Hours passed and the Stellaris was farther from the planet than when it started. More, it no longer pointed at the planet though the distant stars it aimed at were the same. Rod tried again and the same thing happened. In the end, scowling, he swung a tractor on the elusive world, waited an astonishing four full minutes for the beam to take hold and then grumpily set Joe on watch and went to sleep. It was his second period of rest in more clock-days than he could count up.
He slept heavily for a long, long time. He waked and Kit brought him food. It was strictly vegetable and vaguely unsatisfying. He ate, only half-awake, and went back to sleep again.
This time he dreamed. And oddly, it was not a dream of Earth or of the battle just past or even of Kit whom he could not allow to absorb him too much in the present state of things. He dreamed of the dead race on the yellow sun's planet—the race which was now only a multitude of crumpled heaps of brightly-colored garments.
In his dream he saw a space-ship rise from the third planet and land upon another. He dreamed of a tiny colony established there before this space-ship made its flight This ship landed on a hitherto unexplored part of this new planet and * the colonists just moving to the new planet found a vague metal object there.
They meddled with it and immediately they died—not only the meddlers, but those in the grounded space-ship nearby. And then the object melted itself to a mere pool of bubbling metal, which was found by members of the already-established colony much, much later.
The space-ship itself was smashed as if by explosives. And after that there was no more communication between the colony on this other world and the planet from which they had come. The colonists simply lived on, bewildered and helpless.
As a dream it was at once remarkable and suspicious. It was reasonable enough as a rationalization of a hunch. But Rod wondered cagily why his subconscious had pictured no metal pyramid as the object the colonists-to-be had meddled with? Why not a pyramid with sculptured figures on its sides?
It was a very vivid dream. Of course he'd been thinking of other races endangered by the pyramid-ships. Joe had said something about good guys existing to make up for the bad ones. And he'd thought unreasonably often of the yellow sun's second planet. Especially lately. Even when his mind should have been full of battle-plans as the Stellaris sped toward a fight.
It could be a hunch, of course. He'd had a hunch before—on the dead planet, when he was making a push-pull beam to wipe out the looters there. He'd felt deadly danger without knowing why he felt it.
He'd worked frantically, racing against time, though he knew of no real reason why he should fear the coming of looters to the city the Stellaris had landed in. And that hunch and the hurry it caused had saved him and Joe and a painter then and there and probably the Stellaris besides.
The hunch and the dream and the constant thought of the second planet fitted together a little too well. It was plausible that uneasiness should show up as a hunch. It was reasonable enough that an urge to visit a planet should show up in a dream as a concocted explanation of a reason why he should go there. But he didn't believe it.
The real cause of his dream didn't know that the killer-race made its booby-traps in the form of pyramids. The real cause of his dream didn't picture a pyramid on the second planet, though almost certainly one had been there to cause the murder of a race.
Rod got up, thinking coldly. He heard Joe's voice, angry.
"That ring-tailed haystack ain't goin' to lick us! If we set out to hit some place we're goin' to hit it."
Rod stepped into the control-room. Kit was there, looking anxiously ahead.
Joe shook his fist at a forward vision-port.
"Morning," said Rod, drily. "I must've slept the clock around. What's up?"
Then he saw. The second planet loomed large and very near. It appeared to be merely a featureless fleecy white. That would be clouds. But on closer view the clouds were not wholly solid.
They were in masses which sometimes merely thinned at their junctures, and sometimes separated a little to show a darkness below them, the whole producing a mottled semi-marble effect. But the Stellaris was not approaching the planet. It rotated serenely at a seemingly fixed distance.
"We been tryin' to get down onto that hunka cussedness yonder," explained Joe, indignantly. "But the closer we come the quicker it dodges! We been clean around it a dozen times already an' we can't get a bit closer! What're they doin' down there? Pushin' us off with a pressor?"
Rod grinned. He thought he understood the dream now.
"Hardly! We've got a lateral velocity and we're hung tight to the planet by a tractor beam. So we're in an orbit around it. Naturally we can't get down like that!"
"Says who?" demanded Joe pugnaciously, scowling at the planet.
"Says me," Rod told him. "We'll get down through." He took over what controls there were. "When I was a kid I used to twirl a weight on a string and get it going fast then let it wind itself up on my finger. Did you?"
"Uh-huh, but what's that got to do with this?" demanded Joe.
"It's the trick," said Rod. "As the string wound up and got shorter, the weight went around faster and faster. Remember? But it didn't go faster in feet per second, just twirls per second. That's us. The closer we get the faster we go around it—and our tractor-beam will stretch. That's all. I'll fix it."
He swung the ship until the fleecy planet was straight abeam. He put on full drive in the direction opposite that of the planet's seeming motion.
"How long do we take to get around?" he asked.
"Less'n an hour," said Joe angrily. "You can tell. There's one place where it looks like a mountain or something sticks up through the clouds."
Rod nodded. That checked. "We'll land there."
He watched. The Stellaris' drive produced no visible effect for a long time and it seemed insane to try to descend to a planet's surface by driving at right-angles to the desired descent. But that was the only way it could be done.
Presently the passage of the mottled misty surface seemed slower. At the very farthest edge of the visible hemisphere, a speck of solidity appeared. Rod stepped up the drive again.
Then the mottlings were visibly larger. As the planet seemed to slow, the mottlings continued to increase in size.
"We're coming close, now," said Rod. "We'll be holding off on pressors, presently."
It was true. The sphere beneath slowed to a snail's pace and it was very near indeed. The speck of solidity vanished and reappeared, and vanished and reappeared. Mist sometimes boiled over it, sometimes left it in plain view.
Rod began to juggle tractor and pressor-beams. He adjusted the jet-drive. At long last the planet's surface seemed stationary and he cut off the jet. He began, very carefully, to let the ship down into atmosphere.
"I'm going to make a guess," he said meditatively. "When we get down to that mountain-tip—it's the only one that pierces the clouds—we'll find a big mass of stuff that once was melted metal. And not too far away we'll find a smashed-up space-ship. Not a pyramid-ship, this one, but a ship made back on the planet that's dead now."
Kit looked at him, and her mouth opened. Then the logic of the statement appeared.
"I think I see," she said slowly. "You mean it would have been easier for the people of the dead cities to reach this planet than the snow-covered one because it comes nearer. And the one place where solid ground shows would be the place where a space-ship would land. Also it would be the one place where the pyramid-people would have put something to tell them when it was touched."