The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Cosmic Looters, by Alexander Blade This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title: The Cosmic Looters Author: Alexander Blade Release Date: May 13, 2021 [eBook #65331] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COSMIC LOOTERS *** THE COSMIC LOOTERS By Alexander Blade Wyatt knew his situation was desperate: he couldn't stop the alien invasion, and even if he warned Earth—nobody would believe him! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy February 1958 Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Duncan Wyatt sprang up, grabbed his gun and started toward the door before he had his eyes properly open. His ears were ringing with the explosive roar that had awakened him and the pre-fab shack still quivered in the shock wave. He thought the Third World War had started. He crouched in the doorway and peered out onto the mesa. The unorthodox shape of the experimental ultra-tight-beam transmitter loomed over him, black against the star-blazing New Mexican sky, bearing a red star of its own to warn low-flying planes. He was all alone here. His partner, Bannister, had flown out to the Coast to oversee the making of new components for a projected improvement in design. Wyatt had never felt lonely before, even in the total solitude of the mesa top with nothing around it but the vast impersonals of sky and desert, sun and wind. Now he did feel lonely, and scared. He wondered where the bomb had dropped. He couldn't see anything, so he went out and around the corner of the shack, keeping low and sticking tight to the wall. Now he could see a larger area of the mesa, softly but almost adequately lighted by the billion stars above the crystal- clear air. He saw what it was that had fallen out of the sky. It wasn't a bomb. It was a—plane? Call it a plane. Call it a rotary-thrust flying wing. Call it anything you want to, it was there, round and glimmering faintly against the drab rock. The boom and shock that had shaken him out of his bunk must have been the result of the thing pulling out of a steep dive at super-sonic speed. He should have been relieved that this was so. Somehow Wyatt was not. He had a feeling. It was such a crazy feeling that he could not believe it, but he couldn't get rid of it either. He stood still in the shadow by the corner of the shack and waited to see what would happen next. A light came on with blinding suddenness, shining from the center of the queer plane. It showed up every pebble and stunted bush, every grain of the rock, the sun-bitten pre-fab wall, himself in his sock feet and rumpled khakis, standing stiffly with the gun in his hand. A portion of the black outer rim of the round plane dropped down, unfolding into a stair. Wyatt shouted, "What is it? Who are you?" His voice was thin and small in that vastness of windy air. "I have a gun," he shouted. "Come out slowly, with your hands up!" The words sounded ridiculous even while he was saying them. But he had to put up some kind of a front, simply because he was scared. If he didn't he would have had to turn and run away. It was the damned round queer-looking plane. He was in a cold shaking sweat waiting to see what came out of it. When he did see he didn't believe it. She stood in the aperture at the top of the narrow metal stair. Her hands were raised just a little, so that he might be sure there was no weapon in them. He thought she was smiling slightly. She had black hair, black as the blackest shadow you could imagine, shorn close around her head. She was dressed in black—soft boots, close-fitting pants, wide belt with holster, severely plain shirt with a splotch of gold on the front of each shoulder. Somehow he sensed that the gold splotches were insignia, not decorations. He also sensed—from something about the way she stood, the way she looked at him, the hard, disciplined strength that underlay the splendid lines of her body—that this woman was not like any of the women he had ever known, and that probably the Third World War might have been easier to cope with. She said, "There is no need to be afraid." Her English sounded as though she had learned it by mathematical formula, and in a hurry. Wyatt said untruthfully, "I'm not afraid. Just cautious." He walked out closer to the disc-shaped plane. The mesa rock was icy under his socks, the wind was icy down his back, and there was a chill inside him that was purely personal. "Where do you come from?" he asked. "What do you want?" She dropped her hands and came quickly down the stairs, apparently satisfied that he was not going to shoot her. "I haven't much time," she said. Her eyes were the color of pure turquoise, startlingly bright, curiously tilted. She gave a swift glance at the sky and then spoke urgently to Wyatt. "Try to understand, to believe. Your world is going to be attacked. Not tonight, but within a short time. I want you to take a warning to your government, so that we may be prepared when the attack comes." "I see," said Wyatt. He had a wild desire to laugh. He saw himself going to Washington and telling various personages at the White House and the Pentagon that a beautiful girl landed in a funny round ship and told him the Earth was going to be attacked and so they should call out the armed forces to be ready. "They'd shoot me first," he muttered, "and then throw me in a padded cell." He stepped closer to the girl. Her face was handsome, perfectly human and perfectly alien at one and the same time. It was not a soft face. It was used to decision and command. The red mouth, he thought, would never pout or be petulant, but it could easily be cruel. "Who's going to attack Earth? Who are you?" She said impatiently, "It does not matter who I am, except that I'm in a position to know what I'm saying. Listen. There is a huge interstellar task force out there, working its way through this sector of the galaxy, plundering as it goes. These fringe areas are too far away from our center of power at Uryx—a star-system you never heard of here—to make permanent conquest practical, so all we are interested in is loot. Our advance