A knock on the door. The commander opened his eyes a trifle vaguely. He was very old now, the commander. He had dozed.
Alstair said shortly, “Come in!” and Jack Gary entered.
He saluted, pointedly to the commander. Which was according to regulations, but Alstair’s eyes snapped.
“Ah, yes,” said the commander. “Gary. It’s about time for more signals, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
Jack Gary was very quiet, very businesslike. Only once, when he glanced at Helen, was there any hint of anything but the formal manner of a man intent on his job. Then his eyes told her something, in an infinitely small fraction of a second, which changed her expression to one of flushed content.
Short as the glance was, Alstair saw it. He said harshly:
“Have you made any progress in deciphering the signals, Gary?”
Jack was setting the dials of a panwave receptor, glancing at penciled notes on a calculator pad. He continued to set up the reception pattern.
“No, sir. There is still a sequence of sounds at the beginning which must be a form of call, because a part of the same sequence is used as a signature at the close. With the commander’s permission I have used the first part of that call sequence as a signature in our signals in reply. But in looking over the records of the signals I’ve found something that looks important.”
The commander said mildly: “What is it, Gary?”
“We’ve been sending signals ahead of us on a tight beam, sir, for some months. Your idea was to signal ahead, so that if there were any civilized inhabitants on planets about the sun, they’d get an impression of a peaceful mission.”
“Of course!” said the commander. “It would be tragic for the first of interstellar communications to be unfriendly!”
“We’ve been getting answers to our signals for nearly three months. Always at intervals of a trifle over thirty hours. We assumed, of course, that a fixed transmitter was sending them, and that it was signaling once a day when the station was in the most favorable position for transmitting to us.”
“Of course,” said the commander gently. “It gave us the period of rotation of the planet from which the signals come.”
* * * *
Jack Gary set the last dial and turned on the switch. A low-pitched hum arose, which died away. He glanced at the dials again, checking them.
“I’ve been comparing the records, sir, making due allowance for our approach. Because we cut down the distance between us and the star so rapidly, our signals to-day take several seconds less to reach Proxima Centauri than they did yesterday. Their signals should show the same shortening of interval, if they are actually sent out at the same instant of planetary time every day.”
The commander nodded benevolently.
“They did, at first,” said Jack. “But about three weeks ago the time interval changed in a brand-new fashion. The signal strength changed, and the wave form altered a little, too, as if a new transmitter was sending. And the first day of that change the signals came through one second earlier than our velocity of approach would account for. The second day they were three seconds earlier, the third day six, the fourth day ten, and so on. They kept coming earlier by a period indicating a linear function until one week ago. Then the rate of change began to decrease again.”
“That’s nonsense!” said Alstair harshly.
“It’s records,” returned Jack curtly.
“But how do you explain it, Gary?” asked the commander mildly.
“They’re sending now from a space ship, sir,” replied Jack briefly, “which is moving toward us at four times our maximum acceleration. And they’re flashing us a signal at the same interval, according to their clocks, as before.”
A pause. Helen Bradley smiled warmly. The commander thought carefully. Then he admitted:
“Very good, Gary! It sounds plausible. What next?”
“Why, sir,” said Jack, “since the rate of change shifted, a week ago, it looks as if that other space ship started to decelerate again. Here are my calculations, sir. If the signals are sent at the same interval they kept up for over a moment, there is another space ship headed toward us, and she is decelerating to stop and reverse and will be matching our course and speed in four days and eighteen hours. They’ll meet and surprise us, they think.”
The commander’s face lighted up. “Marvelous, Gary! They must be far advanced indeed in civilization! Intercourse between two such peoples, separated by four light-years of distance! What marvels we shall learn! And to think of their sending a ship far beyond their own system to greet and welcome us!”
Jack’s expression remained grim.
“I hope so, sir,” he said dryly.
“What now, Gary?” demanded Alstair angrily.
“Why,” said Jack deliberately, “they’re still pretending that the signals come from their planet, by signaling at what they think are the same times. They could exchange signals for twenty-four hours a day, if they chose, and be working out a code for communication. Instead, they’re trying to deceive us. My guess is that they’re coming at least prepared to fight. And if I’m right, their signals will begin in three seconds, exactly.”
He stopped, looking at the dials of the receptor. The tape which photographed the waves as they came in, and the other which recorded the modulations, came out of the receptor blank. But suddenly, in just three seconds, a needle kicked over and tiny white lines appeared on the rushing tapes. The speaker uttered sounds.
It was a voice which spoke. So much was clear. It was harsh yet sibilant, more like the stridulation of an insect than anything else. But the sounds it uttered were modulated as no insect can modulate its outcry. They formed what were plainly words, without vowels or consonants, yet possessing expression and varying in pitch and tone quality.
