Chapter 10

The star Sol was as bright as Sirius, but no brighter because it was nearly half a light-year away and of course could not compare in intrinsic brightness with that farther giant sun. The Milky Way glowed coldly. All the stars shone without any wavering in their light, from the brightest to the faintest tinted dot. The universe was round. There were stars above and below and before and behind and to the right and left. There was nothing which was solid, and nothing which was opaque. There were only infinitely remote, unwinking motes of light, but there were thousands of millions of them. Everywhere there were infinitesimal shinings of red and blue and yellow and green; of all the colors that could be imagined. Yet all the starlight from all the cosmos added up to no more than darkness. The whitest of objects would not shine except faintly, dimly, feebly. There was no warmth. This was deep space, frigid beyond imagining; desolate beyond thinking; empty. It was nothingness spread out in the light of many stars.

In such cold and darkness it would seem that nothing could be, and there was nothing to be seen. But now and again a pattern of stars quivered a little. It contracted a trace and then returned to its original appearance. The disturbance of the star-patterns moved, as a disturbance, in vast curved courses. They were like isolated ripplings in space.

There seemed no cause for these ripplings. But there were powerful gravitational fields in the void, so powerful as to warp space and bend the starlight passing through them. These gravity-fields moved with an incredible speed. There were ten of them, circling in a complex pattern which was spread out as an invisible unit which moved faster than the light their space-twisting violence distorted.

They seemed absolutely undetectable, because even such minute light-ripplings as they made were left behind them. The ten ships which created these monstrous force-fields were unbelievably small. They were no larger than cargo ships on the oceans of one planet in the solar system toward which they sped. They were less than dust particles in infinity. They would travel for only a few more days, now, and then would flash through the solar system which was their target. They should reach its outermost planet--four light-hours away--and within eight minutes more swing mockingly past and through the inner worlds and the sun. They would cross the plane of the ecliptic at nearly a right angle, and they should leave the planets and the yellow star Sol in flaming self-destruction behind them. Then they would flee onward, faster than the chaos they created could follow.

The living creatures on the world to be destroyed would have no warning. One instant everything would be as it had always been. The next, the ground would rise and froth out flames, and more than two thousand million human beings would hardly know that anything had occurred before they were destroyed.

There was no purpose to be served by notifying the world that it was to die. The rulers of the nations had decided that it was kinder to let men and women look at each other and rejoice, thinking they had all their lives before them. It was kinder that children should be let play valorously, and babies wail and instantly be tended. It was better for humanity to move unknowing under blue and sunshine-filled skies than that they should gaze despairingly up at white clouds, or in still deeper horror at the shining night stars from which devastation would presently come.

In the one place where there was foreknowledge, no attention at all was paid to the coming doom. Burke went raging about brightly lighted corridors, shouting horrible things. He cried out to Sandy to answer him, and defied whatever might have seized her to dare to face him. He challenged the cold stone walls. He raged up and down the gallery in which she had vanished, and feverishly explored beyond it, and returned to the place where she had disappeared, and pounded on solid rock to see if there could be some secret doorway through which she had been abducted. It seemed that his heart must stop for pure anguish. He knew such an agony of frustration as he had never known before.

Presently method developed in his searching. Whatever had happened, it must have been close to the tall archway with the large metal plate in its floor and the brilliant lights overhead. Sandy could not have been more than twenty feet from him when she was seized. When he heard her gasp, he was at this spot. Exactly this spot. He’d whirled, and she was gone. She could not have been farther than the door beyond the archway, or else the one facing it. He went into the most probable one. It was a perfectly commonplace storage-room. He’d seen hundreds of them. It was empty. He examined it with a desperate intentness. His hands shook. His whole body was taut. He moved jerkily.

Nothing. He crossed the corridor and examined the room opposite. There was a bit of dust in one corner. He bent stiffly and fingered it. Nothing. He came out, and there was the tall archway, brightly lighted. The other compartments had no light-tubes. Being for storage only, they would not need to be lighted except to be filled and emptied of whatever they should contain. But the archway was very brilliantly lighted.

