"Stand by!"
The technicians ran for shields. To reinforce the controller's verbal warning a series of buzzers sounded, then anxious supervisors visually confirmed that all were out of the danger zone.
They watched the experimental chamber on large monitors, for they were dealing with something they did not understand in the slightest and were taking no chances. The shielding on the room was sufficient to contain a thermonuclear explosion; the command center even had its own heavily shielded self-contained life-support systems. Even if the rest of the planetoid was destroyed they might survive.
Inside the chamber was a large, slightly concave metal disk; a small rod protruded slightly from its center. The disk aimed down at another disk, one that had no protuberance but was flattened slightly in the center. In the exact center of the lower disk a single plastic cup contained exactly four-tenths of a liter of distilled water. Nothing more.
The men in the command center grew tense as the operators hovered over their consoles.
"Energize!" came the command of the project director. "On my mark . . . Mark!"
A switch was thrown. Inside the experimental chamber the upper disk shimmered slightly and projected an odd violet light onto the lower disk and the glass it held. Now they would learn if this attempt would succeed, unlike the thousands tried earlier. So far they hadn't even managed to boil the water.
The senior scientists of the project wondered why Zinder had been successful with essentially the same setup. They were using the plans and the math Zinder had described in his position papers; the computers of Suba and the Council had assured them that if Zinder's theories were correct the device would work. Historical record said he was right. Why wouldn't it work?
They were missing Zinder's computer, they finally concluded, and the plans for it had died with him on some Markovian world that possibly was not even in our Universe and the machine itself had been destroyed in a Com Police operation where chunks of anti-matter had been driven into collision with it.
Once understood, the problem was simply stated. To do as Zinder said could be done, what had been done, a computer would not only have to analyze a substance, but also discover its basic mathematical relationships, apply Zinder's own formula to correlate it to his greater Universe, and isolate just that set of equations that fully describe that substance—in this case water, and not all water, but specific water. You were dealing not only in basic chemistry and physics, but in time as well. Apply feedback to the signal and the substance should simply cease to exist except in the memory of the computer. Reapply the signal to the Zinder energy flux and the substance should be restored. Or, take the substance's equation and rewrite it to produce, say, H2O2—with a little ingenuity and a sufficiently sophisticated computer the alchemist's dreams were realizable.
And so, all the available computers of the Com area were soon linked to one network, supporting a single goal. And when Zinder's violet beam descended, the contents of the glass were noted, analyzed, and stored.
"Feedback on my mark!" the controller called. "Mark!"
A switch was thrown. The water in the glass became discolored, then seemed to wisk out of existence. Instruments indicated normal conditions in the chamber. The scientists wasted no time getting there.
The glass was, in fact, empty. Not a drop of water remained, yet the glass was cool to the touch.
"Okay, so now we've done what any good microwave generator could do," one glum technician commented. "Now let's see you put it back."
Again the procedures, again the signals, again the eerie photographic effect, and now, when they entered, the glass was full again. They measured it. Exactly four-tenths of a liter.
They had the solution then. They played with it. Over the next few days they became quite adept at transmutation, even removing or adding atomic material. Lead into gold, gold into iron, whatever. Nothing more complicated, though.
"We're limited by our computer capacity," the project chief explained. "Until we develop a better, faster, smaller computer designed specifically for this sort of work, as Zinder did, we'll be limited. Give us a year, maybe two, and we'll be able to conjure up anything at will, I believe—but not now."
The political and military leaders sighed and gnashed their teeth. "We don't have a year," one said for all of them. "We have months at best."
"We can't do it, then," the scientist told them. "It takes time to design such a piece of machinery—although theoretically it's within our capabilities—and even more time to build one."
"Playing god is for later," a politician snapped. "First we must have a later. Is there nothing you can do now to use this device as a weapon?"
"We could just build a huge disk, or set of disks, and use them for example, to project feedback along the entire atomic spectrum. Within the device's limits, which are governed by power source and disk size, we should be able to nullify the individual atoms, although we'd be unable to store them or put them back together again. Whatever is struck by such a field would cease to exist."
"I thought matter and energy could never be created or destroyed, just changed," somebody with a little on the ball objected.
"That's true, within our physical laws," the project chief admitted. "But Zinder's mathematical reality is outside of those. In a sense we don't create or destroy, we merely allow the Universe to transmute the atoms and energy back into a state of rest—his ethers or primal energy. In effect, the so-called laws of the Universe are turned off for anything within that field."
"Build it!" they ordered.
