Yet the raid had been going on for almost a full hour before Mantell knew anything about it. His first hint that something was wrong came when the door of his laboratory opened as he bent low over his workbench, squinting over microminiaturized positronic dispersers and trying to coax them into their proper positions in the template he was building.
Startled, he glanced back over his shoulder and saw Ben Thurdan striding heavily into the room.
“Hello, Ben. Why the big rush?”
Thurdan’s craggy face was tense. “Bombardment. A fleet of Patrol ships chased some fugitive here, and they’re blasting us. Come with me and I’ll show you something, Mantell. Come on!”
Mantell had to half-run after him down the hall to the central control room.
“What about the fugitive?” he asked, remembering his own arrival. “Did he get in okay?”
“He’s here. An assassin.”
Despite himself Mantell flinched. “What?”
“Killed the President of the Dryelleran Confederation, then lit out for here.”
“Did you take him in?”
“Of course. We take everyone in. Harmon’s psychprob-ing him now. But he brought a Patrol armada behind him. They’ve got some new land of heavy-cycle gun that I’ve never heard of before. If you listen you can pick up the sound.”
Mantell listened. He heard a dull boom, and it seemed to him that the floor shook just a little. A moment later the boom was repeated.
“That’s it,” Thurdan said. “They’re blasting at our screens.”
He sat at the control console, in the big chair specially constructed to hold his weight, and switched on the visiscreens. Mantell saw the image take shape almost at once: a thick cloud of Patrol ships orbiting beyond Starhaven’s metal skin, wheeling like stallions and discharging incredible bolts of radiant energy.
But now Thurdan was grinning. He emanated all the confidence and joy of an invincible warrior about to enter battle. His thick strong fingers rattled over the controls.
“Our defensive screens can soak all that stuff up, can’t they?” Mantell asked uneasily.
“Most of it. Theoretically, they have unlimited capacity—but those boys up there are really pouring it on!” Thurdan pointed to a bank of meters whose quivering indicators swung dizzily up into the red area that meant overload and dropped back as Starhaven’s enormous power piles drained away the dangerous excess. And again the Patrol ships slammed down their fierce bolts of force, and still the Starhaven defenses negated them.
“We’ve got to stay on the defensive for a few minutes, still,” said Thurdan. “The load on our screens is too great to give us time to throw out a return blast. But we’ll fix ’em! Watch this.”
Mantell watched.
With strong staccato thrusts of his fingertips over the control boards, Thurdan brought the defense-screens of Starhaven out of synchronized equilibrium, establishing instead a shifting cycle-phase relationship.
“The screens are alternating now,” he grunted. “Give me the differential.”
Mantell squinted up at the dials, found the columns he wanted, and fed the figures rapidly to Thurdan. The big man made delicate adjustments, making mental computations that astonished Mantell.
Finally he sat back, grinning satanically. Sweat was pouring from every pore of his skin.
A chime sounded outside the room. Thurdan muttered, “See what they want, Johnny.”
Mantell darted to the door and opened it. A handful of the defense-screen technicians stood there, pale, puzzled-looking.
Harrell said, “What’s going on in here? The screens are phasing like crazy!”
“Close to overload,” Bryson said.
Mantell smiled. “Ben’s in charge,” he said simply. “Come on in and watch.”
He led them to where Thurdan sat staring broodingly into his vision plates, watching the cloud of orbiting Patrol Ships. There must have been hundreds of them out there, each one smashing every megawatt it could muster into the tough metal hide of Starhaven.
“They’ve been planning this attack for a year,” Thurdan said half to himself, as he made compensating adjustments to absorb the ferocious onslaught. “Waiting for a chance to get this fleet out there and break Star-haven open, once and for all. And they’re so sure they’re going to do it, too—the poor fools!” Then he laughed. “Mantell, are you watching?”
Mantell nodded tensely, too absorbed to speak. He heard the other technicians murmur behind him.
“Here we go, then,” Thurdan said grimly.
His right index finger jabbed sharply down on a projecting green stud of the control panel. The building shook. A violet flare of energy leaped into sight on the vision screen.
And where, a second ago, eleven Space Patrol ships had been arrayed in fighting formation, now there were none.
Thurdan chuckled. “They didn’t expect that, I’d bet! They thought it was impossible to take this heavy an attack and still return fire! But I’m giving them their own juice back twice as hard!”
His finger came down again.
A flank of the Patrol attackers melted into nothingness.
Mantell saw what the strategy was: Thurdan was firing in the millionth-of-a-second pauses between each phase of the synchronized screens, squirting out a burst of energy in the micromoment when Starhaven was left unguarded. But the force of the beam coming up from the planet served as a screen itself, keeping the metal-shielded world from harm.
Again and again Thurdan’s finger came down heavily on the firing stud, until the sky was cleared of ships. The angry cloud of buzzing, energy-spitting gnats that had been plaguing Starhaven was wiped out.
All except one, Mantell saw. One Space Patrol ship remained. He waited for Thurdan to spear it with a burst.
Instead he spoke into a microphone: “Get our ships up there, and grapple that one on. I want that ship. I want to study those guns.”
He flicked away a stream of sweat from his forehead, rose, yawned and stretched. Again Starhaven had triumphed.
An hour later, Mantell was in Thurdan’s office in central Starhaven when four of his private corpsmen brought in the crew of the captured SP ship.
At the moment Thurdan was expounding to him the virtues of his screen setup, with what Mantell considered was excusable pride. The big man had just given an awesome demonstration of skill, and Mantell had told him so. He felt sincerely impressed; and there was no reason why Thurdan shouldn’t know it.
“A hundred and eighty-one ships they lost,” Thurdan said. “Over five hundred Patrolmen dead, and at a cost of billions of credits to the Galactic Federation.”
“And without a single Starhaven casualty,” Mantell pointed out.
“That’s only part of it!” Thurdan exclaimed. “We soaked up enough power in that raid to run Starhaven for a year. I’ve ordered the three auxiliary generators shut down indefinitely, until we’re able to use up the trapped power surplus. We—”
The door chimed.
Myra appeared from the inner office and crossed to the door smoothly, saying, “I’ll see who it is, Mr. Thurdan.”
A moment later she reappeared.
“Well?” Thurdan growled.
“The captive SP men are here, under guard.”
A scowl of surprise and annoyance darkened Thur-dan’s face. “Captive SP men?” he repeated. “Captives? Who said anything about prisoners? Myra, tell me—who brought in the SP ship?”
“Bentley and his crew.”
“Get Bentley on the phone, fast.”
Myra nodded and punched out the number. Mantell, at once side of Thurdan’s desk, was trying to stare away from her, trying not to admire her liquid grace of movement. He knew Thurdan was still keeping close check on him.
The screen swirled colorfully and a face that Mantell recognized appeared. It belonged to the man who had brought him to Starhaven long ago.