"Mmmm," said Joe. "It'd be a kinda good idea to try out that power-gadget from the pyramid. I got an idea about that. There's nothin' there to supply power. Nothin's used up. Nothin's breakin' down. Nothin' to happen. But it gave 'em power—in regular space."
"It's dead now." Then Rod stopped. "You think it could be a trick receiver of power from somewhere?"
"That's my hunch," said Joe. "Maybe they got broadcast power."
"Galaxy-wide?" demanded Rod skeptically. "How?"
"You guess," said Joe grinning. "I bet it's a simple trick, though—like their drive."
He nodded and went back toward the engine-room Rod looked at his watch. There was gravity on the ship now and they had at least twice the power they'd started out with. They knew how to make weapons at least equal to any the alien pyramid-folk possessed. He remembered the pencil-beam of heat the looters had used to cut out a wall in the dead city. He'd have to look into that too. Joe was busy. His job would take time.
Rod hunted in the loot for a pencil-beam gun and found one. On the way back he stopped to watch Joe at work on the automatic push-pull weapon. Joe had only such tools as had been on the ship during its construction but he was doing a good job. Rod watched approvingly.
"Joe," he said after a moment "if you sliced that tensor-plate into segments and fixed the feedback so—"
He illustrated.
"If you do that," Rod finished, "it will shoot back only in the direction from which it's shot at. All the power'll go into a relatively narrow beam" Then another idea struck him.
"My sainted aunt! Better than that Joe, set the feed-back like this! There's no pull on a tractor until it hits something. When there's a tractor going out from every segment—better put a commutator on and run through them in turn—when there's a tractor going out and it hits something, that will turn on the push-pull beam! Full-power too!"
Joe grunted. He looked at Rod with a wry expression.
"It's a bright idea all right. We're turnin' the old Stellaris into a warship, sure enough. But we won't be good company for nice people. We're goin' to go roamin' around like a mad dog?"
"A shunt here will take care of that," said Rod. "With the shunt cut in it will ring a bell when a tractor-beam hits. With a power-switch in parallel we can make it shoot back and then tell us what it did."
Joe looked relieved. "Y-yeah. I see that" He grinned twistily. "I'd hate to go around spittin' death-beams just automatic. We'd wind up kinda lonesome, seems like."
Rod went back to the control-room. But the weapon that was developing stayed in his mind. He went back again and asked Joe to make an adjustment so the push-pull power-feed could be cut off from any desired segment so that one part of the weapon's range could be left unblasted if desired.
"I'm acting," he said, almost embarrassed, "as if I thought we might find friends."
Joe grunted. "Well? Those guys in the pyramid-ships are tough babies. Maybe the folks they killed were good guys. There's usually a good guy somewhere to make up for a bad one."
Then he added, "I'll have this thing ready in a coupla hours. You know how we're goin' to mount it outside? No air there now!"
Rod sketched out a notion for that too. Joe grunted again. "That's half an hour more. I'll set those welder-guys workin' on it"
Back to the control-room again. Rod paced up and down, no longer really conscious of the novelty of gravity in space. The ship began to feel like something other than a hulk navigated by makeshift means.
He began to feel less like a shipwreck victim and more like a man in command of a ship. He began, indeed, to think in terms of what could be done to the pyramid-race, instead of the peril they represented.
It was nearer three hours than two before Joe reported the new weapon finished. It had called for very careful work by practically every man on the ship and the using up of I-beams intended for interior partitions.
When it was complete, Rod threw the switch that meant a return to normal space. There was practically no change in sensation as dots of light appeared in the vision-ports and ran through all the colors of the rainbow before they settled to their usual appearance as stars by myriads on every hand. The yellow sun was now very far away. It was only the brightest distant object in the heavens.
They opened the airlock door, with a tractor covering the opening so no air would escape. Focused pressors pushed the new device outside and maneuvered it delicately to a new position. From the ports Rod guided it to the Stellaris' nose and anchored it. And then a tiny tractor pulled back the switch that set the generator into action and the Stellaris was a fighting ship.
For the first time Rod applied the jet-drive. The ship gave a mighty surge forward.
It headed for the yellow star—and battle.
CHAPTER TEN
Battle!
THEY had seen four planets on their first approach to this solar system. One a world all ice from pole to pole, they had by-passed for the next world sunward. There were two others still nearer to the sun. Rod regarded them speculatively as the Stellaris drove toward the world of dead cities.
"I think," he said meditatively, "that I'm going to take a look at those planets—if we live through this." Kit stood beside him.
"And somehow that settles it Do you realize, Rod, how completely you are expected to decide things? One of the painters said we should be trying to find our own sun or else hunting a planet we can settle on. But Joe said he was crazy and there wasn't even an argument. You wanted to fight so there simply wasn't any question about it"
"There's a reason for us to fight," said Rod curtly. "Nobody can guess the size of the pyramid-ship fleet but it's surely all hunting us. If we stay in one place, fighting, maybe they'll think we're survivors of the race they murdered.
"We have to try to make them think so for the sake of Earth. If they decided they'd better start a general massacre of all the races we could come from, Earth would certainly be included. And there's no faintest preparation to stop them back there."
Joe came climbing up from the engine-room. "That thing that looks like a condenser," he reported amiably, "it works. It's hot now—plenty of power. I hooked it up an' we're runnin' on it."
"Then unhook it" commanded Rod sharply. "Get back to our own power! That doesn't work in the dark universe and we couldn't go into it or stay in it! Shift the leads back! Quick!"
Joe's mouth dropped open. He dived for the engine-room again. Rod's forehead creased. Minutes later Joe came back, crestfallen.
"Sorry," he said apologetically. "I thought it was kinda humorous to use their own power to fight 'em with. We're back on our own now."
"It's broadcast power, all right," said Rod grimly. "Somehow they can fill the whole Galaxy with power for their ships to draw on—unless they've found a source of energy that comes from nothingness itself."
After a moment he added, "I keep thinking about those inner planets. It's a hunch. It bothers me. It doesn't seem quite natural." He shook his head as if to clear it. "Those devils must have broadcast power of some sort, though."
A bell rang sharply. It stopped. It rang again. It stopped. It rang again. Rod and Joe tensed.
"What does that mean?" asked Kit apprehensively.
"It should mean that we blasted a pyramid-ship," Rod told her. "This is a long way out, though."
The sun was again a glaring disk. Something winked in its rays. It vanished. It winked again out a right-hand port. It was infinitely small and the effect was that of a bit of tinsel spinning in a bright light.