Cast of Characters
ROD CANTRELL
inventor of the space-drive unit and involuntary captain of the Stellaris.
KIT BOWEN
Rod's fiancee and helpmate.
JOE
An expert electrician, trapped like Rod and Kit aboard the Stellaris.
COLONY LEADER
Member of an alien species whose survivors are found by Rod.
Also — other artisans and girl biologists trapped on Stellaris, bulbuous headed pyramid-people with attentuated limbs and the little, round folk of the planet of the dead cities.
The Black Galaxy
By MURRAY LEINST ER
GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION
NOVEL No. 20
Galaxy Publishing Corp.
421 Hudson St., New York 14, N. Y.
CxALAXY Science Fiction Novels,
selected by the editors of GALAXY
Science Fiction Magazine, are the
choice of science fiction novels both original and reprint
GALAXY Science Fiction Novel No. 20 35c a copy. Subscription: Six Novels $2.00
The
characters, the location, and the incidents in this book are entirely the
product of the author's imagination and have no relation to any person or event
in real life.
Copyright 1949 by Better Publications, Inc.
Reprinted 1954 by arrangement with the Author
printed
in the united states of america by
the GUINN COMPANY, INC
new
york 14, n. y.
Grounded!
T |
HE
Chairman of the Space Project Committee was very polite. But he was a
politician and Rod Cantrell had been a soldier and was a very famous man and
all politicians know that soldiers and other practical men can be most obstinate
when politics shows clearly what should be done.
"Permit me to congratulate you," the Chairman said blandly,
"on your promotion."
"On being kicked upstairs?" asked Rod drily. "I'm not
pleased. It looks to me—since that*s what I came to protest about—that I'm
promoted to something like a dummy job so that the work I want to do and the
decisions I need to make will be made by people who think more of elections
than of really important things."
The Chairman of the Space Committee laughed
appreciatively. But he made a mental black mark. This man would not be
amenable to political pressure. Perhaps he had better be a little more thoroughly deprived of authority—and given more prestige to
make up for it
"Oh, come, cornel" he said indulgently. "What have you to
complain of? The ship you're building has certainly all the funds anyone could
need!"
"I think," Rod said flatly, "that we should postpone any
attempt at interplanetary travel until we get some interplanetary
weapons." As the Chairman beamed at him he went on doggedly.
"I designed the drive-units for the ship
we're building, for the one now under construction. I made the first
interplanetary flights—the only ones made to date. But I urge the postponement
of exploration until we have some defense. The weapons we have now would be useless
against an enemy with spaceships."
The Chairman beamed on and offered Rod a
cigar. Rod curtly refused it
"Yet"
mused the Chairman amiably, "you did not encounter any other space-ships
in your three interplanetary flights, you cannot name possible enemies and you
have not any real evidence that this—ah—hypothetical enemy you speak of has
weapons superior to our own. After all, we have a gift for destruction
ourselves! And remember, the idea of space-conquest has caught the imagination
of the public!"
Rod set his jaws. He was prepared to be made
ridiculous if he could bring about some measure of defense
against the dangers he foresaw. But a politician could not be expected to
believe anything dangerous if it brought in votes. And the proven possibility
of travel, not only to other planets but to the stars, had roused enormous
popular enthusiasm.
"There were Martians, once," said
Rod. "There aren't anymore. They had a
civilization that in some ways was higher than ours. You've seen the proofs of
that. And they were wiped out They simply vanished
leaving their cities to fall in ruins behind them."
"You
assume that your—ah—hypothetical space-travellers
destroyed them?"
"I
do," said Rod. He added with some irony, "You must remember that I
saw the dead Martian cities with the least stray possession left in place and
what I believe were the remains of the Martians lying where they dropped. And
I saw that pyramid on Calypso, which surely no men made. It was made by the
race I'm talking about which I haven't seen, which I can't name or describe,
but which made it to lure the first man to see it into sending them a signal
that space-travel had been achieved on Earth."
"Yet
you did not even photograph it," said the Chairman, tolerantly. "And
you insist that we devote research and money to weapons—when the world is very
weary of weapons and of
War—instead
of upon space-travel, which has filled humanity with optimism it has never knov/n before! My dear sir, it would be political
suicide!"
"The point is," said Rod bitterly,
"that not to do it may be physical suicide!"
"Now, now." The Chairman beamed cordially. "I shall
confer with the rest of the Committee. You have just had a promotion and perhaps we can manage another. We are fully aware of your
services in the past and you are surely the only interplanetary voyager, so you
cannot be contradicted. But you ask the making of a very unpopular decision!
Suppose we raise you another step in rank?"
Rod stood up, rather pale.
"I'm
not trying blackmail," he said bitterly. "I'm trying to drive some
sense into your head! There are more important things than winning elections,
and staying alive is one of them! I can resign my commission and speak publicly
of what I fear."
The Chairman's smile
remained, though he spoke acidly.
"I
am afraid the popular impression would be that you wish to prevent further
space-voyages, to keep the credit of being the only man who had ever crossed
space. I am sure that—ah— other officers who are your equals in rank would look
at it that way. I shall discuss the matter with my Committee. Meanwhile you
are, of course, under regulation obligations not to make public statements
without official clearance. We will see about another promotion for you."
He
bowed Rod out, beaming at him benevolently. And Rod was sick with apprehension.
He'd wanted to have the first real spaceship capable of putting up a fight. He believed it might need to fight. But anyhow he was still in
command of the construction of the space-ship now building and he'd command it
when it took off from Earth.
Maybe he could find more conclusive proof of
the peril he believed in. Most likely, indeed, on the Moon.
The central peak of Tycho would be the logical place
to look for proof. If he could show a group of scientists
that proof. . . . But as it turned out he wasn't to be allowed to do
anything so sensible.
Two
days later he had his orders. He had a promotion.
And all real authority was taken from him. He was again kicked upstairs, to a
desk, and he was transferred to another branch of the service. He received the
warmest possible thanks for the value of his contributions to the project from
which he was now relieved. He went sick all over. And when he told Kit Bowen
about it he could have wept with impotent fury. She looked at him indignantly.
"'It's not fair!" she cried.
"'You designed the ship, Rod, and you're the only one who will really know
how to run it, anyway, and—and—"
Rod
tried to grin at her, but he couldn't. It was too important Much more important
than his own feelings in the matter.
But
he said somehow through stiff lips, "I'll show my successor everything I
know. Kit And I'll try to make him believe tn what I'm worried about"
Kit
stamped her feet. Then she turned away to keep him from seeing that she wanted
to cry. But she didn't really understand the gone feeling inside of Rod at
that.
They
stood beside the hulk of the Stellaris, which was just two-thirds completed. The ship
was a hundred-odd feet long and forty-some through. It was a space-ship—the
first vessel ever built on Earth to navigate the regions between the stars. Rod
Cantrell had designed it, after making the first human interplanetary flights
in a modified captured weapon taken from the rebels in the war of the Total
State against the Earth Government.
He'd
seen the possibility of a space-drive in a device that had been created only for mass murder and the drive he'd
worked out was no makeshift calling for centuries of development before men
could aspire to the stars. His first flight in the toy-sized altered weapon
took him to the Moon with absolute ease and safety.
His second was equally safe and precise and
it took him to Mars. He brought back photographs and artifacts for proof. And
the third flight, aimed at a more distant objective to check the physical
constants governing the space-drive, had reached Calypso, the largest of
Jupiter's moons.
That makeshift craft, though, could only make
flights as stunts.
The Stellar is had been begun to carry an adequate crew of
scientists for the study, first of Sol's other planets, ultimately for roaming
the stars so that human colonies could begin to spread throughout the Galaxy.
Rod Cantrell had been given charge of the ship's construction, and he had been
promised her command.
But
now he'd been handed orders from the Space Project Commission which dashed all
his hopes. He was not only relieved of the duty of supervising the Stellaris? construction but was bluntly informed that he would not even be a member of her crew when she left Earth—because of his wild tale of an
inimical race, possessing space-ships, which would threaten the peace of Earth.
Kit
said, gulping, "It's not fair, Rod! It's stupid! It's unjust! You
deserve—"
"That doesn't matter," said Rod.
"What does matter is what
can happen. This decision is on account of my report on that
pyramid on Calypso." v
"But
you did the right thing!" insisted the girl. "There wasn't anything
else to do!"
"That
was my opinion," said Rod, "but the Commission doesn't agree. I
think they feel that I consider myself too famous and that I'd like to stop
space-travel so I'd stay the only man who ever achieved it."
"Nonsense!"
scoffed Kit
"They've suspected that report from the
beginning," Rod added. "They've never allowed any reference to the
pyramid to be published. They said it would cause public alarm. Of course, it
would imperil their jobs.
"Their
places were created to encourage space exploration. If they discouraged it,
instead, the Commission will be scrapped and they'll have no salaries. I hate
to think of so great a risk being run just so some political appointees can
stay on salary."
Kit Bowen made a scornful sound. She wasn't exactly engaged to Rod, because engagements
were no longer considered matters that existed formally to be announced. But
they had planned to marry. Rod knew now that it had become doubtful. He could
have played it more or less safe, and guided a scientific expedition in the Stellaris in search of proof of what he knew.
But
he'd tried it the right way, with full reports and an effort to throw the
Committee behind research for defense. As a result, he was kicked upstairs.
He'd never have another chance. And to be a permanent desk-officer—Kit wouldn't care, but he would.
Riveters
pounded on the Stellaris metal skin like monster woodpeckers hunting giant grubs. They were
putting on the flotation-bulges, designed to make her float merrily, even if
she landed in a sea of liquid ammonia.
The
air-lock construction-doors of the ship opened. Electricians came out and
headed for the commissary for lunch. Two girls, no doubt assistants in biology
working on the air-purifying plant, also came out of the lock, chattering, and
went briskly to the same place.
The
air-system for the ship was already installed and was being tested by being run
to purify the air used by workmen on the inside of the already-sealed hull. The
ship's corridors were still bare metal though and it would be many weeks yet before
the living quarters were fitted out, the computers and astrogation
instruments put in, even the first of the ship's stores accumulated.
But
the field-generators and tractor and pressor beams
were in and had already been tried out The ship would
positively go anywhere in the galaxy that her crew demanded, though she was the
first Earth-ship ever built for space-travel. Only Rod knew that she wasn't the
first space-ship. There were others.
The
thing was that the crews of the other ships, roaming among the stars, weren't
human crews and they wouldn't welcome human competition.
He'd learned that from a silvery-metal
pyramid, some thirty feet of seamless stuff on every side. It was out on
Calypso, on the very peak of the highest and most singular of the mountains of
that sub-satellite. It had not been built on Calypso and certainly men hadn't
made it but the creatures who had made it knew that men existed.
There
were bas-reliefs of human forms upon its brightly-gleaming metal sides and
there were two human-size metal doors that could obviously be opened by simply
turning the handles of two human-sized locks. Its location was one that would
certainly be visited by any human explorer of Calypso, if only so that he could
leave a record of his visit there for later voyagers to find. And that so-human
pyramid, suggesting earlier visitors still, would almost irresistably
impel the first man to reach Calypso to turn the door-handles and go in.
But
Rod Cantrell hadn't done that Perhaps because of war experience, perhaps
because he didn't like the artwork. He cut into the structure with a thermite torch, leaving the doors alone. He found it packed
with machinery which surely wasn't of human design, and he struggled to
understand it
In
the end he found a power-storage unit that was far and away beyond anything of
human manufacture. He cut the power-leads and traced connections. And then he
caused the
doors to open. In opening they swung contacts and controls and he saw that
they'd have sent the power—some hundreds of millions of kilowatts —in a mighty
surge of energy through a device he didn't begin to understand but which was
obviously some sort of radiation-generator.
And
instantly thereafter the whole pyramid and its machines began to smoke and were
glowing faintly by the time he got out of it It
melted itself and dissolved in a pool of melted metal—which exploded when the
cut-off power-unit blew. So that he had nothing but a verbal description to
offer with his report —and he wasn't quite believed.
CHAPTER TWO
Take Off
N |
OW
he stood beside the incomplete hulk of the Stellaria with the orders that ended his career in his hand. "It still seems
to me that I did the right thing," Rod said bitterly. "I guessed it
as a sort of booby-trap. It was a gadget to signal somebody, somewhere, when
men climbed up to the point of achieving space-travell
And who'd want to be warned when we reached that
stage? Not friends certainly! If they'd been friendly they'd have helped!"
"Of
course they would!" said Kit with conviction. "I kept that signal
from being sent*" said Rod. "If I'd kept my mouth shut I'd have commanded the Stellaria and we'd have found another one—there's probably another on the central
peak in Tycho's crater on the Moon—and I could have
made the Commission see it
"But
I had to tell about it believing my word would be taken. So now somebody else
will take the Stellaria out and if 11 be pretty odd if the signal doesn't get sent
off when he finds another pyramid. And then what'U happen? What would we do if we'd been traveling among the
stars for ages and found a new, upstart race getting ready to compete with us?
And a rather pugnacious race, at that? We'd smack them down and fast!"
Kit
said, agreeing fully, "If we found them before they'd reached that point
we'd try to make friends with them."
"Whoever
built the pyramid found us," said Rod, drearily. "Maybe
a few thousand years ago. Maybe at the time they knocked off the
Martians. They didn't bother exterminating ua then.
We weren't worth the trouble, though the Martians were."
He
shrugged his shoulders hopelessly. "Anyhow I've got my orders. Somebody'll come to take over from me within hours. I'm
going to take a last look over the ship and then clear my desk and get ready to
leave. Want to come with me?"
Wordlessly
she pressed his arm. They went together to the air-lock. Rod Cantrell composed
his face so that nobody could guess his inner feelings. The lock-doors opened
and they entered.
Immediately there was the oddly pleasant
smell of growing things which came from the air-purifying set-up. It was partly
experimental still, but it demonstrably worked. The air in the ship had been
kept fresh and breathable for more than six weeks, despite the men who worked
inside the hull, by specially-bred plant life kept in hydroponic tanks.
There
were chemical purifiers in reserve of course but normally the ship's air would
be restored to normal as the air of Earth is kept sweet—by plants. There was
even a section of the air-room in which food-plants were being tried out for
the same purpose, turning out foodstuffs as a byproduct of the purification of the ship's atmosphere.
In
hydroponic tanks, vegetables grew with amazing luxuriance. The Stellaris would not be quite self-sustaining but there should be at least
occasional meals of dewy-fresh vegetables even when the ship was on the far
side of Orion.
Rod Cantrell and Kit stepped into the
unfinished interior of the ship. The smells of work were noticeable, though
work had stopped for the lunch-hour. Rod looked lonesomely
about In all probability, he would never set foot in
the Stellaria again.
The
smell of vegetation was strong and pleasant but there was the smell of paint
too and the curious odor of heated metal cooling off—all
the aromas of uncompleted construction. In a room designed for storage four painters ate their lunch com-panionably from lunch-boxes, rather than bother to leave
the ■hip. An electrician smoked restfully beside his tools.
They went into the engine-room, in which
there would be no single massively-moving part. A tiny isotopic generator made
its humming noise. It was built around a block of artificially radioactive
material which gave off electrons alone, with no neutrons or mesons or gamma
rays. It yielded utterly safe power and when its total output was not needed
for the ship's purposes, the excess free electrons were absorbed in another
artificial isotope, which, in absorbing them, become converted into the parent
substance.
A
fuel-supply for years of operation thus had necessarily been built into the
ship when it was made.
The
field-generators, too, were all complete. They had been tested with the Stellaris safely anchored at bow and stern with tractor-beams. Rod regarded the
generators hungrily. He'd designed them and they had features of which he was
very proud. But now he'd never be able to see for himself how his designs stood
up under service conditions.
"You
know how the force-fields work," he said almost wistfully to Kit "In
theory there are an indefinite number of dimensions, therefore an indefinite
number of—I suppose you'd call them universes—in parallel. Our universe hangs
together because all its parts attract each other magnetically and there are
gravitational linkages all through space.
"There's
an incredibly complex network of electrostatic stresses by which even island
universes attract each other. So our universe is stable. But if all the forces
that link an object to our cosmos—the things that tie it in—are cut it falls
out of the universe we know.
"It goes apparently into a dark
universe, where there seem to be no stars. Maybe it's a dead universe where the
process of entropy is complete, where all the energy of the system has run
down. But we don't know yet."
Kit
nodded wisely. In the late rebellion of the Total State the city of Pittsburgh
had vanished between two heart-beats with some millions of human beings.
Washington had been slated to go next and Rod Cantrell had been duped—or so it
was thought by the war lords of the Total State—into operating the weapon which
would destroy it
But he'd understood their weapon a little too
well and it had
been turned terribly against them by his understanding. Now
the Earth Government ruled undisputed again—and the Earth
Government had taken from Rod his chance to go with the
Stellaris to the void between the stars. Because he'd
made a
report that nobody wanted
to believe.....................
"These
generators," said Rod wistfully, "make a field close about the Stellaris which cuts every natural link between the ship and the million-billion
suns of our universe. Electrostatic stresses can't go through that field.
Gravitation doesn't penetrate. Magnetic lines of force are stopped. So the ship
leaves our universe. As Pittsburgh did. Only—we leave
one link of our own making.
"We leave a tractor-beam in existence
pulling the ship toward one spot. A tractor-beam can penetrate the field that
cuts off everything else. And the ship is drawn to the one spot the
tractor-beam is focussed on, although it moves in a
parallel universe and isn't in our cosmos at all. When it stops at the object
the beam is pulling we cut off the force-fields and apparently /all back into
our own space. But we've traveled!"
Kit nodded again. She knew all this of course
but Rod was heartbroken and it helped him to talk.
"And,"
he said wistfully as he led the way out of the engine-room, "a pressor-beam works the same way. We can push away from a
place we want to start from, instead of waiting for a tractor to reach out a
few light-years to our destination."
He
sounded almost enthusiastic as he went along the straight-line corridor between
the engine-room and the control-cabin— as yet practically empty of controls.
"My
trip to Calypso proved," he added, "the mass-inertia ratio in the
dark universe I actually traveled in, isn't the same as in our universe. The
speed of light is higher—much higher. The time I took to get to Mars suggested
it and the trip to Calypso proved that the constants of the two spaces are
different I reached Calypso through the dark universe faster than light could
make the trip through ours!"
Then he stopped. He'd reached the
control-room from which he'd expected to direct the Stellaris. There was the big instrument-board with practically none of the
intended instruments set into place. The switches that had been installed were
taped to the "off" position, to avoid accident They'd
been used just once, when the force-field generators were tried out and the
ship — kept from traveling by anchoring tractor-beams holding her fast—had gone
into the dark universe for minutes.
"But,"
said Rod, after an instant, "that's that."
He
stood grimly in the ship he was now forbidden to command.
Then,
just as he turned to lead Kit outside again, there came a sudden sharp crackling sound from somewhere in the ship. It had the
violent harsh timbre of an electric arc. Somebody shouted frantically. By sheer
instinct Rod Cantrell plunged toward the scene of emergency.
But
he didn't get there. Suddenly he seemed to be falling endlessly, horribly,
nightmarishly, with no weight and no grip on anything. There were vision-ports'
in the control-room, intended to permit a view of a landscape or of the stars.
As the crackling roar grew thunderous those vision-ports turned red, then
orange, then flashed through the spectrum to violet and beyond.
The vision-ports became filled with utter
blackness and on the
instant the control-room
was as dark as any cave on Earth and Rod and Kit seemed to be hurtling blindly
through sheer opacity. Kit uttered a strangled cry. She had left the floor
when weight vanished. She had the hysterical sensation of an increasing,
breathtaking dive.
There were screamings
somewhere. There was a strange metallic smell of vaporized cable. There was a
pungent reek of ozone. The roaring seemed to grow yet louder and the
panic-stricken cries grew with it There came the stench of burned insulation
and then of sooty smoke.
Kit cried out again, "Rod!"
He
said in a coldly savage voice. "Steady! You're not falling. The fields
went on from a short-circuit somewhere in the ship. Now the ship's on fire and
we're in the dark universe—traveling.
Steady!"
A
little flicker of light—flame—appeared in the corridor leading to the
engine-room. There was enough light to show Rod, floating helplessly in the
air, inches only from a featureless metal wall. Kit drifted yards
from any solidity, her eyes wide and filled with fear.
But
the light helped. Rod twisted himself and kicked. He went
tumbling—head-over-heels away from the wall—to the floor, where he grasped the
edge of the incomplete control-panel. He swung himself about The
light flickered again, and he leaped, diving through weightlessness for the
corridor.
He
went soaring into it and a mushrooming
mass of yellow incandescence licked out of it Kit screamed. But the flame died
away a little as he plunged into it flared out again only when he was almost
through, so that it barely singed him. He went plunging on into the
engine-room.
Unable
to stop, he floated until his out-stretched arms cushioned his impact against
the far wall. He swung about again and soared a second time—this time for the
humming small isotopic generator which supplied the electric current for all
the ship.
He
reached it. He held fast—it was extraordinary hard to hold fast with no weight
to help—and savagely cranked off the manual switch which had kept the unit
inert during shipment. The roaring of the arc died instantly. There was only
an ominous booming noise as paint and insulation and construction-stores heated
by the arc continued to burn. But even that tended to die down without the arc
to keep the flame supplied with vaporized fuel.
Then
Rod looked at the ports in the wall of the engine-room, and cold sweat came out
all over him. The ship was incomplete. It was unequipped. It had no stores at
all. But it had taken off from earth. There were stars in view out the
vision-ports, now that the force-field had cut off and the ship was back in
normal space. But it wasn't on Earth. It wasn't on any planet
And there wasn't any sunlight shining in any
of the ports. There weren't—this made Rod's throat go dry when he threw himself
across the dark vacancy of the engine-room to one port after another and stared
out—there weren't even any familiar constellations. The Stellarts had had a speed and kinetic energy of its own by virtue of the shared
motion of the Earth on its axis and around the sun, and the other motion of the
solar system as a whole.
It
had gone into the dark universe where the constants of mass and inertia were
strange and still unexplored. There was not even a bright yellow star anywhere
in the heavens which might be Earth's sun at a greater distance than usual. The
Steliaris was somewhere among the stars. Earth and its sun could be anywhere, in any direction, at
almost any distance up to light-millennia away. There was no possible way to telL Even worse—
The ship, in fact, was a derelict. It had
been designed to be driven by the reaction of its tractor and pressor-beams upon solid bodies outside of itself. Now,
apparently, the nearest solid objects were the stars. It would take years for
the beams to reach the nearest and there was no instrument on board by which
the nearest might even be chosen. There were no stores of food, no star-maps, no trained crew—there was no faintest reasonable ground for
hope nor reason for any effort.
