Part 4
"I'm a friend. Look Hagen, if you want some dope on the _Astarte_ come to Sanaron."
"What's on Sanaron?"
"The dope you want."
"But--"
"Take off in half an hour and we'll be watching for you," said the voice. Then it hung up.
Hagen wondered. But even a fool's lead was better than nothing and Steve had followed less likely leads than this in the past three months. He left the typewriter as it was and went to the spacefield, where he climbed into the inspection craft and took off for Sanaron.
* * * * *
Sanaron was no long run for the fleet Guardian ship. Steve made it in jig time and as he dropped his ship on Sanaron's one spaceport, he saw a planet craft awaiting him. He was whisked across the face of Sanaron to a large city, deposited on the landing stage of a tall hotel building, and dropped a few stories to a luxurious suite.
And once again Hagen was face to face with William Wrightwood.
"What goes on?" demanded Steve.
"You want some information on the _Astarte_?"
"I do."
"You've been ordered to locate this information."
Hagen grunted. "Yes."
"Steve, did the fact that you are William Wrightwood Junior have anything to do with this order?"
"What difference does that make?"
Wrightwood sat back in his chair. "Steve, I hate to do this to you, but your answers have confirmed my suspicions. This order and its impossible fulfillment is more like an attempt to have you resign. This smacks of unfair tactic, and upon that fact I am making my final bid."
"What final bid?"
"Since the Guardians have proven themselves unable to operate as a completely impersonalized agency, they fail in the one thing they claim--which is to operate for good or bad, for rich or poor alike. As such, I can prove the ability to operate the Guardians as a more efficient agency, and I shall do it!"
"Not if I can help it."
"Tell me, Steve, what can you do?"
"I can--"
"There was a faulty generator on the _Astarte_. How did it get there? Would you maliciously try to wreck my ship?"
"What do you think?"
"Of course you wouldn't, knowing that the lives of a hundred people were in the balance. Would I try to wreck my own ship to get you discredited?"
"Hardly, since you'd lose too much."
"Might the Guardians try?"
"No."
"But there are your three possibilities, Steve. One of them is it!"
"So--"
"So it must be your little friends, who knew they could set a fire, then put it out without harm to anybody but the man they want to be rid of."
"That's not my fault," snapped Steve.
"No," smiled Wrightwood, "it's all mine. Remember--I told you that no matter what you did it would ultimately work toward my success? Why don't you try aiding me instead of bucking me?"
Steve found himself answering slowly, instead of snapping out a reply. "Just what do you hope to gain from this?"
"I've gained it," smiled Wrightwood. "I've recordings of this entire meeting, and the tone of your voice during what you have to say is sufficient evidence to prove my point: that the Guardians have been wasting the taxpayers' money by ordering an impossible investigation by a valued man for the spite they hold against his father."
"I might have expected something like this. You've got no news of the _Astarte_."
"Yes--I have. Play along with me until I control the Guardians and I'll see to it that your position is granted back to you. There's no need of investigating the _Astarte_ anyway; and your Commissioner Morehouse is going to eat crow before he's finished."
"Bah!" growled Steve. Once more he turned and left his father's presence abruptly.
* * * * *
He was whisked back to his waiting ship and he took off as fast as he could. It was no more than a fifty minute run across the star trails to Base One, and Steve was going to make it as fast as he could.
But ten minutes out of Sanaron, the alarm whispered and then broke into full clamor.
No danger alarm, this. This was the real thing!
Steve swapped his ship around in space and headed for the spacial co-ordinates given in the alarm. In his mind's eye he could see the men tumbling out of their quarters and into the waiting Guardian ships and hurtling into the black.
Steve found the stricken ship as the squadron came into detector range and deployed. It was a superliner, one of Interstellar's finest. And as Steve came up to the _Lunalight_ the life-craft broke the spacelocks and streaked out and away.
Once more the englobement of warping planes started; plate to plate they formed, jockeying to make their forward-flung planes of warp lie against one another, edge to edge so that the volume enclosed was contained without leak. Tractor ships hurtled up and latched onto the ship and started to bring it down in speed.
But this was not the time; one of the plane ships faltered and the edge of its warp plane broke contact with its neighbor. The spacewarp fractured, and then with the enigmatic peculiarity of a collapsing warp, the volume began to drop back toward prime space from the center out. The warp generator itself, in the bowels of the ship, broke into prime space first.
Matter, at a thousand times the velocity of light, dropping into a space where matter cannot exceed the velocity of light!
Where the tiniest speck of matter will have infinite mass when the speck reaches the velocity of light.
Where the time-field of the mass becomes zero as the velocity of light is reached.
It was like a stellar nova.
A searing intensity of energy trailed out behind the ship and left a streak a million miles long in a matter of microseconds. The ship itself collapsed over the trail of energy, and the whole exploded finally in a hundred-billion mile long course leaving the trailer of raw, unbound energy spread out for the span of a solar system.
Then the trailer itself exploded, blowing streamers of torrential energy deep into space. Bits and shags of the blazing stuff flew away, great gouts, shapeless and viciously scintillating, roared along the ship's course.
