“That's good, eh?” The mayor mopped his face. “Will we have fuel to get there?"
Kim jockeyed the Starshine to a new line. He adjusted the radiation-operated switch to a new value, to throw off the field more quickly than before. He pressed the field-button again. Space reeled once more and the gongs rang and they were deep within the Galaxy. A lurid purple sun blazed balefully far to the left.
Kim began another jockeying for line.
“Khiv Five was beamed about a week ago,” he said reflectively. “We're headed for there now. I think there'll be a warship hanging around, if only to drop into the stratosphere at night and pick up the broadcasts or to drop off a spy or two. Dona, you've got your wristlet on?"
Dona, unsmiling, held up her hand. A curious bracelet clung tightly to the flesh. She looked at his forearm, too. He wore a duplicate. The Mayor of Steadheim rumbled puzzledly.
“These will keep the fighting-beams from killing us,” Kim told him wryly. “And you too. But they'll hurt like the dickens. When they hit, though, these wristlets trip a relay that throws us into transmitter-drives and we get away from there in the thousandth of a second. The beams simply won't have time to kill us. But they'll hurt!"
He made other adjustments—to a newly-installed switch on the instrument-board.
“Now—we see if we get back to Terranova."
He pressed the transmitter-drive button a third time. Stars swirled insanely, with all their colors changing. Then they were still. And there was the ringed sun Khiv with its family of planets about it.
Khiv Five was readily recognizable by the broad, straight bands of irrigated vegetation across its otherwise desert middle, where the water of the melted ice-caps was pumped to its winter hemisphere. It was on the far side of its orbit from the stopping-place of the Starshine, though, and Kim went on overdrive to reach it. This used as much fuel as all the journey from the Second Galaxy.
The three speed-ranges of the Starshine were—if Kim had but known it—quaintly like the three speeds of ancient internal-combustion land-cars. Interplanetary drive was a low speed, necessary for taking off and landing, but terribly wasteful of fuel.
Overdrive had been the triumph of space-navigation for thousands of years. It was like the second gear of the ancient land-cars. And the transmitter-drive of Kim's devising was high speed, almost infinite speed—but it could not be used within a solar system. It was too fast.
Kim drove to the farther orbit of Khiv Five and then went into a long, slow freefall toward the banded planet below. In the old days it would have been changed to a landing-parabola at an appropriate moment.
“Now,” said Kim grimly, “my guess is that we haven't enough fuel to make anything but a crash-landing. Which would mean that we should all get killed. So we will hope very earnestly that a warship is still hanging about Khiv Five, and that it comes and tries to wipe us out."
Dona pointed to a tiny dial. Its needle quivered ever so slightly from its point of rest.
“Mmmmm,” said Kim. “Right at the limit of the detector's range. Something using power. We should know how a worm on a fishhook feels, right now. We're bait."
He waited—and waited—and waited.
The small hundred-foot hull of the spaceship seemed motionless, seen from without. The stars were infinitely far away. The great ringed sun was a hundred and twenty million miles distant. Even the belted planet Khiv Five was a good half-million miles below.
Such motion as the Starshine possessed was imperceptible. It floated with a vast leisureliness in what would be a parabolic semi-orbit. But it would take days to make sure. And meanwhile....
Meanwhile, the Starshine seemed to spawn. A small object appeared astern. Suddenly it writhed convulsively. Light glinted upon it. It whirled dizzily, then more dizzily still, and abruptly it was a shape. It was, in fact, the shape of a spaceship practically the size of the Starshine itself, but somehow it was not quite substantial. For minutes it shimmered and quivered.
“You'll find it instructive,” said Kim dryly to the Mayor of Steadheim, “to look out of a stern-port."
The Mayor lumbered toward a stern-port. A moment later they heard him shout. Minutes later, he lumbered back.
“What's that?” he said angrily. “I thought it was another ship! When I first saw it, I thought it was ramming us!"
