The Aliens

: The Aliens

The human race was expanding through the galaxy ... and so, they

knew, were the Aliens. When two expanding empires meet ... war is

inevitable. Or is it ...?





At 04 hours 10 minutes, ship time, the Niccola was well inside the

Theta Gisol solar system. She had previously secured excellent evidence

that this was not the home of the Plumie civilization. There was no tuned

radiation. The e was no evidence of interplanetary travel--rockets would

be more than obvious, and a magnetronic drive had a highly characteristic

radiation-pattern--so the real purpose of the Niccola's voyage would

not be accomplished here. She wouldn't find out where Plumies came from.



There might, though, be one or more of those singular, conical,

hollow-topped cairns sheltering silicon-bronze plates, which constituted

the evidence that Plumies existed. The Niccola went sunward toward the

inner planets to see. Such cairns had been found on conspicuous landmarks

on oxygen-type planets over a range of some twelve hundred light-years.

By the vegetation about them, some were a century old. On the same

evidence, others had been erected only months or weeks or even days

before a human Space Survey ship arrived to discover them. And the

situation was unpromising. It wasn't likely that the galaxy was big

enough to hold two races of rational beings capable of space travel. Back

on ancient Earth, a planet had been too small to hold two races with

tools and fire. Historically, that problem was settled when Homo

sapiens exterminated Homo neanderthalis. It appeared that the same

situation had arisen in space. There were humans, and there were Plumies.

Both had interstellar ships. To humans, the fact was alarming. The need

for knowledge, and the danger that Plumies might know more first, and

thereby be able to exterminate humanity, was appalling.



Therefore the Niccola. She drove on sunward. She had left one frozen

outer planet far behind. She had crossed the orbits of three others. The

last of these was a gas giant with innumerable moonlets revolving about

it. It was now some thirty millions of miles back and twenty to one side.

The sun, ahead, flared and flamed in emptiness against that expanse of

tinted stars.



Jon Baird worked steadily in the Niccola's radar room. He was one of

those who hoped that the Plumies would not prove to be the natural

enemies of mankind. Now, it looked like this ship wouldn't find out in

this solar system. There were plenty of other ships on the hunt. From

here on, it looked like routine to the next unvisited family of planets.

But meanwhile he worked. Opposite him, Diane Holt worked as steadily, her

dark head bent intently over a radar graph in formation. The immediate

job was the completion of a map of the meteor swarms following cometary

orbits about this sun. They interlaced emptiness with hazards to

navigation, and nobody would try to drive through a solar system without

such a map.



Elsewhere in the ship, everything was normal. The engine room was a place

of stillness and peace, save for the almost inaudible hum of the drive,

running at half a million Gauss flux-density. The skipper did whatever

skippers do when they are invisible to their subordinates. The weapons

officer, Taine, thought appropriate thoughts. In the navigation room the

second officer conscientiously glanced at each separate instrument at

least once in each five minutes, and then carefully surveyed all the

screens showing space outside the ship. The stewards disposed of the

debris of the last meal, and began to get ready for the next. In the

crew's quarters, those off duty read or worked at scrimshaw, or simply

and contentedly loafed.



Diane handed over the transparent radar graph, to be fitted into the

three-dimensional map in the making.



"There's a lump of stuff here," she said interestedly. "It could be the

comet that once followed this orbit, now so old it's lost all its gases

and isn't a comet any longer."



* * * * *



At this instant, which was 04 hours 25 minutes ship time, the alarm-bell

rang. It clanged stridently over Baird's head, repeater-gongs sounded all

through the ship, and there was a scurrying and a closing of doors. The

alarm gong could mean only one thing. It made one's breath come faster or

one's hair stand on end, according to temperament.



The skipper's face appeared on the direct-line screen from the navigation

room.



"Plumies?" he demanded harshly. "Mr. Baird! Plumies?"



Baird's hands were already flipping switches and plugging the radar room

apparatus into a new setup.



"There's a contact, sir," he said curtly. "No. There was a contact. It's

broken now. Something detected us. We picked up a radar pulse. One."



The word "one" meant much. A radar system that could get adequate

information from a single pulse was not the work of amateurs. It was the

product of a very highly developed technology. Setting all equipment to

full-globular scanning, Baird felt a certain crawling sensation at the

back of his neck. He'd been mapping within a narrow range above and below

the line of this system's ecliptic. A lot could have happened outside the

area he'd had under long-distance scanning.



But seconds passed. They seemed like years. The all-globe scanning

covered every direction out from the Niccola. Nothing appeared which

had not been reported before. The gas-giant planet far behind, and the

only inner one on this side of the sun, would return their pulses only

after minutes. Meanwhile the radars reported very faintfully, but they

only repeated previous reports.



"No new object within half a million miles," said Baird, after a suitable

interval. Presently he added: "Nothing new within three-quarter million

miles." Then: "Nothing new within a million miles ..."



The skipper said bitingly:



"Then you'd better check on objects that are not new!" He turned aside,

and his voice came more faintly as he spoke into another microphone.

"Mr. Taine! Arm all rockets and have your tube crews stand by in combat

readiness! Engine room! Prepare drive for emergency maneuvers!

Damage-control parties, put on pressure suits and take combat posts with

equipment!" His voice rose again in volume. "Mr. Baird! How about

observed objects?"



Diane murmured. Baird said briefly:



"Only one suspicious object, sir--and that shouldn't be suspicious. We

are sending an information-beam at something we'd classed as a burned-out

comet. Pulse going out now, sir."



Diane had the distant-information transmitter aimed at what she'd said

might be a dead comet. Baird pressed the button. An extraordinary complex

of information-seeking frequencies and forms sprang into being and leaped

across emptiness. There were microwaves of strictly standard amplitude,

for measurement-standards. There were frequencies of other values, which

would be selectively absorbed by this material and that. There were

laterally and circularly polarized beams. When they bounced back, they

would bring a surprising amount of information.



They returned. They did bring back news. The thing that had registered as

a larger lump in a meteor-swarm was not a meteor at all. It returned four

different frequencies with a relative-intensity pattern which said that

they'd been reflected by bronze--probably silicon bronze. The polarized

beams came back depolarized, of course, but with phase-changes which said

the reflector had a rounded, regular form. There was a smooth hull of

silicon bronze out yonder. There was other data.



"It will be a Plumie ship, sir," said Baird very steadily. "At a guess,

they picked up our mapping beam and shot a single pulse at us to find out

who and what we were. For another guess, by now they've picked up and

analyzed our information-beam and know what we've found out about them."



The skipper scowled.



"How many of them?" he demanded. "Have we run into a fleet?"



"I'll check, sir," said Baird. "We picked up no tuned radiation from

outer space, sir, but it could be that they picked us up when we came out

of overdrive and stopped all their transmissions until they had us in a

trap."



"Find out how many there are!" barked the skipper. "Make it quick!

Report additional data instantly!"



