He cut away a flap of metal from the swelling. He tossed it away with his space-gloved hands. His suit-flash illuminated the hollow within. There was a motor inside, and it was remarkably familiar, though not a motor such as men made for the purpose of turning things. There was a shaft. There were four slabs of something that looked like graphite, rounded to fit the shaft. That was all. No coils. No armature. No sign of magnets.

Men used this same principle, but for a vastly different purpose. Men used the reactive thrust of allotropic graphite against an electric current in their space ships. The Bowdoin-Hall field made such a thrust incredibly efficient, and it was such graphite slabs that drove the Stallifer—though these were monsters weighing a quarter of a ton apiece, impossible for the skid to lift. Insulated cables led to the slabs in wholly familiar fashion. The four cables joined to two and vanished in the seemingly solid girders which formed all the giant grid.

Almost without hope, Stan slashed through two cables with his torch. He dragged out the recharging cable of the skid. He clipped the two ends to the two cut cables. They sparked! Then he stared. The meter of the skid showed current flowing into its power bank. An amazing amount of current. In minutes, the power-storage needle stirred from its pin. In a quarter of an hour it showed half-charge. Then a creaking began all around.

Stan leaped back to one of the cross-girders just as all the plates in an area a mile square about him began to turn—all but the one whose motor-housing he had cut through. All the other plates turned so that their edges pointed to the stars. The sand piled on them by the day storm poured down into the abyss beneath. Only the plate whose motor-housing Stan had cut remained unmoving. Sparks suddenly spat in the metal hollow, as if greater voltage had been applied to stir the unmoving slab. A flaring, lurid, blue-white arc burned inside the housing. Then it cut off.

All the gigantic plates which had turned their edges skyward went creaking loudly back to their normal position, their flat sides turned to the stars. And nothing more happened. Nothing at all.

In another ten minutes, the skid's meter showed that the power bank was fully charged. And Stan, with plenty to think about, straddled the little object and went soaring to northward like a witch on a broom, sending a call on his suit-radio before him.

"Coming, Esther! Give me a directional and let's make it fast! 

 Prev. P 15/41 next