Beware the Microbots Read online

  Perry Rhodan

  The Third Power #35

  Beware the Microbots

  The vital structure-compensator has been installed in the Spaceship Titan. Once more its massive bulk contains the most sophisticated destructive weaponry in interplanetary space. But the toxin-ridden Nonues have wreaked havoc among the crew. And their deadly Ionized Argon has been artificially produced. So Perry Rhodan must return to Honur, and search the treacherous valleys and desolate plains from whence it came. And Honur also harbors the dreaded Microbots...

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  BEWARE THE MICROBOTS

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  1/ TOXIN OF TERROR

  "A TERRIBLE SITUATION! We're caught in a terrible situation!" Perry Rhodan said suddenly.

  Julian Tifflor, Lieutenant in the Terrestrial Spacefleet, had been studying the panoramic observation screens which encircled the walls of the Command Center of the great spaceship. There, amidst the glistening multitude of stars in the globular cluster M-13, he had seen faint reflections from the torpedo-shaped hull of the Ganymede as it waited motionlessly a few miles away from the Titan. Now his attention swung to his leader.

  "We've taken a new crew of 800 aboard," continued Rhodan, "and a structure-compensator which has to be installed. This brings us up to our full complement of 1500—which would make us the most powerful of battleships anywhere if 700 weren't all sick. There's an unknown enemy out there who wants to cut our throats. Unless we can find out who or what he is and where we can comer our invisible assailant, we can't do anything more than shoot down the robot ships sent to attack us."

  Rhodan lifted his head and looked squarely into Tifflor's eyes. "Tiff, as man to man: what would you do in my place?"

  The youthful officer was so surprised that his face fell into the classic expression of amazement: chin nudging his Adam's apple, mouth agape like an asthmatic during a smog alert. Rhodan—the almighty Rhodan—asking his youngest lieutenant for advise!

  Tifflor's quick mind realized at once that this was not the time to thank his superior for the confidence exhibited in him. Nor was any other polite gesture expected—Rhodan simply wanted a plain answer.

  "Our troubles began on Honur," Tifflor recapped the recent events after a short pause for reflection. "Honur, second planet of the sun Thatrel, 47 light-years from Arkon. Inhabitants Arkonide settlers from an earlier era of expansion, intelligent but primitive and completely apathetic."

  Rhodan listened attentively, as if hearing the history of Honur for the first time. He motioned Tifflor to continue.

  "Honur is now off limits for us," the lieutenant continued. "The entire planet is a veritable spaceship trap where dozens of wrecks already have been decaying for some time. —Why? Because cute little bear-like animals indigenous to the planet are saturated clean through their fur with nerve poison. The slightest touch by human or humanoid hand is enough to cause infection. The toxin of the harmless-looking Nonues makes a man lose his inhibitions and commit excesses to the point of completely ignoring his duty. A man infected by the nonue-poison collapses into a laughing idiot who rejects all food and exhausts himself in a state of euphoria.

  "The Titan landed on Honur because, on the advice of the Arkonide Thora, this particular world had been chosen for a rendezvous with the Ganymede. The crew of the Titan fared no better than all the other ships which had the misfortune of landing on Honur. The population was peaceful due to their apathy. The little Nonues were so tame and friendly that everybody cuddled them and took them aboard the ship. The disease spread with lightning speed. Only 5 people were spared: you, sir; the Arkonide Khrest; the 2 mutants, Pucky and Sengu; and I.

  "At the most critical moment the Titan was attacked by another spaceship whose crew consisted of robots. We managed to repulse the attack and you, sir, succeeded in manning the Command Center in spite of the condition of the stricken men. You started the Titan and left Honur.

  "Several other alien ships followed us but the five us, surrounded by ecstatic mutineers, were unable to cope with them. We finally called in the Ganymede from Earth to help us and the nightmare was quickly ended.

  "This is the story, sir. Am I correct?"

  Rhodan nodded thoughtfully, a faint smile playing around his lips. "You're taking a very commendable approach," he said. "First state the facts and then draw the conclusions. That's what you want to do, don't you?"