His screen clicked off. Diane, more than a little pale, worked swiftly to

plug the radar-room equipment into a highly specialized pattern. The

Niccola was very well equipped, radar-wise. She'd been a type G8 Survey

ship, and on her last stay in port she'd been rebuilt especially to hunt

for and make contact with Plumies. Since the discovery of their

existence, that was the most urgent business of the Space Survey. It

might well be the most important business of the human race--on which its

survival or destruction would depend. Other remodeled ships had gone out

before the Niccola, and others would follow until the problem was

solved. Meanwhile the Niccola's twenty-four rocket tubes and

stepped-up drive and computer-type radar system equipped her for

Plumie-hunting as well as any human ship could be. Still, if she'd been

lured deep into the home system of the Plumies, the prospects were not

good.



* * * * *



The new setup began its operation, instantly the last contact closed. The

three-dimensional map served as a matrix to control it. The

information-beam projector swung and flung out its bundle of

oscillations. It swung and flashed, and swung and flashed. It had to

examine every relatively nearby object for a constitution of silicon

bronze and a rounded shape. The nearest objects had to be examined first.

Speed was essential. But three-dimensional scanning takes time, even at

some hundreds of pulses per minute.



Nevertheless, the information came in. No other silicon-bronze object

within a quarter-million miles. Within half a million. A million. A

million and a half. Two million ...



Baird called the navigation room.



"Looks like a single Plumie ship, sir," he reported. "At least there's

one ship which is nearest by a very long way."



"Hah!" grunted the skipper. "Then we'll pay him a visit. Keep an open

line, Mr. Baird!" His voice changed. "Mr. Taine! Report here at once to

plan tactics!"



Baird shook his head, to himself. The Niccola's orders were to make

contact without discovery, if such a thing were possible. The ideal would

be a Plumie ship or the Plumie civilization itself, located and subject

to complete and overwhelming envelopment by human ships--before the

Plumies knew they'd been discovered. And this would be the human ideal

because humans have always had to consider that a stranger might be

hostile, until he'd proven otherwise.



Such a viewpoint would not be optimism, but caution. Yet caution was

necessary. It was because the Survey brass felt the need to prepare for

every unfavorable eventuality that Taine had been chosen as weapons

officer of the Niccola. His choice had been deliberate, because he was

a xenophobe. He had been a problem personality all his life. He had a

seemingly congenital fear and hatred of strangers--which in mild cases is

common enough, but Taine could not be cured without a complete breakdown

of personality. He could not serve on a ship with a multiracial crew,

because he was invincibly suspicious of and hostile to all but his own

small breed. Yet he seemed ideal for weapons officer on the Niccola,

provided he never commanded the ship. Because if the Plumies were

hostile, a well-adjusted, normal man would never think as much like them

as a Taine. He was capable of the kind of thinking Plumies might

practice, if they were xenophobes themselves.



But to Baird, so extreme a precaution as a known psychopathic condition

in an officer was less than wholly justified. It was by no means certain

that the Plumies would instinctively be hostile. Suspicious, yes.

Cautious, certainly. But the only fact known about the Plumie

civilization came from the cairns and silicon-bronze inscribed tablets

they'd left on oxygen-type worlds over a twelve-hundred-light-year range

in space, and the only thing to be deduced about the Plumies themselves

came from the decorative, formalized symbols like feathery plumes which

were found on all their bronze tablets. The name "Plumies" came from that

symbol.



Now, though, Taine was called to the navigation room to confer on

tactics. The Niccola swerved and drove toward the object Baird

identified as a Plumie ship. This was at 05 hours 10 minutes ship time.

The human ship had a definite velocity sunward, of course. The Plumie

ship had been concealed by the meteor swarm of a totally unknown comet.

It was an excellent way to avoid observation. On the other hand, the

Niccola had been mapping, which was bound to attract attention. Now

each ship knew of the other's existence. Since the Niccola had been

detected, she had to carry out orders and attempt a contact to gather

information.



* * * * *



Baird verified that the Niccola's course was exact for interception at

her full-drive speed. He said in a flat voice:



"I wonder how the Plumies will interpret this change of course? They know

we're aware they're not a meteorite. But charging at them without even

trying to communicate could look ominous. We could be stupid, or too

arrogant to think of anything but a fight." He pressed the skipper's call

and said evenly: "Sir, I request permission to attempt to communicate

with the Plumie ship. We're ordered to try to make friends if we know

we've been spotted."



Taine had evidently just reached the navigation room. His voice snapped

from the speaker:



"I advise against that, sir! No use letting them guess our level of

technology!"



Baird said coldly:



"They've a good idea already. We beamed them for data."



There was silence, with only the very faint humming sound which was

natural in the ship in motion. It would be deadly to the nerves if there

were absolute silence. The skipper grumbled:



"Requests and advice! Dammit! Mr. Baird, you might wait for orders! But

I was about to ask you to try to make contact through signals. Do so."



His speaker clicked off. Baird said:



"It's in our laps. Diane. And yet we have to follow orders. Send the

first roll."



Diane had a tape threaded into a transmitter. It began to unroll through

a pickup head. She put on headphones. The tape began to transmit toward

the Plumie. Back at base it had been reasoned that a pattern of

clickings, plainly artificial and plainly stating facts known to both

races, would be the most reasonable way to attempt to open contact. The

tape sent a series of cardinal numbers--one to five. Then an addition

table, from one plus one to five plus five. Then a multiplication table

up to five times five. It was not startlingly intellectual information to

be sent out in tiny clicks ranging up and down the radio spectrum. But it

was orders.



Baird sat with compressed lips. Diane listened for a repetition of any of

the transmitted signals, sent back by the Plumie. The speakers about the

radar room murmured the orders given through all the ship. Radar had to

be informed of all orders and activity, so it could check their results

outside the ship. So Baird heard the orders for the engine room to be

sealed up and the duty-force to get into pressure suits, in case the

Niccola fought and was hulled. Damage-control parties reported

themselves on post, in suits, with equipment ready. Then Taine's voice

snapped: "Rocket crews, arm even-numbered rockets with chemical

explosive warheads. Leave odd-numbered rockets armed with atomics. Report

back!"



Diane strained her ears for possible re-transmission of the Niccola's

signals, which would indicate the Plumie's willingness to try

conversation. But she suddenly raised her hand and pointed to the

radar-graph instrument. It repeated the positioning of dots which were

stray meteoric matter in the space between worlds in this system. What

had been a spot--the Plumie ship--was now a line of dots. Baird pressed

the button.



"Radar reporting!" he said curtly. "The Plumie ship is heading for us.

I'll have relative velocity in ten seconds."



He heard the skipper swear. Ten seconds later the Doppler measurement

became possible. It said the Plumie plunged toward the Niccola at miles

per second. In half a minute it was tens of miles per second. There was

no re-transmission of signals. The Plumie ship had found itself

discovered. Apparently it considered itself attacked. It flung itself

into a headlong dash for the Niccola.



