Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  “I was going to give you a clean death before we left, it is necessary that you do not pass on any embarrassing knowledge. Now I’m going to leave you alive—and wreck your drive and communicators. The black body temperature here is nine hundred Kelvin, and your hull is polished so your equilibrium temperature is a good deal higher. You can sit here and watch it climb!” He turned away, cringing a little as his scorched body came in contact with the rough lining of his armor, and beckoned to one of the men in charge of the scientists. “Bring one of those fellows along. We’ll collect the refrigerator apparatus. Len, you will get any explanations as we take it out. You,” he addressed Elder harshly, “will answer his questions. If we have to ask any of the others, you won’t hear his answer whether he does or not. Do you follow me?” Elder indicated his complete understanding, and went along at a gesture from the weapon of his guard. The other Suzeraintists followed, except two who remained with the prisoners in the control room.

  Elder’s will to resist, if it had ever been strong, was now completely paralyzed. He was not a man of violence or even of action, and would have been the first to admit the fact. He answered the questions of the Suzeraintist technician without hesitation or attempt at deception—it was quickly evident, anyway, that the fellow was probably too good to be easily fooled. He grasped the principles of the refrigerator very quickly, and informed his chief that it would not be necessary to carry away all the apparatus; only certain key parts, which he indicated. The leader was pleased, and the others still more so, since their labor was lightened thereby. Suddenly, however, the technician turned to Elder.

  “How about that junk that was mounted just outside the air lock?” he asked. “I didn’t look it over closely, but I figured it was part of the equipment. It was insulated from the hull, I noticed.”

  “That was not our stuff,” replied the inventor. “It’s Snell’s mass spectrograph. The big disc which is probably bothering you is the cathode—it ionizes the particles outside of the hull, and the ring anode around the admission slit drags them in. He has another electric system to control-their speed, and—”

  “All right; we don’t want it, and you can’t hurt us with it. You can’t do much with a cathode gun unless your target’s grounded.” The technician turned back to the job of dismantling one of Elder’s pet machines.

  By the time the intruders had finished their work, the atmosphere in the Wraith was noticeably warmer—not actually hot, but anyone with a fair imagination could picture what was coming. Inventors have good imaginations as a rule, and even astronomers at times.

  Elder had been returned to the group of prisoners in the control room while the last of the equipment was piled together in the air lock. Then two of the Suzeraintists began carrying it to their own ship, which none of the prisoners had yet seen, but which was arousing lively curiosity in the minds of two of them; and the leader returned to the control room. He could not have been seriously burned, for his activity, had not been very noticeably impaired, but he was evidently suffering considerably; and Calloway more than expected the Suzeraintists had no one on board with enough medical training to treat a second degree burn. The prospect of nursing a collection of blisters across two or three thousand light years of space was probably bothering the fellow fully as much as his present discomfort. Something certainly was making him unhappy.

  He entered the room, pushed off from the doorway, and brought himself to a halt against the bulkhead a few feet from the pilot, at whom he gazed for several minutes. At last he spoke.

  “I’m a little undecided about you,” he said. “I can’t quite make up my mind whether to leave you here to die, like I said, or take you along and administer the proper punishment myself. It would be fun to watch. On the other hand, you’d be a lot safer here; and if anything were to happen to the equipment we borrowed between here and Sheliak, the council might not like it. So I think I’ll leave you here.” He struck out suddenly with his metal-gloved fist, catching Calloway on the side of the head. The wound made by the metal boot started bleeding again, and a number of angry red marks showed the plate-pattern of the space suit glove; but the pilot said nothing. The Suzeraintist commander laughed, and suddenly pushed off toward the door. “Come along, men. They’re safe enough, and no one will have to worry about them for long. If all the stuff isn’t over in our ship by now, we can give the rest a hand.” At the door he paused, looked back at the still motionless figures of his captives, and waved a hand mockingly. “Good-bye, sirs. I am sorry I could not do your bidding at once; but the magnetic interference of my grapple on your hull shall be removed as soon as Len tells me all our new equipment is stowed—and that nothing has been forgotten.” The last phrase was uttered directly at Elder; evidently the pirate had also thought of the possibility of attempted deception or sabotage. With his final words, the fellow disappeared down the corridor to the air lock, and the prisoners felt free once more to move.