scouts go far ahead of the main body. We scouts have been here before. I've been here before. Now I'm warning you. The main force will be at Alpha Centauri when I return to it. When it is finished there, Earth is next." "I don't believe you," Wyatt said. But in spite of himself, he did. He was close to the foot of the stair now, close enough almost to touch the tall, slim girl with the black hair blowing around her forehead and the brilliant, wary eyes. The strange ship loomed above them both. Wyatt looked at it and shivered and gnawed his lip. "Why are you warning me?" he said suddenly. "You're part of the force. Why do you want to betray it?" "I have my reasons," she said, "and they are good ones. But you wouldn't understand them. In any case, the warning is true. Don't question it." She started to withdraw from him, up the metal steps. "Wait," said Wyatt. "Nobody on earth would listen to me if I told them that story. They'd only think I was crazy. Listen, if you really want to have your warning taken seriously you'll have to go to Washington yourself." "That's impossible," she said curtly. Again she started up the steps and again he stopped her. "No," he said, and now he knew that he must not let her get away. As wildly improbable, not to say insane, as this whole business was, she was real and her ship was real, and wiser men than he should be handed the responsibility of dealing with that reality. "You and I together couldn't convince anybody by just talking," he said. "The only thing that could is your ship. That was never made on Earth and they would know that. They could test it, examine it, prove it isn't a fake, a hoax of any kind, and that's going to be hard—you haven't any idea how hard." He stepped onto the lowest step of the stair. "You've got to fly this thing to Washington." "I told you that's impossible," she said. "I've given you the warning; you'll have to do what you can with it. Stand clear!" She turned her back on him and sprang lightly through the aperture into the ship. Wyatt did not stop to think. He rushed up the stair after her and it began to draw itself up as he did so, folding him under, so that he thought he was going to have to jump clear or be crushed. There was a whine of power from inside. Damn her, thought Wyatt, she doesn't care if she kills me. He scrambled frantically up the tilting, flattening rungs and caught the edge of the aperture and kicked himself forward through it. The panel that was sliding in to seal the opening caught him halfway and held him in an agonizing grip. He cried out with pain and the fear of being cut in two. He could see into the round cockpit now, with the black-uniformed woman stopped in the act of sitting down at the controls, her startled face turned toward him. Then her expression became one of intense annoyance. Her hand moved toward the weapon holstered at her waist. In the same instant a warning bell rang and the sliding panel re-opened automatically. Wyatt lurched the rest of the way through, sick and dizzy but knowing that this was no time to indulge his symptoms. He was afraid to fire the gun he still held clutched in his hand, even as a gesture of intimidation. The cockpit was small and faced in metal. A ricocheting bullet could kill either or both of them, or damage the control panel so that the craft could not fly. So he threw the gun instead. It whizzed past her head close enough to touch her hair, and in the second she was busy ducking it he had crossed the tiny metal floor and grappled with her. She did not scream or claw his face or tear at his hair or do any of the things women customarily did. She fought, and she was strong as spring steel. He held her wrist so that she could not get at the weapon in her belt, and her free fist came up under his chin and made him see stars. Then her knee got him in the pit of the belly. All Wyatt's ideas of chivalry deserted him. He let go of her wrist and gambled that he could knock her out before she could get the weapon, whatever it was, out of its holster. He won, but by a shamefully tiny margin. She sagged down and he snatched the weapon himself and then retrieved his gun and stood panting, feeling very shaky at the knees. She shook her head, grunted, looked up at him with blazing eyes, and started up all ready to come back and kill him. He pointed her own weapon and his gun at her, using both hands. "Mine will kill," he said. "I don't know what yours will do, but you know." He motioned to the pilot's seat. "Get in there. We're flying to Washington." She gave him a wicked little smile with the sharp edge of her teeth and did as he told her. CHAPTER II There were places for four beside the pilot, spaced around the circular cockpit. Wyatt strapped himself into the seat nearest the girl. He imagined the take-off would be something special, and he was braced for it, but even the almost instantaneous transition from a state of sitting still on the ground to one of shooting straight up into the sky at a hell of a rate was hard to take. He jammed the gun into her back between the shoulders and said, "Not too high. We're not going to Alpha Centauri." "There are commercial air lanes," she said irritably, "and military air bases and radar installations, and ground-to-air missiles. Even in this ship I couldn't guarantee to elude every one of them." Wyatt considered that, uneasily aware that his gun was now largely a bluff. He was not likely to use it on her, unless he wanted to come down a lot faster than he went up, and she would know that. He said, "All right, get up over the obstacles, but don't try anything too clever. I'm a pretty good pilot and I could gamble on flying this thing myself." That was a flat lie, but he thought it might be worth telling. The girl did not seem to be interested one way or another. The craft continued to go straight up, whistling shrilly as it went, and then it swerved around with surprising gentleness and headed east. Wyatt looked out the small double-sealed window beside him. The stars blinded him. They had ceased to twinkle, and they had grown huge, and they had multiplied. The sky was no longer flat but