* * * * *
There was a white spot in the middle of the sandy-colored northern
hemisphere. It was the size of a pin head to the naked eye. Borden
swung a telescope on it. They were nearly above the point now, where
day turned into night.
The sunlight fell upon the white spot at a flat angle. If the whiteness
were perpetual snow on the tops of mountains, the mountains should
cast shadows. But Borden could not make out shadows near the white.
Automatically he snapped the telecamera before he gave up the effort to
understand the white spot.
"I doubt it's snow," he said. "I don't know what it is."
"Surely you can make a guess!" said Sattell, with that elaborate
courtesy which was getting on everyone's nerves.
"I can't," Borden said briefly.
The ship moved to the dark side of the planet, and presently plunged
into its shadow.
They went on for hours, watching for lights. There were none. When they
came out to sunlight again they had descended a long way during their
time in the planet's night.
They could see that the surface of the planet was pure tumbled sand
dunes with occasional showings of stone. They were three-quarters of
the way around when they saw the white spot again. This time they were
no more than four or five hundred miles high. They could tell its size.
It was all of three hundred miles long, north and south, and from fifty
to seventy-five miles wide. There were thin hair-lines running from it,
remarkably straight on the whole, to the north and south. They were
very, very fine lines. The patch was still white. As they came to be in
line between it and the sun, their shadow would have passed almost over
it.
The white spot changed abruptly. One instant it was white, the next, a
patch of it had turned silver. That silvery appearance spread out and
out in a swift rippling motion. The patch became silver all over its
entire surface.
Then it turned to flame.
There was a screaming of alarm gongs. The emergency feed-back screens
went on and everything went black outside. The lights in the ship
dimmed down to mere dull-red glows.
There was silence.
The ports showed blackness. The drive, of course, ceased to operate.
The ship had sealed itself in a shell of screening, through which
nothing at all could penetrate, but which drew upon the ship's
power-tanks for as much energy as it neutralized outside. And the drain
was so great that the interior lights were dim red spots and not lights
at all.
For five heart-beats the blackness persisted while the four in the ship
stayed frozen.
The feed-back screen cut off. Again they saw the planet below. The
white patch once more was white, instead of flame. But as they looked,
the silvery look spread out all over it in glittering ripples, and they
seemed to look into the heart of a sun's ravening furnaces before the
feed-back screen came into existence for their defense. The ports were
blacked out again.
The ship hurtled on toward emptiness. It was blind. It was helpless.
Borden moved an emergency light to shine on the output meter. The
needle was fast against the pin. The feed-back screen was not only
drawing maximum safe power. It was working on an effective short
circuit of the ship's entire power supply. Busbars carrying that
current would be heating up. They would melt at any instant.
Borden's fingers moved swiftly. He set up a shunt for on-switch
operation of the feed-back field.
He threw the last cross-over tumbler and waited, with sweat beading
his forehead. Something had flung a beam of pure heat-energy at the
_Danaë_. It should have volatized the small space-craft immediately,
but it had been left on for four seconds.
When it ended, the feed-back screen cut off, too. Then the _Danaë_ had
been detected a second time and the planetary weapon used again. Now,
with the feed-back field on-switch instead of relay, _if_ the heat ray
turned off again the feed-back field wouldn't, and the _Danaë_ should
be indetectable to anything but a permeability probe. The space-ship
would seem to have been destroyed, if the heat-beam went off before the
ship's power failed.
* * * * *
It did. A relay clicked somewhere, cut a current flow of some tens
of thousands of amperes. The lights inside the ship flashed to full
brightness. Borden's eyes flicked to the power-meters. The operational
power-tank meter read zero. The emergency reserve power-tank meter
showed a reading that made fresh sweat come out on Borden's face.
But the ports stayed black. Absolutely any form of energy striking
the feed-back field outside would be neutralized. No light would be
reflected. Any detector-field would be exactly canceled, as if nothing
whatever existed where the _Danaë_ hurtled onward some few hundred
miles above the planet's surface.
The _Danaë_, at the moment, was in the position of having made a hole
about itself to crawl into. But it couldn't use its drive. It couldn't
see out. It was hiding in blackness of its own creation, like a
cuttlefish in its own ink.
"Dee," Ellen Borden asked her husband in a shaky voice, "what happened?"
"Something threw a heat-ray at us," said Borden. He mopped his
forehead. "We should have exploded to incandescent gas. But our
feed-back field stopped it. The heat-ray cut off when we should have
been destroyed--and so did our field, so there we were again! And so we
got a second beaming. But now we aren't. At least we appear not to be.
So we can live until we crash."