But
Kit was on board. So when the flames died down and only a penetrating, noisesome reek of burned paint filled the air, Rod Cantrell
turned on the isotopic dynamo once more and switched on lights throughout the
ship.
Painfully
he began the process of searching the unfinished hulk for unwilling members of
its company, to calm them and sooth them and threaten them in preparation for
labors he had yet to imagine, for purposes he had yet to devise, toward ends he
could not even conceive of. Oddly enough, he did not even think of the alien
race that had been the cause of his uneasiness back on Earth. But here among
the stars was where the greatest danger lay.
CHAPTER THREE
Contact
T |
HAT
danger manifested itself within hours. The short-circuit had been repaired—a
painter had shifted some welding-rods to make room for a comfortable nap during
his lunch-hour, and so had made a contact between two exposed wires from which
take-off leads were to have led current elsewhere.
Lights again burned throughout the ship and
Rod had turned on all pressor-beams in the rather
desperate hope that somewhere within their range there might be some solid
substance to give the ship navigability. Actually the most he hoped for was
something to drive toward or from so that there could be acceleration and the
feel of gravity to hearten the bewildered and frightened people who were the Steliaiis' unwilling crew.
They
were turned on and almost immediately he thought he felt a slight stirring of
the ship. It was too slight to be sure. When he held a coin at arm's length and
let it go, it stayed there in mid-air. If anything had been touched by the
beams it had been lost—had slipped out of them. The nightmarish feeling of
perpetual falling continued. Reason did no good. The sensation was
nerve-racking.
Then,
suddenly, a flash of unbearable light poured in through the vision-ports. It
lasted no longer than a flash-bulb's flare, and was gone again. But Rod dived
for a port and stared out. Instantly he blinked, blinded. As he reached the
glass window opening upon all of space a second flash came.
It was blindingly bright—but it came from a
tiny spot, an infinitesimal spot, no larger than a star-image. A pause, then a
third flash came. It would make the ship's hull glow as if incandescent. And
the third flash was not from the same place as the second.
Rod
was dazed for an instant. He had a flash of hope. Then he knew better. He'd had
the pressor-beams turned on at random. They'd
touched something which had sped on out of the pressor-beam field. Now that something flashed a
search-beam. And there was but one possible source for brief unthinkably-bright
flashes of light which would last only for thousandths of a second.
Only
in space would a light-beam have certain advantages over radar. On Earth radar
penetrates clouds and mist. In space there are no hindrances to vision. If
there were a space-ship somewhere
off there in the void and if It had detected the Stellaria' pressor-beams and dived out of them, it might use
radar to locate the Earth-ship.
It would learn more from a single flash of visual light, yielding a photograph, than any scanning-beam could report in hours. The fact was
wisdom after the event but it told Rod instantly that there was a space-ship yonder. And no space-ship could be friendly.
He
went into frenzied activity. He dived back to the engine-room and swung the pressor-beams in tense and urgent quest Spreading
them wider at first he searched for something for them to react against He
found it He felt the ship stir. He put on more power. The ship surged ahead.
More power still and he felt the floor-plates push against his feet He put on
more power and more and more . . .
In
seconds the Stellaria was thrusting away from something unseen at a full gravity acceleration. In minutes more it was a gravity and a half. Rod worked grimly with a small pressor, hunting for a focus so the beam could be locked to
the object it was to thrust away from.
The acceleration increased. The fan-shaped pressors were pushing against something which came closer
despite the repulsive force of the beams the Stellaria played on it. There was an arrogant confidence in the other space-ship,
which seemed to be testing out the maximum power the Stellaria could exert Sweat came out on Rod's forehead.
Then,
suddenly, the small pressor found a focus and locked and he struggled feverishly against nearly two
gravities to the control-room. Just as he laid his
hands on the force-field switches there was a sudden sickening loss of all but the most minute sensation of weight as
the other ship darted out of the pressor-beam and
came flashing up beside the unwieldy Stellaria.
Rod had one glimpse of it as he flung the
force-field
switches home. It was pyramidal. It blanked out a triangular patch of stars. Rod felt a momentary deathly giddiness —and then the force-fields closed in. The Stellaris1 ports went ebony-black and it was again in the dark universe.
Whatever weapon the enemy ship intended to
use did not follow into the dark cosmos, but the Earth-ship's focussed pressor did not
penetrate its own force-fields and thrust and thrust and thrust—with all the
power Rod dared to put into its coils.
The
hulk went streaking madly through the utter blackness of its private cosmos
for second after second — and nothing happened — and then for minute after
minute, then for hour after hour.
For
a long time Rod stood grimly at the incomplete instrument board, expecting any
instant to feel that deadly giddiness and then death. Some weapon had been used
against the Stellaris and he felt sick and weak and ill.
But
after a long time he went down to the engine-room again and examined the single
small pressor-beam he'd focussed
and locked on the pyramidal ship and its point of focus was very, very far
beyond the point at which it had been set. He could not guess the distance.
There had been no chance to calibrate the controls. But it was very, very, very
far away indeed.
After
twelve hours the pressor could no longer adjust to
the increasing distance. The pyramidal ship went beyond its range. The locked
focus went off and the ship hurtled blindly on through black emptiness.
They
haven't got our force-fields," Rod told Kit, grimly. "There's that
much gained. They couldn't follow us when we vanished. At least we can play
hide-and-seek with them!"
Kit
had heard from him about the momentary glimpse he'd had of the other craft.
"That feeling we had," she said
with a shudder. "I thought
I was dying. So did everybody else."
"We probably were," he said evenly.
"If it had lasted a fraction of a second longer they'd have
caught the ship. They'd have examined our corpses and they'd probably have
reported and had the records searched. They'd know that people of our structure
should have set off a gadget on Calypso — only we didn't I suspect we're not
the only lucky people right now!"
An hour later he said abruptly, "I'm
going to cut the field. That ship is a long way off. First I'm going to set the
pressor-beams at a wide angle as a warning system.
But we ought to do something better. . . ."
He hand-set the beams so that the ship would
be surrounded by a shield of repulsion on every side. Any ship or planet or even meteroite that might be within range when the Stellaris returned to normal space would bring about a repulsion of the ship itself.
Having no detection-instruments, they could
tell of the nearness of a solid object they could not see by the stirring of
the ship itself. Then he threw the switches again, to let the Stellaris drop back into the universe of stars.
A
myriad-myriad suns surrounded them, each so remote that it was but a pin-point
of light Again there was no familiar portion of the galaxy within view. There
was the Milky Way, to be sure, but even that seemed to have changed its aspect.
It was markedly brighter on one side than the other — and Earth is not too far,
on a cosmic scale, from the center of the First Galaxy.
The Stellaris had fled at uncountable multiples of the speed of light while in the
dark universe. It was certainly many thousands of light-years from Earth, with
no possible indication either of its first course or of its second in
departing from it
Rod stayed in normal space for four hours,
and the pressorteams lo!d of no solid object within four light-hours'
distance. Griiiiiy, he went back to the dark universe. The
kinetic energy of the Stellaris' acquired velocity remained.
In
normal space it meant a certain speed in an unknown direction. In the dark un.verse that speed was
multiplied. He kept the ship in blackness for half an hour, browbeating an
electrician meanwhile into Leginning the assembly of
a short-short-wave receiver.
Out
into normal space again — and still no star within view which seemed nearer
than any other. He had a course of action planned out, which was almost
hopeless but not quite. He went back into the dark universe once more.
Six
times within the next twenty-four he came back to normal space. Five times the
Stellaris was utterly alone in the center of mockingly remote stars.
But the sixth time — and it was only chance —
the Stellaris winked into being in normal space and there was a giant yellow sun
perceptibly nearer. It had at least a visible disk and flaring prominences
leaped and curled outward from its sides. More, there were planets. No less
than four were plainly visible and a monster world — snow-covered from pole to pole — swam within naked-eye view from the vis;on-ports. Ke
waited with taut nerves beside the force-field switches.
A
bellowing voice came from somewhere below him in the ship. "No-o-o-o radar!"
That
was the electrician beside his short-short-wave receiver. Only voice signals
could be used in the uncompleted ship because there was no intercommunication
system in being.
Rod waited. The pressor-beams
spread out, out and out at the speed of light. Rod was hollow-eyed and jumpy.
There was a stubble of beard on his chin. He had been
doing four men's work under heavier responsibility than any man or men should
ever be required to accept, because he believed that on the safety or utter
destruction of the Stellaris hung the safety of the human race But
he had no choice.
The voice came again from
below, "No-o-o-o
radar!"
The Stellaris then, was not being scanned. Not yet, anyhow. The ship stirred ever so
slightly. The pressor-beams, fanning out, had reached
the snow-covered planet Rod called orders and the beams were narrowed.
The repulsion was from that planet only.
Unless a spaceship were in exact direct line between
the Stellaris and the planet there was nothing in space that was menacing. The odds
were good. But Rod waited a long half-hour, with the "No-o-o-o radar.'" at regular intervals, before he even began to
relax.
"I guess we're safe for the
moment," he said wearily. "We'll have to take a chance anyhow. Kit we
want a tractor put on that planet yonder — not the near one but the next one in
toward this sun. We'll time it, of course."
Even
then he waited tensely. The invisible, narrowed tractor-beam reached out at a
hundred-and-eighty-two-thousand miles a second. Four minutes — five — then a
perceptible jerk. The planet was in the neighborhood of fifty-five million
miles away but now the ship was being drawn toward it
"Rod,"
said Kit anxiously, "you're terribly tiredl Can't I stand watch for you? It'll be hours and hours before
we get there!"
"It'll
be days," said Rod wearily. "We'd better stay in normal space for
this trip. But I'll fix a gadget If those pyramid
devils can't follow us into" the dark universe we can fool them at
that."
He surrendered the controls to her. He
improvised a spring which would throw on the force-fields and keep them on if the
person on watch should be killed by a weapon like that they had experienced.
"Get
somebody to hold this," he said tiredly. "There's enough pull to give
us the feeling of gravity. And I've got a sort
of idea."
Dead World
H |
E
SAT down to draw plans and make calculations. But within seconds he was asleep.
It was not only the sixty-some hours of unremitting tensity
but the strain of worrying about what might be happening back on Earth that
had worn him out. It would be believed of course that he had taken off in the Stellaris deliberately as an act of resentment at having his command taken away
from him.
And
of course he would be classed as a traitor or murderer or worse and immediately
the Space Project Committee would set to work to duplicate the Stellaris and send it off — undoubtedly without orders to be wary of metal
pyramids. He had to get back to Earth in time to stop that — which was patently
impossible He could not hope to get the Stellaris or Kit back to Earth at alL
He
slept and Kit stood valiantly beside the almost empty control-board. The Stellaris moved on toward the unnamed planet of an unknown sun, its acceleration
giving the effect of weight for its occupants. Word went about the
oddly-assorted ship's company of an approaching landing, and they cheered.
The
girl biologists, in charge of the air purifying plant, brought it back to
proper functioning. The hydroponic vegetables had borne a small crop of
edibles, despite the alternations of gravity with no gravity at all. The crop
was very small but there were not many to eat it. Four painters, two
electricians, three arc-welders and five girls had remained in the ship during
the lunch-hour which seemed so long ago.
Presently
a painter came to the control-room to present a complaint Kit put her finger to
her lips, pointed to Rod and beckoned. She explained the significance of the
spring, whispering, and made Rod as comfortable as she could without waking him. Then she went about the ship,
talking earnestly to every individual.
It was a very good idea, because with
continued normal feeling of weight, something like normal mental processes
returned to the unwitting voyagers. They began to realize that none of Earth's
other planets was suited for human use and that it was
not likely that this unknown world would be of any value for them.
They
realized, too, the utter lack of preparation for interstellar travel. There
was not even food, save for the garden in the air-purifying room. But Kit
managed to change their forebodings to no worse than anxious curiosity and when
they had reached that stage they were prepared to act as intelligently as they
could. So the situation, as far as the crew was concerned, was much more hopeful.
Kit
waked Rod when their chosen planet loomed large before them. He opened his
eyes as a voice bellowed monotonously, "No-o-o radar!" from somewhere below in the ship.
"We're
almost there," said Kit anxiously, "and we don't know how to
land."
Rod
was instantly awake. He stared at the disk — big as a dinner-plate — on the
planet ahead. The sensation of weight proved that the Stellaria was hurtling toward it at ever-increasing speed.
"We'll
switch to pressor-beams and slow up," he said.
"So far, pretty good!"
He
sent calls through the ship, warning of the change-over. There was a bare
second of weightlessness, then all floors became
ceilings and all ceilings floors. It was purely a guesswork process. Rod could estimate the planefs
distance only by the time needed for the pressor-beams
to hit it
He
could not estimate the ship's speed at all. But he set to work to improvise
landing tactics by rule of thumb. As a first measure he shifted the beams to one side of the planet,
so that the Stellaria would no longer head straight for the center of the visible hemisphere.
It
was necessary to remember that the danger from alien space-ships might easily
be greater here than anywhere else in the universe. The Stellaris might actually have come back to normal space so far within the empire
of the pyramid-builders that radar beams and scouts were considered unnecessary.
She could, conceivably, be heading for the very stronghold of the alien race
and could have been undetected only because such .an approach was unimaginable.
But it was not likely.
The
Ship's course altered almost imperceptibly. She had been approaching too fast
for an endurable stop short of the strange world's surface. Now she went
angling over to a line that would carry her past. But the great disk enlarged
and grew greater and they saw seas upon it and clouds and vast areas of green
vegetation. When the ship shot past the twilight zone the surface was within
mere thousands of miles.
Rod
said, "I wish we had a telescope on board. I'm not sure, but I saw some
splotches that could be cities."
"Do you think—?"
Tm not guessing," he told her. "I'm
taking a chance. If they beam us it's the pyramid
people. If they don't, it isn't But there must be
plenty of civilization in our galaxy. The fact that they had a trick all worked
out to get warning when we made space-ships rather hints at that
"If there are two civilizations there
are probably hundreds of thousands. There must be too many for the pyramid
people to wipe out so they only set traps for them and knock them off when they
reach a space-ship culture."
Kit said uneasily,
"That — ship certainly turned something on us, without trying to signal us
first and we were plainly running away and not trying to fight them."
"Not surprising," said Rod briefly.
"I saw the bas-reliefs they made of humans." The memory of them was clear.
He had. On the pyramid on Calypso there had
been modeled human figures. They should have been irresistible as incitements to curiosity, so that the doors would be opened. But the
figured people were not modeled by friendly artists. The figures had been made
by craftsman who despised their models.
No artist can keep himself out of his work
and the figures had actually made Rod angry at the scorn implicit in their
making. They pictured humans with strict accuracy but managed somehow to
classify them as beasts and vermin. Men would not have pictured men with such
scorn.
Rod had felt instant suspicion and hostility
toward the builders of the pyramid and was disinclined
to do anything they planned for him to do. That was why he'd cut into the
pyramid instead of hopefully opening its doors — and that was why there was as
yet no warning that humans had achieved space-travel.
Kit
said presently, "You're planning to land. Rod.
Can we test the air?"
"The
sun's the same color as ours at home," Rod told her. "It must have
nearly the same spectrum. And the vegetation's green. The chemistry must be the
same. If plants use chloro-phyl here to utilize
sunlight like ours, the air must be oxygen and nitrogen and C02.
Other gases wouldn't work, we can't even guess at the proportions."
"And the —
gravity?" she said uneasily.
"We've
nothing to measure it with," he said with a shrug. "But we do know that we didn't have to push unbearably to
get over to one side and run past. We practically tested the gravity with our
feet — high up as we are." Then he looked at her sharply. "I had some
sleep, Kit I doubt that you did. Better go get some."
She hesitated, and looked at him wistfully. He said heavily, "I'm not very romantic, am I? But I've got plenty on my mind.
The people in that space-ship tried to kill us out of hand. They must have
killed off the Martians.
"They'll
kill not only us but everybody back on Earth if they catch us and find out our
physical structure and check it with the records they'll undoubtedly have made
when they modeled those figures on the Calypso pyramid. So we've got not only
our own lives to think of but literally everybody else's.
"I've got to try to figure out a way to
finish this ship, and arm it somehow — but I've got the beginning of an idea —
and I've got to concoct some way to blow it and us literally to atoms if we're
caught and killed. And after all that Fm — well — I'm very much in love with
you and I've got to figure out something to make you safe."
He
stood doggedly by the controls, holding the force-field switches against the
springs that would throw the Stellaris into other-space if he should be killed where he stood. Kit's eyes
softened.
"I — see. We can't
think about us. Not yet"
"Not
yet," he agreed heavily. "If we're safe here — and Fm beginning to
think we are — Fm going to try to get the Stellaris down. If those splotches are cities the inhabitants may be anything and
they may be friendly or not civilized or not But I'm hoping they're not the
people who tried to kill us."
He
turned back to the vision-ports. They were over the night-side of the planet
and to one side—actually it felt as if the planet were below—there was only the
blank black bulk of the unknown world. It was hardly a thousand miles away but
the Stellaris could not be checked to land on it without killing all on board by
multiple-gravity deceleration.
Then
the dark globe lay behind and it was time to change back to tractor-beams to
pull back toward it and lessen the ship's headlong speed toward infinity. And
then, hours later, the again-remote planet ceased to dwindle and grew large
once more and he juggled alternate tractor and pressor-beams
to bring the Stellans close to its day-side, then to match speed
with the planet's surface. At long last he dared let the clumsy hulk which was
the Earth-ship down into atmosphere
Bellowing came from below JNo-o-o-o
radarl" And then e> new voice called. "'No-o-o-o radio!" Because a civilization which did not have space-ships or even radar could have
broadcast- waves in its atmosphere, as Earth had done foi
nearly a hundred years before space-travel became possible to its people.
The
ship went heavily lowei and lower, more and more slowly
in relation to the jungle underneath. Where the ship approached there was
jungle. There were rivers. Far away there were the slopes of a mountain range
and, off to one side the authentic blue of a sea. The ship went soggily down and down, its small and accidental crew gazing
at the scene no human eyes had ever before looked at—lower still and individual
jungle-growths became visible
There
was a straight streak which looked like a highway
ol some sort The Stellaris floated onward, rocking a little
on the pressor-beams which supported it Then a city
appeared at the horizon. There were towers and pinnacles and a myriad prismatic flashings of reflected sunlight
But
there was no movement no smoke, no aircraft overhead, no signs of alarm or
recognition of the Stellaris' existence The ship was only two thousand feet
up and there were deep depressions in the vegetation below where its pressor-beams touched ground to uphold it
The
city drew near. And it was dead. There was no life anywhere. But it had not
been dead long because the jungle had not yet encroached on it It was simply dead—undevastated
untouched, unharmed but dead.
Rod
brought the ship to a wallowing stop over the very center of the
metropolis It reached for miles in every direction
On a basis of human occupancy, it could have housed a population of
millions. Yet there was no movement below. Rod began painstakingly to let down
for a landing in a central open space.
Kit
said in a strained voice; "Rod! Those little things on
the highway. Colored things! Brightly-colored!"
"My guess," said Rod briefly,
"is that they're the inhabitants. People who could build a city like this
would be pretty civilized. No reason why they shouldn't wear brightly-colored
clothes."
"But they're not moving!"
"My guess," said Rod again,
"is that they're dead." "A plague?"
"No.
Our friends," said Rod grimly. "A civilization that could build this
city would be close to space-travel. Maybe they sent a ship to that
snow-covered planet and found a pyramid there and opened it up to see who among
their ancestors had gone there first—and called in our friends to exterminate
them."
She
stared at him in horror. His face was very white. He nodded toward the very
center of the open space into which the Stellaria descended. There was a bright
metal pyramid there.
"If,
by any chance, there was a space-ship off on a voyage when this world was
murdered and it came back after the murderers had left," said Rod
harshly, "they'd probably think that some survivors had left word for them
in that. And they'd open it"
"At
a guess that pyramid on Calypso would have killed me too if I'd opened it
in the normal way. Very probably that was it. The ones who summoned the murders
wouldn't live to know what they'd done or take back any word of what a pyramid
implied."
The
ship hovered only a hundred feet above the ground. Slowly,
slowly, slowly, Rod eased it downward. He expected an impact but the Stellaris touched the strange world's surface with a surprising and quite
accidental gentleness.
Without explanation Rod went to the air-lock
and closed the inner door. He cracked the outer door and sniffed cautiously. He
tried again. He took a deep breath. The air seemed to him to be perfectly
adequate.
To make sure, he stepped outside and breathed
deeply. He felt a bitter amusement at the difference between this instant of
landing on a strange world of another sun, and the way
he'd pictured it while the Stellaris was building.
He
hadn't thought that the landing would be made from an almost unmanageable hulk,
unequipped for landing or navigation or even the testing of air, lost utterly
in space, with the despairing knowledge that probably the best that could be
hoped was that the dozen or so humans on the ship might manage to find a place of perpetual exile with a murderous
alien race for enemies.
The air was good but
nothing else was promising.
If
the ship that had contacted the Stellaris had reported its encounter a galaxy-wide search for a race attaining
space-travel might be already under way. If they found Earth.
For
that matter, Earth's cities might already be filled with crumpled figures.
Earth's air might already be empty of fliers. Earth's cities might already be
as dead as this one. Rod Cantrell looked at tumbled heaps of garments on the
pavements about him and cursed thickly.
CHAPTER FIVE
Marks of Murder
I |
T was one of the girls in charge of the
air-purifying plant who solved the food problem for the time being. Her test
for toxic substances was simple but absolutely effective. A tiny morsel of
vegetation was strapped against a girl's
skin near the wrist. A deadly substance would produce immediate reaction.
Irritation or pain or loss of sensation would show toxicity without any risk or
danger to the girl.
A group of two painters and an arc-welder
marched to the edge of the jungle and gathered what fruits they could find.
They came back loaded down, reporting apparent cultivation of the ground, only
partly overwhelmed with wild growths. Carefully labeled samples decorated the
arms of each of the five girls on the ship for the next two hours. Of all the
specimens, only one produced a slight
rash.
Then
it was a question of finding out which of the remaining fruits were most
palatable. Tiny samples, chewed and swallowed, answered that. One produced
cramps. The rest seemed good. The problem of food, then, became to some extent
merely a matter of gathering a sufficient
quantity.
While this went on Rod Cantrell and Kit and
one of the ship's electricians went exploring among the city's buildings for
equally important materials. They wanted metals, tools, weapons. They hadn't
much hope of the last in a civilized
city.
They
found plenty of metal. They found few tools. What they did find in horrible
profusion, though, was the pitiful population of the city. Garments lay
everywhere, each with a heap of dust within it What unthinkable weapon had
killed them could only be guessed at—though Rod thought he had an idea— but
surely it had come upon them without warning.
