“We’ve got less time than I thought,” he said deliberately. “You’ll have to hurry. It won’t be sure at best, and you’ve got to remember that these devils will undoubtedly puncture us from every direction and make sure there’s absolutely nothing living on board. You’ve got to work something out, and in a hurry, to do what I’ve outlined!”
A half-hysterical voice came back to him. “But sir, if I cut the sonic vibrations in the rockets we’ll go up in a flare! A single instant! The disintegration of our fuel will spread to the tubes and the whole ship will simply explode! It will be quick!”
“You fool!” snarled Alstair. “There’s another ship from Earth on the way! Unwarned! And unarmed like we are! And from our course these devils can tell where we came from! We’re going to die, yes! We won’t die pleasantly! But we’re going to make sure these fiends don’t start out a space fleet for Earth! There’s to be no euthanasia for us! We’ve got to make our dying do some good! We’ve got to protect humanity!”
Alstair’s face, as he snarled into the visiplate, was not that of a martyr or a person making a noble self sacrifice. It was the face of a man overawing and bullying a subordinate intoobedience.
With a beam of radiation playing on his ship which the metal-hull absorbed and transformed into heat, Alstair raged at this department and that. A second bulkhead went, and there was a second eruption of vaporized metal and incandescent gas from the monster vessel. Millions of miles away, a wide-flung ring of eggshaped space ships lay utterly motionless, giving no sign of life and looking like monsters asleep. But from them the merciless beams of radiation sped out and focused upon one spot upon the Adastra’s hull, and it spewed forth frothing metal and writhing gases and now and again some still recognizable object which flared and exploded as it emerged.
And within the innumerable compartments of the mighty ship, human beings reacted to their coming doom in manners as various as the persons themselves. Some screamed. A few of the more sullen members of the crew seemed to go mad, to become homicidal maniacs. Still others broke into the stores and proceeded systematically but in some haste to drink themselves comatose. Some women clutched their children and wept over them. And some of them went mad.
But Alstair’s snarling, raging voice maintained a semblance of discipline in a few of the compartments. In a machine shop men worked savagely, cursing, and making mistakes as they worked which made their work useless. The lean air officer strode about his domain, a huge spanner in his band, and smote with a righteous anger at any sign of panic. The rocket chief, puffing, manifested an unexpected genius for sustained profanity, and the rockets kept their pale purple flames out in space without a sign of flickering.
But in the biology laboratory the scene was one of quiet, intense concentration. Bound to helplessness, the Centaurian, featureless and inscrutable, filled the room with its peculiar form of speech. The dictawriter rustled softly, senselessly analyzing each of the sounds and senselessly questing for vocabulary cards which would translate them into English wordings. Now and again a single card did match up. Then the machine translated a single word of the Centaurlan’s speech.
“—ship—” A long series of sounds, varying rapidly in pitch, in intensity, and in emphasis. “—men—” Another long series. “—talk men—”
The Centaurian ceased to make its hootlike noises.
Then, very carefully, it emitted new ones. The speaker translated them all. The Centaurian had carefully selected words recorded with Helen.
“He understands what we’re trying to do,” said Helen, very pale.
The machine said: “You—talk—machine—talk—ship.”
Jack said quietly into the transmitter: “We are friends. We have much you want. We want only friendship. We have killed none of your men except in self defense. We ask peace. If we do not have peace, we will fight. But we wish peace.”
He said under his breath to Helen, as the machine rustled and the speaker hooted: “Bluff, that war talk. I hope it works!”
Silence. Millions of miles away, unseen space ships aimed a deadly radiation in close, tight beams at the middle of the Adastra’s disk. Quaintly enough, that radiation would have been utterly harmless to a man’s body. It would have passed through, undetected. But the steel of the Earth ship’s hull stopped and absorbed it as eddy currents. The eddy currents became heat. And a small volcano vomited out into space the walls, the furnishing, the very atmosphere of the Adastra through the hole that the heat had made.
It was very quiet indeed in the biology laboratory. The receptor was silent. One minute. Two minutes.
Three. The radio waves carrying Jack’s voice traveled at the speed of light, but it took no less than ninety seconds for them to reach the source of the beams which were tearing the Adastra to pieces. And there was a time loss there, and ninety seconds more for other waves to hurtle through space at one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles each second with the reply.
The receptor hooted unmusically. The dictawriter rustled softly. Then the speaker said without expression: “We—friends—now—no—fight—ships—come—to—take—you—planet.”
And simultaneously the miniature volcano on the Adastras hull lessened the violence of its eruption and slowly its molten, bubbling edges ceased first to steam, and then to bubble, and from the bluewhite of vaporizing steel they cooled to yellow, and then to carmine, and more slowly to a dull red, and more slowly still to the glistening, infinitely white metallic surface of steel which cools where there is no oxygen.
Jack said crisply into the control-room microphone: “Sir, I have communicated with the Centaurians and they have ceased fire. They say they are sending a fleet to take us to their planet.”
“Very good,” said Alstair’s voice bitterly, “especially since nobody seems able to make the one contrivance that would do some good after our death. What next?”
“I think it would be a good idea to release the Centaurian here,” said Jack. “We can watch him, of course, and paralyze him if he acts up. It would be a diplomatic thing to do, I believe.”
“You’re ambassador,” said Alstair sardonically. “We’ve got time to work, now. But you’d better put somebody else on the ambassadorial work and get busy again on the job of sending a message back to Earth, if you think you can adapt a transmitter to the type of wave they’ll expect.”
His image faded. And Jack turned to Helen He felt suddenly very tired.
“That is the devil of it,” he said drearily. “They’ll expect a wave like they sent us, and with no more power than we have, they’ll hardly pick up anything else! But we picked up in the middle of a message and just at the end of their description of the sending outfit they’re using on Earth. Undoubtedly they’ll describe it again, or rather they did describe it again, four years back, and we’ll pick it up if we live long enough. But we can’t even guess when that will be. You’re going to keep on working with this—creature, building up a vocabulary?”
Helen regarded him anxiously. She put her hand upon his arm. “He’s intelligent enough,” she said urgently. “I’ll explain to him and let somebody else work with him. I’ll come with you. After all, we—we may not have long to be together.”
“Perhaps ten hours.” said Jack tiredly.
He waited, somberly, while she explained in carefully chosen words—which the dictawriter translated—to the Centaurian. She got an assistant and two guards. They released, the headless Thing. It offered no violence. Instead, it manifested impatience to continue the work of building up in the translator files a vocabulary through which a complete exchange of ideas could take place.