"Right!" said Rod in satisfaction. "A pyramid-ship sentry. Our beam-gun on the bow found him and blasted him, probably before he knew anything about it His skipper probably had a spasm as he died and jammed his controls, so he's spinning."
The bell rang on monotonously, once in each revolution of the commutator which applied full power to each segment of the tensor-plate in turn, to blast any target the device might find. The pyramid-ship was getting a fresh lethal dose of the push-pull beam at each clang of the bell.
Onward the Stellaris bored. Presently the bell stopped.
Rod said, "Hm—we left him behind. We've got to allow for that! We can't have them coming up behind us, where the ship fills up a space and the beams turned off."
"Will we beam the planets, Rod?" asked Kit.
"We've got a minus arrangement" Rod told her. "We don't shoot at anything over a certain range. I don't know exactly what it is but it's probably some thousands of miles."
The planet of the dead race was a perceptible disk now. It was the size of a pea. Time passed. It grew to the size of a marble.
The bell rang. Twice. It stopped and rang twice again—and again—and again.
"Two more of them," said Rod savagely.
Time passed. The double-ring stopped. There was silence. Then a single ring again, monotonously repeated.
"This ain't sportin'," said Joe, scowling, "but y'don't play sportin' with rats."
The planet was the size of a peach, now. There was an infinitesimal shimmering in space ahead—an infinitely thin sliver of what looked like gossamer came up out of the planet's atmosphere. It spread and formed itself into a geometric pattern of wavering specks of light.
"They know we knocked off their ships," said Rod. He was thinking aloud. "They've plenty of sentries out and when a ship dies, it squeals to the rest. Automatically. So they know we can hit, and hard. But they're forming up to fight us. How'll they fight?"
The Stellaris sped furiously toward the enemy formation. There was silence. Then Kit gasped.
"Rod, I feel queer—like that other ti—"
Red's hands moved like lightning. The force-field switch crashed over. He said distinctly—with the ports all black—"The rats!"
They were in the dark universe for a bare second. He flung the switch back once more. There was no difference in the feel of things now, whether in other-space or normal. The Stellaris had dodged only momentarily into the other set of dimensions but in the other-space her velocity was enormous.
Rod, however, overestimated it. He had thought the Stellaris would slip back into the universe of stars beyond the enemy fleet. But she winked into being in its very midst.
There were shining pyramidal shapes on every hand. The bell burst into frenzied, continuous clanging. Glittering metal ships flashed past the ports so swiftly that the eye could not focus on them.
But the Stellaris' weapon poured out death—the death of the pyramid-folk's own contriving—as the Earth-ship hurtled through the fleet of space-murderers and went on beyond them. She was through before they could train a single weapon.
Then Rod swung her about to face the enemy. The drive-jet fought her acquired momentum. The ship slowed—and kept its beam-weapon going as it struggled to dash in again.
Minute by minute the clanging of the bell grew less. Despite her drive the ship was only slowing. She had not stopped. But when the planet's disk ceased to recede and began to grow visibly larger once more—when her savage second charge was evident—Rod saw flickerings as pyramid-ships deserted their formation and fled toward emptiness.
The main body of the fleet did not disperse. It did not flee. But as minute after minute passed, it became apparent that something was wrong. The edges of the pyramid-formation grew fuzzy. The ships did not keep station.
When the Stellaris bored into them again the bell clanged and clanged and clanged. At the thickest part of the fleet it rang frantically, one sharp stroke for each outpouring of the push-pull beam at an individual target. But the ships made no concerted move, nor any purposeful individual ones. The Stellaris was merely killing again ships that were already dead.
Minutes more and she was through a second time and the first space-battle in all the history of the galaxy was over. One Earth-ship that had taken off from its home planet by pure accident, unarmed and unequipped, had wiped out nine-tenths of a fleet that had never before been opposed. And its remnants were in flight.
The Stellaris drove on and on. The unmanned hulks which had been fighting vessels only a little while since fell astern. The clamor of the bell lessened. Presently there were only random disconnected sounds.
Later there were none at all.
"Not too nervy," commented Rod. "They saw we had them licked and those that were left headed for home. It fits the way their minds seem to work."
"What will we do now?" asked Kit "Land on the planet again?"
Rod considered, scowling. "Part of the fleet ran away as soon as they found their broadside was no good." "Broadside?"
"Massed push-pull beams," said Rod shortly. "They turned the beams of the whole fleet on us. We shouldn't have been able to live through it to get within range with a single ship's weapons. Probably wouldn't, at that only you felt queer.
"That was the first-aligned beams hitting us, away out of range for a few beams but well in range for the bunch of them! Another second and that blast would have been so strong nothing in creation could have stood it. Certainly we couldn't!" He paused.
"Some of them, though, ran from a fleet action. They're not a very brave race. I'm trying to figure something out. The ships on the ground knew we'd knocked off their sentries. Of course! So we were dangerous.
"So maybe some of them didn't take off with the rest of the fleet. Playing it safe. It would seem to fit in with the way their minds work. So maybe some ships are still skulking on the ground."
"So?" Kit waited.
"If we can spot them they're dead ducks. But if we tried to land they might knock us down practically from ambush. They're probably half shivering in deadly fear and half licking their chops as they wait for us to land. So—"
He looked abruptly at Kit, and then at Joe. Joe grinned.
"I guess we stop off at one of those other planets?"
"That'll be it," said Kit confidently.
Rod's eyes narrowed, even as he released the small hand-tractor which kept the deadly contrivance on the ship's bow in action.
"Ye-e-e-s," he said slowly. "I guess that will be it. We'll see what is to be seen. But I think I'm going to be mighty cagey!"
He swung the Stellaris about on her course.
The line of flight of a space-ship is not at all the same thing as—say—the path of a ground-vehicle. When a ground vehicle, moving south, turns east it travels east and stops moving south. A space-ship doesn't. The space-ship doesn't stop moving south. There's nothing to stop it.
When a course is changed the new line of movement simply modifies the one the ship followed before and that is the result of all its previous courses. A southward-moving space-ship which heads east actually travels on a line somewhere between south and east.
The exact line depends on the acceleration of the ship, how long it was on the southerly course, and how long it continues on the eastern one. Its direction of motion changes with each of those factors. So that to sight for a planet from space, as the Stellaris did, and then head for it, is no way to reach it.
Rod probably knew it in theory but he realized it the hard way. The yellow sun's second planet had a proper motion all its own, which Rod did not know. The Stellaris had a motion all its own, which was the result of all the courses it had followed during two full days in two different universes. But nevertheless, Rod aimed the ship at the second planet and drove for it.