  Dressier glided at once to the pilot.

  “There isn’t much first aid equipment on board,” he said, “but there must be something. Come along to the cabins and we’ll do what we can to that skull of yours.” Calloway started to shake his head, and evidently found the motion too painful; he spoke instead.

  “Never mind that; if we’re to get out of this we can’t waste time, and if we don’t there’s no point in patching me up. Are you sure all that crowd has left?”

  “I think so; we can check easily enough. But what can we do? The refrigerator is gone, which means we can live only a dozen hours at the outside unless we can get out of here, and that fellow said he was going to wreck our drivers and communicators.”

  “Let’s find out how much damage he did—quickly; we certainly can do nothing after they leave, and it shouldn’t take them over half an hour to check and stow their loot.” As he spoke, Calloway led the way down the corridor leading to the power room.

  The exact amount of damage was not at once evident, for the various parts of the refrigerator had been installed in different places and their removal made things look worse than they really were. A close look, however, showed that the Suzeraintist had kept his word. The coils on each of the four second-order drive converters had been fused by a shot from a flame tube, the insulated case of the medium crystal had been broken open, and the crystal itself not only discharged but shattered to pieces.

  The main phoenix converter was intact, and there was power enough available to boil a fairsized lake out of its bed in a matter of seconds; but there was no way of applying the power to drive or communicate.

  “I guess he just wanted to tantalize us,” said Elder slowly.

  “He only wrecked the stuff we could use; and he must have checked pretty thoroughly. Their technician asked about your mass spectrograph outside the lock, Snell, and did nothing about it when I told them what it was. He said a cathode gun couldn’t be used against an ungrounded target, and anyway he must have seen that the leads to your cathode couldn’t carry a very dangerous load.” Calloway listened with growing eagerness to this tale; when Elder had finished, he spoke up.

  “We needn’t be limited to those conductors. There are yards of coaxial superconductor for converter repairs, and we could run a line to that cathode in a few minutes. We couldn’t insulate it very well, but our suits are synthetic and would protect us from anything running through the hull—it would tend to run on the surface anyway. Let’s go!”

  The three scientists shook their heads negatively in unison, like three members of a team of singing waiters. Snell took it upon himself to explain matters to the pilot.

  “I’m afraid, friend Calloway, it’s not lack of power that renders a cathode beam ineffective in our situation. A cathode ray is simply a stream of electrons; impinging on a grounded target they would set up an electric current through it, which could be useful if the target is inhabited by men, whose tolerance to electricity is not exceptionally high. Unfortunately, that electron stream encountering a ship in space simply charg
es it up until the electrostatic field formed is strong enough to deflect the beam. The stronger the beam, the stronger the field; the weapon provides its own defense:”

  “But it’s something to try; can you think of anything better?” asked the pilot desperately. “Maybe if we send a heavy enough beam across, the current flowing around their hull to equalize its potential would be strong enough to get them. Isn’t there a chance?”

  The heads of Elder and Dressier again oscillated dismally from side to side, and Snell’s started to share the motion; but suddenly the astronomer altered the plane of vibration of his skull ninety degrees, and said, “I’ll help you if you want to try it. As you say, it’s something to do; and also as you say—there might be a chance. Come on; if there is any good to be gotten from this, it will have to be done quickly.”

