It was identical. He crawled inside, dragging the torch, scorching his clothing and legs on the hot edges he had cut Again he cut at metal ruthlessly. He snapped commands and the electrician fed in one long section of bus-bar. He welded it to a connection. He welded a second semi-flexible bar.
He backed out and barked to the painter to get a string, a plumb-line, anything that was cord. And not to let anybody come out of the ship! Even as he commanded he was feverishly using the torch to connect the snaky bus-bars from the pyramid's interior to the preposterous-seeming device mounted on the odd small vehicle.
He finished and cast aside the torch to attach the string with unreasonably shaking fingers to the switch which was so ingenious and so easy to throw and would handle so monstrous a current.
"Okay," he barked. "Get back and in the ship! Run!" He backed toward the Stellaris himself, paying out the string.
Then he heard Kit crying out "Rod—Pyramids!"
Out of the corner of his eye he saw a mote in the sky at the edge of the horizon. But he dared not hasten. He paid out the string and paid it out He stripped off his coat and knotted the end of the string to it Then he ran.
There were voices babbling about him as he focused a tractor-beam on his coat a hundred feet away. With the least possible trace of power he saw the cloth stir.
"Go ahead!" he roared.
He stared out the vision-port. There was not one pyramid in sight but three. They came drifting onward and downward, lower, toward the city. The Stellaris must be visible. They would turn their beams on it as a mere routine precaution.
All visible things turned red, flashed through all the colors of the spectrum to violet and dead-black. The Stellaris was in other-space, the dark universe.
Then Rod raised the power on the tractor-beam, drawing his coat toward him in another set of dimensions. He heard a faint tinking sound—the coat's metal buttons were smacking forcibly against the ship's hull.
Then Rod wanted to be sick—from relief.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ambush
TIME passed slowly indeed in the other-space. Rod found himself doubting the time-rate of his watch. But a watch did keep the same time in the dark universe as in normal space. He knew it. It had been verified on his three interplanetary trips and in the original testings of the Stellaris when her force-field coils were first tried out But the watch hands moved slowly, very slowly.
Kit looked at him with anxious eyes. There were lights in the ship now but the feeling of weightlessness kept a certain nagging impulse of panic always very close. Still, Kit had been so much more fearful for Rod that the eerie sensation of floating in emptiness could almost be ignored, now that he was safe on board.
"What'd you do, Rod?" she asked.
"I think," said Rod, "that I knocked off the looters and the creatures in the three flying pyramids we saw. I hope so! I even think I did it with one of their own weapons. I hope very much that they haven't any defense against it I can't imagine one."
"Their weapons?" Kit said, startled. "You mean you think you made the same thing they used to kill all the people on this planet?"
"And the Martians," said Rod grimly, "and probably plenty of other races that got civilized enough to be either dangerous or worth looting. Remember, you suggested that the weapon a space-ship turned on us might be supersonic-sound waves?" "Y-yes," said Kit uneasily.
"It couldn't have been exactly sound-waves. Not in space. There was no air—or any solid to carry them. But we use tractor beams as if they were cables to pull things and pressors as if they were beams to push things with. I figured that they might have made a gadget that alternated between sending tractor and pressor beams.
"It would send a thin slice of tractor, then a thin slice of pressor and so on. That would go through space. And when it hit something solid it would generate sound waves in it. If the slices were thin enough and alternated fast enough they'd make supersonic waves—such as you suggested—in anything they touched.
"Air would vibrate in the supersonic range. So would water. So would the bodies of any living creatures such a beam struck. It would break up ceramic ware and not break plastic or metal. Sent from one space-ship to another, it would kill all the crew of the ship on the receiving end. Sent from a ship down on a city—"
Kit turned pale.
"They could—stay out in space and send beams down at a city and everybody'd die! Oh, Rod!"
"Apparently they did just that" said Rod. "Anyhow, that's the sort of gadget I made. There were bus-bars and a monstrous thing that works like a vacuum-tube in the building where we saw the televisors.
"Joe and I—Joe's the electrician who was with us—fixed up a pressor-beam generator and put in a feed-back to the tensor-plate. It starts to make pressors, the feed-back makes it shift to tractors, then the feed-back makes it shift back to pressors and so on. It'll generate supersonic frequencies all right! Simple enough too," he added grimly.
"But—"
"Power for it? There was an isotopic generator in the building with the televisors, too. Probably better than the one we have on the ship here. But I did better than that I knew there ought to be a power-storage unit in the booby-trap pyramid we so carefully haven't touched.
"I cut into that pyramid, hooked up that power to the gadget Joe and I had put together and tied a string to the switch. I focused a tractor to pull the string after we'd come into this space. The stuff it generated couldn't hurt us here. Tractor and pressor stuff would have to be focused to come into this universe from ours."
He made an unconscious movement and rather absurdly floated away from his former position. There was no gravity here. There was always the sensation of interminable fall. While constantly aware of the fact that it was weightlessness, not dropping, it was endurable enough. But nobody would ever be able to sleep where gravity was not.
"To finish the picture," said Rod after a moment "the power-storage unit has probably some hundreds of millions of kilowatts of power stored in it I don't know just how fast if 11 discharge through our gadget but there's a choke-effect there to slow it up.
"My guess and my hope is that my gadget generated the pyramid-folks pet murder-frequency stuff for several successive minutes and that those who happened to be around have lost all interest in looting—and in us."
"If it hit them," said Kit.
"It did," he assured her. "We set it to radiate in all directions. The faster the juice ran out the more deadly that beam was. I can't guess its maximum range but it should be strong enough anywhere on this planet!"
In that estimate he was too conservative. Actually the lethal effect of his device had extended rather more than a planetary diameter beyond the surface on the far side of the world. It had lasted for six or seven minutes and it had wiped out all pyramid-creatures within that limit.
Rod, however, was uneasy. His experience of the alien race was not enough to let him know their resources, and he could not calibrate or measure anything he used.
At the moment he worried mainly over the possibility that the aliens might have some defense against the weapon he thought they used for massacres. But he knew, too, that the danger could be greater than that and of a quite different sort.