Tommy Dort soured on his own brain which could find no answer which would work. But there had to be an answer! The gamble was too big! It was too absurd that two spaceships should fight—neither one primarily designed for fighting—so that the survivor could carry back news which would set one race to frenzied preparation for war against the unwarned other.
If both races could be warned, though, and each knew that the other did not want to fight, and if they could communicate with each other but not locate each other until some grounds for mutual trust could be reached—
It was impossible. It was chimerical. It was a day-dream. It was nonsense. But it was such luring nonsense that Tommy Dort ruefully put it into the coder to his gill-breathing friend Buck, then some hundred thousand miles off in the misty brightness of the nebula.
“Sure,” said Buck, in the decoder’s word-cards flicking into space in the message frame. “That is a good dream. But I like you and still won’t believe you. If I said that first, you would like me but not believe me, either. I tell you the truth more than you believe, and maybe you tell me the truth more than I believe. But there is no way to know. I am sorry.”
Tommy Dort stared gloomily at the message. He felt a very horrible sense of responsibility. Everyone did, on the Llanvabon. If they failed in this encounter, the human race would run a very good chance of being exterminated in time to come. If they succeeded, the race of the aliens would be the one to face destruction, most likely. Millions or billions of lives hung upon the actions of a few men.
Then Tommy Dort saw the answer.
It would be amazingly simple, if it worked. At worst it might give a partial victory to humanity and the Llanvabon. He sat quite still, not daring to move lest he break the chain of thought that followed the first tenuous idea. He went over and over it, excitedly finding objections here and meeting them, and overcoming impossibilities there. It was the answer! He felt sure of it.
He felt almost dizzy with relief when he found his way to the captain’s room and asked leave to speak.
It is the function of a skipper, among others, to find things to worry about. But the Llanvabon’s skipper did not have to look. In the three weeks and four days since the first contact with the alien black ship, the skipper’s face had grown lined, and old. He had not only the Llanvabon to worry about. He had all of humanity.
“Sir,” said Tommy Dort, his mouth rather dry because of his enormous earnestness, “may I offer a method of attack on the black ship? I’ll undertake it myself, sir, and if it doesn’t work our ship won’t be weakened.”
The skipper looked at him unseeingly.
“The tactics are all worked out, Mr. Dort,” he said heavily. “They’re being cut on tape now, for the ship’s handling. it’s a terrible gamble, but it has to be done.”
“I think,” said Tommy carefully, “I’ve worked out a way to take the gamble out. Suppose, sir, we send a message to the other ship, offering—”
His voice went on in the utterly quiet captain’s room, with the visiplates showing only a vast mistiness outside and the two fiercely burning stars in the nebula’s heart.
The skipper himself went through the air lock with Tommy. For one reason, the action Tommy had suggested would need his authority behind it. For another, the skipper had worried more intensely than anybody else on the Llanvabon, and he was tired of it. If he went with Tommy, he would do the thing himself, and if he failed he would be the first one killed—and the tape for the Earth-ship’s maneuvering was already fed into the control board and correlated with the master-timer. If Tommy and the skipper were killed, a single control pushed home would throw the Llanvabon into the most furious possible all-out attack, which would end in the complete destruction of one ship or the other—or both. So the skipper was not deserting his post.
The outer air lock door swung wide. It opened upon that shining emptiness which was the nebula. Twenty miles away, the little round robot hung in space, drifting in an incredible orbit about the twin central suns, and floating ever nearer and nearer. It would never reach either of them, of course. The white star alone was so much hotter than Earth’s sun that its heat-effect would produce Earth’s temperature on an object five times as far from it as Neptune is from Sol. Even removed to the distance of Pluto, the little robot would be raised to, cherry-red heat by the blazing white dwarf. And it could not possibly approach to the ninety-odd millions miles which is the Earth’s distance from the sun. So near, its metal would melt and boil away as vapor. But, half a light-year out, the bulbous object bobbed in emptiness.
The two spacesuited figures soared away from the Llanvabon. The small atomic drives which made them minute spaceships on their own had been subtly altered, but the change did not interfere with their functioning. They headed for the communication robot. The skipper, out in space, said gruffly:
“Mr Dort, all my life I have longed for adventure. This is the first time I could ever justify it to myself.”
His voice came through Tommy’s space-phone receivers. Tommy wet his lips and said:
“It doesn’t seem like adventure to me, sir. I want terribly for the plan to go through. I thought adventure was when you didn’t care?”
“Oh, no,” said the skipper. “Adventure is when you toss your life on the scales of chance and wait for the pointer to stop.”
They reached the round object. They clung to its short, scanner-tipped horns.
“Intelligent, those creatures,” said the skipper heavily. “They must want desperately to see more of our ship than the communication room, to agree to this exchange of visits before the fight.”
“Yes, sir,” said Tommy. But privately, he suspected that Buck—his gill-breathing friend—would like to see him in the flesh before one or both of them died. And it seemed to him that between the two ships had grown up an odd tradition of courtesy, like that between two ancient knights before a tourney, when they admired each other wholeheartedly before hacking at each other with all the contents of their respective armories.
They waited.
Then, out of the mist, came two other figures. The alien spacesuits were also power-driven. The aliens themselves were shorter than men, and their helmet openings were coated with a filtering material to cut off visible and ultraviolet rays which to them would be lethal. It was not possible to see more than the outline of the heads within.
Tommy’s helmet phone said, from the communication room on the Llanvabon:
“They say that their ship is waiting for you, sir. The air lock door will be open.”
The skipper’s voice said heavily:
“Mr. Dort, have you seen their space suits before? If so, are you sure they’re not carrying anything extra, such as bombs?”
“Yes, sir,” said Tommy. “We’ve showed each other our space equipment. They’ve nothing but regular stuff in view, sir.”
The skipper made a gesture to the two aliens. He and Tommy Dort plunged on for the black vessel. They could not make out the ship very clearly with the naked eye, but directions for change of course came from the communication room.
The black ship loomed up. It was huge, as long as the Llanvabon and vastly thicker. The air lock did stand open. The two spacesuited men moved in and anchored themselves with magnetic-soled boots. The outer door closed. There was a rush of air and simultaneously the sharp quick tug of artificial gravity. Then the inner door opened.
All was darkness. Tommy switched on his helmet light at the same instant as the skipper. Since the aliens saw by infrared, a white light would have been intolerable to them. The men’s helmet lights were, therefore, of the deep-red tint used to illuminate instrument panels so there will be no dazzling of eyes that must be able to detect the minutest speck of white light on a navigating vision plate. There were aliens waiting to receive them. They blinked at the brightness of the helmet lights. The space-phone receivers said in Tommy’s ear: