Baird pressed the communicator call for the radar room and said coldly:
“I’m obeying orders. Look, Taine! You were picked for your job because you were a xenophobe. It helps in your proper functioning. But this Plumie is here under a flag of truce—”
“Flag of truce!” snarled Taine. “It’s vermin! It’s not human! I’ll—”
“If you move one inch nearer him,” said Baird gently, “just one inch—”
The skipper’s voice bellowed through the general call speakers all over the ship:
“Mr. Taine! You will go to your quarters, under arrest! Mr. Baird, burn him down if he hesitates!”
Then there was a rushing, and scrambling figures appeared and were all about. They were members of the Niccola’s crew, sent by the skipper. They regarded the Plumie with detachment, but Taine with a wary expectancy. Taine turned purple with fury. He shouted. He raged. He called Baird and the others Plumie-lovers and vermin-worshipers. He shouted foulnesses at them. But he did not attack.
When, still shouting, he went away, Baird said apologetically to the Plumie:
“He’s a xenophobe. He has a pathological hatred of strangers—even of strangeness. We have him on board because—”
Then he stopped. The Plumie wouldn’t understand, of course. But his eyes took on a curious look. It was almost as if, looking at Baird, they twinkled.
Baird took him back to the skipper.
“He’s got the picture, sir,” he reported.
The Plumie pulled out his sketch plate. He drew on it. He offered it. The skipper said heavily:
“You guessed right, Mr. Baird. He suggests that someone from this ship go on board the Plumie vessel. He’s drawn two pressure-suited figures going in their air lock. One’s larger than the other. Will you go?”
“Naturally!” said Baird. Then he added thoughtfully: “But I’d better carry a portable scanner, sir. It should work perfectly well through a bronze hull, sir.”
The skipper nodded and began to sketch a diagram which would amount to an acceptance of the Plumie’s invitation.
This was at 07 hours 40 minutes ship time. Outside the sedately rotating metal hulls—the one a polished blue-silver and the other a glittering golden bronze—the cosmos continued to be as always. The haze from explosive fumes and rocket-fuel was, perhaps, a little thinner. The brighter stars shone through it. The gas-giant planet outward from the sun was a perceptible disk instead of a diffuse glow. The oxygen-planet to sunward showed again as a lighted crescent.
Presently Baird, in a human spacesuit, accompanied the Plumie into the Niccola’s air lock and out to emptiness. His magnetic-soled shoes clung to the Niccola’s cobalt-steel skin. Fastened to his shoulder there was a tiny scanner and microphone, which would relay everything he saw and heard back to the radar room and to Diane.
She watched tensely as he went inside the Plumie ship. Other screens relayed the image and his voice to other places on the Niccola.
He was gone a long time. From the beginning, of course, there were surprises. When the Plumie escort removed his helmet, on his own ship, the reason for the helmet’s high crest was apparent. He had a high crest of what looked remarkably like feathers—and it was not artificial. It grew there. The reason for conventionalized plumes on bronze survey plates was clear. It was exactly like the reason for human features or figures as decorative additions to the inscriptions on Space Survey marker plates. Even the Plumie’s hands had odd crestlets which stood out when he bent his fingers. The other Plumies were no less graceful and no less colorful. They had equally clear soprano voices. They were equally miniature and so devoid of apparent menace.
But there were also technical surprises. Baird was taken immediately to the Plumie ship’s engine room, and Diane heard the sharp intake of breath with which he appeared to recognize its working principle. There were Plumie engineers working feverishly at it, attempting to discover something to repair. But they found nothing. The Plumie drive simply would not work.
They took Baird through the ship’s entire fabric. And their purpose, when it became clear, was startling. The Plumie ship had no rocket tubes. It had no beam-projectors except small-sized objects which were—which must be—their projectors of tractor and pressor beams. They were elaborately grounded to the ship’s substance. But they were not originally designed for ultra-heavy service. They hadn’t and couldn’t have the enormous capacity Baird had expected. He was astounded.
