"Later" was indefinitely deferred, to Delilah's serious regret. There simply was no time. There was less time than anyone could have calculated a need for, because when Miranda stole Tchai's space suit she stole from the spacecraft a large fraction of its utility. Tchai was the gunner. The hidden weaponry tucked into the spaceship was no longer a counter in the game unless Delilah herself could operate it, and how could she do that? and pilot at the same time? and keep an eye on the vicious little bitch's machinations and for that matter on Castor, and—hardest of all—simultaneously think and plan and be ready for what terrible and unexpected things the alien ship might produce? Delilah's mind fluttered like a limed bird with the trapper closing in; and then there was no time, no time at all, because the alien ship appeared on their radar, and a moment later Castor squawked in excitement as he picked up the faint dot of it through the starboard glass.
The radar said nothing useful about the alien: the readouts along the edge of the screen gave mass (three hundred metric tons, close enough) and dimensions (easily forty meters long) and shape—shape more like a can of fruit than anything else, with bits of odd metallic shapes stuck onto it. The visual to the naked eye was not even as useful as that, except that there was color to the naked eye, purply, violety color that did not seem material. Delilah snatched the twelve-centimeter glasses out of their felt-lined pocket and stared through them at the stranger. Behind her Castor and Miranda were demanding and pleading and exchanging quick words of explanation of how Miranda had got there; behind her Tchai Howard's radio voice was still screaming demands and questions. Delilah blotted them out. She had enough attention available to keep her own board dressed and her ship on course; all of the rest of it went to what was in the glasses.
The ship was metallic, but not shiny-chrome metallic. Thirty years at relativistic speeds through the diffuse dusts and gases of interstellar space had dulled the shine and pitted the surface. It looked mean. It looked like a storage tank for some unpleasant liquid waste or like one of the first primitive nuclear weapons. It was barrel-shaped rather than truly cylindrical, with here and there a scarred fin or incongruously bright (because long retracted from the buffing of dust) paraboloid dish. The whole thing was longer than the radar had displayed because of its angle of approach, perhaps as much as a hundred meters long.
"What's that purple?" Castor screeched in her ear.
The purple. Good question! The squat cylinder wore at one end a ring of faint violet light. Faint? That was not the right word. The glow hurt the eyes. Plenty of photons were coming out of whatever it was, but perhaps only a small spillover into the visible band. Puzzled, scared, Delilah let the bitch Miranda snatch the glasses away from her and reached to thumb on the ship-to-ship radio. "Unknown spacecraft," she said, "this is the ship of the president of the United States. He is aboard and ready to meet with you."
She released the thumb button and waited for acknowledgment to speak again.
There was no acknowledgment. There was no answer at all. "Call them again, damn you," Miranda shrilled, struggling with Castor for the glasses, and without will of her own Delilah repeated the call.
No answer, and the two spacecraft were moving volitionlessly toward each other, hindquarter to forequarter, not as though they were planning it, but as though some large Caliban were stirring minnows together in a pool. "Back away," whispered Castor, his nerve failing.
Delilah's nerve was also failing, but her finger would not tell the keyboard to take them away. Her duty was assigned. It was not to flee because she was scared or because the aliens were impolite about replying; it was to make contact.
Anyway, she thought, there was still plenty of distance between them, and if they tried anything funny the secret panel to Tchai's weaponry lay within the reach of her right hand, just under the bulge of Miranda's shoulder as she squirmed to stare out the window.
There was not still plenty of distance, though. All of a sudden there was no distance at all. The two ships did not accelerate toward each other; it was something unexpected and worse.
The violet ring slipped free of the alien ship.
It spun around on its axis twice, like a coin on a tabletop. Then it rushed toward them.
Tsoong Delilah slapped quick fingers on the board, and their spaceship bucked and tried to turn away. Thrust forward, she reached out despairingly toward the weaponry board. Miranda was on top of it in her hard and unmoving suit; she wouldn't get out of the way and got a backhanded slap again for her trouble—would have got worse if there had been time—did get worse, verbally at least, with Delilah screaming fury, promising punishment for leaving them without a gunner... There was no time for punishment. There was no time to solve the riddles of the arming and aiming and launching of Tchai's missiles, either.
The ring was on them.
The ring swallowed them. It slipped past the plunging stern quarter of their ship like a hoop over a stake. Delilah had not permitted herself to vomit in years, nor did she feel ill; but for the tenth part of a second something in her stomach lunged toward her throat.
Then it was over.
The ring sailed away from them. They were floating in space. The star-sprinkled black of the sky was all around them.
But the stars were different stars.
Instinctively Delilah cut the thrusters and switched on all sensors: Were they in orbit? was it stable? was there a terrible crash threatening at any second? While the ship's autosystems were reaching for data and trying for solutions, she had a moment to see that they were not alone in space—quite—for behind them and below was a planet, blue-white and huge.
It was not the Earth. Beyond it, its sun was redder and larger and nearer, and under the planet's white blobs of cloud the continent at its sunlit edge was none she had ever seen before.
Doubly they were not alone, for radar squawked the word that a ship-sized object was near. It was on the side of Delilah's spacecraft away from the ruby sun, therefore brightly lit. It, too, was nothing they had seen before. A spaceship? Well, certainly it was a spaceship; that followed from the fact that it was a ship and in space. All the same it was queer that the vessel was lined for air. It was wingless, yes, but its bedbug-shaped contours were those of a lifting body; and it had control surfaces that meant nothing in a vacuum.
Not only bug-shaped. It had a bedbug's claws. Tiny blue-white jets flared on the ship. It turned, till opposing jets halted it in a posture aimed directly at them. Behind it a swell of golden flame showed main-thrust engines, hurling it toward them, and the claws opened.
Delilah could have escaped the claws. This bedbug was a mere rocket, not some mad and inescapable wheel of violet light. There was plenty of time for Delilah to run. There was plenty of time, too, to go through the steps of the weaponry board. Arm, and the ready lights on the lid of the secret board blinked green. Aim, and the sighting reticle flashed a solution.
Launch—
But she did not launch the missile.
Delilah didn't have a chance to launch the missile, actually. Miranda saw what she was doing and swarmed all over her, pinning her arms, wrestling her away from the board—Castor trying clumsily to help one or the other, or to decide which one to help—yelling and shouting of Let go, bitch and Don't be a fool, Tsoong and I'll kill you and You'll kill us all! in hisses and grunts. It was almost impossible to tell which one was shouting which... but then it was all moot. The alien shuttle was too close. The grapples closed. And at once they all went flying in a sudden surge of acceleration as the alien towed them away.