* * * * *



Time passed--interminable time. The sun flared and flamed and writhed in

emptiness. The great gas-giant planet rolled through space in splendid

state, its moonlets spinning gracefully about its bulk. The

oxygen-atmosphere planet to sunward was visible only as a crescent, but

the mottlings on its lighted part changed as it revolved--seas and

islands and continents receiving the sunlight as it turned. Meteor

swarms, so dense in appearance on a radar screen, yet so tenuous in

reality, floated in their appointed orbits with a seeming vast leisure.



The feel of slowness was actually the result of distance. Men have always

acted upon things close by. Battles have always been fought within

eye-range, anyhow. But it was actually 06 hours 35 minutes ship time

before the two spacecraft sighted each other--more than two hours after

they plunged toward a rendezvous.



The Plumie ship was a bright golden dot, at first. It decelerated

swiftly. In minutes it was a rounded, end-on disk. Then it swerved

lightly and presented an elliptical broadside to the Niccola. The

Niccola was in full deceleration too, by then. The two ships came very

nearly to a stop with relation to each other when they were hardly twenty

miles apart--which meant great daring on both sides.



Baird heard the skipper grumbling:



"Damned cocky!" He roared suddenly: "Mr. Baird! How've you made out in

communicating with them?"



"Not at all, sir," said Baird grimly. "They don't reply."



He knew from Diane's expression that there was no sound in the headphones

except the frying noise all main-sequence stars give out, and the

infrequent thumping noises that come from gas-giant planets' lower

atmospheres, and the Jansky-radiation hiss which comes from everywhere.



The skipper swore. The Plumie ship lay broadside to, less than a score of

miles away. It shone in the sunlight. It acted with extraordinary

confidence. It was as if it dared the Niccola to open fire.



Taine's voice came out of a speaker, harsh and angry:



"Even-numbered tubes prepare to fire on command."



Nothing happened. The two ships floated sunward together, neither

approaching nor retreating. But with every second, the need for action of

some sort increased.



"Mr. Baird!" barked the skipper. "This is ridiculous! There must be

some way to communicate! We can't sit here glaring at each other forever!

Raise them! Get some sort of acknowledgment!"



"I'm trying," said Baird bitterly, "according to orders!"



But he disagreed with those orders. It was official theory that

arithmetic values, repeated in proper order, would be the way to open

conversation. The assumption was that any rational creature would grasp

the idea that orderly signals were rational attempts to open

communication.



But it had occurred to Baird that a Plumie might not see this point.

Perception of order is not necessarily perception of information--in

fact, quite the contrary. A message is a disturbance of order. A

microphone does not transmit a message when it sends an unvarying tone. A

message has to be unpredictable or it conveys no message. Orderly clicks,

even if overheard, might seem to Plumies the result of methodically

operating machinery. A race capable of interstellar flight was not likely

to be interested or thrilled by exercises a human child goes through in

kindergarten. They simply wouldn't seem meaningful at all.



But before he could ask permission to attempt to make talk in a more

sophisticated fashion, voices exclaimed all over the ship. They came

blurringly to the loud-speakers. "Look at that!" "What's he do--"

"Spinning like--" From every place where there was a vision-plate on

the Niccola, men watched the Plumie ship and babbled.



This was at 06 hours 50 minutes ship time.



* * * * *



The elliptical golden object darted into swift and eccentric motion.

Lacking an object of known size for comparison, there was no scale. The

golden ship might have been the size of an autumn leaf, and in fact its

maneuvers suggested the heedless tumblings and scurrying of falling

foliage. It fluttered in swift turns and somersaults and spinnings. There

were weavings like the purposeful feints of boxers not yet come to

battle. There were indescribably graceful swoops and loops and curving

dashes like some preposterous dance in emptiness.



Taine's voice crashed out of a speaker:



"All even-number rockets," he barked. "Fire!"






The skipper roared a countermand, but too late. The crunching, grunting

sound of rockets leaving their launching tubes came before his first

syllable was complete. Then there was silence while the skipper gathered

breath for a masterpiece of profanity. But Taine snapped:



"That dance was a sneak-up! The Plumie came four miles nearer while we

watched!"



Baird jerked his eyes from watching the Plumie. He looked at the master

radar. It was faintly blurred with the fading lines of past gyrations,

but the golden ship was much nearer the Niccola than it had been.



"Radar reporting," said Baird sickishly. "Mr. Taine is correct. The

Plumie ship did approach us while it danced."



Taine's voice snarled:



"Reload even numbers with chemical-explosive war heads. Then remove

atomics from odd numbers and replace with chemicals. The range is too

short for atomics."



Baird felt curiously divided in his own mind. He disliked Taine very

much. Taine was arrogant and suspicious and intolerant even on the

Niccola. But Taine had been right twice, now. The Plumie ship had crept

closer by pure trickery. And it was right to remove atomic war heads from

the rockets. They had a pure-blast radius of ten miles. To destroy the

Plumie ship within twice that would endanger the Niccola--and leave

nothing of the Plumie to examine afterward.



The Plumie ship must have seen the rocket flares, but it continued to

dance, coming nearer and ever nearer in seemingly heedless and

purposeless plungings and spinnings in star-speckled space. But suddenly

there were racing, rushing trails of swirling vapor. Half the Niccola's

port broadside plunged toward the golden ship. The fraction of a second

later, the starboard half-dozen chemical-explosive rockets swung

furiously around the ship's hull and streaked after their brothers. They

moved in utterly silent, straight-lined, ravening ferocity toward their

target. Baird thought irrelevantly of the vapor trails of an

atmosphere-liner in the planet's upper air.



The ruled-line straightness of the first six rockets' course abruptly

broke. One of them veered crazily out of control. It shifted to an almost

right-angled course. A second swung wildly to the left. A third and

fourth and fifth--The sixth of the first line of rockets made a great,

sweeping turn and came hurtling back toward the Niccola. It was like a

nightmare. Lunatic, erratic lines of sunlit vapor eeled before the

background of all the stars in creation.



Then the second half-dozen rockets broke ranks, as insanely and

irremediably as the first.



Taine's voice screamed out of a speaker, hysterical with fury:



"Detonate! Detonate! They've taken over the rockets and are throwing 'em

back at us! Detonate all rockets!"



The heavens seemed streaked and laced with lines of expanding smoke. But

now one plunging line erupted at its tip. A swelling globe of smoke

marked its end. Another blew up. And another--



The Niccola's rockets faithfully blew themselves to bits on command

from the Niccola's own weapons control. There was nothing else to be

done with them. They'd been taken over in flight. They'd been turned and

headed back toward their source. They'd have blasted the Niccola to

bits but for their premature explosions.



There was a peculiar, stunned hush all through the Niccola. The only

sound that came out of any speaker in the radar room was Taine's voice,

high-pitched and raging, mouthing unspeakable hatred of the Plumies, whom

no human being had yet seen.