The tractors fled; the plane ships had been hurled back, away, and now were lost in the sky--far behind. They hurried to catch up, for they could hurl their planes of spacial warp against a flaming mass of raw energy and bat it aside like a ping-pong paddle slaps the ball aside. The swampers circled in and the cone projectors fenced with the darting spears of flaming power.
It was Steve that remembered Sanaron. "Charlemagne!" he roared into his mike.
"Who's calling?"
"Hagen. Remember Sanaron."
"Sanaron?"
"Ten minutes back at full drive lies Sanaron!"
"God!"
And then, for the first time in the history of space, in the history of the Guardians, came the dreaded Black Alarm.
* * * * *
Sanaron was a complete stellar system, eight habitable planets well inhabited by every possible form of sentient life. The star, Sanaron, was a nondescript G-zero that would not have had even a number in the Terran catalogs before the conquest of space, but Sanaron was a full-grown star in the flush of its energic cycle. Once the raving centroid of raw energy erupted from the _Lunalight_ fell into the gravitational field of Sanaron it would drop into the star. And then mankind would see, a supernova in operation--for a brief instant before this system cremated itself.
The Black Alarm!
Across the galaxy it went. Guardians from every base in Sector One alerted and took off within a matter of minutes. Guardians from joining sectors moved into Sector One, spreading out through the sector to keep the sector protected; Guardians from outlying sectors moved in, again spreading out. Thinned but active, the Guardians released useful personnel to go out and fight the Black Alarm.
"Charlemagne!"
"Now what?"
"Can I help?"
"Yes," came the cryptic reply; "stay out of our way."
Steve snarled, but he got no reply.
A gout of energy flashed past his viewport, blinding him. Then he realized that he was unprotected, and only a nuisance here.
But--
"Go along with him," said William Wrightwood. "Aid him, and--"
Steve laughed bitterly; swapped ends, and flashed along the line toward Sanaron.
He dropped down upon Wrightwood's hotel and dashed along the corridor. He shouldered his way into the suite with a yell that brought servants and hotel detectives running. It also brought William Wrightwood from his bed, clad in a pair of pale blue silk pajamas.
Somehow it seemed appropriate to flee a holocaust in a pair of passionate pajamas, and for the first time in years Steve saw a bit of humor in his father's mien.
"Black Alarm," he said breathlessly. He shoved Wrightwood back into the bedroom and shut the door on the incoming help.
"Can't save 'em all," said Steve, working his false-fear act for all it was worth. "Slip out with me and we'll es--"
"Good boy, I knew you had what it took."
Wrightwood started to look for clothing.
"No time," snapped Steve. "_Lunalight_ blew up ten minutes spacedrive out of Sanaron. The Guardians have the Black Alarm running, but the magma will get here first. That's raving death from an exploding sun for a billion people living on eight planets. Come on."
Wrightwood looked out of a window frantically. Everything seemed so solid, so safe. Yet--
He turned and nodded at Steve.
* * * * *
With a sly grin Wrightwood could not see, Steve led the older man out into the chill of night and relished the shiver as the cold bit in through the silk pajamas and struck at the man. Then they were into the Guardian craft and into space.
"Where--?"
Steve shrugged. "Want to see it?" he asked.
Horrified, Wrightwood nodded.
Eight minutes later they were approaching the scene. Spread out on a shapeless form ten million miles across, tongues and streamers of raw energy flared forward, flaying space before it as it came. At a hundred and seventy thousand miles per second it came toward Sanaron, so near to the velocity of light that the roaring particles of energy had enormous mass.
No need for the great searchlights here, for the coverage of the explosion was so great that there was no need to filter the blackness away.
Instead, Guardians played before the oncoming death and fought it.
With a quiet disregard for death, Steve ran his little ship to within a mile of the raving storm front and matched its velocity.
White-faced and awed, William Wrightwood watched the horror without really knowing how close he was to death. It was too big to be personal, that flaming front. He saw the circling ships fighting first this tongue and then that, saw the planers fencing the streamers in, holding them while coners sucked away the raving energies and spread them too far apart to be tangible. He saw the swampers soar in to chill a raving island of exploding space, and watched with heaving stomach one of the Guardians get touched by a lance of flame--saw it go searing into death to recreate an island of raw fire of itself.
Then the mad attack against the roaring furnace cleared; Wrightwood began to see that there was a pattern to this.
Methodically the Guardians were isolating the forward-reaching tongues of energy from the main mass; cutting them off, and swamping them. From behind, as Steve circled the scene, planers and swampers were closing in on the trailing flame, chopping it off bit by bit and chilling it out of existence.
Sanaron was no longer a star lost in the stellar field. It was a flaming disc that could be seen, but to look at it hurt the eyes. Steve knew; Sanaron was not too far away.
He hurled his ship to the front again.
And then, as though it were a wave hitting a breakwater, the coruscating front dashed against the massed warp-planes of a whole squadron of Guardians, braced, planted, ready and waiting. The planes buckled and the squadron was forced back but the raving front flattened against the planes and was washed aside; turned back, spread to curl around the edges like tongues of doom reaching for the prey that lurked behind the wall. The squadron retreated, forming its shape as it went, until firm pressor rays behind the out-flung planes felt for and caught the core of Sanaron's outermost planet. With planetary mass behind, the squadron held a parabolic shield in space, ploughing a hole in the racing field of exploding energy.