* * * *
When he returned to the Niccola, he went instantly to the radar room to make sure that pictures taken through his scanner had turned out well. And there was Diane.
But the skipper’s voice boomed at him from the wall.
“Mr. Baird! What have you to add to the information you sent back?”
“Three items, sir,” said Baird. He drew a deep breath. “For the first, sir, the Plumie ship is unarmed. They’ve tractor and pressor beams for handling material. They probably use them to build their cairns. But they weren’t meant for weapons. The Plumies, sir, hadn’t a thing to fight with when they drove for us after we detected them.”
The skipper blinked hard.
“Are you sure of that, Mr. Baird?”
“Yes, sir,” said Baird uncomfortably. “The Plumie ship is an exploring ship—a survey ship, sir. You saw their mapping equipment. But when they spotted us, and we spotted them—they bluffed! When we fired rockets at them, they turned them back with tractor and pressor beams. They drove for us, sir, to try to destroy us with our own bombs, because they didn’t have any of their own.”
The skipper’s mouth opened and closed.
“Another item, sir,” said Baird more uncomfortably still. “They don’t use iron or steel. Every metal object I saw was either a bronze or a light metal. I suspect some of their equipment’s made of potassium, and I’m fairly sure they use sodium in the place of aluminum. Their atmosphere’s quite different from ours—obviously! They’d use bronze for their ship’s hull because they can venture into an oxygen atmosphere in a bronze ship. A sodium-hulled ship would be lighter, but it would burn in oxygen. Where there was moisture—”
The skipper blinked.
“But they couldn’t drive in a non-magnetic hull!” he protested. “A ship has to be magnetic to drive!”
“Sir,” said Baird, his voice still shaken, “they don’t use a magnetronic drive. I once saw a picture of the drive they use, in a stereo on the history of space travel. The principle’s very old. We’ve practically forgotten it. It’s a Dirac pusher-drive, sir. Among us humans, it came right after rockets. The planets of Sol were first reached by ships using Dirac pushers. But—” He paused. “They won’t operate in a magnetic field above seventy Gauss, sir. It’s a static-charge reaction, sir, and in a magnetic field it simply stops working.”
The skipper regarded Baird unwinkingly for a long time.
“I think you are telling me,” he said at long last, “that the Plumies’drive would work if they were cut free of the Niccola.”
“Yes, sir,” said Baird. “Their engineers were opening up the drive-elements and checking them, and then closing them up again. They couldn’t seem to find anything wrong. I don’t think they know what the trouble is. It’s the Niccola’s magnetic field. I think it was our field that caused the collision by stopping their drive and killing all their controls when they came close enough.”
“Did you tell them?” demanded the skipper.
“There was no easy way to tell them by diagrams, sir.”
Taine’s voice cut in. It was feverish. It was strident. It was triumphant.
“Sir! The Niccola is effectively a wreck and unrepairable. But the Plumie ship is operable if cut loose. As weapons officer, I intend to take the Plumie ship, let out its air, fill its tanks with our air, start up its drive, and turn it over to you for navigation back to base!”
Baird raged. But he said coldly:
“We’re a long way from home, Mr. Taine, and the Dirac pusher drive is slow. If we headed ba
ck to base in the Plumie ship with its Dirac pusher, we’d all be dead of old age before we’d gone halfway.”
“But unless we take it,” raged Taine, “we hit this sun in fourteen days! We don’t have to die now! We can land on the oxygen planet up ahead! We’ve only to kill these vermin and take their ship, and we’ll live!”
Diane’s voice said dispassionately:
“Report. A Plumie in a pressure suit just came out of their air lock. It’s carrying a parcel toward our air lock.”
Taine snarled instantly:
“They’ll sneak something in the Niccola to blast it, and then cut free and go away!”
The skipper said very grimly:
“Mr. Taine, credit me with minimum brains! There is no way the Plumies can take this ship without an atomic bomb exploding to destroy both ships. You should know it!” Then he snapped: “Air lock area, listen for a knock, and let in the Plumie or the parcel he leaves.”
