The Black Galaxy

CHAPTER ELEVEN In the Cards

THE 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 irritatingly—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 Stellaris 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. It'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 survivors! 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 done! I've been talking to the colony head. There's no evading it. That's in the cards."