deep and endless, so that even as countless many stars as there were did not crowd it. Far below there was a dark wrinkled rind like the edge of a round cheese, and Wyatt knew that it was the Earth. It was the most magnificent sight he had ever seen, and he wished intensely that he was not seeing it. It was the final touch of insane reality that made the whole wild nightmare consistent. "I was just lying there minding my own business," Wyatt said bitterly, turning away from the window. "Why did you have to pick on me?" "You were obviously a technician, and it would require a technician to grasp what I had to tell you. The others seem not to believe even when they see." "Others?" asked Wyatt startled by a new thought. "Of course. How do you suppose we plan our attacks? How do you suppose we learn the things we must know, including enough of the language to be able to communicate with the people after the invasion? In the normal course of events I would have considered you an especially valuable find. The accessible ones have all been herders of animals or fishermen or primitive tribesmen or poor wanderers, who could not tell us much beyond their own language and their own calling." "You mean," said Wyatt, "that if you hadn't decided to give me the warning instead, you'd have kidnapped me? Taken me—" he nodded at the window, "—out there? Or tried to?" "Of course." "Well," said Wyatt. "I'll be damned." He was enraged, and more alarmed than ever. "Don't forget for a second that I've got this gun in your back." "I'm not likely to," she said in a curiously calm voice. "How are you called?" He told her. "I am Brinna Halphard—Brinna the Dark, I think you would say." It seemed a little ridiculous to say, How do you do? Wyatt grunted uneasily and asked, "Why the sudden friendliness?" "I'm a soldier, and I know it is impossible to win every skirmish. I've learned to make the best of things." "That's fine," said Wyatt, not trusting her for a minute. But he was curious. "Are all women soldiers where you come from?" "As many as wish to be. There is no difference made between the sexes, only between individuals according to their abilities. There are many women in the task force—pilots, technicians, officers, gunners, ordinary troops." "Nobody thinks a thing of it?" "Why should they?" Wyatt could not really think of any good reason, except that on Earth they did. Brinna reached for a panel at her right side and started to open it. Instantly Wyatt was alert. "What are you doing there?" "You want to go to Washington. Unless you can tell me the exact coordinates yourself, I must have the computer work out a course." "Okay," said Wyatt. "Open the panel, but slowly." Behind it there was only a remarkable compact receptor-effector unit. "You see?" she said. "Now if you will allow me —" He allowed her. He asked, "Do you have a chart designation for Washington already in that thing?" "For everywhere in your world," said Brinna. "Naturally." A chill went crawling down Wyatt's back. Some of the larger implications of the situation were beginning to catch up with him. Enemies had entered the skies of Earth, spying, charting. Enemies from another star, so far away that Earth had never heard of it. Earthmen had been kidnapped, the names of cities had been written down, plans had been made. And somewhere out there, in the immense black and fire-blazing gulf that surrounded Earth—not any longer as a protective barrier but as a pathway for invasion—an alien fleet proceeded on its way. Wyatt stared in horror out the window and wondered how, even if all Earth's defenses were mustered, she could fight off an attack by an enemy so superior in technology that interstellar flight was a commonplace. "Brinna," he said, "what—" He started to turn his head toward her and out of the tail of his eye he saw her hand move on the controls but it was already too late to do anything. The plane went out from under him sideways and the window tried to push itself through his head. Then he was thrown the other way with a violence that nearly snapped his neck. The seat belt cut into him and his arms flew out wildly. The gun was pulled from his hand as by a powerful magnet. He yelled involuntarily and then for the second time direction was reversed and his head slammed into the window again and all the stars went out. When he came to he had no weapon at all and his hands were securely fastened to the back of the seat with his own belt. His head ached abominably. "That was a dirty trick," he said. "Now I see why you made that first turn so gentle— so I wouldn't know how fast this thing could maneuver at right angles." Brinna said, "Would you have expected me to give you a performance sheet?" "All right," he said sourly, hating her, hating the feeling of helplessness and disadvantage, raging at the combination of circumstances that had chosen him to grapple with a situation that no one man could possibly have handled. "Where are we going now?" "Back to where I found you. You'll have to get to Washington with the warning some other way." Wyatt groaned. "What do I have to do to make you understand? Nobody will believe a word I say." "It's your world," she said. "I can do no more than tell you what will happen." "You mean you won't do any more," he said furiously. "What's your game, anyway? If you really cared whether Earth is attacked or not you'd make sure—" A pair of little blue lights began to flash alternately at the left of the control panel, accompanied by a shrill buzzing. Brinna started. She said something in her own language that sounded like a curse. "What's the matter?" Wyatt asked. "Trouble. Oh, not with the ship, that's only the communicator." She put out her hand and at the same time she gave him a hard glare. "Just keep quiet. Don't say anything at all, or you may only make things worse for yourself." She flipped a switch. The flashing and buzzing stopped and a man's face appeared in a tiny screen. Wyatt could not see it too clearly from his angle, but it seemed a not unlikeable face of which the chief characteristics were strength and a sort of inner weariness. The man spoke to Brinna and