The Black Galaxy

CHAPTER SIXTEEN Nova!

EVERYTHING was quite ready when the Stellaris went a bare thousand miles from the strange thing it had made of an asteroid, and returned to normal space. Then, with the jet-drive to set its course and establish a velocity, it dived back to darkness to increase that velocity, and came out yet again into the space where suns flamed grandly, surrounded by their families of planets. They were near their destination.

This also was a sol-type sun and it had seven planets. The nearest was red-hot from its proximity to its sun. The second was an arid waste, the third a small and pock-harked cinder. But the fourth was green, with great oceans and clouds floating above its continents and ice-caps at its poles.

"There is a race here," said apologetic twitterings in Rod's ear. "It is still barbarous, knowing metals but using no power, according to the markings we deciphered on the star-map. It will be long before it should cause the pyramid-people concern. Perhaps we may help and guide the people."

Rod said nothing. He made a planetary approach with something approaching professional skill. In hardly more than minutes the Stellaris settled down into atmosphere.

"Rod!" cried Kit. "A city!"

She pointed and Rod swung the ship—so unwieldy in air—into a near approach. It reached the city. It hovered over the city. It was a city, past question. Its ways were paved with quarried stone, its buildings were of massive, cyclopean architecture and it was barbarously magnificent.

But it was definitely barbarous. The great buildings were palaces and temples. The people lived in small structures, most of which plainly had gardens attached to them. There were cultivated fields and pasture-lands outside it. There were crude wooden ships tied to the wharves where a river wandered through it.

As the Stellaris descended Rod saw half-furled sails. Sails had not been used on Earth except for sport in two hundred years. But he saw no movement.

There was no movement

The Stellaris touched ground. Very grim indeed, Rod led the way to the airlock. He opened it.

There was a smell in the air. It was the smell of death. "These people were hardly more than savages," said Rod very quietly, "and they were alive no more than two or three days ago. They haven't even motors! By what we can see they must have lighted their homes with flames, burning the fat of animals, or petroleum.

"They had no fliers, no ground-vehicles except—" he pointed—"that was a vehicle, with an animal pulling it. And these people were killed because some day they might have made a space-ship. The pyramid-folk are frightened. We've frightened them.

"They're wiping out all intelligent life that can challenge them even a thousand years from now! If you want to spare yourselves the grief of killing these fiends, go ahead! Get out! Quickly! I've got work to do!"

But none of the small people moved to land.

Their leader touched hands with Rod.

"We have decided again," his shrill notes said. "We fight. Not to avenge our dead but to protect those who will never know that we lived. Please! Make haste!"

The Stellaris rocketed skyward and went into blackness, then sped madly to the dark asteroid with her jet-drive and tractors together striving for the utmost speed.

In an hour the force-fields were shrunk so that only the Stellaris was included in them. But before that time and under their shielding, the foil-rolls were unrolled. As they touched the dark mass they were welded inseparably to its surface. The other devices needed also were welded fast and the Stellaris anchored herself solidly with tractors, and a pressor irrevocably thrust home the master-switch.

Instantly from the ports of the ship—from which glaring lights had shone—there was only the blackness of empty dark-space. The asteroid had vanished. But the Stellaris remained anchored to it and the Stellaris stayed in dark-space. The ship was with its creation but in dimensions parallel to those of the universe of stars. There was reason.

There were three vision-plates in the ship's control-room, which reported from the asteroid as they had reported from the drone. Starlight shone on the metal of the ungainly object's surface for the first time since time began.

The report the vision-eyes sent to the dark universe was beyond all expectations and beyond the experience of any save members of the race which made shining ships and used them for unwarned murder. It was terrifying. And it was sublime.

The asteroid reached normal space with a velocity which was inherent—and which was above the critical speed of the alloy-plates now welded to it. Those plates bit hard into the substance of the new universe. They were of the stuff which sent pyramids at deadly multiples of the speed of light.

Other-space matter and normal-space matter, alloyed together, were an unholy compound which consumed the energy of gravitation and of magnetism and of the energy which is electrostatic stress. Perhaps it even consumed the energy of light. And all of that energy it transformed into motion, having a velocity in miles-per-second to begin with.

It sped at a mounting speed which turned all visible starlight to violet then turned all heat-rays to blue. And still its rate of progress grew. It sped faster until light itself had no meaning and radio-frequency radiations were light and then even they were nothing.

It hurtled onward and the television-screens saw all the universe in that unimaginable glow which is the slow pulsation of the hearts of suns, taking hours to the beat, but now raised in frequency to a strange and eerie glow. And still the speed increased.

Rod worked controls, his eyes shining like coals. There would be but one chance to use this weapon, this bolt of other-matter from another space, traveling at a rate beside which light-speed was imperceptible. The accuracy of the shot must be absolute. There must be no deviation of the thousands of a hair. And the time was very, very short.

Actually, the thing happened in seconds.

