The mate came into the control room. His spacesuit showed signs of having been spattered with exploded bits of wire insulator.
"That gadget," he said with unbelievable stolidity, "it blew out. It didn't work. It blew when you turned it on."
Trent was too much enraged even to swear. He'd tried the gadget the Yarrow's owners swore by and touted. He'd thrown away the advantage of surprise. Now he was only miles away from an undoubtedly armed pirate which was acutely aware of his presence.
It would have been logical for him to tear his hair in total frustration, and such a reaction would have seemed as useful as any other. But he stared at the spaceboats streaking back toward the pirate ship. It would take them so long to get back and so much longer to get into the spaceboat blisters in which they were carried. The pirate could blow the Yarrow's drive if she went into overdrive. The Yarrow couldn't blow the pirate's. Trent could only put up a fight in normal space with the odds on the pirate. The only fact in his favor was that the pirate wouldn't follow him into overdrive until it had its spaceboats back aboard. It was possible for him to maneuver in a fashion peculiarly like a submarine—one of those fabulous weapons of the last wars on Earth—submerging to get out of sight, but only until the pirate's spaceboats were stowed again.
He used that antiquated maneuver. The Yarrow vanished, only to reappear seconds later in normal space once more and very much nearer to the pirate.
The spaceboats were nearly back home, then. The pirate swung, and there was one of those extraordinarily hurried bursts of smoke which appear when an explosive is set off in emptiness. Vapor appeared and fled madly to nothingness. A shell went hurtling madly to nowhere. The pirate had a gun. The Hecla had said it had been shelled. Trent took the Yarrow into overdrive again. The symptoms of nausea and dizziness and crazy spiral fall were multiplied in their unpleasantness by being repeated after so short an interval.
The time lapse before its return to normal space was very short. It was only seconds, but the spaceboats were alongside the pirate and the mussel-shell-shaped covers of the lifeboat blisters were already opening to receive them. But the Yarrow was only hundreds of yards away, now, and Trent flung it into full-speed-ahead emergency drive.
The Yarrow rushed upon the pirate ship like something infuriated and deadly. It was the most improbable of all possible maneuvers. There were stars on every hand, and above and below to boot. There was no solidity for distances no human being had yet been able to comprehend. With all of space in which to maneuver or attempt to flee, with an enemy come from beyond the nearer stars, Trent was attempting the absolutely earliest and most primitive of naval combat tactics. Ramming. And it was partly successful.
The pirate ship let off a panicky shell at the Yarrow. It missed. Before the gun could be fired again the Yarrow was upon it. Steel hull plates crumpled and tore. The bigger ship plunged into the lesser one, with all its interior ringing from the screech of rent metal.
And the pirate vanished. It had gone into overdrive at the last and ultimate instant, while its bow plates were actually crumpling. The Yarrow plunged through the emptiness the pirate left behind. It turned and plunged again, and again, and yet again, like something huge and enraged trying to trample or to crush a small and agile foe.
There were only two ships left in normal space, here. One of course was the Yarrow. The other was the helpless merchantman Hecla. For the moment Trent ignored the other ship. He kept the Yarrow twisting and circling through the emptiness where the pirate had been. He kept the Yarrow's own drive detector in operation, attempting to locate his enemy. He'd only damaged it in normal space, but if he followed it into overdrive—as things had worked out—it could cripple the Yarrow and then stand off and bombard it until no trace of life remained aboard. Had the men in the pirate's control room been alert, the pirate would have had adequate warning of the Yarrow's coming.
But here and now the pirate ship stayed in overdrive and within detection-range for a considerable time. It might be evaluating the damage the Yarrow's keel had done to it. But Trent listened icily, and heard the whine of its drive grow fainter and fainter until it died away. Then it must be either in normal space—but a very great distance off—or in overdrive and almost unimaginably distant.
It was an hour and more before Trent turned the Yarrow to the disabled Hecla. He'd turned off the spacephone speaker so he could listen to aboard-ship reports. Now he flipped it on again and a shaking, agitated voice came to him instantly.
"Please answer! Our hull is punctured by shells and we've had to put on our spacesuits because our air is going fast. A shell in the engine room knocked out our Lawlor drive and our overdrive coil is blown! Our situation is desperate! Please answer!"
Trent thumbed the transmitter button.
"Yarrow calling Hecla," he said in a dry voice. "Under the circumstances, all I can do is take you aboard and get you to ground somewhere in safety. I can't linger around here. The pirate is damaged but apparently not destroyed. It went into overdrive when we hit it, and it's gotten away. Whether it can come back or not I don't know. Do you want to try to make repairs, gambling that it won't return?"
The voice from the Hecla was almost unintelligible in its frantic denial of any such idea and its haste to accept Trent's offer. Trent made brisk arrangements for the transfer of humans from the disabled ship. He shifted the Yarrow close alongside to make the transfer easier. He summoned the mate.
"You'll stay here," he commanded, "and you'll watch that detector! The pirate's men on watch were looking at the spaceboats so they didn't notice we were on the way. But you'll look at this and nothing else! And you'll report by spacephone if that needle even thinks of quivering!"
He made his way to the blister he'd emptied to receive the Hecla's boat and that helpless space craft's complement. In minutes he was aboard the Hecla. The air pressure was low. Very low. He went briskly over the wreck with the Hecla's skipper, who would follow tradition and be the last man to abandon ship, but who was plainly not happy about delay.
"All right," said Trent, when he'd seen what damage the pirate's shelling had done. "Just one thing more. I want to look at the engine room again."
"If… if the pirate comes back—"
"It will be too bad," agreed Trent. "But just the same—"
He went into the Hecla's engine room. The disabling of the Hecla had been very efficiently done. With the overdrive blown, the cargo boat was capable only of moving in unassisted Lawlor drive. It could make desperate darts and dashes here and there to postpone its inevitable doom. But that would be inconvenient for the pirate. It carried a gun for such occasions. It used it, and the Hecla could no longer have resisted.
At this moment the Hecla's skipper was agitatedly pointing out that the pirate might come back.
Trent did not answer. He was busy in the engine room, reading dials, checking the fuse box. Having established a delay sequence he went with the Hecla's now-quivering skipper to the airlock. The Yarrow's bulk loomed up not forty feet away, but beneath and between the ships an unthinkable abyss lay. Stars shone up from between their feet. One could fall for millions of years and never cease to plummet through nothingness.