The Mysterious Planet

CHAPTER 4 Distress Signal

THERE WAS NO SIGN that the black ship had seen them, though it must have had radars as sensitive as their own, judging by the other scientific marvels they had witnessed. Bob kept wondering about them. It was as if some great genius had turned to crime and put the pirates ahead of the rest of the system.

But he knew that was ridiculous. A genius would have no need to turn to crime—he could make more by remaining lawful, and with much less risk. The only reason many of the great scientists were not rich was that they preferred pure research to the type of life needed to amass a fortune. And the idea of a scientist mad enough to enjoy crime was silly; anything so warping to his thoughts would make him anything but a level-headed scientist.

Besides, great inventions were seldom the result of one man’s work. It took a genius, plus teams of trained men, plus an amazing amount of equipment.

Maybe the miracles weren’t miracles, he suddenly thought. If the Ionian had been captured before… then the “torpedoes” could have been harmless magnesium-oxygen flares. The melting nose of the ship could have been thermite placed inside and set off by radio, and the almost instantaneous removal of crew and freight would have been a pure fake.

He tried to call out the idea. Then his eyes located the telescope screen, and he relaxed. It didn’t account

for all the facts. The ship was still blasting along, without any normal trail of rocket exhaust.

That couldn’t be faked! Anyhow, what good would it be to attempt to trap the Lance of Deimos, unless the pirate ship really did have superior weapons?

He gave up the idea reluctantly, but it simply didn’t explain enough. He let his eyes stay on the screen, watching as the black ship grew. It was hard to see— but there were a lot of stars beyond it, and it blocked those off as it passed; also, even the blackest black paint couldn’t be as dark as raw space, and its outlines showed dimly.

They were within a hundred miles of the ship when it first seemed to notice them. It was Anderson who caught the trouble, and pointed it out. The black ship was no longer growing; it was actually getting smaller!

Then they all saw it. The ship ahead began to shrink rapidly. In a minute it was half the size it had been. Hoeck blinked, and punched feebly at the calculator suspended above his horizontal seat. His voice was unbelieving. “Acceleration over fifty gravities!”

Such a burst of sheer drive should have crushed flat any life inside in seconds. It would make a normal man seem to weigh over four tons! And no ship in the Solar Federation Navy could do better than ten gravities of acceleration, even for a second.

Commander Griffith cut their own acceleration to a minimum, until their weight seemed no greater than it had been on Mars. “Prepare proton rifle!” he called.

“Proton gun ready.” The reply came back at once.

Griffith called down the co-ordinates of the other ship’s location. It was a tiny thing now, but still visible in the radar screen. “Fire!” he ordered, when the co-ordinates were checked.

Almost instantaneously, a terrific burst of fire seemed to erupt in the telescope screen where the black ship had been. Then it faded, and the black ship was a tiny spot, surrounded by a blue haze that turned red and disappeared. Again the proton gun fired, and again. The results were the same.

Something seemed to kick at the Lance of Deimos. Bob suddenly was tossed back of his seat as the ship jerked sharply, its nose tilting sharply. The kicks came again, one for each blast that had been fired from the proton gun.

This time it was Bob who took a wild guess, culled out of all the fantastic stories and articles he had read. “Pressor rays!” he gasped. Nobody had ever figured out what tractor and pressor rays were, beyond the fact that they pulled or pushed, but that hadn’t stopped writers from speculating on them.

Hoeck snorted, but Commander Griffith nodded doubtfully. “It’s as good an explanation as any. Something pushed against us, anyhow—and it wasn’t an accident. I might guess some kind of rebound, but the jolts came faster than we fired the proton gun. That was a warning!”

Then abruptly the pip that marked the black ship on the radar screen disappeared. It had been shrinking to a point, but this was different. It was as if someone had drawn a curtain across space, cutting off the ship from them.

Another miracle! Now the ship could neutralize the radar beam. That meant it either had to absorb the beam or become completely transparent to it—and one was as impossible as the other.

“Delayed reaction from the proton blasts,” Anderson said doubtfully. “Maybe he blew up.”

Commander Griffith shook his head. For the first time Bob could remember, his father looked completely unsure of himself. “No—you know that couldn’t explain it. The fragments would show up on the radar just as strongly as the ship did. He just neutralized our beam.”

He sat staring at the controls and the screen, obviously hating to give up, and yet with nothing to do.

