The Black Galaxy

CHAPTER SIX Pyramids Coming!

THERE 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. That's 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 Stellaris 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, "Y'd 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 mount! 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 through 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.

There 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.