The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (39 page)

“This should be lights.”

It was. Images formed on the queerly shaped screens. The whole interior of the ship glowed. And the whole creation had been so alien as somehow to be revolting, in the harsh white light of the hand lamps the men had used. But now it was like a highly improbable fairy palace. The fact that all doors were circular and all passages round tubes was only pleasantly strange, in the many-colored glow of the ship’s own lighting system. Freddy shook his head in his spacesuit helmet, as if to shake away drops of sweat on his forehead.

“The next should be heat,” he said more grimly than before. “We do not touch that! Oh, definitely! But we try the drive.”

The ship stirred. It swept forward in a smooth acceleration that was invincibly convincing of power. The
Arnina
dwindled swiftly, behind. And Freddy, with compressed lips, touched controls here, and there, and the monstrous ship obeyed with the docility of a willing, well-trained animal. It swept back to clear sight of the
Arnina.

“I would say,” said Bridges in a shaking voice, “that it works. The Patrol has nothing like this!”

“No,” said Freddy shortly. His voice sounded sick. “Not like this! It’s a sweet ship. I’m going to hook in the gyro controls. They ought to work. The creatures who made this didn’t use them. I don’t know why. But they didn’t.”

He cut off everything but the lights. He bent down and hooked in the compact little aluminum device which would control the flow of nitrogen to the port and starboard drive tubes.

Freddy came back to the control board and threw in the drive once more. And the gyro control worked. It should. After all, the tool work of a Space Patrol machinist should be good. Freddy tested it thoroughly. He set it on certain fine adjustment. He threw three switches. Then he picked up one tiny kit he had prepared.

“Come along,” he said tiredly. “Our work’s over. We go back to the
Arnina
and I probably get lynched.”

Bridges, bewildered, followed him to the spidery little spaceboat. They cast off from the huge ship, now three miles or more from the
Arnina
and untenanted save by its own monstrous crew in suspended animation. The Space Patrol cruiser shifted position to draw near and pick them up. And Freddy said hardly:

“Remember the Ethical Equations, Bridges? I said they gave me the answer to that other ship’s drive. If they were right, it couldn’t have been anything else. Now I’m going to find out about something else.”

His spacegloved hands worked clumsily. From the tiny kit he spilled out a single small object. He plopped it into something from a chest in the spaceboat—a mortar shell, as Bridges saw incredulously. He dropped that into the muzzle of a line-mortar the spaceboat carried as a matter of course. He jerked the lanyard. The mortar flamed. Expanding gases beat at the spacesuits of the men. A tiny, glowing, crimson spark sped toward outer space. Seconds passed. Three. Four. Five—

“Apparently I’m a fool,” said Freddy, in the grimmest voice Bridges had ever heard.

But then there was light. And such light! Where the dwindling red spark of a tracer mortar shell had sped toward infinitely distant stars, there was suddenly an explosion of such incredible violence as even the proving-grounds of the Space Patrol had never known. There was no sound in empty space. There was no substance to be heated to incandescence other than that of a half-pound tracer shell. But there was a flare of blue-white light and a crash of such violent static that Bridges was deafened by it. Even through the glass of his helmet he felt a flash of savage heat. Then there was—nothing.

“What was that?” said Bridges, shaken.

“The Ethical Equations,” said Freddy. “Apparently I’m not the fool I thought—”

The
Arnina
slid up alongside the little spaceboat. Freddy did not alight. He moved the boat over to its cradle and plugged in his communicator set. He talked over that set with his helmet phone, not radiating a signal that Bridges could pick up. In three minutes or so the great lock opened and four spacesuited figures came out. One wore the crested four-communicator helmet which only the skipper of a cruiser wears when in command of a landing party. The newcomers to the outside of the
Arnina’s
hull crowded into the little spaceboat. Freddy’s voice sounded again in the headphones, grim and cold.