They couldn’t locate the ship; if they did, they couldn’t catch up with it. Even if they were right beside it, their best weapons were harmless, while it could play games with them by sending harmless little jolts to tell them to go away and stop being bothersome.

Finally Griffith sighed heavily, and shook himself. “I guess we write ourselves off as failures,”

he summed it up. “Plot me a course back to the rest of Wing Nine, Hoeck. We’d better stop chasing hobgoblins and get back to our mission.”

There was nothing else to do, Bob realized, but it didn’t end bis disappointment. He’d grown up with the idea that any Navy ship was a match for any number of pirates and one of the favorite games at the Academy had been based on elaborate movements of pieces on a board where all were pirates except one Navy cruiser. Now, in his first encounter, he was going down heavily in defeat—hopelessly outclassed by a single pirate ship.

It wouldn’t make a pretty story to tell! And it wasn’t good to think about Hoeck was just looking up from his calculations when a signal buzzed from the intercom.

The Commander pressed down one of the buttons automatically. “Control.”

“Sparks,” the voice said quickly. “Commander, I’ve just got another message from the Ionian!”

“The what?”

“The Ionian, sir. It was full of static, but someone was yelling for help and complaining about being stranded by pirates without air. He didn’t know the standard code at all, sir, and his power was fading pretty fast.” Sparks was obviously doubtful about it himself. “I tried to call back, but I got no answer.”

“Could anyone still be on board?” Griffith asked Anderson.

The Leftenant nodded slowly. “I suppose so. It would take days to examine every hiding place there; we just looked in every logical place. But how would he send out a voice message without air?”

“Snap open his helmet, toss in the mike, and close it again. If he held his breath, the suit would fill almost at once, and he’d be unhurt,” Bob answered, and again he was borrowing from some of the adventure fiction he had read. “There’d be some leak near the wires, but he could send a message, pull out the mike, and close down tight again.”

Griffith nodded approvingly at Bob. “I did it myself once, just to test it. The same story you read, Bob, I’ll bet. Sparks, keep sending out assurances—in case his receiver has a light—to tell him we’re answering. Hoeck, you’d better give me another course.”

“Already done,” the navigator said. He passed it over.

This time deceleration was held to six gravities pressure, but it lasted longer. The hulk of the Ionian had been drifting along at a constant speed, while the Lance had built up to a much higher speed and then drifted on at that greater rate. The distance between the two ships was considerable.

But matching course and speed was routine, now that pirates didn’t have to be considered.

They snapped out of high drive almost beside the derelict ship, and with only a slight tendency to drift apart. Commander Griffith corrected this with a few quick blasts of the little steering rockets. Through the viewport Bob could just see some of the crew getting the rubbery tube ready to connect the two ships again.

He looked inquiringly at his father as Anderson got ready to go across, and the Commander nodded. This time Anderson was buckling a heavy automatic pistol outside his suit. He gave one to Bob. “We don’t take chances. If there’s anything funny, shoot first and then get back to the Lance; we have to figure it might be a trap.”

“I’ll cover you from here,” Griffith added. His eyes were worried as he looked at Bob, but he made no move to hold the boy back. In the Navy, voluntary risk was expected.

They went cautiously across and through the open port of the air lock. Inside, everything was just as they had left it. Anderson inspected the way carefully, but he seemed satisfied. They turned toward the radio room. If the person making the call had any sense, he’d wait right there until help came.

Going cautiously through the deserted, lifeless passages of the ship began to give Bob a feeling that he’d had before only when he was a kid and had been hearing too many ghost stories. But he repressed it savagely. Then they were in front of the door that was marked with the zigzag symbol of electronics.

Anderson opened it cautiously. There was no air to carry sound, and the sponge-rubber soles of the space suits made no thud that could be carried through the floor. The small figure sitting at the radio desk never looked up.

The light on the panel was blinking in response to Sparks’s call, but it apparently had meant nothing. The figure sat slumped forward hopelessly, his helmet buried on his arms, which were resting on the desk. It wasn’t until Bob touched him on the shoulder that he stirred.

Then he sprang up as if stung, and swung on them. His eyes dropped to the Navy insignia, and the alarm went out of his face, to be replaced by a sudden wash of relief. He would have fallen if Anderson hadn’t caught him.

Bob was shocked himself. He’d expected to find a man but this was only a boy of about his own age. Even through the suit he was short and slim, with a dark skin, black eyes and hair, and almost too handsome a face.