  "Certainly, sir. But I don't know if..."

  "Nonsense! Go ahead!"

  Tiff shrugged his shoulders. "Well, then: the whole Honur affair looks like a put-up job. Nobody knows who gave Thora the advice to suggest Honur as a rendezvous but I'm sure she has been under the influence of somebody else—either our foe or his agent.

  "The crew of the Titan was poisoned according to plan but thanks to the fact that five men remained unaffected the Titan didn't fall victim to the first robot ship. Our opponent realized that his scheme had misfired to some extent and he pursued us with a more powerful squadron which we were unable to defeat by ourselves. Luckily the Ganymede arrived in the nick of time."

  He suddenly broke off and looked at Rhodan. Rhodan sensed that he wanted to say something else. "So what do you think?" he challenged Tiff. "What advice would you give me?"

  "We've never met our adversary face to face. We've seen only his robots. For some reason he wants to destroy us. In order to defend ourselves we'll have to determine where we can lay our hands on him. The only place where he has made his presence felt by his actions is on Honur although we never made direct contact with him. In my opinion there's nowhere a better place to get on the track of this enemy than Honur."

  Rhodan remained silently in his chair for awhile. Then he jumped up and Tiff rose at the same moment. Rhodan put his hand firmly on Tiff's shoulder. "You know, Tiff, a man who normally makes his decisions all alone sometimes feels it is good to hear the opinion of somebody else. Before I listened to you I had my doubts whether it'd be better to seek help from the Arkonides or take matters into our own hands. You've helped me to make up my mind."

  Tiff felt happy although his faced looked serious. Rhodan took his hand off Tiffs shoulder and admonished him smilingly, "But don't tell anybody about this! I'm afraid my authority would suffer."

  Tiff stood at attention. "Of course not, sir!" he said emphatically.

  With a wave of his hand Rhodan replied: "Don't take it so seriously! For now you'll take over the job of the second pilot until all newcomers have been assigned and adequately trained in their tasks. We're going to remain right here for the time being. I figure we'll be able to take off in 8 or 10 days."

  By now Tiff had lost a little of his shyness. "As Second Pilot, sir," he said with a smile, "shouldn't I know where to go?"

  Rhodan didn't crack a smile. "Where you have suggested yourself. To Honur, of course."

  • • •

  The Titan was a truly gigantic vessel.

  Its spherical body measured 5000 feet in diameter—a separate world equipped with all the accomplishments of the most modem war—and space-travel technology of Arkon.

  While Rhodan and his young lieutenant held the talk which would remain indelibly in Tiff's memory, other important work went on a few hundred feet 'below' them in one of the medical laboratories where doctors were busy solving the puzzle to which the original 700 men of the Titan's crew had fallen victim.

  Dr. Eric Manoli was in charge of the research project. He had returned half a day ago aboard the Ganymede from Earth with a number of other doctors and he was certain they could isolate the poison which had put the victims in a state of euphoria.

  Farther back against the wall of the spacious laboratory a man had
been tied to a chair with his arms and legs so that he was unable to move his body. He sang happily: "...over the ocean, over the sea, when will Matilda be waltzing with me...?"

  It seemed to give him the greatest pleasure to mix up the two songs. He tried to rock on the chair and thereby jerked the chair forward.

  "Be still, you fool!" Manoli shouted at him.

  The man stopped singing and looked at Manoli with a beaming smile. "Why take it so hard, Doc?" he asked. "Life is beautiful. There's no reason for us to make it difficult."

  Manoli lost his temper. "You're making it difficult for me, you idiot!" he yelled at the patient. "When will you come to your senses?"

  "Sense?" the man giggled. "I'm sensible. You're the fool!"

  The physicians were baffled by the condition from which he and his 699 mates suffered. They had never

  before observed that type of euphoria on Earth. The affected victims knew no restraint whatsoever and for this reason Manoli and his associates gave the disease the name hyper-euphoria.