  Snell and the pilot made for the spare-part cabinets along the walls of the power room, and began to string the two-inch-thick strand of Fleming alloy from the leads of the phoenix converter toward the air lock. It would not be necessary to run it through the lock or the hull itself; the mass spectrograph was mounted in a block of insulating synthetic set directly in the hull, and access could be had to the instrument from within the ship. The other two men did nothing; they appeared to have given up all hope, if men can really be said to surrender all traces of that emotion. They were not bereft of reason, however; and Elder moved rapidly enough when Snell addressed him.

  “Reg, you might jump up to the control room and tell us how far away that other ship is, and whether he’s right in front of the air lock. He should be—he must have tied on there, and I don’t suppose he’s cast off yet.”

  Elder went; not only in response to the request, but on his own account. Meaningless as the answer would shortly be, he wondered how the Suzeraintist vessel had protected itself this far inside VV Cephei’s atmosphere without the refrigerator they had come to steal. The screens were still working, and he was able to examine the ship closely.

  The protection was evident.

  The ship was a sphere like their own, and only a little larger. One side was brightly polished, silvery metal, and that hemisphere was turned to face the crimson heart of the giant sun; the other was black, to radiate off as much heat as possible. It was a standard system on space craft which were called upon to approach stars at all closely, and its effectiveness did not approach that of the Elder-Dressier device. That ship must be quite uncomfortable by this time; that might have been why the Suzeraintists were wearing space suits. An evacuated hull would have been additional protection—for a time.

  Elder remembered the errand on which he had been sent, noted that the other ship was still directly opposite their air lock, about two hundred yards away, and that the line of the magnetic grapple still extended across the intervening space. He returned to the power room with the information, and met Snell and Calloway in the corridor, removing the wall panel that exposed the back of the mass spectrograph. It took them only a few moments to complete this task, and the pilot at once set to work joining the cable to the silver disc that marked the rear of the heavy cathode. This did not take long either, as he had a molar diffusion welder with a head set for the Fleming alloy.

  While this work was going on, Elder was sent back to the control room to keep an eye on the pirate vessel. Dressier was still in the power room; he had been put to work checking the phoenix converter for damage that the first inspection might have failed to disclose.

  The entire job took little time; heavy as it would have been on a major planet, the Fleming cable was easy enough to manipulate in free fall, and there certainly was no great complexity to the circuit being set up. Twenty minutes from the time the outer air lock door had closed behind the pirates, everything was ready. By this time even the two inventors had caught the fire of enthusiasm and were watching eagerly for the circuit to be closed—if it could be. It was Calloway who had to restrain the general enthusiasm—probably because he had never considered the attempt anything but a forlorn hope. He warned them of the small chance of success as they all glided from the corridor where the welding had just been finished to the control room, where he at once sought the pilot board from which he could handle all the power developed in the room below. Elder returned to the screen—his watch had been interrupted as he heard them approach—and at once gave an exclamation of alarm.

  “They’ve cast off!” he called. “The grapple is being drawn back, and their air lock is closed.” Calloway promptly craned his heck to view the plate for himself, and Snell moved over beside Elder. The astronomer nodded at what he saw.

  “The grapple is about half way between the ships now, Calloway,” he said quietly. “I’d advise letting go as soon as you can; I doubt if they’ll hang around long after the cable is reeled in.” Calloway’s reply was equally quiet.

  “The switch is closed.”

  Four pairs of ears strained for a nonexistent sound, and four pairs of eyes sought the screen, which still showed the enemy sphere hanging unharmed beside them. Neither eyes nor ears caught any sign of the terrific load that was being slammed into space from the silver disc beside their air lock.

  “We’re in an atmosphere,” said Calloway suddenly. “Wouldn’t that ground our charge?”

  “You could stuff radio tubes with this atmosphere and find them working nicely,” said the astronomer briefly. “The only difference between this atmosphere and empty space is the factor I used to tell you when we were in it—Holy Smoke, why didn’t I think of that!”

