George O. Smith

“ Down in the torpedo-hold were three shining metal cigars. Peter Ellsworth's pets. His babies. Sunk into them were all of his hopes, all his meager finances, and all the money that everybody who was Peter's friend had been able to scrape up. He could not fail. ”

“ Actually, Peter had been covering them for years. There's a lot of free time in a job like Peter's former command—time to watch and think and plan and set down ideas. For seven years Peter Ellsworth had been in command of the Vanguard, and in that time he had seen a good many self-guided missiles launched in the ultimate test against the Vanguard's highly-specialized countermeasures crew. He had watched them all fail. He had taken careful note of the reasons. He had worked with the crew against them—
What better training than this for a man who wanted to build one? ”

“ Not a star, no trace of Sol, not a smudge of distant galaxy or even the slight luminosity of galactic gases. The sky in any direction was a complete and horrid black nothing.
It was Peter that said it: "No one knows how fast we've been accelerating. But let's face it: we can't expect much measureable increase in mass until we get into the upper brackets of velocity. We're probably running to within a few tenths of a percent of the velocity of light."
Hogarth shook his head. "We haven't had time. To accelerate to the velocity of light with ten thousand gravities would take—"
Peter nodded. ”

“ The missile has no Lanson generator because it is not equipped with a crew that starts to fold up under a few gravities."
"That's a great help," snorted Hogarth.
"Damn right it is! If we can set up a terrific Lanson field we can neutralize our mass ... then we can run up our acceleration to some really high values! We can probably approach velocities in the region where the Einstein increase in mass becomes considerable; but since our mass will be neutralized, we can squeeze right up in there near Constant. And the missile, having no Lanson, won't be able to make it. ”

“ The second crew was the countermeasures crew who would take over the operation of the Vanguard against the attack.
Every possible weapon would be used against the missile, every gadget, every device, every brain.
If the Vanguard's crew succeeded there would be a space-borne skyburst of flame that expended itself harmlessly. If the crew failed—and they had never been known to fail—then the Countermeasures Department lost three million dollars worth of guided drone. Not the crews. They were safe in the Vanguard. Just the drone. ”

“ And even so, it has nothing to do with the Einstein Increase. So far as the outside universe goes we are a massive something-or-other traversing space at a velocity near to that of light. I'm of the opinion that we are near enough to Constant so that the increase in mass has gone high enough to produce the Einstein warping of the space fields. That's why no light is getting in."
No one felt too much like arguing with Peter. Radar eventually reported that the missile had dropped beyond range. Hogarth looked at Peter, who still shook his head. ”

“ It was held rigidly at that distance by the pressors, which were protected by the fast flash of the barrier screen, and given their opportunity to press down by the switching needs of the missile's own circuitry.
The crew could do nothing ... nothing but watch; for the super-fast electronic switches could outperform the human mechanism by at least a thousand to one. So instead of being tensed for action—human beings toned into momentary supermen by adrenalin—these same human beings sat and worried about the missile because they now had the time to sit and worry. ”

“ Normal accelerometers depend upon the apparent increase in the gravitational constant. But on a spacecraft where a Lanson generator is used to create a neutralization of part of the mass so that the acceleration can run high without crushing the crew, the accelerometer was a complex integrating circuit that measured the power going into the Lanson, compared it to the power that went into the drivers, measured the true gravity of what was left, performed some internal computations and came up with an electrical current that registered on the control panel. ”

“ A shell, lazier than the rest, flared briefly.
"Henderson: are we on emergency acceleration?"
"We're climbing."
"Climb faster!"
"Can't. We might overload the Lanson."
"Take a chance. We're dead if we don't."
III
The floor surged up below them; the accelerometer crawled up past twenty gravities and kept on going. The complaining cry of the Lanson could be heard throughout the ship now; its output could not keep up with the increasing acceleration. Peter felt as though it must be at least three gravities behind and lagging more and more.
The missile came on. ”

“ In no man's mind was the idea that this spelled defeat for the Ellsworth Self-Guided Missile. The first knockdown does not end a prize-fight; in fact, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. The Vanguard had been on the defensive from the beginning, and the entire criterion of the exercise was whether the Vanguard and its crew could make Earthfall in one, well-integrated piece.
Peter watched Henderson eye the radar screen and begin to get set for the same maneuver again. Then he opened his intercom and called: "Countermeasures? ”

“ Ellsworth shrugged. "We're half way to Hell right now."
They all turned to watch the screens. This, if anything, was worse than before. There had been a tenseness, then; the excitement had poured adrenalin into the veins and tuned them high. There had been deadly danger, averted only by some very fast and rough action. ”

“ The fact that the Vanguard's velocity with respect to Sol (or anything else in the universe) could be measured in thousands of feet per second had nothing to do with it. Relativity. The important thing was the Vanguard's course and velocity with respect to the missile.
The missile, aware in its delicately-balanced circuits that the target had swooped aside, was forced to repeat the same maneuver. ”

“ The accelerometer on Henderson's instrument board quietly zipped across the scale, bent the needle against the safety-peg, and then after waiting for a few minutes, gave up. A small cloud of white smoke obscured the scale; that meter would smell like hell when the meter-repair man took it apart. ”

“ Intrinsic velocity doesn't mean a thing. We're fighting one another, not one-another-with-respect-to-Sol. As far as relative positions go, we're just standing still and all I'm doing on these levers is running your missile back and forth in space. ”

“ Just—"
"Cutting apart might be a good idea," suggested Henderson. "It—"
"You'll stay out of this!" roared Hogarth.
Peter turned to the intercom and opened the key: "Radar! Radio! Countermeasures! Fire up!"
"What about the radiation-silence?" asked Radar.
"Forget it! The missile has our picture in its mind. We're not agile enough to play squirrel, and there just ain't no place to hide. We might as well radiate all we want and get a better picture of the thing. Fire up!" ”