There
were huddled heaps of garments in places that were plainly shops, though the
show-cases hung from the ceilings. There were
innumerable heaps of clothing on the public ways, and in the queer vehicles the
oddly human-like dead race had used.
Many
of the vehicles were wrecked, as if
their drivers had died at the controls and the untended machines had driven on
senselessly until they crashed.
There were many quaintly human-like items in
the dead civilization. The explorers found one little shop with identifiable
cages in it, as if for small captive creatures, and collars of metal apparently
intended for pets.
They
found where groups of the vanished race had died as if in the midst of friendly
conversation and—as their observation grew more acute—they saw that some of the
heaps of garments were smaller than others, and that usually such small
garments were beside larger ones, as if the murdered children had been with
their parents.
Kit
grew very pale. Rod glowered as they went on. The electrician with them
scowled more and more deeply.
"Who
killed all these folks?" he demanded pugnaciously. "It happened all
at once an' it couldn't ha' been more'n a couple of
years ago."
"I
think," said Rod tonelessly, "it was the gang we ran away from. The gang that made a metal pyramid on Calypso. The same gang that built a metal pyramid not far from where I
landed the ship— which we're going to make use of if we have luck."
The electrician spat
"An* you think they killed these people?"
"Because,"
Rod told him, "they made a space-ship. The pyramid on Calypso was
supposed to tip them off when we did. The pyramid in the square back by the
ship is bait If there was a space-ship away from home when this world was
killed and if it came back, the people in it would think some survivors of the
catastrophe had left a record for them."
"They'd
go inside to see. And they'd be killed. And the
murderers would be notified to come and mop up just to make sure. See?"
The
electrician spat again. "We'd better figure out something to slap them guys down," he said coldly. "They need
it."
The
three went on. And everywhere they moved through the city they saw new
evidences of the high degree of civilization the dead race had achieved, more
and more of the pathetic heaps of garments which had been members of that race.
Kit, perhaps, saw those most clearly. The electrician saw also the enormous
wealth left ownerless by the annihilation of its creators.
Not
only was there a metropolis left, which humans could take over and use with
little modification, but there were goods and even jewels—strangely-cut and
very beautiful—and all the other portable possessions of a civilized world. He
made no move to burden himself though. There was too much of riches in sight to
make mere looting a temptation. But it was plain enough that he saw.
Rod saw the technical side of the murdered
culture. He noted the lavish use of non-corrodible alloys. He saw plastics used
where human-made plastics would not have been satisfactory. He took a small
sliver of colorless transparent stuff and held a flame to it It did not discolor or char.
"Looks
like fluocarbon," he said absorbedly.
"These people had gone places!"
Then
they entered a great building which was plainly a power-station and a
communication-center at once. Here Rod was in his element and the electrician
was not far behind him. The central hall was huge and bright with sunlight and
there were many machines upon the floor.
"Generator
yonder," said Rod, nodding. "Looks like an electron-emitting isotope
trick like ours. See the power-leads from it?"
The
electrician observed, "Silver bus-bars. Looks like nylon insulation
everywhere."
"Or
fluocarbon plastic. Hm."
Rod stared at a huge block of solid transparent stuff with metal sheets and
rods deeply imbedded in it Power-leads ran to it but the metal sheets did not
connect within the transparency. He stared while the others wandered about Then
Kit a little distance away, uttered a cry.
"Rod! Come here! Oh^ifs terrible!"
Rod
went quickly. And Kit was standing with clenched hands before a double row of
instruments. Between them the floor was quite covered with the bright garments
of the dead race, showing that all the occupants of the building had been
crowded here when death fell upon their city. And the rows of instruments
showed why.
They
were, in effect, television instruments. But it took time to realize it,
because on each screen a distinct and motionless image remained. Each
instrument still showed the picture that had been upon it at the instant the
city died.
Some
of the pictures were of individual members of the race in the act of speaking.
Others—many others—were of scenes upon the ways, either of this city or
another, showing the dead race as it had been. On two screens there was no hint
of danger or of the coming of death.
But no less than six showed the death-agonies
of those who were still not dead. The screens were horrible to look at Three —and this was where the heaps of garments were
thickest— showed the sky. Each showed a strange object against a background of
clouds or stars. And the three were identical. Each was a monstrous metal pryamid.
Rod stared woodenly at the images. Then he
examined the instruments which held them.
"Vision-screens,"
he announced unnecessarily. Then he added, "A good trick. They didn't
project their television. They modified a plate of some sort that can change
like—well—like the skin of a chameleon. Didn't have to worry about
brightness. Like a photograph, only it must have moved. When the machine
went off the last picture stayed until it went back on again."
He fumbled and peeled off a strip of flexible
material which formed the screen. The image remained on it It
was, in effect, a photograph of the last object the dying eyes of these people
bad looked at. He hunted and found a stock of similar sheets —but blank—to be
used as replacements.
"Television,"
he said, "only you could keep any scene you wanted to as a photograph. I
think I've got a good hunch on what killed these people. The trouble is to
prove it"
Kit caught her breath. She
was grief-stricken at the pictures.
"Rod! They were so much like us! So much like us!"
"That
flying pryamid was the destroyer," Rod pointed
out "A pyramid's a good structural form—the most rigid you can make with
straight girders. And there's no sense in streamlining a space-ship because
there's no air-resistance in space. Besides, polished metal at such angles
would reflect away radar-beams—solar heat too if they wanted to go close to a
sun.
"My guess is that was a fighting-ship.
It appeared in the sky overhead and these people's telescopes picked it up and
they were watching it when they died."
The
electrician said suddenly, "Hey! These
sets must've blown out—"
"Whatever
killed the people stopped the sets," agreed Rod coldly. "They
wouldn't have switched them off just because they were dying. Whatever killed
the people did something to the sets! If we open one up we may check on an idea
I've got"
He
saw the electrician reach in his overall pocket for tools. He went to the big
block of plastic with the imbedded and covered metal plates. The thing
bothered him. The plastic was plainly an insulator and as plainly the whole
thing was designed to perform some electrostatic or electronic function. He
felt that he ought to understand.
One
of the plates wasn't solid metal but pierced with innumerable holes like a
sieve. Rod frowned, a hunch telling him that this was important. He tried to figure
it out as an electrostatic device, guessing at capacity-effects between the
enclosed plates. But this part would neutralize the capacity-effect between
that and that and—
His mouth dropped open. It was a vacuum tube!
Save that the parts were imbedded in plastic instead of held in emptiness, it
was plainly a vacuum tube! The plastic must have acted electronically like a
vacuum, allowing electron-flow. And they must have had the trick of cold
emission of electrons from a metal surface! If that were so this device would
handle incredible amounts of power!
As
Rod's eyes began to glow, the electrician came to him. "Hey! We can fix these sets! I opened one up and a
pair of porcelain insulators is crumpled all up. They were the mounting
insulators and they went to powder and the works settled and shorted and quit workin'!"
Rod
wanted to babble of his own discovery but instead he followed back to the
vision-sets. It was as the electrician had said. Supports for the apparatus
within the cases had shivered to powder.
Kit had a strange expression on her face.
"Rod! I've got an idea. I don't know anything
about science but in school once our instructor showed us how supersonic waves
could break glass to powder if they were strong enough and of sufficient
high-frequency. He said they were used to sterilize things. Could the way
these people were killed be something like that?"
"It could," said Rod grimly.
"We had a dose of something like it from that other space-ship—remember?
But air won't carry supersonics. It's elastic and they go down in pitch. And
there wasn't any air where that other space-ship caught up with us. I think
you're close. Very close."
The electrician showed Kit the powder
remaining from the shattered insulators. It was very fine. The rest of the
insulation was plastic. Then he bent down and tore at silken garments on the
floor. Not even Kit protested. The dead race had no such bony skeletons as
humanity possesses. There was only fine dust within the garments. The
electrician folded torn cloth to a pad.
"This's
dry," he observed. "It'd ought to do for a
insulator for a try, anyhow."
He
reached into the case, then drew back and put on rubber gloves for safety's
sake. As he lifted the settled mass of coils and wires there was a tiny
snapping sound. A spark jumped brittlely and ceased.
The electrician put the pad in place. He prepared another and adjusted that.
Kit said tensely,
"It's working!"
They looked. The sheet on which a colored
photograph had appeared permanently fixed now changed beneath their eyes. It
was extraordinary to see the picture, by the light from overhead, change
itself by an apparent flow of pigment from one spot to another to form a new
arrangement of shapes and colors.
Where the scene on this instrument's screen
had been that of the last instant in the life of the people of this planet, now
it was the scene currently in being. The street was empty of moving forms but
there were those empty heaps of garments on the ground where the people of the
planet had been. It was plainly a current view of the place where the connected
sending instrument stood.
And
then, preposterously, as they watched there came a movement in the distance. Kit caught her breath. Then the electrician
swore luridly. And then Rod clenched his hands until the blood flowed in his
palms.
CHAPTER SIX
Pyramids Coming!
T |
HERE were living creatures moving toward the
sending-instrument Not many—the three human watchers could see clearly and
there were but four individuals in sight. Those four individuals rode in one of
the odd vehicles native to the planet. Rod and the others watched intently.
They
had bulbous heads and attenuated arms and legs, and one of them guided the
vehicle to a spot no more than fifty or sixty yards from the
vision-sender. There the vehicle stopped. The four got out and stared at a
building.
One
lifted something from a belt about his middle. Flame darted from it in a thin straight line. He swept it up, and side-wise, and down, and across
again. A section of plastic-sealed wall fell slowly outward.
From
somewhere within the vision-instrument, they heard the crash of its fall. The
four marched unconcernedly across the wreckage, trampling underfoot the gay
garments of the murdered native race.
Rod said in a whisper,
"This may be a sender too. No noise!"
The three humans stood motionless. In minutes
the four sticklike figures came out, burdened with loads of shimmering stuff
the watchers could not identify. They piled it in the vehicle. They went back
as if for more.
Rod
thrust the others from before the vision-machine so that, if this were a
two-way instrument, their images would not remain on the screen at the other
end. Crisply he ripped out the pads of temporary insulation. There was a tiny
spark and the picture ceased to move.
"They're
looters," said Rod grimly. "They're not the native race certainly.
Presumably they're the crowd that travels in those flying pyramids. They're the
murderers. And now it becomes clear why they wait for another race to reach
the spaceship stage of civilization before they murder them.
"A
civilized race leaves a civilization behind when it dies. It leaves cities to
be looted. It turns murder from a precaution
into a business!" His nostrils were widened. He breathed heavily, went
white with a deep, corrosive anger.
"We
go back to the ship," he said flatly. "You see the pattern! They murdered
the natives of this planet without warning .and set up at least one pyramid to
tell them if any survivors turned up later.
"When they were sure it was quite safe
they came back and now they've begun the leisurely looting of the cities whose
inhabitants they killed. Quite safe and very logical."
His tone, at the end, changed to raging fury.
But he led the way back toward the ship without a word of explanation. He was torn between quite irrational rage and a
desperate desire to get Kit away from here and out of danger. Yet he knew that
even back on Earth, unless something quite impossible happened, Kit would be
equally doomed. Whether in flight through space or hidden in the dark universe
she was in no better case.
Through the air-lock and into the ship. The party gone to gather fruit was back with
a large supply. Rod called a meeting of the curiously-assorted ship's
company. He curtly summed up the situation.
"There are three things we can do,"
he said shortly at the end. "We can leave this planet, which is being
looted by the creatures who killed its inhabitants.
That means taking a chance we can't even estimate of finding another planet
where we can try to provision ourselves — and possibly arm ourselves for
defense.
"We can go into the dark universe and
open the air-lock and die quickly. Or —" he paused — "we can stay
here, fight or dodge the looters and try to find an observatory and star-maps
and possibly the way back home."
There could be no dissension. But a painter pointed out that since he hadn't agreed to this voyage he
considered that he was on overtime — rather,
double-time pay for all work done outside of his regular job of painting. His
union, in fact, might insist on a still higher rate of pay. And he would work
only if assured that a mediation-based award of pay would be accepted.
Rod agreed impatiently.
"But
the first thing," he said urgently, "is to hide the ship. The only
safe hiding-place is the dark universe. You know how the field-generators were
tested. We anchored the ship in place with focused tractor-beams and then
turned on the fields. She went into the dark universe, but stayed in the part
of it parallel to her slip. When the fields were turned off she came back to
where she'd been. Thafs what we'll have to do now."
One of the girl biologists
said dismally, "No weight?"
"No
weight," agreed Rod. "Except for those of us out on the planet,
working a little trick I think we can handle. Who volunteers for that?"
He
had his pick of the ship's company. He chose an electrician and a painter and
almost angrily refused Kit's insistence that she be of the party.
"I'm not going to take any chances"
he told her, "but I don't want to be worried about you. And you're more
able than anybody else to attend to what has to be done -— on the ship, that
is."
He
shifted the St el tar is on her pressor-beams
to a position close by the walls of a massive
building. He anchored her there by focused beams and flicked on the
force-fields for the infinitesimal part of a second. Back in normal space the ship had not moved. He tried it again
for longer periods.
The
anchoring tractors worked exactly as he wished. Focused, they worked even from
the other-space, though when unfocused they could not be used either into or
out of it. He wrote, at some length. Then he took a half-dozen
small objects and focused material-handler tractor beams on them — small
beams. He turned the tractor-power away down and then took them out of the ship
despite the reduced-power tractor's pull.
He wedged them in place so they could not fly
back to the ship until released but so that they would fly back to the ship.
even
into the dark universe, when set free. Then he was ready. He and his two
followers went outside. Rod looked up to the port through which Kit regarded
him anxiously. He waved his hand.
There
was a puff of air. The Stellaris — was not There was only emptiness where she
had been. She was in another cosmos, in another set of dimensions, as far
removed from this planet's surface as the farthest island universe.
Yet
if any of the small objects arranged for the purpose were released it would be
drawn to the ship and through the forcefield and into
the open air-lock in the fraction of a second, implying a removal of no more
than yards.
Rod started off for the big building in which
he'd found the television sets and the isotopic generator and the huge mass of
plastic which was a vacuum tube in its functioning. On the way he spoke
crisply.
"We
had a space-ship turn something on us that was pretty bad. It lasted only the
fraction of a second, so it didn't kill us. Here something deadly hit It didn't
break plastic or metal or stone but it crumbled ceramic insulators to powder.
Got any idea what it could be?"
The
painter, knitting his brows, said, 'You can break china when plastic only
bounces. What they got? Something that smacks hard?"
"They
didn't push down the buildings," Rod pointed out "A bunch of little blows, like a compressed-air
drill, will cut through stone that a straight push or a rotary drill won't
handle. My guess is they had a sort of pressor-beam,
only instead of pushing steadily it hit hard and fast — and often. Vibration."
The
electrician said, demurring, "Yd get an awful
kick-back from a pressor-beam that went off an' on
like that!"
"Suppose,"
said Rod, "in between it was a tractor? Suppose they had a beam that
changed from a pressor to a tractor a hundred times a second — two hundred thousand? What
then?"
The three men took half a dozen steps toward
the hall of the machines and television sets. Then the electrician grunted.
"Mmmh! You could fix the tensor-plate to be a
chopper! Migawd, yeah! Say! I could fix one o' them!"
"We're going to," said Rod curtly.
"We're going to use something the people that built this city made. My
guess is that it'll handle a few hundred million kilowatts. And I know a
power-unit that'll give it that much power—for awhile. We're going to work like
hades!"
In
his mind there was a feeling of terrible urgency. There were looters in some
other city of this same planet. That meant there was a pyramid-ship here too.
It might be the plan of the space-murderers to loot one city of this planet ^at
a time. It was much more likely that there would be cargoships
coming to load up with the booty of their crime at as many cities as possible.
They'd
have waited until they felt it safe to loot — but once they began they would
not want the looting to spread over a term of years. After all, the jungle
would begin to creep into the dead cities. Since there were already looters in
one city there should be others on the way.
The electrician set about gathering the
material for his coils and plates, cutting away freely at bus-bars and cables
of solid silver to supply his needs. With power such as Rod had spoken of no
mere wire would serve as conductors. He cut and tugged and tugged and cut.
Rod
and the painter went out to hunt for a vehicle that could be made to run. When
they found one not outwardly wrecked Rod had to sweat over it to discover how
it ran. It stirred feebly — and that was all. They tried a second and its power
was dead.
It was not until they came upon one which had
apparently waited for its owners or passengers beneath an overhanging arch —
so that it was protected from rain — that the queer vehicle moved briskly. Then
they had to learn to guide it
But
they were back and trundling into the great hall before the electrician had
begun to shape those illogical and superficially insane twistings
of metal which ordinarily are hidden by weather-proof housings and careful
range-limiters, in the tractor and pressor-beams of
commerce.
He
stopped to help Rod make sure of the cutting-off of the isotopic generator and
then the two of them hacked at heavy leads and struggled with the massive
bus-bars they would require. The painter judgmatically
contrived a way to load the big block of plastic — which was a vacuum tube — on
the vehicle. Then Rod and the electrician mounted their coils about the
"tube" in its exotic placing.
"I've got a hunch," said Rod
suddenly. "This is our mountl We'll
run it up to the pyramid, cut in and connect the leads with the power-unit
there. And then —"
The
electrician swung around suddenly. "Yeah!" he said, blankly. "Then! Lookaheah! This thing ain't got any guides! I got her
hooked to squeal up to the bloopin' point an' with
enough power in her there ain't goin'
to be anything in who knows how far ain't goin' to hot up! Where're we goin'
to be when you turn her on?"
"On
the ship," said Rod, "and in the dark universe. We'll be safe there.
I've got an idea how bad this is going to be!"
He
worked on, grimly. Hours passed. Sweat covered him. The electrician mopped his
forehead from time to time. The painter helped awkwardly, obeying orders. The
feeling of tenseness grew greater and greater in Rod's mind. It was unreasonable
but it was overpowering. It was a hunch so strong that at last he dared not
wait longer.
"We
get going," he said brittlely. "I'd like to
file it down a little
more but we can't risk it Come along!"
He
started the little vehicle. He ran it slowly out of the building, then faster
and ever faster to the square where the
Stellaris had landed. He backed it to the base of the pyramid — which was so much
like that one on Calypso — save that the bas-reliefs pictured another race than
the human — and stopped the vehicle.
He
ran across the square to where he had wedged certain small objects in place. He
scribbled a note to Kit on a scrap of paper as he ran. The paper was the order
removing him from authority over the Stellaris. With an almost hysterical sensation of urgency he jammed the note into
the little object, which pulled and tugged to escape from his hand.
He released it
It
flashed through the air — and vanished. It had been drawn tlirough
the force-field which cut off all the rest of the universe of stars from the Stellaris. It had, unquestionably, gone into other-space and clanked loudly in the
open air-lock door of the space-ship.
And
Rod stood wrestling with his illogical impatience while seconds ticked away,
more seconds and more — but he had given strict orders that when a noise of an
arriving object sounded in the air-lock, the outer door was to be closed and
the object examined for a note before any action was taken.
Then — there was the Stellaris before him, come out of another set of dimensions and another universe
to obey his orders.
He
rushed into the air-lock, shaking with the feeling of imminent need. "A
torch!" he commanded feverishly. "A cutting-torch!
Make it quick! Speed! For the love of —"
He
took the tiny, deadly instrument and raced back with it. He began fiercely to
cut through the plating of the pyramid which was intended to kill any who
opened it in the obvious way and signal the tampering to a race of killers. The
metal smoked and a thin line of parting showed. He cut through swiftly,
counting somehow upon the inner identity of this pyramid to the other he had
opened.
It was identical. He crawled inside, dragging
the torch, scorching his clothing and legs on the hot edges he had cut. Again
he cut at metal ruthlessly. He snapped commands and the electrician fed in one
long section of bus-bar. He welded it to a connection. He welded a second
semi-flexible bar.
He
backed out and barked to the painter to get a string, a plumb-line, anything that was cord. And not to let anybody come out of
the ship! Even as he commanded he was feverishly using the torch to connect
the snaky bus-bars from the pyramid's interior to the preposterous-seeming
device mounted on the odd small vehicle.
He
finished and cast aside the torch to attach the string with unreasonably
shaking fingers to the switch which was so ingenious and so easy to throw and
would handle so monstrous a current
"Okay," he barked. "Get back
and in the ship! Run!" He
backed toward the Stellaris himself, paying out the string.
Then he heard Kit crying out. "Rod—Pyramids!"
Out
of the corner of his eye he saw a mote in the sky at
the edge of the horizon. But he dared not hasten. He paid out the string and
paid it out He stripped off his coat and knotted the end of the string to it.
Then he ran.
Ther were voices babbling about him as he focused
a tractor-beam on his coat a hundred feet away. With the least possible trace
of power he saw the cloth stir.
"Go ahead!" he roared.
He
stared out the vision-port There was not one pyramid
in sight but three. They came drifting onward and downward, lower, toward the
city. The Stellaris must be visible. They would turn their beams on it as a mere routine precaution.
All
visible things turned red, flashed through all the colors of the spectrum to
violet and dead-black. The Stellaris was in other-space, the dark universe.
Then Rod raised the power on the
tractor-beam, drawing his coat toward him in another set of dimensions. He
heard a faint tinking sound
— the coat's metal buttons were smacking forcibly against the ship's hull.
Then Rod wanted to be sick — from relief.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ambush
T |
IME
passed slowly indeed in the other-space. Rod found himself doubting the
time-rate of his watch. But a watch did keep the same time in the dark universe
as in normal space. He knew it. It had been verified on his three interplanetary
trips and in the original testings of the Stellaris when her force-field coils were first tried out. But the watch hands
moved slowly, very slowly.
Kit looked at him with anxious eyes. There
were lights in the ship now but the feeling of weightlessness kept a certain
nagging impulse of panic always very close. Still, Kit had been so much more
fearful for Rod that the eerie sensation of floating in emptiness could almost
be ignored, now that he was safe on board.
"What'd you do, Rod?" she asked.
"I
think," said Rod, "that I knocked off the looters and the creatures
in the three flying pyramids we saw. I hope sot I
even think I did it with one of their own weapons. I hope very much that they
haven't any defense against it. I can't imagine one."
"Their weapons?" Kit
said, startled. "You mean you think you made the same thing they used to
kill all the people on this planet?"
"And
the Martians," said Rod grimly, "and probably plenty of other races
that got civilized enough to be either dangerous or worth looting. Remember,
you suggested that the weapon a space-ship
turned on us might be supersonic-scund waves?"
"Y-yes," said Kit uneasily.
"It
couldn't have been exactly sound-waves. Not in space. There was no air — or any
solid to carry them. But we use tractor beams as if they were cables to pull
things and pressors as if they were beams to push
things with. I figured that they might have made a gadget that alternated
between sending tractor and pressor beams.