There was silence. Baird said very quietly:
“I doubt they think it possible to cut the ships apart. A torch is no good on thick silicon bronze. It conducts heat too well! And they don’t use steel. They probably haven’t a cutting-torch at all.”
* * * *
From the radar room he watched the Plumie place an object in the air lock and withdraw. He watched from a scanner inside the ship as someone brought in what the Plumie had left. An electronics man bustled forward. He looked it over quickly. It was complex, but his examination suddenly seemed satisfying to him. But a grayish vapor developed and he sniffed and wrinkled his nose. He picked up a communicator.
“Sir, they’ve sent us a power-generator. Some of its parts are going bad in our atmosphere, sir, but this looks to me like a hell of a good idea for a generator! I never saw anything like it, but it’s good! You can set it for any voltage and it’ll turn out plenty juice!”
“Put it in helium,” snapped the skipper. “It won’t break down in that! Then see how it serves!”
In the radar room, Baird drew a deep breath. He went carefully to each of the screens and every radar. Diane saw what he was about, and checked with him. They met at the middle of the radar room.
“Everything’s checked out,” said Baird gravely. “There’s nothing else around. There’s nothing we can be called on to do before something happens. So…we can…act like people.”
Diane smiled very faintly.
“Not like people. Just like us.” She said wistfully: “Don’t you want to tell me something? Something you intended to tell me only after we got back to base?”
He did. He told it to her. And there was also something she had not intended to tell him at all—unless he told her first. She said it now. They felt that such sayings were of the greatest possible importance. They clung together, saying them again. And it seemed wholly monstrous that two people who cared so desperately had wasted so much time acting like professional associates—explorer-ship officers—when things like this were to be said…
As they talked incoherently, or were even more eloquently silent, the ship’s ordinary lights came on. The battery-lamp went on.
“We’ve got to switch back to ship’s circuit,” said Baird reluctantly. They separated, and restored the operating circuits to normal. “We’ve got fourteen days,” he added, “and so much time to be on duty, and we’ve a lost lifetime to live in fourteen days! Diane—”
She flushed vividly. So Baird said very politely into the microphone to the navigation room:
“Sir, Lieutenant Holt and myself would like to speak directly to you in the navigation room. May we?”
“Why not?” growled the skipper. “You’ve noticed that the Plumie generator is giving the whole ship lights and services?”
“Yes, sir,” said Baird. “We’ll be there right away.”
* * * *
They heard the skipper’s grunt as they hurried through the door. A moment later the ship’s normal gravity returned—also through the Plumie generator. Up was up again, and down was down, and the corridors and cabins of the Niccola were brightly illuminated. Had the ship been other than an engineless wreck, falling through a hundred and fifty million miles of emptiness into the flaming photosphere of a sun, everything would have seemed quite normal, including the errand Baird and Diane were upon, and the fact that they held hands self-consciously as they went about it.
They skirted the bulkhead of the main air tank. They headed along the broader corridor which went past the indented inner door of the air lock. They had reached that indentation when Baird saw that the inner air-lock door was closing. He saw a human pressure suit past its edge. He saw the corner of some object that had been put down on the air-lock floor.
Baird shouted, and rushed toward the lock. He seized the inner handle and tried to force open the door again, so that no one inside it could emerge into the emptiness without. He failed. He wrenched frantically at the control of the outer door. It suddenly swung freely. The outer door had been put on manual. It could be and was being opened from inside.
“Tell the skipper,” raged Baird. “Taine’s taking something out!” He tore open a pressure-suit cupboard in the wall beside the lock door. “He’ll make the Plumies think it’s a return-gift for the generator!” He eeled into the pressure suit and zipped it up to his neck. “The man’s crazy! He thinks we can take their ship and stay alive for a while! Dammit, our air would ruin half their equipment! Tell the skipper to send help!”
He wrenched at the door again, jamming down his helmet with one hand. And this time the control worked. Taine, most probably, had forgotten that the inner control was disengaged only when the manual was actively in use. Diane raced away, panting. Baird swore bitterly at the slowness of the outer door’s closing. He was tearing at the inner door long before it could be opened. He flung himself in and dragged it shut, and struck the emergency air-release which bled the air lock into space for speed of operation. He thrust out the outer door and plunged through.
