Rocket from Infinity

by Lester Del Rey

  “I don’t think so.”

  “That’s comforting, but I’d like you to be positive before you make any moves.”

  Pete ignored her as he made the move he had in mind. Tensed for an instant reaction, he jetted the car slowly forward into the open space around the ship. Nothing happened. They moved closer. Then, as they came inside the arc the ship was capable of while swinging with its imprisoned nose as a fulcrum, there was definite movement.

  The hull shuddered and swung in their direction.

  “Did you see that?”

  Pete cut sharply to the right, drew a tight arc of his own, and went back to his drifting spot. From this point of safety they watched the giant swing around until it passed through the position they had lately occupied. Then its apparent drift ceased, and it swung back into a straight line with the drift of the stream.

  “What did you prove?” Jane asked innocently.

  “Didn’t you see what I proved?”

  “Just that it’s easy to get killed in here.”

  “That ship lashed out at us.”

  “And you laughed at me for calling it a live thing. Actually, all you did was make a move coincident with a magnetic drift-swing.”

  Pete smiled, “I’m glad you’re getting your feet back on the ground.”

  “That sounds funny—out here.”

  “I was speaking figuratively.”

  “Look—will you stop pushing our luck? We’ve brushed close to death seven distinct times that I recall, and now—”

  Pete ignored her as he pushed carefully back into the cluster behind them. Safely inside, he selected an asteroid about half the size of the monocar and put his nose gently against it. Then he pushed the asteroid slowly out into the open.

  When he had it clear of the cluster, he put more power to the jets and forced the big rock into an intermediate arc that would carry it within range of the spaceship’s lateral swing.

  “Now watch.”

  “What am I supposed to see?”

  Pete pointed. “That!”

  As though the approach of the asteroid constituted a signal, the hull of the ship began to arc around on its rock fulcrum. At one point, both Pete and Jane gasped as the ship elevated its swing with a definitely artificial upward jerk. Thus, when its plates hit the approaching asteroid, it was with a dead-center contact that reversed the asteroid’s course and sent it spinning back into the cluster.

  “All right,” Pete said grimly. “Was that natural magnetic drift?”

  “It knocked the asteroid back into the cluster!”

  “Exactly. And what does that prove?”

  Jane smiled with a touch of mockery. “I’m all ears, teacher. What does it prove?”

  “A cybernetic brain.”

  “Well, aren’t you the clever one? A ship with a cybernetic brain patterned to batting asteroids around the Belt. A rather expensive child’s toy, I’d say.”

  “If you’re so blasted smart, figure out your own riddles,” Pete snapped. “I’d say it’s some sort of a defense mechanism. A pilotless ship is vulnerable. It repels boarders or at least makes boarding difficult. And it can clear its own path if necessary.”

  Happy at having needled Pete successfully, Jane was all apology. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were so touchy. What will we do now?”

  Pete glanced at her and found her expression so guileless and trusting that he felt guilty at being annoyed. “I think we ought to try and board her. I think she’s a derelict.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Because we get no signal. We might get shot to pieces or welcomed with open arms, but we certainly wouldn’t be ignored by a live ship.”

  “That reminds me,” Jane said. “I want to call home.”

  Passing quickly through the emergency band, Jane put the Snapdragons call letters on the public channel and a few moments later Rachel Barry’s plaintive voice came in. “Jane! You poor child! What are they doing to you now?”

  “Nothing, Mother, but a lot has happened.”

  “Can we keep our monocar?”

  Jane looked blank for a moment. So much had happened that she’d forgotten about Pete’s salvage threat. “Yes, Mother—I mean, no—well, maybe.” Jane looked appealingly at Pete. He was no help. “An awful lot has happened, Mother.”

  “Then tell me, child. Did that awful Pete Mason apologize to Uncle Homer for the things he said?”

  “No, Mother. I can’t tell you about it now. It was the other way.”

  “Uncle Homer apologized to—”

  “No. He tried to kill him.”

  “Jane! You aren’t making sense. Who tried to kill whom?”

  “Mother, this is a public channel. I’ll tell you later. Right now we’re in the Badlands. We found a strange ship and—” Jane stopped, becoming quite confused herself. “Mother, I’ll tell you all about it when we get back.”

  “When will that be?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got to cut out. Uncle Homer might get a fix on us if he’s listening.”

  “Why should he want to do that? Jane! What’s going on?”

  “Mother, I’ve got to cut out! I’ll call you later.”

  Jane snapped the switch. “I guess I shouldn’t have called,” she said. “Mother will worry her head off now.”

  Pete wasn’t paying any attention. He was studying the mysterious derelict that now hung motionless in the stream with its nose glued to the huge, jagged asteroid.

  “I’m going to try to grapple on,” he said.

  “But you just saw what happens when—”

  “It would have to really whip around to throw us off with our magnets on full. If it starts shaking our teeth loose, we’ll let go.”

  “It certainly ought to be fun,” Jane said dubiously. “Fun or not, there’s something you’re overlooking.”