  They were trying to find the poison. They tested the patient who had been brought in under strict guard and isolated from the others and they also conducted experiments with one of the few Nonues who had been kept alive for this purpose.

  The little furred animal was locked up in a cage and stared between the bars with big sad but curious and friendly eyes at the men in the white coats. They were careful not to get closer to it than three feet. The whole cute creature was from head to tail only one foot long but they were afraid it could spit and that its saliva contained the potent toxin.

  Suddenly a deep calm voice said in the background: "I believe we've got it!"

  Dr. Manoli dropped the test tube he held in his hand and spun around. Dr. Hayward, a gigantic figure of a man who had recently joined the medical service of the spacefleet, sat with a jolly grin at his microscope.

  "What have you got?" Manoli demanded to know.

  "The poison," Hayward replied, pointing to the eyepiece of his microscope.

  Manoli rushed to his side with three or four steps. "Let me see!" he panted.

  Hayward moved over and Manoli peered through the microscope. "I can't see a thing," he complained.

  "Is the stuff colorless?"

  "Of course," Hayward answered.

  "Can't it be dyed?"

  "I haven't tried yet."

  Manoli looked at him flabbergasted. "Then do it! Or do you think we've got cat's-eyes like you?"

  Hayward's calm couldn't be shaken. He removed the microscopic slide and put a drop of blue liquid dye on it. Then he inserted it again into the microscope. Manoli sighed with relief. "Well, its about time... The microscope showed a chain of crystals with a regular 12-cornered cross section. "Do you have any idea what it is?" Manoli asked without taking his eye off the ocular.

  "Yes," Hayward muttered, "some hexylamin, don't you think?" Manoli nodded vehemently. "Of course. You're right. Do you have enough of the stuff for an exact analysis?"

  "I suppose so."

  "Then go ahead and hurry up!"

  • • •

  Hayward was a man who preferred to speak slowly and calmly, still he did his work faster than most other people. The exact analysis of a hexylamin is no simple matter even with Arkonide methods but Hayward finished the job in an hour and a half and went to Manoli.

  "Well?" Manoli grunted. "Do you know something about atomic physics?" Hayward countered. Manoli frowned. "Listen, Hayward, I wanted you to tell me what..."

  "Yes, I know. But to understand it you must know something about atomic physics."

  "Why?"

  "Are you familiar with Argon?"

  "A noble gas, yes."

  "It can't be made to enter into chemical combination with any substance whatsoever unless it is ionized and kept in the ionized state. This can be accomplished by placing it next to a suitably constructed molecule so that the Argon atom is held by a molecular electron but not neutralized."

  "Ah!" Manoli exclaimed. "And?"

  "And? Somebody has done just that with the toxin. It's an Argono-hexylamin, to coin a new word."

  Manoli blinked. "Somebody did it? Do you mean to say..."

  "Precisely. Ionized Argon doesn't occur in nature in sufficient quantities. This toxin has been artificially produced."

  • • •

  The result of the analysis could not be questioned. Now that the substance of the poison had been discovered they had no trouble isolating it in ample amounts from the other secretions of the Nonues and to conduct further experiments nor was it difficult to extract it from the spinal fluid of the stricken patients.

  Hayward's designation Argono-hexylamin was adopted and it received in addition to its chemical description the medical name Argonin because of its unique noble gas ingredient. The process leading from the contamination to the hyper-euphoria was as yet to be determined. However the indisputable fact that Argonin was an artificial product proved to be far more challenging than the curiosity for ascertaining the mode of its effect.

  Rhodan was immediately advised of the examination's outcome. He summoned Hayward and Manoli and obtained a full report. However he was unable to learn what he was most anxious to find out; how did the Nonues happen to be infested with this artificial venom?

  • • •

  Exactly nine days after the arrival of the Ganymede the training of the 800 newcomers was finished and the structure-compensator was installed in the Titan so that they were ready to start.

