Invaders of Space
Murray Leinster
CHAPTER ONE
OUTSIDE the control building, the spaceport lights seemed to rival the stars in number, and to outshine them in brightness. There was a good two square miles of black tarmac to be seen from the office window, reflecting the lights in wavery streaks of brightness. But there was no activity anywhere. Horn, who had no business being in the control room of the spaceport, listened to a faint buzzing, moaning sound that came out of a loudspeaker overhead. It came from a space tramp, the Theban, coming down out of the night on emergency-landing status.
The landing-grid operator, whose proper empire this control room was, leaned back in a tilting chair and negligently watched certain dials and a screen on which a single blurry bright speck showed. The speck was the Theban, not yet sighted, but on the way to be brought to ground in the Formalhaut spaceport. The buzzing, moaning sound was not a comfortable one to hear.
"That's a nasty sort of noise," Horn commented. "The engines that are making it could conk out any second. Lucky they got this far."
The operator nodded and said negligently, "I'll get 'em down." His manner was one of total leisure and indifference, but he kept the dials on the wall before him under constant watch. Once he reached over and adjusted some control. The buzzing moan grew louder. With the increased volume, other noises could be heard behind it. The buzzing came from a pick-up microphone in the ship's control room somewhere out in space. Sounds of movement could be heard: a growling voice; another voice, answering truculently. The growling voice swore.
"Calling ground!" it rasped a moment later. "Calling ground! Where's your beam? Do you want us banging around up here for ever? Where's your beam?"
The operator said without haste. "You're heading right into it. But you're low and in the planet's shadow. If you weren't in such a hurry -"
The growling voice rasped, "But we are in a hurry! How about that repair job we need?"
"I told you," said the grid operator, "there's nothing doing in the repair shop until morning local time. You might as well have gone in orbit to wait. I told you that, too!"
The voice from space swore virulently. The operator said, "You're just touching our force beam now. Hold fast. I'm going to have to kill your lateral velocity and you're so low you may feel it."
The growling voice from the loudspeaker bellowed an order, away from the microphone. The unseen ship, still far out of atmosphere, floated into the invisible, intangible force beam of the landing grid. Dials and indicators in the control office, aground, showed that the landing grid's power was flowing swiftly out to make a field of almost solid density as the original beam was pierced by the ship still high up and deep in the black shadow of the planet Formalhaut III.
The ship became fixed in the fields of force. The grid operator sat leisurely erect. The process of landing a ship from this point on was almost automatic. He adjusted a turn knob and watched for the results. They were, of course, that the grid's force fields tightened gradually. The Theban - still invisible in the night - became anchored in the immaterial beam. Then the operator touched the braking button and the hovering ship checked. It had almost had velocity enough for an orbit. To bring it down and land it in one piece, it had to be slowed to the speed of the planet's rotation at the latitude of the spaceport.
The buzzing from the loudspeaker grew violently louder. There were crashes. Loose objects in the ship's control room slid and banged to the floor, drawn there by the ship's artificial gravity field.
The grid operator snapped, "Are you crazy? Cut your drive !"
More crashes. Then the buzzing ceased. When a ship is grasped by a landing grid's fields, it cuts its own drive and is drawn down to the spaceport by the grid. Landing grids were invented, at first, because they had to be made if space travel were to become practical. It required more fuel for a ship to climb up into space against gravity than to journey halfway across the galaxy. It required as much more to land safely. So landing grids were devised, using ground-supplied power to lift and land starships. That simple fact tripled the cargo they could carry.
Then the grids were developed past that simple usefulness. It appeared that they could draw power from the ionized upper layers of a planet's atmosphere. They could provide for most - or all - of a planet's energy requirements. And then it became obvious that they were very useful because when they brought a ship down they placed it neatly in position opposite the passenger ramp or the warehouse where passengers or cargo should be landed or taken aboard.
"I think," said Horn, "that up there in that ship they're a little bit panicky. Considering the noises their engines were making, they've reason to be. They've been waiting for the engines to blow any second. It took nerve to turn them off. They might not turn on again."
The grid operator said disgustedly, "There's something wrong with them, calling for an emergency landing and yelling they've got to have emergency repairs! They ordered me to get a repair crew ready to get them back aloft again in hours. Try to get union mechanics out of bed for a special job, just on a tramp skipper's say-so!"
Horn shook his head. "They won't get off in hours, maybe days. That's an old-style Riccardo drive, and the noise means it's about to lie down and die. I didn't know any of those old ships were still in service. I'd hate to guess how old it is."
He could have looked up the descending ship in the Spacecraft Register and found out all about her, even including her present very dubious reputation. But he wasn't interested enough to do so.
He'd stopped by the spaceport to ask if there were news about the liner Danae, en route to Formalhaut now. He knew there could be no news, of course. The Danae was somewhere in the ship lanes leading from Canna II to Formalhaut III. There was a girl on board the Danae. She was on the way to this planet. When she arrived, she and Horn were to be married. So Horn was jumpy and unreasonably worried, and hungry for news that simply couldn't be had.
A voice barked abruptly from the speaker, originating in the space tramp now descending.
"Look here!" it said furiously, "if we can't get an emergency repair job, cancel this landing! Push us out, and we'll go somewhere else. We're in a hurry!"
The grid operator looked annoyedly at Horn, to call attention to the unreasonable demand. Horn shrugged. The operator said, "You asked for emergency landing. You're getting it. Regulations say an emergency landing, once begun, has to be completed, and the ship must be surveyed before it's lifted off again." He added in a chiding tone, "Too many skippers clipped hours off in-port time by claiming emergency. You know that."
The voice from the speaker bellowed profanity. The operator turned down the volume until the voice was a tiny sound, mouthing unspeakable things. He watched his dials. After a long wait he turned on the warning lights outside, and any atmosphere flier in the neighbourhood would be made aware that a ship was coming down from space. Of course at this hour of the night there was no great need for the warning.
"Where'd this Theban come from?" asked Horn. The operator shook his head to signify that he didn't know.
"If they came down the ship lane, the Danae'll follow. They'll know if there are any warnings to spacemen out for that lane. It's pretty clear, usually. But I'll ask."
The operator nodded. "Space travel always seems perfectly safe," he, observed, "until you've got somebody travelling. Then you worry."
Horn said restlessly, "Right! The Danae's a good ship. I designed her engines. She's as good a ship as there is. But I have someone aboard her. So naturally -"
He walked uneasily to a window and looked out. It was quiet and still and the innumerable lights of the spaceport - especially the half-mile-high landing grid - looked curiously lonely. But all places look lonely when night falls and there is no activity where everything was hustle and bustle during the day. During daylight there'd be cargo planes landing on and taking off the tarmac outside. There might be a space freighter aground, loading or unloading. Sometimes there'd be a liner on the tarmac inside the grid, putting off mail and passengers' baggage and fast-freight items, doing everything in a great hurry to get back to space and the long ship lanes again.