Then the G.C. phone said abruptly:
“Calling Commander Alstair! Radiation from ahead! Several wave lengths, high intensity! Apparently several space ships are sending, though we can make out no signals!”
And then Jack Gary came into the biology laboratory. His face was set in grim lines. It was very white. He saluted with great precision.
“I didn’t have to work hard, sir,” he said sardonically. “The last communications officer had been taking his office more or less as a sinecure. We’d had no signals for seven years, and he didn’t expect any. But they’re coming through and have been for months.
“They left Earth three years after we did. A chap named Callaway, it seems, found that a circularly polarized wave makes a tight beam that will hold together forever. They’ve been sending to us for years past; no doubt, and we’re getting some of the first messages now.
“They’ve built a second Adastra, sir, and it’s being manned—hell, no! It was manned four years ago! It’s on the way out here now! It must be at least three years on the way, and it has no idea of these devils waiting for it. Even if we blow ourselves to bits, sir, there’ll be another ship from Earth coming, unarmed as we are, to run into these devils when it’s too late to stop—”
The G.C. phone-snapped again: Commander Alstair! Observations reporting! The external hull temperature has gone up five degrees in the past three minutes and is still climbing. Something’s pouring heat into us at a terrific rate!”
Alstair turned to Jack. He said with icy politeness: “Gary, after all there’s no use in our continuing to hate each other. Here is where we all die together. Why do I still feel inclined to kill you?”
But the question was rhetorical only. The reason was wholly clear. At the triply horrible news, Helen had begun to cry softly. And she had gone blindly into Jack’s arms to do it.
IV
The situation was, as a matter of fact, rather worse than the first indications showed. The external hull temperature, for instance, was that of the generalizing thermometer, which averaged for all the external thermometers. A glance at the thermometer bank, through a visiphone connection, showed the rearmost side of the Adastra at practically normal. It was the forward hemisphere, the side nearest Proxima Centauri, which was heating. And that hemisphere was not heating equally. The indicators which flashed red lights were closely grouped.
Alstair regarded them with a stony calm in the visiplate.
“Squarely in the center of our disk, as they see it,” he said icily. “It will be that fleet of space ships, of course.”
Jack Gary said crisply: “Sir, the ship from which we took prisoners made contact several hours earlier than we expected. It must be that, instead of sending one vessel with a transmitter on board, they sent a fleet, and a scout ship on ahead. That scout ship has reported that we laid a trap for some of her crew, and consequently they’ve opened fire!”
Alstair said sharply into a G.C. transmitter:
“Sector G90 is to be evacuated at once. It is to be sealed off immediately and all occupants will emerge from air locks. Adjoining sectors are to be evacuated except by men on duty, and they will don space suits immediately.”
He clicked off the phone and added calmly: “The external temperature over part of G90 is four hundred degrees now. Dull-red heat. In five minutes it should melt. They’ll have a hole bored right through us in half an hour.”
Jack said urgently: “Sir! I’m pointing out that they’ve attacked because the scout ship reported we laid a trap for some of its crew! We have just the ghost of a chance—”
“What?” demanded Aistair bitterly. “We’ve no weapons!”
“The dictawriter, sir!” snapped Jack. “We can talk to them now!”
Alstair said harshly: “Very well, Gary. I appoint you ambassador. Go ahead!”
He swung on his heel and went swiftly from the control room. A moment later his voice came out of the G.C. phone: “Calling the Rocket Chief! Report immediately on personal visiphone. Emergency!”
His voice cut off, but Jack was not aware of it. He was plugging in to communications and demanding full power on the transmission beam and a widening of its arcs. He snapped one order after another and explained to Helen in swift asides.
She grasped the idea at once. The Centaurian in the biology laboratory was bound, of course. No flicker of expression could be discovered about the narrow slits which were his vision organs. But Helen-knowing the words of the vocabulary cards-spoke quietly and urgently into the dictawriter microphone. Hootlike noises came out of the speaker in their place, and the Centaurian stirred. Sounds came from him in turn, and the speaker said woodenly:
“I—speak—ship—planet. Yes.”
And as the check-up came through from communications control, the eerie, stridulated, unconsonanted noises of his language filled the biology laboratory and went out on the widened beam of the main transmitter.
Ten thousand miles away the Centaunan scout snip hovered. The Adastra bored on toward the ringed sun which had been the goal of mankind’s most daring expedition. From ten thousand miles she would have seemed a mere dot, but the telescopes of the Centaurians would show her every detail. From a thousand miles she would seem a toy, perhaps, intricately-crisscrossed with strengthening members.
From a distance of a few miles only, though, her gigantic size could be realized fully. Five thousand feet in diameter, she dwarfed the hugest of those distant, unseen shapes in emptiness which made up a hostile fleet now pouring deadly beams upon her.
From a distance of a few miles, too, the effect of that radiation could be seen. The Adastra’s hull was alloy steel; tough and necessarily with a high hysteresis-rate. The alternating currents of electricity induced in that steel by the Centaurian radiation would have warmed even a copper hull. But the alloy steel grew hot. It changed color. It glowed faintly red over an area a hundred feet across.
A rocket tube in that area-abruptly ceased to emit its purple, lambent flame. It had been, cut off. Other rockets increased their power a trifle to make up for it. The dull red glow of the steel increased. It became carmine.
Slowly, inexorably, it heated to a yellowish tinge. It became canary in color. It tended toward blue.
Vapor curled upward from its surface, streaming away from the tortured, melting surface as if drawn by the distant sun. That vapor grew thick; dazzlingly bright; a veritable cloud of metallic steam. And suddenly there was a violent eruption from the center of the Adastra’s lighted hemisphere. The outer hull was melted through. Air from the interior burst out into the void, flinging masses of molten, vaporizing metal before it. It spread with an incredible rapidity, flaring instantly into the attenuated, faintly glowing mist of a comet’s tail.
The visiplate images inside the Adastra grew dim. Stars paled ahead. The Earth ship had lost a part of her atmosphere and it fled on before her, writhing. Already it had spread into so vast a space that its density was immeasurable, but it was still so much more dense than the infinite emptiness of space that it filled all the cosmos before the Adastra with a thinning nebulosity.
And at the edges of the huge gap in the big ship’s hull, the thick metal bubbled and steamed, and the interior partitions began to glow with an unholy light of dull-red heat, which swiftly went up to carmine and began to turn faintly yellow.
In the main control room, Aistair watched bitterly until the visiplates showing the interior of section G90 fused. He spoke very calmly into the microphone before him.