The Black Galaxy

CHAPTER ONE Grounded!

THE Chairman of the Space Project Committee was very polite. But he was a politician and Rod Cantrell had been a soldier and was a very famous man and all politicians know that soldiers and other practical men can be most obstinate when politics shows clearly what should be done.

"Permit me to congratulate you," the Chairman said blandly, "on your promotion."

"On being kicked upstairs?" asked Rod drily. "I'm not pleased. It looks to me—since that's what I came to protest about—that I'm promoted to something like a dummy job so that the work I want to do and the decisions I need to make will be made by people who think more of elections than of really important things."

The Chairman of the Space Committee laughed appreciatively. But he made a mental black mark. This man would not be amenable to political pressure. Perhaps he had better be a little more thoroughly deprived of authority—and given more prestige to make up for it.

"Oh, come, come!" he said indulgently. "What have you to complain of? The ship you're building has certainly all the funds anyone could need!"

"I think," Rod said flatly, "that we should postpone any attempt at interplanetary travel until we get some interplanetary weapons." As the Chairman beamed at him he went on doggedly.

"I designed the drive-units for the ship we're building, for the one now under construction. I made the first interplanetary flights—the only ones made to date. But I urge the postponement of exploration until we have some defense. The weapons we have now would be useless against an enemy with spaceships."

The Chairman beamed on and offered Rod a cigar. Rod curtly refused it.

"Yet," mused the Chairman amiably, "you did not encounter any other space-ships in your three interplanetary flights, you cannot name possible enemies and you have not any real evidence that this—ah—hypothetical enemy you speak of has weapons superior to our own. After all, we have a gift for destruction ourselves! And remember, the idea of space-conquest has caught the imagination of the public!"

Rod set his jaws. He was prepared to be made ridiculous if he could bring about some measure of defense against the dangers he foresaw. But a politician could not be expected to believe anything dangerous if it brought in votes. And the proven possibility of travel, not only to other planets but to the stars, had roused enormous popular enthusiasm.

"There were Martians, once," said Rod. "There aren't anymore. They had a civilization that in some ways was higher than ours. You've seen the proofs of that. And they were wiped out. They simply vanished leaving their cities to fall in ruins behind them."

"You assume that your—ah—hypothetical space-travellers destroyed them?"

"I do," said Rod. He added with some irony, "You must remember that I saw the dead Martian cities with the least stray possession left in place and what I believe were the remains of the Martians lying where they dropped. And I saw that pyramid on Calypso, which surely no men made. It was made by the race I'm talking about, which I haven't seen, which I can't name or describe, but which made it to lure the first man to see it into sending them a signal that space-travel had been achieved on Earth."

"Yet you did not even photograph it," said the Chairman, tolerantly. "And you insist that we devote research and money to weapons—when the world is very weary of weapons and of

War—instead of upon space-travel, which has filled humanity with optimism it has never known before! My dear sir, it would be political suicide!"

"The point is," said Rod bitterly, "that not to do it may be physical suicide!"

"Now, now." The Chairman beamed cordially. "I shall confer with the rest of the Committee. You have just had a promotion and perhaps we can manage another. We are fully aware of your services in the past and you are surely the only interplanetary voyager, so you cannot be contradicted. But you ask the making of a very unpopular decision! Suppose we raise you another step in rank?"

Rod stood up, rather pale.

"I'm not trying blackmail," he said bitterly. "I'm trying to drive some sense into your head! There are more important things than winning elections, and staying alive is one of them! I can resign my commission and speak publicly of what I fear."

The Chairman's smile remained, though he spoke acidly.

"I am afraid the popular impression would be that you wish to prevent further space-voyages, to keep the credit of being the only man who had ever crossed space. I am sure that—ah—other officers who are your equals in rank would look at it that way. I shall discuss the matter with my Committee. Meanwhile you are, of course, under regulation obligations not to make public statements without official clearance. We will see about another promotion for you."

He bowed Rod out, beaming at him benevolently. And Rod was sick with apprehension. He'd wanted to have the first real spaceship capable of putting up a fight. He believed it might need to fight. But anyhow he was still in command of the construction of the space-ship now building and he'd command it when it took off from Earth.

Maybe he could find more conclusive proof of the peril he believed in. Most likely, indeed, on the Moon. The central peak of Tycho would be the logical place to look for proof. If he could show a group of scientists that proof.... But as it turned out he wasn't to be allowed to do anything so sensible.

Two days later he had his orders. He had a promotion. And all real authority was taken from him. He was again kicked upstairs, to a desk, and he was transferred to another branch of the service. He received the warmest possible thanks for the value of his contributions to the project from which he was now relieved. He went sick all over. And when he told Kit Bowen about it he could have wept with impotent fury. She looked at him indignantly.

"It's not fair!" she cried. "You designed the ship, Rod, and you're the only one who will really know how to run it, anyway, and—and—"

Rod tried to grin at her, but he couldn't. It was too important Much more important than his own feelings in the matter.

But he said somehow through stiff lips, "I'll show my successor everything I know, Kit. And I'll try to make him believe in what I'm worried about"

Kit stamped her feet. Then she turned away to keep him from seeing that she wanted to cry. But she didn't really understand the gone feeling inside of Rod at that.