“It's a gadget,” said Kim abstractedly. His eyes were on the indicator of one of the detectors. The needle was definitely away from its point of rest. “There's something moving toward us. My guess is that it's a warship with fighting-beams—and hafnium and fuel."
* * *
4
ENCOUNTER IN THE VOID
The Mayor of Steadheim looked from one to the other of them. Dona was pale. She looked full of dread. Kim's lips were twisted wryly, but his eyes were intent on the dial. The mayor opened his mouth, and closed it, then spoke wrathfully.
“I don't understand all this! Where'd that other ship come from?"
“It isn't a ship,” said Kim, watching the dial that told of the approach of something that could be an enemy—and it had been a matter of faith that only the Starshine roamed the space-ways. “I got it made back on Terranova.
“We took a big reel of metal spring-wire, and wound it round and round a shape like that of the Starshine. When it was in place we annealed it and tempered it so it would always resume that shape. And then we wound it back on its reel. I just dumped it out in space from a special lock astern.
“It began to unroll, and of course to go back to the form it had been tempered in. Here, with no gravity to distort it, it went perfectly back into shape. Close-to, of course, you can see it's only a shell and a thin one. But a few miles away it would fool you."
The needle on the detector-dial crept over and over. Kim wet his lips. Dona's face was white.
Then Kim winced and the Mayor of Steadheim roared furiously and the Universe without the view-ports swayed and dissolved into something else. Alarm-gongs rang and the Starshine was in a brand-new place, with a blue-white giant sun and a dwarf companion visible nearby. The ringed sun Khiv had vanished.
“K-Kim!” said Dona, choking.
“I'm quite all right,” he told her. But he wiped sweat off his face. “Those beams aren't pleasant, no matter how short the feeling is."
He turned back to the controls. The faint whine of the gyros began. The Starshine began to turn about. Kim applied power. But it took a long time for the ship's nose to be turned exactly and precisely back in the direction from which it had come.
“It's getting ticklish,” he said abruptly. “There's less than a cupful of fuel left."
“Space!” said the Mayor of Steadheim. He looked sick and weak and frightened. “What happened?"
“We were in a sort of orbit about Khiv Five,” said Kim, succinctly. “We had a decoy ship out behind us. A warship spotted our arrival. It sneaked up on us and let go a blast of its beams—the same beams that killed all the men on Khiv Five.
“They didn't bother Dona—she's a girl—but they would have killed us had not a relay flung the Starshine away from there. The beams got left behind. So did the dummy ship. I think they'll clamp on it to look it over. Now if our enemies keep turning over long enough, we'll be all right. Now, let's see!"
His jaw was set as the transmitter-drive came on and the familiar crazy gyration of all the stars again took place and the gongs rang once more. But his astrogation was perfect. There was the ringed sun Khiv again with its banded fifth planet and its polar ice-cap and its equatorial belt of desert with the wide bands of irrigated land crossing it. Kim drove for the planet. He looked at the fuel-gauge.
“Our tanks,” he said evenly, “read empty. What fuel's left is in the catalyzer."
A needle stirred on the banjk of indicators. Dona caught her breath. Kim sweated. The indication on the dial grew stronger. The electron-telescope field sparkled suddenly, where light glinted on glistening metal. Kim corrected course subtly.
The
re was the tiny form which looked so amazingly like a duplicate of the Starshine. It was actually a thin layer of innumerable turns of spring-wire. On any planet it would have collapsed of its own weight. Here in space it looked remarkably convincing.
But the three in the Starshine did not look at it. They looked at the shape that had come alongside it and made fast with magnetic grapples that distorted the thin decoy wildly—the shape that gave no sign of any activity or any motion or any life.
That shape was a monster spaceship a thousand feet long. It looked as if it bulged with apparatus of death. It was gigantic. It was deadly.
“Our trick worked,” said Kim uneasily. “We should begin to feel uncomfortable, you and I, in minutes—if only our engines keep running!"
He spoke to the Mayor of Steadheim. Almost as he spoke, a tiny tingling began all over his body. As the ship went on, that tingling grew noticeably stronger.
