"Look! There! Something's coming!" an observer jittered, and Jalte swung his plate.
Jalte saw—nothing. Eichmil saw the same thing. There was nothing to see. A vast, intangible nothing—yet a nothing tangible enough to occult everything material in a full third of the cone of vision! Jalte's operators hurled into it their mightiest beams. Nothing happened. They struck nothing and disappeared. They loosed their heaviest duodec torpedoes; gigantic missiles whose warheads contained enough of that frightfully violent detonate to disrupt a world. Nothing happened—not even an explosion. Not even the faintest flash of light. Shell and contents alike merely and, oh, so incredibly peaceful, ceased to exist. There were important bursts of cosmics, but they were invisible and inaudible; and neither Jalte nor any member of his crew were to live long enough to realize how terribly they had already been burned.
Gigantic pressors shoved against it; beams of power sufficient to deflect a satellite; beams whose projectors were braced, in steel-laced concrete down to bedrock, against any conceivable thrust. But this was negative, not positive, matter—matter negative in every respect of mass, inertia, and force. To it a push was a pull. Pressors to it were tractors—at contact they pulled themselves up off their massive foundations and hurtled into the appalling blackness.
Then the negasphere struck. Or did it? Can nothing strike anything? It would be better, perhaps, to say that the spherical hyperplane which was the three-dimensional cross-section of the negasphere began to occupy the same volume of space as that in which Jalte's unfortunate world already was. And at the surface of contact of the two the materials of both disappeared. The substance of the planet vanished; the incomprehensible nothingness of the negasphere faded away into the ordinary vacuity of empty space.
Jalte's base, all the three hundred square miles of it, was taken at the first gulp. A vast pit opened where it had been, a hole which deepened and widened with horrifying rapidity. And as the yawning abyss enlarged itself the stuff of the planet fell into it, in turn to vanish. Mountains tumbled into it, oceans dumped themselves into it. The hot, frightfully compressed and nascent material of the planet's core sought to erupt—but instead of moving, it, too, vanished. Vast areas of the world's surface crust, tens of thousands of square miles in extent, collapsed into it, splitting off along crevasses of appalling depth, and became nothing. The stricken globe shuddered, trembled, ground itself to bits in paroxysm after ghastly paroxysm of disintegration.
What was happening? Eichmil did not know, since his "eye" was destroyed before any really significant developments could eventuate. He and his scientists could only speculate and deduce—which, with surprising accuracy, they did. The officers of the Patrol ships, however, knew what was going on, and they were scanning with intently narrowed eyes the instruments which were recording instant by instant the performance of the new cosmic super-screens which were being assaulted so brutally.
For, as has been said, the negasphere was composed of negative matter. Instead of electrons, its building blocks were positrons—the "Dirac holes" in an infinity of negative energy. Whenever the field of a positron encountered that of an electron, the two neutralized each other, giving rise to two quanta of hard radiation. And, since those encounters were occurring at the rate of countless trillions per second, there was tearing at the Patrol's defenses a flood of cosmic rays of an intensity which no spaceship had ever before been called upon to withstand. But the new screens had been figured with a factor of safety of five, and they stood up.
The planet dwindled with soul-shaking rapidity to a moon, to a moonlet, and finally to a discreetly conglomerate aggregation of meteorites before the mutual neutralization ceased.
"Primaries now," Haynes ordered briskly, as the needles of the cosmic-ray-screen meters dropped back to the points of normal functioning. The probability was that the defenses of the Boskonian citadels would now be automatic only, that no life had endured through that awful flood of lethal radiation; but he was taking no chances. Out flashed the penetrant super rays and the fortresses, too, ceased to exist save as the impalpable infradust of space.