“I’m not sure. I can’t pick it up in the ‘scope. But look at the tracing screen.” The red line had begun to curve. A moment before it had been approaching Ben’s ship in a straight 45-degree trajectory; now it was curving upward on the screen until it was almost parallel to the white line of the little S-80.
Tom Barron looked up at Ben. “Since when can an asteroid change course?”
“It can’t,” Ben said. “That’s no asteroid. That’s a ship under power. And it’s close enough for us to see it.” He turned back to the telescope, searching the area of space where the intruding ship had to be.
He went back and searched again, more carefully, with growing alarm. The ship, or whatever it was, was unquestionably close enough for reflected light to reveal it as Ben crisscrossed the area a third time. But there was no image of any kind in the telescope. Tom Barron started to say something, but Ben waved him to silence. There was something wrong here, something Ben simply couldn’t understand. Friend or foe, there was a ship out there, probably no more than fifty linear miles from his own ship, moving on a parallel course with his ship. The tracking screen showed it to be moving at precisely the same speed.
The radar said plainly that it was there… but the telescope revealed no sign of it.
And that, of course, was flatly impossible. Any ship or any other object in space that would show up on a short-range radar scanner should be equally visible in the telescope. With the new intensifiers to quadruple the light-gathering power of the telescope’s lenses, even a ship deliberately painted flat black to reduce its reflectivity should stand out like a beacon in the sky. But this area of space appeared utterly empty.
Thoroughly alarmed now, Ben turned back to the ship’s controls. He had encountered his share of curious happenings in space, but this was something new. “Tom, you’d better strap down here and keep an eye on the tracing screen for me. Joyce, you get secured on a cot. We’re going to do some jumping around.”
Very slightly, Ben dropped the ship’s acceleration, and shifted its course away from the mysterious intruder. Without a moment’s hesitation, the red line on the screen also slowed and veered. Ben veered more sharply, this time in toward the intruder in a long flat arc. The red line veered instantly to match the move again. Whatever it was, it had attached itself to the little S-80 and was following its maneuvers move by move with rather amazing agility. Once more Ben tried to telescope, with no more success than before.
“Look, what’s going on?” Tom Barron demanded.
“I don’t know,” Ben said. “But whatever it is, I don’t like it. There’s something out there that behaves like a ship, but I can’t pick it up on the ‘scope.”
“Maybe it has some kind of masking device,” Tom said.
Ben looked up at him sharply. “We’ve been trying to develop a masking device for ships for decades, and we haven’t gotten to first base. Unless your people have stumbled onto one that we’ve never heard of.”
Tom looked dubious. “If we had, seems to me we would have been using it for ground protection during raids.”
“Exactly,” Ben said. Once again he veered the S-80 in to-ward the intruder, watched the red line veer away in tandem. “They don’t want to close in on us, they’re just staying on our tail.” He peered through the view screen at the empty expanse of space, saw the flat brilliance of the sun’s disk and the thin red fingernail of Mars now visible at the extreme edge of the screen. “And they don’t want to be seen… well, maybe we can chisel a look all the same. Hold on.”
With a few swift moves Ben activated the ship’s side jets, and began a sharp banking maneuver, turning the ship as hard as he could. In the engine room the null-grav generators whined in protest at the overload; Ben eased up momentarily, then banked again, turning the ship through a 180-degree arc in a series of sharp maneuvers. With each shift the red line on the tracer screen followed suit, shifting and straightening. Ben’s little ship bucked and shuddered under the impact of force vectors it was never expected to withstand, and his passengers gripped their shock bars for dear life.
But in the space of a few moments he had turned the ship in a full half-circle, so that the sun’s bright disk lay full in the view screen with the intruder moving somewhere between him and the sun.
A few more carefully calculated moves did it. The tracer screen was three-dimensional, with coordinates zeroed in the plane of the sun’s orbit. Now Ben calculated his ship’s angle in relation to the sun’s plane, and figured the intruder’s angle as well. Abruptly, Ben dipped the little ship’s nose down so that the intruder lay in a straight line between the S-80 and the sun.
An instant later the phantom ship seemed to recognize Ben’s trap; the red line veered downward sharply. But it was already too late. For the space of a few seconds the sun’s disk was blotted out, eclipsed by the phantom. Prepared and waiting, Ben punched a stopwatch. Moments later the shadow was gone, and Ben stopped the timer. “Got him,” he said. “Tom, read that interval dial.” Tom read the figures on the tracing screen indicating the phantom ship’s distance from their own ship at the instant its hulk had crossed in front of the sun. Swiftly Ben taped the figures into the computer, adding the ship’s velocity and the length of the eclipse. It was crude calculation, ignoring a couple of minor variables, but it would be close enough to tell Ben what he wanted to know. The computer buzzed for a moment, and ejected a card.
Ben looked at it, and sucked his breath in between his teeth.
There was something out there, all right. Almost beyond doubt, it was a ship… a phantom ship that could somehow mask itself from observation by reflected light. But it was made of solid matter that could not avoid masking the sun’s disk as it passed between the sun and the observer.
And it was no ordinary space ship. The answer on the card was hardly believable; the ship was huge, larger than any Spacer cruiser, larger than the largest orbit ship the Spacers had ever built. It was a ship so large that it defied belief, and yet it was there.
What was more, the phantom ship must have realized what Ben Trefon had done, for a moment later it suddenly veered away from the parallel course it had been following and moved swiftly out into the darkness of the asteroid Rings. Within a few seconds it disappeared from the radar scanner, as though once detected it no longer dared to stay.
As suddenly as it had appeared, it was gone. But much as he tried to conceal his alarm from his prisoners, Ben Trefon could not conceal it from himself. The Barrons might assume that it had merely been another Spacer ship making a reconnaissance run without stopping for contact, but Ben could not brush the incident aside so easily.
He was reasonably certain that the phantom was not a Spacer ship. But that was not what worried him. The real trouble was that he was equally certain that it was no ship that had ever been built on Earth either.
6. The Face Of The Enemy
IN THE FIRST few minutes after the mysterious intruder vanished, Ben had plenty of routine navigational work to do to keep his mind off the strange encounter. The course of the little S-80 had to be rectified and a new course plotted, since the maneuverings had involved both movement through space and loss of time on the previous plotting. But the work was largely automatic once the computations were complete; Ben’s hands went through the motions as his mind worked feverishly to make some sense out of the phantom ship and the things its visit implied.
The truth was that the encounter had shaken him up badly. Tom and Joyce Barron appeared to have shrugged the incident off without much concern and began busying themselves among the ship’s music tapes. It seemed obvious that the real significance of the encounter simply had not dawned on them.