"It
would send a thin slice of tractor, then a thin slice of pressor
and so on. That would go through space. And when it hit something solid it
would generate sound waves in it If the slices were thin enough and alternated
fast enough they'd make supersonic waves — such as you suggested — in anything
they touched.
"Air would vibrate in the supersonic
range. So would water. So would the bodies of any living creatures such a beam
struck. It would break up ceramic ware and not break plastic or metal. Sent
from one space-ship to another, it would kill all the crew of the ship on the
receiving end. Sent from a ship down on a city —"
Kit turned pale.
"They
could — stay out in space and send beams down at a city and everybody'd die! Oh, Rod!"
"Apparently
they did just that" said Rod. "Anyhow, that's the sort of gadget I
made. There were bus-bars and a monstrous thing that works like a vacuum-tube
in the building where we saw the televisors.
"Joe
and I — Joe's the electrician who was with us — fixed up a pressor-beam
generator and put in a feed-back to the tensor-plate. It starts to make pressors, the feed-back makes it shift to tractors, then the feed-back makes it shift back to pressors and so on. It'll generate supersonic frequencies
all right! Simple enough too," he added grimly.
"But —"
"Power for it? There was an isotopic generator in the
building with the televisors, too. Probably better
than the one we have on the ship here. But I did better than that I knew there
ought to be a power-storage unit in the
booby-trap pyramid we so carefully haven't touched.
"I
cut into that pyramid, hooked up that power to the gadget Joe and I had put
together and tied a string to the switch. I focused a tractor to pull the
string after we'd come into this space. The stuff it generated couldn't hurt us
here. Tractor and pressor stuff would have to be
focused to come into this universe from ours."
He
made an unconscious movement and rather absurdly floated away from his former
position. There was no gravity here. There was always the sensation of
interminable fall. While constantly aware of the fact that it was
weightlessness, not dropping, it was endurable enough. But nobody would ever be
able to sleep where gravity was Jiot
"To
finish the picture," said Rod after a moment "the power-storage unit
has probably some hundreds of millions of kilowatts of power stored in it I
don't know just how fast it'll discharge through our gadget but there's a
choke-effect there to slow it up.
"My
guess and my hope is that my gadget generated the pyramid-folks
pet murder-frequency stuff for several successive minutes and that those who
happened to be around have lost all interest in looting — and in us."
"It it hit them," said Kit
"It
did," he assured her. "We set it to radiate in all directions. The
faster the juice ran out the more deadly that beam was. I can't guess its
maximum range but it should be strong enough anywhere on this planet!"
In
that estimate he was too conservative. Actually the lethal effect of his device
had extended rather more than a planetary diameter beyond the surface on the far side
of the world. It had lasted for six or seven minutes and it had wiped out all
pyramid-creatures within that limit
Rod,
however, was uneasy. His experience of the alien race was not enough to let him
know their resources, and he could not calibrate or measure anything he used.
At
the moment he worried mainly over the possibility that the aliens might have
some defense against the weapon he thought they used
for massacres. But he knew, too, that the danger could be greater than that and
of a quite different sort
As a
matter of safety he kept the Stellaris in other-space for twelve hours. If the aliens had a defense against his
weapon they'd expect the Stellaris to reappear immediately the weapon was used. But if twelve full hours
elapsed they would think the human ship had fled. So he waited.
But
time passed very slowly until what might be termed social life within the ship
began. The four girls who'd tended the air-purifier system had^ been classed
officially as assistants in biology, and were more or less inclined to feel
superior to mere painters and arc-welders and electricians. Some of the men,
too, were middle-aged and obviously family men.
But one of the arc-welders was good looking
and one of the painters displayed virtuosity on the mouth-organ. Also there was
some food aboard ship and there was at least a precedent for expecting to set
foot again on a planet with breathable air.
Also
there were the lurid tales of riches and jewels and incredible luxury in the empty
cities of the planet to which they were still anchored. So, during the tedious
wait, barriers broke. Music began somewhere off in the ship. There were voices.
There was even laughter.
Kit
went to see while Rod sweatingly tried to make calculations
and draw diagrams on a memo-pad which had no weight — and while he himself
floated head-down in relation to a normal position in the control-room. Kit
drew herself lightly along the hand-rails which ran on
floors and ceilings and side-walls alike. She came back smiling, floating with
extraordinary grace in mid-air.
"Rod! You ought to see!" she told him.
"One of the painters has tied himself in place with string. He's playing
the mouth-organ and they're having a dancel It's like a Virginia reel in three dimensions! Everybody's
got pieces of cardboard and they're using them like wings to fan themselves
around with in the craziest set-to you ever saw!"
Uproarious
laughter sounded in the ship, which floated in an illimitable emptiness of
darkness — in a universe in which no living thing could dwell
— alone as surely no human ship was ever alone before — in a cosmos without a single star.
Rod said restlessly, "That's good, Kit.
Go and watch if you like. I'd better not. Anyhow, I'm going to try
something."
There was reason for his reserve. He was,
perforce, the captain of the Stellaris. As such he could join in difficult labor and should share in any danger.
But he must remain remote if all his decisions were to go unquestioned. And it
was necessary for him to make the decisions. If he relaxed to mere sociable
behavior his leadership would no longer be based upon the mystery of
commissioned authority. He would have become merely another man.
He
pulled himself to the engine-room. Restlessly he set the tractor-beams — those not in use for anchorage — to fan out in all
directions through this other-space. Practically nothing was known as yet about
the dark universe. Light traveled faster there and inertia was less. Incredible
speeds were possible.
So
much was known, and nothing else. The other-space could be a mere incalculable emptiness, without the most minute particle of
substance anywhere in it Yet in theory a cosmos
without mass could not exist A closed universe could not be closed without
substance to make the gravitational warp that would close it So there must be
matter of some sort
But
Rod turned on the tractor-beams and fanned them out, merely to be doing
something. The odds against any solid object within the distance the
tractor-beams would cross within a few hours — even at the tremendous speed of
radiation here were enormous.
He
went back to the control-room, looking at his watch. Kit rested lightly in a
screwed-down chair, staring at nothing. Her face was utterly dismal.
"I
— er — I put on the tractor-beams to see if there
could be anything solid around," he told her, pretending not to see her
expression.
She did not answer.
"I'm
hoping," he said awkwardly after a moment, "that we've wiped out
those pyramid-makers and that we'll be able to go through one of their ships
and pick up some of their stuff. In this space those projectors of theirs that
shoot beams of light should be handy. I'd like to know what kind of drive they
have — and they've got a sort of flame-pistol that could be useful."
Kit's
lips trembled. A tear appeared at the corner of her eye and did not run down
her cheek because there was no gravity to draw it. It blurred all her vision
and she shook her head to clear it. The tear-drop flew off into the air as a
tiny round globule. She gulped.
Rod said helplessly, "I feel like a
scoundrel, Kit. I act as if I didn't
think about you at all."
"You don't think of me," said Kit
"And — and we're likely to be killed any time and —"
"If
you looked happy," said Rod doggedly, "as if we were being romantic,
the four other girls would envy you. And if romance breaks out in this ship it
will be bad! There are ten men and only five girls. Right now it doesn't look
as if we've much chance of getting back and if ten men get romantic over five
girls —"
"S-some of the men are
m-married," said Kit
"It'll
be hard for them to bear that in mind after they give up hope of getting back
home and know they're some thousands of light-years away."
Then
Rod said grimly, "I look at it this way — we're in the position of people
who were shipwrecked in the olden days. But we've no hope of being rescued. No
friendly space-ship will ever run across us! So we've got to load up with food.
We've got to get weapons. We've got to get tools.
"And if we can't find our way back to
Earth — the chance is slim — we've got to find a planet these space-murderers
aren't interested in, one that we can settle on. We may have to turn ourselves
into a colony and spend all our lives somewhere we can't even guess at yet.
Right now we've got to keep from doing anything that will start dissension on
board."
"You
could say something nice once in a while," said Kit miserably.
"If I did," said
Rod, "I wouldn't want to stop at that"
The ship stirred — slightly
but definitely.
Rod
dived for the corridor to the engine-room. The movement of the ship could mean
but one thing. The tractor-beam had touched something solid. Even hurtling
through the air he glanced at his watch. The beam had been on for fourteen
minutes. That would mean a hundred and sixty million miles in normal space. It
might mean ten or twenty or a hundred times that here. It might mean anything
or nothing whatever.
He
reached the beam-projectors. Again carefully leaving the anchor-tractors
untouched, Rod cut down the power of one after another of the rest Another stirring. The beam which had struck something was
identified. He put'pressors in parallel and sent them
out to cover the direction.
It
was again fourteen minutes before a pressor hit the
unseen object the tractor tugged at Rod took a deep breath. It wasn't coming
this way, then. Not fast at any rate.
He settled down to finicky, delicate
manipulation. It was, in a way,
ridiculous for him to try to locate and focus a beam on something of unknown
size — an unguessable but enormous distance away —
when it was somewhere in a fifteen-degree-square arc of space.
It
took fourteen minutes to discover whether an individual beam was even pointed
in the right direction. But he had a dozen beams he could use, adjusting them
in sequence, and he could shift the unfocused beams to find when they slid off
the object.
The
three-dimensional dance ended when the painter ran out of breath with which to
blow the harmonica. An impromptu theatrical performance began. There was a
painter who fancied himself as a tap-dancer. He essayed to demonstrate. With no
weight to hold him anywhere his antics were unpredictable even to himself.
The
spectators held fast to handrails on walls and floor and ceiling. The girls
shrieked with laughter. The men howled. Somebody essayed to juggle. It was
impossible. Nothing came back to his hands. The laughter tended to grow
hysterical.
It
was a wholesome enterprise and it was all very well as long as they could
remember that they were not falling into endless nothingness. These antics
helped them to remember. But the instant that thought ceased to hold the center
of one's mind, muscles tensed in panic, eyes widened and breathing became
difficult because one was falling, falling, falling. . . .
It was long hours before Rod heard the
curious crisp noise within a pressor-coil
which told that it was locked. It was focused upon something invisible and
unspeakably remote in the absolute blaclc of
other-space. Rod looked at the beam-mounting. He made a tiny mark. After half an hour, there was no change in the long-range
adjustment. Whatever the object was, it had no great velocity either toward or
away from the Stellaris.
If it was a — well — a heavenly body, a
burned-out sun in a universe run down, it might be useful. So Rod left a beam
on it, drawing the minimum of power. He went floating along the corridor to the
control-room and there Kit looked at him steadily, a sheet of paper in her
hand. She no longer looked unhappy.
"Rod," she said,
"do you remember writing this?"
Rod
flushed. He'd written her a note before going out to make the death-beam
generator. The Stellaris was to vanish from the planet's surface while he worked — it was to hide
in other-space because there were alien looters on the unnamed world.
Pyramid-ships
might come to this city. They might beam any area they intended to land on, as
a matter of routine precaution. If they did he and the other two men on the
planet's surface would die. So he'd written a note for Kit to And in case he didn't come back. And she'd found it
"I
didn't think to tear that up when I came back," he said uncomfortably.
"Just — well — forget it won't you?"
"Hardlyl" said Kit She smiled tremulously. "If you
really feel this way about me, I want to remember it. I won't doubt any more!"
She
smiled at him. The temptation was irresistible. But the electrician named Joe came floating into the control-room, flapping two large
sheets of cardboard for wings. He braked expertly with them and grinned.
"If I only had a harp," he said,
beaming, "I'd feel like an angel for sure!"
"I'm
getting set to go back and see what our trick did to those looters and the
pyramid-ships," Rod told him, momentarily confused.
Joe raised his eyebrows and made no comment
He fanned himself to a wall and caught hold of a hand-rail. "I'd like to
spring an idea," he said.
"Go ahead!"
"Suppose
we fix up a couple gizmos like the one we made back yonder on the planet,"
said Joe. "Then we could put up a scrap
if one of them pyramids came after us."
"Providing we shot
first," said Rod.
"That's
right," agreed Joe. "But suppose we tricked the circuit so the
tensor-plate was choked? So when we turned on the juice nothin'
happened?"
Rod waited, frowning.
"Then,"
said Joe, grinning, "if they turned a beam on us,
our feed-backs 'ud pick it up an' uncork our beam on
them! They start shootin', an' automatic we shoot
back."
"Good enough," admitted Rod.
"Only we'd still die. That wouldn't kill their beams. It would just kill
them."
"Then
tie in our force-field switch," said Joe amiably. "They slap a beam
on us, we shoot back an' go whammo
into other-space. All automatic! A bear-trap. I don't
like those guys!"
"I
don't either," said Rod. He reflected. "Mmmmmm. You've got something there. I begin to like
it I wonder if they have it"
"It's
not likely, Rod," Kit interposed. 'They'll kill off other civilizations as
soon as they have space-travel. You didn't arm your first ship and there was no
plan to arm the Stellaris. No-body'd be set to
fight in their first space-ships.
"The
pyramid-people have probably never had a real fight in their lives. They won't
be looking for anybody to fight back, any more than a hunter expects a rabbit
to let go at him with a blaster."
"Something
there too," admitted Rod. "But they're probably scary at that Most likely they started this murder business because they
were frightened the first time their ships came upon another race. They wiped
that race out because it scared them. Then they looted its cities and found it
paid off. Still, if they think that way . .
A chilly thought came to him. He felt small
cold prickles running up and down his spine.
"Right
now we've got to take a chance that we hit them hard," he said grimly.
"Pass along the word that we're going back to normal space on the planet
we found. And Joe —*
"Yeah?"
"Go
down in the engine-room. I've got a pressor locked on
something in the dark universe. If I throw the force-fields back on, you put
power into that pressor. Plenty of itl We'll want to get moving, and fasti"
Joe grinned, let go of the hand-rail and
flapped blissfully
»
across the
room. He bounced off the doorway and went soaring toward the engines.
Shoutings went through the ship. There was a
roll-call, so that the sudden return of gravity would not take anyone by
surprise. Then Rod threw off the force-fields.
Weight
came back, but no light outside. Rod blinked, then
roared, "Lights out! Quick!" It
was night outside on the planet, and the lighted ports of the Stellaris would show for miles.
After
long minutes Rod put Kit's hands on the switch that would send the Stellaris back to other-space. Quietly — it seemed strange to be able to walk — he
went to the air-lock. He cracked it open. There was no sound anywhere. He
stepped out into the night. The air was chill and many strange stars shone
overhead. It was altogether eerie to stand in such strangeness on the ways of
a city that had been murdered, on a planet that had no name, in the weird
stillness of its night.
But
night had not long fallen. On the horizon there was still a trace of
luminosity. A single wisp of cloud, high up, glowed faintly in sunlight from
below the horizon. But overhead the sky was deep-blue. Stars twinkled brightly.
And
there was silence to crack the eardrums. Perhaps at the edge of the city where
the jungle began, boughs and branches whispered in a night-wind. But here all
was stillness. Everything was dead. As his eyes adjusted to the starlight the
soaring, graceful architecture took form in the dimness.
And
then he saw one of the pyramids that had been floating overhead before the Stellaria — its improvisioned weapon radiating death —
had fled into the other-space. The pyramid had come down out of control.
It had crashed into the side of a cliff-like
structure and tumbled out again. It lay askew with one of its corners still
caught in the gap its impact had made. Rod drew a deep breath of satisfaction.
The weapon he'd made had worked. There was now no living alien of the murderous
race upon this planet But —
Something
made him raise his eyes. Stars moved overhead. They moved visibly. Tiny specks
of yellow incandescence shifted place among the many-colored distant suns. One
winked out completely. Another suddenly appeared.
For an instant Rod thought of shooting stars
— of meteors. But
meteors do not move slowly. These things did. Especially, meteors do not move
in geometric formation, arranged as a slightly skewed
triangle which give the appearance from one viewpoint of a pyramid.
The
specks were pyramid-ships — a space-fleet of the killer-race! There were
literally hundreds of them and they approached the planet on which Rod stood.
The flashes of light were sunlight reflected from their polished sides.
Rod
went cold all over. But it was obvious enough, once he thought about it. The
aliens who put up a pyramid on Calypso had the mentality of people who install
elaborate burglar-alarms. It was part of a pattern of thought
They
did not think of mercy, so they would not think of watchfulness.
Cold-bloodedness manifesting itself in unwarned race-murders implied a whole
psychology. And a suspicion that had come to Rod no more than half an hour
since was verified.
The aliens plainly took no chances. As they
did not imagine friendly commerce — implying loyalty — between different races,
they did not imagine loyalty or courage in their own. So a pyramid-ship was not trusted to meet and report upon
emergencies.
As a power-storage unit and a transmitter was built into the traps they set
for other civilizations, so similar devices were built into their ships. In the
unthinkable event that one of their crews was wiped out by a race unknown to them the crew was not depended on to report with their
last trace of strength.
When
the stick-like creatures in a pyramid-ship died the ship itself sent out a death-cry of radiation which could travel across half a galaxy. Perhaps
there were relays to receive and transmit communications faster than the speed
of light When a ship
was destroyed, a monstrous, overwhelming fleet could be sent instantly to
avenge and destroy.
The
winking spects of light moved on. Probably they would
englobe the planet on which the looting-party had
been destroyed. They might blast the planet itself out of existence. Or
perhaps —
Rod
ground his teeth. He'd made a mistake.
He'd lost precious hours out of exaggerated caution. But he would not make
that mistake again.
He went back into the ship to give crisp and
savage orders.
CHAPTER EIGHT.
The Enemy
T |
HERE
was no alarm but the suspense itself was hair-raising. Joe the electrician and
an arc-welder with a torch cut loose the generator of the deadly
tractor-pressor radiation. Already there was a tendency to call it "the push-pull beam" instead of tractor-pressor or supersonic radiation.
While they did so Rod and two others assailed
the fallen and apparently helpless pyramid-ship. They cut into its airlock
door — and gagged at the smell within. It was a living-thing smell.
It
was, in fact, the personal smell of the aliens. It was indescribable and
revolting. In all probability the aliens themselves were unconscious of it, as
humans are unaware of the human smell which is so comforting to a dog. But this
reek filled men with rage.
They
went through the monstrous ship, hand-flashes flickering here and there. They
were armed with nothing more deadly than spanners but they looked fiercely to
see if anything remained alive. They ignored machinery and weapons and
technical devices, seeking only dangerous life. They found none though there were
many bodies.
They clambered out again and found the
vehicle they'd used as a beam-mount and trundled it to the Sre/far/V
air-lock door. They helped heave off the block of plastic which acted as a
giant vacuum tube.
Joe
the electrician observed casually, "Say! When we were fussin'
around that pyramid we musta stepped on somethin'. Their little booby-trap got all hotted up and melted itself down. Okay?"
"Very
much so," Rod told him. "They'll think somebody opened it, or maybe
that it went off of itself. But they won't see where we cut it open. It should
puzzle them a bit. Come along!"
With
two others he set the little vehicle off at top speed through the dead city's
streets. His spine was literally crawling with apprehension but he went on
grimly. If the newly-come fleet simply surrounded the planet and at a signal
blasted it with the deadly push-pull radiation, every square inch of the
planet's surface would become death itself. Nothing could live. It could happen
at any instant
And
there was no conceivable defense against it But he'd lost twelve hours, waiting
in other-space out of apprehension, overestimating the pyramid-ships' means of
defense. Now he knew that a race so careful of its own life that it practised murder as a trade would be a very fearful one. It was likely to overestimate the enemy that had
struck at it Instead of a manned ship it would probably send a robot
— a
drone — to investigate the weapons used against its vanquished ships. If the
drone itself were destroyed the fleet would withdraw until some counter to the
new weapon could be devised.
But Rod had no new weapon. He had only — be
believed
— the
instrument by which the aliens did their murders. Even that needed to be
powered by apparatus of their construction. He could not destroy anything now.
So the aliens would find nothing in particular to alarm them, though it would
be some time before they felt safe in landing.
Still, they could be examining the surface of
the planet with telescopes — perhaps electron-telescopes — and they might
detect the Stellarts. On the other hand they'd have to use infrared on the night side of the
planet and infra-red does not give good definition. The ship and its tiny
landing-party might — might! — be safe until more light came with the dawn.
He
had to risk it. He drove to the power-station. The four men cut free the
isotopic dynamo and manhandled it to the vehicle. They loaded up four
television-machines. They went racing back. The other load had been carried in
through the air-lock. Now this load was put on board the Stellarts.
"I'd
like to have more food," said Rod, "but we can go on short rations
for awhile. All right? Seal her up!"
He
took post in the control-room. Joe had connected up more switches, but there were still no
instruments. He released the anchoring tractor-beams and pushed the ship up on pressors. He maneuvered above the tumbled
pyramid-ship. He sent down tractors and locked them.
The Stellaris sank as the strain came on, but he fed more power to the pressor-beams which held up the earth-ship on unsubstantial
stilt-like legs. Presently the pyramid-ship stirred and floated free. Then Rod
maneuvered it very gently up against the Stellaris' bottom-plates and pushed up to five thousand feet.
For long minutes the ship hung there, swaying
and oscillating with a soggy, burdened motion. But Rod had more controls to
set by hand, since the ship was not one-tenth wired for navigation. There had
to be tractors — unfocused — set to overlap in a globe all around. The
force-field generators had to have certain constants changed.
That was really the ticklish part. Rod had
designed the generators but he sweated as he worked. And as the crucial
instant drew near he felt a despairing certainty that, from somewhere in the
star-studded vault overhead, a death-beam would strike down just before he took
his final action.
But it didn't
When
he raced to the control-room and glanced out the ports he saw a shimmering,
faintly luminous horizon all about and many stars above. He saw far-distant
darkness, which was this world's jungle, and at one place a sea.
But
directly under the Stellaris a huge flat plate of polished metal shut off
all sight of the ground. It was the pyramid-ship. Rod threw the master
tractor-switch and, as the ship lurched violently, he threw the force-field
switch hard over.
It
was all familiar, now. There was only blackness outside and there was no weight
whatever, but there were new strange grinding noises. They were against the
earth-ship's hull. They were rhythmic and reverberating.
"We
made it," Rod told Kit swallowing. "I was almost sure we wouldn't
have time."
Kit held fast to a
hand-rail to keep from floating free.
"Whafs that
grinding?" she asked Rod in a frightened
voice.
"That's
our friend, the enemy," he said. "The force-field generators were
intended only to drop the Stellaris into other-space but I designed
them so they could be changed. And I just changed them.
"I
had them spread out to make a spherical
field a half-mile across — well beyond our hull. So when they went on, they
dropped the pyramid-ship and everything else within a quarter-mile into
other-space with us."
Kit frowned bewilderedly.
"But
can we do anything with it?" she asked. "There's no air outside and we've certainly nothing like a space-suit."
