The skipper grew almost purple.
‘Do you realize,’ he demanded savagely, ‘that if the crew of that ship is in suspended animation, and if their coffins or containers open only from inside - do you realize that they expect to open them themselves?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Freddy wearily. fOf course. Why not?’
‘Do you realize that cables from those containers lead to thermobatteries in the ship’s outer plating? The monsters knew they couldn’t survive without power, but they knew that in any other solar system they could get it! So they made sure they’d pass close to our sun with what power they dared use, and went into suspended animation with a reserve of power to land on and thermobatteries that would waken them when it was time to set to work!’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Freddy, as wearily as before. ‘They had courage, at any rate. But what would you do about that?’
‘I’d report it to Headquarters!’ raged the skipper. ‘I’d report that this is a warship capable of blasting the whole Patrol out of the ether and smashing our planets! I’d say it was manned by monsters now fortunately helpless, but with fuel enough to maneuver to a landing. And I’d ask authority to take their coffins out of their ship and destroy them! Then I’d—’
‘I did something simpler,’ said Freddy. ‘I disconnected the thermobatteries. They can’t revive. So I’m going to get a few hours’ sleep. If you’ll excuse me-’
He went to his own cabin and threw himself on his bunk.
Men with scanners continued to examine every square inch of the monster derelict. They worked in spacesuits. To have filled the giant hull with air would practically have emptied the Amina’s tanks. A spacesuited man held a scanner before a curious roll of flexible substance, on which were inscribed symbols. His headphones brought instructions from the photo room. A record of some sort was being duplicated by photography. There were scanners at work in the storerooms, the crew’s quarters, the gun mounts. So far no single article had been moved from the giant stranger. That was Freddy’s order. Every possible bit of information was being extracted from every possible object, but nothing had been taken away. Even chemical analysis was being done by scanner, using cold-light spectrography applied from the laboratory on the cruiser.
And Freddy’s unpopularity had not lessened. The engineer officer cursed him luridly. The stranger’s engines, now— They had been patched up after an explosion, and they were tan-talizingly suggestive. But their working was unfathomable. The engineer officer wanted to get his hands on them. The physiochemical officer wanted to do some analysis with his own hands, instead of by cold-light spectrography over a scanner. And every man, from the lowest enlisted apprentice to the skipper himself, wanted to get hold of some artifact made by an alien, non-human race ten thousand years ahead of human civilization. So Freddy was unpopular.
But that was only part of his unhappiness. He felt that he had acted improperly. The Ethical Equations gave mathematical proof that probabilities and ethics are interlinked, so that final admirable results cannot be expected from unethical beginnings. Freddy had violated discipline - which is one sort of ethics - and after that through his uncle had interjected politics into Patrol affairs. Which was definitely a crime. By the Equations, the probability of disastrous coincidences was going to be enormous until corrective, ethically proper action was taken to cancel out the original crimes. And Freddy had been unable to devise such action. He felt, too, that the matter was urgent. He slept uneasily despite his fatigue, because there was something in the back of his mind which warned him stridently that disaster lay ahead.
Freddy awoke still unrefreshed and stared dully at the ceiling over his head. He was trying discouragedly to envision a reasonable solution when there came a tap on his door. It was Bridges with a batch of papers.
‘Here you are!’ he said cheerfully, when Freddy opened to him. ‘Now we’re all going to be happy!’
Freddy took the extended sheets.
‘What’s happened?’ he asked. ‘Did the skipper send for fresh orders regardless, and I’m to go in the brig?’
Bridges, grinning, pointed to the sheets of paper in Freddy’s hand. They were from the physiochemical officer, who was equipped to do exact surveys on the lesser heavenly bodies.
‘Elements found in the alien vessel’ was the heading of a list. Freddy scanned the list. No heavy elements, but the rest was familiar. There had been pure nitrogen in the fuel tank, he remembered, and the engineer officer was going quietly mad trying to understand how they had used nitrogen for atomic power. Freddy looked down to the bottom. Iron was the heaviest element present.
‘Why should this make everybody happy?’ asked Freddy.
Bridges pointed with his finger. The familiar atomic symbols had unfamiliar numerals by them. H3, Li5, Gl8— He blinked He saw N15, F18, S34’35— Then he stared. Bridges grinned.
