As Rod's eyes began to glow, the electrician came to him. "Hey! We can fix these sets! I opened one up and a pair of porcelain insulators is crumpled all up. They were the mounting insulators and they went to powder and the works settled and shorted and quit workin'!"
Rod wanted to babble of his own discovery but instead he followed back to the vision-sets. It was as the electrician had said. Supports for the apparatus within the cases had shivered to powder.
Kit had a strange expression on her face.
"Rod! I've got an idea. I don't know anything about science but in school once our instructor showed us how supersonic waves could break glass to powder if they were strong enough and of sufficient high-frequency. He said they were used to sterilize things. Could the way these people were killed be something like that?"
"It could," said Rod grimly. "We had a dose of something like it from that other space-ship—remember? But air won't carry supersonics. It's elastic and they go down in pitch. And there wasn't any air where that other space-ship caught up with us. I think you're close. Very close."
The electrician showed Kit the powder remaining from the shattered insulators. It was very fine. The rest of the insulation was plastic. Then he bent down and tore at silken garments on the floor. Not even Kit protested. The dead race had no such bony skeletons as humanity possesses. There was only fine dust within the garments. The electrician folded torn cloth to a pad.
"This's dry," he observed. "It'd ought to do for a insulator for a try, anyhow."
He reached into the case, then drew back and put on rubber gloves for safety's sake. As he lifted the settled mass of coils and wires there was a tiny snapping sound. A spark jumped brittlely and ceased. The electrician put the pad in place. He prepared another and adjusted that.
Kit said tensely, "It's working!"
They looked. The sheet on which a colored photograph had appeared permanently fixed now changed beneath their eyes. It was extraordinary to see the picture, by the light from overhead, change itself by an apparent flow of pigment from one spot to another to form a new arrangement of shapes and colors.
Where the scene on this instrument's screen had been that of the last instant in the life of the people of this planet, now it was the scene currently in being. The street was empty of moving forms but there were those empty heaps of garments on the ground where the people of the planet had been. It was plainly a current view of the place where the connected sending instrument stood.
And then, preposterously, as they watched there came a movement in the distance. Kit caught her breath. Then the electrician swore luridly. And then Rod clenched his hands until the blood flowed in his palms.
CHAPTER SIX
Pyramids Coming!
THERE were living creatures moving toward the sending-instrument. Not many—the three human watchers could see clearly and there were but four individuals in sight. Those four individuals rode in one of the odd vehicles native to the planet. Rod and the others watched intently.
They had bulbous heads and attenuated arms and legs, and one of them guided the vehicle to a spot no more than fifty or sixty yards from the vision-sender. There the vehicle stopped. The four got out and stared at a building.
One lifted something from a belt about his middle. Flame darted from it in a thin straight line. He swept it up, and side-wise, and down, and across again. A section of plastic-sealed wall fell slowly outward.
From somewhere within the vision-instrument, they heard the crash of its fall. The four marched unconcernedly across the wreckage, trampling underfoot the gay garments of the murdered native race.
Rod said in a whisper, "This may be a sender too. No noise!"
The three humans stood motionless. In minutes the four sticklike figures came out, burdened with loads of shimmering stuff the watchers could not identify. They piled it in the vehicle. They went back as if for more.
Rod thrust the others from before the vision-machine so that, if this were a two-way instrument, their images would not remain on the screen at the other end. Crisply he ripped out the pads of temporary insulation. There was a tiny spark and the picture ceased to move.
"They're looters," said Rod grimly. "They're not the native race certainly. Presumably they're the crowd that travels in those flying pyramids. They're the murderers. And now it becomes clear why they wait for another race to reach the spaceship stage of civilization before they murder them.
"A civilized race leaves a civilization behind when it dies. It leaves cities to be looted. It turns murder from a precaution into a business!" His nostrils were widened. He breathed heavily, went white with a deep, corrosive anger.
"We go back to the ship," he said flatly. "You see the pattern! They murdered the natives of this planet without warning and set up at least one pyramid to tell them if any survivors turned up later.
"When they were sure it was quite safe they came back and now they've begun the leisurely looting of the cities whose inhabitants they killed. Quite safe and very logical."
His tone, at the end, changed to raging fury. But he led the way back toward the ship without a word of explanation. He was torn between quite irrational rage and a desperate desire to get Kit away from here and out of danger. Yet he knew that even back on Earth, unless something quite impossible happened, Kit would be equally doomed. Whether in flight through space or hidden in the dark universe she was in no better case.
Through the air-lock and into the ship. The party gone to gather fruit was back with a large supply. Rod called a meeting of the curiously-assorted ship's company. He curtly summed up the situation.
"There are three things we can do," he said shortly at the end. "We can leave this planet, which is being looted by the creatures who killed its inhabitants. That means taking a chance we can't even estimate of finding another planet where we can try to provision ourselves—and possibly arm ourselves for defense.
"We can go into the dark universe and open the air-lock and die quickly. Or—" he paused—"we can stay here, fight or dodge the looters and try to find an observatory and star-maps and possibly the way back home."
There could be no dissension. But a painter pointed out that since he hadn't agreed to this voyage he considered that he was on overtime—rather, double-time pay for all work done outside of his regular job of painting. His union, in fact, might insist on a still higher rate of pay. And he would work only if assured that a mediation-based award of pay would be accepted.
Rod agreed impatiently.
"But the first thing," he said urgently, "is to hide the ship. The only safe hiding-place is the dark universe. You know how the field-generators were tested. We anchored the ship in place with focused tractor-beams and then turned on the fields. She went into the dark universe, but stayed in the part of it parallel to her slip. When the fields were turned off she came back to where she'd been. That's what we'll have to do now."
One of the girl biologists said dismally, "No weight?"
"No weight," agreed Rod. "Except for those of us out on the planet, working a little trick I think we can handle. Who volunteers for that?"
He had his pick of the ship's company. He chose an electrician and a painter and almost angrily refused Kit's insistence that she be of the party.
"I'm not going to take any chances," he told her, "but I don't want to be worried about you. And you're more able than anybody else to attend to what has to be done—on the ship, that is."
He shifted the Stellaris on her pressor-beams to a position close by the walls of a massive building. He anchored her there by focused beams and flicked on the force-fields for the infinitesimal part of a second. Back in normal space the ship had not moved. He tried it again for longer periods.