He stared at her. Her breath was a white steam. She shivered violently. There was already a thin layer of frost on her clothes.
"All right" he said sullenly," but I want to know—" Angrily—angry at his own incomprehension—he led her back to the opening in the pyramid-ship. There was every seeming of gravity here, created by the tractors which held an atmosphere.
Rod stepped out on the Stellaris' skin and there were feet of feathery snow on it. It was unbelievably cold. There was no heat in the dark universe and its emptiness sucked greedily at heat in objects from a living cosmos.
Joe stamped and chattered in the air-lock. When Rod handed Kit in he cut the cable that had furnished light in the alien ship.
"W-we got more cable from them," he gasped, "an' we got to close this lock! I'm glad I ain't a brass monkey or this cold'd ha' done me dirt!"
The outer airlock door closed. The inner one opened. There was warmth and light, and a slight pervading taint in the air from the objects the aliens had owned.
CHAPTER NINE
War Basis
FIVE minutes later Rod grimly cut off the tractors which had held an atmosphere in mid-space and an enemy spaceship with it. He found sardonic amusement in picturing the effect of that gesture upon the pyramid-folk.
The Stellaris still had a beam locked on the planet of the dead cities. Its power was low, but she would not be too many millions of miles away if she went back to normal space now. And the air she'd brought into the dark universe would return; to normal space immediately it expanded beyond the force-fields.
There would be a sudden, violent, astounding irruption of vapor in emptiness, somewhere in sight of the planet. And a comet's tail can contain no more than a mere few cubic inches of gas, which yet is expanded and ionized and visible as a trail of hundreds of thousands of miles.
A half-mile sphere of air, expanded suddenly, should make such a sight as the stick-men had never seen before. It should fill them with enormous apprehension, simply because of its' strangeness and because it followed closely on the destruction of at least three of their ships.
If they investigated and found the gutted pyramid-ship which should go back to a star-filled cosmos somewhere near the air-cloud, they should be more uneasy still. Because they'd find their ship looted only of sample objects rather than of all its contents, and they'd realized that it had been flung contemptuously away as worthless.
But there was that loot to examine. It was more than ever unfortunate that the Stellaris had no gravity. The booty floated about irritatingly and those who tried to explore its possibilities floated too.
The primitive-seeming condenser remained inscrutable, though its power-leads had surely carried an enormous load. The sample light, however, glowed brightly when connected to the Stellaris' power-lines. But Rod was scornful.
"Mercury-vapor," he said contemptuously, "with a phosphor in the tube around it! We stopped using that sort of thing fifty years ago!"
The drive was again irritating. To all intents and purposes it was a rocket with a jet-speed astronomically high because a pressure-beam was used on it. The light-guns could have been made on Earth. The radar set had elements of novelty but Joe and Rod agreed that men made better ones. The vision-screen was not nearly as good as the ones in the dead city. Rod pushed himself away from all of them.
"They had a drive and a push-pull beam, both of which were quite within our reach," he said sourly. "Their power-supply is over my head and undoubtedly they had some trick for faster-than-light travel. But that's all! In two months we could wipe them out, given this stuff back on Earth! Since we can't get back to Earth we've got to do what we can right here!"
The other things taken from the ship, being non-technical, seemed less important. But there were bales of soft, lustrous fabric, which the girls of the air-plant oh'd and ah'd over. There were chests of prismatically glistening ware of unfamiliar shape—household luxuries of some sort and possibly tableware.
There were jewels. There were art-objects portraying flowers of exquisite delicacy and people—at least, they wore garments—which were neither the people of the planet of the yellow sun nor pyramid-folk nor any other known race.
"Those fiends didn't make this stuff," said Rod grimly. "This must come from the cities of some other poor devils they've wiped out!"
The faint taint of alien smell made his hackles tend to rise. There could never have been friendship between human beings and the people of the pyramid race under the happiest of auspices. This smell made enmity inevitable.
"We'll get to work," said Rod distastefully. "I hate to use a trick of theirs—but we need that drive."
Groping with tractor and pressor-beams was not the most efficient form of space-travel, so the alien drive was to be installed. It was simple enough to float it to a stern-ward position and weld it in place.
It needed a tiny opening for the ejected gas-particles to escape from but their speed would be so great that they'd bore their own exit. It was not so easy to weld braces and a mounting to take up its thrust. Rod left two welders swearing at the difficulty of working when they had no weight.
Kit smiled at him wrily. "Somebody has to take care of you," she said defensively when she saw him frowning. "And you'd have stayed there until you froze! I had to come after you!"
"Thanks," he said heavily. "I'm just worried because there was some stuff on that ship I didn't get. Most of their gadgets were primitive and we can do much better. But—"
"Did you find out how they got their artificial gravity?" she asked hopefully. "I get awfully tired of just floating."
"They didn't have gravity," he protested.
"But I could walk in that ship," she insisted. "I did!"
"That was our—" Rod groaned. "I'm stupid! I'll be back!"
He went to the engine-room. He pulled Joe off the drive-installation and together they set up a tractor in the extreme stern-most compartment of the ship. They widened out its beam. In less than twenty minutes objects and persons within the Stellaris began to settle gently toward the stern.
Thirty seconds later they had perceptible weight and after a minute weight was practically normal everywhere in the ship. Rod climbed then—though the ship was in other-space—back to face Kit in the control-room.
"We could have had gravity all along," he told her ruefully "I only had to put a tractor in the ship's tail to pull us all toward it. Joe's setting up a pressor in the bow to neutralize it outside. So we've got gravity. Now what?"
"Nothing," said Kit wistfully, "except that it would be nice to stop worrying and think about ourselves sometimes."
"I believe," Rod told her, "there's an outside chance even of that!"
He inspected the small tractor locked on the planet of dead cities. Locked as it was, its mount adjusted its focus to allow for varying distance and it was possible to estimate the distance from the planet to the spot at which the Stellaris would return to normal space. It was too close. He put power on the pressor. Joe came in, uncoiling a power-lead.
"The jet drive," he said crisply. "You got a switch you ain't usin'?" He connected the cable and scrupulously labeled the switch.
"Joe," said Rod. "Remember your idea of a push-pull beam that would shoot back if we were beamed? Listen!" He spoke carefully. Joe grinned.
"Sure! I'll fix it. Too bad we ain't got more stuff to work with."
"You might use that isotopic generator we got from the city," Rod suggested. "We can hardly run a cable out."