“I’ve some more shells, sir. They’re tracer shells which have been in the work boat for eight days. They’re not quite as cold as the ship, yonder—that’s had two thousand years to cool off in—but they’re cold. I figure they’re not over eight or ten degrees absolute. And here are the bits of material from the other ship. You can touch them. Our spacesuits are as nearly nonconductive of heat as anything could be. You won’t warm them if you hold them in your hand.”

The skipper—Bridges could see him—looked at the scraps of metal Freddy held out to him. They were morsels of iron and other material from the alien ship. By the cold glare of a handlight the skipper thrust one into the threaded hollow at the nose of a mortar shell into which a line-end is screwed when a line is to be thrown. The skipper himself dropped in the mortar shell and fired it. Again a racing, receding speck of red in emptiness. And a second terrible, atomic blast.

The skipper’s voice in the headphones:

“How much more of the stuff did you bring away?”

“Three more pieces, sir,” said Freddy’s voice, very steady now. “You see how it happens, sir. They’re isotopes we don’t have on Earth. And we don’t have them because in contact with other isotopes at normal temperatures, they’re unstable. They go off. Here we dropped them into the mortar shells and nothing happened, because both isotopes were cold—down to the temperature of liquid helium, or nearly. But there’s a tracer compound in the shells, and it burns as they fly away. The shell grows warm. And when either isotope, in contact with the other, is as warm as…say…liquid hydrogen…why…they destroy each other. The ship yonder is of the same material. Its mass is about a hundred thousand tons. Except for the aluminum and maybe one or two other elements that also are nonisotopic and the same in both ships, every bit of that ship will blast off if it comes in contact with matter from this solar system above ten or twelve degrees absolute.”

“Shoot the other samples away,” said the skipper harshly. “We want to be sure—”

There were three violent puffs of gases expanding into empty space. There were three incredible blue-white flames in the void. There was silence. Then—

“That thing has to be destroyed,” said the skipper, heavily. “We couldn’t set it down anywhere, and its crew might wake up anyhow, at any moment. We haven’t anything that could fight it, and if it tried to land on Earth—”

The alien monster, drifting aimlessly in the void, suddenly moved. Thin flames came from the gill-like openings at the bow. Then one side jetted more strongly. It swung about, steadied, and swept forward with a terrifying smooth acceleration. It built up speed vastly more swiftly than any Earth-ship could possibly do. It dwindled to a speck. It vanished in empty space.

But it was not bound inward toward the sun. It was not headed for the plainly visible half-moon disk of Jupiter, now barely seventy million miles away. It headed out toward the stars.

“I wasn’t sure until a few minutes ago,” said Freddy Holmes unsteadily, “but by the Ethical Equations something like that was probable. I couldn’t make certain until we’d gotten everything possible from it, and until I had everything arranged. But I was worried from the first. The Ethical Equations made it pretty certain that if we did the wrong thing we’d suffer for it…and by we I mean the whole Earth, because any visitor from beyond the stars would be bound to affect the whole human race.” His voice wavered a little. “It was hard to figure out what we ought to do. If one of our ships had been in the same fix, though, we’d have hoped for—friendliness. We’d hope for fuel, maybe, and help in starting back home. But this ship was a warship, and we’d have been helpless to fight it. It would have been hard to be friendly. Yet, according to the Ethical Equations, if we wanted our first contact with an alien civilization to be of benefit to us, it was up to us to get it started back home with plenty of fuel.”

“You mean,” said the skipper, incredulously, “you mean you—”

“Its engines use nitrogen,” said Freddy. “It runs nitrogen fifteen into a little gadget we know how to make, now. It’s very simple, but it’s a sort of atom smasher. It turns nitrogen fifteen into nitrogen fourteen and hydrogen. I think we can make use of that for ourselves. Nitrogen fourteen is the kind we have. It can be handled in aluminum pipes and tanks, because there’s only one aluminum, which is stable under all conditions. But when it hits the alien isotopes in the drive tubes, it breaks down—”

He took a deep breath.

