Then he heard a tiny click. Sweat ran down his face. He worked desperately to localize the signal Esther had set to working in the yacht before she left it. When at last he landed and was sure theErebuswas under the starlit sand about him, he looked at the power gauge and tensed his lips. He pressed his space helmet close to Esther's, until it touched. He spoke, and his voice carried by metallic conduction without the use of radio.
"We might make it if we try now. But we're going to need a lot of power at best. I'm going to gamble the local yokels can't trace a skid drive and wait for morning, to harness the whirlwinds to do our digging for us."
Her voice came faintly back to him by the same means of communication.
"All right, Stan."
She couldn't guess his intentions, of course. They were probably insane. He said urgently:
"Listen! The yacht's buried directly under us. Maybe ten feet, maybe fifty, maybe Heaven knows how deep! There's a bare chance that if we get to it we can do something, with what I know now about the machines in use here. It's the only chance I know, and it's not a good one. It's only fair to tell you—"
"I'll try anything," said her voice in his helmet, "with you."
He swallowed. Then he stayed awake and desperately alert, his suit-microphones at their highest pitch of sensitivity, during the long and deadly monotonous hours of the night.
There was no alarm. When the sky grayed to the eastward, he showed her how he hoped to reach the yacht. The drive of the skid, of course, was not a pulsatory field such as even the smallest of space yachts used. It was more nearly an adaptation of a meteor-repeller beam, a simple reactive thrust against an artificial-mass field. It was the first type of drive ever to lift a ship from Earth. For take-off and landing and purposes like meteor mining it is still better than the pulsating-field drive by which a ship travels in huge if unfelt leaps. But in atmosphere it does produce a tremendous black-blast of repelled air. It is never used on atmosphere-flyers for that very reason, but Stan proposed to make capital of its drawback for his purpose.
When he'd finished his explanation, Esther was more than a little pale, but she smiled gamely.
"All right, Stan. Go ahead!"
"We'll save power if we wait for the winds," he told her.
Already, though, breezes stirred across the dawn-lit sand. Already they were hot breezes. Already the fine, impalpable sand dust which settled last at nightfall was rising in curious opaque clouds which billowed and curled and blotted out the horizon. But the grid was hidden by the bulge of the planet's surface.
Stan pointed the little skid downward in a hollow he scooped out with his space-gloved hands. He set the gyros running to keep it pointed toward the buried yacht. He had Esther climb up behind him. He lashed the two of them together, and strapped them to the skid. And he waited.
In ten minutes after the first sand grains pelted on his armor, the sky was hidden by the finer dust. In twenty there were great gusts which could be felt even within the space suits. In half an hour a monster gale blew.
Stan turned on the space skid's drive. It thrust downward toward the sand and the buried yacht. It thrust upward against the air and pelting sand.
In three-quarters of an hour the sandstorm had reached frenzied violence—but the skid pushed down from within a little hollow. Its drive thrust up a spout of air. That spout drew sand grains with it. But it was needful to increase the power. After an hour a gigantic whirlwind swept around them. It tore at the two people and the tiny machine. It sucked up such a mass of powdery sand particles that their impact on the space suits was like a savage blow.
Emptiness opened beneath the skid as sand went whirling up in a sandspout the exact equivalent of a waterspout at sea. Stan and Esther and the skid itself would have been torn away by its violence but that the skid's drive was on full, now. The absurd little traveler thrust sturdily downward. When sand was drawn away by wind, it burrowed down eagerly to make the most of its gain.
Its back-thrust kept a steady, cone-shaped pressure on the sand which would have poured in upon it. Stan and Esther were buried and uncovered and buried again, but the skid fought valorously. It strove to dig deeper and to fling away the sand that would have hidden it from view. It remained, actually, at the bottom of a perpetually filling pit which it kept from filling by a geyser of upflung sand from its drive.
In twenty minutes another whirlwind touched the pit briefly. The skid—helped by the storm—dug deeper yet. There came other swirling maelstroms....
