They were all in the ship's bridge now. Thile and Kara and a young man
named Vray were conferring tensely with the radarman and checking a
bristling array of instruments.
Birrel was looking at space.
The ports on one side were shielded against the sun, so he couldn't see
it. Earth was behind, or below them, so he couldn't see that either.
All he could see was nothing, an infinity of it, without top or
bottom, front or back, beginning or end. The stars floated in it, by
the millions and billions, like shoals of fiery fish gleaming red and
gold and blue and green, white and violet, orange and dull crimson.
They were not crowded. There was plenty of room between them. The
eye was drawn farther and farther into those distances and the body
unconsciously tried to follow, until the mind recoiled from the edge of
some psychic calamity and screamed for solidity. Birrel spun away from
the port and grabbed hold of a stanchion and stood with his eyes shut,
sweating and shaking as though he had just run a race.
Kara said, "It gets you, doesn't it?"
He indicated that it did, beyond words. She nodded.
"It's no different with us. We look up at our summer skies just as
you have, and dream about what it's like. We read books and we see
pictures. But you can't know until you actually get out into space and
see it for yourself. And I don't think you ever get over being awed. I
never have."
Birrel opened his eyes again, but kept them firmly fixed on the
inside of the bridge. Thile and Vray were still hanging over their
instruments, looking grim.
"That ship," said Birrel. "It'll try and catch us, I suppose. Stop us
from getting word to Ruun."
"I can't imagine Vannevan letting us go without a fight." Her voice was
not exactly frightened, but it had a sort of clipped tightness about it
that was far from carefree.
"Can he? Catch us, I mean?"
"The Irrians are good spacemen, and their ships are about as fast as
ours. But Thile is a wizard. He can outfly anything in space."
Thile heard her and looked up. He said sourly, "Thanks. But you might
as well tell him the truth. Vannevan is not going to rely on speed
and skill alone, but on weapons. And we're not carrying any atomic
armaments. The government brains didn't think it was wise, considering
that we were trespassing on a strange world and might conceivably have
an accident, such as falling into a city. They're thoughtful that way."
"As an Earthman, I appreciate it," said Birrel. "You have conventional
weapons, don't you? That's at least an equal footing."
"We're not used to them," Thile said. "They are. But we'll do our best.
Believe me."
He glanced at Vray and nodded.
"Stand by for translation."
Birrel looked at Kara.
"That only means," she said, "that we're going faster."
"How much faster?"
"Well, just at first," she said, "about double the speed of light."
Birrel stopped trying to go along intelligently with any of it. He just
let it happen.
The lights inside the ship dimmed and burned blue. There was a
screeching whine that rose up and out of hearing, clawing at the nerves
as it went, and then there was a moment of awful vertigo when the ship
and everything in it seemed to slip and fall sideways in an insane
fashion.
The open ports slid shut automatically. Just before they closed Birrel
caught a glimpse through them of the stars he had been looking at only
a few moments before. They shifted, streamed like burning rain, and
vanished, to be replaced by squiggling lines of lights.
Then the ports were shut and there was nothing except the personal
sense of disorientation to show that anything had happened.
Complacently, like one who knows he is dreaming and that therefore
these strange things are not really happening and so need not be taken
seriously, Birrel listened to the voices of the men, speaking technical
words of no meaning to him as they went through what was apparently a
routine check. Then the radarman said,
"They're right with us."
Thile grunted. "Full acceleration," he said. "Build up as fast as you
can. Maybe their generators aren't as good as ours."
* * * * *
The whining began again but on a different note. Birrel pictured
himself inside an iron egg flying through space--what kind of
space?--at double, triple, quadruple the speed of light. He erased the
thought from his mind as quickly as he could. He said to Kara,
"Why haven't people done more star-travelling? You obviously have a
workable drive."
"We haven't had the time until recently," Kara said. "The Irrians
kept us too busy. Then the few exploratory trips we did make to
neighboring systems were discouraging. In most cases the planets were
uninhabitable, and the ones that did have life forms were pretty awful.
Our government hasn't encouraged star flight. I think they're afraid of
what might come flying back our way."
The ship quivered and trembled. Birrel thought he could almost feel the
atoms crawling in the metal under his hand.
"Do you ever hit things?" he asked. "Like stars, I mean."
"Not very often. But I believe the results are quite spectacular. You
become a nova almost at once."
He laughed. He did not ask any more questions.
The whining levelled off at last, refusing to go any higher. A
collection of needles steadied on the main control-board.
Vray said, "That's it."
The radarman shook his head and said, "They're still with us."
The lines deepened in Thile's face, turning it grim and hard.
"Action stations. We'll try and get them before they get us."
Birrel said, "What do you want me to do?"
"Back in your bunk and strap in. This is liable to be rough."
He shook his head. "There must be something I can do."
"You'd only be in the way," Kara said. She was already removing a
protective panel from a control-board ominously marked in red. She
smiled, to take the sting out of the words. "You'll need a vac-suit.
