The Voyage of the Space Beagle

CHAPTER SIX

In the blazing brilliance of the gigantic machine shop, Coeurl laboured. Most of his memories were back, the skills he had been taught by the builders, his ability to adjust to new machines and new situations. He had found the lifeboat resting in a cradle. It had been partly dismantled.

Coeurl slaved to repair it. The importance of escaping grew on him. Here was access to his own planet and to other coeurls. With the skills he could teach them, they would be irresistible. This way, victory would be certain. In a sense, then, he felt as if he had made up his mind. Yet he was reluctant to leave the ship. He was not convinced that he was in danger. After examining the power sources of the machine shop, and thinking back over what had occurred, it seemed to him that these two-legged beings didn’t have the equipment to overcome him.

The conflict raged on inside him even as he worked. It was not until he paused to survey the craft that he realized how tremendous a repair job he had done. All that remained was to load up the tools and instruments he wanted to take along. And then — would he leave, or fight? He grew anxious as he heard the approach of the men. He felt the sudden change in the tempestlike thunder of the engines, a rhythmical off-and-on hum, shriller in tone, sharper, more nerve-racking than the deep-throated, steady throb that had preceded it. The pattern had an unnerving quality. Coeurl fought to adjust to it and, by dint of concentrating, his body was on the point of succeeding when a new factor interfered. The flame of powerful mobile projectors started its hideous roaring against the massive engine-room doors. Instantly, his problem was whether to fight the projectors or counter the rhythm. He couldn’t, he quickly discovered, do both.

He began to concentrate on escape. Every muscle of his powerful body was strained as he carried great loads of tools, machines, and instruments, and dumped them into any available space inside the lifeboat. He paused in the doorway at last for the penultimate act of his departure. He knew the doors were going down. Half a dozen projectors concentrating on one point of each door were irresistibly, though slowly, eating away the remaining inches. Coeurl hesitated, then withdrew all energy resistance from them. Intently, he concentrated on the outer wall of the big ship, toward which the blunt nose of the forty-foot lifeboat was pointing. His body cringed from the surge of electricity that flowed from the dynamos. His ear tendrils vibrated that terrific power straight at the wall. He felt on fire. His whole body ached. He guessed that he was dangerously close to the limit of his capacity for handling energy.

In spite of his effort, nothing happened. The wall did not yield. It was hard, that metal, and strong beyond anything he had ever known. It held its shape. Its molecules were monatomic but their arrangement was unusual — the effect of close packing was achieved without the usual concomitant of great density.

He heard one of the engine-room doors crash inward. Men shouted. Projectors rolled forward, their power unchecked now. Coeurl heard the floor of the engine-room hiss in protest as those blasts of heat burned the metal. Closer came that tremendous, threatening sound. In a minute the men would be burning through the flimsy doors that separated the engine room from the machine shop.

During that minute, Coeurl won his victory. He felt the change in the resisting alloy. The entire wall lost its bitterly held cohesion. It looked the same, but there was no doubt. The flow of energy through his body came easy. He continued to concentrate it for several seconds longer, then he was satisfied. With a snarl of triumph, he leaped into his small craft and manipulated the lever that closed the door behind him.

One of his tentacles embraced the power drive with almost sensuous tenderness. There was a forward surge of his machine as he launched it straight at the thick outer wall. The nose of the craft touched, and the wall dissolved in a glittering shower of dust. He felt tiny jerks of retardation as the weight of the metallic powder that had to be pushed out of the way momentarily slowed the small ship. But it broke through and shot irresistibly off into space.

Seconds went by. Then Coeurl noticed that he had departed from the big vessel at right angles to its course. He was still so close that he could see the jagged hole through which he had escaped. Men in armour stood silhouetted against the brightness behind them. Both they and the ship grew noticeably smaller. Then the men were gone, and there was only the ship with its blaze of a thousand blurring portholes.

Coeurl was turning away from it now, rapidly. He curved a full ninety degrees by his instrument board, and then set the controls for top acceleration. Thus within little more than a minute after his escape, he was heading back in the direction from which the big vessel had been coming all these hours.