* * * * *



Baird sat tense in the frustrated and desperate composure of the man who

can only be of use while he is sitting still and keeping his head. The

vision screen was now a blur of writhing mist, lighted by the sun and

torn at by emptiness. There was luminosity where the ships had

encountered each other. It was sunshine upon thin smoke. It was like the

insanely enlarging head of a newborn comet, whose tail would be formed

presently by light-pressure. The Plumie ship was almost invisible behind

the unsubstantial stuff.



But Baird regarded his radar screens. Microwaves penetrated the mist of

rapidly ionizing gases.



"Radar to navigation!" he said sharply. "The Plumie ship is still

approaching, dancing as before!"



The skipper said with enormous calm:



"Any other Plumie ships, Mr. Baird?"



Diane interposed.



"No sign anywhere. I've been watching. This seems to be the only ship

within radar range."



"We've time to settle with it, then," said the skipper. "Mr. Taine,

the Plumie ship is still approaching."



Baird found himself hating the Plumies. It was not only that humankind

was showing up rather badly, at the moment. It was that the Plumie ship

had refused contact and forced a fight. It was that if the Niccola were

destroyed the Plumie would carry news of the existence of humanity and of

the tactics which worked to defeat them. The Plumies could prepare an

irresistible fleet. Humanity could be doomed.



But he overheard himself saying bitterly:



"I wish I'd known this was coming, Diane. I ... wouldn't have resolved to

be strictly official, only, until we got back to base."



Her eyes widened. She looked startled. Then she softened.



"If ... you mean that ... I wish so too."



"It looks like they've got us," he admitted unhappily. "If they can take

our rockets away from us--" Then his voice stopped. He said, "Hold

everything!" and pressed the navigation-room button. He snapped: "Radar

to navigation. It appears to take the Plumies several seconds to take

over a rocket. They have to aim something--a pressor or tractor beam,

most likely--and pick off each rocket separately. Nearly forty seconds

was consumed in taking over all twelve of our rockets. At shorter range,

with less time available, a rocket might get through!"



The skipper swore briefly. Then:



"Mr. Taine! When the Plumies are near enough, our rockets may strike

before they can be taken over! You follow?"



Baird heard Taine's shrill-voiced acknowledgment--in the form of

practically chattered orders to his rocket-tube crews. Baird listened,

checking the orders against what the situation was as the radars saw it.

Taine's voice was almost unhuman; so filled with frantic rage that it

cracked as he spoke. But the problem at hand was the fulfillment of all

his psychopathic urges. He commanded the starboard-side rocket-battery to

await special orders. Meanwhile the port-side battery would fire two

rockets on widely divergent courses, curving to join at the Plumie ship.

They'd be seized. They were to be detonated and another port-side rocket

fired instantly, followed by a second hidden in the rocket-trail the

first would leave behind. Then the starboard side--



"I'm afraid Taine's our only chance," said Baird reluctantly. "If he

wins, we'll have time to ... talk as people do who like each other. If it

doesn't work--"



Diane said quietly:



"Anyhow ... I'm glad you ... wanted me to know. I ... wanted you to know,

too."



She smiled at him, yearningly.



* * * * *



There was the crump-crump of two rockets going out together. Then the

radar told what happened. The Plumie ship was no more than six miles

away, dancing somehow deftly in the light of a yellow sun, with all the

cosmos spread out as shining pin points of colored light behind it. The

radar reported the dash and the death of the two rockets, after their

struggle with invisible things that gripped them. They died when they

headed reluctantly back to the Niccola--and detonated two miles from

their parent ship. The skipper's voice came:



"Mr. Taine! After your next salvo I shall head for the Plumie at full

drive, to cut down the distance and the time they have to work in. Be

ready!"



The rocket tubes went crump-crump again, with a fifth of a second

interval. The radar showed two tiny specks speeding through space toward

the weaving, shifting speck which was the Plumie.



Outside, in emptiness, there was a filmy haze. It was the rocket-fumes

and explosive gases spreading with incredible speed. It was thin as

gossamer. The Plumie ship undoubtedly spotted the rockets, but it did not

try to turn them. It somehow seized them and deflected them, and darted

past them toward the Niccola.



"They see the trick," said Diane, dry-throated. "If they can get in close

enough, they can turn it against us!"



There were noises inside the Niccola, now. Taine fairly howled an

order. There were yells of defiance and excitement. There were more of

those inadequate noises as rockets went out--every tube on the starboard

side emptied itself in a series of savage grunts--and the Niccola's

magnetronic drive roared at full flux density.



The two ships were less than a mile apart when the Niccola let go her

full double broadside of missiles. And then it seemed that the Plumie

ship was doomed. There were simply too many rockets to be seized and

handled before at least one struck. But there was a new condition. The

Plumie ship weaved and dodged its way through them. The new condition was

that the rockets were just beginning their run. They had not achieved the

terrific velocity they would accumulate in ten miles of no-gravity. They

were new-launched; logy: clumsy: not the streaking, flashing

death-and-destruction they would become with thirty more seconds of

acceleration.



So the Plumie ship dodged them with a skill and daring past belief. With

an incredible agility it got inside them, nearer to the Niccola than

they. And then it hurled itself at the human ship as if bent upon a

suicidal crash which would destroy both ships together. But Baird, in the

radar room, and the skipper in navigation, knew that it would plunge

brilliantly past at the last instant--



And then they knew that it would not. Because, very suddenly and very

abruptly, there was something the matter with the Plumie ship. The life

went out of it. It ceased to accelerate or decelerate. It ceased to

steer. It began to turn slowly on an axis somewhere amidships. Its nose

swung to one side, with no change in the direction of its motion. It

floated onward. It was broadside to its line of travel. It continued to

turn. It hurtled stern-first toward the Niccola. It did not swerve. It

did not dance. It was a lifeless hulk: a derelict in space.



And it would hit the Niccola amidships with no possible result but

destruction for both vessels.



* * * * *



The Niccola's skipper bellowed orders, as if shouting would somehow

give them more effect. The magnetronic drive roared. He'd demanded a

miracle of it, and he almost got one. The drive strained its

thrust-members. It hopelessly overloaded its coils. The Niccola's

cobalt-steel hull became more than saturated with the drive-field, and it

leaped madly upon an evasion course--



And it very nearly got away. It was swinging clear when the Plumie ship

drifted within fathoms. It was turning aside when the Plumie ship was

within yards. And it was almost safe when the golden hull of the

Plumie--shadowed now by the Niccola itself--barely scraped a side-keel.



There was a touch, seemingly deliberate and gentle. But the Niccola

shuddered horribly. Then the vision screens flared from such a light as

might herald the crack of doom. There was a brightness greater than the

brilliance of the sun. And then there was a wrenching, heaving shock.

Then there was blackness. Baird was flung across the radar room, and

Diane cried out, and he careened against a wall and heard glass shatter.