The nose of the skid touched solidity. It had burrowed down nearly fifty feet, with the aid of whirlwinds, and come to the yachtErebus.
But it was another hour before accident and fierce efforts on Stan's part combined to let him reach the air-lock door, and maneuver the skid to keep that doorway clear, and for Esther to climb in—followed by masses of slithering sand—and Stan after her.
Inside the buried yacht, Stan fumbled for lights. He made haste to turn off the signaling device that had led him back to it deep under the desert's surface. And it was strangely and wonderfully still here, buried under thousands of tons of sand.
Esther slipped out of her space suit and smiled tremulously at Stan.
"Now?"
"Now," said Stan, "if you want to, you can start cooking. We could do with a civilized meal. And I'll see what I can do toward a slightly less uncertain way of life."
He went forward. TheErebuswas a small yacht, to be sure. It was a bare sixty feet over-all, and of course as a pleasure craft it had no actual armament. But within two bulging blisters at the bow the meteor-repellers were mounted. In flight, in space, they could make a two-way thrust against stray bits of celestial matter, so that if a meteor was tiny it was thrust aside, or if too large theErebusswerved away.
From within, Stan changed the focus of the beams. They had been set to send out tiny reaction beams no larger than a rifle bore. At ten miles such a beam would be six inches across, and at forty a bare two feet. He adjusted both to a quickly widening cone and pointed one up, the other down. One would thrust violently against the sand under the yacht, and the other against the sand over it. The surface sand, at least, could rise and be blown away. The sand below would support the yacht against further settling.
He went back to where Esther laid out dishes.
"I've started something," he told her. "One repeller beam points up to make the sand over our heads effectively lighter so it can be blown away more easily. The storm ought to burrow right down to us, with that much help. After we're uncovered, we may, just possibly, be able to work the ship up to the surface. But after that we've got to do something else. The repellers aren't as powerful as a drive, and it's hardly likely we could lift out of gravity on them. Even if we did, we're a few light-centuries from home. To fix our interstellar drive we need the help of our friends of the grid."
Esther paused to stare.
"But they'll try to kill us!" she protested. "They've tried hard! And if they find us we've no weapons at all—not even a hand-blaster!"
"To the contrary," said Stan dryly, "we've probably the most ghastly weapon anybody ever invented—only it won't work on any other planet than this."
Then he grinned at her. Now, he too was out of his space suit. The food he'd asked her to prepare was out on the table, but he ignored it. He took one step toward her. And then there came a muffled sound, picked up by the outside hull-microphones. It grew in volume. It became a roar. Then the yacht shifted position. Its nose tilted upward.
"The first step," said Stan, "is accomplished. I can't stop to dine. But—"
He kissed her hungrily. Five days—six, now—in space suits with the girl one hopes to marry has its drawbacks. An armored arm around the hulking shoulders of another suit of armor—even with a pretty girl inside it—is not satisfying. To hold hands with three-eighth-inch space gloves is less than romantic. And to try to kiss a girl three-quarters buried in a space helmet leaves much to the imagination. Stan kissed her. It took another shifting movement of the yacht, which toppled them the length of the cabin, to make him stop.
Then he laughed and went to the control room.
Vision screens were useless, of course. The little ship was still most of her length under sand, but the repellers' cones of thrust had dug a great pit down to her. Now Stan juggled the repellers to take fullest advantage of the storm. At times—with both beams pushing up—the ship was perceptibly lifted by uprushing air. And Stan could be prodigal with power, now. The skid was sharply limited in its storage of energy, but all the space between the two skins of theErebuswas a power bank. It could travel from one rim of the Galaxy to the other without exhausting its store. And the upward lift of whirlwinds—once there were six within ten minutes—and the thrusts of the repellers gradually edged theErebusto the surface.