“I gave them a double aluminum tank of nitrogen, and bypassed their atom smasher. Nitrogen fourteen goes into their drive tubes, and they drive! And…I figured back their orbit, and set a gyro to head them back for their own solar system for as long as the first tank of nitrogen holds out. They’ll make it out of the sun’s gravitational field on that, anyhow. And I reconnected their thermobatteries. When they start to wake up they’ll see the gyro and know that somebody gave it to them. The double tank is like their own and they’ll realize they have a fresh supply of fuel to land with. It…may be a thousand years before they’re back home, but when they get there they’ll know we’re friendly and…not afraid of them. And meanwhile we’ve got all their gadgets to work on and work with—”

Freddy was silent. The little spaceboat clung to the side of the
Arnina,
which with its drive off was now drifting sunward past the orbit of Jupiter.

“It is very rare,” said the skipper ungraciously, “that a superior officer in the Patrol apologizes to an inferior. But I apologize to you, Mr. Holmes, for thinking you a fool. And when I think that I, and certainly every other Patrol officer of experience, would have thought of nothing but setting that ship down at a Patrol Base for study, and when I think what an atomic explosion of a hundred thousand tons of matter would have done to Earth…I apologize a second time.”

Freddy said uncomfortably:

“If there are to be any apologies made, sir, I guess I’ve got to make them. Every man on the
Arnina
has figured he’s rich, and I’ve sent it all back where it came from. But you see, sir, the Ethical Equations—”

* * * *

When Freddy’s resignation went in with the report of his investigation of the alien vessel, it was returned marked “Not Accepted.” And Freddy was ordered to report to a tiny, hard-worked spacecan on which a junior Space Patrol officer normally gets his ears pinned back and learns his work the hard way. And Freddy was happy, because he wanted to be a Space Patrol officer more than he wanted anything else in the world. His uncle was satisfied, too, because he wanted Freddy to be content, and because certain space-admirals truculently told him that Freddy was needed in the Patrol and would get all the consideration and promotion he needed without any politicians butting in. And the Space Patrol was happy because it had a lot of new gadgets to work with which were going to make it a force able not only to look after interplanetary traffic but defend it, if necessary.

And, for that matter, the Ethical Equations were satisfied.

*

THE PLANTS

(Originally Published in 1946)

The plants on Aiolo grew by thousands and millions and hundreds of millions over the wide flat plains of the planet. It was not a very luring planet, perhaps, but the plants knew no other and they were content. They were all alike. Every one was a flower with a singularly complicated center and a wide collar of white petals. It grew four feet high upon a reedy, seemingly flimsy stalk. Up at the top, just under the blossom, there was a furry thickening of the stalk for about six inches. This thick part was asymmetric, with lumps here and there as if the organism within it were far from simple. It was. The plants spent most of the daylight hours gazing at Aiolo’s tiny, blue-white sun. Now and then, though, they turned from it to regard each other or any singular occurrence that might take place. But there were not often any occurrences because there was nothing on Aiolo but the plants. Literally nothing. No animals. No birds. No insects. And the plants were all alike. They were not only the dominant species on Aiolo, they were its flora and fauna and everything else.

But one day there came a screaming, far away in Aiolo’s thin air, and out of the purplish sky a dark object came hurtling horribly. For a time it traveled almost parallel to the ground, but gradually it descended, struck and bounced upward like a skipped stone, struck and bounced again, and then struck a third time and ploughed a monstrous furrow in the soft earth for a quarter of a mile before it stopped. It killed thousands of the plants of Aiolo in its plunging.

After it was still for a long time, four men came staggering out of gaping rents in its plating and gazed dazedly about them. And all the planets within view turned their faces to regard them curiously.

Hours after their landing, the four men built a campfire in the great furrow dug by the
Copernicus’
shattered hull. They brought out shattered burnable litter from the ship’s interior to use for fuel, because, of course, the plants would not burn. As they cooked, the sun sank abruptly and the formerly faintly-visible stars came out with astonishing brilliance. The only light anywhere on the ground was that of the campfire. The flames licked high and burned with more than ordinary brightness. The atmosphere of Aiolo was only five percent nitrogen, and despite its thinness men could breathe without air tanks, and fire could burn.