‘Try to figure what that ship’s worth!’ he said happily. ‘It’s all over the Amina. Prize money isn’t allowed in the Patrol, but five percent of salvage is. Hydrogen three has been detected on Earth, but never isolated. Lithium five doesn’t exist on Earth, or glucinium eight, or nitrogen fifteen or oxygen seventeen or fluorine eighteen or sulphur thirty-four or thirty-five! The whole ship is made up of isotopes that simply don’t exist in the solar system! And you know what pure isotopes sell for! The hull’s practically pure iron fifty-five! Pure iron fifty-four sells for thirty-five credits a gram! Talk about the lost treasures of Mars! For technical use only, the stripped hull of this stranger is worth ten years’ revenue of Earth government! Every man on the Amina is rich for life. And you’re popular!’
Freddy did not smile.
‘Nitrogen fifteen,’ he said slowly. ‘That’s what’s in the remaining fuel tank. It goes into a queer little aluminum chamber we couldn’t figure out, and from there into the drive tubes. I see—’
He was very pale. Bridges beamed.
‘A hundred thousand tons of materials that simply don’t exist on Earth! Pure isotopes, intact! Not a contamination in a carload! My dear chap, I’ve come to like you, but you’ve been hated by everyone else. Now come out and bask in admiration and affection!’
Freddy said, unheeding:
‘I’ve been wondering what that aluminium chamber was for. It looked so infernally simple, and I couldn’t see what it did—’
‘Come out and have a drink!’ insisted Bridges joyously. ‘Be lionized! Make friends and influence people!’
‘No,’ said Freddy. He smiled mirthlessly. ‘I’ll be lynched later anyhow. Hm-m-m. I want to talk to the engineer officer. We want to get that ship navigating under its own power. It’s too big to do anything with towlines.’
‘But nobody’s figured out its engines!’ protested Bridges. ‘Apparently there’s nothing but a tiny trickle of nitrogen through a silly chamber that does something to it, and then it flows through aluminum baffles into the drive tubes. It’s too simple! How are you going to make a thing like that work?’
?I think,’ said Freddy, ‘it’s going to be horribly simple. That whole ship is made up of isotopes we don’t have on Earth. No. It has aluminum and carbon. They’re simple substances. Theirs and ours are just alike. But most of the rest—’
He was pale. He looked as if he were suffering.
‘I’ll get a couple of tanks made up, of aluminum, and filled with nitrogen. Plain air should do— And I’ll want a gyro-con-trol. I’ll want it made of aluminum, too, with graphite bearings—’
He grinned mirthlessly at Bridges.
‘Ever hear of the Ethical Equations, Bridges? You’d never expect them to suggest the answer to a space-drive problem, would you? But that’s what they’ve done. I’ll get the engineer officer to have those things made up. It’s nice to have known you, Bridges—’
As Bridges went out, Freddy Holmes sat down, wetting his lips, to make sketches for the engineer officer to work from.
The control room and the engine room of the monster ship were one. It was a huge, globular chamber fi
lled with apparatus of startlingly alien design. To Freddy, and to Bridges too, now, there was not so much of monstrousness as at first. Eight days of familiarity, and knowledge of how they worked, had made them seem almost normal. But still it was eerie to belt themselves before the instrument board, with only iheir hand lamps for illumination, and cast a last glance at the aluminum replacements of parts that had been made on some planet of another sun.
‘If this works,’ said Freddy, and swallowed, ‘we’re lucky. Here’s the engine control. Cross your fingers, Bridges.’
The interior of the hulk was still airless. Freddy shifted a queerly shaped lever an infinitesimal trace. There was a slight surging movement of the whole vast hull. A faint murmuring came through the fabric of the monster ship to the soles of their spacesuit boots. Freddy wet his lips and touched another lever.
‘This should be lights.’
It was. Images formed on the queerly shaped screens. The whole interior of the ship glowed. And the whole creation had been so alien as somehow to be revolting, in the harsh white light of the hand lamps the men had used. But now it was like a highly improbable fairy palace. The fact that all doors were circular and all passages round tubes was only pleasantly strange, in the many-colored glow of the ship’s own lighting system. Freddy shook his head in his spacesuit helmet, as if to shake away drops of sweat on his forehead.
