Man of Many Minds

by E. Everett Evans

George Hanlon was thrilled with the excitement of what was coming, yet knew a touch of fear. He had never been under fire, and knew only from hearsay just what it meant to be in a ship that might be destroyed any instant without the least chance of anyone escaping. In space warfare, there usually just were no survivors. You won and lived—or you lost and were blasted out of existence.

But it wouldn't be long now—the scouts were already establishing their globe just outside of detection range. "No signs of being discovered yet," they reported.

Then the light cruisers began slipping through the screen of scouts to take their positions. Suddenly, a number of great beams of energy stabbed up toward them from below, and the screens of the cruisers flared in brilliant confiscations of flame as those mighty rays struck them.

"Don't you cruisers and scouts take foolish chances!" High Admiral Ferguson's voice rasped into the mike. "If those beams are too hot, get back fast! Heavy cruisers and battleships, down!"

Instantly Hanlon could feel the surge of acceleration as the great ship he was riding plummeted planetward. In the plate he and his father were scanning, he could see the dots of blue light that identified the nearest scouts, and a moment later the greens of the light cruisers.

Then those dots fled behind his range of vision as the heavies flashed past them.

The plate Hanlon was using was of limited vision, so he could not see the battle as a whole, as High Admiral Ferguson could in his wide-coverage screens. Only what was going on directly below and close to either side was visible to Hanlon. Yet he could see several of those great, stabbing beams reaching out toward the fleet.

A change in color at one edge of his plate caught his eye, and he saw the ship nearest on his right begin to glow as a heavy beam from below worked on its screens, burrowing its way in and in, trying to blast the ship out of existence.

Great streams of radiance struck and ricocheted from its screens, which were swiftly mounting through the spectrum as more and more power was thrown against them by the enemy below.

The air in the Sirius began to grow hotter, and his father answered his inquiring look, "They're attacking us, too, and that's heating us up. Hope our screens hold," he grinned grimly.