A little flicker of light—flame—appeared in the corridor leading to the engine-room. There was enough light to show Rod, floating helplessly in the air, inches only from a featureless metal wall. Kit drifted yards from any solidity, her eyes wide and filled with fear.
But the light helped. Rod twisted himself and kicked. He went tumbling—head-over-heels away from the wall—to the floor, where he grasped the edge of the incomplete control-panel. He swung himself about. The light flickered again, and he leaped, diving through weightlessness for the corridor.
He went soaring into it and a mushrooming mass of yellow incandescence licked out of it Kit screamed. But the flame died away a little as he plunged into it flared out again only when he was almost through, so that it barely singed him. He went plunging on into the engine-room.
Unable to stop, he floated until his out-stretched arms cushioned his impact against the far wall. He swung about again and soared a second time—this time for the humming small isotopic generator which supplied the electric current for all the ship.
He reached it. He held fast—it was extraordinary hard to hold fast with no weight to help—and savagely cranked off the manual switch which had kept the unit inert during shipment. The roaring of the arc died instantly. There was only an ominous booming noise as paint and insulation and construction-stores heated by the arc continued to burn. But even that tended to die down without the arc to keep the flame supplied with vaporized fuel.
Then Rod looked at the ports in the wall of the engine-room, and cold sweat came out all over him. The ship was incomplete. It was unequipped. It had no stores at all. But it had taken off from earth. There were stars in view out the vision-ports, now that the force-field had cut off and the ship was back in normal space. But it wasn't on Earth. It wasn't on any planet.
And there wasn't any sunlight shining in any of the ports. There weren't—this made Rod's throat go dry when he threw himself across the dark vacancy of the engine-room to one port after another and stared out—there weren't even any familiar constellations. The Stellaris had had a speed and kinetic energy of its own by virtue of the shared motion of the Earth on its axis and around the sun, and the other motion of the solar system as a whole.
It had gone into the dark universe where the constants of mass and inertia were strange and still unexplored. There was not even a bright yellow star anywhere in the heavens which might be Earth's sun at a greater distance than usual. The Stellaris was somewhere among the stars. Earth and its sun could be anywhere, in any direction, at almost any distance up to light-millennia away. There was no possible way to tell. Even worse—
The ship, in fact, was a derelict. It had been designed to be driven by the reaction of its tractor and pressor-beams upon solid bodies outside of itself. Now, apparently, the nearest solid objects were the stars. It would take years for the beams to reach the nearest and there was no instrument on board by which the nearest might even be chosen. There were no stores of food, no star-maps, no trained crew—there was no faintest reasonable ground for hope nor reason for any effort.
But Kit was on board. So when the flames died down and only a penetrating, noisesome reek of burned paint filled the air, Rod Cantrell turned on the isotopic dynamo once more and switched on lights throughout the ship.
Painfully he began the process of searching the unfinished hulk for unwilling members of its company, to calm them and sooth them and threaten them in preparation for labors he had yet to imagine, for purposes he had yet to devise, toward ends he could not even conceive of. Oddly enough, he did not even think of the alien race that had been the cause of his uneasiness back on Earth. But here among the stars was where the greatest danger lay.
CHAPTER THREE
Contact
THAT danger manifested itself within hours. The short-circuit had been repaired—a painter had shifted some welding-rods to make room for a comfortable nap during his lunch-hour, and so had made a contact between two exposed wires from which take-off leads were to have led current elsewhere.
Lights again burned throughout the ship and Rod had turned on all pressor-beams in the rather desperate hope that somewhere within their range there might be some solid substance to give the ship navigability. Actually the most he hoped for was something to drive toward or from so that there could be acceleration and the feel of gravity to hearten the bewildered and frightened people who were the Stellaris' unwilling crew.
They were turned on and almost immediately he thought he felt a slight stirring of the ship. It was too slight to be sure. When he held a coin at arm's length and let it go, it stayed there in mid-air. If anything had been touched by the beams it had been lost—had slipped out of them. The nightmarish feeling of perpetual falling continued. Reason did no good. The sensation was nerve-racking.
Then, suddenly, a flash of unbearable light poured in through the vision-ports. It lasted no longer than a flash-bulb's flare, and was gone again. But Rod dived for a port and stared out. Instantly he blinked, blinded. As he reached the glass window opening upon all of space a second flash came.
It was blindingly bright—but it came from a tiny spot, an infinitesimal spot, no larger than a star-image. A pause, then a third flash came. It would make the ship's hull glow as if incandescent. And the third flash was not from the same place as the second.
Rod was dazed for an instant He had a flash of hope. Then he knew better. He'd had the pressor-beams turned on at random. They'd touched something which had sped on out of the pressor-beam field. Now that something flashed a search-beam. And there was but one possible source for brief unthinkably-bright flashes of light which would last only for thousandths of a second.
Only in space would a light-beam have certain advantages over radar. On Earth radar penetrates clouds and mist. In space there are no hindrances to vision. If there were a space-ship somewhere off there in the void and if it had detected the Stellaris' pressor-beams and dived out of them, it might use radar to locate the Earth-ship.
It would learn more from a single flash of visual light, yielding a photograph, than any scanning-beam could report in hours. The fact was wisdom after the event but it told Rod instantly that there was a space-ship yonder. And no space-ship could be friendly.
He went into frenzied activity. He dived back to the engine-room and swung the pressor-beams in tense and urgent quest. Spreading them wider at first he searched for something for them to react against. He found it He felt the ship stir. He put on more power. The ship surged ahead. More power still and he felt the floor-plates push against his feet He put on more power and more and more...
In seconds the Stellaris was thrusting away from something unseen at a full gravity acceleration. In minutes more it was a gravity and a half. Rod worked grimly with a small pressor, hunting for a focus so the beam could be locked to the object it was to thrust away from.
The acceleration increased. The fan-shaped pressors were pushing against something which came closer despite the repulsive force of the beams the Stellaris played on it. There was an arrogant confidence in the other space-ship, which seemed to be testing out the maximum power the Stellaris could exert. Sweat came out on Rod's forehead.
Then, suddenly, the small pressor found a focus and locked and he struggled feverishly against nearly two gravities to the control-room. Just as he laid his hands on the force-field switches there was a sudden sickening loss of all but the most minute sensation of weight as the other ship darted out of the pressor-beam and came flashing up beside the unwieldy Stellaris.