Before nightfall it no longer lay in a sand pit. It was only half buried in sand. And when the winds died down to merely savage gales, at twilight, and then slowly diminished to more angry gusts, and at long last there was calm without and even the impalpable fine dust that settled last no longer floated in the air, and the stars shone—then Stan was ready.
He turned on the ship's communicator and sent a full-power wave out into the night. He spoke. What he said would be unintelligible, of course, but he said sardonically to the empty desert:
"YachtErebuscalling! Down on the desert, every drive smashed, and not so much as a hand-blaster on board for a weapon. Maybe you'd like to come and get us!"
Then—and only then—he went and ate the long delayed meal Esther had made ready.
It was half an hour before the microphones gave warning. Then they relayed clankings and poundings and thuddings on the sand. It was the sound of heavy machines marching toward theErebus. Scores of them. The machines separated and encircled the disabled yacht, though they were invisible behind the dunes all about. And then, simultaneously, they closed in.
The landing beams of theErebusflashed out. Light flickered in the chill darkness. The beams darted here and there.
Then the machines appeared. The scene was remarkable. Over the dunes marched gigantic metal monsters, many-legged, with bodies as great as theErebusitself. Great bulges on their forward parts gave the look of eyes, as if these were huge insects marching to devour and destroy. As the landing-light beams flickered from one to another of them, huge metallic tusks appeared, and toothed jaws—used for excavation. They were not machines designed for war, but they were terrifying, and they could be terrible.
Esther's hand on Stan's shoulder trembled as the monsters closed in. And then Stan, in the unarmed and seemingly defenseless little space yacht, swung the meteor-repeller controls and literally cut them to pieces.
"We're barbarians," said Stan, "compared to these folk. So we've an advantage. It's likely to be only temporary, though!"
He watched the carcasses of the great machines, flicking the landing-light beams back and forth. They were tumbled terribly on the ground. Some were severed in two or three places, and their separate sections sprawled astonishedly on a dune-side. One was split through lengthwise. Another had all of one set of legs cut off clean, and lay otherwise unharmed but utterly helpless.
Out of that incapacitated giant a smaller version of itself crawled. It was like a lifeboat. Stan watched. Other small versions of the great machines appeared. One made a dash at theErebus, and he cut it savagely in two. There was no other attack. Instead, the smaller many-legged machines ran busily from one to another of the wrecks—seeming to gather up survivors—and then went racing away into the dark.
Then there was stillness.
"They knew we saw them," said Stan grimly. "They knew we could smash them. And they realized that we wouldn't unless they attacked again. I wonder what they think of us now?"
"What you did to them was—awful," said Esther. She shuddered. "I still don't know what it was. I never heard of any weapon like that!"
"It could only exist here," said Stan. He grimaced. "We've meteor-repellers. They push away anything in their beam. I narrowed them to their smallest size and put full power into them. That was all."
"But meteor-repellers don't cut!" protested Esther.
"These did," said Stan. "They were working through sand, just that. They pushed it. With a force of eighty tons in a half-inch beam. The sand that was in the beam was shot away with an acceleration of possibly fifty thousand gravities—and more sand kept falling into the beam. Each particle was traveling as fast as a meteor when it hit, over there. When it struck, it simply flared to incandescent vapor. No atomic torch was ever hotter! And there was no end to the sand I threw. You might say I cut those machines up with a sand blast, but there was never such a sand blast as this! It took a barbarian—like me—to think of it!
"Now," he added, "I need to go over to those machines and get some stuff I think they've got in them. That's what I provoked this attack for. But maybe the drivers are laying low to jump on me if I try it. I'll have to wait until nearly dawn. They won't risk waiting until almost time for the sandstorms! Not with fifty miles to travel back to the grid!"
He stayed on guard. Presently he yawned. He stood up and paced back and forth, glancing from time to time at the screen. After a long time Esther said:
"You didn't sleep last night, Stan. Could I watch for a while so you can rest?"
"M'm-m. Yes. If anything stirs, wake me. But I don't look for action here. The real action will be back underground."