Rod grinned a
little, as he wiped sweat off his forehead. "We brought air with us."
Joe
the electrician came floating seraphically into the
control-room.
"Near
as I can figure," he reported, "we got five-six hundred feet of
extension cable we can hook together to get light in that ship those critters ain't
usin' any longer."
"But —" Kit grew
more uneasy.
"We
brought a half-mile sphere of air with us," Rod repeated. "And we've
got tractors pulling in every direction. They act the same as gravity. There's
a vacuum outside, of course, but there's a vacuum outside of every planet.
"Gravity holds air to the planets.
Tractors are holding air to us. We can walk around on the outside of the ship
if we want to. We couldn't even fall off! The tractors would pull us back, as
they pull back the air."
With
Joe he went to the air-lock. He cracked the door. No hiss of escaping air followed. He opened it wider. There was air outside. The Stellaris and its captive were in effect a miniature planet, holding an atmosphere against the emptiness of space by means of tractor-beams.
"But we've got to work fast," Rod
said grimly. "I wish
we had warm clothes. This air will be losing heat to space and there's no sun
to put it back. We'll be lucky to have an hour. Let's go!"
Carrying
a line, with Joe uncoiling flexible light-extension wire behind him, Rod
stepped out of the lock. A huge, glaring bulb glowed on the end of the wire.
The tractors held them fast against the Stellaritf outer skin. There was the one fierce electric-light in an entire dark
universe.
One
tiny spot of illumination in hundreds of thousands of light-years — it showed
the brightly-polished flat plating of the alien ship. A painter poked his head
out of the air-lock and shivered, then gingerly followed. An arc-welder came
too, carrying the tools of his trade..
They
cut through the skin of the other ship, since the airlock
was no longer convenient They pulled away masses of insulation. They cut
through another skin. The repugnant reek of the pyramid-people filled their
nostrils.
"We'll try to turn on their
lights," observed Rod. "They must've had them! And then we start to
loot the looters. Joe and I will hunt for technical stuff. The rest of you send
back tools, anything that looks like books or fabrics — anything that could be
interesting or useful. And work fasti"
Joe
strung lights and hunted for a way to turn on the obvious sources of
illumination in the first compartment they had reached. The lights remained
obstinately off. Joe cut one loose and turned it over to be sent back to the Stellaria. Rod went on to more important matters.
The
ship was amazing — not because of its development but because of its crudity.
Its pyramidal form had doubtless been chosen long since because of its rigidity
and because reflecting surfaces at specific angles had advantages when it was
desired to go — say — near a sun.
But
the ship was not the work of a really civilized race. There was no trace of
artistry anywhere — not even the clean smooth lines of purely functional
design. This ship looked as if it had been designed by a construction man who
thought only of how to put it together. Everything else had been ignored.
It was a job that ignorant or unskilled labor
could assemble and there was no particular thought for the comfort of its crew
or the psychological effect of good design. The dead members of the crew were
not prepossessing. Their faces were almost without features and were wholly
without expression. They seemed fit occupants of a vessel designed for strict
utility and nothing else.
Rod
gained an increasingly strong impression that this was a case of a barbarous
race suddenly acquiring a weapon they were not prepared to use except as
barbarians. It appeared that just as mathematics was thousands of years ahead
of technology in ancient Greece, this race had suddenly developed a specific
technology thousands of years ahead of every other part of their civilization.
Used as they had used it, such an advantage
would almost or quite stop progress in every other line. They would not develop
a civilization of their own as long as they looted other civilizations.
He
looked at the ship's weapons. He found only the push-pull beam and he'd
designed it better than they had. The engine-room was absurdly simple and
utterly cryptic but even there he saw clumsiness in such items as the grouping
of bus-bars.
The
source of power, though, did baffle him. All bus-bars ran from a triple plate
of glass or plastic which had two metal plates between its leaves. It looked
like a primitive condenser but apparently it supplied all the power that was
used in the ship.
It
was dead, now. There was no potential across it but there could be no other
reading of its function than that of power-supply.
Rod had it cut loose and
sent it to the Stellaris.
The
drive was equally crude and equally improbable, until he looked at it twice.
Then he held his head. It was simply a pressor-beam
fined down to a needle-point and aimed at an infinitesimal hole in a metal
plate.
The pressor-beam would exert a pressure of hundreds of
thousands of tons upon the center of an opening only thousandths
of an inch in diameter. There was a not particularly good gas-flow regulator
which governed the flow of a tiny trickle of gas to the opening.
"My
sainted aunt!" said Rod bitterly. "Look at it! We could have had
space-travel this past fifty years! Interplanetary travel, at any ratel They let gas flow to the
pin-hole and push it through with a pressor-beam!
It's a pressor-beam rocket!
"Millions or billions of tons to the
square inch pressure on the escaping gas! They'll get jet-velocities close to
light-speed! Get this to the Stellaris, Joe. We'll use it, though I'm going to be ashamed. But they get more
than light-speed in their ships, Joe! Howtt they do
that?"
He
went prowling. He found the self-acting signal-device which sent a thunderous
message of despair when the ship went out of action. Simple enough,
save for the apparatus which used up the energy. He could not guess at the type
of radiation which was produced. But nine-tenths of the things he saw were
behind comparable human devices.
Men
could do much better with every contrivance he understood and he suspected
they could do better with the rest. This race had been enough ahead of the
races it had murdered never to have to extend itself.
So there was a flavor to the entire culture. It was barbarous and unpleasant
and crude and revolting. It figuratively stank as its possessions did
literally.
Joe
the electrician tried to draw his attention. He waved him away. Other men spoke
to him and he paid no heed. He searched feverishly.
The
light-guns were simple. Men could make them. He found something that was
obviously a type of radar. There was a vision-screen of sorts. But he hunted desperately and in vain for
star-maps and for navigation-instruments.
The
nearest thing he found to them was a chest from which a fierce heat still poured and which was a chaos of
melted and churned-up metal and charred stuff like paper. Nothing could
be made of it It might be — it could be — that all star-maps
and navigational data was automatically destroyed when the signal of despair
was sent off by a shattered ship. If so, it was still more proof of the
murderer-psychology of the race.
Then Kit shook his elbow insistently. Her
face was white and pinched.
"You've
been here two hours, Rod! It's cold! The moisture's all frozen out of the air
outside the ship. The tractors pulled it down as snow! Now the air's lost so
much heat it's apt to freeze too!"
Rod
said harshly, "You should have stayed on the Stellarial Why'd you come?"
"You
wouldn't listen to anybody else!" said Kit desperately. "They said
you pushed them away and kept on hunting like a crazy man! When the air freezes you can't live!"
He
stared at her. Her breath was a white steam. She shivered violently. There was
already a thin layer of frost on her clothes.
"All right," he said
sullenly," but I want to know —" Angrily — angry at his own
incomprehension — he led her back to the opening in the pyramid-ship. There was
every seeming of gravity here, created by the tractors which held an
atmosphere.
Rod
stepped out on the Stellaria' skin and there were feet of feathery snow on
it It was unbelievably cold. There was no heat in the
dark universe and its emptiness sucked greedily at heat in objects from a
living cosmos.
Joe stamped and chartered in the air-lock.
When Rod handed Kit in he cut the cable that had furnished light in the alien
ship.
"W-we
got more cable from them," he gasped, "an' we got to close this lock!
I'm glad I ain't a brass monkey or this cold'd ha' done me dirt!"
The
outer airlock door closed. The inner one opened. There was warmth and light,
and a slight pervading taint in the air from the objects the aliens had owned.
CHAPTER NINE
War Basis
F |
IVE minutes later Rod grimly cut off the
tractors which had held an atmosphere in mid-space and an enemy spaceship with
it. He found sardonic amusement in picturing the effect of that gesture upon
the pyramid-folk.
The Stellaris still had a beam locked on the planet of the dead cities. Its power was
low, but she would not be too many millions of miles away if she went back to
normal space now. And the air she'd brought into the dark universe would return
to normal space immediately it expanded beyond the force-fields.
There
would be a sudden, violent, astounding irruption of
vapor in emptiness, somewhere in sight of the planet And a comet's tail can contain no more than a mere few cubic inches of gas,
which yet is expanded and ionized and visible as a trail of hundreds of
thousands of miles.
A
half-mile sphere of air, expanded suddenly, should make such a sight as the
stick-men had never seen before. It should fill them with enormous
apprehension, simply because of its strangeness and because it followed closely
on the destruction of at least three of their ships.
If
they investigated and found the gutted pyramid-ship, which should go back to a
star-filled cosmos somewhere near the air-cloud, they should be more uneasy
still. Because they'd find their ship looted only of sample objects rather than
of all its contents, and they'd realized that it had
been flung contemptuously away as worthless.
But
there was that loot to examine. It was more than ever unfortunate that the Stellaris had no gravity. The booty floated about irritatingly and those who tried
to explore its possibilities floated too.
The
primitive-seeming condenser remained inscrutable, though its power-leads had
surely carried an enormous load. The sample light, however, glowed brightly
when connected to the Stellstris' power-lines. But Rod was scornful.
"Mercury-vapor,"
he said contemptuously, "with a phosphor in the tube around itl We stopped using that sort of
thing fifty years ago!"
The
drive was again irritating. To all intents and purposes it was a rocket with a
jet-speed astronomically high because a pressure-beam was used on it The light-guns could have been made on Earth. The radar set
had elements of novelty but Joe and Rod agreed that men made better ones. The
vision-screen was not nearly as good as the ones in the dead city. Rod pushed
himself away from all of them.
"They had a drive and a push-pull beam,
both of which were quite within our reach," he said sourly. "Their
power-supply is over my head and undoubtedly they had some trick for
faster-than-light travel. But that's all! In two months we could wipe them out,
given this stuff back on Earth! Since we can't get back to Earth we've got to
do what we can right here!"
The
other things taken from the ship, being non-technical, seemed less important
But there were bales of soft lustrous fabric, which the girls of the air-plant oh'd and ah'd over. There were
chests of prismatically glistening ware of unfamiliar
shape — household luxuries of some sort and possibly tableware.
There
were jewels. There were art-objects portraying flowers of exquisite delicacy
and people — at least, they wore garments — which were neither the people of
the planet of the yellow sun nor pyramid-folk nor any other known race.
"Those
fiends didn't make this stuff," said Rod grimly. "This must come from
the cities of some other poor devils they've wiped out!"
The faint taint of alien smell made his
hackles tend to rise. There could never have been friendship between human beings
and the people of the pyramid race under the happiest of auspices. This smell
made enmity inevitable.
"We'll
get to work," said Rod distastefully. "I hate to use a trick of
theirs — but we need that drive."
Groping
with tractor and pressor-beams was not the most
efficient form of space-travel, so the alien drive was to be installed. It was
simple enough to float it to a stern-ward position and weld it in place.
It
needed a tiny opening for the ejected gas-particles to escape from but their speed
would be so great that they'd bore their own exit. It was not so easy to weld
braces and a mounting to take up its thrust. Rod left two welders swearing at
the difficulty of working when they had no weight
Kit smiled at him wrily.
"Somebody has to take care of you," she said defensively when she saw
him frowning. "And you'd have stayed there until you froze! I had to come
after you!"
"Thanks,"
he said heavily. "I'm just worried because there was some stuff on that
ship I didn't get. Most of their gadgets were primitive and we can do much
better. But —"
"Did
you find out how they got their artificial gravity?" she asked hopefully.
"I get awfully tired of just floating."
"They didn't have
gravity," he protested.
"But I could walk in
that ship," she insisted. "I did!"
"That was our —"
Rod groaned. "I'm stupid! I'll be back!"
He
went to the engine-room. He pulled Joe off the drive-installation and together
they set up a tractor in the extreme stern-most compartment of the ship. They
widened out its beam. In less than twenty minutes objects and persons within
the Stellaris began to settle gently toward the stern.
Thirty
seconds later they had perceptible weight and after a minute weight was practically normal everywhere in the ship. Rod climbed
then — though the ship was in other-space — back to face Kit in the
control-room.
"We could have had gravity all
along," he told her ruefully. "I only had to put a tractor in the
ship's tail to pull us all toward it Joe's setting up a pressor
in the bow to neutralize it outside. So we've got gravity. Now
what?"
"Nothing,"
said Kit wistfully, "except that it would be nice to stop worrying and
think about ourselves sometimes."
"I
believe," Rod told her, "there's an outside chance even of
that!"
He
inspected the small tractor locked on the planet of dead cities. Locked as it
was, its mount adjusted its focus to allow for varying distance and it was
possible to estimate the distance from the planet to the spot at which the Stellaris would return to normal space. It was too close. He put power on the pressor. Joe came in, uncoiling a power-lead.
"The
jet drive," he said crisply. "You got a switch you ain't usin'?" He connected
the cable and scrupulously labeled the switch.
"Joe," said Rod. "Remember
your idea of a push-pull beam that would shoot back if we were beamed?
Listen!" He spoke carefully. Joe grinned.
"Sure!
I'll fix it Too bad we ain't
got more stuff to work with."
"You might use that isotopic generator
we got from the city," Rod suggested. "We can hardly run a cable
out."
"Mmmm," said Joe. "It'd be a kinda
good idea to try out that power-gadget from the pyramid. I got an idea about
that There's nothin' there
to supply power. Nothin's used up. Noth-in's breakin' down. Nothin' to
happen. But it gave 'em power — in regular
space."
"It's dead now." Then Rod stopped.
"You think it could be a trick receiver of power from somewhere?"
"That's
my hunch," said Joe. "Maybe they got broadcast power."
"Galaxy-wide?"
demanded Rod skeptically. "How?"
"You
guess," said Joe grinning. "I bet it's a simple trick, though — like
their drive."
He
nodded and went back toward the engine-room. Rod looked at his watch. There was
gravity on the ship now and they had at least twice the power they'd started
out with. They knew how to make weapons at least equal to any the alien
pyramid-folk possessed. He remembered the pencil-beam of heat the looters had
used to cut out a wall in the dead city. He'd have to look into that too. Joe
was busy. His job would take time.
Rod
hunted in the loot for a pencil-beam gun and found one. On the way back he
stopped to watch Joe at work on the automatic push-pull weapon. Joe had only
such tools as had been on the ship during its construction but he was doing a
good job. Rod watched approvingly.
"Joe,"
he said after a moment "if you sliced that tensor-plate into segments and
fixed the feedback so —"
He illustrated.
"If
you do that" Rod finished, "it will shoot back only in the direction
from which it's shot at All the power'll go into a
relatively narrow beam." Then another idea struck him.
"My sainted aunt! Better than that, Joe, set the feed-back like this! There's no pull on a tractor
until it hits something. When there's a tractor going out from every segment —
better put a commutator on and run through them in
turn — when there's a tractor going out and it hits something, that will turn
on the push-pull beam! Full-power too!"
Joe grunted. He looked at Rod with a wry
expression.
"It's
a bright idea all right We're turnin'
the old Stellaris into a warship, sure enough. But we won't be
good company for nice people. We're goin* to go roamin' around like a mad
dog?"
"A
shunt here will take care of that," said Rod. "With the shunt cut in
it will ring a bell when a tractor-beam hits. With a power-switch in parallel we can make it shoot back and then tell us what
it did."
Joe
looked relieved. "Y-yeah. I see that" He grinned twist-ily. "I'd hate
to go around spittin' death-beams just automatic.
We'd wind up kinda lonesome, seems like."
Rod
went back to the control-room. But the weapon that was developing stayed in his
mind. He went back again and asked Joe to make an adjustment so the push-pull
power-feed could be cut off from any desired segment, so that one part of the
weapon's range could be left unblasted if desired.
"I'm
acting," he said, almost embarrassed, "as if I thought we might find
friends."
Joe
grunted. "Well? Those guys in the pyramid-ships are tough babies. Maybe
the folks they killed were good guys. There's usually a good guy somewhere to
make up for a bad one."
Then
he added, "I'll have this thing ready in a coupla hours. You know how we're goin' to mount it outside? No air there
now!"
Rod sketched out a notion for that too. Joe grunted again. "That's half an hour more.
I'll set those welder-guys workin' on it"
Back to the control-room again. Rod paced up and down, no longer really
conscious of the novelty of gravity in space. The ihip
began to feel like something other than a hulk navigated by makeshift means.
He
began to feel less like a shipwreck victim and more like • man in command of a
ship. He began, indeed, to think in terms of what could be done to the
pyramid-race, instead of the peril they represented.
It
was nearer three hours than two before Joe reported the new weapon finished. It
had called for very careful work by practically every man on the ship and the
using up of I-beams intended for interior partitions.
When it was complete, Rod threw the switch
that meant a return to normal space. There was practically no change in
sensation as dots of light appeared in the vision-ports and ran through all the
colors of the rainbow before they settled to their usual appearance as stars by
myriads on every hand. The yellow sun was now very far away. It was only the
brightest distant object in the heavens.
They
opened the airlock door, with a tractor covering the opening so no air would
escape. Focused pressors pushed the new device
outside and maneuvered it delicately to a new position. From the ports Rod
guided it to the Stellaris" nose and anchored it. And then a tiny tractor pulled back the switch
that set the generator into action and the Stellaris was a fighting ship.
For
the first time Rod applied the jet-drive. The ship gave a mighty surge forward.
It headed for the yellow
star — and battle.
Battle!
T |
HEY
had seen four planets on their first approach to this solar system. One a world all ice from pole to pole, they had
by-passed for the next world sunward. There were two others still nearer to the
sun. Rod regarded them speculatively as the Stellaris drove toward the world of dead cities.
"I think," he
said meditatively, "that I'm going to take a look at those planets — if we live through this." Kit stood beside
him.
"And
somehow that settles it Do you realize, Rod, how completely you are expected
to decide things? One of the painters said we should be trying to find our own
sun or else hunting a planet we can settle on. But Joe said he was crazy and
there wasn't even an argument. You wanted to fight so there simply wasn't any
question about it."
"There's
a reason for us to fight," said Rod curtly. "Nobody can guess the
size of the pyramid-ship fleet but ifs surely all hunting us. If we stay in one
place, fighting, maybe they'll think
we're survivors of the race they murdered.
"We
have to try to make them think so for the sake of Earth. If they decided they'd
better start a general massacre of all the races we could
come from, Earth would certainly be included. And there's no faintest
preparation to stop them back there."
Joe came climbing up from the engine-room. "That thing
that looks like a condenser," he reported amiably, "it works. It's hot now — plenty of power. I hooked it up an' we're run-nin' on it"
"Then unhook it," commanded Rod
sharply. "Get back to our own power! That doesn't work in the dark universe and we couldn't go
into it or stay in it! Shift the leads back!
Quick!"
Joe's mouth dropped open. He dived for the
engine-room iBgain. Rod's forehead creased. Minutes later Joe
came back, crestfallen.
"Sorry,"
he said apologetically. "I thought it was kinda
humorous to use their own power to fight 'em with.
We're back en our own now."
"It's broadcast
power, all right," said Rod grimly. "Somehow they can fill the whole
Galaxy with power for their ships to draw on — unless they've found a source of
energy that comes from nothingness itself."
After a moment he added, "I keep
thinking about those inner planets. It's a hunch. It bothers me. It doesn't
seem quite natural." He shook his head as if to clear it. "Those
devils must have broadcast power of some sort, though."
A
bell rang sharply. It stopped. It rang again. It stopped. Tt
rang again. Rod and Joe tensed.
"What does that
mean?" asked Kit apprehensively.
"It
should mean that we blasted a pyramid-ship," Rod told her. "This is a
long way out, though."
The
sun was again a glaring disk. Something winked in its rays. It vanished. It
winked again out a right-hand port. It was infinitely small and the effect was that
of a bit of tinsel spinning in a bright light
"Right!"
said Rod in satisfaction. "A pyramid-ship sentry.
Our beam-gun on the bow found him and blasted him, probably before he knew
anything about it His skipper probably had a spasm as he died and jammed his
controls, so he's spinning."
The
bell rang on monotonously, once in each revolution of the commutator
which applied full power to each segment of the tensor-plate in turn, to blast
any target the device might find. The pyramid-ship was getting a fresh lethal
dose of the push-pull beam at each clang of the bell.
Onward the Stellaris bored. Presently the bell stopped.
Rod said, "Hm
— we left him behind. We've got to allow for thatl We can't have them coming up behind us, where the ship fills
up a space and the beams turned off."
"Will we beam the
planets, Rod?" asked Kit
"We've
got a minus arrangement," Rod told her.
"We don't shoot at anything over a certain range. I don't know exactly
what it is but it's probably some thousands of miles."
The planet of the dead race was a perceptible
disk now. It was the size of a pea. Time passed. It grew to the size of a
marble.
The
bell rang. Twice. It stopped and rang twice again —
and again — and again.
"Two more of
them," said Rod savagely.
Time
passed. The double-ring stopped. There was silence. Then a single ring again,
monotonously repeated.
"This
ain't spcrtin'," said
Joe, scowling, "but y*don't play sportin' with
rats."
The
planet was the size of a peach, now. There was an infinitesimal shimmering in
space ahead — an infinitely thin sliver of what looked like gossamer came up
out of the planet's atmosphere. It spread and formed itself into a geometric
pattern of wavering specks of light.
"They
know we knocked off their ships," said Rod. He was thinking aloud.
"They've plenty of sentries out and when a ship dies, it squeals to the rest. Automatically.
So they know we can hit, and hard. But they're forming up to fight us. How'll
they fight?"
The Stellaris sped furiously toward the enemy formation. There was silence. Then Kit
gasped.
"Rod, I feel queer —
like that other ti —"
Rod's
hands moved like lightning. The force-field switch crashed over. He said
distinctly — with the ports all black — "The rats!"
They were in the dark
universe for a bare second. He flung the switch back once more. There was no
difference in the feel of things now, whether in other-space or normal. The Stellaris had dodged only momentarily into the other set of dimensions but in the
other-space her velocity was enormous.
Rod,
however, overestimated it. He had thought the Stellaris would slip back into the universe of stars beyond the enemy fleet. But
she winked into being in its very midst.
There
were shining pyramidal shapes on every hand. The bell burst into frenzied,
continuous clanging. Glittering metal ships flashed past the ports so swiftly
that the eye could not focus on them.
But
the Stellaris' weapon poured out death — the death of the
pyramid-folk's own contriving — as the Earth-ship hurtled through the fleet of
space-murderers and went on beyond them. She was through before they could
train a single weapon.
Then
Rod swung her about to face the enemy. The drive-jet fought her acquired
momentum. The ship slowed — and kept its beam-weapon going as it struggled to
dash in again.
Minute by minute the clanging of the bell
grew less. Despite her drive the ship was only slowing. She had not stopped.
