The Black Galaxy

CHAPTER THREE Contact

THAT danger manifested itself within hours. The short-circuit had been repaired—a painter had shifted some welding-rods to make room for a comfortable nap during his lunch-hour, and so had made a contact between two exposed wires from which take-off leads were to have led current elsewhere.

Lights again burned throughout the ship and Rod had turned on all pressor-beams in the rather desperate hope that somewhere within their range there might be some solid substance to give the ship navigability. Actually the most he hoped for was something to drive toward or from so that there could be acceleration and the feel of gravity to hearten the bewildered and frightened people who were the Stellaris' unwilling crew.

They were turned on and almost immediately he thought he felt a slight stirring of the ship. It was too slight to be sure. When he held a coin at arm's length and let it go, it stayed there in mid-air. If anything had been touched by the beams it had been lost—had slipped out of them. The nightmarish feeling of perpetual falling continued. Reason did no good. The sensation was nerve-racking.

Then, suddenly, a flash of unbearable light poured in through the vision-ports. It lasted no longer than a flash-bulb's flare, and was gone again. But Rod dived for a port and stared out. Instantly he blinked, blinded. As he reached the glass window opening upon all of space a second flash came.

It was blindingly bright—but it came from a tiny spot, an infinitesimal spot, no larger than a star-image. A pause, then a third flash came. It would make the ship's hull glow as if incandescent. And the third flash was not from the same place as the second.

Rod was dazed for an instant He had a flash of hope. Then he knew better. He'd had the pressor-beams turned on at random. They'd touched something which had sped on out of the pressor-beam field. Now that something flashed a search-beam. And there was but one possible source for brief unthinkably-bright flashes of light which would last only for thousandths of a second.

Only in space would a light-beam have certain advantages over radar. On Earth radar penetrates clouds and mist. In space there are no hindrances to vision. If there were a space-ship somewhere off there in the void and if it had detected the Stellaris' pressor-beams and dived out of them, it might use radar to locate the Earth-ship.

It would learn more from a single flash of visual light, yielding a photograph, than any scanning-beam could report in hours. The fact was wisdom after the event but it told Rod instantly that there was a space-ship yonder. And no space-ship could be friendly.

He went into frenzied activity. He dived back to the engine-room and swung the pressor-beams in tense and urgent quest. Spreading them wider at first he searched for something for them to react against. He found it He felt the ship stir. He put on more power. The ship surged ahead. More power still and he felt the floor-plates push against his feet He put on more power and more and more...

In seconds the Stellaris was thrusting away from something unseen at a full gravity acceleration. In minutes more it was a gravity and a half. Rod worked grimly with a small pressor, hunting for a focus so the beam could be locked to the object it was to thrust away from.

The acceleration increased. The fan-shaped pressors were pushing against something which came closer despite the repulsive force of the beams the Stellaris played on it. There was an arrogant confidence in the other space-ship, which seemed to be testing out the maximum power the Stellaris could exert. Sweat came out on Rod's forehead.

Then, suddenly, the small pressor found a focus and locked and he struggled feverishly against nearly two gravities to the control-room. Just as he laid his hands on the force-field switches there was a sudden sickening loss of all but the most minute sensation of weight as the other ship darted out of the pressor-beam and came flashing up beside the unwieldy Stellaris.

Rod had one glimpse of it as he flung the force-field switches home. It was pyramidal. It blanked out a triangular patch of stars. Rod felt a momentary deathly giddiness—and then the force-fields closed in. The Stellaris' ports went ebony-black and it was again in the dark universe.

Whatever weapon the enemy ship intended to use did not follow into the dark cosmos, but the Earth-ship's focused pressor did not penetrate its own force-fields and thrust and thrust and thrust—with all the power Rod dared to put into its coils.

The hulk went streaking madly through the utter blackness of its private cosmos for second after second—and nothing happened—and then for minute after minute, then for hour after hour.

For a long time Rod stood grimly at the incomplete instrument board, expecting any instant to feel that deadly giddiness and then death. Some weapon had been used against the Stellaris and he felt sick and weak and ill.

But after a long time he went down to the engine-room again and examined the single small pressor-beam he'd focused and locked on the pyramidal ship and its point of focus was very, very far beyond the point at which it had been set. He could not guess the distance. There had been no chance to calibrate the controls. But it was very, very, very far away indeed.

After twelve hours the pressor could no longer adjust to the increasing distance. The pyramidal ship went beyond its range. The locked focus went off and the ship hurtled blindly on through black emptiness.

"They haven't got our force-fields," Rod told Kit, grimly. There's that much gained. They couldn't follow us when we vanished. At least we can play hide-and-seek with them!"