Here, Rett's will fit you."
She took a baggy-looking suit and a plastic helmet out of a locker and
handed it to him. The others were putting on similar suits, leaving the
helmets open. Birrel said, "Why?"
"In case we're hulled. If you hear the warning-horn, clap your helmet
shut. _Fast._"
She showed him how and then practically pushed him out of the bridge.
He shuffled back to the cabin and lay down on the bunk, feeling worse
than he had at any time since the beginning of this hare-brained
venture. He was scared, and he didn't mind admitting it. If he had been
able to do something, anything at all, it wouldn't have been so bad.
But just to lie here alone in this completely incredible ship, thinking
of the completely incredible but perfectly real destruction that faced
him--that was something no man ought to be asked to do.
He did it.
He was able to sense the "feel" of the ship, and from that to gauge the
variations--the slight recoil and shudder as missiles presumably were
launched, the greater perturbations of what could only be the near-miss
blasts of the enemy weapons. It occurred to him that what these
star-folk meant by "conventional weapons" were probably not at all the
simple explosive types referred to by that name on Earth. The technical
problems involved in launching any kind of missile at all at light-plus
speeds were so far beyond him that he didn't even try to figure them.
But there was no doubt that it was being done. Every leap and jar of
the ship told him that unmistakably.
Even so, Birrel was not prepared for the suddenness and violence of
what happened.
There was a crash. He felt it physically and heard it, too, this time,
transmitted by the ship's air. He fell upward against the straps as the
gravitational axis of the ship was brutally reversed. The lights dimmed
to an eerie blue and there was a horrible tortured howling of overtaxed
generators. The ship rammed through into normal space with much the
same effort as of a speeding car hitting a stone wall, only greatly
magnified. Birrel heard the warning-horn start. He clapped his helmet
shut, and then inertia flung him into the recoil couch as into a slab
of granite and the joints of the ship began to spring around him. Then
everything was dead, generators, horn, everything. The ship was silent
except for one sound, the hiss of escaping air.
* * * * *
Stunned but still, incredibly, alive, Birrel unfastened the straps and
floated out of the couch.
The ship was still moving, but there was no longer any gravity field
to speak of. Birrel was in free fall. He floated like a great clumsy
balloon out of the cabin and toward the bridge, clawing his way while
the ship bent and wavered and wobbled around him, its rigid frame gone
limp. As limp as his own body felt. Currents of escaping air whirled
papers, garments, pieces of equipment, bits of wreckage wildly around
in the interior. He was in a panic lest his helmet be cracked or his
suit torn.
The bridge was a shambles of buckled steel and shattered glass. The
radarman was crumpled among the remains of his equipment, which had
toppled and crushed him. Thile, strapped into the pilot's chair, was
stirring feebly. Birrel looked frantically around for Kara.
She was strapped into a recoil chair in front of the fire-control
panel. He thought at first she was dead, but when he looked closer he
could see that she was breathing. There was nothing he could do for her
at the moment and she was safer where she was, so he left her and went
to help Thile. There was no sign of Vray at all, except for a few small
red icicles formed on the edge of a jagged rift in the hull through
which everything movable in the bridge had already been sucked.
Thile's voice came faintly through the helmet audio. "I told you they
were better shots."
"Are you hurt?"
"Are you?"
"I don't know yet. Haven't had time."
"Nor me," said Thile. "I can stand up, so I guess I'll live." Blood was
trickling from his helmet. He snuffled at it and made futile pawing
motions at his helmet. "Well, that does it. Vannevan's won hands down."
He swore, a dejected and bitter man. "Four good men dead, and all for
nothing. It wasn't even a good try."
He pointed through the riven wall, to the black peaceful gulf beyond
with the far stars shining in it.
"See there?"
There was a ship, matching its pace to the slow drift of the derelict.
From its slim belly a much smaller craft dropped and jetted fire.
"They'll be aboard us in a few minutes."
Remembering how Vannevan had conducted his questioning at the
farmhouse, Birrel could see little hope. If he and Thile and Kara were
going to be at Vannevan's mercy, they might better have gone the way of
Vray and the radarman.
Unless--
"Listen," said Birrel suddenly, "Listen, there's one thing we might
do." He went over to Kara and shook her until she opened her eyes.
"There isn't much time, you've both got to play along with me or it
won't work. It might give us an edge, to use against Vannevan. Listen--"
He spoke rapidly, forcefully, and they listened, while the life-boat
of the Irrian ship came closer, riding its fiery jet across the black
gulf outside.
Thile said, "It might work--"
"It'll be dangerous," whispered Kara. "If he finds out--"
"I don't figure I have much to lose anyway," said Birrel dryly. "Hurry
up!"
When Vannevan and his men came into the broken ship they found Thile
and Kara clinging quietly together, apart from the Earthman Birrel, who
was strapped into a recoil chair with his hands bound tightly behind
him.