The sun the aliens' star-maps pictured lay ahead. It was a giant sun, so huge and fierce that the aliens' inhabited planet lay two-hundred-million miles away. It was toward that sun that the other-space projectile sped. It was miles in diameter, but it could be controlled.

It moved at five thousand times the speed of light but Rod had precious moments in which to observe its course and aim it, seconds in which to adjust the aim, fractions of seconds in which to make sure.

Then he cut loose the anchoring tractors and the Stellaris floated on while the hurtling thing went unguided.

The Earth-ship returned to normal space far beyond the solar system of the pyramid-makers. And the thing was already finished. But the light had not yet reached this spot.

Those on the Earth-ship had time to line the ports, staring, and see the giant sun and even to glimpse the shining specks which were its worlds before the spectacle began.

They did not see the missile strike. No eyes could follow the mass which struck at thousands of millions of miles per second, with all the stored energy in its impact that it had absorbed from the linkage-fields across its path. They could not even tell where it had struck.

They saw only that the great sun swelled suddenly and swelled again with a monstrous and terrible deliberation, then seemed to pour out into all space as if to devour it utterly. The timing was like the seemingly slow-motion process of water falling over Victoria Nyanza falls.

Actually it was of incredible vehemence and unthinkable force. The free energy within the sun had suddenly been tripled by the arrival of that supernal missile, which sank to the sun's very heart before its atoms could explode.

The sun literally detonated. Flaming ravening star-stuff shot outward at thousands of miles-per-second. A planet was engulfed—a second. A third, fourth, fifth and sixth.

Those on the Stellaris watched the sun become a nebula, a mass of incandescent gas filling a globe five-thousand-million miles across. And no planet lived in that inferno—no gigantic generator of power, able to supply thousands of murder-fleets light-millennia away, could still be functioning. The planet of the pyramid-ships was gone. Its sun had blown itself to vapor.

And no pyramid-ship anywhere in the galaxy had power.

Those in motion past the speed of light stayed in motion. There was no power in them to brake below the critical speed of the alloy of which they were made. Those below the speed of light had no power to rise to it. Those in planetary atmospheres fell heavily in the ground. Those grounded stayed aground.

But most of the murder-fleets out upon the errand of wholesale massacre so lately commanded and not yet completed—most of them drifted on unendingly. A few suns acquired small fleets of pyramidal satellites. One or two planets captured brightly-polished moons.

And of course there were some meteoric falls, which, when excavated, disclosed half-fused artifacts and dead aliens with bulbous heads and attenuated arms and legs. But most of the pyramid-ships simply drifted on—and on—and on.

Forever.

When the Stellaris got back to her own solar system it was necessary to be very careful. Not because of fear from any Earth-defense but lest she do damage. The bow-weapon had to be turned off completely. Tractor and pressor scanning-beams could not be used, of course, when nearing a planet with so precariously poised a civilization as Earth's.

And then it was distinctly quaint that as she lowered heavily into atmosphere Earth-Government planes darted upon her, firing furiously, and had to be pushed away with pressors as the ship went tiredly to ground.

Then there were investigations and vast excitement and much indignation. Rod Cantrell, said solemn individuals in Earth Government, had departed from Earth without authorization in the only vessel capable of space-navigation and defense of the human race against certain strange alien spaceships which had plunged to their destruction upon the Earth's surface.

Who knew, said these indignant people, how many more alien ships were floating about outside the Earth's atmosphere, preparing for invasion and the capture of Sol's fairest planet?

Rod said curtly that there were no more alien ships about. Glowering a little, he made his report. Those who had been of the unwilling crew of the Stellaris substantiated it. The small round people of the planet of dead cities told in their fluting voices what had become of their race. Earth Government gave them a space-ship, ultimately, and they went back to build up their civilization anew.

In the end the court-martial at which this testimony came out was ended and Rod Cantrell was formally absolved of all penalty for having been on board the Stellaris when a short-circuit threw it into space.

He was cleared of all censure for having saved the ship and those in it and no blame—so the verdict ran—lay upon him for having fought the murderers of a thousand civilizations and for having certainly prevented the ending of humanity.

And then, as a separate and necessarily slow process, there began the tedious, red-tape-filled process of rewarding him. In the course of a year or so he would undoubtedly be given a medal.

But he was not concerned. A month after the Stellaris' return to Earth there were fluting sounds in the anteroom of the quarters he occupied. The leader of the colonists from the planet of dead cities wished to confer with him. Rod liked the little round man but he begged off.

Kit said, "Why'd you do that, Rod? He's a nice little person."

"I know," said Rod. "But d'you remember how little attention I paid to you while we were off in the Stellaris?" "I certainly do!" said Kit.

"I was busy," Rod explained amiably. "But I just got leave for our marriage and a honeymoon. And I thought that since I neglected you so much before—well—I thought I'd put everything else aside and pay a little attention to you now."

THE END