Zinder Nullifiers, they called them. They were built in under four months, months of costly gains by the Dreel, who were constantly growing in numbers, resourcefulness, and boldness. Little testing could be done; the Nullifiers would work or they would not. If they did not, the Com faced annihilation; if they did, the fleet of the Dreel faced oblivion.
Three Nullifiers were built and two were deployed almost immediately, guarded by the planet-wreckers of the weapons locker and the best automated defenses the Com had. They resembled giant radar antennas, over fifteen kilometers across, and were constructed of thin, metallic fabric. When folded for travel the devices were able to keep pace with the fastest Com ships.
True to form, the Dreel allowed the attacking Com fleet to approach unmolested; Com forces penetrated the perimeter with no opposition. Only when the corridor could be effectively closed behind them did the attack begin.
The umbrellalike dishes had been deployed long before. Suddenly the Com forces slowed, inviting attack. The location of the Dreel main force and its central command world was known because the Dreel believed in commanding from the forward edge of the battle area, to be seen but not to be reached, advancing with the forward units.
The incredibly fast needle shapes of the Dreel ships closed on the fleet from all sides in a flash; they were ready. The two Zindar Nullifiers were deployed back to back; each could sweep one hundred eighty degrees. The balance of the Com force floated between the two projectors.
The Com fleet waited. Hoped. At the speed of the Dreel fighters, human control was out of the question—computers alone could manage the necessary nanosecond response time. The crews could only monitor their screens while the Dreel closed, then suffer the jolts and unexpected accelerations as the automated defenses took over; the projector crews experienced pulsed vibrations as very short bursts of Zinder feedback were used.
Then the Dreel just weren't there any more. Not only did they vanish suddenly, but so did all other matter within the disks' foci. Light, even gravity vanished, annihilated; briefly a great hole opened around the task force, one in which absolutely nothing, not even a hard vacuum, existed. A scientist checked his instruments, frowned. "That shouldn't have happened. The device was to annihilate matter, not energy."
Scientists fell to, trying to locate the flaw. The military didn't care; their forces were committed and the thing worked. The task force accelerated and headed for the known command center of the Dreel. Meanwhile Dreel counterattacks not only continued, their intensity increased. As yet the Dreel had no idea of the danger they faced, could not understand what was involved.
The unwanted total annihilation was observed dozens of times before the science monitors had doped the problem out: Their relatively puny computers were unable to discriminate properly between matter and energy, and the violet ray was not fully controlled. The device had been designed for transmutation and re-creation by Zinder, not as disintegration weapon. Without the supercomputer the carrier was wild; it nullified everything it struck. Everything.
"We're tearing a hole in the fabric of space-time itself!" one of the scientists exclaimed. "Thanks to the pulsed field we've been able to let things repair themselves—but sustained nullification on a huge scale might be beyond nature's ability to counteract!"
"The Markovian brain might not be able to handle such a huge gap," another agreed. "The rip might be impossible to close!"
They rushed to communicators to warn the military leaders who made the decisions, but the military's response was an unexpected one. "We have lost almost a third of the Com; we face certain destruction. This is the only effective, deployable weapon you have managed to produce. While it is true that we might condemn ourselves by using it, we most certainly will condemn ourselves by not using it. We go on!"
As its forces simply winked out of existence, the Dreel Set did what any intelligent beings would do. They started a retreat, withdrawing as quickly as possible. For the bulk of their forces this was simple because they were faster than anything the Com could muster. But for the mother ship, an artificial planetoid over ten thousand kilometers in diameter, such flight was not possible. While the mother ship could attain the speeds required, powering up and the preparations necessary to prevent killing all aboard would take perhaps three days. In its present shape the mother ship was not as fast as the Com ships pursuing it.
Due to the limitations of their power sources, the Zinder Nullifiers had an effective range of under one light-year; they had closed to within a parsec of their quarry when it started to move.
The Dreel knew they could not outdistance the Nullifiers, but those aboard the task force did not.
"Turn the forward disk on and keep it on, aimed at the Dreel mother ship, unless needed for defense," ordered the military men; the military computers agreed that it was the only thing to do.
A hole opened before the Com task force, a hole in space-time. Not having enough experience to appreciate the effect of the Nullifiers, the fleet officers suddenly discovered that they could no longer see their quarry on the other side of the hole. Even light was destroyed—and they were moving into the very hole they had created!
Scientists all over the task force held their breath.
Something winked, momentarily producing an effect like a photographic negative, then there was nothing, not even Nullifiers.
The hole, though, didn't stop; it expanded in all directions, devouring everything in its path. The Dreel mother ship was caught when the hole was barely a light-year wide; it devoured two stars and their attendant planetary systems within five days. Andit kept growing. And at its center was nothing.