The Space-Navy would close in on the section of space in which Ben’s little ship was, of course. But it would not come in in any pattern. The courses of the ships would be unpredictable. They would come together, but in a manner and at intervals and speeds none could compute. If Ben had been planning flight, he would have recognized its hopelessness. He might have dodged or crashed through any orderly arrangement of englobing ships, but this plan made evasion mathematically impossible. And, moreover, the General Order commanded the moving up of other thousands of ships behind the globe. Ben’s positron-beam blast had been within or near the orbit of a meteor-stream. With all the might of the Galactic Commission behind the search for him, that meteor-stream would be examined. Every stony mass would be inspected. The task, of course, would be quite the most gigantic task ever undertaken even by the Galactic Fleet, but it ended, absolutely, any trace of hope for Ben and Sally.
But Ben had other, grimmer, more immediate reason for despair. Sally burned with fever. She had been rested, and she had been relatively strong. But now the Thing devoured her life.
Bitterly, he saw the flaw in the process which had driven the Thing out the first time. He had made Sally’s body painful for it to inhabit. The first time, the Thing had fled at its first opportunity. But it had fled. It had not been forced out—it had been frightened out. And the Thing was intelligent. Now it realized that Ben would have to release the positive potential which caused it suffering, and that then it would cease to suffer. It endured the discomfort he created in order to work its revenge.
“I need,” said Ben desperately, while the Galactic Navy moved to destroy him and Sally babbled in delirium, “to make something that will drag the Thing around! Drag it! Physically! And it isn’t matter! It’s just a pack of negative charges bound together. It’s a bound charge. A bound charge—”
Electrons. A complex of electrons. It was energy on the verge of becoming matter, or matter past the verge of becoming energy. What can you do to an electric charge? How can you make it move, save by its own tension? What can you do to a bound charge? -
“Bound charge. . . bound charge—” muttered Ben, with sweat beading his forehead. “Sally’s dying, and I’m thinking about bound charges— the stuff kids learn in kindergarten! What’s a bound—Ah-h-h-h-h!”
He plunged at his instrument board. - He dragged ruthlessly at the CC phone. He pulled off the front panel by main strength and jerked fiercely at certain wires within it. He wanted plate-current and condensers and a tiny rectifier capsule. The condensers and rectifier went into a unit hastily built up on an insulated handle. The device terminated in a ball-contact. There was a single, long, flexible lead to the plate-current terminal of the last of the amplifying tubes of the CC phone. He worked madly, and when it was done he set the originating circuit in the phone to oscillating, and pushed the oscillation frequency up to a hundred million per second. But his take-off was from the plate of the last tube, which did not yield oscillating current, but merely pulsating. It was current which varied in voltage—but not in direction of flow—a hundred million times a second. And the variations in voltage were a thousand volts or more. He checked his device, sweating, and went over to Sally. He was shaking with hope and hatred and terror. He turned off the ceiling light. Sally glowed terribly. The multiplied metabolism of the Thing made her seem almost white-hot. Ben touched the ball-contact to Sally’s cheek. He pressed the contact which let the pulsating plate-current flow into his condenser. The glow of Sally’s flesh vanished.
It was just as simple as that.
Ben raged at himself for not having done it earlier. It is taught almost in kindergartens that when one plate of a condenser is charged with positive electricity, and the second plate connected to an insulated body, that free—negative——electrons in the insulated body will be drawn into the condenser. If the condenser is taken away, it will carry those electrons with it. If its capacity and applied voltage are high enough, it will leave no free electrons in the insulated body. And the Thing was a complex of free electrons.
But it had will. It was alive. It had intelligence, and it could hate. And such an entity could resist, could figuratively dig in, could symbolically sink its teeth and claws into the body it inhabited and resist the drawing power of applied voltage, even the maximum that Ben could apply. But one can resist a steady pull where an intermittent one is irresistible. The pulsations of the plate-current, as Ben had now arranged it, caused no steady pull, but instead a series of fierce and wrenching jerks at the resistance of the Thing. The current now shook the Thing. It tore at it like a dog at the throat of a rat. The Thing was brutally torn at, and brutally released, one hundred million times in every second. Nothing, material or immaterial, could withstand such a mauling. The Thing’s grip was broken, its will shattered, its resistance made impossible—perhaps it was rendered unconscious! It flowed into the condenser, and the rectifier capsule prevented its return. It was imprisoned in the small device in Ben’s hand—and an unholy triumph filled him.
He turned on the lights and put the condenser-device very carefully down. He made sure to put it on an insolantite surface—an insulator of practically infinite resistance. He put on insulatiuig boots. He stood before the Geiger counter, and it gave no sign. He picked up Sally and carried her for the second time to the bunk he had insulated from the floor. He laid her there. She still babbled, and her eyes were fever-bright, but the cause of that fever was gone. She would return to normal—but probably terribly weak—within a very little time.
Ben returned to the control room. His eyes burned more brightly with hatred than Sally’s had burned with fever. He regarded his device with a vengeful satisfaction. He cut off the switch and discharged the positive plate. The knob he had touched to Sally’s cheek began to glow fiercely, even though the lights were shining. There was more than one Thing in the condenser. Freed-from the electric bondage Ben had contrived, but with no path by which to escape to the metal skin of the ship, there was a fierce glowing of the compressed, intolerably crowded Things.
He turned the Geiger counter upon the knob. It clattered furiously. He turned it away.
“Ah-h-h-h!” he said thickly. “You’re there, eh? And you know you’re caught!”
He seemed to feel waves of pure hate enveloping him. He grinned savagely.
“You’d kill Sally, eh? You’re smart! Maybe you can understand me, and maybe you can’t, but you know what’s going to happen, don’t you?”
He took out the little positron-beam pistol. He put it within inches of the knob of metal which glowed with pulsating, hating light. He pulled the trigger. There was a reddish glow from the pistol. There was a searing, intolerable light from the knob. There was an unhearable, unbearable shriek—the feeling of anguish and rage and insupportable hatred.
Then the knob- was merely a bit of metal attached to a condenser and an electric cord. It did not affect the Geiger counter. Ben licked his lips, his rage unappeased. He turned out the lights once more. There was a glow on the pilot’s chair. He stalked it, and touched the knob to it with the plate-current on. The glow vanished. He turned off the switch and discharged the positive plate. The knob glowed. More faintly, to be sure. There was but one Thing trapped this time. Ben laughed without mirth. He gave the Thing a blast of the positron beam. It screamed soundlessly and died.
Sally’s babbling ceased. She called faintly. Ben went to her, all savagery and hate. He gave her water.