There was a reddish glow from the pistol. No noise. Nothing else. That was all.
But the white luminescence on the doorsill flared unbearably. Ben had an extraordinary sensation, as if he had heard a soundless scream. And the Thing went mad. It was here and there and everywhere. Every particle of bare metal in the control room seemed to flash as the Thing raced with incredible speed in a crazy, frenzied rush over every metallic path it had traversed before. It could not be seen as an area of light, but it seemed as if all bare metal in sight emitted a wavy, lunatic glow.
Ben started suddenly. He raised the pistol. And abruptly there was no glow anywhere. The control room was normal. The dials of the instruments were visible, of course, but Sally could not be seen. -
“If I’d pointed this beam anywhere at all and held it on,” said Ben bitterly, “the Thing might have run into it. But I didn’t think of it in time. -
He turned on the light again. Sally was asleep in the insulated chair in which she had endured for three days and nights. She was utterly relaxed. She looked unspeakably weary and pathetic, sleeping in the abandoned confidence of a child.
Ben looked down at her, and his face softened.
“Maybe it’s dead,” he told her quietly, “and maybe it’s not. But it’ll never get to you again!”
He went into the stateroom. He carefully and elaborately insulated the bunk there from any possible electrical connection with floor or side walls. He put on insulating shoes. He picked Sally up in his arms and carried her, still sleeping, and laid her on the bunk. He covered her. He kissed her very gently.
In the control-room a pale white glow appeared on the metal of the pilot’s chair. It rose to the top and stayed there. It was motionless, but it wavered in intensity. It seemed to throb a little. If Ben had been in the room—why just as he had felt a little while since that he felt a soundless scream of agony, now he would have felt hatred so terrible that the hackles at the back of his neck would have stirred.
He started back into the control room. The glow slid alertly down the metal parts of the chair. It was gone when he came through the door. Then it appeared suddenly in the stateroom. It went restlessly, ragingly, back and forth upon the metal walls. And the stateroom seemed to be filled with hatred also.
A space cruiser resignedly took up post in an orbit about the dark star Lamda Boötes. It would circle that star for six months and be relieved. Forty years before, a sub-commissioner had intended to change cruisers at that place, and commanded that one be here to meet him. He had later changed his plan of travel, but there was no order to withdraw the cruiser posted at the rendezvous. The first cruiser asked for relief after six months of utterly useless waiting. It was relieved by a cruiser under orders to take its place. Seventy-eight cruisers, in turn, had uselessly swung about the dark star for six months each because of an order given forty years before and never rescinded.
Highly unofficial gossip, told behind official palms, informed the sub-commissioner of the Formaihaut sector that the sub-commissioner of the Markhab sector had said he was a fool. The sub-commissioner of the Formalhaut sector, in indignation, ordered that no clearances be issued to spaceships to Markhab or from it. All space lanes in that part of the Galaxy passed through the two sectors. In consequence, the economic system -by which eight hundred millions of people lived was brought to a standstill.
The small sun Mu Aquila showed definite.signs of instability—signs which by the McPherson-Adair formula indicated an imminent internal explosion. There was no office of the Administrative Service on any of its planets, which altogether had a bare five million inhabitants. Notification of the impending nova-flare was sent to the nearest sector office, with the usual request for evacuation of all the planets which would be destroyed or made uninhabitable. A clerk, recently transferred to that sector and desirous of distinguishing himself, observed an error in the drafting of the request. He returned it for re-preparation before forwarding it for action. He failed to mark it “Urgent Official,” which meant that it went by ordinary mail and would not reach its destination for two months. Of course, the McPherson-Adair formula indicated that the explosion would take place in six to seven weeks. -
There was a plague on Pharona, and a quarantine prohibited any psivate or commercial ship to land on or leave it. But an Administrative Service vessel landed, bringing dispatches, and left again after taking all normal sanitary precautions. It landed on Galata, and cases of the plague were observed there within twelve hours.
And Ben Sholto still defied the Space Navy, the Administrative Service, and presumably the Galactic Commission itself by remaining alive.
Great, jagged, rocky fragments floated in space between the stars. In between the greater pieces were innumerable smaller bits. The little spacecraft wallowed in a stream of cosmic flotsam, sharing its motion. The blue-white sun of this solar system was far away, now, and very faint. But even with the naked eye, from a port on the little sports cruiser, one could see half a dozen huge and irregularly-shaped masses within a matter of miles. This was the thickest part of the meteor-stream. This was, perhaps, the remnant of what had been the nucleus of a comet. Some of these great stones were half a mile by three-quarters. One needlelike mass was at least a mile and a half in length, but nowhere more than four hundred yards through.
Ben surveyed his surroundings carefully. A tiny electron telescope amplified even starlight upon cold stone to any desired degree. The CC phone muttered and muttered and muttered. Someone, somewhere, had fired a positron beam. A Space-Navy receiver had picked up the radiation involved—and positron-beam bursts do not occur in nature. Naval craft were concentrating to hunt for the source of the blast. It had been, of course, the shot Ben had fired at the Thing on the doorsill, and the coordinates on it were not as close as they might have been, because nobody had expected a fugitive to be so foolish. Even so, however, the hunt would have been much more deadly if spacemen had been conducting it, instead of being completely fettered by pompous orders issued by one brass hat, altered by another, and changed by a third in strict order of seniority.
Ben turned on a low trace of his space drive. Its force could almost have been measured in dynes, rather than in the milpos—millions of foot-pounds—commonly spoken of in engine rooms. The little spaceship swam slowly among the crowded bits of cometary debris. It came to rest close beside the flank of the largest of all the masses of matter in sight. He maneuvered until no more than fifty feet separated the small vessel from the great mass of metal and rock. There would be mutual gravitation between them, of course. They would tend to fall together. But the acceleration of that gravity was so slight that it might take a month or more for the sports cruiser to fall just fifty feet.
For two days, now, Sally had remained on the insulated bunk, except when she donned an insulated spacesuit with the helmet left off, to move about the little ship. The Thing could not reach her. She was recovering from the terrific ordeal she had endured—and now Ben swore at himself for what he considered stupidity. Instead of allowing the Thing - itself to build up a positive potential, he could have made one artificially. If by any chance the Thing found a way to return to Sally, he felt confident that he could drive it Out again, now, in minutes rather than days.
He knew that the Thing still existed. The Geiger counter revealed its presence from time to time. Sally had seen it, glowing balefully in the darkness of the stateroom, when she woke after infinitely restful sleep.
The little sports cruiser lay close beside a monstrous and misshapen hunk of stone and metal. It went drifting Out and out from the blue-white sun. Destroyers and cruisers and even battleships hunted for it, bedeviled by authoritative brass hats in swivel chairs. The CC phone muttered and muttered. Without detector-screens, which were useless anyhow because of the meteor-stream all about, Ben could not even estimate the nearness of his pursuers, but he felt safe. They could not ex amine every one of the countless millions of objects in a cometary orbit. Not possibly.