  “If you’re referring to salvage possibilities, I’m way ahead of you. If that ship is a derelict it could make the Barrys rich.”

  “What about the Masons?”

  “Oh, we’d be generous and declare you in.”

  “Well, thanks a pile!”

  Pete wasn’t as annoyed as he sounded. He thought it probable that Jane was deliberately forcing the light, bantering mood. Her moment of truth relative to Uncle Homer had hit her hard. He admired the about-face courage she was showing.

  “Here goes,” he said. “I’m going in fast so we can clamp on before she starts swinging.”

  “Good luck—good luck to both of us—but how do you know her reaction potential? You saw lazy swings against slow-moving objects.”

  “A ship that big can’t react sharply enough to be dangerous.”

  “Just for the sake of argument,” Jane said, “I’ll bet it can.”

  Pete gauged his angle visually and jammed down on the jet switch. “Women!” he muttered disdainfully.

  A few moments later, after a monstrous swish of suddenly hurled metal brushed their grapplers, they were whirling end-over-end toward a wall of clustered asteroids.

  Pete clawed desperately at the controls and reversed to a halt with a jagged shaft of rock just ready to ram in through the bubble. With the car hanging on balance, they untangled themselves. Jane pushed her hair out of her eyes and said, “You’re very good. Your reflexes and your skill saved our lives.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But of course that was after your stupidity put us in danger.”

  Pete neglected to thank Jane for that. He stared at the ship as it settled back into its trough behind the asteroid. “That does it. We can’t board the idiotic tub!”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Jane replied airily.

  “What’s your idea?”

  “If I was in charge I’d go around in front and ease the car over the asteroid. The brain�
��s got a time-span quotient or it would still be trying to shake off the asteroid its nose is fused to. If we came in from that side…”

  Pete was staring, still expressionless, at the weird ship.

  “All right!” Jane exploded. “It’s only a mechanical brain. Its deductive abilities are limited to its patterns. Come in from the front and you might fool the crazy thing!”

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t a good idea,” Pete snapped.

  “Thanks for the credit.”

  Pete did not reply as he pointed the car along the wall of the open circle and moved around in front of the asteroid that had captured the spaceship. He nosed up over its jagged surface and inched toward the spot where the collision fusion had melted the craft and the asteroid together.

  “That ship certainly took a sweet punch in the nose,” he muttered.

  The fusion area—metal and lava run together—was at least ten feet wide.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Jane said. “How could a ship and an asteroid fuse that way? One of them should have been smashed to dust.”

  “The only way it could have happened seems impossible.”

  “What way?”

  “As I see it, the collision occurred out in space. Either the ship or the asteroid was revolving at a high rate of speed at the time of contact. Two coincident motions would have been necessary.”

  “You mean high-speed trajectory and rotation at the same time.”

  “That’s right. But how could such a situation have been brought about?”

  “I’d say an asteroid. Knocked off a larger body, it could have a forward-spinning motion in the same direction as its trajectory!”

  “And the new trajectory formed by the collision brought the ship and the asteroid into the Badlands.”

  “Well, no pilot in his right mind would have brought it here, that’s for sure,” Jane said.

  Pete was watching the ship as though he expected it to grow a fist and knock him back where he’d come from. “We seem to be getting away with it,” he said cautiously.

  “The brain can’t differentiate us from the asteroid it’s accepted.”

  “Maybe it would be smart if we grappled onto the fusion area. Then I’ll walk onto the hull and hang on by my boots.”

  Jane was doubtful now. “I don’t know. Maybe we ought to go for help.”

  “And split the salvage?”

  “Your father and Betcha—”

  “No,” Pete said firmly. “We’ve got to find out more about this tub. I think the brain would accept established contact—a magnetic grip—because it accepted the fused asteroid.”

  “We’ll both go.”

  “You stay here. You’ll have to pick me up if I get thrown off.”

  They activated their heat and air equipment, and Pete opened the bubble and crawled out of the car. He grappled to the fused surface and then began moving forward. Jane watched tensely from the car as he came to the edge of the fusion and stepped across.

  Nothing happened. He moved his other foot forward. There was no reaction from the ship. Slowly, then with increasing confidence, he moved out onto the massive hull and turned to motion Jane toward him. A few moments later, she, too, was crossing the fusion area and grappling to the hull with her magnetic boots. Pete waited for her and as she came close he noted the confused and questioning look on her face.

  “Do you feel what I feel?” she asked.

  “As though you’re sinking into something soft?”

  “Yes—as though we haven’t got any footing. I have to keep looking down to be sure I’m not sinking in.”

  Intrigued, they both squatted down to check further into their joint reaction. Pete laid his gloved hand flat on the dull, sheenless metal of the hull. He stared at his hand for a few moments and then looked up at Jane.

  “It’s weird. My sense of touch tells me I’m sinking in up to my elbow. But my eyes say my hand is lying on a hard surface. I don’t know which to believe.”

  “There’s something very weird about this hull—this metal.”

