The stranger ship abruptly dwindled. It dwindled with incredible speed, rushing off along the line of sight at an impossible velocity, and abruptly clicking out of sight, like an image on a movie-film that has been cut, and repaired after the scene that showed the final disappearance.
"Cole--Cole--did you get that? Did you see--do you understand what happened?" Kendall was excitedly shouting now.
"He missed us," Cole sighed. "It"s a wonder--hanging out here in s.p.a.ce, with the protector of the T-247"s fields gone."
"No, no, you asteroid--that"s not it. _He went off faster than light itself!_"
"Eh--what? Faster than _light_? That can"t be done--"
"He did it, I know he did. That"s how he got inside our screens. He came inside faster than the warning message could relay back the information.
Didn"t you see him accelerate to an impossible speed in an impossible time? Didn"t you see how he just vanished as he exceeded the speed of light, and stopped reflecting it? _That ship was no ship of this solar system!_"
"Where did he come from then?"
"G.o.d only knows, but it"s a long, long way off."
II
The IP-M-122 picked them up. The M-122 got out there two days later, in response to the calls the T-247 had sent out. As soon as she got within ten million miles of the little tender, she began getting Cole"s signals, and within twelve hours had reached the tiny thing, located it, and picked it up.
Captain Jim Warren was in command, one of the old school commanders of the IP. He listened to Kendall"s report, listened to Cole"s tale--and radioed back a report of his own. s.p.a.ce pirates in a large ship had attacked the T-247, he said, and carried it away. He advised a close watch. On Pluto, his investigations disclosed nothing more than the fact that three mines had been raided, all platinum supplies taken, and the records and machinery removed.
The M-122 was a fifty-man patrol cruiser, and Warren felt sure he could handle the menace alone, and hung around for over two weeks looking for it. He saw nothing, and no further reports came of attack. Again and again, Kendall tried to convince him this ship he was hunting was no mere s.p.a.ce pirate, and again and again Warren grunted, and went on his way. He would not send in any report Kendall made out, because to do so would add his endors.e.m.e.nt to that report. He would not take Kendall back, though that was well within his authority.
In fact, it was a full month before Kendall again set foot on any of the Minor Planets, and then it was Mars, the base of the M-122. Kendall and Cole took pa.s.sage immediately on an IP supply ship, and landed in New York six days later. At once, Kendall headed for Commander McLaurin"s office. Buck Kendall, lieutenant of the IP, found he would have to make regular application to see McLaurin through a dozen intermediate officers.
By this time, Kendall was savagely determined to see McLaurin himself, and see him in the least possible time. Cole, too, was beginning to believe in Kendall"s a.s.sertion of the stranger ship"s extra-systemic origin. As yet neither could understand the strange actions of the machine, its attack on the Pluto mines, and the capture and theft of a patrol ship.
"There is," said Kendall angrily, "just one way to see McLaurin and see him quick. And, by G.o.d, I"m going to. Will you resign with me, Cole?
I"ll see him within a week then, I"ll bet."
For a minute, Cole hesitated. Then he shook hands with his friends.
"Today!" And that day it was. They resigned, together. Immediately, Buck Kendall got the machinery in motion for an interview, working now from the outside, pulling the strings with the weight of a hundred million dollar fortune. Even the IP officers had to pay a bit of attention when Bernard Kendall, multi-millionaire began talking and demanding things.
Within a week, Kendall _did_ see McLaurin.
At that time, McLaurin was fifty-three years old, his crisp hair still black as s.p.a.ce, with scarcely a touch of the gray that appears in his more recent photographs. He stood six feet tall, a broad-shouldered, powerful man, his face grave with lines of intelligence and character.
There was also a permanent narrowing of the eyes, from years under the blazing sun of s.p.a.ce. But most of all, while those years in s.p.a.ce had narrowed and set his eyes, they had not narrowed and set his mind. An infinitely finer character than old Jim Warren, his experience in s.p.a.ce had taught him always to expect the unexpected, to understand the incomprehensible as being part of the unknown and incalculable properties of s.p.a.ce and the worlds that swam in it. Besides the fine technical education he had started with, he had acquired a liberal education in mankind. When Buck Kendall, straight and powerful, came into his office with Cole, he recognized in him a character that would drive steadily and straight for its goal. Also, he recognized behind the millionaire that had succeeded in pulling wires enough to see him, the scientist who had had more than one paper published "in an amateur way."
"Dr. Bernard Kendall?" he asked, rising.
"Yes, sir. Late Buck Kendall, lieutenant of the IP. I quit and got Cole here to quit with me, so we could see you."
"Unusual tactics. I"ve had several men join up to get an interview with me." McLaurin smiled.
"Yes, I can imagine that, but we had to see you in a hurry. A hidebound old rapscallion by the name of Jim Warren picked us up out by Pluto, floating around in a six-man tender. We made some reports to him, but he wouldn"t believe, and he wouldn"t send them through--so we had to send ourselves through. Sir, this system is about to be attacked by some extra-systemic race. The IP-T-247 was so attacked, her crew killed off, and the ship itself carried away."
"I got the report Captain Jim Warren sent through, stating it was a gang of s.p.a.ce pirates. Now what makes you believe otherwise?"
"That ship that attacked us, attacked with a neutron gun, a gun that shot neutrons through the hull of our ship as easily as protons pa.s.s through open s.p.a.ce. Those neutrons killed off four of the crew, and spared us only because we happened to be behind the water tanks. Ma.s.ses of hydrogen will stop neutrons, so we lived, and escaped in the tender.