But when the planet's disk ceased to recede and began to grow visibly larger
once more—when her savage second charge was evident — Rod saw Bickerings as pyramid-ships deserted their formation and
fled toward emptiness.
The
main body of the fleet did not disperse. It did not flee. But as minute after
minute passed, it became apparent that something was wrong. The edges of the
pyramid-formation grew fuzzy. The ships did not keep station.
When
the Stellaris bored into them again the bell clanged and
clanged and clanged. At the thickest part of the fleet it rang frantically, one
sharp stroke for each outpouring of the push-pull beam at an individual target But the ships made no concerted move, nor any purposeful
individual ones. The Stellaris was merely killing again ships that were already dead.
Minutes more and she was
through a second time and the first space-battle in all the history of the
galaxy was over. One Earth-ship that had taken off from its home planet by pure
accident, unarmed and unequipped, had wiped out nine-tenths of a fleet that had
never before been opposed. And its remnants were in flight
The Stellaris drove on and on. The unmanned hulks which had been fighting vessels only
a little while since fell astern. The clamor of the bell lessened. Presently
there were only random disconnected sounds.
Later there were none at
all.
"Not
too nervy," commented Rod. "They saw we had them licked and those
that were left headed for home. It fits the way their minds seem to work."
"What will we do
now?" asked Kit "Land on the planet
again?"
Rod
considered, scowling. "Part of the fleet ran away as soon as they found
their broadside was no good."
"Broadside?"
"Massed
push-pull beams," said Rod shortly. "They turned the beams of the
whole fleet on us. We shouldn't have been able to live through it to get within
range with a single ship's weapons. Probably wouldn't at that only you felt
queer.
"That was the first-aligned beams
hitting us, away out of range for a few beams but
well in range for the bunch of theml Another second
and that blast would have been so strong nothing in creation could have stood
it Certainly we couldn't!" He paused.
"Some
of them, though, ran from a fleet action. They're not a very brave race. I'm
trying to figure something out The ships on the ground
knew we'd knocked off their sentries. Of course! So we were dangerous.
"So
maybe some of them didn't take off with the rest of the fleet. Playing it safe. It would seem to fit in with the way their
minds work. So maybe some ships are still skulking on the ground."
"So?" Kit waited.
"If
we can spot them they're dead ducks. But if we tried to land they might knock
us down practically from ambush. They're probably half shivering in deadly fear
and half licking their chops as they wait for us to land. So —"
He looked abruptly at Kit,
and then at Joe. Joe grinned.
"I guess we stop off
at one of those other planets?"
"That'll be it,"
said Kit confidently.
Rod's
eyes narrowed, even as he released the small hand-tractor which kept the deadly
contrivance on the ship's bow in action.
"Ye-e-e-s,"
he said slowly. "I guess that will be it We'll
see what is to be seen. But I think I'm going to be mighty cagey!"
He swung the Stellaris about on her course.
The line of flight of a space-ship is not at all the same thing as —
say — the path of a ground-vehicle. When a ground vehicle, moving south,
turns east it travels east and stops moving south. A space-ship doesn't The space-ship doesn't stop moving south. There's nothing to
stop it
When a course is changed the new line of
movement simply modifies the one the ship followed before and that is the
result of all its previous courses. A southward-moving space-ship which heads
east actually travels on a line somewhere between south and east.
The
exact line depends on the acceleration of the ship, how long it was on the
southerly course, and how long it continues on the eastern one. Its direction
of motion changes with each of those factors. So that to sight for a planet from space, as the Stellaris did, and then head for it, is no way to reach it.
Rod
probably knew it in theory but he realized it the hard way. The yellow sun's
second planet had a proper motion all its own, which Rod did not know. The Stellaris had a motion all its own, which was the result of all the courses it had followed
during two full days in two different universes. But nevertheless, Rod aimed
the ship at the second planet and drove for it
Hours
passed and the Stellaris was farther from the planet than when it started. More, it no longer
pointed at the planet though the distant stars it aimed at were the same. Rod
tried again and the same thing happened. In the end, scowling, he swung a
tractor on the elusive world, waited an astonishing four full minutes for the
beam to take hold and then grumpily set Joe on watch and went to sleep. It was
his second period of rest in more clock-days than he could count up.
He
slept heavily for a long, long time. He waked and Kit
brought him food. It was strictly vegetable and vaguely unsatisfying. He ate,
only half-awake, and went back to sleep again.
This time he dreamed. And oddly, it was not a
dream of Earth or of the battle just past or even of Kit whom he could not
allow to absorb him too much in the present state of things. He dreamed of the
dead race on the yellow sun's planet — the race which was now only a multitude
of crumpled heaps of brightly-colored garments.
In
his dream he saw a space-ship rise from the third planet and land upon another.
He dreamed of a tiny colony established there before this space-ship made its
flight This ship landed on a hitherto unexplored part
of this new planet and the colonists just moving to the new planet found a
vague metal object there.
They
meddled with it and immediately they died — not only the meddlers, but those in
the grounded space-ship nearby. And then the object melted itself to a mere
pool of bubbling metal, which was found by members of the already-established
colony much, much later.
The space-ship itself was smashed as if by
explosives. And
after that there was no more communication between the colony on this other world and the planet from which they had come. The colonists
simply lived on, bewildered and helpless.
As a dream it was at once remarkable and
suspicious. It was reasonable enough as a rationalization of a hunch. But Rod
wondered cagily why his subconscious had pictured no metal pyramid as the
object the colonists-to-be had meddled with? Why not a pyramid with sculptured
figures on its sides?
It was a very vivid dream. Of course he'd
been thinking of other
races endangered by the pyramid-ships. Joe had said something about good guys
existing to make up for the bad ones. And he'd thought unreasonably often of
the yellow sun's •econd planet Especially
lately. Even when his mind should have been full of battle-plans as the Stellaria sped toward a fight
It could be a hunch, of course.
He'd had a hunch before — on the dead planet when he was making a push-pull
beam to wipe out the looters there. He'd felt deadly danger without knowing why
he felt it
He'd
worked frantically, racing against time, though he knew of no real reason why
he should fear the coming of looters to the city the Stellaria had landed in. And that hunch and the hurry it caused had saved him and
Joe and a painter then and there and probably the Stellaria besides.
The
hunch and the dream and the constant thought of the second planet fitted
together a little too well. It was plausible that uneasiness should show up as
a hunch. It was reasonable enough that an urge to visit a planet should show up
in a dream as a concocted explanation of a reason why he should go there. But
he didn't believe it
The
real cause of his dream didn't know that the killer-race made its booby-traps in the form of pyramids. The real cause of
his dream didn't picture a pyramid on the second planet though almost certainly one had been there
to cause the murder of a race.
Rod got up, thinking
coldly. He heard Joe's voice, angry.
"That ring-tailed haystack ain't goin' to lick us! If we set
out to hit some place we're goin' to hit it"
Rod
stepped into the control-room. Kit was there, looking anxiously ahead.
Joe shook his fist at a
forward vision-port
"Morning," said Rod, drily. "I
musrVe slept the clock around. What's up?"
Then he saw. The second planet loomed large
and very near. It appeared to be merely a featureless fleecy white. That would
be clouds. But on closer view the clouds were not wholly solid.
They
were in masses which sometimes merely thinned at their junctures, and sometimes
separated a little to show a darkness below them, the whole producing a mottled
semi-marble effect But the Stellaria was not approaching the planet It rotated serenely at a seemingly fixed
distance.
"We been tryin'
to get down onto that hunka cussedness yonder,"
explained Joe, indignantly. "But the closer we come the quicker it dodges!
We been clean around it a dozen times already an' we can't get a bit closer! WhatYe they doin' down there? Pushin'
us off with a pressor?"
Rod grinned. He thought he
understood the dream now.
"Hardly! We've got a lateral velocity and we're hung tight to the planet by a
tractor beam. So we're in an orbit around it Naturally
we can't get down like that!"
"Says
who?" demanded Joe pugnaciously, scowling at the planet.
"Says
me," Rod told him. "We'll get down through." He took over what
controls there were. "When I was a kid I used to twirl a weight on a
string and get it going fast then let it wind itself up on my finger. Did
you?"
"Uh-huh, but what's that got to do with
this?" demanded Joe.
"If
s the trick," said Rod. "As the string wound up and got shorter, the
weight went around faster and faster. Remember? But it didn't go faster in feet
per second, just twirls per second. That's us. The closer we get the faster we
go around it — and our tractor-beam will stretch, Thaf
s all. I'll fix it"
He
swung the ship until the fleecy planet was straight abeam. He put on full drive
in the direction opposite that of the planet's seeming motion.
"How long do we take
to get around?" he asked.
"Less'n an hour," said Joe angrily. "You can tell.
There's one place where it looks like a mountain or something sticks up through
the clouds."
Rod nodded. That checked.
"We'll land there."
He
watched. The Stellaris" drive produced no visible effect for a long time and it seemed insane to
try to descend to a planet's surface by driving at right-angles to the desired
descent. But that was the only way it could be done.
Presently the passage of the mottled misty
surface seemed slower. At the very farthest edge of the visible hemisphere, a
speck of solidity appeared. Rod stepped up the drive again.
Then
the mottlings were visibly larger. As the planet
seemed to slow, the mottlings continued to increase
in size.
"We're
coming close, now," said Rod. "We'll be holding off on pressors, presently."
It was true. The sphere beneath slowed to a
snail's pace and it was very near indeed. The speck of solidity vanished and
reappeared, and vanished and reappeared. Mist sometimes boiled over it,
sometimes left it in plain view.
Rod
began to juggle tractor and pressor-beams. He
adjusted the jet-drive. At long last the planet's surface seemed stationary
and he cut off the jet. He began, very carefully, to let the ship down into
atmosphere.
"I'm going to make a guess," he
said meditatively. "When we get down to that mountain-tip — it's the only
one that pierces the clouds — we'll find a big mass of stuff that once was
melted metal. And not too far away we'll find a smashed-up space-ship. Not a
pyramid-ship, this one, but a ship made back on the planet that's dead
now."
Kit
looked at him, and her mouth opened. Then the logic of
the statement appeared.
"I think I see," she said slowly.
"You mean it would have been easier for the people of the dead cities to
reach this planet than the snow-covered one because it comes nearer. And the
one place where solid ground shows would be the place where a space-ship would
land. Also it would be the one place where the pyramid-people would have put
something to tell them when it was touched."
Rod
grimaced. "I spoke too sensibly," he said. "Now I'll make a
prophecy. When we land we'll wait. And presently some survivors of the race of
the next planet out will come to us. And I think they'll be friendly."
Joe blinked. "Ghosts?"
"No.
Real people," Rod assured him. "People that
happened not to be home when their world was murdered but perfectly real
people. You saw what they were like in the televisors."
"How'll
they come?" demanded Joe skeptically. "Spaceships?"
"More likely aeroplanes,"
said Rod, working the ship down with infinite pains. "Maybe
ground-vehicles. But they'll come!"
In
this, though, he was wrong. He let down the Stellaris with the utmost of painstaking care. There was air outside, and winds.
There was a vast sea of cloud and streamers of mist that writhed up from it
Sometimes
the mountain-top was hidden by white stuff. Sometimes it was laid bare. But at
long last the Stellaris settled with a noticeable jolt upon the barren rock of what appcartd to be an upward-slanted small plateau rather than a
po tvid peak.
Rod
pointed out a port. There, in plain view from where the ship touched ground,
was a shining, mirror-like surface. It had been a liquid once. It was solid
metal now. A quarter-mile away there
was a shattere:! carcass which was only a quarter of the Stellaris' size but su 2ly had once been a nearly spherical space-ship.
But
Rod was mistaken about waiting, about having people of the supposedly dead race
come to them.
They
didn't have to wait The people were already there on
the mountain-top, waiting for them.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In the Cards
T |
HE Stellaris settled again through thick and swirling mists Slowly and cautiously,
and slowly and cautiously, she moved down toward the white oblivion the clouds
promised and produced.
There
were strange people in the control-room of the Earth-ship. The tallest was no
more than four and a half feet tall and they were distinctly rotund, all of
them. They made clear high-pitched sounds to each other, and now and again one
of them put urgent hands upon Rod at the controls and made the same clear
sounds to him.
At
such times the sounds made sense. When there was physical contact there was
meaning in the musical tones of the small people. At other times they were only
sounds — very musical, more or less pleasant, but only sounds.
But
of course the same could be said of any unfamiliar Earth language.
Rod had been prepared for it. After all, he'd
had a highly useful hunch in a dead city and he'd been obsessed with the
thought of coming to this planet, and he'd had a dream which ignored
information he possessed.
Had his own
subconscious mind dictated that dream, it would surely have pictured a metal
pyramid on the cloud-wreathed world as the origin of the pool of metal. But the
dream did not picture that at all.
When
the other facts were taken into consideration it added up to limited,
incomplete information from somewhere, from a source which had some knowledge
that Rod did not possess and lacked some data that he did.
Explanation
was complete, now. The dream was accurate as far as it went. The little people
now in the ship's control-room had been very brave indeed. They'd come out of
the mist to meet the Stellaris as it landed and they'd made gestures
obviously intended as a welcome.
And Rod had gone out to them. He carried a
flame-weapon taken from the captured pyramid-ship but he left it in his pocket.
He had no uneasiness about the air because the small people breathed it and the
air of their home planet was suitable for humans.
So
the group of half a dozen rotund figures and Rod — inevitably grim — had met on
the top of the one mountain to rise above the planet's clouds. There was not
exactly tenseness in the air. Rod felt an anxious, an actually desperate
sensation of hope and fear together, communicated to him in the odd fashion of
a hunch.
He
spoke. His tone was dry. "We're all in the same jam, it seems. And with a
community of dislikes we ought to be friends."
Flutelike
notes filled his ears. Then a short round figure approached, very hesitantly,
and held out two hands. They were not human hands but they were empty. Rod put out his own. The round figure almost apologetically moved
closer and very tentatively offered to touch hands with Rod.
"I'll try anything
once," said Rod. "Go ahead!"
The
hands touched. The round man's flesh was warm and firm. But instantly the
high-pitched sounds were language. Urgent, apprehensive
words. It was even reasonable that comprehension should follow physical
contact but Rod did not wait for theoretic discussion. He spoke himself and his
words were understood.
Minutes later he led the
way to the air-lock.
"These
people," he said crisply inside the ship, with the small group clustered
behind him. "These people are members of a colony from the planet we
visited. They know the rest of their race is wiped out They've every reason to
be our friends.
"If you hold hands with them you can
talk. We'll work out explanations later. Right now we're going to shift the Stellaris down out of sight beneath the clouds. Get talking to them and find out
all you can."
And
then he went to the control-room with the rotund man who had first touched
hands with him. He prepared to shift the Stellaris. Here, atop the mountain, at least sometimes it could be sighted from
space and bathed in a deadly push-pull beam.
The ship rose on her pressor-beams.
She moved. But navigation in a world of mist was ticklish. Rod had to feel his
way cautiously. More, the small people had come a long way to greet the Earth-ship. It was necessary to ease the unwieldy
space-craft through many passes among high and unseen mountains.
There
were moments when he was absorbed in the task and the trilling speech of the
little folk was a disturbance. And there were many times when
warm hands touched him irritat-ingly — but at each
such contact the twitterings became intelligible —
and he received useful knowledge about his immediate problem. He was beginning to feel
more tolerant.
When
the mountains were cleared there was a long
flight of some hundreds of miles over unseen level stuff which might have been
either flat land or sea. Rod did not like it He liked to see what he was doing.
But in snatches between the more practical data on course and height he caught
fragments of twittering not meant for his ears. And they were reassuring.
When
at long last he set the ship down — it was actually the third time he had
brought her to ground since her lunatic departure from Earth — when at long
last he landed again he was reasonably satisfied about the small folk. But he
was wholly dissatisfied with the picture of the future as they saw it He was
not even very much pleased with the ship's surroundings when he cut off the
power.
The Stellaria lay in a forest of gigantic trees, with trunks from ten to fifty feet in
diameter. There was everywhere a gray
twilight Huge wide-spreading branches at once shut out
a view of the clouds and seemed to form a roof
which kept out the mist, so that the space beneath them was clear.
Later
one of the biological assistants told Kit that the order of things in
vegetation was reversed in these trees. Instead of taking moisture from the
ground and losing it through the leaves, these trees absorbed water through
their foliage and sent it down to their roots.
But
under their protection the colony from the third planet had set itself up to
survive. There was a tiny power-house, quaintly like the
architecture of the dead cities in its details. There were small houses. And
everywhere, some fifty to a hundred
feet up on the tree-trunks, there were light-projectors to throw light down on
the colony and its inhabitants and their cultivated fields.
On a
cloud-covered planet there would not be much ultraviolet and under such a
forest there would be none at all. But lights could substitute. The colony
could survive and feed itself. But it was very small. There were no more than two hundred
individuals remaining of a race that had dotted a planet with cities.
When
the humans emerged from the ship they could feel the overwhelming relief from
tension the welcoming-party's report had brought. Rod was led at once to the
colony's head. And — holding hands absurdly — they plunged into the business
before them.
For
the rest the establishment of friendship and understanding was the most urgent
of needs. Kit took half a dozen of the little round women into the Stellaris. She held hands and talked and they readily understood her.
They exclaimed politely over the Stellaris, but it was clear that they considered its incompletion uncivilized. Only
after Kit explained the accidental and unpremeditated beginning of the voyage
were they quite convinced. Then they expressed engaging sympathy.
But
when they saw the loot taken from the pyramid-ship — the lustrous fabrics, and
the delicately prismatic plastic-ware, and the flowers and seeming people on
the other art-objects — they were fascinated.
They
could not understand how people who made such things could be murderers. Then
Kit explained that it was apparently loot from still another murdered race and
she fairly felt the burning hatred the small people knew.
When Rod came back to the
ship she was full of news.
"Rod,
they're adorable!" she told him enthusiastically. "They are
civilized! They are charming! I've found out about telepathy, Rod. They say
that telepathy's never quite satisfactory because no two people see things
exactly the same way.
"A
square or a circle doesn't look quite the same to me as it does to you, Rod. So
there's normally a fogginess in anything like
thought-transference because you're trying to see through somebody else's
eyes."
Rod nodded.
"But
words do help to get thoughts into a pattern
that can be transmitted," Kit went on breathlessly. "And with contact
real communication is possible. When they talk and hold hands they get each
other's meanings much more accurately than we do.
"Outside of that they can only pick up
emotions, not thoughts. They know how you feel but not what you think. And they
knew that their race was dead when they couldn't pick up any feeling of the
race's emotions.
"They were able to tell when the looters
were on the planet because their emotions were alien and contemptuous. But when
they picked up our emotions of horror and sympathy and anger at what we saw
they knew we'd come and weren't the murderers!"
"I
know," said Rod tiredly. "The whole colony held hands and all of them
tried to warn us about the looters but all they could do was make
me jumpy. Before the battle they were trying again."
"They
could only make us interested in the inner planets. After I went to sleep they
were able to make me dream but they can't do more than that without physical
contact and it took all of them working together to do so much."
"It's wonderful that
they're able to do that much," said Kit
"Very
wonderful," said Rod in some bitterness. "They brought us here with
it But do you think we can take all of them on the Stellaris? Will our air-purifier keep them from suffocating with us if they stay on
board indefinitely?"
Kit
looked blank. "I don't suppose so. If s kept the air
good for us."
— "Fifteen people! Add two hundred more.
What then?"
"But they're all right
here, aren't they?"
"For
how long?" demanded Rod. "We had one brief
contact with a space-ship just out of Earth. All our other contacts have been
here in this solar system. The pyramid-people murdered this race because they
made a space-ship and it was only luck that this colony'd
been started before they learned of it We figured that
if we stayed here those fiends would think we were survivors and not guess we
came from Earth. Now there are survivorsl So what happens?"
Kit
shook her head. He said savagely, Those rats hunt for
us — as a colony. They find these people — a colony. They wipe them out for
what we've donel I've been talking to the colony
head. There's no evading it That's in the cards."
CHAPTER TWELVE
Boarders
S |
HRILL twitterings
down below. The voice of Joe the electrician, just coming in
the air-lock. "Okay, fellas! If you can
make anything outa it you're welcome! Anyhow, ifs
plenty hot if you can use the power."
His
voice died away and the twitterings with it He was
taking a group of the small round men into the engine-room, doubtless to show
them the condenser-device from the pyramid-ship the Stellaris' crew had looted.
"If
we hadn't turned up," said Rod, "those fiends would never have
suspected that there were survivors. The colony could have gone on for centuries,
building up a new civilization maybe and knowing about space-murderers and
working out ways of fighting them when they dared take to space again. But we
turned up. We've spoiled that idea!"
He
spread out his hands. Those rats will look for us. They'll find them. If we go away and leave these people here they'll be murdered like the
rest of their race. Because of usl And
we can't allow thatl"
"N-naturally," said Kit distressedly. "Of course we can't But
what can we do?"
"That's what's got to be worked out,"
Rod told her grimly. "We can depend on the pyramid-ships coming back. And
with an answer to our last trick, tool"
He felt something close to despair. There are
obligations that cannot be evaded. If the Stellaria had made the race of murderers suspect the existence of a colony, where
there was none, that was warfare. But to cause those
murderers to search for a colony which did exist was something else. Human
beings can't do that sort of thing and go off untroubled.
Joe came in, beaming. "Those little guys
are pretty smart" he said contentedly. "They take that condenser
that's a power-picker-up an' chirp at each other an' tell me they think they
know somethin' that they can figure out that gizmo
from. They say they got a hunch it's even the answer to faster-than-light
travel. So they go off, cartin' it precious, to see
what they see. Okay?"
Rod
nodded. He sat scowling at the mass of unfilled spaces which should have been
the Stellaris? instrument-board.
"Listen,
Joe," he said heavily. "Those pyramid-rats have taken a licking. From us. But they can't leave it at that. They can't stay
licked. They've committed so many crimes they can't stop. If any other race
gets space travel and they can't wipe that race out the pyramid-people get
wiped out They know it. They can't make friends now. It's too late!"
Joe
said amiably, "Those little guys won't make friends,
that's sure! Maybe they got squeaky high voices but they know what hate
is! They were asking me questions about the cities yonder an' the way I could
tell they felt made my hair curl!"
Rod
said impatiently, "What do you think the pyramid-ships will come back
with? I doubt they're too smart They made some
discoveries and used them for weapons and apparently were satisfied to stop at
that. Their ships are no more civilized than a pirate ship in the old days. But
they've got to work out some way to handle us. What'll it be?"
Joe
sat on the corner of what was intended for a navigator's table, if a navigator
should ever acquire star-maps and navigating instruments. He swung one foot.
