“What’s that?”
“They tried to slip up on us. That looks as if they intended to open fire without warning. But maybe they are frightened and only expected to examine us without our getting a chance to attack them. In that case, our only bet is to swing over our signaling beam to the space ship. When they realize we know they’re there and still aren’t getting hostile, they may not guess we can’t fight. They may think we want to be friendly and they’d better not start anything with a ship our size that’s on guard.”
“Very well. You’re detailed to communication duty,” said Aistair. “Go ahead and carry out that program. I’ll consult the rocket engineers and see what they can improvise in the way of fighting equipment. Dismiss!”
His tone was harsh. It was arrogant. It rasped Jack’s nerves and made him bristle all over. But he had to recognize that Aistair wasn’t letting his frank dislike work to the disadvantage of the ship. Aistair was, in fact, one of those ambitious officers who are always cordially disliked by everybody, at all times, until an emergency arises. Then their competence shows up.
Jack went to the communications-control room. It did not take long to realign the transmitter beam. Then the sender began to repeat monotonously the recorded last message from the Adastra to the distant and so far unidentified planet of the ringed star. And while the signal went out, over and over again, Jack called on observations control for a sight of the strange ship.
They had a scanner on it now and by stepping up illumination to the utmost, and magnification to the point where the image was as rough as an old-fashioned half-tone cut, they brought the strange ship to the visiplate as a six-inch miniature.
It was eggshaped and perfectly smooth. There was no sign of external girders, of protruding atmospheric navigation fins, of escape-boat blisters. It was utterly featureless save for tiny spots which might be portholes, and rocket tubes in which intermittent flames flickered.
It was still decelerating to match the speed and course of the Adastra.
“Have you got a spectroscope report on it?” asked Jack.
“Yeh,” replied the observations orderly. “An’ I don’t believe it. They’re using fuel rockets-some organic compound. An’ the report says the hull of that thing is cellulose, not metal. It’s wood, on the outside.”
Jack shrugged. No sign of weapons. He went back to his own job. The space ship yonder was being penetrated through and through by the message waves. Its receptors could not fail to be reporting that a tight beam was upon it, following its every movement, and that its presence and probable mission were therefore known to the mighty ship from out of space.
But Jack’s own receptors were silent. The tape came out of them utterly blank. No—a queer, scrambled, blurry line, as if the analyzers were unable to handle the frequency which was coming through. Jack read the heat effect. The other space ship was sending with a power which meant five thousand kilowatts pouring into the Adastra. Not a signal. Grimly, Jack heterodyned the wave on a five-meter circuit and read off its frequency and type. He called the main control.
“They’re pouring short stuff into us,” he reported stiffly to Aistair. “About five thousand kilowatts of thirty-centimeter waves, the type we use on Earth to kill weevils in wheat. It ought to be deadly to animal life, but of course our hull simply absorbs it.”
Helen. Impossible to stop the Adastra. They’d started for Proxima Centauri. Decelerating though they were, they couldn’t check much short of the solar system, and they were already attacked by a ship with four times their greatest acceleration. Pouring a deadly frequency into them—a frequency used on Earth to kill noxious insects. Helen was ...
“Maybe they think we’re dead! They’ll know our transmitter’s mechanical.”
The G.C. phone snapped suddenly, in Aistair’s voice.
“Attention, all officers! The enemy space ship has poured what it evidently considers a deadly frequency into us, and is now approaching at full acceleration! Orders are that absolutely no control of any sort is to be varied by a hair’s breadth. Absolutely no sign of living intelligence within the Adastra is to be shown. You will stand by all operative controls, prepared for maneuver if it should be necessary. But we try to give the impression that the Adastra is operating on automatic controls alone! Understood?”
Jack could imagine the reports from the other control rooms. His own receptor sprang suddenly into life. The almost hooted sounds of the call signal, so familiar that they seemed words. Then an extraordinary jumble of noises-words in a human voice. More stridulated sounds. More words in perfectly accurate English. The English words were in the tones and accents of an officer of the Adastra, plainly recorded and retransmitted.
“Communications!” snapped Aistair. “You will not answer this signal! It is an attempt to find out if we survived their ray attack!”
“Check,” said Jack.
Aistair was right. Jack watched and listened as the receptor babbled on. It stopped. Silence for ten minutes. It began again. The Adastra hurtled on. The babble from space came to an end. A little later the G.C. phone snapped once more:
“The enemy space ship has increased its acceleration, evidently convinced that we are all dead. It will arrive in approximately four hours. Normal watches may be resumed for three hours unless an alarm is given.”
Jack leaned back in his chair, frowning. He began to see the tactics Aistair planned to use. They were bad tactics, but the only ones a defenseless ship like the Adastra could even contemplate. It was at least ironic that the greeting the Adastra received at the end of a seven-years’ voyage through empty space be a dose of a type of radiation used on Earth to exterminate vermin.
But the futility of this attack did not mean that all attacks would be similarly useless. And the Adastra simply could not be stopped for many millions of miles, yet. Even if Alstair’s desperate plan took care of this particular assailant and this particular weapon, it would not mean—it could not!—that the Adastra or the folk within had any faintest chance of defending themselves.
And there was Helen ...
III
The visiplates showed the strange space ship clearly, now, even without magnification. It was within five miles of the Adastra and it had stopped. Perfectly eggshaped, without any protuberance whatever except the rocket tubes in its rear, it hung motionless with relation to the Earth ship, which meant that its navigators had analyzed her rate of deceleration long since and had matched all the constants of her course with precision.
Helen, her face still tear-streaked, watched as Jack turned up the magnification, and the illumination with it. Her father had collapsed very suddenly and very completely. He was resting quietly now, dozing almost continuously, with his face wearing an expression of utter contentment.
He had piloted the Adastra to its first contact with the civilization of another solar system. His lifework was done and he was wholly prepared to rest. He had no idea, of course, that the first actual contact with the, strange space ship was a burst of short waves of a frequency deadly to all animal life.
The space ship swelled on the visiplate as Jack turned the knob. He brought it to an apparent distance of a few hundred yards only. With the illumination turned up, even the starlight on the hull would have been sufficient to show any surface detail. But there was literally none. No rivet, no bolt, no line of joining plates. A row of portholes were dark and dead within.