CHAPTER VII

They were all in the ship's bridge now. Thile and Kara and a young man named Vray were conferring tensely with the radarman and checking a bristling array of instruments.

Birrel was looking at space.

The ports on one side were shielded against the sun, so he couldn't see it. Earth was behind, or below them, so he couldn't see that either. All he could see was nothing, an infinity of it, without top or bottom, front or back, beginning or end. The stars floated in it, by the millions and billions, like shoals of fiery fish gleaming red and gold and blue and green, white and violet, orange and dull crimson. They were not crowded. There was plenty of room between them. The eye was drawn farther and farther into those distances and the body unconsciously tried to follow, until the mind recoiled from the edge of some psychic calamity and screamed for solidity. Birrel spun away from the port and grabbed hold of a stanchion and stood with his eyes shut, sweating and shaking as though he had just run a race.

Kara said, "It gets you, doesn't it?"

He indicated that it did, beyond words. She nodded.

"It's no different with us. We look up at our summer skies just as you have, and dream about what it's like. We read books and we see pictures. But you can't know until you actually get out into space and see it for yourself. And I don't think you ever get over being awed. I never have."

Birrel opened his eyes again, but kept them firmly fixed on the inside of the bridge. Thile and Vray were still hanging over their instruments, looking grim.

"That ship," said Birrel. "It'll try and catch us, I suppose. Stop us from getting word to Ruun."

"I can't imagine Vannevan letting us go without a fight." Her voice was not exactly frightened, but it had a sort of clipped tightness about it that was far from carefree.

"Can he? Catch us, I mean?"

"The Irrians are good spacemen, and their ships are about as fast as ours. But Thile is a wizard. He can outfly anything in space."

Thile heard her and looked up. He said sourly, "Thanks. But you might as well tell him the truth. Vannevan is not going to rely on speed and skill alone, but on weapons. And we're not carrying any atomic armaments. The government brains didn't think it was wise, considering that we were trespassing on a strange world and might conceivably have an accident, such as falling into a city. They're thoughtful that way."

"As an Earthman, I appreciate it," said Birrel. "You have conventional weapons, don't you? That's at least an equal footing."

"We're not used to them," Thile said. "They are. But we'll do our best. Believe me."

He glanced at Vray and nodded.

"Stand by for translation."

Birrel looked at Kara.

"That only means," she said, "that we're going faster."

"How much faster?"

"Well, just at first," she said, "about double the speed of light."

Birrel stopped trying to go along intelligently with any of it. He just let it happen.

The lights inside the ship dimmed and burned blue. There was a screeching whine that rose up and out of hearing, clawing at the nerves as it went, and then there was a moment of awful vertigo when the ship and everything in it seemed to slip and fall sideways in an insane fashion.

The open ports slid shut automatically. Just before they closed Birrel caught a glimpse through them of the stars he had been looking at only a few moments before. They shifted, streamed like burning rain, and vanished, to be replaced by squiggling lines of lights.

Then the ports were shut and there was nothing except the personal sense of disorientation to show that anything had happened.

Complacently, like one who knows he is dreaming and that therefore these strange things are not really happening and so need not be taken seriously, Birrel listened to the voices of the men, speaking technical words of no meaning to him as they went through what was apparently a routine check. Then the radarman said,

"They're right with us."

Thile grunted. "Full acceleration," he said. "Build up as fast as you can. Maybe their generators aren't as good as ours."

* * * * *

The whining began again but on a different note. Birrel pictured himself inside an iron egg flying through space--what kind of space?--at double, triple, quadruple the speed of light. He erased the thought from his mind as quickly as he could. He said to Kara,

"Why haven't people done more star-travelling? You obviously have a workable drive."

"We haven't had the time until recently," Kara said. "The Irrians kept us too busy. Then the few exploratory trips we did make to neighboring systems were discouraging. In most cases the planets were uninhabitable, and the ones that did have life forms were pretty awful. Our government hasn't encouraged star flight. I think they're afraid of what might come flying back our way."

The ship quivered and trembled. Birrel thought he could almost feel the atoms crawling in the metal under his hand.

"Do you ever hit things?" he asked. "Like stars, I mean."

"Not very often. But I believe the results are quite spectacular. You become a nova almost at once."

He laughed. He did not ask any more questions.

The whining levelled off at last, refusing to go any higher. A collection of needles steadied on the main control-board.

Vray said, "That's it."

The radarman shook his head and said, "They're still with us."

The lines deepened in Thile's face, turning it grim and hard.

"Action stations. We'll try and get them before they get us."

Birrel said, "What do you want me to do?"

"Back in your bunk and strap in. This is liable to be rough."

He shook his head. "There must be something I can do."

