He made a careful visual examination with the electron telescope, and grinned at Sally.
“Picking us out at even a thousand miles would be a miracle,” he told her. ‘We can go in for conversation and such things until the Navy decides that somebody was mistaken or we are dead. Meanwhile I’m going to see if I can make that Thing a little more uncomfortable still.”
The Thing was in the metal fabric of the ship. It could move anywhere that a conductor existed. But it was not, apparently, possible for it to extract subsistence from metal. It was cannibalistic—life which lived by devouring life. For some reason the life force in a male body—a man’s body—was not suitable for it. It could only derive nourishment from the vital force in the cells of a woman’s tissues. Yet its metabolism continued. It gave off cosmic rays in metal, as in human flesh. It must be that it lost energy while in nonliving matter, and regained energy—fed—in living stuff. If it could be kept from any access to Sally for a long enough time, it might starve, simply because it had radiated away in cosmic rays all the energy it possessed.
Sally smiled at Ben. They were bound to each other not only by feeling, but by the fact that they stood together literally~ against the universe. All the power of all the nations upon all the planets of all the suns of the Galaxy was opposed to them. They defied the pomposity of the brass hats of the universe simply by remaining alive. All authority demanded their death. Thousands of ships, with their number constantly increasing, and hundreds of thousands of men were- devoting their every effort to the discovery of a sixty-foot space cruiser designed for sport, in which Ben Sholto and Sally Hale carried a plague which had wiped out ten million people. And fat men in swivel chairs grew purple with rage as stinging rebukes passed from higher to lower officialdom.
“Conversation?” said Sally, smiling. ‘We’ve been together—how long, Ben? We’ll be together all the rest of our lives. Maybe only we two, hiding through all the years to come!”
“Maybe,” admitted Ben, grinning, “in that case we’ll hold hands.”
She put her hand in its insulating glove upon his shoulder. She bent -down. He kissed her. And then he started, as if startled by a flash of light.
She straightened up, her face stricken and pale.
“It’s . . - back!” she said in a queer, -racked voice. “Oh, Ben! It’s back! I can . . . feel it! And it’s raging! It’s crazy with hatred! It’s . . . it’s . . . oh, -it’s terrible!”
Ben swung the Geiger counter. Pointed at Sally, it clattered. No, it did not clatter. It roared. The cosmic rays created by the Thing, as shown by the counter, were many, many times more than any previous amount. It seemed as if the Thing were starved, and tore at the life force of Sally’s body with a terrible voracity.
“I’m going to pack you full of positive charges,” and Ben, frantically, “and get that Thing out again, and I’m going to kill it.”
He worked savagely. Sally sat down. In the insulated spacesuit the Thing could not leave her, though that was what they most desperately desired. Ben swiftly put together a static generator. It was old-fashioned. It was archaic, but it was what the only possible theory called for. He worked it by hand and touched its electrode to Sally’s cheek. The existence of a high potential was instantly evidenced. Sally’s hair stirred and tried to stand out from her head.
“How does it like that?” demanded Ben fiercely.
Sally babbled. And Ben had worked so swiftly and so concentratedly that he had hardly looked at her. Her face was flushed. Her eyes were bright but vague. She showed every sign of fever; high fever; fever producing delirium. But the Thing had fled, before, when the positive charge was vastly less than this.
Ben touched her cheek. A spark leaped, and she quivered a little.
“W-water, please.” she babbled. “I’d like a drink of water with lots of ice and pink roses in it—”
But the Thing should be out, now. Ben turned off the lights to look at her. And she still glowed. The Thing had not come out.
A battered space-tramp was ordered blasted out of space as a “dangerous object” by a sub-commissioner when in defiance of orders not to land in the Beta Cetacia solar system it dived toward the surface of an uninhabited planet. It had reported desperately that its crew was nearly out of food and the air-supply would last for only four more days. But it could show no proper clearance from its last port-of-landing, and was suspected of smuggling. The Navy ship which trailed it did not destroy it until it had landed and its crew had escaped, and was ordered to return to port for arrest and disciplinary action.
Three thousand colonists were refused landing-permits on Thetis IX, because of missing papers they swore they had turned over on the day of their arrival. (The papers were found months later in an under-clerk’s desk drawer. He had forgotten to forward them. For the credit of the Service they were destroyed and the affair hushed up.)
The sub-commissioner on Axcturis V issued an order forbidding criticism of the Administrative Service until criticized conditions had been reported to and passed upon by the Administrative Service Board of Appeals. On the same day he denied four requests for appeals to the Administrative Service Board of Appeals.
On Sirius II, one Arthur Matheson was ordered arrested for making scientific experiments endangering the authority of the Galactic Commission. The experiments were those which led ultimately to the Matheson Matter-transmitter.
And it was reported to Reserve Headquarters that Ben Sholto’s position had been approximately determined and his capture was a matter of hours.
But Ben was frantically fighting the intangible Thing which occupied Sally’s body. Three times he charged Sally, in the insulated spacesuit, with the highest potential the static generator could produce. Three times he drove the Thing to frenzy. And three times he released the charge. The number of Things which roved triumphantly about the metalwork of the small ship increased visibly. There were at least a dozen. But Sally’s body continued to glow. The Geiger counter continued to make a roaring noise rather than a clattering. The Thing—somehow Ben assumed that it was the original one—remained, tearing at the life which remained in Sally, consuming it and raking revenge for the hurt it had suffered.
The CC phone muttered and muttered. Once or twice it spoke loudly and distinctly. Some one of the searching ships was very near. Then there came the blasting tone-signal of a General Order, and Ben automatically touched the volume-control, half-crazed as he was -by the urgency of the problem the Thing presented.
He had fired a single positron-blast at the Thing. The radiation from that blast had been picked up. The co-ordinates on it were not accurate but now someone used that very inaccuracy in - a statistical method of making it impossible for Ben to escape from a closing-in mass of ships. It had to be assumed that Ben would listen in on Navy orders, and he had dodged past one Space-Navy cruiser by passing too close to it, too fast for its ranging devices to operate. This order forestalled any chance of his doing such a thing again. The order commanded every Navy ship within certain fixed classifications-at least two thousand ships in all—to assume the co-ordinates of the positron-beam blast to be no better than approximate, and to use random mathematics to alter them within certain fixed limits. Each ship was then to head for its arbitrarily chosen—but nearby— destination at maximum acceleration.