she answered him, and Wyatt could not understand a word of what they said. Some part of the conversation seemed to concern Wyatt himself. He became more and more frantically uneasy. When the contact was broken and the screen was blank again, he leaned forward against his bonds and demanded, "What's all that about?" Brinna nodded briefly toward the window. "Look out there." Her brows were drawn down into a black angry bar and she seemed to be thinking hard. Wyatt looked out the small window. A second disc-shaped craft had joined them. It was about four hundred feet away, keeping pace. Even while he looked at it the craft tilted, showing a glowing pink center surrounded by the black outer ring, and appeared to shoot away into the starry void. Brinna followed it. Wyatt said, "Hey. You said you were going to put me off on the mesa—" She shook her head. "Not now. That's Makvern out there, the good gray Makvern who would be suspicious of his own father. He knows you're aboard. There is only one place I can take you." She pointed expressively. "Out. If I tried to drop back down to Earth now I'd be in front of a court-martial before breakfast." She turned to face him. It seemed that she had done her thinking, compensating for the sudden change in direction that Makvern's appearance had necessitated. "Listen," she said. "I'm the only hope you have of getting back to Earth before the attack. If you tell anyone that I tried to pass on a warning, that one hope will be gone. Do you understand me?" "Perfectly," Wyatt said. He had been doing some thinking too. "I am also your only hope of getting a warning to Earth before the invasion, which you badly want to do not because you give a tinker's damn what happens to Earth, but because of the effect you think it will have on some deal of your own. So I guess in a sense we're partners, then?" "You could say that." Her eyes were as bright and hard as two chips of blue stone. She was as handsome a girl as Wyatt had ever seen, and she scared the devil out of him. "Partners. Yes. But whatever my motives may be they do not concern you, or Earth. And if I do not succeed with my plan this time—" She shrugged. "There will be other worlds." Wyatt said shrewdly, "They might not be as well able to fight back as Earth, though. We don't quite have space flight yet, but we do have nuclear weapons. Enough to give even your force a real jar. And that's what you want, isn't it?" Her face changed slightly. He thought she almost smiled, in a wry unhumorous way. "You're far too clever," she said. "Don't let your cleverness betray you." "I'll watch it," he said, not feeling clever at all, feeling sick and agonized as the last thin rim of Earth dropped away out of sight and all of a sudden he knew that he was in space. For one wild moment he thought, This whole thing is a dream, it happened too fast and it's all too crazy to be real, and pretty soon I'll wake up. But he knew it was not a dream. He was here, awake and substantial, and he was a captive, going with bound hands into an unknown void. And going fast. CHAPTER III It had been night, and suddenly it was day. There was no twilight zone, no period of transition. The craft shot out of the Earth's shadow into the full blaze of the sun, and it was like somebody turning on all the lights in the world in the middle of a dark room. Wyatt flinched and turned his head away. When he dared to look again there was a filter lens over the port. Actually it must have slid into place at once, or the raw glare would have blinded him. And now space seemed to be brimming over with light, all the blackness hidden beyond that golden blaze. He could see Makvern's craft, still in position ahead and to one side, its polished rim flashing and glittering. It seemed to skim through the ocean of light like a fleeting shadow, and Wyatt found himself mesmerized by the illusion that he, too, was being buoyed up and whirled along, a chip on the floods of heaven. Brinna hunched brooding over her controls and never gave it all a second look. Wyatt realized that of course this was an old story to her. She must have seen suns all over the galaxy and consider them no more interesting than street lamps. It was not an old story to Wyatt. He was still frightened to death of being where he was, but even the fear was getting lost in the overwhelming wonder and magnificence of it. He craned his neck around to peer at the actual sun itself, but that was behind them and the ports on that side of the cockpit were blacked out completely. All he could see were shaking veils of fire that sprang out suddenly to cover half his field of vision and then fell back, streaming in golden streams. He thought these must be solar prominences, or part of the corona. The golden flood of light spread out and out and he could not see any end to it, though he knew there must be one. Rushing obliquely ahead of the craft was a thin black knife-edged blade cutting sharp across the radiance, and he knew that that was their own shadow. There was the light, and Makvern's craft, and the shadow, and nothing else. Then a white curved thing like a gnawed bone slid into view, and he knew it was the edge of the Moon. They headed toward it. For the first time Wyatt had something by which to estimate their speed. Whatever it was in miles per hour, it was too damned fast. The Moon fairly sprang at them. He could see craters opening and weird jagged mountains shooting up, exactly like pictures of growing plants taken with a strobe camera. The flinty peaks glinted like rows of teeth. Wyatt's heart came up in his throat. He understood that Makvern and Brinna must know what they were doing, and he was determined not to yell, but he found himself trying to push his feet through the floor in an involuntary gesture of putting on brakes. The two craft tilted and swung across the face of the Moon—it was only the airlessness of space and the brilliance of the reflecting sunlight, Wyatt knew, that made the surface seem close enough to reach out and pick up the perfectly defined chunks of broken pumice as they passed. Plains, craters, pinnacles and ranges, blinding white or