4
The mayor of Steadheim looked from one to the other of them. Dona was pale. She looked full of dread. Kim's lips were twisted wryly, but his eyes were intent on the dial. The mayor opened his mouth, and closed it, then spoke wrathfully.
"I don't understand all this! Where'd that other ship come from?"
"It isn't a ship," said Kim, watching the dial that told of the approach of something that could only be an enemy—and it had been a matter of faith that only theStarshineroamed the space-ways. "I got it made back on Terranova.
"We took a big reel of metal spring-wire, and wound it round and round a shape like that of theStarshine. When it was in place we annealed and tempered it so it would always resume that shape. And then we wound it back on its reel. I just dumped it out in space from a special lock astern.
"It began to unroll, and of course to go back to the form it had been tempered in. Here, with no gravity to distort it, it went perfectly back into shape. Close to, of course, you can see it's only a shell and a thin one. But a few miles away it would fool you."
The needle on the detector-dial crept over and over. Kim wet his lips. Dona's face was white.
Then Kim winced and the Mayor of Steadheim roared furiously and the Universe without the viewports swayed and dissolved into something else. Alarm-gongs rang and theStarshinewas in a brand-new place, with a blue-white giant sun and a dwarf companion visible nearby. The ringed sun Khiv had vanished.
"K-kim!" said Dona, choking.
"I'm quite all right," he told her. But he wiped sweat off his face. "Those beams aren't pleasant, no matter how short the feeling is."
He turned back to the controls. The faint whine of the gyros began. TheStarshinebegan to turn about. Kim applied power. But it took a long time for the ship's nose to be turned exactly and precisely back in the direction from which it had come.
"It's getting ticklish," he said abruptly. "There's less than a cupful of fuel left."
"Space!" said the Mayor of Steadheim. He looked sick and weak and frightened. "What happened?"
"We were in a sort of orbit about Khiv Five," said Kim, succinctly. "We had a decoy ship out behind us. A warship spotted our arrival. It sneaked up on us and let go a blast of its beams—the same beams that killed all the men on Khiv Five.
"They didn't bother Dona—she's a girl—but they would have killed us had not a relay flung theStarshineaway from there. The beams got left behind. So did the dummy ship. I think they'll clamp on to it to look it over. And if our engines keep turning over long enough, we'll be all right. Now, let's see!"
His jaw was set as the transmitter-drive came on and the familiar crazy gyration of all the stars again took place and the gongs rang once more. But his astrogation was perfect. There was the ringed sun Khiv again with its banded fifth planet and its polar ice-cap and its equatorial belt of desert with the wide bands of irrigated land crossing it. Kim drove for the planet. He looked at the fuel-gauge.
"Our tanks," he said evenly, "read empty. What fuel's left is in the catalyzer."
A needle stirred on the bank of indicators. Dona caught her breath. Kim sweated. The indication on the dial grew stronger. The electron-telescope field sparkled suddenly, where light glinted on glistening metal. Kim corrected course subtly.
There was the tiny form which looked so amazingly like a duplicate of theStarshine. It was actually a thin layer of innumerable turns of spring-wire. On any planet it would have collapsed of its own weight. Here in space it looked remarkably convincing.
But the three in theStarshinedid not look at it. They looked at the shape that had come alongside it and made fast with magnetic grapples that distorted the thin decoy wildly—the shape that gave no sign of any activity or any motion or any life.
That shape was a monster space-ship a thousand feet long. It looked as if it bulged with apparatus of death. It was gigantic. It was deadly.
"Our trick worked," said Kim uneasily. "We should begin to feel uncomfortable, you and I, in minutes—if only our engines keep running!"
He spoke to the Mayor of Steadheim. Almost as he spoke, a tiny tingling began all over his body. As the ship went on, that tingling grew noticeably stronger.
"What—"
"We've no weapons," said Kim, "nor time to devise them. But when we were slaves on the planets we came from we were held enslaved by a circuit that could torture us or paralyze us at the will of our rulers. The Disciplinary Circuit. Remember?
"I put a Disciplinary-Circuit generator in that little decoy ship. I took a suggestion from what our friends yonder did to the fighting beams. I tuned the Disciplinary Circuit to affect any man—but no woman—within its range.
"The generator went on when she grappled the decoy. Every man in it should be helpless. If it stands like that, we'd be paralyzed too if we went near. But not Dona."
The tingling was quite strong. It was painful. Presently it would be excruciating. It would be completely impossible for any man within fifty miles of the decoy space-ship to move a muscle.