They stood beside the hulk of the Stellaris, which was just two-thirds completed. The ship was a hundred-odd feet long and forty-some through. It was a space-ship—the first vessel ever built on Earth to navigate the regions between the stars. Rod Cantrell had designed it after making the first human interplanetary flights in a modified captured weapon taken from the rebels in the war of the Total State against the Earth Government

He'd seen the possibility of a space-drive in a device that had been created only for mass murder and the drive he'd worked out was no makeshift calling for centuries of development before men could aspire to the stars. His first flight in the toy-sized altered weapon took him to the Moon with absolute ease and safety.

His second was equally safe and precise and it took him to Mars. He brought back photographs and artifacts for proof. And the third flight, aimed at a more distant objective to check the physical constants governing the space-drive, had reached Calypso, the largest of Jupiter's moons.

That makeshift craft, though, could only make flights as stunts. The Stellaris had been begun to carry an adequate crew of scientists for the study, first of Sol's other planets, ultimately for roaming the stars so that human colonies could begin to spread throughout the Galaxy. Rod Cantrell had been given charge of the ship's construction, and he had been promised her command.

But now he'd been handed orders from the Space Project Commission which dashed all his hopes. He was not only relieved of the duty of supervising the Stellaris' construction but was bluntly informed that he would not even be a member of her crew when she left Earth—because of his wild tale of an inimical race, possessing space-ships, which would threaten the peace of Earth.

Kit said, gulping, "It's not fair, Rod! It's stupid! It's unjust! You deserve—"

"That doesn't matter," said Rod. "What does matter is what can happen. This decision is on account of my report on that pyramid on Calypso."

"But you did the right thing!" insisted the girl. "There wasn't anything else to do!"

"That was my opinion," said Rod, "but the Commission doesn't agree. I think they feel that I consider myself too famous and that I'd like to stop space-travel so I'd stay the only man who ever achieved it."

"Nonsense!" scoffed Kit

"They've suspected that report from the beginning," Rod added. "They've never allowed any reference to the pyramid to be published. They said it would cause public alarm. Of course, it would imperil their jobs.

"Their places were created to encourage space exploration. If they discouraged it, instead, the Commission will be scrapped and they'll have no salaries. I hate to think of so great a risk being run just so some political appointees can stay on salary."

Kit Bowen made a scornful sound. She wasn't exactly engaged to Rod, because engagements were no longer considered matters that existed formally to be announced. But they had planned to marry. Rod knew now that it had become doubtful He could have played it more or less safe, and guided a scientific expedition in the Stellaris in search of proof of what he knew.

But he'd tried it the right way, with full reports and an effort to throw the Committee behind research for defense. As a result, he was kicked upstairs. He'd never have another chance. And to be a permanent desk-officer—Kit wouldn't care, but he would.

Riveters pounded on the Stellaris' metal skin like monster woodpeckers hunting giant grubs. They were putting on the flotation-bulges, designed to make her float merrily, even if she landed in a sea of liquid ammonia.

The air-lock construction-doors of the ship opened. Electricians came out and headed for the commissary for lunch. Two girls, no doubt assistants in biology working on the air-purifying plant, also came out of the lock, chattering, and went briskly to the same place.

The air-system for the ship was already installed and was being tested by being run to purify the air used by workmen on the inside of the already-sealed hull. The ship's corridors were still bare metal though and it would be many weeks yet before the living quarters were fitted out, the computers and astrogation instruments put in, even the first of the ship's stores accumulated.

But the field-generators and tractor and pressor beams were in and had already been tried out. The ship would positively go anywhere in the galaxy that her crew demanded, though she was the first Earth-ship ever built for space-travel. Only Rod knew that she wasn't the first space-ship. There were others.

The thing was that the crews of the other ships, roaming among the stars, weren't human crews and they wouldn't welcome human competition.

He'd learned that from a silvery-metal pyramid, some thirty feet of seamless stuff on every side. It was out on Calypso, on the very peak of the highest and most singular of the mountains of that sub-satellite. It had not been built on Calypso and certainly men hadn't made it but the creatures who had made it knew that men existed.

There were bas-reliefs of human forms upon its brightly-gleaming metal sides and there were two human-size metal doors that could obviously be opened by simply turning the handles of two human-sized locks. Its location was one that would certainly be visited by any human explorer of Calypso, if only so that he could leave a record of his visit there for later voyagers to find. And that so-human pyramid, suggesting earlier visitors still, would almost irresistibly impel the first man to reach Calypso to turn the door-handles and go in.

But Rod Cantrell hadn't done that. Perhaps because of war experience, perhaps because he didn't like the artwork. He cut into the structure with a thermite torch, leaving the doors alone. He found it packed with machinery which surely wasn't of human design, and he struggled to understand it

In the end he found a power-storage unit that was far and away beyond anything of human manufacture. He cut the power-leads and traced connections. And then he caused the doors to open. In opening they swung contacts and controls and he saw that they'd have sent the power—some hundreds of millions of kilowatts—in a mighty surge of energy through a device he didn't begin to understand but which was obviously some sort of radiation-generator.

And instantly thereafter the whole pyramid and its machines began to smoke and were glowing faintly by the time he got out of it. It melted itself and dissolved in a pool of melted metal—which exploded when the cut-off power-unit blew. So that he had nothing but a verbal description to offer with his report—and he wasn't quite believed.