He went back into the cabin and threw himself down. Almost instantly he was asleep. Esther watched the vision-plates dutifully. There was silence and stillness everywhere. After a long time she looked in on the sleeping Stan. A little later she looked in again, reached over, and touched his hair gently. Later still she looked in yet again. She kissed him lightly—he did not wake—and went back to the control cabin, to watch the vision-plates.
Nothing happened.
Out in space, though, very many millions of miles away, a tiny mote winked into existence as if by magic, with the cutting off of its Bowdoin-Hall field drive. It hung seemingly motionless for a while, as if orienting itself. It seemed to locate what it sought—and vanished, but again winked into being a bare few thousand miles from the planet's surface.
It did not disappear again. It drove down toward the half-obscured disk at the normal acceleration of a landing drive. Toward dawn it screamed down into atmosphere above the planet's surface. It drove on into the day, and into howling winds and far-flung sand. It rose swiftly, and went winging toward the summer polar cap.
Khor Alpha's single planet had gone unvisited by men during two centuries of interstellar travel, but now there had been three separate visitations within ten days.
The last of the three visitors settled to ground where hoarfrost partly whitened the desert's face. A full-power carrier-wave spread out from it. And in the control room of theErebusa speaker suddenly barked savagely:
"Stan Buckley! I'm here to kill you! Communicate!"
Esther gasped. She recognized the voice. Rob Torren! Back more than two months before Stan had expected him! The words did not make sense to her. Stan had tried to spare her despair by concealing the fact that Torren's return would be to kill him, under a compact which her presence here made void.
"Rob!" cried Esther softly into the transmitter. "Rob Torren! It's Esther calling! Esther Hume!"
An indescribable sound from the speaker. With trembling hands she adjusted the vision receiver. She looked into the taut, drawn, raging features of Rob Torren. He stared at her out of the screen.
"Stan's asleep, Rob!" cried Esther eagerly. "He didn't expect you back for a long time yet! You're wondering how I got here? Oh—"
Laughing a little, joyously, she told of her desperate voyage to be with Stan when he should be tried, and how her drive had been burnt out by impinging on the drive of the space skid on which Stan had left theStallifer. And of course she told of her subsequent meeting with Stan.
"And there are inhabitants here," she finished eagerly, "and they've been trying to kill us."
She was all joy and relief at Torren's arrival. But his face was ravaged by conflicting emotions, all of them intense and all harrowing.
"But—what's the matter, Rob?" she asked. "You look so queer!" Then she added in abrupt, startled doubt. "And Rob! Why did you say you had come back to kill Stan? You were joking, weren't you?"
He raged at her instantly. "He coached you, eh? To pretend you didn't know anything? Trying to make me take you both to safety on a promise of fighting me later? It won't work! I've a line on your wave and I'll be coming! I'll be coming fast! And maybe you've no weapons, but I have! I've a Space Guard one-man ship! I forced theStalliferto dock at Lora Beta and put me ashore! I got this ship to hunt back for Stan, claiming his recapture as my responsibility! I did plan to have him write you a letter before I killed him, but since you know everything now—"
She saw the beginning of an infuriated movement. Then the screen went blank.
After a moment's frightened irresolution she went to Stan. She woke him, and after the first three words he was sternly alert.
"This sets things up nicely!" he said bitterly. "You didn't know about him, of course, but—our friends of the grid are concocting weapons to destroy us, and now he's streaking here along his locator line to blast us with everything a Space Guard ship can carry! And he'll have long-range stuff! He can burn us to a crisp if we put a repeller beam on him! We can't sand-blast him! We can't—"
He began to struggle swiftly into a space suit. Esther said:
"Wherever you're going, I'm going too!"
"You're not!" he said harshly. "You'll go in the control room with your hands on the beam controls. If some of the local citizens are hiding in those wrecks, you'll smash them if they jump me! I haven't so much as a pocketknife! You've got to be my weapons while I dig into those wrecks!"