"What
I'd do? Hm — we come out of other-space right in the
middle of their fleet an' knock 'em off by dozens
before they can slap a beam on us, an' we're gone, still fightin',
before they come to — them that's left. If I had to cook up somethin'
it'd be to handle a ship that turned up in my lap."
Rod waited, frowning.
"An'
it looks to me," said Joe, "like if I thought somebody was goin' to do that I'd have beams goin'
out in all directions as soon as I thought he was thinkin'
about it If there was any way to keep 'em from bumping off my own gang —"
Rod
jumped. "Right I keep thinking in terms of our outfitting. But they've
got measuring instruments! They can calibrate their beams! They could mount push-pull
generators that would kill up to ten thousand miles but not beyond.
"Then they could space their ships
fifteen thousand miles apart and have a fifty-percent overlap and a formation
that'd fill up the whole solar system! All such a fleet would need to do would
be simply to sweep through a solar system and everything in it would be dead!
If we charged a formation like that or tried to turn up in its middle . .
."
Joe
nodded. "Uh-huh. We'd get a dose of push-pull beam that'd knock us off in
a hurry."
"And
whafs more —'' Rod's forehead cleared. "Since they haven't got other-space force-fields they
probably think we can jump from a standing start to light-speed or better. That
would seem to explain our jumping through their beam into their laps!"
Joe swung his foot, unperturbed.
"Uh-huh." Then he said,
"Those
little guys are pretty good with tools. How much time you think we got?"
"Not
much! The ships that escaped have got to get back to base, wherever that may
be. They've got to work out a new trick — which will probably be that one — and
mount new projectors and calibrate them and then come back. But it won't take
long!"
Joe
said amiably, "A focused tractor works from the other-space to this. You
think it'd work from this to the other space? An' a pressor, too?"
"Why not?" Then Red stared. "Are you thinking of a
drone? That would be the trick, of course."
"Yeah,"
said Joe, grinning. "I'd scare the pants off 'em
if they saw the oP Stellaris amblin' right up to 'em
through all the beams they could pour into her, wipin'
'em out copious an' not havin'
a whisker curled by the worst they could do. They'd figure they were goners
sure!" Then he added, "If we got time to fix it."
"That," said Rod
sourly, "is the question!"
It was a very urgent question. And there were
others. But answers of a sort were forthcoming for most. As for the time before
a refurbished pyramid-fleet could be expected back, the small people could
promise some telepathic warning.
As
they'd known of their race's death by the absence of any emotions to perceive,
and of the coming of looters on the planet by their scorn, and of the landing
of the Steltaris by the much more sympathetic emotions of its occupants at sight of the
murdered cities — so they could know of the space-fleet's return.
But
they could not get the slightest inkling of any technical improvements in the
enemy ships by their psychic gift. They simply couldn't read thoughts — only
feelings.
Feverish
activity commenced. The small people began to make a double of the Stellaris — a double in appearance only.
It
was a mere shell of thin metal put over a frame that would hold it in shape.
Some of their technicians began a • feverish duplication of the fighting-device
on the Stellaris1
bow.
The
arc-welders from the ship welded that in place and so released tractors that
had anchored it. Joe ran cables into the control-room and set up something like
adequate indicators — getting the needed instruments from the colony's small
store.
Work
went on frantically in the Stellaris' flotation-bulges too. There was no time to build new sections to the
ship but the flotation-bulges now served no purpose.
Heavily
insulated inside, with heating-elements provided, they could accommodate a
great addition to the hydroponic gardens which kept the ship's air fresh. The
small folk, too, had plants which would serve to excellent purpose. They would
provide food in vast quantities.
The matter of food for the first time was
solved. The colonists had plenty and the colony had necessarily been staffed
with technologists needed for its survival. The dieticians discussed matters
in great detail with the several humans. They made tests. They painstakingly
experimented.
In
two days from the Stellaris' landing, the diet of its human crew was
wholly bearable. There was a close approximation of bread, and a very near
similitude of three or four different vegetables — but the ones from the
ship's air-rooms still tasted better.
There
was even a pretty good imitation of steak, which the dietitians assured Kit
contained all the needed amino-acid chains the human being required, plus the
fats they had begun hungrily to crave. It was not exactly right — not exactly —
but it was a great deal better than they'd had;
The
real triumph, however, was in the technical department. The little round men
used the same plastic "vacuum-tube" that Rod had salvaged from the
planet They had two others, which were smaller. They
used the condenser-device from the pyramid-ship also for power.
The imitation Stellaria was an empty shell but for a complex, heavily-built device in its very
center. That device did not include a drive, because there were reinforced
plates on which the real Stellaris could focus tractor and pressor-beams, so that
its pseudo-twin could be maneuvered and moved from a distance.
But
in place of the drive there were tiny beams focused on devices in the Stellaria which performed the functions of cables. The power in those beams would
vary to communicate information to the Stellaria even in other-space. And the little men dismantled the four televisors and set their scanners in the giant robot they
were constructing. The receiving-screens went in the Earth-ship's control-room.
Altogether an incredible lot was done. The
Earth-ship was no longer alone. She had a fighting-ship for companion, unmanned,
to be sure, but which had at least five times the power-supply of the parent
vessel and her fighting-beam was deadly.
With
many hands to work on it, all inspired alike by hatred and equipped with skill,
that fighting-beam was a monstrous engine for destruction.
The
push-pull beams were ingeniously designed to scan all space with fifty times
the rapidity of the first device and to linger briefly on any found target.
They
had the power of a generator designed to supply a metropolis, plus two smaller generators intended to furnish a colony not only with ordinary power but the means of combatting
a strange environment, plus a power-unit from an enemy space-ship itself. The
beam of this single ship should have nearly the range of a fleet-broadcast of
the enemy.
But it was, of course, a
robot
Two days passed — three —
four. Then there were twitteringa in all the compartments of the Stellaria as the
round little colonists crowded into it They carried
small possessions.
They
had already moved stores and highly useful supplies into the ship's unfinished
storage-rooms. They were, to all intents and purposes, abandoning their
colony, because their entire solar system would be blasted when the
pyramid-fleet returned. And the Stellaria seemed crowded.
It
was necessary. Twenty of the little folk had been on watch since the beginning.
They sat in a circle, holding hands in a quaint
absorption.
They were aware, of course, of the emotions
of their fellows and of the humans around them. But they carefully ignored
those sensations.
They
must have felt a curious loneliness as they listened or
watched — however the process could be described by which they waited for the
sensations of alien presences which would tell of the return of the enemy fleet
It
was coming. It was coming fast. The air-lock was sealed. The Stellaria thrust up-ward on those invisible stilts which were pressor-beams
and Rod drew the pseudo-ship after him as cloud-banks swirled around the
Earth-ship.
He
had controls for this ship, now. He swung it past the Stellaria as it wallowed in the impenetrable mist.
He sent the drone out of
atmosphere into space.
Warm hands clasped him
urgently. Twitterings.
They had meaning.
"It seema that they come taster than light. They are very triumphant. Their emotions suggest that they will slow to visibility only after they enter this system and that they will flash through it, destroying everything in an instant without any possibility of reply.''
That" said Rod with
some confidence, "is what they think!"
An
hour later he no longer had confidence. An hour later the Stellaria was beaten, its drone crippled. It fled madly through other-space while the pyramid-ship systematically
wrought destruction upon all the planets of the yellow sun. If any life had remained it no longer did so.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Defeat
A |
T
FIRST, it did seem that the battle would go Rod's way. The drone-ship went up
into sunlit space from the the cloudy covering of the
second planet. Hidden in the mist, Rod had to interpret the look of things from
the television-screen in the control-room.
In a
very real sense the vision-screens were superior to eyesight. There was an
adjustment of which the humans had not known by which the images could be
enlarged. Any part of the transmitted scene could be chosen and examined under
high magnification.
Small
round men watched those screens, ready to rip off for later study the lasting
image should an informative event occur. The images were in full color and of
astoundingly fine definition. It was hard to believe that they were transmitted
from space by tiny focused tractor and pressor-beams.
The
first scenes were wholly peaceful. There was the yellow sun and there were the
four planets in plain view. Beyond there were the cold lights of a million million suns of every color and degree of brightness.
As
the pseudo-ship rose higher and higher from the cloud-banked globe Rod saw for
the first time the actual picturesque-ness of
interplanetary space. Always, before, when he saw the stars beyond atmosphere,
he had had immediate pressing problems of navigation or of survival.
But as a color-picture on a
vision-screen its startling beauty and variety struck home. Which proved that Rod was wholly human in
failing to notice beauty until a frame was put around it
Of
the enemy ships there was as yet no sign. The drone ship was two thousand miles
out. Three. Five. Then warm
hands touched Rod and musical notes in his ears formed themselves into words.
The enemy fleet was very close. The crews of
its many ships were triumphant by anticipation.
Rod shot the Stellaris up to emptiness. For seconds, there seemed to be two Earth-ships in the
void. They were identical to all outward appearance and to all seeming they
were alone in space.
Suddenly,
though, the real Stellaris winked out of being. It had gone into the
other-space and its only link with the cosmos of the yellow sun was the
tenuous complex grid of focused tractor and pressor-beams
which linked the drone-ship to the Stellaris, the Stellaris in turn to two planets of this solar system
and to an unthinkably remote unknown object deep in the heart of the dark
universe.
These
three anchorages gave the Earthship leverage she
needed to maneuver the drone. The television eyes in the drone gave what
information was needed to maneuver the drone. The television eyes in the drone
gave what information was needed for maneuvers and, of course, the hidden inner
weapon began its ceaseless search for targets the instant the Stellaris vanished.
The
tranquility of airless space remained. The drone-ship — a mere shell — moved
like a pawn from another universe, seemed to come to a decision. It swung about in emptiness and headed steadily for the planet
of the dead cities.
Its
movement was smooth and even, which was in itself a proof that it was not a
ship moving on normal drive. a ship under power would either be accelerating
or slowing, certainly not coasting at the beginning of an interplanetary
voyage.
The dummy space-craft moved on and on. And
then something appeared magically, something else appeared magically, suddenly
all of space seemed aglitter with shining metal shapes appearing eerily from
nowhere.
The yellow sunlight gleamed on their sides,
and the vision-screens showed them by myriads in all directions, from a colossal
pyramid almost within arm's reach of the drone — it filled all of one
television screen — to others and others dwindling through all sizes to the
uncertainties of sixth-magnitude brightness.
Within
a space of seconds the , whole system of the yellow
sun was filled with ships. There was no counting them. There were thousands
upon thousands upon thousands of them. The pyramid-race had massed such a fleet
as Rod had not conceived of to crush the one small vessel which challenged its
might and its privilege of assassination.
But
the Stellaris did represent in fact as great a danger to the murder-race as the
pyramid-ships to it. If left undestroyed the Stellaris could multiply.
In
the dark universe Rod stared in amazement at the spectacle. He touched a
single stud, and the drone-ship's weapon lashed out invisibly. But he was
almost dazed by the instantaneous appearance of this monstrous fleet
"They
slowed from faster-than-light drive," he said blankly. That must be it!
They traveled in formation, faster than light! And they all slowed together and
— here they are! They took my trick of jumping into their laps and twisted it
to make their lap jump into me!"
The
statement was exact. In the previous fleet-encounter, the Stellaris had leaped from extreme range instantly into the midst of the
pyramid-ships. There it had done vast damage. Now the enemy fleet had appeared
as if leaping from incredible distances, in 'a formation which could not but
surround any space-ship near this sun, with every pyramid-vessel spouting
deadly radiation from each of its five flat sides.
Against
such a maneuver there could be no defense. It was perfectly designed to wipe
out all life in a volume of space exceeding the gravitational field of a sun.
Every world and every comet, every asteroid and even every stray grain of
meteoric matter — all would be sterilized instantly before a warning-device
could operate or a single relay kick over. It was deadliness itself.
And
it worked perfectly. The drone-ship was almost crashed by a monster pyramid as
it slowed to visibility and ravening beams of push-pull killer-stuff raged
through it That pyramid flung away, keeping formation at many miles a second.
Other pyramid-ships flashed past, each one pouring its deadly beams upon the
robot vessel. The pseudo-Sfe//aris
seemed to falter. Nothing living could survive what it had taken. Nothing could
live within it. Nothing!
But the drone-ship fought on. It spun crazily
and its beam licked out and licked out and licked out. It bit savagely into the
enemy armada as it poured by, every ship flooding the defiant drone with
ever-fresh murderousness. Pyramid-ships by dozens and by hundreds hurtled by
and each one blasted it afresh.
And each one died. Because
whether dead or not, a complicated and inordinately powerful apparatus
functioned in the robot, too. Three separate generators — plus a
power-supply unit of the enemy's own make — thrust energy eagerly into a
push-pull generator which threw a tight aimed beam at every target its detectors
disclosed.
That
beam far outranged the enemy weapons, because they were practising
saturation-beaming and that precluded concentration of their deadliness. So
the little robot killed and killed and killed.
But its own lifelessness was certain. Its far-reading
murderousness became known but the enemy ships beyond its range exulted in the
destruction of the one small crew which was a danger to their race.
Those within range of its weapon, however,
were past triumph. They were past everything. They were coffins hurtling
onward senselessly.
In other-space, in the Stellaris? control-room, warm hands touched Rod. Twitterings
became speech. "More! Kill more of them!"
Rod said grimly and with narrowed eyes,
"I share your ambition. But this is bigger than I expected. They're
regrouping now and they must know by this time that the beam that's killing
them is working by itself. Every one in range is
knocked off and the others are ducking."
Kit said, staring from one to another of the
vision-screens, "A terrible lot of them must have been hit, Rod. Look at
the way they —"
"There's
a terrible lot left," he said bitterly. "We've already knocked off more than were in the entire other fleet, and they know they've been
hurt. But look how many are left! I'm
worried!"
He
sent the drone belligerently at the ships which now drew back from it. But in
the space about the yellow sun a curiously dramatic picture formed. The fleet
which had already made sure that no life remained on four worlds and the space
about them was halting in its plunge.
Scurrying
motions took place. Ships whose previous course would have taken them closer to
the drone-ship now frantically scurried out of her way but not all of them
succeeded.
Yet despite Rod's furious working of controls
in other-space there presently developed a regrouping of the untold thousands
of angular enemies. The pyramid-ships formed a titanic hollow sphere — and the drone-ship
was in its very center.
The drone-ship plunged and spun and plunged
again. It sueceeded only in violent jerkings and the hollow sphere remained — remained beyond
the farthest limit of the robot's range.
In
other-space Rod scowled. "They've got pressors
on it," he said savagely. "All the whole fleet.
Massed pressors — as they massed
their killer-beam before. They're holding it still and away from all of
them. I haven't got power enough to push-pull it against all that! Looks bad!"
He kept the drone-ship trying frantically to
break free but he watched the vision-screens. Time passed. Twitterings
sounded behind him, warm hands touched him. The shrill became intelligible.
"They will try to tow it somewhere. Perhaps to their home planet."
"That,"
said Rod, "I would like to see! But I don't think they will. They build
gadgets in their ships to destroy their star-maps when a ship goes dead. They
might suspect us of something even more drastic. And if we'd thought of it we
would have! I don't know what they'll try but things could look a lot better
than they do."
Time
passed. Any action among the ships of the hollow globe, of course, was
invisible because of the distance. Rod waited grimly, keeping the robot still
plunging as if unreasoning mechanism only were at work. But there was
something still to be learned.
The pyramid-folk, probably for the first time
in their history, had met intelligent and deadly opposition to their career of
murder. The opposition had been costly. But they had learned from it Much too
well and much too much! They'd englobed and now held
helpless a much more deadly fighting-machine than the Stellaris had been only a few days since.
Rod
drew in his breath sharply. A little knot of angular ships sped out from the
massed armada.
It
went swiftly toward the helplessly plunging little ship in the midst of all its
enemies.
Warm hands. More twitterings.
"More of them die?"
"Hardly," said Rod angrily.
"They learn too quicklyl They
know nothing can be alive on our ship, though still it fights. So they've set
up robot-controls on some of their ships and — we'll see what they do.
"They
want to look at the dead crew they think is inside, so they can be sure to
massacre the race that bred it They'd also like to
have that fighting-beam, which is better than theirs. And I don't want them to
have it!"
Already
he had multiplied the deadliness of the alien race by forcing them to devise
this new saturation-beaming of a whole solar system. But if each of their
ships, in addition, acquired a fighting-beam as deadly as the robot's that
would be more serious still.
The
moving remotely-controlled pyramid-ships took position on every side of the
dummy craft Its self-directing weapon flooded them
with lethal push-pull radiation. It did not affect them. They arranged
themselves in a geometric pattern about it They swayed
a little in their respective positions.
Rod, watching through the television eyes,
said softly, "Ah-h-h! They've got pressors
fanning out! They push against each other but mostly against our double. Now
they'll move and take her where they please. But the fleet'll
have to cut off its beams!"
He released the directional controls on the
locked beams, so the little dummy ship could be moved where the enemy wished.
It moved. Its robot escort set out for the nearest planet which was the world
of dead cities.
"They'll
ground it" said Rod, "and hold it against the ground and hammer it
with another robot ship until they crack it and knock out its beam. Then
they'll look it over. No!"
Another
ship came streaking out of the spherical formation. It had taken longer,
perhaps, to fit out with more accurate remote control. It swept in a great
curve, matched speed and course with the small convoy, and went along with them
for seconds. The dummy Earth-ship seemed to struggle mechanically.
Then
there was a sudden flash of light. A thin, concentrated beam of pure flame
darted across emptiness. It lanced through the hull of the StellariJ substitute and on beyond for miles. The flame flashed again. Another puncture. A third.
In
other-space, a television-screen went dead. There was a sudden crashing noise.
A locked beam going from one universe to another went crazy as the object on
which it was focused ceased to exist save as blue-white vapor. The robot
fighting-ship, helpless now, was being systematically riddled with holes. The
process would keep up until its weapon went off and examination by living
things became possible.
"We're licked," said Rod coldly.
"They're smarter than I thought. They've got us beaten."
He
threw over one switch after another. The Stellaris surged forward in the dark space where stars were not
"Rod,"
asked Kit anxiously. "You mean we can't do anything but run away?"
"Nothing else," he told her.
"We simply can't handle that fleet. We can play heck with it — we have —
but it's just too big for us. So we depart for new pastures."
Agitated
twitterings came from all about him. There was one of
the little folk touching Kit for the ability to understand what Rod said. He
repeated the confession of defeat The others made
grief-stricken sounds.
"We're
still safe ourselves," said Rod over his shoulder. "We're safer
probably, than anybody else in the galaxy. And I'm not leaving our dummy for
them to paw over. We've just got to start all over again in some new fashion.
The only question is, what the heck can the other
fashion be?"
He cut off the robot's weapon and watched the
televisionscreens. Suddenly, all the screens went
black. There were flutelike waitings from the little
folk.
Tell
'em, Kit," said Rod. "Remember we made our
force-fields take in a half-mile sphere of air outside the ship when we wanted
to go over that other pyramid? And remember how I sprang the booby-trap before that by tying a
string to my coat and pulling it into this space with a focused tractor? And
how I sent you a note from the planet when you were in this space?"
"I remember," admitted Kit "But I don't see —"
"A
focused tractor can pull something out of normal space to this, if there's a
force-field big enough to hold it So I pulled our dummy-ship into the dark universe."
There was a resounding crash against the Stellaris* hull.
"Here
it is," said Rod. "Now we'll get to blazes away from here and figure
out what next"
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
New Tactics
F |
OR
hour after hour the Stetlaris plunged blindly through the utter blackness
of other-space with its battered, shattered robot-twin in tow. Rod pulled the
ship away from the system of the yellow sun by the tractor long ago fixed on an
unseen object in darkness' deepest heart
He
could have used the jet-drive but there would have been a trail of vapor —
tenuous enough, but possibly followable — when the
ejected molecules of gas fell back to normality beyond the ship's
force-fields. Even then the Stellaria would be unreachable but there was no point in giving the enemy any
clues at all to the nature of its security.
As time went on and acceleration continued
the ship reached the speed of light and multiples of it Inertia had quite other
values here than in the inhabited universe. But whatever they pulled toward was
solid and Rod checked its distance by sending pressors
to strike it, estimating their time of travel to the strange object.
The
small round folk talked interminably among themselves. Joe the electrician,
passing by an especially intent conclave, was halted and hands laid upon him. After seconds of listening he sat down
absorbedly.
Half
an hour later Rod was down in the engine-room working with tractors and pressors that had no wired connections to the control-room.
Joe came in search of him.
"Hey!"
said Joe. Those little guys, they got an idea about the way the pyramid-ships
go faster than lightl"
"Yes?"
They
got it figured out mathematical," said Joe, "that there could be a kinda stuff that ain't natural.
That hadn't oughta exist but could get made — or
maybe could make itself in a star or something. It wouldn't — uh — react to our magnetism an' it
wouldn't be pulled by gravity or anything like that."
"It ought to fall into
other-space," objected Rod.
"Only,"
Joe explained, "it could be alloyed with natural stuff when it got made.
And if they had that kinda stuff a little of it would
mix with a lot of other stuff and y'could make a ship
of it And that phoney stuff, it would absorb gravity
an' magnetism an' so on an' make it damp itself out
Thafs why it wouldn't be pulled by it But the
energy*d have to go somewhere so it*d show up as motion. Thafs
what they say and they say the figures prove it" he added hastily.
"If d be like soaking up heat an' getting electricity. Y'see?"
"Partly,"
said Rod. Something clicked in a pressor-coil. He
looked at the distance-adjustment on the pressor-beam
mount He compared it with a similar
guide on a tractor mounting He began, very delicately, to vary the two together
so that neither was subjected to excessive strain.
"So
all they'd have to do would be to line up the motion an' they'd have a whale of
a drive!" said Joe. "Actually, these guys say that If
you got the stuff movin' fast enough it'd start movin' faster on its own account They say those
pyramid-ships could have that stuff in 'em, in all
the metal an' such.
"So
that all they have to do is pile on their drive-jets until they're goin' fast enough an' they pop into all kindsa
speed. It's like runnin' fast enough to catch a train. Once you got holda it, you ain't runnin', you're ridin'.
"Only the train they catch is runnin' all ways at once. Whichever way they want to go,
when they* goin' fast enough all of a sudden they're ridin' 'm an' how! Then all they got to do is slow down
when they want to get off."
Rod straightened up and
stared. Then he bent over again.
"There's
more to it It has to neutralize increase in mass with
velocity and a few little things like that" he observed, "but it does
make a certain amount of sense."
"Yeah? But —"
"Ask
'em to figure out two others things," said Rod.
"One is how those rats broadcast power, if smashing the generator will cut
it off and how fast the cut-off will spread. And the other — I'm asking them to
dig into it because I gave them the theory and they've time to work it out and
it'll need time and sound thinking — the other is how to make force-fields that
will drop matter from this space into ours.