“What—"
“We've no weapons,” said Kim, “nor time to devise them. But when we were slaves on the planets we came from we were held enslaved by a circuit that could torture us or paralyze us at the will of our rulers. The Disciplinary Circuit. Remember?
“I put a Disciplinary Circuit generator in that little decoy ship. I took a suggestion from what our friends yonder did to the fighting beams. I turned the Disciplinary Circuit to affect any man—but no woman—within its range.
“The generator went on when she grappled the decoy. Every man in it should be helpless. If it stands like that, we'd be paralyzed too if we went near. But not Dona."
The tingling was quite strong. It was painful. Presently it would be excruciating. It would be completely impossible for any man within fifty miles of the decoy spaceship to move a muscle.
“However,” said Kim, “I've arranged that. I had Disciplinary Circuit projectors fitted on the Starshine. We turn them on that ship. Automatically, the generators on the decoy will cut off. Our friends will still be helpless, and we can go up and grapple—if our engines keep going!"
He threw a switch. A relay snapped over somewhere and a faint humming noise began. The tingling of Kim's body ceased. The decoy and the enemy spaceship grew large before them. The enemy was still motionless.
Its crew, formerly held immobile by the circuit in the decoy, was now held helpless by the beams from the Starshine. But neither Kim nor the Mayor of Steadheim could enter the enemy ship without becoming paralyzed too.
Dona slipped quietly from the control-room. She came back, clad in a spacesuit, with the helmet face-plate open.
“All ready, Kim,” she said quietly.
Sweat stood out in droplets on Kim's face. The Starshine drifted ever so gently into position alongside the pair of motionless shapes—the one so solid and huge, the other so flimsy and insubstantial. Kim energized the grapples. There was a crushing impact as the Starshine anchored itself to the enemy.
Kim reached over and pulled out a switch.
“That's the wristlet relay switch,” he told Dona. “We stay here until you come back—even if a fighting-beam hits us. You've got to go on board that monster and get some fuel, and, if you can, a hafnium catalyzer. If another battleship's around and comes up—you drive the Starshine home with what fuel you can get. We'll be dead, but you do that. You hear?"
“I'll—hurry, Kim,” Dona said.
“Be careful!” commanded Kim fiercely. “There shouldn't be a man on that ship who can move, but be careful!"
She kissed him quickly and closed the face-plate of her helmet. She went into the airlock and closed the inner door.
There was silence in the Starshine. Kim sweated. The outer airlock door opened. The two ships were actually touching. The clumping of the magnetic shoes of Dona's spacesuit upon the other ship's hull was transmitted to the Starshine.
Kim and the Mayor of Steadheim heard the clankings as she opened the other ship's outer airlock door—the inner door. Then they heard nothing.
Dona was in an enemy spaceship, unarmed. Subjects of the Empire of Greater Sinab manned it. They or their fellows had murdered half the population of the banded planet below. They were helpless, now, to be sure, held immobile by fields maintained by the precariously turning engines of the Starshine.
But the fuel-gauge showed the fuel-tanks absolutely dry. The Starshine was running on fuel in the pipelines and catalyzers. It had been for an indefinite time. Its engines would cut off at any instant.
When the lights flickered Kim groaned. This meant that the last few molecules of fuel were going from the catalyzer. He feverishly used power for the Disciplinary Circuit beams which kept the enemy crew helpless and for the grapples which kept the two ships in contact—for nothing else.
But still the lights flickered. The engines gasped for power. They started and checked and ran again, and again checked.
The second they failed finally, the immobile monster alongside would become a ravening engine of destruction. The two men in the Starshine would die in an instant of unspeakable torment. Dona—now fumbling desperately through unfamiliar passageways amid contorted, glaring figures—would be at the tender mercies of the crew.
And when the three of them were dead the drive of the Starshine would be at the disposal of the Empire of Greater Sinab if they only chose to look at it. The beastly scheme of conquest would spread and spread and spread throughout the Galaxy and enslave all women—and murder all human men not parties to the criminality.