He went swiftly out the air-lock with only a cutting-torch in his hands. He fairly ran toward the débris of the attacking army of machines. He reached the first. It had been sliced longitudinally in half by a stream of sand particles traveling at fifty miles or better per second, in a stream of air of the same velocity. Nothing could have withstood such an attack. No material substance in the universe could have resisted it. Four-inch plates of steel and foot-thick girders had been cut through like so much dough, the severed edges gone not to liquid but to vapor in the deadly stream.
The whole mechanism of the machine was exposed. The great biting jaws, designed to tear away huge masses of intermingled sand and ice. The tusks to break loose sections for the jaws to handle. The tanks to contain the precious damp material. The machine had not been made for fighting, but it, alone, could have torn theErebusto fragments. With an army of such machines—
Stan clambered into the neatly halved shell with his cutting-torch. All about him were small devices, cryptic things, the strictly practical contrivances of a hundred-thousand-year-old civilization. He itched to examine them, but he needed certain bars of allotropic graphite he suspected would be here. They were. The motors which ran the leg movements were motors like those which turned the great slabs. They consisted of slabs of graphite and the metal which slid past them. That was all. Only one special allotrope of graphite makes a motor of such simplicity. Only—
He burdened himself with black, flaky bars, cutting ruthlessly through machinery to which an engineer would have devoted months of study. He had an even dozen of the bars in his arms when a sudden blast rocked him. He whirled, and saw a small cloud of still incandescent vapor and Something which was separating horribly into many steaming pieces. Other Things seemed to leap to smother him under their weight. He could not see them save as vague shapes, but he knew they were there.
Another exploded as Esther, in theErebusand watching with the infrared scanner, desperately used the weapon which had never existed before and could not be used anywhere save on this one planet.
Stan ran clumsily for the ship over the drifting, powdery sand. Inhumanly resolute unhuman things leaped after him. He saw the flares as Esther destroyed them. He knew that she was wide eyed and trembling and sick with horror at what she had to do.
But he stumbled into the air-lock and dogged it shut behind him. And Esther came running to greet him, not shaking and not trembling and not horrified, but with burning eyes and the fiery anger of a Valkyrie. She was not wearing her space suit.
"They tried to kill you!" she cried fiercely. "They were hiding! They'd have murdered you—"
He put down his bars of allotropic graphite. He reached out to take her in his arms. But—
"Damn these space suits!" he said furiously. "You'll have to wait to be kissed until this job's finished!"
He tore up the flooring hatch above the little ship's drive. He jerked off the housing.
"Keep watch!" he called to the control room. "At least one of the machines must be waiting behind the dunes, hoping for a break!"
He worked with frantic haste, shedding his space suit by convulsive movements. This should have been the most finicky of fine-fitting jobs. To repair a Bowdoin-Hall drive unit by replacing its graphite bars for maximum efficiency is a matter for micrometric precision. But efficiency was not what he wanted, now, but speed. And these bars almost fitted. They were vastly unlike the five-hundred-pound monsters for the grid slabs. These should at least move the ship, and if the ship could be moved—
He had two of them in place and six more to go when the speaker in the control room blared triumphantly.
"Stan Buckley! Tune in! I'm right above your ship! Tune in!"
Stan swore in a sick disgust. Two out of eight was not enough. He was helpless for lack, now, of time. And the corrosive hatred that comes of helplessness filled him. He went into the control room and said drearily to Esther:
"Sorry, my dear. Another twenty minutes and you'd have been safe. I think we lose."
He kissed her, and with fury-steadied fingers tuned in the communication-plate. Rob Torren grinned furiously at him.
"I thought I'd let you know what's happening," said Torren in a voice that was furry with whipped-up rage. "I'm going to go back and report that you were killed resisting arrest. I'm going to melt down the yacht until it could never be identified as theErebus—if anybody ever sees it again! And—maybe you'll enjoy knowing that I did the things I charged you with, and have the proceeds safely banked away! I faked the evidence that proved it on you. And I hoped to have Esther, too, but she's spoiled that by trying to come and help you! Now—"
"Now," said Stan coldly, "you'll stand off a good twenty miles and beam us. You'll take no chances that we might be able to throw a handful of sand at you! You'll be so damned cautious that you won't even come close to see your success with your own eyes! You'll read it off on instruments! You're pretty much afraid of me!"