etched with inky shadow, flashed beneath them and then they were on top of the terminus and over it and it was night again, black, black, black and hung with stars. Wyatt shook himself, feeling dazed. It was like a plunge into deep water, stunning. The filter shield slid automatically away from the window. He looked out at the hind side of the Moon, glimmering mysteriously in the eternal starshine, and was not very surprised to see that it looked very much like the familiar face. Once more the two craft tilted and swung, and Wyatt saw the ship. It hung motionless between the Moon and the stars, an enormous cylindrical shape catching dull glints on its flanks and its blunt nose. He could only guess its size by the area of stars it blotted out, and even that was only a guess. It was big. Big enough. It was not showing any lights at first, but then one came on, laying a hard white path across the empty blackness. Makvern's craft found the path and raced along it, slowing as it went, and presently vanished. "What is it?" asked Wyatt, and Brinna said, "Scout tender. You didn't think we were going all the way to Alpha Centauri in these skimmers, did you?" Wyatt said, "I hadn't really thought about it, one way or the other." Alpha Centauri, he thought. My God. Brinna put the skimmer, as she called it, into the lighted guidepath. "You're likely to have a fairly rough time of it," she said. "They will question you. They're not brutes, but they're thorough. I won't be able to do anything about that. But hang on, and I'll arrange your escape as soon as I can." "Thank you," said Wyatt bitterly. "If," said Brinna with equal bitterness, "you hadn't been in such a blazing hurry to make me go to Washington, you wouldn't be here. So don't blame me for all your troubles." The skimmer slowed, climbing up the beam of light. A resurgence of panic took hold of Wyatt. "Why Alpha Centauri? Why do I have to go there?" "Two reasons. We work well ahead, always planning the next campaign before we finish the last one. I told you they'll question you. In the normal course of events you would be shown the Centauri campaign so that you could get a clear idea of just how we work, and then you would be used to persuade your people not to resist." "But you'll arrange my escape before that." "I'll do what I can," she snapped, "as long as you keep your mouth shut. Now we're going in, and from here on you're just another captive." Wyatt looked at her. He didn't trust her promise, not at all. He thought he had better never trust this dark girl too far. The skimmer rose up into a great hatch. Wyatt heard a thunderous click transmitted through the air in the cockpit and felt a strong jar as what he thought must be a magnetic grapple took hold. Beyond the window now he saw a brightly lighted space that looked as big as Grand Central, equipped with great incomprehensible pieces of machinery. None of them looked like any propulsion or communication machines he knew. How did a faster-than-light ship communicate, anyway? An idea came to him. Small figures moved out there. He recognized them as men wearing spacesuits. The suits were astonishingly like those being tested by the Air Force for high-altitude flying. He thought the A.F. boys would be glad to know their designs were good. The skimmer was dormant, being lifted and handled by forces outside. Brinna said, "We have to wait for pressure to build up." The huge hatch doors beneath had closed. Presently Wyatt heard sounds faintly from outside the skimmer, chiefly a throbbing noise like the beating of a gigantic heart which he thought must be the air-pumps. He nursed the idea that had come to him. He didn't think it was a very good idea but it was the only one he had, and he had to do something, try somehow, to get a warning to Earth. He could not just wait for Brinna to help him escape, it might never be possible—even if she wasn't double-crossing him as she was obviously double-crossing someone else. He'd try his own way. Soon a light showed on the control board and Brinna pushed a lever under it. She got up. "All right," she said. "You go ahead of me." Wyatt rose, his hands still tied. He passed through the aperture and onto the narrow stair which had unfolded from the rim. There was a platform under the bottom rung and he stepped onto it. Brinna came behind him. The skimmer hung suspended from a grapple on an overhead track. Makvern's craft was just beyond it on a similar grapple. At the end of the track was a mobile rack with three skimmers already in it and two empty slots. Three other racks held fifteen more, stacked up like pies in a bakery. The men in spacesuits—some of them were women—were taking off their helmets. They were looking at Wyatt, interested but not unduly so. Makvern was walking toward them. He also was looking at Wyatt. His eyes were dark and his skin was leathery with exposure to many suns. His hair was rough and wiry, iron gray. His shoulders were wide and his body was hard and narrow and his legs were long. Wyatt thought if he had not met Makvern in another time and place he might have liked him. As it was, he hated him. Makvern nodded to Brinna. He wore the same black uniform, but the insigne on his shirt was different and contained a ruby stud. He watched Wyatt as another man untied his hands. "A technician, eh?" he said, speaking English no better than Brinna did, but perfectly intelligibly. "Good work, Captain. We have needed one badly." "Thank you," said Brinna. "I hope he'll be useful." Makvern said to Wyatt, "What is your field?" "Communications," said Wyatt. "And I can tell you right now that I don't know anything more about weapons and defense than anybody who can read the daily papers, and that I won't be useful at all." Makvern said, "I see Brinna explained to you why you were being brought here." "She did. Fully." "Well," said Makvern. "Come along." He walked away and Brinna motioned for Wyatt to follow and he did, padding in his sock feet over the deck. It was a hell of a thing, he thought, to be on his way to Alpha Centauri without any shoes. But his hands were free now. They were so sure he couldn't