* * * * *
Fire and flame enveloped the planet, passed around it, held from it by the warp-planes of the Guardians. A ship crumpled and died; its place was refilled by a spare. Another ship ran out of power abruptly and it was replaced until it could drop into the planet and recharge.
Then, as abruptly as the passing of an ocean wave, the roaring furnace in space was passed. The swampers and coners that fought the rear guard of the flaming death appeared in the tortured sky, scurrying around to wipe out the isolated trailers that the passage of the holocaust had left behind.
Another squadron came out of the blackness, a group from a distant sector that plunged past the planet and hit the flame from the rear. Steve circled the field of horror again and Wrightwood, his face pressed against the viewplate, watched the arrival of three more squadrons that hit Sanaron, formed a plate-to-plate shield while fighting for position, and established their protection for the next planet with a matter of seconds to spare.
One streamer leaked through a crevasse in the hastily-made shield, and the inside of the paraboloid was filled with swampers that fought the flame right to the atmosphere of the planet before it died.
And as the sun itself came under attack, the bulk of the racing squadrons came circling in from distant sectors. Men and sentient beings coming prepared to fight a supernova, to stand in there while a sun explodes, fighting space to hold a tenuous barrier in place to save the fragments of humanity that lived on the eight planets of Sanaron.
But Sanaron the Sun had mass, and the flaming particles of the erupting space had mass but were discrete.
There was a turning in the flame, a coalescence that centered, radially inward, upon the sun that waited for it and attracted it. With stellar mass behind, the flung planes of warped space held well, but the mass of energy, as its volume was, and the gouts and streamers of raw flaming space flattened against the plates and curled along them, creeping around and around. And around and around.
"Hold 'em," cried Steve.
Wrightwood turned anxiously. "What are they trying to do?"
Steve smiled wearily. "We're going to establish a complete globe around Sanaron and hold that raving horror out of the stellar mass."
"But--"
"The rest--on the outside--will fight it."
"And if they fail?"
Steve's expression told him.
"But Steve--there's ten thousand ships trapped inside of that sphere of raving energy."
"Yup."
"And they'll--they'll--?"
"_They'll?_ You mean _we'll_. Yes. We'll die. But we're not going to die; the Guardians never die...."
The sphere of roaring energy closed down on the last avenue of escape. Outside was sheer hell. Below them was the stellar furnace called Sanaron, giver of life and death. Above them was a completed sphere of raw hell trying to drop down and add its raw mass-energy to Sanaron.
Somewhere outside raced and circled the rest of the Guardians, swamping the fires of exploding space and trimming down the depth of the energy bit by bit.
But doggedly they held, and an hour passed before there came a shout over the radio, a shout barely heard through the overwhelming roar of cosmic static. The sphere had thinned!
From that moment on it was certain. Once mankind got the upper hand over his foe, aided and augmented by beings from far across the galaxy devoted to the same program, the horror-fires were due to die swiftly. The flaming skies opened, spread, became isolated bits of intolerable light, and then winked out as sheer mass of numbers hit them from all sides with swamping volumes and rayed cones. Planers swept bits together into a larger flame and called for swampers to come and chill it.
Then, once more plate to plate, the planers formed into a mighty single plane and swept space like a cosmic dragnet, forcing the danger out into deep space where there was no danger.
Then came the final signal; the Black Alarm was finished.
* * * * *
William Wrightwood, Senior, faced Commissioner Morehouse openly. "But so many--?" he faltered. Wrightwood was wearing his foster son's clothing and it looked a bit incongruous to see the jaunty uniform on the elderly Wrightwood.
Morehouse shrugged. "The reptilian culture from Sector Eight is as helpful as the cockeyed gang of cat-men from Nine."
"But--"
"Of course they're not reptiles nor cats. None of them have ever been within a hundred light years of Terra. But they're sentient, brilliantly so. They love their own music and their own literature and their own art, none of which means anything to any other culture, really. But we have a common ground to base the Galactic Civilization upon--someday. We all have the fear of destruction and the willingness to fight against it. To help our neighbor fight it, even though he sees colors we cannot, and can hear sounds we cannot hear."
"My mighty little empire looks a bit small--"
"Indeed."
"Morehouse, it strikes me that you're up a tree."
"I am?"
"You've got a fine man here trapped in a lousy job. I'll bet a hat I can get farther along than either you or he can about finding the truth about the _Astarte_." Wrightwood smiled. "Then you can take him off that job."
"Maybe," smiled Morehouse. "But remember that I'm giving the orders. I can also rescind them--providing they need rescinding."
"Well?"
"Do they need rescinding?" asked Morehouse. "Does Steve still hate you?"
"No man can really hate another man that he's just succeeded over," said Wrightwood. "Watch!" Wrightwood turned and called: "Hey! Steve!"
Steve Hagen turned away from Lois Morehouse. "Yes, dad?" he replied.
He came across the office holding her hand.