"Afraid?" raged Rob Torren. "You'll see!"
The communication screen went blank. Stan leaped to the meteor-repeller controls and stared at the vertical vision-plate which showed all the sky above.
"Not the shadow of a chance," he said coldly, "but a beam does make a little glow! If he misses us once—but he won't—maybe I can get in one blast...."
There was tense silence. Deadly silence. The screen overhead showed a multitude of cold, unwinking stars. One of them winked out and on again.
"I'll try—" began Stan.
Then the screen seemed to explode into light. Something flared like a nova in the sky. Intolerable brilliance filled a quarter of the screen—and faded. Swiftly. It went out.
Stan drew a deep breath.
"That," he said softly, "I think was a hundred thousand million horsepower in a power beam. I think our friends the grid makers have been working on armament to fight us with, and I think they've got something quite good! They don't like strangers. Torren was a stranger, and they got a shot at him, and they took it. And now they'll get set to come over here after us. If you'll excuse me, I'll go back to the drive!"
He returned to the cabin where two out of a necessary eight graphite bars were in place. He worked. Fast. No man ever worked so fast or so fiercely or with such desperately steady hands. In twenty minutes he made the last, the final connection. And just as he dropped the hatch in place, Esther called anxiously:
"More machines coming, Stan! The microphones pick them up!"
"Coming!" he told her briskly. He went to the instrument board and threw switches here and there. "The normal thing," he said evenly, "would be to lift from the ground here, on landing drive, and go into field drive out of atmosphere. But we won't do it for two reasons. One is that we have no landing drive. The other is that at normal take-off acceleration, our friends of the grid would take a potshot at us with the thing they used on Rob Torren. With a hundred thousand million horsepower. So—here goes!"
He stabbed a simple push button.
With no perceptible interval and with no sensation of movement, theErebuswas out in deep space. The screens showed stars on every side—all the stars of the Galaxy. And these were not the hostile, immobile, unfriendly stars the first voyagers of space had seen. With the Bowdoin-Hall field collapsing forty times a second, the stars moved visibly. The nearer ones moved more swiftly and the farther ones more slowly, but all moved. The cosmos seemed very small and almost cosy, and the stars mere fireflies and the Rim itself no more than a few miles away from them.
Stan watched. He said, "We're not making much time. Not over six hundred lights, I'd say. But we'll get there."
"And—and when we do—"
"H'm," said Stan. "You can swear Torren said he'd committed the crimes he charged me with and faked the evidence against me. With that testimony, they'll examine the evidence as they do when there are no witnesses. It'll fall down. And I'll be cleared."
"Stan!" said Esther indignantly. "I meant—"
"And when I'm cleared," said Stan, "we'll get married."
"That," admitted Esther, "is what I had in mind."
He kissed her, and stood watching the moving cosmos critically.
"Our friends the grid builders have gotten waked up now," he observed. "They know they're not the only intelligent race in the universe, and they may not like it. They're a fretful crew! But they'll have to be made friends with. And quick, or they might cause trouble! I think I'll apply to be assigned to the task force that will undertake the job. It ought to be interesting! Not a dull moment!"
Esther scowled at him.
"Now," she protested, "you reduce me to being glad we're not making our proper speed! Because after you get back—"
"Listen, my dear," said Stan generously, "I'll promise to come home from time to time. And when I do I'll grab you like this, and kiss you like this—" There was an interlude. "And do you think you'll manage to survive?"
Esther gasped for breath. But she was smiling.
"I—I think I'll be able to stand it," she admitted.
"Good!" said Stan. "Now let's go have some breakfast!"