  His companions had no time to ask for an elucidation of this remark. On the heels of the astrophysicist’s words, the eyes fixed on the viewplate were abruptly dazzled by a flare of yellow-green light that suddenly erupted in front of the image of the other ship. Calloway, whose eyes were by far the fastest, was sure it had jetted originally from the end of the grapple cable, of which a few yards had been still projecting; but now there was no way to be sure. The flare was not just a spark; it continued, the automatic safety controls on the screen cutting down the brilliancy of the image so that nothing else could be seen. Calloway made a movement to open the switch, and was stopped at once by Snell.

  “Leave it on!” exclaimed the astronomer. “Leave it on until we touch! We have no drive, remember!” The pilot obeyed, only half understanding what went on. He let the power run for nearly five minutes, and finally cut it off when Snell signaled him to do so. The plate instantly cleared.

  The other sphere was a scant fifty yards away, and visibly drawing closer. An area eight or ten yards across, centered at the spot where the magnetic grapple had been projected, was glowing a fierce white; and a wave of heat from the corridor where the cathode was mounted caused the men to realize that their own hull could be in little better condition. Investigation showed, however, that only the anode of the mass spectrograph had suffered seriously—the insulating block in which the device was mounted had held up very well. Snell’s instrument, however, was a hopeless ruin.

  There was no sign of activity on the other ship. Calloway and Snell donned space suits and went across, gaining access through the lock on the further side. They found three charred bodies in the air lock toward the Wraith, four rigid forms in the control room, and a single living pirate in one of the bunks who was just recovering the use of his limbs after a heavy electric shock. He was quickly disarmed and locked in his cabin; and Calloway. immediately attached grapples to the Wraith and began accelerating as hard as he dared away from the core of VV Cephei.

  Three hours later, when they had attained open space and made a short second-order leap to safety, the others joined them in the Suzeraintist ship. Elder and Dressier had a question to ask.

  “Snell, just what closed that circuit? Cal’s idea of knocking them out before the hull loaded up was nonsense from the first; and you said that there was practically no matter outside our hull to conduct electricity. Anyway, gases and dust particles are rotten conductors. You seemed to expect something just before things let
go; what was it?” The astronomer smiled.

  “I should have thought of it sooner. Of course, a complete circuit was what we needed. That length of cable projecting toward our hull helped a lot—don’t jump on me, I know it wasn’t enough by itself, but it helped, as I say. The real deciding factor was that.” He pointed through a port in the control room wall. The others stared, and said nothing. Beyond the transparent window was the dazzling blue-white glare of a sun, a sun near enough to show a perceptible disc. It hung close beside the foggy red bubble that was the red giant they had just left, Snell saw the uncomprehending expressions on the three faces, and smiled again.

  “Gentlemen, meet VV Cephei—the primary of the system we have just left. It is the one you see from Earth with a telescope. It’s fainter and less massive, but far more voluminous, companion occupies a large fraction of the space between, so that one surface is comparatively close to the primary—a primary far brighter than Sol, and a class B sun, which means lots and lots of ultra-violet radiation”—he smiled faintly once more as Elder’s whistle of comprehension reached his ears—“which in turn means a heavily ionized layer in the region of the companion’s atmosphere nearest the primary. There are other such systems—Epsilon and Zeta Aurigae, to name two. I will admit that the actual ion density is very small, but coupled with the local field intensity caused by the projecting cable it was enough to start things, and the vapor produced when the cable boiled away undoubtedly helped. Is it clear enough?”

  “No,” said Calloway. “That current was running through both ships. Why didn’t it get us? We weren’t protected any more than they.”

  “Not through both ships. Through their ship, and through our Fleming cable, which is a superconductor. Their entire hull had a far higher resistance than our cable, so in their ship the current went through men where it could—the fellow in the bed, luckily for him, was probably touching metal at only one spot. The others were up and around, and even if they didn’t close a circuit with their bodies in the first instant, I am sure none of them would have had self-control enough to stand still when he found himself alive.