The lights flickered again. They almost died and on the Starshine, Kim clenched his hands in absolute despair. On the enemy warship the immobile crew made agonized raging movement.
But the engine caught fugitively once more, and Dona worked desperately and then fled toward the airlock with her booty while the Disciplinary Circuit field which froze the Sinabian crew wavered, and tightened, and wavered once more.
And died!
Dona dragged open the enemy's airlock door as a howl rose behind her. She flung open the other as murderous projectors warmed. She clattered along the other hull of the Sinabian ship on her magnetic shoes, and saw the Starshine drifting helplessly away, even the grapples powerless to hold the two bodies together.
At that sight, Dona gasped. She leaped desperately, with star-filled nothingness above and below and on every hand. She caught the Starshine's airlock door.
And Kim cut out the Disciplinary-Circuit beams and the flow of current to the grapples and, with a complete absence of hope, pressed the transmitter-drive button. He had no shred of belief that it would work.
But it did. The equalizer-batteries from the engines gave out one last surge of feeble power—and were dead. But that was enough, since nothing else drew current at all. The stars reeled.
This was a test.
Almost anything could happen. Kim held his breath, anxiously watching and waiting for the worst, his senses attuned to the delicate mechanism about him.
And then, slowly, the reaction was fully determined, and he smiled.
* * *
5
THE NEEDED FUEL
The Starshine had a mass of about two hundred tons and an intrinsic velocity of so many miles per second. When the field went on, her mass dropped almost to zero, but her kinetic energy remained the same. Her velocity went up almost to infinity. And the Universe went mad.
The vision-ports showed stark lunacy. There were stars, but they were the stars of a madman's dream. They formed and dissolved into nothingness in instants too brief for estimate. For fractions of micro-seconds they careered upon impossible trajectories across the vision-ports’ field of view.
Now a monstrous blue-white sun glared in terribly, seemingly almost touching the ship. An instant later there was utter blackness all about. Then colossal flaring globes ringed the Starshine, and shriveling heat poured in.
Then there was a blue watery-seeming cosmos all around like the vision of an underwater world and dim shapes seemed to swim in it, and then stars again, and then....
It was stark, gibbering
madness!
But Kim reached the instrument-board. With the end of the last morsel of power he had ceased to have weight and had floated clear of the floor and everything else.
By the crazy, changing light he sighted himself and, when he touched a sidewall, flung himself toward the now-dark bank of instruments. He caught hold, fumbled desperately and threw the switch a radiation-relay should have thrown. And then the madness ended.
There was stillness. There was nothing anywhere. There was no weight within the ship, nor light, nor any sound save the heavy breathing of Kim and the Mayor of Steadheim. The vision-ports showed nothing.
Looking carefully, with eyes losing the dazzle of now-vanished suns, one could see infinitely faint, infinitely distant luminosities. The Starshine was somewhere between galaxies, somewhere in an unspeakable gulf between islands of space, in the dark voids which are the abomination of desolation.
There were small clankings aft. The outer airlock door went shut. A little later the inner door opened. And then Kim swan fiercely through weightlessness and clung to Dona, still in her spacesuit, unable to speak for his emotion.
The voice of the Mayor of Steadheim arose in the darkness which was the interior of the Starshine—and the outer cosmos for tens of thousands of light years all about.
Dona now had the face-plate of her helmet open. She kissed Kim hungrily.
“—brought you something,” she said unsteadily. “I'm not sure what, but—something. They've separate engines to power their generators on that ship, and there were tanks I thought were fuel-tanks."
“Space!” roared the Mayor of Steadheim, forward. “Who's that talking? Am I dead? Is this Hades?"
“You're not dead yet,” Kim called to him. “I'll tell you in a minute if you will be."
There were no emergency-lights in the ship, but Dona's suit was necessarily so equipped. She turned on lights and Kim looked at the two objects she had brought.
The Last Spaceship Page 6
