The Black Galaxy

CHAPTER EIGHT The Enemy

THERE 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 Stellaris' 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—he 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 Stellaris. 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 Stellaris.

"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.

"What's 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 auto 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 Stellaris' 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 fast!"

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 Stellaris. 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 refleeting 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 rate! 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! How'd 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 Stellaris! 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 Stellaris' 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 chattered 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.