The little tender, lightless, escaped their observation, and we were picked up. Now, when the 247 had been picked up, and locked into their ship, that ship started accelerating. It accelerated so fast along my line of sight that it just dwindled, and--vanished. It didn"t vanish in distance, it vanished _because it exceeded the speed of light_."
"Isn"t that impossible?"
"Not at all. It can be done--if you can find some way of escaping from this s.p.a.ce to do it. Now if you could cut across through a higher dimension, your _projection_ in this dimension might easily exceed the speed of light. For instance, if I could cut directly through the Earth, at a speed of one thousand miles an hour, my projection on the surface would go twelve thousand miles while I was going eight. Similar, if you could cut _through_ the four dimensional s.p.a.ce instead of following its surface, you"d attain a speed greater than light."
"Might it not still be a s.p.a.ce pirate? That"s a lot easier to believe, even allowing your statement that he exceeded the speed of light."
"If you invented a neutron gun which could kill through tungsten walls without injuring anything within, a system of accelerating a ship that didn"t affect the inhabitants of that ship, and a means of exceeding the speed of light, all within a few months of each other, would you become a pirate? I wouldn"t, and I don"t think any one else would. A pirate is a man who seeks adventure and relief from work. Given a means of exceeding the speed of light, I"d get all the adventure I wanted investigating other planets. If I didn"t have a cent before, I"d have relief from work by selling it for a few hundred millions--and I"d sell it mighty easily too, for an invention like that is worth an incalculable sum. Tie to that the value of compensated acceleration, and no man"s going to turn pirate. He can make more millions selling his inventions than he can make thousands turning pirate with them. So who"d turn pirate?"
"Right." McLaurin nodded. "I see your point. Now before I"d accept your statements _in re_ the "speed of light" thing, I"d want opinions from some IP physicists."
"Then let"s have a conference, because something"s got to be done soon.
I don"t know why we haven"t heard further from that fellow."
"Privately--we have," McLaurin said in a slightly worried tone. "He was detected by the instruments of every IP observatory I suspect. We got the reports but didn"t know what to make of them. They indicated so many funny things, they were sent in as accidental misreadings of the instruments. But since _all_ the observatories reported them, similar misreadings, at about the same times, that is with variations of only a few hours, we thought something must have been up. The only thing was the phenomena were reported progressively from Pluto to Neptune, clear across the solar system, in a definite progression, but at a velocity of crossing that didn"t tie in with any conceivable force. They crossed faster than the velocity of light. That ship must have spent about half an hour off each planet before pa.s.sing on to the next. And, accepting your faster-than-light explanation, we can understand it."
"Then I think you have proof."
"If we have, what would you do about it?"
"Get to work on those "misreadings" of the instruments for one thing, and for a second, and more important, line every IP ship with paraffin blocks six inches thick."
"Paraffin--why?"
"The easiest form of hydrogen to get. You can"t use solid hydrogen, because that melts too easily. Water can be turned into steam too easily, and requires more work. Paraffin is a solid that"s largely hydrogen. That"s what they"ve always used on neutrons since they discovered them. Confine your paraffin between tungsten walls, and you"ll stop the secondary protons as well as the neutrons."
"Hmmm--I suppose so. How about seeing those physicists?"
"I"d like to see them today, sir. The sooner you get started on this work, the better it will be for the IP."
"Having seen me, will you join up in the IP again?" asked McLaurin.
"No, sir, I don"t think I will. I have another field you know, in which I may be more useful. Cole here"s a better technician than fighter--and a darned good fighter, too--and I think that an inexperienced s.p.a.ce-captain is a lot less useful than a second-rate physicist at work in a laboratory. If we hope to get anywhere, or for that matter, I suspect, stay anywhere, we"ll have to do a lot of research pretty promptly."
"What"s your explanation of that ship?"
"One of two things: an inventor of some other system trying out his latest toy, or an expedition sent out by a planetary government for exploration. I favor the latter for two reasons: that ship was _big_. No inventor would build a thing that size, requiring a crew of several hundred men to try out his invention. A government would build just about that if they wanted to send out an expedition. If it were an inventor, he"d be interested in meeting other people, to see what they had in the way of science, and probably he"d want to do it in a peaceable way. That fellow wasn"t interested in peace, by any means. So I think it"s a government ship, and an unfriendly government. They sent that ship out either for scientific research, for trade research and exploration, or for acquisitive exploration. If they were out for scientific research, they"d proceed as would the inventor, to establish friendly communication. If they were out for trade, the same would apply. If they were out for acquisitive exploration, they"d investigate the planets, the sun, the people, only to the extent of learning how best to overcome them. They"d want to get a sample of our people, and a sample of our weapons. They"d want samples of our machinery, our literature and our technology. That"s exactly what that ship got.
"Somebody, somewhere out there in s.p.a.ce, either doesn"t like their home, or wants more home. They"ve been out looking for one. I"ll bet they sent out hundreds of expeditions to thousands of nearby stars, gradually going further and further, seeking a planetary system. This is probably the one and only one they found. It"s a good one too. It has planets at all temperatures, of all sizes. It is a fairly compact one, it has a stable sun that will last far longer than any race can hope to."
"Hmm--how can there be good and bad planetary systems?" asked McLaurin.
"I"d never thought of that."