The Black Galaxy

CHAPTER NINE War Basis

FIVE minutes later Rod grimly cut off the tractors which had held an atmosphere in mid-space and an enemy spaceship with it. He found sardonic amusement in picturing the effect of that gesture upon the pyramid-folk.

The Stellaris still had a beam locked on the planet of the dead cities. Its power was low, but she would not be too many millions of miles away if she went back to normal space now. And the air she'd brought into the dark universe would return; to normal space immediately it expanded beyond the force-fields.

There would be a sudden, violent, astounding irruption of vapor in emptiness, somewhere in sight of the planet. And a comet's tail can contain no more than a mere few cubic inches of gas, which yet is expanded and ionized and visible as a trail of hundreds of thousands of miles.

A half-mile sphere of air, expanded suddenly, should make such a sight as the stick-men had never seen before. It should fill them with enormous apprehension, simply because of its' strangeness and because it followed closely on the destruction of at least three of their ships.

If they investigated and found the gutted pyramid-ship which should go back to a star-filled cosmos somewhere near the air-cloud, they should be more uneasy still. Because they'd find their ship looted only of sample objects rather than of all its contents, and they'd realized that it had been flung contemptuously away as worthless.

But there was that loot to examine. It was more than ever unfortunate that the Stellaris had no gravity. The booty floated about irritatingly and those who tried to explore its possibilities floated too.

The primitive-seeming condenser remained inscrutable, though its power-leads had surely carried an enormous load. The sample light, however, glowed brightly when connected to the Stellaris' power-lines. But Rod was scornful.

"Mercury-vapor," he said contemptuously, "with a phosphor in the tube around it! We stopped using that sort of thing fifty years ago!"

The drive was again irritating. To all intents and purposes it was a rocket with a jet-speed astronomically high because a pressure-beam was used on it. The light-guns could have been made on Earth. The radar set had elements of novelty but Joe and Rod agreed that men made better ones. The vision-screen was not nearly as good as the ones in the dead city. Rod pushed himself away from all of them.

"They had a drive and a push-pull beam, both of which were quite within our reach," he said sourly. "Their power-supply is over my head and undoubtedly they had some trick for faster-than-light travel. But that's all! In two months we could wipe them out, given this stuff back on Earth! Since we can't get back to Earth we've got to do what we can right here!"

The other things taken from the ship, being non-technical, seemed less important. But there were bales of soft, lustrous fabric, which the girls of the air-plant oh'd and ah'd over. There were chests of prismatically glistening ware of unfamiliar shape—household luxuries of some sort and possibly tableware.

There were jewels. There were art-objects portraying flowers of exquisite delicacy and people—at least, they wore garments—which were neither the people of the planet of the yellow sun nor pyramid-folk nor any other known race.

"Those fiends didn't make this stuff," said Rod grimly. "This must come from the cities of some other poor devils they've wiped out!"

The faint taint of alien smell made his hackles tend to rise. There could never have been friendship between human beings and the people of the pyramid race under the happiest of auspices. This smell made enmity inevitable.

"We'll get to work," said Rod distastefully. "I hate to use a trick of theirs—but we need that drive."

Groping with tractor and pressor-beams was not the most efficient form of space-travel, so the alien drive was to be installed. It was simple enough to float it to a stern-ward position and weld it in place.

It needed a tiny opening for the ejected gas-particles to escape from but their speed would be so great that they'd bore their own exit. It was not so easy to weld braces and a mounting to take up its thrust. Rod left two welders swearing at the difficulty of working when they had no weight.

Kit smiled at him wrily. "Somebody has to take care of you," she said defensively when she saw him frowning. "And you'd have stayed there until you froze! I had to come after you!"

"Thanks," he said heavily. "I'm just worried because there was some stuff on that ship I didn't get. Most of their gadgets were primitive and we can do much better. But—"

"Did you find out how they got their artificial gravity?" she asked hopefully. "I get awfully tired of just floating."

"They didn't have gravity," he protested.

"But I could walk in that ship," she insisted. "I did!"

"That was our—" Rod groaned. "I'm stupid! I'll be back!"

He went to the engine-room. He pulled Joe off the drive-installation and together they set up a tractor in the extreme stern-most compartment of the ship. They widened out its beam. In less than twenty minutes objects and persons within the Stellaris began to settle gently toward the stern.

Thirty seconds later they had perceptible weight and after a minute weight was practically normal everywhere in the ship. Rod climbed then—though the ship was in other-space—back to face Kit in the control-room.

"We could have had gravity all along," he told her ruefully "I only had to put a tractor in the ship's tail to pull us all toward it. Joe's setting up a pressor in the bow to neutralize it outside. So we've got gravity. Now what?"

"Nothing," said Kit wistfully, "except that it would be nice to stop worrying and think about ourselves sometimes."

"I believe," Rod told her, "there's an outside chance even of that!"

