The voice of the void

by Jr. John W. Campbell

Already a small city was developing it seemed. But back on the old planets, mighty works were being undertaken. They were building two thousand ships, the biggest ships that had ever been built. Millions of tons they weighed, and each ship was one vast power plant. Down through the heart of it ran a mighty cylinder of glistening metal. A tiny control room, invisible among the titanic machines, governed all its vast energies. It was a gargantuan projector of the nullifying field, a mighty ship that could hurl its energies into space to form a field of the force that could reach out across a million and a half miles. Two thousand of these vast machines were being built. Gigantic power plants they were. But these peacefully minded men designed them so that, their work done, they could be easily converted into merchant cargo ships, and the mighty generators could be used to light and heat their cities.

In less than two weeks the great ships were ready, and were resting on the surface of the great world out there across space, ready for the attack. The last mighty form had but just floated, light as a feather, from the huge receiving station, and now they lay in a row. So vast they were that they seemed unreal, figments of some strange dream. Mighty cigar-shaped hulls of four-foot armor plate, half sunken in slight depressions they lay now, their terrific weight making the soil flow like some semi-liquid mass. Nestled between two of the gargantuan ships there rested the control ship. Now, one by one the fleet of the mighty bulks rose gently, gracefully into the air, formed in a perfect cone, with the control ship, scarcely visible in this congregation of giants, following behind the leading ship.

Out to that minor sun they flashed, and around it they formed a great sphere of ships. Then each of the mighty projectors, nose pointing to the blazing sun below, turned loose its powers. Through special filters they could watch the field forming. First it was a thin shell that surrounded the entire planet as the projectors threw it into position. Ten thousand small ships were occupied in maintaining the field of electrons in place with their projectors. Already the shell of force was thick and strong. Unless the Force Creatures made a concerted effort at some one point, they would soon be doomed.

They did this. There must have been many, many thousands of them. The field was almost broken, it was bulging out, scattering under the drive of their energies. Soon they would have broken through, but one of the great projector ships reached the spot before the field had quite yielded, and condensing his field projector till it was a ray, they could see the field suddenly fall in, driven in by the awful power of that titanic driving.

It took them sixty-three hours to completely establish that mighty energy field. Naturally the star, which made no use of Atomic energy, was quite unaffected. But when, at the end of three weeks, the energy field had slowly dissipated itself into space, there were no more of the Atomic Giants.

Now the four habitable planets were at once settled upon. Already they had been carefully mapped, and the Supreme Council had drawn up a plan for the use of the vast planets. More area there was than they needed now, by far, so the cities were scattered widely over the globes. Mere planetary distances meant nothing to them. And all the areas between were carefully preserved as vast, natural parks. Through them wound roads for the little ground cars, so that the people might better see the beauties of the place. And some of the harmless animals would be permitted to live that the future population might know them. It was to be the fulfilment of a millennium-old dream—a warm, sunlight world, a kindly, young world where nature supplied the air, and the water, and the warmth in great abundance.

It was a kindly nature they seemed to have met here. And the work began.

Dozens, hundreds of the great receiver stations were set up. And at each station there would grow a great city. Now there poured across the infinite void a mighty influx of machines and workers and tools. These were the first, for they must build the cities for the billions to come. Rapidly the work went on as the skilled artisans directed the mighty machines in their labors, and on the surface of this new globe there rose from the ground mighty walls of lustrous, gleaming metal, reflecting the sun in a million different colors, a wondrous city of flashing, changing light, for the metal walls were automatically ruled with thousands of lines to the inch, a titanic diffraction grating that sent up a rainbow of changing, flashing color. A mile and a half into the air towered the buildings of the cities, and already the commerce was building up as the great receiver stations discharged their steady stream of immigrants.

One and a half years it took them to move all their treasures and priceless records, all their goods, all their machines and themselves across the void into their new cities. One and a half years of swift, efficient labor that transformed these new worlds into civilized planets.

But now they had twenty billion years to live ere these planets, too, would be dark, cold and sunless. And then they could easily move to some other distant system. But why wait till the Sun grew cold? They were already making investigations. Out across space there still glowed countless millions of unexplored stars! Now there would be no population limit to their peoples; there would be expansion, and since each man lived from two to three thousand years, the expansion could be rapid.