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Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers
By
Harry Harrison
v1.0 Initial release - Kronos
v1.1 Removed extra linebreaks resulting in 1 line per paragraph, added blank line between paragraphs
Harry Harrison was born in Stamford, Connecticut in 1925 and lived in New York City until 1943,
when he joined the United States Army. He was a machine-gun instructor during the war, but returned to
his art studies after leaving the army. A career first as a commercial illustrator and later as art director and
editor for various picture, news, and fiction magazines fitted him only for a lifetime residence in New
York, so he changed it for the freelance writer's precarious existence and moved his family to Cuautla,
Mexico. Since then he has lived in Kent, Camden, Italy, Denmark, Spain and Surrey; he has now
returned to his native land, but he has not ceased to wander. He rationalizes this continual change of
residence as essential research, when in reality it is an incurable case of wanderlust that enables him to
indulge all his enthusiasms: travel, skiing, practising Esperanto, and making an annual pilgrimage to the
Easter Congress of the British Science Fiction Association.
1
JEST 89,000 VOLTS
"Come on, Jerry," Chuck called out cheerfully from inside the rude shed that the two chums had fixed
up as a simple laboratory. "The old particle accelerator is fired up and rarin' to go!"
"I'm fired up and rarin' to go too," Jerry whispered into the delicate rose ear of lovely Sally
Goodfellow, his lips smacking their way along her jaw towards her lips, his insidious hands stealthily
encircling her waist.
"Silly!" Sally giggled and wriggled free of his powerful, yet tender embrace with a solid blow of the
heel of her hand against his chin. "You know that I like Chuck just as much as I like you." Then, with a
saucy toss of her shoulder-length locks she was gone, and Jerry looked after her longingly, fingering his
bruised jaw.
"Come on, Jerry, the accumulators are crackling with barely restrained power," Chuck shouted.
"Here I come."
Jerry entered the shed and closed and locked the door carefully behind him, for there were discoveries
and yetunpatented inventions here that would set the largest corporations in the land to licking their lips. It
just so happened that these two young men, still students at a secluded State College in drowsy
Pleasantville, had two of the keenest minds in the country, perhaps the entire world. Tall, dark-haired,
broad-shouldered Jerry Courteney, handsome as a Greek god with a whimsical smile forever playing
about his lips, would never be taken for the topnotch engineer that he was, the man who walked off with
every medal and every award in every field that he chose to study. He looked less like a scholar than the
rugged frontiersman he really was, for he had been born up on the far northern border of our country, on
a homesteaded ranch in Alaska north of the Arctic Circle. In that rough environment he had grown up
with his four strapping brothers and strapping father, who strapped them all quite well when they got out
of line, as high-spirited boys ever will. The others were all still there, hewing a precarious living from the
virgin wilderness, but much as he loved the icy silences and whispering trees, Jerry had been bitten by the
bug of knowledge, just as his arms were bitten by the ravenous mosquitoes so his skin was tougher than
shoe leather, and had made his way from school to school, scholarship to scholarship until he reached
State College.
Chuck van Chider, no less of a genius, had had a far easier time of it. A blond giant of man with arms
as thick as a strong man's legs, he was the heart and spirit of the State Stegasauri, the championship
football team, the man who could open a hole in any line, who could carry the ball through any number of
grappling foe. When he remembered to. Twice during the last season he had stopped stock still with the
game surging around him as a solution to a complicated mathematical problem suddenly presented itself
to him. He went on to win these games, so his teammates never minded the blank moments, and he was
also the heir to the van Chider millions which also did not make him any enemies. Born with a platinum
spoon in his mouth, his father had prospected a platinum mine on the very spot where the Pleasantville
Mental Hospital now stood; he had never known want. Before the mine had played out, the shrewd
Chester van Chider had sold out and used the money to buy the tiny cheese works outside of town. By
the addition of inert ingredients and deliquescing agents to the sturdy cheese he had built a world wide
market for Van Chider Cheddar - and a fortune for himself. Though discontented radicals from the
lunatic fringe often said his cheese tasted like rancid sealing wax, the public at large loved it, mostly for its
deliquescing agents which absorbed water from the atmosphere so that after a few days, if you didn't eat
fast enough, you had more cheese than you started with. Chester van Chider was a shrewd businessman,
unlike the greedy operators who bought his platinum mine only to have it play out a few weeks later, this
blow being so great that most of them ended up in the aforementioned looney bin built on the minesite.