He inspected the small tractor locked on the planet of dead cities. Locked as it was, its mount adjusted its focus to allow for varying distance and it was possible to estimate the distance from the planet to the spot at which the Stellaris would return to normal space. It was too close. He put power on the pressor. Joe came in, uncoiling a power-lead.

"The jet drive," he said crisply. "You got a switch you ain't usin'?" He connected the cable and scrupulously labeled the switch.

"Joe," said Rod. "Remember your idea of a push-pull beam that would shoot back if we were beamed? Listen!" He spoke carefully. Joe grinned.

"Sure! I'll fix it. Too bad we ain't got more stuff to work with."

"You might use that isotopic generator we got from the city," Rod suggested. "We can hardly run a cable out."

"Mmmm," said Joe. "It'd be a kinda good idea to try out that power-gadget from the pyramid. I got an idea about that. There's nothin' there to supply power. Nothin's used up. Nothin's breakin' down. Nothin' to happen. But it gave 'em power—in regular space."

"It's dead now." Then Rod stopped. "You think it could be a trick receiver of power from somewhere?"

"That's my hunch," said Joe. "Maybe they got broadcast power."

"Galaxy-wide?" demanded Rod skeptically. "How?"

"You guess," said Joe grinning. "I bet it's a simple trick, though—like their drive."

He nodded and went back toward the engine-room Rod looked at his watch. There was gravity on the ship now and they had at least twice the power they'd started out with. They knew how to make weapons at least equal to any the alien pyramid-folk possessed. He remembered the pencil-beam of heat the looters had used to cut out a wall in the dead city. He'd have to look into that too. Joe was busy. His job would take time.

Rod hunted in the loot for a pencil-beam gun and found one. On the way back he stopped to watch Joe at work on the automatic push-pull weapon. Joe had only such tools as had been on the ship during its construction but he was doing a good job. Rod watched approvingly.

"Joe," he said after a moment "if you sliced that tensor-plate into segments and fixed the feedback so—"

He illustrated.

"If you do that," Rod finished, "it will shoot back only in the direction from which it's shot at. All the power'll go into a relatively narrow beam" Then another idea struck him.

"My sainted aunt! Better than that Joe, set the feed-back like this! There's no pull on a tractor until it hits something. When there's a tractor going out from every segment—better put a commutator on and run through them in turn—when there's a tractor going out and it hits something, that will turn on the push-pull beam! Full-power too!"

Joe grunted. He looked at Rod with a wry expression.

"It's a bright idea all right. We're turnin' the old Stellaris into a warship, sure enough. But we won't be good company for nice people. We're goin' to go roamin' around like a mad dog?"

"A shunt here will take care of that," said Rod. "With the shunt cut in it will ring a bell when a tractor-beam hits. With a power-switch in parallel we can make it shoot back and then tell us what it did."

Joe looked relieved. "Y-yeah. I see that" He grinned twistily. "I'd hate to go around spittin' death-beams just automatic. We'd wind up kinda lonesome, seems like."

Rod went back to the control-room. But the weapon that was developing stayed in his mind. He went back again and asked Joe to make an adjustment so the push-pull power-feed could be cut off from any desired segment so that one part of the weapon's range could be left unblasted if desired.

"I'm acting," he said, almost embarrassed, "as if I thought we might find friends."

Joe grunted. "Well? Those guys in the pyramid-ships are tough babies. Maybe the folks they killed were good guys. There's usually a good guy somewhere to make up for a bad one."

Then he added, "I'll have this thing ready in a coupla hours. You know how we're goin' to mount it outside? No air there now!"

Rod sketched out a notion for that too. Joe grunted again. "That's half an hour more. I'll set those welder-guys workin' on it"

Back to the control-room again. Rod paced up and down, no longer really conscious of the novelty of gravity in space. The ship began to feel like something other than a hulk navigated by makeshift means.

He began to feel less like a shipwreck victim and more like a man in command of a ship. He began, indeed, to think in terms of what could be done to the pyramid-race, instead of the peril they represented.

It was nearer three hours than two before Joe reported the new weapon finished. It had called for very careful work by practically every man on the ship and the using up of I-beams intended for interior partitions.

When it was complete, Rod threw the switch that meant a return to normal space. There was practically no change in sensation as dots of light appeared in the vision-ports and ran through all the colors of the rainbow before they settled to their usual appearance as stars by myriads on every hand. The yellow sun was now very far away. It was only the brightest distant object in the heavens.

They opened the airlock door, with a tractor covering the opening so no air would escape. Focused pressors pushed the new device outside and maneuvered it delicately to a new position. From the ports Rod guided it to the Stellaris' nose and anchored it. And then a tiny tractor pulled back the switch that set the generator into action and the Stellaris was a fighting ship.

For the first time Rod applied the jet-drive. The ship gave a mighty surge forward.

It headed for the yellow star—and battle.