He called:



"Diane!"



He clutched crazily at anything, and called her name again. The

Niccola's internal gravity was cut off, and his head spun, and he heard

collision-doors closing everywhere, but before they closed completely he

heard the rasping sound of giant arcs leaping in the engine room. Then

there was silence.



"Diane!" cried Baird fiercely. "Diane!"



"I'm ... here," she panted. "I'm dizzy, but I ... think I'm all right--"



The battery-powered emergency light came on. It was faint, but he saw her

clinging to a bank of instruments where she'd been thrown by the

collision. He moved to go to her, and found himself floating in midair.

But he drifted to a side wall and worked his way to her.



She clung to him, shivering.



"I ... think," she said unsteadily, "that we're going to die. Aren't we?"



"We'll see," he told her. "Hold on to me."



Guided by the emergency light, he scrambled to the bank of

communicator-buttons. What had been the floor was now a side wall. He

climbed it and thumbed the navigation-room switch.



"Radar room reporting," he said curtly. "Power out, gravity off, no

reports from outside from power failure. No great physical damage."



He began to hear other voices. There had never been an actual

space-collision in the memory of man, but reports came crisply, and the

cut-in speakers in the radar room repeated them. Ship-gravity was out all

over the ship. Emergency lights were functioning, and were all the lights

there were. There was a slight, unexplained gravity-drift toward what had

been the ship's port side. But damage-control reported no loss of

pressure in the Niccola's inner hull, though four areas between inner

and outer hulls had lost air pressure to space.



"Mr. Baird," rasped the skipper. "We're blind! Forget everything else

and give us eyes to see with!"



"We'll try battery power to the vision plates," Baird told Diane. "No

full resolution, but better than nothing--"



They worked together, feverishly. They were dizzy. Something close to

nausea came upon them from pure giddiness. What had been the floor was

now a wall, and they had to climb to reach the instruments that had been

on a wall and now were on the ceiling. But their weight was ounces only.

Baird said abruptly:



"I know what's the matter! We're spinning! The whole ship's spinning!

That's why we're giddy and why we have even a trace of weight.

Centrifugal force! Ready for the current?"



There was a tiny click, and the battery light dimmed. But a vision screen

lighted faintly. The stars it showed were moving specks of light. The sun

passed deliberately across the screen. Baird switched to other outside

scanners. There was power for only one screen at a time. But he saw the

starkly impossible. He pressed the navigation-room button.



"Radar room reporting," he said urgently. "The Plumie ship is fast to us,

in contact with our hull! Both ships are spinning together!" He was

trying yet other scanners as he spoke, and now he said: "Got it! There

are no lines connecting us to the Plumie, but it looks ... yes! That

flash when the ships came together was a flash-over of high potential.

We're welded to them along twenty feet of our hull!"



The skipper:



"Damnation! Any sign of intention to board us?"



"Not yet, sir--"



Taine burst in, his voice high-pitched and thick with hatred:



"Damage-control parties attention! Arm yourselves and assemble at

starboard air lock! Rocket crews get into suits and prepare to board this

Plumie--"



"Countermand!" bellowed the skipper from the speaker beside Baird's

ear. "Those orders are canceled! Dammit, if we were successfully boarded

we'd blow ourselves to bits! Those are our orders! D'you think the

Plumies will let their ship be taken? And wouldn't we blow up with them?

Mr. Taine, you will take no offensive action without specific orders!

Defensive action is another matter. Mr. Baird! I consider this welding

business pure accident. No one would be mad enough to plan it. You watch

the Plumies and keep me informed!"



His voice ceased. And Baird had again the frustrating duty of remaining

still and keeping his head while other men engaged in physical

activity. He helped Diane to a chair--which was fastened to the

floor-which-was-now-a-wall--and she wedged herself fast and began a

review of what each of the outside scanners reported. Baird called for

more batteries. Power for the radar and visions was more important than

anything else, just then. If there were more Plumie ships ...



* * * * *



Electricians half-floated, half-dragged extra batteries to the radar

room. Baird hooked them in. The universe outside the ship again appeared

filled with brilliantly colored dots of light which were stars. More

satisfying, the globe-scanners again reported no new objects anywhere.

Nothing new within a quarter million miles. A half-million. Later Baird

reported:



"Radars report no strange objects within a million miles of the

Niccola, sir."



"Except the ship we're welded to! But you are doing very well. However,

microphones say there is movement inside the Plumie."



Diane beckoned for Baird's attention to a screen, which Baird had

examined before. Now he stiffened and motioned for her to report.



"We've a scanner, sir," said Diane, "which faces what looks like a port

in the Plumie ship. There's a figure at the port. I can't make out

details, but it is making motions, facing us."



"Give me the picture!" snapped the skipper.



Diane obeyed. It was the merest flip of a switch. Then her eyes went

back to the spherical-sweep scanners which reported the bearing and

distance of every solid object within their range. She set up two

instruments which would measure the angle, bearing, and distance of the

two planets now on this side of the sun--the gas-giant and the

oxygen-world to sunward. Their orbital speeds and distances were known.

The position, course, and speed of the Niccola could be computed from

any two observations on them.






Diane had returned to the utterly necessary routine of the radar room

which was the nerve-center of the ship, gathering all information needed

for navigation in space. The fact that there had been a collision, that

the Niccola's engines were melted to unlovely scrap, that the Plumie

ship was now welded irremovably to a side-keel, and that a Plumie was

signaling to humans while both ships went spinning through space toward

an unknown destination--these things did not affect the obligations of

the radar room.



Baird got other images of the Plumie ship into sharp focus. So near, the

scanners required adjustment for precision.



"Take a look at this!" he said wryly.



She looked. The view was of the Plumie as welded fast to the Niccola.

The welding was itself an extraordinary result of the Plumie's

battle-tactics. Tractor and pressor beams were known to men, of course,

but human beings used them only under very special conditions. Their

operation involved the building-up of terrific static charges. Unless a

tractor-beam generator could be grounded to the object it was to pull, it

tended to emit lightning-bolts at unpredictable intervals and in entirely

random directions. So men didn't use them. Obviously, the Plumies did.



They'd handled the Niccola's rockets with beams which charged the

golden ship to billions of volts. And when the silicon-bronze Plumie ship

touched the cobalt-steel Niccola--why--that charge had to be shared. It

must have been the most spectacular of all artificial electric flames.

Part of the Niccola's hull was vaporized, and undoubtedly part of the

Plumie. But the unvaporized surfaces were molten and in contact--and they

stuck.



For a good twenty feet the two ships were united by the most perfect of

vacuum-welds. The wholly dissimilar hulls formed a space-catamaran, with

a sort of valley between their bulks. Spinning deliberately, as the

united ships did, sometimes the sun shone brightly into that valley, and

sometimes it was filled with the blackness of the pit.



While Diane looked, a round door revolved in the side of the Plumie ship.