escape, inside their ship. Well, he couldn't. But maybe he could do something else. He looked at Makvern as they walked along the huge room. "Star-ships," Wyatt said. "Faster than light. How the devil can you communicate at speeds and distances like that?" Makvern smiled slightly. "That's right, you said you're a communications man. Well, there are ways. There are beams you never heard of." "I'd like to see an outfit that can send a signal faster than light," Wyatt grunted. Makvern looked at him thoughtfully. "Why not? We'll be going right past the communic room." Brinna looked as though she wanted to say something, but she didn't, and they went on out of the hold and through a neat functional labyrinth of corridors. "Here we are," said Makvern and opened a bulkhead door. Wyatt sprang forward, low and fast, like a football player making a desperate tackle. His shoulder struck Makvern in the small of the back, his arms clasped him tight around the waist, and his weight bore him forward and down, through the door into the communications room. They hit the deck together, Wyatt on top, Makvern grunting heavily from the impact. Two men inside the room sprang up from their places in alarm. Wyatt turned his head and saw Brinna in the doorway and kicked the door shut in her face. There was no way to lock it. He scrambled to his feet, wild with the need for haste, and he realized then that Makvern was not moving. He must have hit his head on the deck when he fell. Wyatt dragged him against the door to block it, and by that time one of the two men had turned back to his instruments and was shouting into what Wyatt assumed to be the ship's intercom. The other man was almost on top of him. Wyatt could not possibly avoid that rush. The man was big and he was young and strong and he pinned Wyatt against the wall and pounded at him. Wyatt did not worry about prize-ring rules. He lowered his head and butted, hard. The man staggered back, and Wyatt gave him a clip on the jaw to help him down and then made a rush of his own, at the man who was busily arousing the whole ship. This man was not a pugnacious type. He looked at Wyatt with large horrified eyes and flung up his hands in a vague gesture of striking but Wyatt's fist took him solidly in the face and he whimpered and turned around and folded over his own knees. The communic room was now quiet, except for a series of noises outside the door. Wyatt stood panting, looking at the maze of equipment. Right here within reach was the means of warning Earth. The radio system on this ship must be strong enough to blanket every receiver on the planet. All he had to do was figure out how to use it. He swore in an agony of frustration. Nothing was marked right, nothing was as he knew it. It was all there, and it was totally useless. He reached down and took hold of the man who was crouched on the deck near him. He dragged him upright. He shook him. "Listen," he said. "Listen, you're going to get this thing working. Understand?" The man shook his head dazedly from side to side and said something in his own language. Wyatt's grip became cruel. "You're going to send a message to Earth," he said, and then Makvern spoke quietly behind him. "He can't understand you, Wyatt. Let him go." Wyatt spun around, still holding the man. Makvern had got up. He was standing beside the door with a weapon in his hand. The door was now open and Brinna was standing in it, her thumbs hooked in her belt, watching. Men were arriving behind her in the corridor. Wyatt said, "If you shoot me you'll get your own man too." He shifted his grip, dragging the man closer to the control panel. Feeling even while he was speaking the absolute hopelessness of this last ditch play, he said, "Tell him what I want or I'll smash your communication system so thoroughly—" "It was a good try, Wyatt," said Makvern, not without a certain admiration, and pressed a stud on his weapon. Wyatt never knew what hit him. When he awoke he was lying in a bunk in a small metal cabin. Close beside his head there swung a curious helmet-like device linked by cables to a squat cabinet. Makvern was standing looking down at him. He looked alert and wary and his hand rested casually on his holstered side-arm. "How are you feeling now?" said Makvern. Wyatt started a sour reply, and then he froze in an incredulous astonishment. Makvern had not spoken in English. He had spoken in a totally strange language—and yet he, Wyatt, had understood him! "What—how—" Wyatt began. Makvern smiled. "How do you know the language of Uryx, our language, all of a sudden? Simple. Learning-tapes." He gestured toward the helmet and the cabinet. Wyatt gaped like a yokel. It was too uncanny. Hearing words he'd never consciously heard before, and yet understanding them— He articulated with difficulty. "Learning-tapes?" Makvern sat down. "You've been under a seda-ray for some days, Wyatt. In fact, we're nearly to our rendezvous with the fleet, off Alpha Centauri." So time had passed? That wasn't surprising. But this other thing— Makvern went on. "Don't you yet have it on your Earth, the technique of teaching arbitrary knowledge to a subject in his sleep?" Wyatt began to get it now. "You mean, a recorded voice repeating facts over and over in a sleeping man's ear? Yes. We have that—but it's not good enough to teach a man a whole new language in sleep." "With us," said Makvern, "it is good enough. We always use it, once we pick up the vocabulary and grammar from our first captives. Makes it easier to question them. Instead of all our intelligence officers, technicians and so on having to learn the captive's language, we give him our language." It was still too much for Wyatt to take in. He lay looking at Makvern, and after a moment he said, "You seem like a decent guy, not a butcher or a greedy conqueror type. Maybe you can tell me what gives your people the idea they've a right to go around acting like a bunch of goddamned bandits." Makvern smiled faintly. "Probably," he said, "because that's exactly what we are. Uryx is still a young empire. I imagine you have learned on Earth how empires grow—starting from a small weak