Behind him, the gigantic globe shrank rapidly, became too small for individual portholes to be visible. Almost straight ahead, Coeurl saw a tiny, dim ball of light — his own sun, he realized. There, with other coeurls, he could build an interstellar-space ship and travel to stars with inhabited planets. Because it was so important, he felt suddenly frightened. He had turned away from the rear viewing plates. Now he glanced into them again. The globe was still there, a tiny dot of light in the immense blackness of space. Suddenly, it twinkled and was gone.

For a moment, he had the startled impression that, just before it disappeared, it moved. But he could see nothing. He wondered uneasily if they had shut off all their lights and were following him in the darkness. It seemed clear that he would not be safe until he actually landed.

Worried and uncertain, he gave his attention again to the forward viewing plates. Almost immediately, he had a sharp sense of dismay. The dim sun toward which he was heading was not growing larger. It was visibly smaller. It became a pin point in the dark distance. It vanished.

Fear swept through Coeurl like a cold wind. For minutes he peered tensely into the space ahead, hoping frantically that his one landmark would become visible again. But only the remote stars glimmered there, unwinking points against a velvet background of unfathomable distance.

But wait! One of the points was growing larger. With every muscle taut, Coeurl watched the point become a dot. It grew into a round ball of light and kept on expanding. Bigger, bigger, it became. Suddenly it shimmered, and there before him, lights glaring from every porthole, was the great globe of the space ship — the very ship which a few minutes before he had watched vanish behind him.

Something happened to Coeurl in that moment. His mind was spinning like a flywheel, faster and faster. It flew apart into a million aching fragments. His eyes almost started from their sockets as, like a maddened animal, he raged in his small quarters. His tentacles clutched at precious instruments and flung them in a fury of frustration. His paws smashed at the very walls of his ship. Finally, in a brief flash of sanity, he knew that he couldn’t face the inevitable fire of disintegrators that would now be directed against him from a safe distance.

It was a simple thing to create the violent cell disorganization that freed every droplet of id from his vital organs.

One last snarl of defiance twisted his lips. His tentacles weaved blindly. And then, suddenly weary beyond all his strength to combat, he sank down. Death came quietly after so many, many hours of violence.

Captain Leeth took no chances. When the firing ceased and it was possible to approach what was left of the lifeboat, the searchers found small masses of fused metal, and only here and there remnants of what had been Coeurl’s body.

“Poor pussy!” said Morton. “I wonder what he thought when he saw us appear ahead of him, after his own sun disappeared. Understanding nothing of anti-accelerators, he didn’t know that we could stop short in space, whereas it would take him more than three hours. He would seem to be heading in the direction of his own planet, but actually he’d be drawing farther and farther away from it. He couldn’t possibly have guessed that, when we stopped, he flashed past us, and that then all we had to do was follow him and put on our little act of being his sun until we were close enough to destroy him. The whole cosmos must have seemed topsy-turvy to him.”

Grosvenor listened to the account with mixed emotions. The entire incident was rapidly blurring, losing shape, dissolving into darkness. The moment-by-moment details would never again be recalled by an individual exactly as they had occurred. The danger they had been in already seemed remote.

“Never mind the sympathy!” Grosvenor heard Kent say. “We’ve got a job — to kill every cat on that miserable world.”

Korita murmured softly. “That should be simple. They are but primitives. We have merely to settle down, and they will come to us, cunningly expecting to delude us.” He half turned to Grosvenor. “I still believe that will be true,” he said in a friendly tone, “even if our young friend’s ‘beast’ theory turned out to be correct. What do you think, Mr. Grosvenor?”

“I’d go even a little further,” Grosvenor said. “As a historian, you will undoubtedly agree that no known attempt at total extermination has ever proved successful. Don’t forget that pussy’s attack on us was based on a desperate need for food; the resources of this planet apparently can’t support this breed much longer. Pussy’s brethren know nothing about us, and therefore are not a menace. So why not just let them die of starvation?”