The keen business mind of the father was reflected in the mathematical genius of the son.
In some ways as different as night and day, blond and dark-haired, wiry and stocky, the two friends
were very much alike inside. They had strong hearts and rugged digestions - and minds that were as keen
as any that could be found. All around them, in the cluttered laboratory that had once been a simple shed,
lay the fruits of their mutual genius. A tossed-aside bit of breadboard circuitry that would one day
revolutionize long-line transmission of electricity, a bit of scribbled paper that elaborated a simple
equation for squaring the circle. These were the playthings of their ever-curious minds - and their latest
plaything now filled the room and hummed with life. A massive, hulking, 89,000-volt particle accelerator
that they had put together from surplus electromagnets and a rusty water boiler. High-density batteries of
their own invention brimmed full of electricity, and all that was required now was to throw the great gang
switch to send the charged particles smashing into the target. "Put the rubidium on the target area, will
you?" Chuck called out, busily at work adjusting a meter, his thick, strong fingers as delicate as those of a
master watchmaker at the precise job.
"Right on," Jerry answered and reached for the sample of the rare metal they were bombarding - but
seized instead a piece of Van Chider Cheddar from the large wheel they always kept nearby. It was a
moment of youthful madness, a harmless jest brought on perhaps by the stillwarm memory of those
precious lips against which his had so recently rested. Filled with the joy of life, he prized the damp piece
of cheese free and slapped it onto the chamber and sealed and evacuated it.
"Stand clear," Chuck shouted. "There she blows!" With a mighty crackling the batteries discharged
completely, and the sharp smell of ozone filled the air. Visible only as a sudden fine beam of purple Ught,
the particles struck the target and vanished.
"Experiment eighty-three," Chuck said, licking a pencil and making a note on the chart. The clamps
pulled free and the cover came away and he looked in at the target and his eyes bulged and the pencil fell
from his limp fingers. "I'll be double gosh-darned!" he whispered. Jerry could contain himself no longer
but burst out laughing at his friend's astonishment "Just a joke," he gasped through the laughter. "I put
some cheese in place of the rubidium."
"This is cheese?" Chuck asked, and withdrew a spherical black lump from the target area.
This time it was Jerry's turn to gape and gasp, and Chuck enjoyed a good chuckle at his friend's
discomfiture. But the fun once over, they turned their attention to the sudden mystery.
"It was cheese before it was bombarded," Jerry said, suddenly serious, looking at the shiny black
pellet through a strong lens.
"There are a number of unusual chemicals in my father's cheese. Somehow they united under the
bombardment to form this new compound, once the large quantities of hydrogen and oxygen had been
freed from the water. What can it be?"
"We can find out easily enough - but I have just had an idea. Take a vacuum tube. . . ."
"Of course, I had the same obvious idea. Put this new substance in place of the cathode and hook it
up and see what kind of signal it produces."
"Exactly my idea." Jerry smiled. "But we need a name for this substance."
"I think cheddite fills the bill."
"Bang on!"
They cracked the glass casing of a hulking PF167 power tube and put the mysterious fragment of
cheddite in place of the cathode, Jerry deftly wiring it into the circuit while Chuck took a glass rod and
quickly blew a new envelope for the tube. A few moments more sufficed to wire the tube into a
breadboarded amplifier circuit and to switch the power on.
"Give it some more juice," Jerry said, frowning at the meters hooked up to the output of the circuit.
"She's taking all we have now," Chuck answered, spinning the great theostat to its final stop.
"Well, then there's something mighty fishy here. Look. The current is pouring into the circuit - but it is
not coming out! Not a needle has flickered from the stops. Where is all that energy going?"
Chuck scratched his wide jaw in puzzlement. "It's not coming out as volts or ohms or watts, that is for
sure. So it must be radiant energy of a different kind. Let's hook up a hunk of aerial to that output and
see what kind of signal it is putting out."
A handy metal coat hanger served that function well and was wired into the circuit while test
instruments were set up around it.