poverty-ridden state fighting for its existence and becoming, by the process of eating its neighbors, a tremendous power able to conquer everything in sight. When it does this it wants to gorge itself on all the things it never had before." He made a sweeping gesture. "Wealth, beauty, techniques, cultures, knowledge, everything under a thousand suns that can enrich or entertain us. We are still in this stage of acquisitiveness." Wyatt grunted. "That all sounds very philosophic, but it still doesn't make you anything but bandits." "When we join the main fleet," said Makvern, refusing to be angered, "you can take that up with Varsek." "Varsek?" "Commander in Chief of the Task Force. The—ah—Boss, I think you would say." "I'll be glad to take it up with him," Wyatt said. "And if he thinks he's going to get any help from me, he's wrong." He looked up at Makvern and he said suddenly, "You deliberately gave me a chance at that communic room, didn't you?" "Did I?" "Yes. You didn't have to show it to me, you must have known what was in my mind. But you had no intention of letting me get a message off to Earth. You shammed unconsciousness till it looked like I might make it, and then you came to and stopped me." "Why would I do a thing like that?" Makvern asked calmly. "Why, indeed? That's what I'm asking." Makvern said, "Perhaps I was testing you to find out something, Wyatt. Let me ask you a question in return. Why did you let Brinna capture you so easily?" "What do you mean, easily?" "You had a weapon. Yet you didn't use it on Brinna. Why?" Wyatt became instantly wary and on guard. Makvern, then, suspected the arrangement between Brinna and himself, suspected Brinna of a double-cross? He'd better be careful. He said, "What's this about Brinna? To me, she's just a female wildcat that dropped out of the sky." "She is what you would call very high brass," Makvern said. "A high officer of the Task Force, completely trusted by Commander Varsek." Had Makvern faintly emphasized the word "trusted"? Wyatt wasn't sure. He was only sure now that some devil's broth of intrigue went on in the immense Task Force that followed its looting voyage through the galactic suns, and that he, Wyatt, was less than the smallest pawn in the hidden game. "I wouldn't," said Makvern, "think too much of Brinna. She's beautiful, I know. But she's in love." Oddly, Wyatt felt a pang to hear that. "In love? With whom?" "With power," Makvern said grimly, and then the next moment the light in the cabin went blue and there was a vertiginous shock that made Wyatt feel as though he was falling, falling, everything gone from around him, plunging through abysses of darkness— A whining sound went up to a shriek and passed beyond hearing, and then the lights burned white again and the dizziness in his head passed. "What the devil—" he began huskily. Makvern stood up. "We just went out of overdrive. We've reached the Task Force. Come on Wyatt—for you, this is it." CHAPTER IV Here in the windowed bridge, the background was all stars. Clouds of stars, rivers of them, chains and globes of them, and drawn across them here and there like curtains of the most glorious fire ever imagined were the shining nebulae. They were all colors. Red, blue, smoky yellow, green, diamond white. Some of them, Wyatt realized, were not stars at all but galaxies, scattered out in careless millions through the apparently infinite universe. To an earthbound, skybound man like himself, this was almost too much to take. Look at ten billion stars and a million galaxies and all the empty space between for them to roam around in, and realize that this is the universe, you are in the middle of it, not standing on the edge looking up the way you do on Earth but right in the middle of it, the nothingness and allness of it without end, amen. If you have no religion you get one in a hurry, because obviously only God could have made this. Wyatt was dimly aware that someone—Makvern—was talking to him. Alpha Centauri. A hand pointed, guiding him back from the infinite to the particular. Ahead, still very far away but close enough to stand out from among the more distant stars like a beacon lamp, was a yellow sun. "There's a companion," Makvern said, "but it's insignificant and did not prevent the formation of a stable planetary system around the primary. Alpha Centauri has eight planets—it's very much like your own Sol. The two inner planets are too hot, and the outer ones are too cold, but the third and fourth support life. The third is closer to the sun than Earth and is still in a comparatively primitive stage of evolution. We can pick up minerals there but nothing else. The fourth world is our target." Wyatt shut his eyes against the blaze of suns and nebulae and wheeling galaxies and tried to concentrate on Alpha Centauri, its fourth planet, and himself. "Where's your fleet?" he asked, and opened his eyes again, looking closer at hand instead of trying to see the end of creation. Once more Makvern pointed. Once more Wyatt was stunned, this time in a much more personal way. Suns and galaxies were beyond him, the incredible handiwork of God, but men had built these ships. And the one was almost as overwhelming a thing as the other. It was the hell and all of a fleet. It too was a long way off, though not anything like as far as Alpha Centauri. Makvern explained that they did not attempt any very close maneuvering in hyper-drive, where you counted your fractional seconds of error in multiples of parsecs. The main task force would approach the system of Alpha Centauri at planetary speeds and deploy according to the master attack plan already decided upon while the fleet had been busy plundering the hapless worlds of the star- system before this one. The scout ship was now on an intersecting course. Wyatt watched this convergence with a mounting awe and an increasing conviction that no matter how many warnings he might bring to Earth it would not do them one bit of good. He had thought the scout tender was huge when he first saw it hanging beyond the dark side of the Moon. The closer he got to the fleet the smaller the tender seemed to him