By touching helmets together they could talk, though not very distinctly. The boy obviously had no radio inside his suit, but Anderson bent down and Bob did the same.

The boy was babbling his thanks, but Anderson cut him off. “Are there any more here?”

“No.” The boy sounded as if something very unpleasant lay buried in the single word. “No, sir. Only me. Only Juan Roman, son of Bartolomeo Roman, who was captain of the Ionian, and now…”

He shuddered, and Anderson nodded sympathetically. It wasn’t hard to guess what had happened to his father. Anderson motioned for him to follow and, no longer suspecting a trap, they went back toward the air lock at a faster gait.

The boy looked genuine enough, aside from his obvious condition when they had found him.

Io had been settled exclusively by Spanish Americans, and Spanish was the official language there, though most of the people also spoke English. Juan’s English contained the faint trace of an accent, and his appearance fitted his obvious ancestry.

Griffith was waiting for them when they came back, standing at the door of the control room.

He had tea and wafers waiting for Juan. For a second he seemed surprised at the boy’s age, but he covered it quickly, while they introduced themselves.

Then the ship got under way again, heading on the automatic pilot for the rest of Wing Nine.

Juan gasped at the pressure of acceleration, but he apparently could stand it. They were not on high drive; probably Griffith had ordered Wing Nine to hold up for his arrival, cutting down acceleration.

“I’ll have to ask you several questions,” Commander Griffith began. “I know this is no time to bother you, Juan, but I have to get some information.”

“I shall gladly give all I can,” Juan assured him. “I, too, do not like black ships which come to kill my father.”

Although Griffith nodded and smiled, his next question whipped out sharply. “Where did you get your suit, Juan?”

Bob had forgotten that there had been sixty suits in the lockers and only sixty listed on the manifest.

But Juan shrugged. “It was made for me special, because I am too small for a regular suit. When my father let me come on this, my first trip, we ordered it in advance.”

Griffith sat back, apparently satisfied, and the rest of the questioning was done more quietly, though it didn’t bring as much information as the Commander obviously wanted.

The ship had been carrying drugs to Neptune, as they had guessed. Juan’s mother had just died, and his father took him along. He had the run of the ship and was generally enjoying it, before the attack came. Then, out of nowhere—because either their radar was defective or their operator was careless—the black ship had swung in ahead of them. Bartolomeo Roman had let out a cry about pirates and had begun, too late, to try to fight back. But at first the black ship had done nothing. It had just hung there in space, keeping half a mile ahead of them, and apparently waiting.

They had sent out a signal, but then something strange happened. The black ship had opened a tiny window, and something blue had floated back to the Ionian and straight through the walls into the radio room; after that, the radio was dead. They had waited, too, until his father could wait no more. He had fired his few torpedoes. Then the strange ship had melted their nose and the crew had come aboard.

“And my father, he had put me in my space suit and had made me hide in a closet just beside the control room,” Juan finished. “He went to meet them, and I heard him cry out. I wanted to go down, but I could not disobey him. Then there was no air, and I waited and waited. And at last I went to the radio room. The blue stuff was gone then. I called. You came. That is all.”

“You never saw the men from the black ship?” Griffith asked, frowning.

“No. Only what I have told you.”

Further questioning revealed that Juan had felt the men from the Lance moving about—carried as faint sounds through the floor and his suit—but had thought they were still the pirates. Commander Griffith finished at last and sent him down with Anderson to a spare bunk. From the sleepy way he acted, Bob guessed that the tea had held a mild sedative to quiet him down.

“Sound asleep,” Anderson reported ten minutes later. Then he glanced out. “Hey, we’re back with the Wing!”

Griffith nodded. “We caught up five minutes ago. I wish that boy had seen them!”

“What good would it have done?” Bob asked. “Pirates don’t look much different from anyone else, do they?”

“These might—since they’re no pirates!” The Commander nodded, sucking thoughtfully on his pipe, a dark cloud of gloom on his face. “No human being designed that ship. And no human science could do what it did. That leaves just one place for them—Planet X! It’s inhabited, all right, and by a race of some kind that’s centuries ahead of us. I’d like to know what they look like.”

He sucked on his pipe again, and frowned more deeply. “Well, we know one thing.

Whatever form of life is out there, it’s unfriendly and it’s dangerous! Maybe too dangerous!”