And of course he would be classed as a traitor or murderer or worse and immediately the Space Project Committee would set to work to duplicate the Stellaris and send it off—undoubtedly without orders to be wary of metal pyramids. He had to get back to Earth in time to stop that—which was patently impossible He could not hope to get the Stellaris or Kit back to Earth at all.
He slept and Kit stood valiantly beside the almost empty control-board. The Stellaris moved on toward the unnamed planet of an unknown sun, its acceleration giving the effect of weight for its occupants. Word went about the oddly-assorted ship's company of an approaching landing, and they cheered.
The girl biologists, in charge of the air purifying plant brought it back to proper functioning. The hydroponic vegetables had borne a small crop of edibles, despite the alternations of gravity with no gravity at all. The crop was very small but there were not many to eat it. Four painters, two electricians, three arc-welders and five girls had remained in the ship during the lunch-hour which seemed so long ago.
Presently a painter came to the control-room to present a complaint Kit put her finger to her lips, pointed to Rod and beckoned. She explained the significance of the spring, whispering, and made Rod as comfortable as she could without waking him. Then she went about the ship, talking earnestly to every individual.
It was a very good idea, because with continued normal feeling of weight, something like normal mental processes returned to the unwitting voyagers. They began to realize that none of Earth's other planets was suited for human use and that it was not likely that this unknown world would be of any value for them.
They realized, too, the utter lack of preparation for interstellar travel. There was not even food, save for the garden in the air-purifying room. But Kit managed to change their forebodings to no worse than anxious curiosity and when they had reached that stage they were prepared to act as intelligently as they could. So the situation, as far as the crew was concerned, was much more hopeful.
Kit waked Rod when their chosen planet loomed large before them. He opened his eyes as a voice bellowed monotonously, "No-o-o radar!" from somewhere below in the ship.
"We're almost there," said Kit anxiously, "and we don't know how to land."
Rod was instantly awake. He stared at the disk—big as a dinner-plate—on the planet ahead. The sensation of weight proved that the Stellaris was hurtling toward it at ever-increasing speed.
"We'll switch to pressor-beams and slow up," he said. "So far, pretty good!"
He sent calls through the ship, warning of the change-over. There was a bare second of weightlessness, then all floors became ceilings and all ceilings floors. It was purely a guesswork process. Rod could estimate the planet's distance only by the time needed for the pressor-beams to hit it.
He could not estimate the ship's speed at all. But he set to work to improvise landing tactics by rule of thumb. As a first measure he shifted the beams to one side of the planet so that the Stellaris would no longer head straight for the center of the visible hemisphere.
It was necessary to remember that the danger from alien space-ships might easily be greater here than anywhere else in the universe. The Stellaris might actually have come back to normal space so far within the empire of the pyramid-builders that radar beams and scouts were considered unnecessary. She could, conceivably, be heading for the very stronghold of the alien race and could have been undetected only because such an approach was unimaginable. But it was not likely.
The Ship's course altered almost imperceptibly. She had been approaching too fast for an endurable stop short of the strange world's surface. Now she went angling over to a line that would carry her past. But the great disk enlarged and grew greater and they saw seas upon it and clouds and vast areas of green vegetation. When the ship shot past the twilight zone the surface was within mere thousands of miles.
Rod said, "I wish we had a telescope on board. I'm not sure, but I saw some splotches that could be cities."
"Do you think—?"
"I'm not guessing," he told her. "I'm taking a chance. If they beam us it's the pyramid people. If they don't, it isn't. But there must be plenty of civilization in our galaxy. The fact that they had a trick all worked out to get warning when we made space-ships rather hints at that.
"If there are two civilizations there are probably hundreds of thousands. There must be too many for the pyramid people to wipe out so they only set traps for them and knock them off when they reach a space-ship culture."
Kit said uneasily, "That—ship certainly turned something on us, without trying to signal us first and we were plainly running away and not trying to fight them."
"Not surprising," said Rod briefly. "I saw the bas-reliefs they made of humans." The memory of them was clear.
He had. On the pyramid on Calypso there had been modeled human figures. They should have been irresistible as incitements to curiosity, so that the doors would be opened. But the figured people were not modeled by friendly artists. The figures had been made by craftsman who despised their models.
No artist can keep himself out of his work and the figures had actually made Rod angry at the scorn implicit in their making. They pictured humans with strict accuracy but managed somehow to classify them as beasts and vermin. Men would not have pictured men with such scorn.
Rod had felt instant suspicion and hostility toward the builders of the pyramid and was disinclined to do anything they planned for him to do. That was why he'd cut into the pyramid instead of hopefully opening its doors—and that was why there was as yet no warning that humans had achieved space-travel.
Kit said presently, "You're planning to land, Rod. Can we test the air?"
"The sun's the same color as ours at home," Rod told her. "It must have nearly the same spectrum. And the vegetation's green. The chemistry must be the same. If plants use chlorophyl here to utilize sunlight like ours, the air must be oxygen and nitrogen and C02. Other gases wouldn't work, we can't even guess at the proportions."
"And the—gravity?" she said uneasily.
"We've nothing to measure it with," he said with a shrug. "But we do know that we didn't have to push unbearably to get over to one side and run past. We practically tested the gravity with our feet—high up as we are." Then he looked at her sharply. "I had some sleep, Kit I doubt that you did. Better go get some."
She hesitated, and looked at him wistfully. He said heavily, "I'm not very romantic, am I? But I've got plenty on my mind. The people in that space-ship tried to kill us out of hand. They must have killed off the Martians.
"They'll kill not only us but everybody back on Earth if they catch us and find out our physical structure and check it with the records they'll undoubtedly have made when they modeled those figures on the Calypso pyramid. So we've got not only our own lives to think of but literally everybody else's.
"I've got to try to figure out a way to finish this ship, and arm it somehow—but I've got the beginning of an idea—and I've got to concoct some way to blow it and us literally to atoms if we're caught and killed. And after all that I'm—well—I'm very much in love with you and I've got to figure out something to make you safe."
He stood doggedly by the controls, holding the force-field switches against the springs that would throw the Stellaris into other-space if he should be killed where he stood. Kit's eyes softened.