Kit had heard from him about the momentary glimpse he'd had of the other craft.

"That feeling we had," she said with a shudder. "I thought I was dying. So did everybody else."

"We probably were," he said evenly. "If it had lasted a fraction of a second longer they'd have caught the ship. They'd have examined our corpses and they'd probably have reported and had the records searched. They'd know that people of our structure should have set off a gadget on Calypso—only we didn't I suspect we're not the only lucky people right now!"

An hour later he said abruptly, "I'm going to cut the field. That ship is a long way off. First I'm going to set the pressor-beams at a wide angle as a warning system But we ought to do something better...

He hand-set the beams so that the ship would be surrounded by a shield of repulsion on every side. Any ship or planet or even meteroite that might be within range when the Stellaris returned to normal space would bring about a repulsion of the ship itself.

Having no detection-instruments, they could tell of the nearness of a solid object they could not see by the stirring of the ship itself. Then he threw the switches again, to let the Stellaris drop back into the universe of stars.

A myriad-myriad suns surrounded them, each so remote that it was but a pin-point of light Again there was no familiar portion of the galaxy within view. There was the Milky Way, to be sure, but even that seemed to have changed its aspect. It was markedly brighter on one side than the other—and Earth is not too far, on a cosmic scale, from the center of the First Galaxy.

The Stellaris had fled at uncountable multiples of the speed of light while in the dark universe. It was certainly many thousands of light-years from Earth, with no possible indication either of its first course or of its second in departing from it.

Rod stayed in normal space for four hours, and the pressorbeams told of no solid object within four light-hours' distance. Grimly, he went back to the dark universe. The kinetic energy of the Stellaris' acquired velocity remained.

In normal space it meant a certain speed in an unknown direction. In the dark universe that speed was multiplied. He kept the ship in blackness for half an hour, browbeating an electrician meanwhile into beginning the assembly of a short-short-wave receiver.

Out into normal space again—and still no star within view which seemed nearer than any other. He had a course of action planned out, which was almost hopeless but not quite. He went back into the dark universe once more.

Six times within the next twenty-four he came back to normal space. Five times the Stellaris was utterly alone in the center of mockingly remote stars.

But the sixth time—and it was only chance—the Stellaris winked into being in normal space and there was a giant yellow sun perceptibly nearer. It had at least a visible disk and flaring prominences leaped and curled outward from its sides. More, there were planets. No less than four were plainly visible and a monster world—snow-covered from pole to pole—swam within naked-eye view from the vision-ports. He waited with taut nerves beside the force-field switches.

A bellowing voice came from somewhere below him in the ship. "No-o-o-o radar!"

That was the electrician beside his short-short-wave receiver. Only voice signals could be used in the uncompleted ship because there was no intercommunication system in being.

Rod waited. The pressor-beams spread out; out and out at the speed of light Rod was hollow-eyed and jumpy. There was a stubble of beard on his chin. He had been doing four men's work under heavier responsibility than any man or men should ever be required to accept because he believed that on the safety or utter destruction of the Stellaris hung the safety of the human race. But he had no choice. The voice came again from below, "No-o-o-o radar!" The Stellaris then, was not being scanned. Not yet, anyhow. The ship stirred ever so slightly. The pressor-beams, fanning out, had reached the snow-covered planet. Rod called orders and the beams were narrowed.

The repulsion was from that planet only. Unless a spaceship were in exact direct line between the Stellaris and the planet there was nothing in space that was menacing. The odds were good. But Rod waited a long half-hour, with the "No-o-o-o radar!" at regular intervals, before he even began to relax.

"I guess we're safe for the moment," he said wearily. "We'll have to take a chance anyhow. Kit, we want a tractor put on that planet yonder—not the near one but the next one in toward this sun. We'll time it, of course."

Even then he waited tensely. The invisible, narrowed tractor-beam reached out at a hundred-and-eighty-two-thousand miles a second Four minutes—five—then a perceptible jerk. The planet was in the neighborhood of fifty-five million miles away but now the ship was being drawn toward it.

"Rod," said Kit anxiously, "you're terribly tired! Can't I stand watch for you? It'll be hours and hours before we get there!"

"It'll be days," said Rod wearily. "We'd better stay in normal space for this trip. But I'll fix a gadget If those pyramid devils can't follow us into the dark universe we can fool them at that."

He surrendered the controls to her. He improvised a spring which would throw on the force-fields and keep them on if the person on watch should be killed by a weapon like that they had experienced.

"Get somebody to hold this," he said tiredly. "There's enough pull to give us the feeling of gravity. And I've got a sort of idea."