The long-unused armaments room was half the width of the ship away. They
went toward it silently, seven men and a girl, praying that their
visitor would not meet them or spot their furtive advance on the
intercom. They slunk into the gunroom and Pink, coming last, ran the
heavy emergency bolt across the door behind him.
The armaments officer was dead, of course. Pink said quietly, "Who knows
the principles of these weapons?" Daley and Joe Silver raised their
hands. "Activate the viewers, then."
Two walls darkened and became the silver-flecked night of space; it was
as if they had become suddenly transparent. Half a dozen of the
void-giants showed near the _Elephant's Child_, hovering or slowly
drifting around the bow of the ship.
"Now," said the captain, "if only our friend in the bottle has left us
our guns--train 'em on those monstrosities and fire every forward
battery simultaneously."
The lieutenants, seated in foam-chairs behind the double banks of the
gun controls, manipulated instruments that were very like the sights on
common atom-pistols. Thin blue lines moved across the reflected picture
of the space beyond the ship's nose, steadied and centered on the
nearest giants. Silver glanced at Daley, who said, "Count o' three,
Joe."
Every man leaned forward, scowling at the screens. The nearest
space-soarer squinted full in their faces, as though he could actually
see them as they were scanning him. Coincidence, but--Pink shuddered.
"One," said Daley. "Two."
The _Elephant's Child_ rocked wildly up and back as thirty platinum
guns, the heaviest type in the known universe, fired their
hell-projectiles--great shells whose inconceivable destructive power was
released by the splitting of the curium atom. In flight, the ship would
have absorbed the tremendous recoil automatically; stationary as she
was, it bucked her over like a blown leaf.
The shells, set to explode at the very closest range that safety
permitted, flashed upon the twin screens like bursting suns. Human eyes
looking directly at such a bombardment would have crisped in their
sockets; even on the screens their glare was too bright for comfort.
The men blinked, peered sharply for signs of the effect on the giants.
Pink felt disappointment, so biting and gut-curdling that he nearly
vomited. For at first the shells seemed to have had little effect except
to hurl the giants back a mile or so from the ship. Then, as they slowly
surged forward toward it again, he saw that they had not escaped whole.
One lacked an arm; another had, half his head blown away; a third
drifted in without the lower half of his torso. The expressions of their
bronze-yellow faces were not of pain, however, but only of rage.
"Hey!" bellowed Calico. "We nicked 'em up, anyway!"
"Look again," said Daley morosely, standing from his foam-chair. "Look
at the head of the far left skunk."
He who had lost half his cranium was slowly regenerating it, the brow
and cheek pressing outward to form new firm outlines, a missing eye
gradually emerging from the bloodless tatters of the old socket. Pink
said, "Well." He took a deep breath. "Well, that's that. Let's all get
out and plink at them with bean-shooters. It'll do as much harm." All
the giants were reconstituting their lost parts.
Now one monster, floating right up to the ship, wrapped his
five-hundred-feet-long arms around it and gave it a shake. It was as if
a man had rattled a box full of beetles. The officers of the _Elephant's
Child_, who had ridden through the bucking of the tremendous explosion,
were unprepared for this movement, for they had risen from their deep
seats. They sprawled across the room, smashing up against the wall with
bone-jarring thumps. Pinkham found himself entangled with Circe Smith in
a pretzel of arms and legs that would under other circumstances have
been ridiculous but pleasurable. Fearing for her safety, he grasped her
around the waist; she yielded to him a moment, then struggled back and
stood up. Was her face flushed with indignation, fright, or--? He got to
his own feet. The giant had released the ship.
"We are chastened," murmured Jerry, feeling a bruised shin.
"And now what?" asked Joe Silver. "Ordinary weapons are as much use to
us as spitballs." He sat down. "Let's figure out what else to try.
Somewhere there's an answer."
They all sat down, Pink said, "Remember Wolf 864?"
"Sure," said Daley, who had been on that expedition with Pinkham when
they were young cubs out of jetschool. "Friendly natives, kind of
vegetable-animal life, and we murdered half of them unintentionally. We
had to get out and never go back."
"How?" asked Circe. "How did you kill them?"
"Germs. The common ordinary non-toxic germs we carry in our systems all
the time. It was a massacre--and of a queer, sweet kind of beast. They
had no tolerance for our microbes."
"I volunteer to find the alien and breathe in his face," said Jerry.
"Somebody hand me an onion," he added.
The conversation went on. It grew aimless to Pink, a bunch of boys
whistling by a graveyard, eight prisoners speculating on their escape
when they had no real knowledge of their jailer. He fiddled with the
intercom, saw that the crew had gathered by the mutiny gates and were
waiting tensely, puny weapons in their hands. He spoke a few words of
encouragement to them. 57 men--whom he hated to see die. Somehow he had
to save them.
It was about half an hour afterwards that he first discovered he was
breathing too shallowly.