He went into it, his hand-weapon shaking with the tension in him. There was the metal plate on the floor. It was large--yards in extent. He began a circuit of the walls. Halfway around, he realized that the walls were masonry. Not native rock, like every other place in the fortress. This wall had been made! He stared about. On the opposite wall there was a small thing with a handle on it, to be moved up or down. It was a round metal disk with a handle, set in the masonry.

He flung himself across the room to examine it. He was filled with terror for Sandy, which would turn into more-than-murderous fury if he found her harmed. The metal floor-plate lay between. He stepped obliviously on the plate...

The universe dissolved around him. The brightly lit masonry wall became vague and misty. Simultaneously quite other things appeared mistily, then solidified.

He was abruptly in the open air, with a collapsed and ruined structure about and behind him. This was not emptiness, but the surface of a world. Over his head there was a sunset sky. Before him there was grass, and beyond that a horizon, and to his left there was collapsed stonework and far off ahead there was a hill which he knew was not a natural hill at all. There was a moon in the sky, a half-moon with markings that he remembered. There were trees, too, and they were trees with long, ribbony leaves such as never grew on Earth.

He stood frozen for long instants, and a second, smaller moon came up rapidly over the horizon and traveled swiftly across the sky. It was jagged and irregular in shape.

Then flutings came from somewhere to his rear. They were utterly familiar sounds. They had distinctive pitch, which varied from one to another, and they were of different durations like half-notes and quarter-notes in music. And they had a plaintive quality which could have been termed elfin.

All this was so completely known to him that it should have been shocking, but he was in such an agony of fear for Sandy that he could not react to it. His terror for her was breath-stopping. He held his weapon ready in his hand. He tried to call her name, but he could not speak.

The long, ribbony leaves of the trees waved to and fro in a gentle breeze. And then Burke saw a figure running behind the swaying foliage. He knew who it was. The relief was almost greater pain than his terror had been. It was such an emotion as Burke had experienced only feebly, even in his recurrent dream. He gave a great shout and bounded forward to meet Sandy, crying out again as he ran.

Then he had his arms about her, and she clung to him with that remarkable ability women have to adapt themselves to circumstances they’ve been hoping for, even when they come unexpectedly. He kissed her feverishly, panting incoherent things about the fear he’d felt, holding her fast.

Presently somebody tugged at his elbow. It was Holmes. He said drily, “I know how you feel, Burke. I acted the same way just now. But there are things to be looked into. It’ll be dark soon and we don’t know how long night lasts here. Have you a match?”

Pam regarded the two of them with a peculiar glint of humor in her eyes. Keller was there too, still shaken by an experience which for him had no emotional catharsis attached.

Burke partly released Sandy and fumbled for his cigarette lighter. He felt singularly foolish, but Sandy showed no trace of embarrassment.

“There was a matter-transposer,” she said, “and we found it, and we all came through it.”

Keller said awkwardly, “I turned on the communicator to base. It must have been a matter-transposer. I thought, in the instrument-room, that it was only a communicator.”

Holmes moved away. He came back bearing broken sticks, which were limbs fallen from untended trees. He piled them and went back for more. In minutes he had a tiny fire and a big pile of branches to keep it up, but he went back for still more.

“It works both ways,” observed Sandy. “Or something does! There must be another metal plate here to go to the fortress. That huge, crazy bird I saw in the gravity-generator room must have come from here. He probably stepped on the plate because it was brightly lighted and--”

“You’ve got your pistol?” demanded Burke.

The sunset sky was darkening. The larger, seemingly stationary moon floated ever-so-slightly nearer to the zenith. The small and jagged moon had gone on out of sight.

“I have,” said Sandy. “Pam gave hers to Holmes. But that’s all right. There won’t be savages. Over there, beyond the trees, there’s a metal railing, impossibly old and corroded. But no savage would leave metal alone. I don’t think there’s anybody here but us.”

Burke stared at something far away that looked like a hill.