The three men in the control room had heard them many times before, and so had the girl. But for the first time they carried to her an impression of menace, of threat, of a concealed lust for destruction that made her blood run cold.
* * * *
II.
The space ship hurtled on through space, her rocket tubes sending forth small and apparently insufficient purple flames which emitted no smoke, gave off no gas, and were seemingly nothing but small marsh fires inexplicably burning in emptiness.
There was no change in her outer appearance. There had been none to speak of in years. At long, infrequent intervals men had emerged from air locks and moved about her sides, bathing the steel they walked on and themselves alike with fierce glares from heat lamps lest the cold of her plating transmit itself through the material of the suits and kill the men like ants on red-hot metal. But for a long time no such expedition had been needed.
Only now, in the distant faint light of Proxima Centauri, a man in a space suit emerged from such a tiny lock. Instantly he shot out to the end of a threadlike life line. The constant deceleration of the ship not only simulated gravity within. Anything partaking of its motion showed the same effect. The man upon its decelerating forward side was flung away from the ship by his own momentum, the same force which, within it, had pressed his feet against the floors.
He hauled himself back laboriously, moving with an exaggerated clumsiness in his bloated space suit. He clung to handholds and hooked himself in place, while he worked an electric drill. He moved still more clumsily to another place and drilled again. A third, and fourth, and fifth. For half an hour or more, then, he labored to set up on the vast steel surface, which seemed always above him, an intricate array of wires and framework. In the end he seemed content. He hauled himself back to the air lock and climbed within. The Adastra hurtled onward, utterly unchanged save for a very tiny fretwork of wire, perhaps thirty feet across, which looked more like a microscopic barbed-wire entanglement than anything else.
Within the Adastra, Helen Bradley greeted Jack warmly as he got out of his space suit.
“It was horrible!” she told him, “to see you dangling li
ke that! With millions of miles of empty space below you!”
“If my line had parted,” said Jack quietly, “your father’d have turned the ship and caught up to me. Let’s go turn on the inductor and see how the new reception grid works.”
He hung up the space suit. As they turned to go through the doorway their hands touched accidentally. They looked at each other and faltered. They stopped, Helen’s eyes shining. They all unconsciously swayed toward each other. Jack’s hands lifted hungrily.
Footsteps sounded close by. Alstair, second in command of the space ship, rounded a corner and stopped short.
“What’s this?” he demanded savagely. “Just because the commander’s brought you into officers’ quarters, Gary, it doesn’t follow that your Mut methods of romance can come, too!”
“You dare!” cried Helen furiously.
Jack, from a hot dull flush, was swiftly paling to the dead-white of rage.
“You’ll take that back,” he said very quietly indeed, “or I’ll show you Mut methods of fighting with a force gun! As an officer, I carry one, too, now!”
Alstair snarled at him.
“Your father’s been taken ill,” he told Helen angrily. “He feels the voyage is about over. Anticipation has kept up his strength for months past, but now he’s-”
With a cry, the girl fled.
Alstair swung upon Jack. “I take back nothing,” he snapped. “You’re an officer, by order of the commander. But you’re a Mut besides, and when I’m commander of the Adastra you don’t stay an officer long! I’m warning you! What were you doing here?”
Jack was deathly pale, but the status of officer on the Adastra, with its consequent opportunity of seeing Helen, was far too precious to be given up unless at the last extremity. And, besides, there was the work he had in hand. His work, certainly, could not continue unless he remained an officer.
“I was installing an interference grid on the surface,” he said, “to try to discover the sending station of the messages we’ve been getting. It will also act, as you know, as an inductor up to a certain range, and in its range is a good deal more accurate than the main inductors of the ship.”
“Then get to your damned work,” said Alstair harshly, “and pay full attention to it and less to romance!”
Jack plugged in the lead wire from his new grid to the pan-wave receptor. For an hour he worked more and more grimly. There was something very wrong. The inductors showed blank for all about the Adastra. The interference grid showed an object of considerable size not more than two million miles distant and to one side of the Adastra’s course. Suddenly, all indication of that object’s existence blanked out. Every dial on the pan-wave receptor went back to zero.
“Damnation!” said Jack under his breath.
He set up a new pattern on the controls, calculated a moment and deliberately changed the pattern on the spare bank of the main inductors, and then simultaneously switched both instruments to their new frequencies. He waited, almost holding his breath, for nearly half a minute. It would take so long for the inductor waves of the new frequency to reach out the two million miles and then collapse into the analyzers and give their report of any object in space which had tended to deform them.
Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight seconds. Every alarm bell on the monstrous ship clanged furiously! Emergency doors hissed into place all over the vessel, converting every doorway into an air lock. Seconds later, the visiplates in the main control room began to flash alight.
“Reporting, Rocket Control!” “Reporting, Air Service!” “Reporting, Power Supply.”
Jack said crisply: “The main inductors report an object two million miles distant with velocity in our direction. The commander is ill. Please find Vice Commander Alstair.”
Then the door of the control room burst open and Alstair himself raged into the room.
“What the devil!” he rasped. “Ringing a general alarm? Have you gone mad? The inductors--”
Jack pointed to the main inductor bank. Every dial bore out the message of the still-clanging alarms. Alstair stared blankly at them. As he looked, every dial went back to zero.
And Alstair’s face went as blank as the dials.
“They felt out our inductor screens,” said Jack grimly, “and put out some sort of radiation which neutralized them. So I set up two frequencies, changed both, and they couldn’t adjust their neutralizers in time to stop our alarms.”
Alstair stood still, struggling with the rage which still possessed him. Then he nodded curtly.
“Quite right. You did good work. Stand by.”
And, quite cool and composed, he took command of the mighty space ship, even if there was not much for him to do. In five minutes, in fact, every possible preparation for emergency had been made and he turned again to Jack.
“I don’t like you,” he said coldly. “As one man to another, I dislike you intensely. But as vice commander and acting commander at the moment, I have to admit that you did good work in uncovering this little trick of our friends to get within striking distance without our knowing they were anywhere near.”
Jack said nothing. He was frowning, but it was because he was thinking of Helen. The Adastra was huge and powerful, but she was not readily maneuverable. She was enormously massive, but she could not be used for ramming. And she possessed within herself almost infinite destructiveness, in the means of producing Caldwell fields for the disintegration of matter, but she contained no weapon more dangerous than a two-thousand-kilowatt vortex gun for the destruction of dangerous animals or vegetation where she might possibly land.
“What’s your comment?” demanded Alstair shortly. “How do you size up the situation?”
“They act as if they’re planning hostilities,” replied Jack briefly, “and they’ve got four times our maximum acceleration so we can’t get away. With that acceleration they ought to be more maneuverable, so we can’t dodge them. We’ve no faintest idea of what weapons they carry, but we know that we can’t fight them unless their weapons are very puny indeed. There’s just one chance that I can see.”
“What’s that?”
“They tried to slip up on us. That looks as if they intended to open fire without warning. But maybe they are frightened and only expected to examine us without our getting a chance to attack them. In that case, our only bet is to swing over our signaling beam to the space ship. When they realize we know they’re there and still aren’t getting hostile, they may not guess we can’t fight. They may think we want to be friendly and they’d better not start anything with a ship our size that’s on guard.”
“Very well. You’re detailed to communication duty,” said Alstair. “Go ahead and carry out that program. I’ll consult the rocket engineers and see what they can improvise in the way of fighting equipment. Dismiss!”
* * * *
His tone was harsh. It was arrogant. It rasped Jack’s nerves and made him bristle all over. But he had to recognize that Alstair wasn’t letting his frank dislike work to the disadvantage of the ship. Alstair was, in fact, one of those ambitious officers who are always cordially disliked by everybody, at all times, until an emergency arises. Then their competence shows up.
Jack went to the communications-control room. It did not take long to realign the transmitter beam. Then the sender began to repeat monotonously the recorded last message from the Adastra to the distant and so far unidentified planet of the ringed star. And while the signal went out, over and over again, Jack called on observations control for a sight of the strange ship.
They had a scanner on it now and by stepping up illumination to the utmost, and magnification to the point where the image was as rough as an old-fashioned half-tone cut, they brought the strange ship to the visi-plate as a six-inch miniature.
It was egg-shaped and perfectly smooth. There was no sign of external girders, of protruding atmospheric-navigation fins, of escape-boat blisters. It was utterly featureless save for tiny spots which might be portholes, and
rocket tubes in which intermittent flames flickered. It was still decelerating to match the speed and course of the Adastra.
“Have you got a spectroscope report on it?” asked Jack.
“Yeh,” replied the observations orderly. “An’ I don’t believe it. They’re using fuel rockets—some organic compound. An’ the report says the hull of that thing is cellulose, not metal. It’s wood, on the outside.”
Jack shrugged. No sign of weapons. He went back to his own job. The space ship yonder was being penetrated through and through by the message waves. Its receptors could not fail to be reporting that a tight beam was upon it, following its every movement, and that its presence and probable mission were therefore known to the mighty ship from out of space.
Before The Golden Age - A SF Anthology of the 1930s Page 89