  “Your perception astounds me,” Pete said dryly.

  Jane refused to be baited. “I think the sinking-in phenomenon is a side effect. This is a highly specialized metal with specifics and capabilities beyond our knowledge.” She raised her eyes. There was awe and a certain fright in them. “This ship wasn’t built in our system.”

  Pete was surprised. “You sound like an upper class-man in an engineering school.”

  “Maybe I’m not very smart, but I was with my father a lot. He was a brilliant man. I couldn’t help learning a little about spaceships.”

  Unaware of how much that little was going to turn out to be, Pete came to his feet and looked about helplessly. “Well, at least the tub isn’t throwing us off.”

  “How did you plan to get inside? No matter how far we sink, we’re still out here.”

  “I assumed that if the ship is empty it had been abandoned. In that case, there should be an open hatch someplace. If not, maybe I can climb in through a jet tube.”

  “Did you see any while she was swinging her tail around?”

  “No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “Then we’d better start hunting. We’re probably on borrowed time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If Homer Deeds and his two friends aren’t smart enough to track us here, it would be a big surprise to me.”

  Pete glanced around at the circular walls of the ominous pocket they were in; a pocket formed in a clump of asteroids jammed together and moving as a single body.

  “Another thing—if an asteroid blunders into range and activates this tub’s crazy responses, we’ll get thrown into next week.”

  At that moment a new and ominous grinding of rock on rock was telegraphed through the asteroids across the Badlands.

  “How far away was that?” Jane asked.

  “I don’t know, but it’s a lot too close. Let’s hurry.”

  As they moved—as though walking through molasses—toward the ship’s tail, the same thought was in both their minds. They’d been rather proud of the victory they’d achieved in putting their boots to the hull.

  But they seemed to have merely won their way into greater trouble.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE BRAIN OF A KILLER

  “It doesn’t look like a jet to me,” Jane said.

  “Maybe it’s just a steering tube, but it’s still a hole,” Pete replied. “I’m going in.”

  “And leave me out here all alone?”

  This wail from Jane, Pete thought, was refreshing after a fashion—a definitely feminine reaction from a girl who could be very unfeminine a great deal of the time.

  “Well, we can’t squeeze in together, and until we find out the score, it’s safer out here than in there.” Jane watched as Pete eased himself into the narrow, circular opening feet-first. A few moments later he pushed his head out.

  “It isn’t a jet or a steering tube. It’s an escape hatch of some kind. Come on.”

  Jane lost no time and Pete pulled her into a small chamber with enough room for three or four people to stand comfortably. Jane pointed to the inner wall.

  “That’s the outer seal of the airlock, but how do we open it?”

  Pete ran his hands over the surface of the inner wall. Then he looked at Jane strangely, took off his gloves, and repeated the examination.

  “It’s warm!”

  Jane frowned. “That doesn’t make sense!” She took off her own gloves and touched the wall and her expression changed. Perhaps it didn’t make sense but nonetheless the wall was a hundred degrees warmer than the unchanging temperature of the Belt.

  “Pete, I’m scared.”

  “So am I, but—”

  “There’s t
oo much here that contradicts logic. In the first place, this ship could easily be a thousand years old. The pittings on the hull alone indicate great age and passage through the kind of bombardments we just don’t get in the System. Any sort of creature we find inside would have to have an incredible life span. That and other things give us ample reason to believe the ship is an ancient, lifeless derelict. But its walls are warm!”

  “Don’t panic,” Pete advised. “Just keep on using your precious logic. There must be something inside that can create heat indefinitely.”

  “A ship powered by fusionable material with a half-life of more than a thousand years?”

  “Exactly.”

  “But atomic fusion isn’t the method here. Where are the jets?”

  “Let’s not turn this into a debating society or there’s going to be a gun poked in at us and it won’t matter. I’m wondering how to crack that outer air seal.”

  “That shouldn’t be too difficult,” Jane said. “The control of the hatches and the ports must be centered in the cybernetic brain.”

  “Sure, but it didn’t open on entry. So what’s the signal?”

  “There shouldn’t have to be any. This is a spaceship, not a bank vault.” Jane tapped on the panel of the air seal. Nothing happened.

  “Looks as though the brain isn’t receiving today,” Pete said.

  “Pressure might be the key,” Jane said. She put both hands on the seal and pressed her weight against it.

  The seal opened.

  “Sure,” Pete said. “The seal is controlled by a memory bank adjusted to pressure.”

  “All it takes,” Jane said with understandable smugness, “is a little common sense.”

  Pete followed her into a larger chamber and the door closed behind them. In a moment they could hear air hissing in. At the same time a narrow panel over their head began to glow. It reached apparent capacity quickly, throwing a faint light into the chamber.

  “Pretty stingy with the electric power,” Pete said.

  “If you were a light panel you’d be pretty feeble too, after a thousand years,” Jane said.

  “You seem to be pretty sure of your time span.”

  Jane ignored his doubt. “This ship hasn’t been in out of the void long, either.”