The Black Galaxy

CHAPTER FOURTEEN New Tactics

FOR hour after hour the Stellaris plunged blindly through the utter blackness of other-space with its battered, shattered robot-twin in tow. Rod pulled the ship away from the system of the yellow sun by the tractor long ago fixed on an unseen object in darkness' deepest heart.

He could have used the jet-drive but there would have been a trail of vapor—tenuous enough, but possibly followable—when the ejected molecules of gas fell back to normality beyond the ship's force-fields. Even then the Stellaris would be unreachable but there was no point in giving the enemy any clues at all to the nature of its security.

As time went on and acceleration continued the ship reached the speed of light and multiples of it Inertia had quite other values here than in the inhabited universe. But whatever they pulled toward was solid and Rod checked its distance by sending pressors to strike it, estimating their time of travel to the strange object.

The small round folk talked interminably among themselves. Joe the electrician, passing by an especially intent conclave, was halted and hands laid upon him. After seconds of listening he sat down absorbedly.

Half an hour later Rod was down in the engine-room working with tractors and pressors that had no wired connections to the control-room. Joe came in search of him.

"Hey!" said Joe. "Those little guys, they got an idea about the way the pyramid-ships go faster than light!"

"Yes?"

"They got it figured out mathematical," said Joe, "that there could be a kinda stuff that ain't natural. That hadn't oughta exist but could get made—or maybe could make itself in a star or something It wouldn't—uh—react to our magnetism an' it wouldn't be pulled by gravity or anything like that"

"It ought to fall into other-space," objected Rod.

"Only," Joe explained, "it could be alloyed with natural stuff when it got made. And if they had that kinda stuff a little of it would mix with a lot of other stuff and y'could make a ship of it. And that phoney stuff, it would absorb gravity an' magnetism an' so on an' make it damp itself out.

"That's why it wouldn't be pulled by it. But the energy'd have to go somewhere so it'd show up as motion. That's what they say and they say the figures prove it" he added hastily. "It'd be like soaking up heat an' getting electricity. Y'see?"

"Partly," said Rod. Something clicked in a pressor-coil. He looked at the distance-adjustment on the pressor-beam mount He compared it with a similar guide on a tractor mounting. He began, very delicately, to vary the two together so that neither was subjected to excessive strain.

"So all they'd have to do would be to line up the motion an' they'd have a whale of a drive!" said Joe. "Actually, these guys say that if you got the stuff movin' fast enough it'd start movin' faster on its own account. They say those pyramid-ships could have that stuff in 'em, in all the metal an' such.

"So that all they have to do is pile on their drive-jets until they're goin' fast enough an' they pop into all kindsa speed. It's like runnin' fast enough to catch a train. Once you got holda it, you ain't runnin', you're ridin'.

"Only the train they catch is runnin' all ways at once. Whichever way they want to go, when they' goin' fast enough all of a sudden they're ridin' 'm an' how! Then all they got to do is slow down when they want to get off."

Rod straightened up and stared. Then he bent over again.

"There's more to it. It has to neutralize increase in mass with velocity and a few little things like that," he observed, "but it does make a certain amount of sense."

"Yeah? But—"

"Ask 'em to figure out two others things," said Rod. "One is how those rats broadcast power, if smashing the generator will cut it off and how fast the cut-off will spread. And the other—I'm asking them to dig into it because I gave them the theory and they've time to work it out and it'll need time and sound thinking—the other is how to make force-fields that will drop matter from this space into ours.

"We can take stuff from our space and drop it into this and hold it here. When we cut out fields it drops back. Now I'm going to want to reverse that process and I think I could do it in time but I'm going quietly mad with stuff that doesn't need that much brains and is even more urgent."

He went back to his pressor and tractor-beams, while Joe returned to the conference of the small people with a puzzled frown on his face.

The ship was crowded but the colonists were civilized and likeable. They crowded themselves to leave room so the humans wouldn't feel crowded. Their women zestfully took over some of the looted fabrics and presently presented Kit with a costume faithfully copying the cut and fit of the one she wore, but breathtaking—in part because of their use of some of the art-objects of unknown origin. The other four girls instantly begged to be similarly attired.

The men conferred and politely asked leave to use an empty store-room for a laboratory. There they conferred endlessly and one of them made computations on an extraordinarily simple machine from the colony and then worked painstakingly with Joe to transfer the equations from his notation to human mathematical terminology.

Rod juggled his beams and juggled them and adjusted them ever more delicately. In the end the Stellaris made what might be called a landing on something large and solid in the depths of other-space. Lights thrown out the ports disclosed a rough, seemingly curdled surface of a dark and apparently metallic substance.

Its size was unguessable but it was huge. It had, apparently, no gravitational attraction for the ship—or the drone—and it was plainly not a type of matter normally found in the universe of stars.

When Rod had made tests, he called a conference of all on board. He put his hands on the colony leader so that all could understand him.

"I want to make a report," he told them grimly. "We were licked in our last encounter with the pyramid-ships. But we're vastly better off than we were. Putting extra vegetation in the flotation-bulges has kept our air pure. We've plenty of power and plenty of food. I consider that we can live indefinitely in this ship while we hunt for a planet we can live on.

"We can possibly establish a colony the pyramid-folk will never find. Certainly we can now build more ships—given materials—which can elude if not defeat those fiends. I don't think it likely that we can ever find our way back to Earth."

A twittering interrupted him. A round little man spoke. Rod understood, but Joe—also touching one of the little folk—translated truculently.

"He says he's been askin' all of us all we knew about the stars we see from Earth. He says he ain't sure, but he thinks there's a chance he can pilot us back to Earth."

There were fifteen humans on the ship. Twelve of them—Rod and Kit and Joe were silent—made a lot of noise. When it ended, Rod went on doggedly. "But back on Earth they didn't believe in danger from the pyramid-people. Whether they'll believe us now or not, I don't know. Certainly it'll take time for them to get ready to fight—if they do.

"But we're ready to fight now. We just got licked, and badly, but we did so much damage that there's a chance the pyramid-people leaders will decide to end their danger immediately by wiping out all races that even promise to achieve civilization. That's what I'm afraid of. If we go on fighting it's going to be bad but—"

He stopped, uncertain what to say next. Joe stood up.

"Anybody that argues," he said belligerently, "is going to get his head knocked off. I seen the dead bodies on that planet"

There was silence. Presently Rod said, "Then I suppose we'll get to work. We're going to make a new weapon and then we're going to find out where those pyramid-people have their home planet. Then we're going to smash it and them. And we'll all probably get gray hair in the process."

There was no discussion. Later the colony leader of the little people came to Rod and touched him and asked earnestly. "Why did you discuss? Are you not the leader? Why did you explain and why did your friend threaten?"

"That," said Rod drily, "is what we call democracy."