"I'll give it just a millivolt first," Jerry said as he threw the switch.
What happened next was as soundless as it was shocking. The moment the current went into the
circuit something was broadcast from the coat hanger-aerial, because a coat-hanger-shaped chunk of
wall instantly vanished. It happened soundlessly and in a fraction of a second of time. Jerry hurled off the
current, and they rushed to the wall. Through the new opening they could see the board fence that circled
the backyard - and the same strange force had also taken a coat-hanger-shaped section from the fence
as well.
"And spreading," Chuck mused. "That hole in the fence is two or three times as big as the first
opening."
"Not only that," Jerry said, squinting along the edge of the hole. "If you look, you'll see a stub of a mast
next door where the Grays' new color TV aerial used to be. And, let me think for a second, yes, I'm
right. That missing section of fence is where the landlady's cat sleeps in the afternoon. And he was
sleeping there when I came in."
"This will take some thinking out," Chuck said as they hammered boards over the opening in the wall
"We had better keep it to ourselves for a while. I'll send an anonymous check to the Grays for their
aerial."
"We better think about an anonymous cat for my landlady as well."
A sudden knocking on the door startled them both, and they exchanged glances, for it was the
landlady calling to them. Mrs. Hosenpefer was a good woman, though advanced in years, a widow who
had run her home as a boardinghouse ever since her husband, a switchman on the railroad, had met a
tragic end under a boxcar that his advancing deafness had prevented hearing approach. Somewhat guiltily
the two young men opened the door to face the white-haired widow wringing her hands with despair.
"I don't know what to do," she wailed, "and I know I shouldn't bother you out here, but something
terrible has happened. My cat" - both listeners recoiled at the word "has been stolen. Poor Max, who
would do that to a sweet harmless animal like that?"
"Just what do you mean 'stolen'?" Jerry asked, fighting desperately to keep the tension out of his voice.
"I can't imagine why, some people will do awful things these days, it must be the drugs. Here I thought
my Max was asleep on the fence out there" - the two listening men stirred ever so slightly at the words -
"but he wasn't. Kidnapped. I just had a phone call from the sheriff in Clarktown that somebody had
thrown Max through a window or something right into the middle of the Unreformed Baptist choir
practice. Max was very angry and scratched the soloist. They caught him and called me because of the
tag on his collar."
"This call came through now?" Jerry asked, innocently.
"Not a minute ago. I rushed right out here to ask for help."
"And Clarktown is eighty miles away," Chuck said, and the chums exchanged pregnant, significant
glances.
"I know, an awful distance. How can I get my darling Max back?"
"Now don't you worry an instant," Jerry said, gently ushering the bereaved woman out. "We'll drive
right over and get Max. It's in the bag." The closing door shut off her cries of gratitude, and the
experimenters faced each other.
"Eighty miles!" Chuck shouted.
"Instantaneous transmission!"
"We've done it!"
"Done what?"
"I don't know - but whatever it is, I feel it is a great step forward for mankind!"
2
A SHOCKING DISCOVERY
"We'll just have to go back to the old drawing board" Chuck sighed gloomily, looking at the large hole
in the ground where the boulder had been and at the larger hole in the nearby hillside. "We just can't
control the cheddite projector no matter how hard we try."
"Let me have one more go," Jerry muttered as he probed the depths of the device with a long-shanked
screwdriver. For security's sake they had built their invention into a small portable Japanese television set,
and so cunningly contrived the inner wiring that it still functioned as a TV as well. Jerry finished his
adjustment and switched the set on. There was a quick glimpse of a vampire sinking his fangs into a girl's
fair neck before a secret button activated the cheddite projector. The TV screen now displayed a
complex wave form which changed shape as further adjustments were made.
"I think this is it." Jerry grinned as he sighted along the aerial. "I'm going to focus on that stick and
move it over by the ridge there. Here goes."
There was no sound or visible radiation from the device, but the cheddite force sprang out, unseen yet
irresistible. The stick did not move. However, a great rock a hundred yards away disappeared in a
fraction of a second and reappeared over the lake behind them. The sudden tumultuous splashing was
followed instantly by a wave of water that washed around their ankles.
"Our problem is control." Chuck grimaced unhappily, wiping off the TV set.

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