The Black Galaxy

CHAPTER TEN Battle!

THEY 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 it's 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 runnin' 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 again. 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 on 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. It 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 that! 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 sportin'," 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—"

Red'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 flickerings 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 them! 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 second planet. Especially lately. Even when his mind should have been full of battle-plans as the Stellaris 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 Stellaris 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 Stellaris 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 must've 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 Stellaris 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! What're 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.

"It'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. That'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 appeared to be an upward-slanted small plateau rather than a pointed 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 shattered carcass which was only a quarter of the Stellaris' size but surely 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.