As Diane caught her breath, Baird reported crisply. At his first words

Taine burst into raging commands for men to follow him through the

Niccola's air lock and fight a boarding party of Plumies in empty

space. The skipper very savagely ordered him to be quiet.



"Only one figure has come out," reported Baird. The skipper watched on a

vision plate, but Baird reported so all the Niccola's company would

know. "It's small--less than five feet ... I'll see better in a moment."

Sunlight smote down into the valley between the ships. "It's wearing a

pressure suit. It seems to be the same material as the ship. It walks on

two legs, as we do ... It has two arms, or something very similar ... The

helmet of the suit is very high ... It looks like the armor knights used

to fight in ... It's making its way to our air lock ... It does not use

magnetic-soled shoes. It's holding onto lines threaded along the other

ship's hull ..."



The skipper said curtly:



"Mr. Baird! I hadn't noticed the absence of magnetic shoes. You seem to

have an eye for important items. Report to the air lock in person. Leave

Lieutenant Holt to keep an eye on outside objects. Quickly, Mr. Baird!"



* * * * *



Baird laid his hand on Diane's shoulder. She smiled at him.



"I'll watch!" she promised.



He went out of the radar room, walking on what had been a side wall. The

giddiness and dizziness of continued rotation was growing less, now. He

was getting used to it. But the Niccola seemed strange indeed, with the

standard up and down and Earth-gravity replaced by a vertical which was

all askew and a weight of ounces instead of a hundred and seventy pounds.



He reached the air lock just as the skipper arrived. There were others

there--armed and in pressure suits. The skipper glared about him.



"I am in command here," he said very grimly indeed. "Mr. Taine has a

special function, but I am in command! We and the creatures on the Plumie

ship are in a very serious fix. One of them apparently means to come on

board. There will be no hostility, no sneering, no threatening gestures!

This is a parley! You will be careful. But you will not be

trigger-happy!"



He glared around again, just as a metallic rapping came upon the

Niccola's air-lock door. The skipper nodded:



"Let him in the lock, Mr. Baird."



Baird obeyed. The humming of the unlocking-system sounded. There were

clankings. The outer air lock dosed. There was a faint whistling as air

went in. The skipper nodded again.



Baird opened the inner door. It was 08 hours 10 minutes ship time.



The Plumie stepped confidently out into the topsy-turvy corridors of the

Niccola. He was about the size of a ten-year-old human boy, and

features which were definitely not grotesque showed through the clear

plastic of his helmet. His pressure suit was, engineering-wise, a very

clean job. His whole appearance was prepossessing. When he spoke, very

clear and quite high sounds--soprano sounds--came from a small

speaker-unit at his shoulder.



"For us to talk," said the skipper heavily, "is pure nonsense. But I take

it you've something to say."



The Plumie gazed about with an air of lively curiosity. Then he drew out

a flat pad with a white surface and sketched swiftly. He offered it to

the Niccola's skipper.



"We want this on record," he growled, staring about.



Diane's voice said capably from a speaker somewhere nearby:



"Sir, there's a scanner for inspection of objects brought aboard. Hold

the plate flat and I'll have a photograph--right!"



The skipper said curtly to the Plumie:



"You've drawn our two ships linked as they are. What have you to say

about it?"



He handed back the plate. The Plumie pressed a stud and it was blank

again. He sketched and offered it once more.



"Hm-m-m," said the skipper. "You can't use your drive while we're glued

together, eh? Well?"



The Plumie reached up and added lines to the drawing.



"So!" rumbled the skipper, inspecting the additions. "You say it's up to

us to use our drive for both ships." He growled approvingly: "You

consider there's a truce. You must, because we're both in the same fix,

and not a nice one, either. True enough! We can't fight each other

without committing suicide, now. But we haven't any drive left! We're a

derelict! How am I going to say that--if I decide to?"



Baird could see the lines on the plate, from the angle at which the

skipper held it. He said:



"Sir, we've been mapping, up in the radar room. Those last lines are

map-co-ordinates--a separate sketch, sir. I think he's saying that the

two ships, together, are on a falling course toward the sun. That we have

to do something or both vessels will fall into it. We should be able to

check this, sir."



"Hah!" growled the skipper. "That's all we need! Absolutely all we need!

To come here, get into a crazy right, have our drive melt to scrap, get

crazily welded to a Plumie ship, and then for both of us to fry together!

We don't need anything more than that!"



Diane's voice came on the speaker:



"Sir, the last radar fixes on the planets in range give us a course

directly toward the sun. I'll repeat the observations."



The skipper growled. Taine thrust himself forward. He snarled:



"Why doesn't this Plumie take off its helmet? It lands on oxygen planets!

Does it think it's too good to breathe our air?"



Baird caught the Plumie's eye. He made a gesture suggesting the removal

of the space helmet. The Plumie gestured, in return, to a tiny vent in

the suit. He opened something and gas whistled out. He cut it off. The

question of why he did not open or remove his helmet was answered. The

atmosphere he breathed would not do men any good, nor would theirs do him

any good, either. Taine said suspiciously:



"How do we know he's breathing the stuff he let out then? This creature

isn't human! It's got no right to attack humans! Now it's trying to trick

us!" His voice changed to a snarl. "We'd better wring its neck! Teach its

kind a lesson--"



The skipper roared at him.



"Be quiet! Our ship is a wreck! We have to consider the facts! We and

these Plumies are in a fix together, and we have to get out of it before

we start to teach anybody anything!" He glared at Taine. Then he said

heavily: "Mr. Baird, you seem to notice things. Take this Plumie over the

ship. Show him our drive melted down, so he'll realize we can't possibly

tow his ship into an orbit. He knows that we're armed, and that we can't

handle our war heads at this range! So we can't fool each other. We might

as well be frank. But you will take full note of his reactions, Mr.

Baird!"



* * * * *



Baird advanced, and the skipper made a gesture. The Plumie regarded Baird

with interested eyes. And Baird led the way for a tour of the Niccola.

It was confusing even to him, with right hand converted to up and left

hand to down, and sidewise now almost vertical. On the way the Plumie

made more clear, flutelike sounds, and more gestures. Baird answered.



"Our gravity pull was that way," he explained, "and things fell so fast."



He grasped a handrail and demonstrated the speed with which things fell

in normal ship-gravity. He used a pocket communicator for the falling

weight. It was singularly easy to say some things, even highly technical

ones, because they'd be what the Plumie would want to know. But quite

commonplace things would be very difficulty to convey.



Diane's voice came out of the communicator.



"There are no novelties outside," she said quietly. "It looks like

this is the only Plumie ship anywhere around. It could have been

exploring, like us. Maybe it was looking for the people who put up

Space-Survey markers."



"Maybe," agreed Baird, using the communicator. "Is that stuff about

falling into the sun correct?"



"It seems so," said Diane composedly. "I'm checking again. So far, the

best course I can get means we graze the sun's photosphere in fourteen

days six hours, allowing for acceleration by the sun's gravity."