‘The next should be heat,’ he said more grimly than before. ‘We do not touch that! Oh, definitely! But we try the drive.’
The ship stirred. It swept forward in a swift smooth acceleration that was invincibly convincing of power. The Amina dwindled swifdy, behind. And Freddy, with compressed lips, touched controls here, and there, and the monstrous ship obeyed with the docility of a willing, well-trained animal. It swept back to clear sight of the Amina.
‘I would say,’ said Bridges in a shaking voice, ‘that it works. The Patrol has nothing like this!’
‘No,’ said Freddy shortly. His voice sounded sick. ‘Not like this! It’s a sweet ship. I’m going to hook in the gyro controls. They ought to work. The creatures who made this didn’t use them. I don’t know why. But they didn’t.’
He cut off everything but the lights. He bent down and looked in the compact little aluminum device which would control the flow of nitrogen to the port and starboard drive tubes.
Freddy came back to the control board and threw in the drive once more. And the gyro control worked. It should. After all, the tool work of a Space Patrol machinist should be good. Freddy tested it thoroughly. He set it on a certain fine adjustment. He threw three switches. Then he picked up one tiny kit he had prepared.
‘Come along,’ he said tiredly. ‘Our work’s over. We go back to the Amina and I probably get lynched.’
Bridges, bewildered, followed him to the spidery little spaceboat. They cast off from the huge ship, now three miles or more from the Amina and untenanted save by its own monstrous crew in suspended animation. The Space Patrol cruiser shifted position to draw near and pick them up. And Freddy said hardly:
‘Remember the Ethical Equations, Bridges? I said they gave me the answer to that other ship’s drive. If they were right, it couldn’t have been anything else. Now I’m going to find out about something else.’
His spacegloved hands worked clumsily. From the tiny kit he spilled out a single small object. He plopped it into something from a chest in the spaceboat - a mortar shell, as Bridges saw incredulously. He dropped that into the muzzle of a line-mortar the spaceboat carried as a matter of course. He jerked the lanyard. The mortar flamed. Expanding gases beat at the spacesuits of the men. A tiny, glowing, crimson spark sped toward outer space. Seconds passed. Three. Four. Five— ‘Apparently I’m a fool,’ said Freddy, in the grimmest voice Bridges had ever heard.
But then there was light. And such lightl Where the dwindling red spark of a tracer mortar shell had sped toward infinitely distant stars, there was suddenly an explosion of such incredible violence as even the proving-grounds of the Space Patrol had never known. There was no sound in empty space. There was no substance to be heated to incandescence other than that of a half-pound tracer shell. But there was a flare of blue-white light and a crash of such violent static that Bridges was deafened by it. Even through the glass of his helmet he felt a flash of savage heat. Then there was - nothing.
‘What was that?’ said Bridges, shaken.
‘The Ethical Equations,’ said Freddy, Apparently I’m not the fool I thought—’
The Amina slid up alongside the little spaceboat. Freddy did not alight. He moved the boat over to its cradle and plugged in his communicator set. He talked over that set with his helmet phone, not radiating a signal that Bridges could pick up. In three minutes or so the great lock opened and four spacesuited figures came out. One wore the crested four-communicator helmet which only the skipper of a cruiser wears when in command of a landing party. The newcomers to the outside of the Amina’s hull crowded into the little spaceboat. Freddy’s voice sounded again in the headphones, grim and cold.
‘I’ve some more shells, sir. They’re tracer shells which have been in the work boat for eight days. They’re not quite as cold as the ship, yonder - that’s had two thousand years to cool off in
- but they’re cold. I figure they’re not over eight or ten degrees absolute. And here are the bits of material from the other ship. You can touch them. Our spacesuits are as nearly non-conductive of heat as anything could be. You won’t warm them if you hold them in your hand.’
The skipper - Bridges could see him - looked at the scraps of metal Freddy held out to him. They were morsels of iron and other material from the alien ship. By the cold glare of a hand-light the skipper thrust one into the threaded hollow at the nose of a mortar shell into which a line-end is screwed when a line is to be thrown. The skipper himself dropped in the mortar shell and fired it. Again a racing, receding speck of red in emptiness. And a second terrible, atomic blast.
