On the other hand, it was the most firmly believed of all the dogmas of science that mankind had nothing to fear but itself. There had been an interstellar civilization once before. There were the ruins of its cities to prove it. It had ended. The same ruins proved that. But it was a human civilization. There couldn’t be a non-human race in the galaxy to constitute a danger to mankind. The lost race of the rubble-heap cities had exterminated all rivals before it grew old and weary and—so the most respected authorities said—committed suicide.
The beam-locator clicked again. Something new had been projected at the Marintha. It was on the order of a radar-beam, but the analyzer made it out to be extraordinarily complex. It ceased. Howell threw the yacht’s electron telescope into circuit. The telescope-screen showed a pattern of stars, but with something indefinite in silhouette between them. He adjusted the controls. The object clarified. There was only starlight, and this was quite at the limit of the telescope’s pick-up power for such faint illumination. But the thing in the telescope field was obviously a spaceship of some sort. Yet it certainly hadn’t been made on any planet Howell knew.
He said sharply over his shoulder: “Ketch! Hurry up with the drive. There’s something out yonder I don’t like. We may need to get moving—and fast!”
He had cold chills running up and down his spine. The sensation was like what one might expect if one saw a ghost. Howell saw something and didn’t believe it—but still he saw it. There couldn’t be another civilized race! It wasn’t possible! For half a thousand years men had roamed the stars, and at first they were cautious and even timorous because the laws of probability said that pure chance must have produced more than one creature capable of civilization in the hundreds of millions of Earth-type worlds in the galaxy of the Milky way.
But there were none. There never had been even one intelligent race other than the human. The progenitors of modern mankind had possessed a civilization that present-day men hadn’t yet matched. They’d wiped out all possible rivals just as they’d destroyed all dangerous animals on the worlds they’d colonized. Modern man had inherited a galaxy made safe for humanity. He hadn’t inherited anything else, but this much seemed certain—and nothing contrary to it could be imagined!
But some ten thousand miles away there was an object which beamed complex microwaves at the Marintha. It was shaped like an Earth-ecology slug. Now, suddenly, a faint whining sound came from it, and was picked up by the Marintha’s detection apparatus. The whine was like that of a space-drive—the normal-space drive used for journeys between planets and for landings and liftings-off from worlds. It was slow, and quite useless outside a planetary system. But the drive used between suns was too fast to be practical for journeys of only light-hours or even days.
“That’s a drive,” said Howell. All unconsciously, his voice had gone grim. “It’s a ship, and it’s moving toward us! Ketch, can you hurry things up?”
Ketch swore. A spanner clattered on the engine room floor. He’d tried to hurry and his fingers became thumbs.
“These bolts have a lot of threads on them,” he said irritably. “I’m doing the best I can!”
Howell watched the radar-screen. Karen opened her lips to speak, and did not.
“It’s moving toward us,” Howell said tensely. “And it has plenty of acceleration!” He stirred restlessly. “I’ll feel better when we can drive!”
Karen’s father came to the control room door. He’d removed the apron he’d been wearing while, despite his eminence in the science of botany, he acted as ship’s cook for a small, private, and strictly amateur space-exploration expedition. Howell set the controls for a high-speed entry into overdrive the instant it was possible. Breen looked at him benignly.
“What’s up?”
Howell said again, “There’s something out there. It looks like a ship and acts like a ship. But it can’t be—unless it’s a non-human one.”
“Impossible!” said Breen confidently. “Let’s go over and look at it.”
“It’s coming to look at us,” said Howell.
Ketch said angrily from the engine room, “I crossed a thread. Four more bolts to go!”
Then there was silence. By all authoritative opinion, the thing that was happening, couldn’t be. The slug-shaped ship simply couldn’t have been made by men. Its radar—if it was only a radar—wouldn’t have had such a complex wave-form. But there were radar-scopes in existence which instead of returning only the news that something was a certain distance away, bearing such-and-such, gave information about the object’s size and shape and composition. It was expected to be very useful to meteor-miners, but the Marintha wasn’t equipped with it. The slug-ship might have something of the sort, though, in which case it already knew much more about the Marintha than the Marintha knew about it.
Howell touched the query-button, and the triple circle on the radar-screen shrank and disappeared. The quadruple circle appeared. The blip beyond it from the second impossible object showed up again. It seemed to be stationary, still nearly fifty thousand miles away.
“That one’s not heading our way, anyhow,” said Howell. “Maybe they feel about us as I feel about them. I’d like to have a consort right now, to carry back word of this affair if we happened to get the worst of it.”
A noise came out of the all-wave receiver. It was not a voice, in any normal sense. It was a mooing, bleating, howling sound, more like the dismal bellow of an animal than anything else. Karen went pale. The idea of a mysterious, alien spaceship operated by men would be alarming enough to a girl—but a spaceship with a crew of beasts who made mere sounds instead of speech…
“If that’s a question,” said Howell grimly, “the answer is ‘no comment’. Not yet! When Ketch has finished his job, maybe! But we act mysterious until he’s finished, anyhow.”
Ketch called from the engine room:
“Two more bolts, and then tightening up all around. Then we’ll be set!”
Howell bit at his knuckles, watching the instruments and the screens. It was not easy to admit to one’s self that humanity’s isolated grandeur and dignity might be an illusion. But a different race, achieving spacecraft, might have better ships than men could make. Which would be bad! They might be so much farther advanced that men would be like savages in comparison! And when a civilized race encounters a primitive one, the result is history—at least on Earth. It isn’t the civilized race that dies of the meeting.
A second mooing, bleating sound. It was horrible because it seemed to be meaningless. It was a noise, and some creature had made it, but it had no discoverable significance. No understandable purpose was served by its utterance.
“Maybe,” said Howell in wholly mirthless amusement, “maybe we should howl back. It might be only polite!”
But his expression did not lighten. He was uneasy. He was very unhappily puzzled. He was genuinely worried, which showed itself in a violent wish that Karen hadn’t come on this cruise. The journey itself was Breen’s idea—to test a theory he’d formed about the eight kinds of food-plants found wherever ancient cities had become mere piles of rubble. Howell had offered the Marintha and himself because he knew that Karen would make the trip with her father. Now he wished urgently that he hadn’t, for Karen’s sake alone.