"And you and I," said Baird wryly, "have been acting as professional

associates only, when--"



"Don't say it!" said Diane shakily. "It's terrible!"



He put the communicator back in his pocket. The Plumie had watched him.

He had a peculiarly gallant air, this small figure in golden space armor

with its high-crested helmet.



They reached the engine room. And there was the giant drive shaft of the

Niccola, once wrapped with yard-thick coils which could induce an

incredible density of magnetic flux in the metal. Even the return

magnetic field, through the ship's cobalt-steel hull, was many times

higher than saturation. Now the coils were sagging: mostly melted. There

were places where re-solidified metal smoked noisomely against

nonmetallic floor or wall-covering. Engineers labored doggedly in the

trivial gravity to clean up the mess.



"It's past repair," said Baird, to the ship's first engineer.



"It's junk," said that individual dourly. "Give us six months and a place

to set up a wire-drawing mill and an insulator synthesizer, and we could

rebuild it. But nothing less will be any good."



The Plumie stared at the drive. He examined the shaft from every angle.

He inspected the melted, and partly-melted, and merely burned-out

sections of the drive coils. He was plainly unable to understand in any

fashion the principle of the magnetronic drive. Baird was tempted to try

to explain, because there was surely no secret about a ship drive, but he

could imagine no diagrams or gestures which would convey the theory of

what happened in cobalt-steel when it was magnetized beyond one hundred

thousand Gauss' flux-density. And without that theory one simply couldn't

explain a magnetronic drive.



They left the engine room. They visited the rocket batteries. The

generator room was burned out, like the drive, by the inconceivable

lightning bolt which had passed between the ships on contact. The Plumie

was again puzzled. Baird made it clear that the generator-room supplied

electric current for the ship's normal lighting-system and services. The

Plumie could grasp that idea. They examined the crew's quarters, and the

mess room, and the Plumie walked confidently among the members of the

human crew, who a little while since had tried so painstakingly to

destroy his vessel. He made a good impression.



"These little guys," said a crewman to Baird, admiringly, "they got

something. They can handle a ship! I bet they could almost make that ship

of theirs play checkers!"



"Close to it," agreed Baird. He realized something. He pulled the

communicator from his pocket. "Diane! Contact the skipper. He wanted

observations. Here's one. This Plumie acts like soldiers used to act in

ancient days--when they wore armor. And we have the same reaction! They

will fight like the devil, but during a truce they'll be friendly,

admiring each other as scrappers, but ready to fight as hard as ever when

the truce is over. We have the same reaction! Tell the skipper I've an

idea that it's a part of their civilization--maybe it's a necessary part

of any civilization! Tell him I guess that there may be necessarily

parallel evolution of attitudes, among rational races, as there are

parallel evolutions of eyes and legs and wings and fins among all animals

everywhere! If I'm right, somebody from this ship will be invited to tour

the Plumie! It's only a guess, but tell him!"



"Immediately," said Diane.



* * * * *





The Plumie followed gallantly as Baird made a steep climb up what once

was the floor of a corridor. Then Taine stepped out before them. His eyes

burned.



"Giving him a clear picture, eh?" he rasped. "Letting him spy out

everything?"



Baird pressed the communicator call for the radar room and said coldly:



"I'm obeying orders. Look, Taine! You were picked for your job because

you were a xenophobe. It helps in your proper functioning. But this

Plumie is here under a flag of truce--"



"Flag of truce!" snarled Taine. "It's vermin! It's not human! I'll--"



"If you move one inch nearer him," said Baird gently, "just one inch--"



The skipper's voice bellowed through the general call speakers all over

the ship:



"Mr. Taine! You will go to your quarters, under arrest! Mr. Baird, burn

him down if he hesitates!"



Then there was a rushing, and scrambling figures appeared and were all

about. They were members of the Niccola's crew, sent by the skipper.

They regarded the Plumie with detachment, but Taine with a wary

expectancy. Taine turned purple with fury. He shouted. He raged. He

called Baird and the others Plumie-lovers and vermin-worshipers. He

shouted foulnesses at them. But he did not attack.



When, still shouting, he went away, Baird said apologetically to the

Plumie:



"He's a xenophobe. He has a pathological hatred of strangers--even of

strangeness. We have him on board because--"



Then he stopped. The Plumie wouldn't understand, of course. But his eyes

took on a curious look. It was almost as if, looking at Baird, they

twinkled.



Baird took him back to the skipper.



"He's got the picture, sir," he reported.



The Plumie pulled out his sketch plate. He drew on it. He offered it. The

skipper said heavily:



"You guessed right, Mr. Baird. He suggests that someone from this ship go

on board the Plumie vessel. He's drawn two pressure-suited figures going

in their air lock. One's larger than the other. Will you go?"



"Naturally!" said Baird. Then he added thoughtfully: "But I'd better

carry a portable scanner, sir. It should work perfectly well through a

bronze hull, sir."



The skipper nodded and began to sketch a diagram which would amount to an

acceptance of the Plumie's invitation.



This was at 07 hours 40 minutes ship time. Outside the sedately rotating

metal hulls--the one a polished blue-silver and the other a glittering

golden bronze--the cosmos continued to be as always. The haze from

explosive fumes and rocket-fuel was, perhaps, a little thinner. The

brighter stars shone through it. The gas-giant planet outward from the

sun was a perceptible disk instead of a diffuse glow. The oxygen-planet

to sunward showed again as a lighted crescent.



Presently Baird, in a human spacesuit, accompanied the Plumie into the

Niccola's air lock and out to emptiness. His magnetic-soled shoes clung

to the Niccola's cobalt-steel skin. Fastened to his shoulder there was

a tiny scanner and microphone, which would relay everything he saw and

heard back to the radar room and to Diane.



She watched tensely as he went inside the Plumie ship. Other screens

relayed the image and his voice to other places on the Niccola.



He was gone a long time. From the beginning, of course, there were

surprises. When the Plumie escort removed his helmet, on his own ship,

the reason for the helmet's high crest was apparent. He had a high crest

of what looked remarkably like feathers--and it was not artificial. It

grew there. The reason for conventionalized plumes on bronze survey

plates was clear. It was exactly like the reason for human features or

figures as decorative additions to the inscriptions on Space Survey

marker plates. Even the Plumie's hands had odd crestlets which stood out

when he bent his fingers. The other Plumies were no less graceful and no

less colorful. They had equally clear soprano voices. They were equally

miniature and so devoid of apparent menace.



But there were also technical surprises. Baird was taken immediately to

the Plumie ship's engine room, and Diane heard the sharp intake of breath

with which he appeared to recognize its working principle. There were

Plumie engineers working feverishly at it, attempting to discover

something to repair. But they found nothing. The Plumie drive simply

would not work.



