Astounding Science Fiction, British Edition — page 93: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

GIMMICK The ship was huge on Calland’s screen, bristling with slice beam an- tenna, many times as big as a human ship, and, he knew, almost impreg- nable to projectiles. Not one had been captured or inspected, and the secret of the slice beam was not known. The ships seemed close to being floating cities, and there were so few of them that the theory was that these were the ships the Furries had entered the star cluster in as colonists a generation back. The cruiser went by at normal speed, coasting silently without radio static, an impressive murderous sight. Calland knew that it was equipped so that its crew could withstand accelera- tions and quick turns of maneuvering almost a third faster than the best ship of humanity, and that they were so well powered for their weapon that the ship could stand off out of pro- jectile range and carve the smaller ships into chunks before they could get close enough to begin fighting. Besides the compulsive drive of his plans, there was curiosity. A Furry cruiser would be a treasure trove of new gimmicks inside. The problem was, how could he get into one? The commander of the fleet had some similar idea. He was supposedly organizing his defenses merely to keep the cruiser from getting through to Mark II, but the Furry ship instead ran into a trap. Row on row of ships, half the fleet, ranked one behind the other in eight rows, the heads of the lines pointing directly at the approaching cruiser so that each line seemed only to be one ship on the enemy’s screens. They did not seem a threat, al- though they approached from differ- ent directions, for they could be easily dodged or beam-sliced before they came within projectile range. The cruiser coasted on. 91 On Calland’s special screen, with information-corrections removing all the waver and uncertainty of distance, the lines of ships converged on the Furry at high speed, like eight arrows. They held complete radio silence, but at the planned moment every second ship of every arrow veered slightly to one side. There were two arrows where ~ each had been before, again half of each veered and there were from six- teen arrows, thirty-two, then sixty- four ships, visible on the Furry screen, in range of the Furry beams, some of them caught and falling apart like sliced apples, but still coming with momentum, converging on the single huge cruiser. One more sidewise thrust and then there were no more lines, only individual ships which finished the pattern with an outflinging of mines around them, and it was done. The Furry ship was totally englobed in a tightening sphere of ships and mines—with a command to sur- render thundering on its radio. Noth- ing could save it but the EG projectile screen thrown around them from out- side. The message to surrender prom- eised it if they ceased fire and opened their ports immediately. The one other time a Furry was crippled badly enough to be abandoned the crew took off in a lifeboat and the ship immedi- ately melted down behind them leav- ing no informative pieces, but this time there was no place for the crew to go. They ignored the warning. Beaming slice rays destructively in all direc- tions the huge cruiser was flung for- ward in a wild dash to escape— plowed through a wall of mines in a series of rending explosions and scat- tered itself across dark space in a smear of red glowing fragments and white flashes. From his great distance Bob Cal- land saw the attempt to capture the cruiser only in a fragmentary way, Conniclooolks.ec© AA