David Grinnell by Across Time

David Grinnell by Across Time

Author:Across Time [Time, Across]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-08-24T20:26:56+00:00


way, he gained a good knowledge of its capacities and techniques.

As they traveled, he commanded the ship's fabulous televiewers to bring to close vision the surface of the suns and worlds they passed. He gazed into the fiery maws of mighty stars, erupting countless megatons of subatomic energy. He saw solar storms on stars, and watched tornadoes of frozen oxygen upon barren cold planets surrounding them. He saw a lush world on which primitive monsters hunted each other, amid the surroundings of carboniferous world-youth. He saw an aged world whose intelligent creatures had never mastered atomic energy; and who were condemned to slow starvation as the deserts ate away their fields and the air slowly escaped into space.

He saw many evidences of second-growth humanity pushing up on worlds that had once harbored humanity, and whose human colonists had left it even as they had left Earth.

But he saw no sign of the globes in space. Whether the EPL had been instructed not to show him such, or whether they simply could not be spied upon, Zack did not know. But he saw nothing of their actions or beings.

Now he passed into the close-packed realm of the Milky Way cluster, and the black sky of space became gray with the mass of suns that filled the view. The ship shifted eerily and seemed now to be almost half translucent as it tore ahead. It was clear that, to avoid the powerful cross-currents of gravity and solar energies, the ship had eased itself partly out of normal space and was proceeding along some extra-spacial orbit unknown and unguessed in Zachary's day.

XII. Combat

There came a day when the ship slowed, passed back into normal space, and began to crawl—to crawl in an interplanetary way, comparatively speaking—toward a group of suns. On this day Zachary Halleck was watching the suns approach him through the front walls of the ship, when from somewhere there was a ringing and the ever-present music changed pitch, became a paeon of alarm.

He rose and the EPL was at his side. "A spaceship is approaching," it said.

"Show it to me," said Zack. Immediately, a spot of light became visible through one section of the ship's wall. It enlarged and was fully detailed, showing a pointed-nose rocket-driven craft, with stubby .gun ports and visible circular portholes.

As the image enlarged, the Ever-Perfect Lieutenant described the other ship's make-up, its capacity, its probable crew, speed, weight, armament. There was no magic in this and no guess-work. Zachary understood just how the manlike being could recite these facts. Being actually nothing but the speaking control board of the ship, it was merely translating into understandable terms the readings of its infinitely exact and incredibly perfected detection instruments.

"The vessel," said the EPL, "is very primitive. It belongs in the second century of spaceship construction, and is operated by second-growth humans. We have nothing to fear from it."

"Can it detect us?" asked Zachary, filled with the awe of his position. This other ship was quite formidable



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