"However," said Kim, "I've arranged that. I had Disciplinary-Circuit projectors fitted on theStarshine. We turn them on that ship. Automatically, the generator on the decoy will cut off. Our friends will still be helpless, and we can go up and grapple—if our engines keep going!"
He threw a switch. A relay snapped over somewhere and a faint humming noise began. The tingling of Kim's body ceased. The decoy and the enemy space-ship grew large before them. The enemy was still motionless.
Its crew, formerly held immobile by the circuit in the decoy, was now held helpless by the beams from theStarshine. But neither Kim nor the Mayor of Steadheim could enter the enemy ship without becoming paralyzed too.
Dona slipped quietly from the control-room. She came back, clad in a space-suit with the helmet face-plate open.
"All ready, Kim," she said quietly.
Sweat stood out in droplets on Kim's face. TheStarshinedrifted ever so gently into position alongside the pair of motionless shapes—the one so solid and huge, the other so flimsy and insubstantial. Kim energized the grapples. There was a crushing impact as theStarshineanchored itself to the enemy.
Kim reached over and pulled out a switch.
"That's the wristlet relay switch," he told Dona. "We stay here until you come back—even if a fighting-beam hits us. You've got to go on board that monster and get some fuel and, if you can, a hafnium catalyzer. If another battleship's around and comes up—you drive theStarshinehome with what fuel you can get. We'll be dead, but you do that. You hear?"
"I'll—hurry, Kim," Dona said.
"Be careful!" commanded Kim fiercely. "There shouldn't be a man on that ship who can move, but be careful!"
She kissed him quickly and closed the face-plate of her helmet. She went into the airlock and closed the inner door.
There was silence in theStarshine. Kim sweated. The outer airlock door opened. The two ships were actually touching. The clumping of the magnetic shoes of Dona's space-suit upon the other ship's hull was transmitted to theStarshine.
Kim and the Mayor of Steadheim heard the clankings as she opened the other ship's outer airlock door—the inner door. Then they heard nothing.
Dona was in an enemy space-ship, unarmed. Subjects of the Empire of Greater Sinab manned it. They or their fellows had murdered half the population of the banded planet below. They were helpless, now, to be sure, held immobile by fields maintained by the precariously turning engines of theStarshine.
But the fuel-gauge showed the fuel-tanks absolutely dry. TheStarshinewas running on fuel in the pipeline and catalyzers. It had been for an indefinite time. Its engines would cut off at any instant.
When the lights flickered Kim groaned. This meant that the last few molecules of fuel were going from the catalyzer. He feverishly cut off the heaters which kept the ship warm in space. He cut off the air-purifier.
He became desperately economical of every watt of energy. He used power for the Disciplinary-Circuit beams which kept the enemy crew helpless and for the grapples which kept the two ships in contact—for nothing else.
But still the lights flickered. The engines gasped for power. They started and checked and ran again, and again checked.
The second they failed finally, the immobile monster alongside would become a ravening engine of destruction. The two men in theStarshinewould die in an instant of unspeakable torment. Dona—now fumbling desperately through unfamiliar passage-ways amid contorted, glaring figures—would be at the tender mercy of the crew.
And when the three of them were dead the drive of theStarshinewould be at the disposal of the Empire of Greater Sinab if they only chose to look at it. The beastly scheme of conquest would spread and spread and spread throughout the Galaxy and enslave all women—and murder all human men not parties to the criminality.
The lights flickered again. They almost died and on theStarshine, Kim clenched his hands in absolute despair. On the enemy warship the immobile crew made agonized raging movements.
But the engine caught fugitively once more, and Dona worked desperately and then fled toward the airlock with her booty while the Disciplinary Circuit field which froze the Sinabian crew wavered, and tightened, and wavered once more.
And died!
Dona dragged open the enemy's inner airlock door as a howl rose behind her. She flung open the outer as murderous projectors warmed. She clattered along the outer hull of the Sinabian ship on her magnetic shoes, and saw theStarshinedrifting helplessly away, even the grapples powerless to hold the two bodies together.
At that sight, Dona gasped. She leaped desperately, with star-filled nothingness above and below and on every hand. She caught theStarshine'sairlock door.
And Kim cut out the Disciplinary-Circuit beams and the flow of current to the grapples and, with a complete absence of hope, pressed the transmitter-drive button. He had no shred of belief that it would work.
But it did. The equalizer-batteries from the engines gave out one last surge of feeble power—and were dead. But that was enough, since nothing else drew current at all. The stars reeled.
This was a test.
Almost anything could happen. Kim held his breath, anxiously watching and waiting for the worst, his senses attuned to the delicate mechanisms about him.
And then, slowly, the reaction was fully determined, and he smiled.