“And it’s wood!” repeated Jack. “Made out of some sort of cellulose which stands the cold of space!”
Helen said queerly: “It looks to me as if it had been grown, rather than built.”
Jack blinked. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but the receptor at his elbow suddenly burst into the hootlike stridulations which were the signals from the egglike ship. Then English words, from recordings of previous signals from the Aadstra. more vowelless, modulated phrases. It sounded exactly as if the beings in the other space ship were trying urgently to open communication and were insisting that they had the key to the Adastra’s signals. The temptation to reply was great.
“They’ve got brains, anyhow,” said Jack grimly.
The signals were cut off. Silence. Jack glanced at the wave tape. It showed the same blurring as before.
“More short stuff. At this distance, it ought not only to kill us, but even sterilize the interior of the whole ship. Lucky our hull is heavy alloy with a high hysteresis-rate. Not a particle of that radiation can get through.”
Silence for a long, long time. The wave tape showed that a terrific beam of thirty-centimeter waves continued to play upon the Adastra. Jack suddenly plugged in observations and asked a question. Yes, the outer hull was heating. It had gone up half a degree in fifteen minutes.
“Nothing to worry about in that,” grunted Jack. “Fifteen degrees will be the limit they can put it up, with this power.”
The tape came out clear. The supposed death radiation was cut off. The eggshaped ship darted forward. And then for twenty minutes or more Jack had to switch from one outside vision disk to another to keep it in sight. It hovered about the huge bulk of the Adastra with a wary inquisitiveness. Now half a mile away, now no more than two hundred yards, the thing darted here and there with an amazing acceleration and as amazing a breaking power. It had only the rocket tubes at the smaller end of its eggshaped form. It was necessary for it to fling its whole shape about to get a new direction, and the gyroscopes within it must have been tremendously powerful. Even so, the abruptness of its turns was startling.
“I wouldn’t like to be inside that thing!” said Jack. “We’d be crushed to a pulp by their normal navigation methods. They aren’t men like us. They can stand more than we can.”
The thing outside seemed sentient, seemed alive. And by the eagerness of its movements it seemed the more horrible, flitting about the gigantic space ship it now believed was a monstrous coffin.
It suddenly reversed itself and shot back toward the Adastra. Two hundred yards, one hundred yards, a hundred feet. It came to a cushioned stop against the surface of the Earth vessel.
“Now we’ll see something of them,” said Jack crisply.
“They landed right at an air lock. They know what that is, evidently. Now we’ll see them in their space suits.”
But Helen gasped. A part of the side of the strange ship seemed to swell suddenly. It bulged out like a blister. It touched the surface of the Adastra. It seemed to adhere. The point of contact grew larger.
“Good Lord!” said Jack blankly. “Is it alive? And is it going to try to eat our ship?”
The general-communication phone rasped sharply: “Officers with arms to the air lock GH41 immediately! The Centaurians are opening the air lock from the outside. Wait orders there! The visiplate in the airlock is working and you will be informed. Go ahead!” The phone clicked off. Jack seized a heavy gun, one of the force rifles which will stun a man at anything up to eighteen hundred yards and kill at six, when used at full power. His side arm hung in its holster. He swung for the door.
“Jack!” said Helen desperately.
He kissed her. It was the first time their lips had touched, but it seemed the most natural thing in the world, just then. He went racing down the long corridors of the Adastra to the rendezvous. And as he raced, his thoughts were not at all those of a scientist and an officer of Earth’s first expedition into interstellar space.
Jack was thinking of Helen’s lips touching his desperately, of her soft body pressed close to him.
A G.C. speaker whispered overhead as he ran:
“They’re inside the air lock. They opened it without trouble. They’re testing our air, now. Apparently it suits them all.”
The phone fell behind. Jack ran on, panting. Somebody else was running ahead. There were half a dozen, a dozen men grouped at the end of the corridor. A murmur from the side wall.
“… rking at the inner airlock door. Only four or five of them, apparently, will enter the ship. They are to be allowed to get well away from the air lock. You will keep out of sight. When the emergency locks go on it will be your signal. Use your heavy force guns, increasing power from minimum until they fall paralyzed. It will probably take a good deal of power to subdue them. They are not to be killed if it can be avoided. Ready!”
There were a dozen or more officers on hand. The fat rocket chief. The lean air officer. Subalterns of the other departments. The rocket chief puffed audibly as he wedged himself out of sight. Then the clicking of the inner airlock door. It opened into the anteroom. Subdued, muffled hootings came from that door. The Things—whatever they were—were inspecting the space suits there. The hootings were distinctly separate and distinctly intoned. But they suddenly came as a babble. More than one Thing was speaking at once. There was excitement, eagerness, an extraordinary triumph in These voices.
Then something stirred in the doorway of the airlock anteroom. A shadow crossed the threshold. And then the Earthmen saw the creatures who were invading the ship.
For an instant they seemed almost like men. They had two legs, and two dangling things—tentacles—which apparently served as arms and tapered smoothly to ends which split into movable, slender filaments. The tentacles and the legs alike seemed flexible in their entire lengths. There were no “joints” such as men use in walking, and the result was that the Centaurians walked with a curiously rolling gait.
Most startling, though, was the fact that they had no heads. They came wabbling accustomedly out of the air lock, and at the end of one “arm” each carried a curious, semi-cylindrical black object which they handled as if it might be a weapon. They wore metallic packs fastened to their bodies. The bodies themselves were queerly “grained.” There was a tantalizing familiarity about the texture of their skin.
Jack, staring incredulously, looked for eyes, for nostrils, for a mouth. He saw twin slits only. He guessed at them for eyes. He saw no sign of any mouth at all. There was no hair. But he saw a scabrous, brownish substance on the back of one of the Things which turned to hoot excitedly at the rest. It looked like bark, like tree bark. And a light burst upon Jack. He almost cried out, but instead reached down and quietly put the lever of his force gun at full power at once.
The Things moved on. They reached a branching in the corridor and after much arm waving and production of their apparently articulated sounds they separated into two parties. They vanished. Their voices dwindled. The signal for an attack upon them had not yet been given. The officers, left behind, stirred uneasily. But a G.C. phone whispered.
“Steady! They think we’re all dead. They’re separating again. We may be able to close emergency doors and have each one sealed off from all the rest and then handle them in detail. You men watch the air lock!”