It was a wholesome enterprise and it was all very well as long as they could remember that they were not falling into endless nothingness. These antics helped them to remember. But the instant that thought ceased to hold the center of one's mind, muscles tensed in panic, eyes widened and breathing became difficult because one was falling, falling, falling....
It was long hours before Rod heard the curious crisp noise within a pressor-coil which told that it was locked It was focused upon something invisible and unspeakably remote in the absolute black of other-space. Rod looked at the beam-mounting. He made a tiny mark. After half an hour, there was no change in the long-range adjustment. Whatever the object was, it had no great velocity either toward or away from the Stellaris.
If it was a—well—a heavenly body, a burned-out sun in a universe run down, it might be useful. So Rod left a beam on it, drawing the minimum of power. He went floating along the corridor to the control-room and there Kit looked at him steadily, a sheet of paper in her hand. She no longer looked unhappy.
"Rod," she said, "do you remember writing this?"
Rod flushed. He'd written her a note before going out to make the death-beam generator. The Stellaris was to vanish from the planet's surface while he worked—it was to hide in other-space because there were alien looters on the unnamed world.
Pyramid-ships might come to this city. They might beam any area they intended to land on, as a matter of routine precaution. If they did he and the other two men on the planet's surface would die. So he'd written a note for Kit to find in case he didn't come back. And she'd found it.
"I didn't think to tear that up when I came back," he said uncomfortably. "Just—well—forget it, won't you?"
"Hardly!" said Kit She smiled tremulously. "If you really feel this way about me, I want to remember it I won't doubt any more!"
She smiled at him. The temptation was irresistible. But the electrician named Joe came floating into the control-room, flapping two large sheets of cardboard for wings. He braked expertly with them and grinned.
"If I only had a harp," he said, beaming, "I'd feel like an angel for sure!"
"I'm getting set to go back and see what our trick did to those looters and the pyramid-ships," Rod told him, momentarily confused.
Joe raised his eyebrows and made no comment. He fanned himself to a wall and caught hold of a hand-rail. "I'd like to spring an idea," he said.
"Go ahead!"
"Suppose we fix up a couple gizmos like the one we made back yonder on the planet," said Joe. "Then we could put up a scrap if one of them pyramids came after us."
"Providing we shot first," said Rod.
"That's right," agreed Joe. "But suppose we tricked the circuit so the tensor-plate was choked? So when we turned on the juice nothin' happened?"
Rod waited, frowning.
"Then," said Joe, grinning, "if they turned a beam on us, our feed-backs 'ud pick it up an' uncork our beam on them! They start shootin', an' automatic we shoot back."
"Good enough," admitted Rod. "Only we'd still die. That wouldn't kill their beams. It would just kill them."
"Then tie in our force-field switch," said Joe amiably. "They slap a beam on us, we shoot back an' go whammo into other-space. All automatic! A bear-trap. I don't like those guys!"
"I don't either," said Rod. He reflected. "Mmmmmm. You've got something there. I begin to like it. I wonder if they have it"
"It's not likely, Rod," Kit interposed. "They'll kill off other civilizations as soon as they have space-travel. You didn't arm your first ship and there was no plan to arm the Stellaris. Nobody'd be set to fight in their first space-ships.
"The pyramid-people have probably never had a real fight in their lives. They won't be looking for anybody to fight back, any more than a hunter expects a rabbit to let go at him with a blaster."
"Something there too," admitted Rod. "But they're probably scary at that. Most likely they started this murder business because they were frightened the first time their ships came upon another race. They wiped that race out because it scared them. Then they looted its cities and found it paid off. Still, if they think that way ..."
A chilly thought came to him. He felt small cold prickles running up and down his spine.
"Right now we've got to take a chance that we hit them hard," he said grimly. "Pass along the word that we're going back to normal space on the planet we found. And Joe—"
"Yeah?"
"Go down in the engine-room. I've got a pressor locked on something in the dark universe. If I throw the force-fields back on, you put power into that pressor. Plenty of it! We'll want to get moving, and fast!"
Joe grinned, let go of the hand-rail and flapped blissfully across the room. He bounced off the doorway and went soaring toward the engines.
Shoutings went through the ship. There was a roll-call, so that the sudden return of gravity would not take anyone by surprise. Then Rod threw off the force-fields.
Weight came back, but no light outside. Rod blinked, then roared, "Lights out! Quick!" It was night outside on the planet, and the lighted ports of the Stellaris would show for miles.
After long minutes Rod put Kit's hands on the switch that would send the Stellaris back to other-space. Quietly—it seemed strange to be able to walk—he went to the air-lock. He cracked it open. There was no sound anywhere. He stepped out into the night. The air was chill and many strange stars shone overhead. It was altogether eerie to stand in such strangeness on the ways of a city that had been murdered, on a planet that had no name, in the weird stillness of its night.
But night had not long fallen. On the horizon there was still a trace of luminosity. A single wisp of cloud, high up, glowed faintly in sunlight from below the horizon. But overhead the sky was deep-blue. Stars twinkled brightly.
And there was silence to crack the eardrums. Perhaps at the edge of the city where the jungle began, boughs and branches whispered in a night-wind. But here all was stillness. Everything was dead. As his eyes adjusted to the starlight the soaring, graceful architecture took form in the dimness.
And then he saw one of the pyramids that had been floating overhead before the Stellaris—its improvisioned weapon radiating death—had fled into the other-space. The pyramid had come down out of control.
It had crashed into the side of a cliff-like structure and rumbled out again. It lay askew with one of its corners still caught in the gap its impact had made. Rod drew a deep breath of satisfaction. The weapon he'd made had worked. There was now no living alien of the murderous race upon this planet But—
Something made him raise his eyes. Stars moved overhead. They moved visibly. Tiny specks of yellow incandescence shifted place among the many-colored distant suns. One winked out completely. Another suddenly appeared.
For an instant Rod thought of shooting stars—of meteors. But meteors do not move slowly. These things did. Especially, meteors do not move in geometric formation, arranged as a slightly skewed triangle which give the appearance from one viewpoint of a pyramid.
The specks were pyramid-ships—a space-fleet of the killer-race! There were literally hundreds of them and they approached the planet on which Rod stood. The flashes of light were sunlight reflected from their polished sides.
Rod went cold all over. But it was obvious enough, once he thought about it. The aliens who put up a pyramid on Calypso had the mentality of people who install elaborate burglar-alarms. It was part of a pattern of thought.
They did not think of mercy, so they would not think of watchfulness. Cold-bloodedness manifesting itself in unwarned race-murders implied a whole psychology. And a suspicion that had come to Rod no more than half an hour since was verified.