His momentum carried him almost too far. He fell, and only the magnetic soles of his shoes enabled him to check himself. He was in that singular valley between the two ships, where their hulls were impregnably welded fast. Round-hulled Plumie ship, and ganoid-shaped Niccola, they stuck immovably together as if they had been that way since time began. Where the sky appeared above Baird’s head, the stars moved in stately procession across the valley roof.
He heard a metallic rapping through the fabric of his space armor. Then sunlight glittered, and the valley filled with a fierce glare, and a man in a human spacesuit stood on the Niccola’s plating, opposite the Plumie air lock. He held a bulky object under his arm. With his other gauntlet he rapped again.
“You fool!” shouted Baird. “Stop that! We couldn’t use their ship, anyhow!”
His space phone had turned on with the air supply. Taine’s voice snarled:
“We’ll try! You keep back! They are not human!”
But Baird ran toward him. The sensation of running upon magnetic-soled shoes was unearthly: it was like trying to run on fly-paper or bird-lime. But in addition there was no gravity here, and no sense of balance, and there was the feeling of perpetual fall.
There could be no science nor any skill in an encounter under such conditions. Baird partly ran and partly staggered and partly skated to where Taine faced him, snarling. He threw himself at the other man—and then the sun vanished behind the bronze ship’s hull, and only stars moved visibly in all the universe.
* * * *
But the sound of his impact was loud in Baird’s ears inside the suit. There was a slightly different sound when his armor struck Taine’s, and when it struck the heavier metal of the two ships. He fought. But the suits were intended to be defense against greater stresses than human blows could offer. In the darkness, it was like two blindfolded men fighting each other while encased in pillows.
Then the sun returned, floating sedately above the valley, and Baird could see his enemy. He saw, too, that the Plumie air lock was
now open and that a small, erect, and somehow jaunty figure in golden space armor stood in the opening and watched gravely as the two men fought.
Taine cursed, panting with hysterical hate. He flung himself at Baird, and Baird toppled because he’d put one foot past the welded boundary between the Niccola’s cobalt steel and the Plumie ship’s bronze. One foot held to nothing. And that was a ghastly sensation, because if Taine only rugged his other foot free and heaved—why—then Baird would go floating away from the rotating, now-twinned ships, floating farther and farther away forever.
But darkness fell, and he scrambled back to the Niccola’s hull as a disorderly parade of stars went by above him. He pantingly waited fresh attack. He felt something—and it was the object Taine had meant to offer as a return present to the Plumies. It was unquestionably explosive, either booby-trapped or timed to explode inside the Plumie ship. Now it rocked gently, gripped by the magnetism of the steel.
The sun appeared again, and Taine was yards away, crawling and fumbling for Baird. Then he saw him, and rose and rushed, and the clankings of his shoe-soles were loud. Baird flung himself at Taine in a savage tackle.
He struck Taine’s legs a glancing blow, and the cobalt steel held his armor fast, but Taine careened and bounced against the round bronze wall of the Plumie, and bounced again. Then he screamed, because he went floating slowly out to emptiness, his arms and legs jerking spasmodically, while he shrieked…
The Plumie in the air lock stepped out. He trailed a cord behind him. He leaped briskly toward nothingness.
There came quick darkness once more, and Baird struggled erect despite the adhesiveness of the Niccola’s hull. When he was fully upright, sick with horror at what had come about, there was sunlight yet again, and men were coming out of the Niccola’s air lock, and the Plumie who’d leaped for space was pulling himself back to his own ship again. He had a loop of the cord twisted around Taine’s leg. But Taine screamed and screamed inside his spacesuit.
It was odd that one could recognize the skipper even inside space armor. But Baird felt sick. He saw Taine received, still screaming, and carried into the lock. The skipper growled an infuriated demand for details. His space phone had come on, too, when its air supply began. Baird explained, his teeth chattering.
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 166