I
It was raw, red war for all of them, from the moment the two ships intercepted each other, one degree off the plane of the ecliptic and three diameters out from the second planet of the star that was down on the charts as K94. K94 was a GO type star; and the yelping battle alarm of the trouble horn tumbled sixteen men to their stations. This was at thirteen hours, twenty-one minutes, four seconds of the ship’s day.
Square in the scope of the laser screen, before the Survey Team Leader aboard the Harrier, appeared the gray, light-edged silhouette of a ship unknown to the ship’s library. And the automatic reflexes of the computer aboard, that takes no account of men not yet into their vacuum suits, took over. The Harrier disappeared into no-time.
She came out again at less than a quarter-mile’s distance from the stranger ship and released a five-pound weight at a velocity of five miles a second relative to the velocity of the alien ship. Then she had gone back into no-time again—but not before the alien, with computer-driven reflexes of its own, had rolled like the elongated cylinder it resembled, and laid out a soft green-colored beam of radiation which opened up the Harrier forward like a hot knife through butter left long on the table. Then it too was gone into no-time. The time aboard the Harrier was thirteen hours, twenty-two minutes and eighteen seconds; and on both ships there were dead.
“There are good people in the human race,” Cal Hartlett had written only two months before, to his uncle on Earth, “who feel that it is not right to attack other intelligent beings without warning—to drop five-pound weights at destructive relative velocities on a strange ship simply because you find it at large in space and do not know the race that built it.
“What these gentle souls forget is that when two strangers encounter in space, nothing at all is known—and everything must be. The fates of both races may hinge on which one is first to kill the other and study the unknown carcass. Once contact is made, there is no backing out and no time for consideration. For we are not out here by chance, neither are they, and we do not meet by accident.”
Cal Hartlett was Leader of the Mapping Section aboard the Harrier, and one of those who lived through that first brush with the enemy. He wrote what he wrote as clearly as if he had been Survey Leader and in command of the ship. At any moment up until the final second when it was too late, Joe Aspinall, the Survey Leader, could have taken the Harrier into no-time and saved them. He did not; as no commander of a Survey Ship ever has. In theory, they could have escaped.
In practice, they had no choice.
When the Harrier ducked back into no-time, aboard her they could hear the slamming of emergency bulkheads. The mapping room, the fore weight-discharge room and the sleeping quarters all crashed shut as the atmosphere of the ship whiffed out into space through the wound the enemy’s beam had made. The men beyond the bulkheads and in the damaged sections would have needed to be in their vacuum suits to survive. There had not been time for that, so those men were dead.
The Harrier winked back into normal space.
Her computer had brought her out on the far side of the second planet, which they had not yet surveyed. It was larger than Earth, with somewhat less gravity but a deeper atmospheric envelope. The laser screen picked up the enemy reappearing almost where she had disappeared, near the edge of that atmosphere.
The Harrier winked back all but alongside the other and laid a second five-pound weight through the center of the cylindrical vessel. The other ship staggered, disappeared into no-time and appeared again far below, some five miles above planetary surface in what seemed a desperation attempt to gain breathing time. The Harrier winked after her—and came out within five hundred yards, square in the path of the green beam which it seemed was waiting for her. It opened up the drive and control rooms aft like a red-hot poker lays open a cardboard box.
A few miles below, the surface stretched up the peaks of titanic mountains from horizon to horizon.
“Ram!” yelled the voice of Survey Leader Aspinwall, in warning over the intercom.
The Harrier flung itself at the enemy. It hit like an elevator falling ten stories to a concrete basement. The cylindrical ship broke in half in midair and bodies erupted from it. Then its broken halves and the ruined Harrier were falling separately to the surface below and there was no more time for anyone to look. The clock stood at 13 hrs., 23 minutes and 4 seconds.
The power—except from emergency storage units—was all but gone. As Joe punched for a landing the ship fell angling past the side of a mountain that was a monster among giants, and jarred to a stop. Joe keyed the intercom of the control board before him.
“Report,” he said.
In the Mapping Section Cal Hartlett waited for other voices to speak before him. None came. He thumbed his audio.
“The whole front part of the ship’s dogged shut, Joe,” he said. “No use waiting for anyone up there. So—this is Number Six reporting. I’m all right.”
“Number Seven,” said another voice over the intercom. “Maury. O.K.”
“Number Eight. Sam. O.K.”
“Number Nine. John. O.K….”
Reports went on. Numbers Six through Thirteen reported themselves as not even shaken up. From the rest there was no answer.
In the main Control Section, Joe Aspinwall stared bleakly at his dead control board. Half of his team was dead.
The time was 13 hours, 30 minutes, no seconds.
He shoved that thought from his mind and concentrated on the positive rather than the negative elements of the situation they were in. Cal Hartlett, he thought, was one. Since he could only have eight survivors of his Team, he felt a deep gratitude that Cal should be one of them. He would need Cal in the days to come. And the other survivors of the Team would need him, badly.
Whether they thought so at this moment or not.
“All right,” said Joe, when the voices had ended. “We’ll meet outside the main airlock, outside the ship. There’s no power left to unseal those emergency bulkheads. Cal, Doug, Jeff—you’ll probably have to cut your way out through the ship’s side. Everybody into respirators and warmsuits. According to pre-survey”—he glanced at the instruments before him—“there’s oxygen enough in the local atmosphere for the respirators to extract, so you won’t need emergency bottles. But we’re at twenty-seven thousand three hundred above local sea-level. So it’ll probably be cold—even if the atmosphere’s not as thin here as it would be at this altitude on Earth.” He paused. “Everybody got that? Report!”
They reported. Joe unharnessed himself and got up from his seat. Turning around, he faced Maury Taller.
Maury, rising and turning from his own communications board on the other side of the Section, saw that the Survey Leader’s lean face was set in iron lines of shock and sorrow under his red hair. They were the two oldest members of the Team, whose average age had been in the mid-twenties. They looked at each other without words as they went down the narrow tunnel to the main airlock and, after putting on respirators and warmsuits, out into the alien daylight outside.