"You'd only be in the way," Kara said. She was already removing a protective panel from a control-board ominously marked in red. She smiled, to take the sting out of the words. "You'll need a vac-suit. Here, Rett's will fit you."

She took a baggy-looking suit and a plastic helmet out of a locker and handed it to him. The others were putting on similar suits, leaving the helmets open. Birrel said, "Why?"

"In case we're hulled. If you hear the warning-horn, clap your helmet shut. _Fast._"

She showed him how and then practically pushed him out of the bridge. He shuffled back to the cabin and lay down on the bunk, feeling worse than he had at any time since the beginning of this hare-brained venture. He was scared, and he didn't mind admitting it. If he had been able to do something, anything at all, it wouldn't have been so bad. But just to lie here alone in this completely incredible ship, thinking of the completely incredible but perfectly real destruction that faced him--that was something no man ought to be asked to do.

He did it.

He was able to sense the "feel" of the ship, and from that to gauge the variations--the slight recoil and shudder as missiles presumably were launched, the greater perturbations of what could only be the near-miss blasts of the enemy weapons. It occurred to him that what these star-folk meant by "conventional weapons" were probably not at all the simple explosive types referred to by that name on Earth. The technical problems involved in launching any kind of missile at all at light-plus speeds were so far beyond him that he didn't even try to figure them. But there was no doubt that it was being done. Every leap and jar of the ship told him that unmistakably.

Even so, Birrel was not prepared for the suddenness and violence of what happened.

There was a crash. He felt it physically and heard it, too, this time, transmitted by the ship's air. He fell upward against the straps as the gravitational axis of the ship was brutally reversed. The lights dimmed to an eerie blue and there was a horrible tortured howling of overtaxed generators. The ship rammed through into normal space with much the same effort as of a speeding car hitting a stone wall, only greatly magnified. Birrel heard the warning-horn start. He clapped his helmet shut, and then inertia flung him into the recoil couch as into a slab of granite and the joints of the ship began to spring around him. Then everything was dead, generators, horn, everything. The ship was silent except for one sound, the hiss of escaping air.

* * * * *

Stunned but still, incredibly, alive, Birrel unfastened the straps and floated out of the couch.

The ship was still moving, but there was no longer any gravity field to speak of. Birrel was in free fall. He floated like a great clumsy balloon out of the cabin and toward the bridge, clawing his way while the ship bent and wavered and wobbled around him, its rigid frame gone limp. As limp as his own body felt. Currents of escaping air whirled papers, garments, pieces of equipment, bits of wreckage wildly around in the interior. He was in a panic lest his helmet be cracked or his suit torn.

The bridge was a shambles of buckled steel and shattered glass. The radarman was crumpled among the remains of his equipment, which had toppled and crushed him. Thile, strapped into the pilot's chair, was stirring feebly. Birrel looked frantically around for Kara.

She was strapped into a recoil chair in front of the fire-control panel. He thought at first she was dead, but when he looked closer he could see that she was breathing. There was nothing he could do for her at the moment and she was safer where she was, so he left her and went to help Thile. There was no sign of Vray at all, except for a few small red icicles formed on the edge of a jagged rift in the hull through which everything movable in the bridge had already been sucked.

Thile's voice came faintly through the helmet audio. "I told you they were better shots."

"Are you hurt?"

"Are you?"

"I don't know yet. Haven't had time."

"Nor me," said Thile. "I can stand up, so I guess I'll live." Blood was trickling from his helmet. He snuffled at it and made futile pawing motions at his helmet. "Well, that does it. Vannevan's won hands down." He swore, a dejected and bitter man. "Four good men dead, and all for nothing. It wasn't even a good try."

He pointed through the riven wall, to the black peaceful gulf beyond with the far stars shining in it.

"See there?"

There was a ship, matching its pace to the slow drift of the derelict. From its slim belly a much smaller craft dropped and jetted fire.

"They'll be aboard us in a few minutes."

Remembering how Vannevan had conducted his questioning at the farmhouse, Birrel could see little hope. If he and Thile and Kara were going to be at Vannevan's mercy, they might better have gone the way of Vray and the radarman.

Unless--

"Listen," said Birrel suddenly, "Listen, there's one thing we might do." He went over to Kara and shook her until she opened her eyes. "There isn't much time, you've both got to play along with me or it won't work. It might give us an edge, to use against Vannevan. Listen--"

He spoke rapidly, forcefully, and they listened, while the life-boat of the Irrian ship came closer, riding its fiery jet across the black gulf outside.

Thile said, "It might work--"

"It'll be dangerous," whispered Kara. "If he finds out--"

"I don't figure I have much to lose anyway," said Birrel dryly. "Hurry up!"

When Vannevan and his men came into the broken ship they found Thile and Kara clinging quietly together, apart from the Earthman Birrel, who was strapped into a recoil chair with his hands bound tightly behind him.