“There’s a building, or the ruins of one. No lights. No smoke. Savages would occupy it. We’re alone, all right! I wonder where? We could be anywhere within a hundred or five hundred light-years from Earth.”

“Then,” said Sandy comfortably, “we should be safe from the Enemy.”

“No,” said Burke. “If the Enemy has an unbeatable weapon, destroying one solar system won’t be enough. They’ll smash every one that humanity ever used. Which includes this one. They’ll be here eventually. Not at once, but later. They’ll come!”

He looked at the small fire. There were curious, familiar fragrances in the air. Over to the west the sun sank in a completely orthodox glory of red and gold. The larger moon swam serenely in the sky.

“I’m afraid,” said Pam, “that we won’t eat tonight unless we can get back to the fortress and the ship. I guess we’re farther from our dinners than most people ever get. Did you say five hundred light-years?”

“Ask Keller,” grunted Burke. “I’ve got to think.”

Far off in the new night there was something like a birdsong, though it might come from anything at all. Much nearer there were peculiarly maternal clucking noises. They sounded as if they might come from a bird with a caricature of a bill and stumpy, useless wings. There was a baying noise, very far away indeed, and Burke remembered that the ancestry of dogs on Earth was as much a mystery as the first appearance of mankind. There were no wild ancestors of either race. Perhaps there had been dogs with the garrison of the fortress, which might be five hundred light-years away, in one sense, but could not be more than a few yards, in another.

Holmes squatted by the fire and built it up to brightness. Keller came back to the circle of flickering light. His forehead was creased.

“The constellations,” he said unhappily. “They’re gone!”

“Which would mean,” Burke told him absently, “that we’re more than forty light-years from home. They’d all be changed at that distance.”

Holmes seated himself beside Pam. They had reached an obvious understanding. Burke’s eyes wandered in their direction. Holmes began to speak in a low tone, and Pam smiled at him. Burke jerked his head to stare at Sandy.

“I think I forgot something. Should I ask you again to marry me? Or do I take it for granted that you will?--if we live through this?” He didn’t wait for her answer. “Things have changed, Sandy,” he said gruffly. “Mostly me. I’ve gotten rid of an obsession and acquired a fixation--on you.”

“There,” said Sandy warmly, “there speaks my Joseph! Yes, I’ll marry you. And we will live through this! You’ll figure something out, Joe. I don’t know how, but you will!”

“Yes-s-s,” said Burke slowly. “Somehow I feel that I’ve got something tucked away in my head that should apply. I need to get it out and look it over. I don’t know what it is or where it came from, but I’ve got something...”

He stared into the fire, Sandy nestled confidently against him. She put her hand in his. The wind blew warm and softly through the trees. Presently Holmes replenished the fire.

Burke looked up with a start as Sandy said, “I’ve thought of something, Joe! Do you remember that dream of yours? I know what it was!”

“What?”

“It came from a black cube,” said Sandy, “which was a cube that somebody from the garrison took to Earth. And what kind of cube would they take? They wouldn’t take drill-instruction cubes! They wouldn’t take cubes telling them how to service the weapons or operate the globes or whatever else the fortress has! Do you know what they’d take?”

He shook his head.

“Novels,” said Sandy. “Fiction stories. Adventure tales. To--experience on long winter evenings or even asleep by a campfire. They were fighting men, Joe, those ancestors of ours. They wouldn’t care about science, but they’d like a good, lusty love story or a mystery or whatever was the equivalent of a Western twenty thousand years ago. You got hold of a page in a love story, Joe!”

“Probably,” he growled. “But if I ever dream it again I’ll know who’s behind those waving branches. You.” Then, surprised, he said, “There were flutings when I came through the matter-transposer. They’ve stopped.”

“They sounded when I came through, too. And when Pam and Holmes and Keller came. Do you know what I think they are?” Sandy smiled up at him. “‘_You have arrived on the planet Sanda. Surface-travel facilities to the left, banking service and baggage to the right, tourist accommodations and information straight ahead._’ We may never know, Joe, but it could be that!”