"We
can take stuff from our space and drop it into this and hold it here. When we
cut out fields it drops back. Now I'm going to want to reverse that process
and I think I could do it in time but I'm going quietly mad with stuff that
doesn't need that much brains and is even more urgent"
He
went back to his pressor and tractor-beams, while Joe
returned to the conference of the small people with a puzzled frown on his
face.
The ship was crowded but the colonists were
civilized and likeable. They crowded themselves to leave room so the humans
wouldn't feel crowded. Their women zestfully took over some of the looted
fabrics and presently presented Kit with a costume faithfully copying the cut
and fit of the one she wore, but breathtaking — in part because of their use of
some of the art-objects of unknown origin. The other four girls instantly
begged to be similarly attired.
The
men conferred and politely asked leave to use an empty store-room for a
laboratory. There they conferred endlessly and one of them made computations
on an extraordinarily simple machine from the colony and then worked painstakingly
with Joe to transfer the equations from his notation to human mathematical
terminology.
Rod juggled his beams and juggled them and
adjusted them ever more delicately. In the end the Stellaris made what might be called a landing on something large and solid in the
depths of other-space. Lights thrown out the ports disclosed a rough, seemingly
curdled surface of a dark and apparently metallic substance.
Its
size was unguessable but it was huge. It had,
apparently, no gravitational attraction for the ship — or the drone — and it
was plainly not a type of matter normally found in the universe of stars.
When Rod had made tests, he called a
conference of all on board. He put his hands on the colony leader so that all
could understand him.
"I
want to make a report," he told them grimly. "We were licked in our
last encounter with the pyramid-ships. But we're vastly better off than we
were. Putting extra vegetation in the flotation-bulges has kept our air pure.
We've plenty of power and plenty of food. I consider that we can live
indefinitely in this ship while we hunt for a planet we can live on.
"We can possibly establish a colony the
pyramid-folk will never find. Certainly we can now build more ships — given
materials — which can elude if not defeat those fiends. I don't think it likely
that we can ever find our way back to Earth,"
A
twittering interrupted him. A round little man spoke. Rod understood, but Joe —
also touching one of the little folk — translated truculently.
"He
says he's been askin' all of us all we knew about the
stars we see from Earth. He says he ain't sure, but
he thinks there's a chance he can pilot us back to Earth."
There
were fifteen humans on the ship. Twelve of them — Rod and Kit and Joe were
silent — made a lot of noise. When it ended, Rod went on doggedly. "But
back on Earth they didn't believe in danger from the pyramid-people. Whether
they'll believe us now or not, I don't know. Certainly it'll take time for them
to get ready to fight — if they do.
"But we're ready to fight now. We just
got licked, and badly, but we did so much damage that there's a chance the
pyramid-people leaders will decide to end their danger immediately by wiping
out all races that even promise to achieve civilization, That's what I'm afraid
of. If we go on fighting it's going to be bad but —"
He stopped, uncertain what
to say next. Joe stood up.
"Anybody
that argues," he said belligerently, "is
going to get his head knocked off. I seen the dead
bodies on that planet."
There
was silence. Presently Rod said, "Then I suppose we'll get to work. We're
going to make a new weapon and then we're going to find out where those
pyramid-people have their home planet. Then we're going to smash it and them. And we'll all probably get gray hair in the
process."
There
was no discussion. Later the colony leader of the little people came to Rod and
touched him and asked earnestly. "Why did you discuss? Are you not the leader? Why did you explain and why did your friend threaten?''
"That," said Rod
drily, "is what we call democracy."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Ret Trap
T |
HERE
was a dark universe unguessable hundreds of millions
of light-years in extent. There was a wandering
thing in it, a small thing by comparison with the heavenly
bodies of star-studded space. In the Earth's solar system it would have been an
asteroid, perhaps.
It
was barely eight miles through. Its mass could not be measured because it was
not a substance which normally existed in normal space. Perhaps it could be
created there. Perhaps it was. Possibly it was some unimaginable end-product
which remained when the neutronium core of a dwarf
star decayed and ceased to be matter that the other universe could retain.
Gravity did not effect it Magnetism did not
draw it. It had no electric conductivity nor did it change the dielectric constant
of emptiness. But it was matter of a sort and it could be alloyed with metal.
Rod
verified that fact with samples taken in through the air-lock while tractors
held the air from flowing out. He gave it to the small folk, saying that it was
probably the substance they had deduced from theory could exist.
Their
theory suggested other tests, which they made. They went feverishly to work to
make alloys. They tore apart the tattered robot-ship with beams which were
stronger than the metal they required.
When
the alloy was not too high in metal from normal space they found that it was
self-welding. Two bits of it, pressed together, united solidly with the
strength of a weld.
The
small men joyously improvised a process which turned out that alloy as a foil —
and the painters on the ship worked at their trade for the first time since
leaving Earth. They
coated one side of the foil with paint so that it
could be stored in rolls without welding itself back to solidity.
Stored
it was — placed in storage where no thief or race of thieves imaginable could
come upon it It was piled on the shattered remnant of
the drone-ship's plating, anchored to the dark-space object by a tractor with a
field of its own to retain it and a generator from the colony to keep it in
being.
There
were two other generators available. They had been on the drone. There was also
the pyramid-ship's power device. The small men had taken that apart and found a
surface-treatment of the metal, which to them explained everything. They
essayed to give the theory to Rod but he was impatient
"You say it's a matter of a spherical
field practically the diameter of the galaxy, with constants calling for the
assumption that space is elastic and can be compressed. All right It warps so it must be elastic. If it can be compressed the dop-pler effect on island-universe spectra simply proves
distance and not retreat but let it go.
"That's
all right — but when you talk about the selective flow of power in a
force-field to surface-treated plates because of molecular changes created by
the treatment —" Rod shrugged.
"I'll
want to know it sometime. The main thing is that the whole field will go off
instantly the generator's smashed. Fm
not going to try to understand right now. I'm already trying to get some
of your math and my head is creaking with the load."
He
was trying to check the calculations on a device
the colonists were building in their store-room lab. It would, they assured
him, create a force-field large enough to shift the entire asteroid into
normal space.
The
mathematical statements had been translated by Joe and he had — as an
electrician working on modern equipment — a mathematical training which once
would have implied a master of arts degree. But this math was beyond him and he
translated it blindly. Rod was having trouble with it.
In
the end he accepted what was not wholly clear because what was clear was so evidently right. He wanted to get at the Stellaris' force-held generators again. He expanded them to their absolute maximum
size. At the new adjustment, the ship would carry a four-mile sphere of normal
space into the dark universe when the field went on.
Then he went back to normal space with the
ship. She had then been in the dark universe for a long long
time and humans and small people alike crowded to the ports to look at the
stars. It was strange to see the hunger of both races to look at far-distant
suns which now so peculiarly meant home to them.
He'd told Kit his immediate plans and she was
ready with half a dozen of the little folk, all solemnly holding hands. The Stellaris floated at random amid the stars. Twitterings.
"They
say, Rod," reported Kit shakily, "that there aren't any
pyramid-people around. Space is empty around here. It's nice, isn't it?"
"Pleasant
but not what we need," said Rod. "We'll try again."
The jet-drive went on and the ship went into
dark space and came out again light-years away. The little folk solemnly
strained for a sense of the emotions of the murderers. Nothing.
A second dive and a leap of light-years and a third listening search. A fourth
—
Excited twitterings. Hands touched Rod. "There are many of the murder-race! Many.1"
"Which
way?" demanded Rod. "Can you tell? Do they know we're here?"
More
flute-like noises.
"They are bored. They know nothing. They are — they are yonder."
A small unhuman
hand gestured. Little folk watched avidly as Rod sent a tractor-beam with
infinitesimal power groping for the space-ships the small people perceived.
"Got the line,"
he reported. "Tell me if they're warned."
He
swung the Stellaris. Jet-drive. A dive and instant emergence
from blackness. Nothing. The switches crashed
and crashed again. The enemy ships were invisible. Their presence had been
detected by the psychic sense of the small people and verified by tractor.
"Very near," said the high-pitched notes. "Very near! Very, very near. They are frightened! Quick!"
Rod
sent the ship ahead in a desperate leap and the field closed in. The
fully-expanded field was like a gigantic net which closed about the Earth-ship.
There
was a shrill uproar. The little folk clamored, "They are frightened. They are helpless! They do not know what has happened!"
Rod
grimly and squeamishly changed the controls on the Stellaris1 bow-weapon.
"I
never could kill a rat in a trap," he said savagely. "Herel You do it!"
He put the warm, non-human hand of the leader
of the little round colonists upon a switch. "Throw it — and they'll
die."
There
was a tumult of shill voices. The Stellaris had winked out of other-space and instantly vanished into it again. But
with her in her vanishing had gone the contents of a four-mile sphere of
emptiness. As once she had carried air to the dark universe, now she carried —
nothing, on the first attempts.
But
this time the force-field had enclosed a pyramid-ship inside it with the Stellaris. Once before such a vessel had been dragged
into the illimitable dark but the crew of that one had been dead. The crew of this was yet alive.
The little folk shrilled at one another in a
terrible joy. Their leader trembled with his satisfaction as he savagely threw
the switch which sent a beam of utter deadliness into the captive enemy.
It
was a trivial payment for the millions upon millions of their fellows but the
small people were filled with impassioned joy. They felt — they ielt! — the murderers of their race blasted out of
life.
"The
answer," said Rod, seeing Kit's expression,
"is that their power-supply only works in normal space. We ought to know
that. So when I snatched them out of the natural universe into this one their
power went, their weapons were useless and I think that even the gadget that
destroys their star-maps failed to work. At least, that's what I'm afterl"
He went to the air-lock, in which were mounted tractor and pressor-beams
and a powerful mounted light With tractors the enemy ship was brought alongside
the Stellaris. The two airlocks were lined up.
And
— this was the ticklish part — while tractors again kept air from escaping Rod
and a welder cut through into the pyramid-ship and went into the revolting
reek which was its atmosphere.
With
hand-flashes Rod and those who would help him made their way to where only
molten metal and charred paper had remained on the other ship they'd searched.
But here — here were shining unfamiliar instruments and infinitely ingenious
star-maps and all that could be needed to navigate a pyramid-ship the length
and breadth of the galaxy.
Rod
had Joe and two others load themselves down. He himself carried precious maps.
They returned to the Stellaris. A dozen of the small men followed them back
to the ship from the blasted enemy, but it was significant that not one of the round
men carried a single object as a trophy. Their hatred of
the killers of their race was too great to let them look at even a memento
without rage.
The Stellaria headed back through dark-space for the asteroid of dark-space matter.
Rod and the colony mathematicians pored over the maps and astrogation
instruments. But they knew the principles by which such things must work and
the secrets came easily.
By
the time they were near the asteroid the matter was settled. Rod returned to
normal space and checked his observations. The colony power-technician by then
had worked out a field-flow instrument to detect the power-field of the enemy
and to locate its center. His observation checked with the star-maps.
Everything checked.
The
ship was filled with fluting sounds. The round small colonists were strangely
moved. They knew that their dead cities, their dead world, their dead race
would soon be avenged. But Rod, touching hands for technical reasons, heard
distressed discussions in the back-ground.
The small people had craved vengeance with a fierceness close to insanity, as long as they had little
hope of it But now they had savored it They had known fully the helpless,
screaming panic of the crew which had had to be killed.
It could not be spared.
Descriptions
of either of the two races in the Stellaria could not be allowed to go back to the leaders of the pyramid-folk. So
the pyramid-ship's crew had to die. But a discussion went on in the Earth-ship
with mounting distress.
To destroy a race because it had destroyed
one's own might be just and proper — but it made one a murderer too.
And the small people were
an inherently gentle folk.
The
preparations for moving the dark asteroid to normal space were almost complete
when something like a deputation of the colonists came to Rod. The round men
were very unhappy, but very much in earnest Rod touched hands and the shrill
sounds about him were somehow very solemn.
"We ask," said
the leader unhappily, "that we be taken to a near planet we find on the alien's star-maps. As we read the maps, we should be able to live there. We owe you our lives and any hope our race can have of surviving through us and our children.
"If you ask it, we will remain and help you even to the destruction of the murderers of our kin. But unless you ask we prefer to try to build up a new civilization without protection. We have tasted revenge — and we do not like it."
Rod
regarded them steadily. "I don't like killing, either," he said
grimly. "I weakened just now. I gave the task to one of you. But I am
wondering now if a fleet may not be going through one solar system after
another, wiping out the life to be found there.
"I
am wondering if such a fleet has reached my home planet yet. I am wondering if
the fifteen of us humans on this ship are the only human beings still alive —
as you are the only living members of your race. I don't want to leave my race
in danger for one instant if it's living.
"And
if it's dead," he added harshly, "I want it to be avenged before I
find out! I don't want to keep on living while I hate creatures I have spared.
But I'll take you to the planet you've chosen. We need some fresh observations
anyhow."
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Nova!
E |
VERYTHING
was quite ready when the Stellaris went a bare thousand miles from the strange thing it had made of an
asteroid, and returned to normal space. Then, with the jet-drive to set its
course and establish a velocity, it dived back to darkness to increase that
velocity, and came out yet again into the space where suns flamed grandly,
surrounded by their families of planets. They were near their destination.
This
also was a sol-type sun and it had seven planets. The nearest was red-hot from
its proximity to its sun. The second was an arid waste, the third a small and
pock-harked cinder. But the fourth was green, with
great oceans and clouds floating above its continents and ice-caps at its
poles.
"There
is a race here," said apologetic twitterings
in Rod's ear. "It
is still barbarous, knowing metals but using no power, according to the
markings we diciphered on the star-map. It will be long before it should cause the
pyramid-people concern. Perhaps we may help and guide the people."
Rod said nothing. He made a planetary
approach with something approaching professional skill. In hardly more than
minutes the Stellar
is settled down into
atmosphere.
"Rod!" cried Kit.
"A city!"
She
pointed and Rod swung the ship — so unwieldy in air — into a near approach. It
reached the city. It hovered over the city. It was a city, past question. Its
ways were paved with quarried stone, its buildings were of massive, cyclopean
architecture and it was barbarously magnificent.
But
it was definitely barbarous. The great buildings were palaces and temples. The
people lived in small structures, most of which plainly had gardens attached to
them. There were cultivated fields and pasture-lands outside it. There were
crude wooden ships tied to the wharves where a river wandered through it.
As
the Stellaris descended Rod saw half-furled sails. Sails had not been used on Earth
except for sport in two hundred years. But he saw no movement
There was no movement.
The Stellaris touched ground. Very grim indeed, Rod led the way to the airlock. He
opened it
There was a smell in the air. It was the
smell of death. "These people were hardly more than savages," said
Rod very quietly, "and they were alive no more than two or three days ago.
They haven't even motors! By what we can see they must have lighted their homes
with flames, burning the fat of animals, or petroleum.
"They had no fliers, no ground-vehicles
except —" he pointed — "that was a vehicle, with an animal pulling
it And these people were killed because some day they
might have made a space-ship. The pyramid-folk are frightened. We've frightened them.
"They're wiping out all intelligent life that can challenge them even a thousand
years from now! If you want to spare yourselves the grief of killing these
fiends, go ahead! Get out! Quickly! I've got
work to do!"
But none of the small
people moved to land.
Their leader touched hands
with Rod.
"We
have decided again," his shrill notes said. "We fight.
Not to avenge our dead but
to protect those wlio will never know that we lived.
Please! Make haste!"
The Stellaria rocketed skyward and went into blackness, then sped madly to the dark
asteroid with her jet-drive and tractors together striving for the utmost
speed.
In
an hour the force-fields were shrunk so that only the Stellaris was included in them. But before that time and under their shielding,
the foil-rolls were unrolled. As they touched the dark mass they were welded
inseparably to its surface. The other devices needed also were welded fast and
the Sre/-taria anchored herself solidly with tractors, and a pressor irrevocably thrust home the master-switch.
Instantly
from the ports of the ship — from which glaring lights had shone
— there was only the blackness of empty dark-space. The asteroid had vanished.
But the Stellaris remained anchored to it and the Stellaria stayed in dark-space. The ship was with its creation but in dimensions
parallel to those of the universe of stars. There was reason.
There were three vision-plates in the ship's
control-room,
which reported from the
asteroid as they had reported from the drone. Starlight shone on the metal of
the ungainly object's surface for the first time since time began.
The
report the vision-eyes sent to the dark universe was beyond all expectations
and beyond the experience of any save members of the race which made shining
ships and used them for unwarned murder. It was terrifying. And it was sublime.
The
asteroid reached normal space with a velocity which was inherent — and which
was above the critical speed of the alloy-plates now welded to it. Those plates
bit hard into the substance of the new universe. They were of the stuff which
sent pyramids at deadly multiples of the speed of light.
Other-space
matter and normal-space matter, alloyed together, were
an unholy compound which consumed the energy of gravitation and of magnetism
and of the energy which is electrostatic stress. Perhaps it even consumed the
energy of light. And all of that energy it transformed into motion, having a
velocity in miles-per-second to begin with.
It sped at a mounting speed which turned all
visible starlight to violet, then turned all heat-rays to blue. And still its
rate of progress grew. It sped faster until light itself
had no meaning and radio-frequency radiations were light and then even they
were nothing.
It
hurtled onward and the television-screens saw all the universe in that
unimaginable glow which is the slow pulsation of the hearts of suns, taking
hours to the beat, but now raised in frequency to a
strange and eerie glow. And still the speed increased.
Rod
worked controls, his eyes shining like coals. There would be but one chance to
use this weapon, this bolt of other-matter from another space, traveling at a
rate beside which light-speed was imperceptible. The accuracy of the shot must
be absolute. There must be no deviation of the thousands of a hair. And the time waa very, very short.
Actually, the thing
happened in seconds.
The
sun the aliens' star-maps pictured lay ahead. It was a giant sun, so huge and
fierce that the aliens' inhabited planet lay two-hundred-million miles away. It
was toward that sun that the other-space projectile sped. It was miles in
diameter, but it could be controlled.
It
moved at five thousand times the speed of light but Rod had precious moments in
which to observe its course and aim it, seconds in which to adjust the aim,
fractions of seconds in which to make sure.
Then
he cut loose the anchoring tractors and the Stellaris floated on while the hurtling thing went
unguided.
The
Earth-ship returned to normal space far beyond the solar system of the
pyramid-makers. And the thing was already finished. But the light had not yet
reached this spot.
Those
on the Earth-ship had time to line the ports, staring, and see the giant sun and
even to glimpse the shining specks which were its worlds before the spectacle
began.
They did not see the missile strike. No eyes
could follow the mass which struck at thousands of millions of miles per
second, with all the stored energy in its impact that it had absorbed from the
linkage-fields across its path. They could not even tell where it had struck.
They saw only that the great sun swelled
suddenly and swelled again with a monstrous and terrible deliberation, then
seemed to pour out into all space as if to devour it utterly. The timing was
like the seemingly slow-motion process of water falling over Victoria Nyanza
falls.
Actually
it was of incredible vehemence and unthinkable force. The free energy within
the sun had suddenly been tripled by the arrival of that supernal missile,
which sank to the sun's very heart before its atoms could explode.
The sun literally detonated. Flaming ravening
star-stuff shot outward at thousands of miles-per-second. A planet was engulfed
— a second. A third, fourth, fifth and sixth.
Those
on the Stellaria watched the sun become a nebula,
a mass of incandescent gas filling a globe five-thousand-million miles across. And no planet lived in that
inferno — no gigantic generator of power, able to supply thousands of murder-fleets
light-millennia away, could still be functioning. The planet of the
pyramid-ships was gone. Its sun had blown itself to vapor.
And no pyramid-ship
anywhere in the galaxy had power.
Those
in motion past the speed of light stayed in motion. There was no power in them
to brake below the critical speed of the alloy of
which they were made. Those below the speed of light had no power to rise to
it. Those in planetary atmospheres fell heavily in the ground. Those grounded
stayed aground.
But
most of the murder-fleets out upon the errand of wholesale massacre so lately
commanded and not yet completed — most of them drifted on unendingly. A few
suns acquired small fleets of pyramidal satellites. One or two planets captured
brightly-polished moons.
And
of course there were some meteoric falls, which, when excavated, disclosed
half-fused artifacts and dead aliens with bulbous heads and attenuated arms and
legs. But most of the pyramid-ships simply drifted on — and on — and on.
Forever.
*****
When the Stellaris got back to her own splar system it was
necessary to be very careful. Not because of fear from any Earth-defense but
lest she do damage. The bow-weapon had to be turned off completely. Tractor and
pressor scanning-beams could not be used, of course,
when nearing a planet with so precariously poised a civilization as Earth's.
And
then it was distinctly quaint that as she lowered heavily into atmosphere
Earth-Government planes darted upon her, firing furiously, and had to be pushed
away with pressors as the ship went tiredly to
ground.
Then
there were investigations and vast excitement and much indignation. Rod
Cantrell, said solemn individuals in Earth Government, had departed from Earth
without authorization in the only vessel capable of space-navigation and defense
of the human race against certain strange alien spaceships which had plunged
to their destruction upon the Earth's surface.
Who
knew, said these indignant people, how many more alien ships were floating
about outside the Earth's atmosphere, preparing for invasion and the capture of
Sol's fairest planet?
Rod
said curtly that there were no more alien ships about. Glowering a little, he
made his report. Those who had been of the unwilling crew of the Stellaria substantiated it The small round people of the planet of dead cities
told in their fluting voices what had become of their race. Earth Government
gave them a space-ship, ultimately, and they went back to build up their
civilization anew.
In
the end the court-martial at which this testimony came out was ended and Rod
Cantrell was formally absolved of all penalty for having been on board the Stellaris when a short-circuit threw it into space.
He
was cleared of all censure for having saved the ship and those in it and no
blame — so the verdict ran — lay upon him for having fought the murderers of a
thousand civilizations and for having certainly prevented the ending of
humanity.
And then, as a separate and necessarily slow process, there began the tedious, red-tape-filled process of
rewarding him. In the course of a year
or so he would undoubtedly be given a medal.
But he was not concerned. A month after the Stellaris' return to Earth there were fluting sounds in the anteroom of the
quarters he occupied. The leader of the colonists from the planet of dead
cities wished to confer with him. Rod liked the little round man but he begged
off.
Kit
said, "Why'd you do that, Rod? He's a nice little person."
"I know," said Rod. "But d'you remember how little attention
I paid to you while we were off in the Stellaris?" "I certainly do!" said Kit
"I
was busy," Rod explained amiably. "But I just got leave for our
marriage and a honeymoon. And I thought that since I neglected you so much
before — well — I thought I'd put everything else aside and pay a little
attention to you now."
THE END
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