It was the fifth of August when the announcement was made. And it was the same day on which nearly the entire fleet from all the camps on Mars started off for Venus, but the movement was detected almost at once, and from great underground bases on Mars the Solarian fleet sent out fifty thousand ten-man ships. These ships skimmed along close to the ground, and their polished metal had been sprayed with a drab paint so that they seemed but shadows that became practically invisible as they sped along, widely separated, but rapidly converging on the site of the Sphere's camp. This had remained on Mars, guarded by so small a number of ships that it was evident they expected the Solarian fleet to go to Venus, as no doubt would have been necessary but for this swift counter raid.
So perfectly camouflaged were the Solarian ships, that they got within ten miles of the camp without being discovered. Then, as their Dis rays flashed out, the entire group of the torpedo-ships dove on them. There were nearly one hundred thousand of the ten-man ships, diving down at them in a zigzag course that made them impossible targets, but the fleet had been approaching from all sides, and now the entire Sirian defense was concentrating on the machines attacking from the north. Those from the south crept in behind them, and suddenly the sphere started into the air, then went flying out into space at terrific speed. It barely escaped the Dis rays of the attackers. Only its tremendous acceleration saved it. Now several thousand of the torpedo ships shot after it, the rest falling into the form of a great disc to block the path of the pursuers. Man had long been accustomed to two dimensional maneuvering, but the ease with which these Sirians fell into complex three dimensional formations showed long practice in the art of warfare in space.
That raid was successful in that it forced the immediate return of the Sirian fleet, and very nearly destroyed the sphere. Over seventy-two thousand of the torpedo-ships were destroyed, but we lost two thousand ships and twenty thousand men. But Waterson announced that the Sirians would no longer be able to escape because of their greater acceleration. He had discovered a method for using an attractor beam of a short range but considerable power to be used with an electro-magnetic device that would automatically turn on the instruments in such a way that no matter what the accelerations might be, no matter how great, as long as they were within the limits of the ship's strength, the accelerations and centrifugal forces would be instantly neutralized, thus making possible violent maneuvers that the sudden forces had hitherto made impossible. A demonstration of his new ship had confirmed it. He took up a number of the Cabinet in his special machine, and turned hairpin turns at ten miles a second! The acceleration would have been instantaneously deadly had those neutralizers failed. They might as well have been under a half million ton freighter as it landed, as undergo those accelerations! But in that perfectly balanced room, it was not detectable. The ship's hull was made triple strength, as were the power projectors, and the generators. It was powered like a freighter, and could reach its full speed of 1,000 miles per second at an acceleration 5,000 times that of Earth's gravity. Waterson, who weighed two hundred and ten pounds on Earth would have weighed over five tons! It meant that the Solarian fleet would no longer be handicapped by the greater flexibility of the enemy ships. The plants that had been manufacturing the machines had already closed down temporarily, while the dies for these new machines were being made. But within thirty-six hours the first of the machines was being turned out.
And now a great crew of young men were being gathered to man them. They were all volunteers. There were to be one million ships, and that meant ten million men would be needed. Only modern methods could have made that possible, but with three populations, totaling over twenty billions, a sufficient number of volunteers came forward to make the work easy. As fast as these men came to the conscription stations, they were put into the new machines. And here also modern methods had helped. The Waterson system of material energy release had been so successful, that the price of a completed car had dropped to well under one hundred dollars for the small two-man machines. And even for the interplanetary models not more than two thousand dollars needed to be paid, for the raw materials were absolutely free, the labor was mechanically reduced to almost nothing, and as the energy that drove these machines was as cheap as the raw materials, they merely charged enough to make the venture pay a decent return on investment and to pay the wages of the few machine supervisors and the office staff. Men worked five days a week on three-hour shifts in the factories, but longer hours and more pay went to the builders, to the men who had to manually control the building construction machinery, for law forbade the building of offices on the mass production scheme, since that meant an unvaried, monotonous city. But everywhere wages were high, for wages depend, not on the amount of work men do, but on the amount of finished product they can turn out. The men accomplished more, and were paid more, but they worked less. It had taken many years to finally convince the Earth of that, but the example of American labor, with its shorter hours and higher wages was proof enough. And then the influence of the mighty energies Waterson had released made it even more apparent. Mars had already developed the system under the force of the released atomic energies.
High wages and cheap machines had meant that everyone owned one. And so absolutely safe were they that they commanded perfect confidence. This had been a big factor in the making of this mighty fleet. Everyone knew how to operate the machines, so it was easy to fill the places on the machines with pilots.
Nevertheless, special training was necessary to overcome the caution against quick turns that long experience had instilled in them all. Each accepted applicant was taken up in one of the new machines, and given a breath-taking ride—a ride that consisted in diving toward the Earth with terrific sudden acceleration. Then, just when the student felt certain they would crash and become a mass of molten metal, the ship was brought up, not a mile from the ground, to settle gently; then, when they almost touched the ground, they leapt into the air again with an acceleration that shot them out of the atmosphere with the velocity of a meteor, while the outer wall of tungsto-iridium alloy glowed cherry red. Then came sharp turns at ten or twenty miles a second, till at last the students no longer gripped the arms of their seats in anticipation of a sudden acceleration. Then they were taken down and given a ship to experiment with.
But none of these men had ever handled a weapon of the sort they were to use, so mimic battle practice was held, with the glowing rays of a harmless ionizing beam instead of the deadly Dis rays.
Daily reports were coming from the Martian scouts as time went on. The Sirians, too, had decided to do some fleet building, for nearly three-quarters of their fleet had been destroyed. The production rate of man's factories, 120,000 a day, had gained a slight lead. It would require ten days before a fleet of a million could leave for Mars with a home guard of two-hundred thousand ships.
The destruction of the Martian plants had lowered the production rate to about 3,500 an hour, but shops put up rapidly on Earth and Venus had quickly brought the production-rate back, and it would be nearer 7,000 an hour by the time the last of the fleet had been finished.