousing her would be a project, not an operation; millions of cubic yards of material would have to be hauled off into space with tractors and allowed to simmer for a few hundred years; but what of that?

Bergenholm had said that the fields would tend to prevent the radioactives from spreading, as they otherwise would⁠—and Virgil Samms was still safe!

“Virge, my boy, come along.” He took the First Lensman by his good arm and lifted him out of his chair. “Old Doctor Kinnison’s peerless prescription for you and me is a big, thick, juicy, porterhouse steak.”