The skipper’s voice in the headphones:
‘How much more of the stuff did you bring away?’
‘Three more pieces, sir,’ said Freddy’s voice, very steady now. ‘You see how it happens, sir. They’re isotopes we don’t have on Earth. And we don’t have them because in contact with other isotopes at normal temperatures, they’re unstable. They go off. Here we dropped them into the mortar shells and nothing happened, because both isotopes were cold - down to the temperature of liquid helium, or nearly. But there’s a tracer compound in the shells, and it bums as they fly away. The shell grows warm. And when either isotope, in contact with the other, is as warm as … say ..: liquid hydrogen … why … they destroy each other. The ship yonder is of the same material. Its mass is about a hundred thousand tons. Except for the aluminum and maybe one or two other elements that also are nonisotopic and the same in both ships, every bit of that ship will blast off if it comes in contact with matter from this solar system above ten or twelve degrees absolute.’
‘Shoot the other samples away,’ said the skipper harshly. ‘We want to be sure—’
There were three violent puffs of gases expanding into empty space. There were three incredible blue-white flames in the void. There was silence. Then—
‘That thing has to be destroyed,’ said the skipper, heavily. ‘We couldn’t set it down anywhere, and its crew might wake up anyhow, at any moment. We haven’t anything that could fight it, and if it tried to land on Earth—’
The alien monster, drifting aimlessly in the void, suddenly moved. Thin flames came from the gill-like openings at the bow. Then one side jetted more strongly. It swung about, steadied, and swept forward with a terrifying smooth acceleration. It built up speed vastly more swifdy than any Earthship could possibly do. It dwindled to a speck. It vanished in empty space.
But it was not bound inward toward the sun. It was not headed for the plainly visible half-moon disk of Jupiter, now barely seventy million miles away. It headed out toward the stars.
1 wasn’t sur
e until a few minutes ago/ said Freddy Holmes unsteadily, but by the Ethical Equations something like that was probable. I couldn’t make certain until we’d gotten everything possible from it, and until I had everything arranged. But I was worried from the first. The Ethical Equations made it pretty certain that if we did the wrong thing we’d suffer for it … and by we I mean the whole Earth, because any visitor from beyond the stars would be bound to affect the whole human race.’ His voice wavered a little. ‘It was hard to figure out what we ought to do. If one of our ships had been in the same fix, though, we’d have hoped for - friendliness. We’d hope for fuel, maybe, and help in starting back home. But this ship was a warship, and we’d have been helpless to fight it. It would have been hard to be friendly. Yet, according to the Ethical Equations, if we wanted our first contact with an alien civilization to be of benefit to us, it was up to us to get it started back home with plenty of fuel.’
‘You mean,’ said the skipper, incredulously, ?you mean you—’
‘Its engines use nitrogen,’ said Freddy. ‘It runs nitrogen fifteen into a little gadget we know how to make, now. It’s very simple, but it’s a sort of atom smasher. It turns nitrogen fifteen into nitrogen fourteen and hydrogen. I think we can make use of that for ourselves. Nitrogen fourteen is the kind we have. It can be handled in aluminum pipes and tanks, because there’s only one aluminum, which is stable under all conditions. But when it hits the alien isotopes in the drive tubes, it breaks down—’
He took a deep breath.
‘I gave them a double aluminum tank of nitrogen, and bypassed their atom smasher. Nitrogen fourteen goes into their drive tubes, and they drive! And … I figured back their orbit, and set a gyro to head them back for their own solar system for as long as the first tank of nitrogen holds out. They’ll make it out of the sun’s gravitational field on that, anyhow. And I reconnected their thermobatteries. When they start to wake up they’ll see the gyro and know that somebody gave it to them.:
The double tank is like their own and they’ll realize they have a fresh supply of fuel to land with. It… may be a thousand years before they’re back home, but when they get there they’ll know we’re friendly and … not afraid of them. And meanwhile we’ve got all their gadgets to work on and work with—’
Murray Leinster Page 4