I wondered, momentarily, whether these creatures had yet discovered the secret of our cruiser's design and operation, and then forgot my wonder as we began to creep stealthily toward them. As we crawled past a little heap of short, thick metal bars, each of us grasped one, and then crept on again. In a moment we were within a dozen paces of the unsuspecting globe-men, and at once we sprang to our feet and charged down upon them with uplifted maces.
So unexpected and so swift was our attack that the three had time only to turn toward us, half-raising their fire-disks, and then our heavy clubs had crashed down through their round, soft bodies, sending them to the floor in a sprawling oozing mass. We dropped our weapons and sprang toward the cruiser.
Its lower door was open, and instantly we were inside it.
At once Sarto Sen sprang up the stair toward the conning-tower, while Hal Kur and Nar Lon raced into the generator-room. I paused to slam shut the heavy door, its closing automatically starting the throbbing oxygen pumps, and then hastened up the stair also. Even as I did so there began the familiar humming of the vibration-generators, droning out with swiftly gathering power. And now I had reached the conning-tower, where Sarto Sen was working swiftly with the controls.
At the moment that I burst into the little room there came a sudden harsh grating of metal from outside, and then a score of high-pitched, thrumming cries. I sprang to the window, and there, across the red lit platform, a mass of dark, globular figures had suddenly poured up onto the platform's surface, from another of its pillar-lifts. They ran toward us, heard the humming of the cruiser's generators, and then stopped short. Their fire-disks swept up and a dozen balls of the destroying flame leapt toward us. But at the moment that they did so there was a swift clicking of switches beneath the hands of Sarto Sen, a sudden roar of wind, and then the red-lit platform and all on it had vanished from sight as our ship flashed out again into the void of space.
V
Always, now, I remember the weeks of our homeward flight as a seemingly endless time during which we flashed on and on through space, struggling against our own desire to sleep. For now there were but four of us to operate the cruiser, and the generators alone required the constant care of two of our number, while another must stand watch in the conning-tower. That meant that each of us could grasp but a few hours of sleep at irregular intervals, while our ship fled on. Even so I do not think that we could have managed with any other engineer than Nar Lon, for he, who had been chief of the engineers, was equal to three men in his knowledge and vigilance.
So we sped on, while Alto dwindled in size behind us, and the bright star that was our own sun burned out in waxing glory ahead. And through the long hours of my watches in the conning-tower I watched red star and yellow with an unceasing, growing fearfulness, for well I knew that with each second they were leaping closer and closer toward each other, and toward the doom of the Eight Worlds.
On and on our cruiser hummed, at its highest speed, fleeing through the void toward our own sun with the velocity of light. And surely never was voyage so strange as ours, since time began. A voyage from star to star, in a ship flung forward by unseen vibrations, its crew four haggard and burning-eyed men who were racing against time to carry the news on which depended the fate of our universe. Dreamlike had been our outward voyage, but this homeward flight resembled an endless torturing nightmare. At last, though, its end drew in sight, and gradually we slackened speed as we flashed nearer toward our own universe. By the time we received our first telestereo challenge from an Interplanetary Patrol cruiser outside Neptune we were moving at a scant million miles an hour. When we announced our identity, though, a peremptory order was flashed across the solar system for all interplanetary traffic to clear the space-lanes between ourselves and Earth, so that we were able to hurtle on toward the green planet at full speed without danger of collisions. And so, at last, our ship was slanting down again over the great Hall of Planets, into the very landing-court from which we had made the start of our momentous voyage.
Fighting against the fatigue which threatened to overwhelm me, I staggered out of the cruiser into the waiting hands of those in the landing-court, and five minutes later I was stumbling onto the dais where Mur Dak faced the hastily assembled Council. Standing there, swaying a little from sheer exhaustion, I spoke to Mur Dak and to the Council, relating in concise phrases the events of our voyage and the discovery we had made. When I had finished, saluting and slumping into a chair, there was an utter, deathlike silence over the great hall, and then a sigh went up as Mur Dak stepped forward to speak.
"You have heard the report of Jan Tor," he said, his voice calm and even as ever, "and you know now what doom threatens us and what chance we have to avert that doom. And now you must make decision. As you know, during the past weeks our scientists have been engaged in the construction of many hundreds of new vibration-cruisers like the one used by Jan Tor in his voyage. Soon, now, these cruisers will be complete, and they can be used by us in either of two ways.
"We can use them to save a fragment of our people, since in these ships a few thousand of us can escape to another star, though all the rest of us must inevitably perish with our universe when the two suns meet. Or we can use them for battle, instead of flight, speeding out in them to this planet of Alto's, attacking these globe-people and using their own force-ray projector in an attempt to swerve Alto aside before it destroys us. And that is the decision which you must make, a decision on which rests the fate of the races of man. Shall a few of us flee in these star-cruisers to another universe, allowing the oncoming sun to destroy our own, or shall we go out in them to Alto and make a single desperate attempt to swerve the approaching sun aside, and save the Eight Worlds?"
And now again there was silence, a thick and heavy silence, fateful with the doom of universes, the destiny of suns. I felt sleep overwhelming me, now, and though I struggled to keep my tired eyelids open I was slipping farther and farther down into drowsy depths of oblivion. Dimly, as though from an infinite distance, I heard a mighty shouting rising from the massed members around me. Then, just before complete unconsciousness descended on me, the roaring lessened for a single moment, and in that moment I heard the voice of Mur Dak, strong and vibrant.
"You have made decision," he was saying, "and when the cruiser-fleet is completed it shall start at once-for Alto!"
The three weeks that elapsed between our return and the sailing of the great fleet were undoubtedly the most frenzied in the history of the Eight Worlds. Our own scientists had calculated that if we were to save our universe, Alto must be swerved from its course within the next fifty days, since after that it would be too late, for even if swerved aside after that time the dying sun would still crash through at least part of our solar system, wrecking it completely. We must reach the ray-projector on Alto's planet and use it before the end of the fiftieth day, or it would be too late. So through the first twenty of those fifty days all other work throughout the Eight Worlds had been abandoned and every effort was concentrated upon the completion of the cruisers. Each planet was furnishing its own contingent for the fleet, and on each of the Eight Worlds men toiled to exhaustion in laboratory and factory, while others stood ready to take their places. Swiftly the cruisers, more than a thousand in number, approached completion, and now were being equipped with the weapon our scientists had devised for them, a deadly blue ray which had the power of stimulating atomic movement in every molecule of matter it touched to such a point that whatever matter was struck by it vanished beneath its touch, splitting instantly into its original atoms.