They took Baird through the ship's entire fabric. And their purpose, when

it became clear, was startling. The Plumie ship had no rocket tubes. It

had no beam-projectors except small-sized objects which were--which must

be--their projectors of tractor and pressor beams. They were elaborately

grounded to the ship's substance. But they were not originally designed

for ultra-heavy service. They hadn't and couldn't have the enormous

capacity Baird had expected. He was astounded.



* * * * *



When he returned to the Niccola, he went instantly to the radar room to

make sure that pictures taken through his scanner had turned out well.

And there was Diane.



But the skipper's voice boomed at him from the wall.



"Mr. Baird! What have you to add to the information you sent back?"



"Three items, sir," said Baird. He drew a deep breath. "For the first,

sir, the Plumie ship is unarmed. They've tractor and pressor beams for

handling material. They probably use them to build their cairns. But they

weren't meant for weapons. The Plumies, sir, hadn't a thing to fight with

when they drove for us after we detected them."



The skipper blinked hard.



"Are you sure of that, Mr. Baird?"



"Yes, sir," said Baird uncomfortably. "The Plumie ship is an exploring

ship--a survey ship, sir. You saw their mapping equipment. But when they

spotted us, and we spotted them--they bluffed! When we fired rockets at

them, they turned them back with tractor and pressor beams. They drove

for us, sir, to try to destroy us with our own bombs, because they didn't

have any of their own."



The skipper's mouth opened and closed.



"Another item, sir," said Baird more uncomfortably still. "They don't use

iron or steel. Every metal object I saw was either a bronze or a light

metal. I suspect some of their equipment's made of potassium, and I'm

fairly sure they use sodium in the place of aluminum. Their atmosphere's

quite different from ours--obviously! They'd use bronze for their ship's

hull because they can venture into an oxygen atmosphere in a bronze ship.

A sodium-hulled ship would be lighter, but it would burn in oxygen. Where

there was moisture--"



The skipper blinked.



"But they couldn't drive in a non-magnetic hull!" he protested. "A

ship has to be magnetic to drive!"



"Sir," said Baird, his voice still shaken, "they don't use a magnetronic

drive. I once saw a picture of the drive they use, in a stereo on the

history of space travel. The principle's very old. We've practically

forgotten it. It's a Dirac pusher-drive, sir. Among us humans, it came

right after rockets. The planets of Sol were first reached by ships using

Dirac pushers. But--" He paused. "They won't operate in a magnetic field

above seventy Gauss, sir. It's a static-charge reaction, sir, and in a

magnetic field it simply stops working."



The skipper regarded Baird unwinkingly for a long time.



"I think you are telling me," he said at long last, "that the Plumies'

drive would work if they were cut free of the Niccola."



"Yes, sir," said Baird. "Their engineers were opening up the

drive-elements and checking them, and then closing them up again. They

couldn't seem to find anything wrong. I don't think they know what the

trouble is. It's the Niccola's magnetic field. I think it was our field

that caused the collision by stopping their drive and killing all their

controls when they came close enough."



"Did you tell them?" demanded the skipper.



"There was no easy way to tell them by diagrams, sir."



Taine's voice cut in. It was feverish. It was strident. It was

triumphant.



"Sir! The Niccola is effectively a wreck and unrepairable. But the

Plumie ship is operable if cut loose. As weapons officer, I intend to

take the Plumie ship, let out its air, fill its tanks with our air, start

up its drive, and turn it over to you for navigation back to base!"






Baird raged. But he said coldly:



"We're a long way from home, Mr. Taine, and the Dirac pusher drive is

slow. If we headed back to base in the Plumie ship with its Dirac pusher,

we'd all be dead of old age before we'd gone halfway."



"But unless we take it," raged Taine, "we hit this sun in fourteen

days! We don't have to die now! We can land on the oxygen planet up

ahead! We've only to kill these vermin and take their ship, and we'll

live!"



Diane's voice said dispassionately:



"Report. A Plumie in a pressure suit just came out of their air lock.

It's carrying a parcel toward our air lock."



Taine snarled instantly:



"They'll sneak something in the Niccola to blast it, and then cut free

and go away!"






The skipper said very grimly:



"Mr. Taine, credit me with minimum brains! There is no way the Plumies

can take this ship without an atomic bomb exploding to destroy both

ships. You should know it!" Then he snapped: "Air lock area, listen for

a knock, and let in the Plumie or the parcel he leaves."



There was silence. Baird said very quietly:



"I doubt they think it possible to cut the ships apart. A torch is no

good on thick silicon bronze. It conducts heat too well! And they don't

use steel. They probably haven't a cutting-torch at all."



* * * * *



From the radar room he watched the Plumie place an object in the air lock

and withdraw. He watched from a scanner inside the ship as someone

brought in what the Plumie had left. An electronics man bustled forward.

He looked it over quickly. It was complex, but his examination suddenly

seemed satisfying to him. But a grayish vapor developed and he sniffed

and wrinkled his nose. He picked up a communicator.



"Sir, they've sent us a power-generator. Some of its parts are going bad

in our atmosphere, sir, but this looks to me like a hell of a good idea

for a generator! I never saw anything like it, but it's good! You can set

it for any voltage and it'll turn out plenty juice!"



"Put it in helium," snapped the skipper. "It won't break down in that!

Then see how it serves!"



In the radar room, Baird drew a deep breath. He went carefully to each of

the screens and every radar. Diane saw what he was about, and checked

with him. They met at the middle of the radar room.



"Everything's checked out," said Baird gravely. "There's nothing else

around. There's nothing we can be called on to do before something

happens. So ... we can ... act like people."



Diane smiled very faintly.



"Not like people. Just like us." She said wistfully: "Don't you want to

tell me something? Something you intended to tell me only after we got

back to base?"



He did. He told it to her. And there was also something she had not

intended to tell him at all--unless he told her first. She said it now.

They felt that such sayings were of the greatest possible importance.

They clung together, saying them again. And it seemed wholly monstrous

that two people who cared so desperately had wasted so much time acting

like professional associates--explorer-ship officers--when things like

this were to be said ...



As they talked incoherently, or were even more eloquently silent, the

ship's ordinary lights came on. The battery-lamp went on.



"We've got to switch back to ship's circuit," said Baird reluctantly.

They separated, and restored the operating circuits to normal. "We've got

fourteen days," he added, "and so much time to be on duty, and we've a

lost lifetime to live in fourteen days! Diane--"



She flushed vividly. So Baird said very politely into the microphone to

the navigation room:



"Sir, Lieutenant Holt and myself would like to speak directly to you in

the navigation room. May we?"



"Why not?" growled the skipper. "You've noticed that the Plumie

generator is giving the whole ship lights and services?"



"Yes, sir," said Baird. "We'll be there right away."



* * * * *



They heard the skipper's grunt as they hurried through the door. A moment

later the ship's normal gravity returned--also through the Plumie

generator. Up was up again, and down was down, and the corridors and

cabins of the Niccola were brightly illuminated. Had the ship been

other than an engineless wreck, fall