There was no change in her outer appearance. There had been none to speak of in years. At long, infrequent intervals men had emerged from air locks and moved about her sides, bathing the steel they walked on and themselves alike with fierce glares from heat lamps lest the cold of her plating transmit itself through the material of the suits and kill the men like ants on red-hot metal. But for a long time no such expedition had been needed.
Only now, in the distant faint light of Proxima Centauri, a man in a space suit emerged from such a tiny lock. Instantly he shot out to the end of a threadlike life line. The constant deceleration of the ship not only simulated gravity within. Anything partaking of its motion showed the same effect. The man upon its decelerating forward side was flung away from the ship by his own momentum, the same force which, within it, had pressed his feet against the floors.
He hauled himself back laboriously, moving with an exaggerated clumsiness in his bloated space suit. He clung to handholds and hooked himself in place, while he worked an electric drill. He moved still more clumsily to another place and drilled again. A third, and fourth, and fifth. For half an hour or more, then, he labored to set up on the vast steel surface, which seemed always above him, ah intricate array of wires and framework. In the end he seemed content. He hauled himself back to the air lock and climbed within.
The Adastra hurtled onward, utterly unchanged save for a very tiny fretwork of wire, perhaps thirty feet across, which looked more like a microscopic barbed-wire entanglement than anything else.
Within the Adastra, Helen Bradley greeted Jack warmly as he got out of his space suit.
“It was horrible!” she told him, “to see you dangling like that! With millions of miles of empty space below you!”
“If my line had parted,” said Jack quietly, “your father’d have turned the ship and caught up to me. Let’s go turn on the inductor and see how the new reception grid works.”
He hung up the space suit. As they turned to go through the doorway their hands touched accidentally. They looked at each other and faltered. They stopped, Helen’s eyes shining. They unconsciously swayed toward each other. Jack’s hands lifted hungrily.
Footsteps sounded close by. Aistair, second in command of the space ship, rounded a corner and stopped short.
“What’s this?” he demanded savagely. “Just because the commander’s brought you into officers’ quarters, Gary, it doesn’t follow that your Mut methods of romance can come, too!”
“You dare!” cried Helen furiously.
Jack, from a hot dull flush, was swiftly paling to the dead-white of rage.
“You’ll take that back,” he said very quietly indeed, “or I’ll show you Mut methods of fighting with a force gun! As an officer, I carry one, too, now!”
Alstair snarled at him.
“Your father’s been taken ill,” he told Helen angrily. “He feels the voyage is about over. Anticipation has kept up his strength for months past, but now he’s -”
With a cry, the girl fled.
Alstair swung upon Jack. “I take back nothing,” he snapped. “You’re an officer, by order of the commander. But you’re a Mut besides, and when I’m commander of the Adastra you don’t stay an officer long! I’m warning you! What were you doing here?”
Jack was deathly pale, but the status of officer on the Adastra, with its consequent opportunity of seeing Helen, was far too precious to be given up unless at the last extremity. And, besides, there was the work he had in hand. His work, certainly, could not continue unless he remained an officer.
“I was installing an interference grid on the surface,” he said, “to try to discover the sending station of the messages we’ve been getting. It will also act, as you know, as an inductor up to a certain range, and in its range is a good deal more accurate than the main inductors of the ship.”
“Then get to your damned work,” said Alstair harshly, “and pay full attention to it and less to romance!”
Jack plugged in the lead wire from his new grid to the pan-wave receptor. For an hour he worked more and more grimly. There was something very wrong. The inductors showed blank for all about the Adastra. The interference grid showed an object of considerable size not more than two million miles distant and to one side of the Adastra’s course. Suddenly, all indication of that object’s existence blanked out. Every dial on the pan-wave receptor went back to zero.
“Damnation!” said Jack under his breath.
He sat up a new pattern on the controls, calculated a moment and deliberately changed the pattern on the spare bank of the main inductors, and then simultaneously switched both instruments to their hew frequencies. He waited, almost holding his breath, for nearly half a minute. It would take so long for the inductor waves of the new frequency to reach out the two million miles and then collapse into the analyzers and give their report of any object in space which had tended to deform them.
Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight seconds. Every alarm bell on the monstrous ship clanged furiously! Emergency doors hissed into place all over the vessel, converting every doorway into an air lock. Seconds later, the visiplates in the main control room began to flash alight.
“Reporting, Rocket Control!”
“Reporting, Air Service!”
“Reporting, Power Supply!”
Jack said crisply: “The main inductors report an object two million miles distant with velocity in our direction. The commander is ill. Please find Vice Commander Aistair.”
Then the door of the control room burst open and Aistair himself raged into the room.
“What the devil!” he rasped. “Ringing a general alarm? Have you gone mad? The inductors ...”
Jack pointed to the main inductor bank. Every dial bore out the message of the still clanging alarms. Alstair stared blankly at them. As he looked, every dial went back to zero. And Alstair’s face went as blank as the dials.
“They felt out our inductor screens,” said Jack grimly, “and put out some sort of radiation which neutralized them. So I set up two frequencies, changed both, and they couldn’t adjust their neutralizers in time to stop our alarms.”
Alstair stood still, struggling with the rage which still possessed him. Then he nodded curtly.
“Quite right. You did good work. Stand by.”
And, quite cool and composed, he took command of the mighty space ship, even if there was not much for him to do. In five minutes, in fact, every possible preparation for emergency had been made and he turned again to Jack.
“I don’t like you,” he said coldly. “As one man to another, I dislike you intensely. But as vice commander and acting commander at the moment, I have to admit that you did good work in uncovering this little trick of our friends to get within striking distance without our knowing they were anywhere near.”
Jack said nothing. He was frowning, but it was because he was thinking of Helen. The Adastra was huge and powerful, but she was not readily maneuverable. She was enormously massive, but she could not be used for ramming. And she possessed within herself almost infinite destructiveness, in the means of producing Caidwell fields for the disintegration of matter, but she contained no weapon more dangerous than a two thousand kilowatt vortex gun for the destruction of dangerous animals or vegetation where she might possibly land.
“What’s your comment?” demanded Aistair shortly. “How do you size up the situation?”
“They act as if they’re planning hostilities,” replied Jack briefly, “and they’ve got four times our maximum acceleration so we can’t get away. With that acceleration they ought to be more maneuverable, so we can’t dodge them. We’ve no faintest idea of what weapons they carry, but we know that we can’t fight them unless their weapons are very puny indeed. There’s just one chance that I can see.”