  The structure-compensator was a device which had been taken as booty from the Springers, the race of Galactic traders, and duplicated on Earth using the same principle. It produced a field shielding the structure disturbances of the four-dimensional space-time-continuum created by the transition of a vessel. Under normal conditions such disturbances could be tracked hundreds of light-years away but they were intercepted and neutralized by the structure-compensator.

  Hence a ship equipped with the compensatory device was completely safe from structure-sensors hyper-rangefinders registering the disturbance caused by a transition—until the time somebody discovered a principle counteracting the effect of the structure-compensator.

  The compensator brought in by the Ganymede from Earth was originally intended for the use of the Terrestrial Defense Fleet under the command of Maj. Deringhouse. Colonel Freyt, the Commander of the Ganymede mentioned several times that Deringhouse surrendered the device only with the greatest reluctance.

  Rhodan's announcement that the Titan was to return to Honur caused considerable consternation among the new members of the crew. The mishap, which had occurred on Honur, was by now common knowledge. It required some additional explanations on the part of the Commander to alleviate the anxiety among the men. "Now that we know the danger, it has lost its worst terror. We're going to take all precautionary measures when we land on Honur and, most important, we'll have the Ganymede as rear protection. On the other hand we must all realize that we can't simply turn our backs on this menace if we want to keep the Earth safe. It would be sure to catch up with us. We must locate the enemy and reason with him or, if that fails, destroy him. We've no other choice. Hence we're forced to return to Honur."

  2/ TRACK OF THE GODS

  Honur's sun was a small star whose spectrum reached a maximum in the infra-red band. Therefore the light it radiated even in the middle of the day was as red as that of the Earth's sun in the early morning or before sunset.

  Honur was a small world of moderate weight with a surface gravitation of 0.7 G. Its mean yearly temperature was 48.5° F according to Arkonide records—this was less than on Earth but much more than on Mars, for instance, with which Honur could best be compared.

  Its surface was dry. There were no oceans and only a few lakes but it had mountains with peaks reaching considerable heights.

  At the foot of one such massif, whose crest towered above 13,000 feet, the Titan had landed near a little lake on that fateful day when its misfortune began.
/>   The Titan landed again at the same plate while the Ganymede remained in a wide orbit around the planet. The Command Centers of the Ganymede and the Titan maintained uninterrupted audio-visual contact via telecom.

  Rhodan took no more chances.

  The natives, the 'Approved People' as they called themselves, were nowhere to be seen. Shortly after the previous landing they had silently squatted down at the shore of the lake and motionlessly stared at the gigantic ship.

  Now the Titan had been already there for 10 hours and none of the natives had appeared. Did they have a hand in the mystery? Could they be the faithful servants of those strangers they called the Gods?

  Rhodan gave his instructions. A search team under Lt. Tifflor was ordered to comb the neighborhood of the Titan in a radius of 50 miles. The rapidity with which the natives had appeared on the scene after the first landing of the Titan indicated that there was at least one inhabited place to be found within this radius. Tifflor's group of men took some of the multi-purpose vehicles, which could travel on land, in the water and through the air and were armed with some powerful weapons. Their special objective was to find one of the 'Approved Ones' and to bring him in for a psycho-examination.

  A second group under the command of Maj. Chaney was assigned the task of crisscrossing the planet with three long-range reconnaissance crafts of the Gazelle type and to study the physical features of this world. Rhodan felt sure that the unknown enemy was bound to consume a great amount of energy if he had a base somewhere on the planet and that the sensitive measuring instruments of the Gazelles could easily verify it.

  Rhodan took for granted that the enemy, if he stayed on Honur, would harbor no doubts about the intentions of the Titan, provided he was endowed with human or humanoid mentality. He was likely to consider the search action as a provocation and to retaliate without delay.

  Attacks on the 2 search teams and the Titan could be expected to take place any moment. Additional Gazelles stood ready to take off to go to Tifflor's or Chaney's aid in case they were in distress. The Ganymede was also in a state of continual alarm. Chaney and Tifflor were advised to keep in touch via telecom at all times.