and the smaller he felt himself, until he thought that this must be pretty much like a minnow's-eye view of a school of whales passing in all their majesty, accompanied on the flanks by the swift sinister forms of great sharks. The analogy was obvious but not a bad one, Wyatt thought. The phalanx of huge dark shapes swam in space as in black water, touched with vagrant gleams of light that might have been phosphorescence instead of starshine. The hugest of them—the heavy support craft, the troop transports, the supply ships, and the swag-bellied monstrosities that Brinna said were used to store and carry loot—travelled together in a wedge-shaped formation, with the flagship at the apex. Ahead and on both wings were the smaller, faster destroyer- type craft, heavily armed but maneuverable. These were the spearhead of any attack, and the defenders of the fleet from any hostile action in space. Behind came a shoal of smaller craft like the tender, the inglorious but indispensable work-horses of the fleet. Clear across the galaxy these ships had come, built and manned by humans, conceived in their brains and controlled by their hands. It seemed a pity their purpose could not have been more noble. The Task Force swept closer and closer, rolled over the tender like a mighty wave, engulfed it, and carried it along in its resistless rush toward Alpha Centauri. A communicator at the back of the bridge, which had been rattling away in the course of routine technicalities, suddenly changed its tone. "Clear channels," said a brisk important voice. "Clear channels for Number One." The operator at Fleet Control whose image had appeared on the screen promptly pulled the switch on himself. Involuntarily everyone in the bridge room snapped to attention, even Makvern and Brinna. Swiftly, under her breath, Brinna said, "What does he want that couldn't wait for our regular report?" She looked worried. Guilty conscience, Wyatt thought. But Makvern's conscience was clear, at least where Wyatt was concerned, and he looked worried too. Almost, you might say, apprehensive. When he turned to face the screen there was no sign of this in his face, nothing but the properly alert expression of a staff officer about to speak to his chief. A smartly turned out operator, owner of the officious voice, appeared in the screen. "ST-6," he said. "ST-6, this is Number One calling. Number One, calling for Staff Captain Makvern." Makvern stepped forward into the pick-up area. "Captain Makvern here." "Stand by, sir. Commander Varsek is ready to speak to you." Makvern stood by. He seemed perfectly at ease. Brinna's mouth was drawn tight and her eyes were narrowed. Wyatt started to say something and she shook her head at him fiercely. He shut up. The bridge waited silently as though the Supreme Being was about to step into it. The operator had vanished from the screen. It remained blank for a moment or two. Then it brightened again and Commander Varsek was mirrored in it. He nodded to Makvern, who saluted. He was sitting behind a big desk covered with charts, papers, microfilm spools, a couple of viewers, and various communic media. In contrast to the immaculate turn-out of his operator—and everybody else that Wyatt had so far seen—Varsek's uniform shirt was open down the front, his sleeves were rolled up, and the shirt itself looked as though he had been digging ditches in it. He gave the impression of a man enormously embroiled in work, the two-hours-of-sleep-a-night, coffee-and-benzedrine-and-I-thrive-on-it type that automatically makes everybody else feel like a lazy slob. All this part of him Wyatt found only mildly irritating. It was Varsek's face and what he sensed behind it that made Wyatt feel he could really hate this man. Varsek was a big lean man, and his face was big and lean, with a lot of bone in it and no softness anywhere, and no warmth, and no friendliness. He smiled, and the smile was a lie. Wyatt thought all the rest of it was a lie too, or at least a deliberate pose. Only his eyes were true. They looked at Makvern, and then at Brinna, and then for quite a long moment at Wyatt, and they were rapacious and hungry, cold and cruel, highly intelligent, and disconcertingly demonstrative of a mind capable of handling nearly anything. "This is your captive, is it?" he said. "Good. He looks more intelligent than any I've seen yet." He turned his attention back to Makvern. "I've sent a skimmer for you. You too, Brinna." Makvern said, in an almost too carefully expressionless voice, "We were about to report to the flagship." "This is important, Makvern. Can't wait. I've got Loran aboard, very sick, about dying I'd say. I want you and Brinna here." His gaze flicked again to Wyatt. "Bring him along. It may help him to understand us better." "Yes, sir," said Makvern. Varsek nodded and the screen went dead. Somebody said, "Skimmer's coming into the airlock now, sir." Makvern turned around and looked at Brinna. His face was absolutely white. So was hers. White, frightened, and bitterly angry. "Who is Loran?" asked Wyatt. "One of our under officers," Makvern said, too quietly. "Come on, we mustn't keep them waiting." They left the bridge and went, not below to the main launching hold, but aft to a small lock. On the way Wyatt asked, "Can you tell me what's going on?" "For your own sake," said Makvern, "no." They got into the skimmer and the pilot took it away and they sat stiff and silent like three people going to a wake. And Wyatt had an idea he was about to get a little closer to the truth of whatever forces were operating behind the scenes here. He needed to know, needed it desperately. He was prepared to sell or double-cross anybody including himself in order to get a warning to Earth in time, but before he could do that he had to know who was buying, and what, and for how much. The skimmer passed swiftly through the fleet, past the great dull-gleaming hulls tarnished by a thousand atmospheres, pitted and scarred by the cosmic dust and drift of half a galaxy. The black enormous form of the flagship loomed ahead, blotting out the stars. The skimmer was gathered into it. A minute late...