He made an inarticulate sound and stared at the fire again. She fell silent. Soon Keller was dozing. Holmes strode away and came back dragging leafy branches. He made a crude lean-to for Pam, to reflect back the warmth of the fire upon her. She curled up, smiled at him, and went confidently to sleep. A long time later Sandy found herself yawning. She slipped her fingers from Burke’s hand and settled down beside Pam.

Burke seemed not to notice. He was busy. He thought very carefully, running through the information he’d received from the black cubes. He carefully refrained from thinking of the desperate necessity for a solution to the problem of the Enemy. If it was to be solved, it would be by a mind working without strain, just as a word that eludes the memory is best recalled when one no longer struggles to remember it.

Twice during the darkness Holmes regarded the blackness about them with suspicion, his hand on the small weapon Pam had passed to him. But nothing happened. There were sounds like bird calls, and songs like those of insects, and wind in the trees. But there was nothing else.

When gray first showed in the east, Burke shook himself. The jagged small moon rose hurriedly and floated across the sky.

“Holmes,” said Burke reflectively. “I think I’ve got what we want. You know how artificial gravity’s made, what the circuit is like.”

To anybody but Holmes and Keller, the comment would have seemed idiotic. It would have seemed insane even to them, not too long before. But Holmes nodded.

“Yes. Of course. Why?”

“There’s a chooser-circuit in the globes,” said Burke carefully, “that picks up radiation from an Enemy ship, and multiplies it enormously and beams it back. The circuit that made the radiation to begin with has to be resonant to it, as the globe burns it out while dashing down its own beam.”

“Naturally,” said Holmes. “What about it?”

“The point is,” said Burke, “that one could treat a suddenly increasing gravity-field as radiation. Not a stationary one, of course. But one that increased, fast. Like the gravity-fields of the Enemy ships, moving faster than light toward our sun.”

“Hmmmm,” said Holmes. “Yes. That could be done. But hitting something that’s traveling faster than light--”

“They’re traveling in a straight line,” said Burke, “except for orbiting around each other every few hours. There’s no faster-than-light angular velocity; just straight-line velocity. And with the artificial mass they’ve got, they couldn’t conceivably dodge. If we got some globes tricked up to throw a beam of gravity-field back at the Enemy ships, there might be resonance, and there’s a chance that one might hit, too.”

Holmes considered.

“It might take half an hour to change the circuit,” he observed. “Maybe less. There’d be no way in the world to test them. But they might work. We’d want a lot of them on the job, though, to give the idea a fair chance.”

Burke stood up, creaking a little from long immobility.

“Let’s hunt for the way back to the fortress,” he said. “There is a way. At least two crazy birds were marching around in the fortress’ corridors.”

Holmes nodded again. They began a search. Matter transposed from the fortress--specifically, the five of them--came out in a nearly three-walled alcove in the side of what had once been a magnificent building. Now it was filled with the trunks and stalks of trees and vines which grew out of every window-opening. There were other, similar alcoves, as if other matter-transposers to other outposts or other worlds had been centered here. They were looking for one that a plump, ridiculous bird might blunder into among the broken stones.

They found a metal plate partly arched-over by fallen stones in the very next alcove. They hauled at the tumbled rock. Presently the way was clear.

“Come along!” called Burke. “We’ve got a job to do! You girls want to fix breakfast and we want to get to work. We’ve a few hundred light-years to cross before we can have our coffee.”

Somehow he felt no doubt whatever. The five of them walked onto the corroded metal plate together, and the sky faded and ghosts of tube-lights appeared and became brilliant, and they stepped off the plate into a corridor one section removed from the sending-transposer which had translated them all, successively, to wherever they had been.

And everything proceeded matter-of-factly. The three men went to the room where metal globes by hundreds waited for the defenders of the fortress to make use of them. They were completely practical, those globes. There were even small footholds sunk into their curving sides so a man could climb to their tops and inspect or change the apparatus within.