The Incredible Planet by John W. Campbell

Author:John W. Campbell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

They approached the Solar System at a speed less than that of light, on their momentum wave drive. Somewhere between Neptune and Uranus a slim, swift ship met them, a ship some eight hundred feet long, a good third smaller than the Nova. It was a glistening steel hull, and on its bow was the designation "I. C. C. 256". Below that was the insignia of the Interplanetary Council.

A radio beam on the Standard Communications Channel came into the speaker of the Nova. "Halt for investigation, by order of the Interplanetary Council. What ship, and where from?"

Aarn smiled gently as he flipped a tumbler over. "Brother, this ship is the Nova, and it's from so far away I couldn't even tell you. I happen to be Aarn Munro, accompanied by Russel M. Spencer and Donald G. Carlisle. We tested out the first momentum-wave ship, and, as you may remember, didn't come back. I see somebody else tested it out—successfully. How long have we been missing? We've been where time doesn't run the same way."

"Spencer—Munro—Carlisle—" gasped the voice at the other end. Abruptly it became sharp. "Impossible. They died three and a half years ago."

Aarn chuckled. "Come on home, and we'll tell the Commander."

The I. C. C. 256 was suddenly clutched in a combined tractor-pressor beam that had been designed to handle such things as Seeset super-battleships. A rotating magnetic field spun it around in the direction of Earth, and the two ships flashed forward.

Aarn's gray eyes twinkled with slumbering humor. "I wonder what the I. C. C. made out of it?"

The cruiser abruptly started fighting. Transpons lashed out angrily at the Nova, and flared against Aarn's defense conductor shield. "You couldn't soften our outer shell with a toy like that, even if I let you touch it," Aarn informed the cruiser gently. "Try again." Several forms of material destruction rained on the Nova. Most of them stopped dead in the outer magnetic wall, but one type, evidently equipped with neutralizing devices, slipped through, and exploded violently—and harmlessly—against the resistium wall. A heat ray followed, radio frequency energy. Aarn neutralized it.

"Pretty good, Captain. But really — old Earth would be rather hard put if the fellows we've been playing with paid a visit. Now take that planetoid off there," said Aarn, taking it on a tractor beam. "In the first place, you need better transpons." The planetoid exploded into incandescent gas under Aarn's beams. "Second, you need some bombs of a different sort, a gravity bomb for instance. Let's put that back together, Spence." A gravity bomb exploded in the region of the gaseous planetoid, abruptly sucking the flying molecules back to a sphereoid again. "Then again, one of these space-cups would cat up anything you've got." A Seeset space-cup floated out, green and malignant, and vanished with a huge mouthful of the matter. "I'll even show you my best weapon."

The milky opalescent ray reached out for the tenth part of a second, and the planetoid was a clear shining gas cloud in space, that not even a gravitational bomb would have been able to recondense.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.