"Okay, fine," Pat Barkley said, as he closed the recovery bin. "Let's get the hell out of here."
A crewman guided the bin toward the open hatch.
"Imagination is a powerful thing," Pat Barkley said as he stepped out of the ship. "I can almost feel the cold."
Josh shivered. He, too, had been thinking that it was his imagination.
The thermal shell protected against cold as well as heat.
The Watcher waited until the four men were inside the smaller of the two ships. They were in contact with the surface through the ice-encased hull. The Watcher flowed the energy of the silencing into the metal of the ship. Nothing happened. The answer was found in the mind of Joshua Webster. The Watcher recorded the data regarding the thermal shell andordered still another total review of all information. The density of the silencing cold was amplified. For hundreds of miles around the site silencer modules were brought to full power.
As the four men moved heavily toward the larger ship, taking with them the bodies of the first two intruders, the Watcher ordered animation of the newly activated mobile extensions. The cold, the weapon that had never failed, was ineffective against the thermal shield. The action that was ordered was risky. Timing had to be exact. It would take time to reach the orbiting ship. The men on the ground must be prevented from giving alarm. The Watcher was certain in his logic center that Man's claim to be able to reduce a planet to rubble was vainglorious boasting, but there was certain knowledge that the warship above had weapons that could cause bothersome damage.
The first of the mobile extensions was lifted to the surface from an underground chamber. It was the color of the ice. It moved quickly and smoothly toward the invaders. It had been fashioned in the image of the Designers, but was more sure-footed as it leapt from hummock to hummock, ran smoothly across a flat plain, and approached the downed ships from the blind side.
Meanwhile, mobile extensions as black as the face of space lifted off under their own internal power to angle upward toward the orbit of the alien ship.
The Watcher saw all, recorded all, and while functioning on several different levels probed into the mind of the man to whom access had been attained. The emotions which were known to the man as anger and sadness were still in dominance. It was a simple matter to keep the man to his purpose. The group of four entered the larger of the two ships, the empty specimen collector floating along easily in front of one of the crewmen.
"So far so good," Josh radioed to the Erin Kenner. "We have the bodies from Old Folks. We're going into the Fran Webster for the others." He avoided calling the dead by name. That would have been too painful. He led the way. When he saw David and Ruth frozen in sexual union, his throat was so dry that he could not swallow.
Pat was feeling the cold. His lips were numb. He looked at the frozen mass, the female legs locked around the back of the man, all of it made more than obscene by the damage done when freezing cells expanded and ruptured.
"Cap'n, what in hell are we up against?" Pat asked.
Josh shook his head.
"Kirsty Girard swept this ice ball from pole to pole looking for life signals," Pat said. "She didn't find any."
"Well, it will be up to the big brains from headquarters to figure it out,"
Josh said. "Let's do it."
Once again the cutting beam of a molecular disrupter was used to separate the frozen bodies from the deck. Once again four men strained and slipped and grunted to put the mass in the specimen bin.
"Erin Kenner, "Josh sent, "this is the captain. Mission accomplished.
We're coming up."
"Acknowledged, Captain," said Kirsty Girard from the Erin Kenner.
The crewmen started the bin toward the hatch. Josh looked around and felt his anger surge again. The Fran Webster had been a beautiful ship.
His brother had worked hard for decades to be able to own such a masterpiece of the shipbuilders' craft and it had been taken from him without apparent reason. At the moment that seemed almost as offensive as David's death. Four members of the Webster family had come to DF-2 without warlike aims and they were dead. He took one last look around.
The beautifully constructed instrument panel of the Zede Starliner was distorted by a layer of clear ice. The ship was dead. Even the residual power in the blink generator had been drained away, and that was damned odd. As long as a generator was within view of a star it collected and held power.
Suddenly the image of a star cluster with sterile orbiting planets flashed into his mind and he looked over his shoulder quickly as he felt a flush of disease. Killing a blink generator down to cold stop was not nearly as difficult as cooling the molten core of a world, but the images were similar.
He saw that the crewmen were almost at the hatch. Pat was directly behind them. He shrugged his shoulders under the load of the thermal shield and took one step.
One of the crewmen cried out in surprise as the hatch was filled with whiteness that resolved itself into humanoid shape.
"Captain?" said the other crewman as the white figure moved.
"Watch it," Pat Barkley yelled, trying to bring the muzzle of his saffer to bear on the thing in the hatch.
"Fire," Josh ordered, lifting his own rifle only to find the body of one of the crewmen between him and the hatch.
The explosion was contained within the hull of the Fran Webster. A
shock wave rushed past the white figure in the hatch without displacing it.
It leapt forward and pushed the floating specimen bin out of the way. The four men had been tossed about by the explosion. Quickly the extension opened the visors of the thermal shells and with its fist smashed the helmets of the E.V.A.s.
Josh Webster was conscious when he looked up into the icy face, saw a pair of glowing eyes, saw dexterous fingers moving toward the visor of his shell.
"Kirsty," he whispered, as he nudged open the communicator with his chin.
"Yes, Captain."
"Kirsty—" He could not form the words he was bellowing in his mind.
He was thinking, "Shoot, shoot, shoot. Blast him, Kirsty. Max force."
He said, "Kirsty, we're coming up."
"That's an affirmative," Kirsty said. "We have the launch on viewer."
The cold ended Josh's agony of self-blame.
"Bridge, Weapons."
"Go, Weapons."
"Kirsty, I'm getting ghost images on short-range detection."
"Show me," Kirsty said.
A viewer came to life. Against a black background a glowing image moved.
"Mass about two hundred pounds," Weapons said. "Size roughly three by six feet. And the sonofabitch is invisible, it seems."
"What shows it?"
"Infrared only."
"Shoot it," Kirsty said.
"Shoot it?"
"Now," Kirsty ordered.
A lance of fire went out from the bow of the ship. There was a distant flare.
"Scratch one ghost," Weapons said.
"There are others?"
"Only seven."
"Shoot them, too," Kirsty ordered.
"Aye, aye," said Weapons.
This time it was not so easy. The ghost images had begun a frantic dance of movement that flitted them from side to side in all directions, but one vector of their movement kept them coming toward the ship.
"Kirsty," Weapons said, "three down. The others are closing. I suggest we up shields."
"Can't. The launch is just ten minutes away from the lock," Kirsty said.