headphonesexcept the frying noise all main-sequence stars give out, and theinfrequent thumping noises that come from gas-giant planets' loweratmospheres, and the Jansky-radiation hiss which comes from everywhere.
The skipper swore. The Plumie ship lay broadside to, less than a score ofmiles away. It shone in the sunlight. It acted with extraordinaryconfidence. It was as if it dared the _Niccola_ to open fire.
Taine's voice came out of a speaker, harsh and angry:
"_Even-numbered tubes prepare to fire on command._"
Nothing happened. The two ships floated sunward together, neitherapproaching nor retreating. But with every second, the need for action ofsome sort increased.
"_Mr. Baird!_" barked the skipper. "_This is ridiculous! There must besome way to communicate! We can't sit here glaring at each other forever!Raise them! Get some sort of acknowledgment!_"
"I'm trying," said Baird bitterly, "according to orders!"
But he disagreed with those orders. It was official theory thatarithmetic values, repeated in proper order, would be the way to openconversation. The assumption was that any rational creature would graspthe idea that orderly signals were rational attempts to opencommunication.
But it had occurred to Baird that a Plumie might not see this point.Perception of order is not necessarily perception of information--infact, quite the contrary. A message is a disturbance of order. Amicrophone does not transmit a message when it sends an unvarying tone. Amessage has to be unpredictable or it conveys no message. Orderly clicks,even if overheard, might seem to Plumies the result of methodicallyoperating machinery. A race capable of interstellar flight was not likelyto be interested or thrilled by exercises a human child goes through inkindergarten. They simply wouldn't seem meaningful at all.
But before he could ask permission to attempt to make talk in a moresophisticated fashion, voices exclaimed all over the ship. They cameblurringly to the loud-speakers. "_Look at that!_" "_What's he do--_""_Spinning like--_" From every place where there was a vision-plate onthe _Niccola_, men watched the Plumie ship and babbled.
This was at 06 hours 50 minutes ship time.
* * * * *
The elliptical golden object darted into swift and eccentric motion.Lacking an object of known size for comparison, there was no scale. Thegolden ship might have been the size of an autumn leaf, and in fact itsmaneuvers suggested the heedless tumblings and scurrying of fallingfoliage. It fluttered in swift turns and somersaults and spinnings. Therewere weavings like the purposeful feints of boxers not yet come tobattle. There were indescribably graceful swoops and loops and curvingdashes like some preposterous dance in emptiness.
Taine's voice crashed out of a speaker:
"_All even-number rockets_," he barked. "_Fire!_"
The skipper roared a countermand, but too late. The crunching, gruntingsound of rockets leaving their launching tubes came before his firstsyllable was complete. Then there was silence while the skipper gatheredbreath for a masterpiece of profanity. But Taine snapped:
"_That dance was a sneak-up! The Plumie came four miles nearer while wewatched!_"
Baird jerked his eyes from watching the Plumie. He looked at the masterradar. It was faintly blurred with the fading lines of past gyrations,but the golden ship was much nearer the _Niccola_ than it had been.
"Radar reporting," said Baird sickishly. "Mr. Taine is correct. ThePlumie ship did approach us while it danced."
Taine's voice snarled:
"_Reload even numbers with chemical-explosive war heads. Then removeatomics from odd numbers and replace with chemicals. The range is tooshort for atomics._"
Baird felt curiously divided in his own mind. He disliked Taine verymuch. Taine was arrogant and suspicious and intolerant even on the_Niccola_. But Taine had been right twice, now. The Plumie ship had creptcloser by pure trickery. And it was right to remove atomic war heads fromthe rockets. They had a pure-blast radius of ten miles. To destroy thePlumie ship within twice that would endanger the _Niccola_--and leavenothing of the Plumie to examine afterward.
The Plumie ship must have seen the rocket flares, but it continued todance, coming nearer and ever nearer in seemingly heedless andpurposeless plungings and spinnings in star-speckled space. But suddenlythere were racing, rushing trails of swirling vapor. Half the _Niccola's_port broadside plunged toward the golden ship. The fraction of a secondlater, the starboard half-dozen chemical-explosive rockets swungfuriously around the ship's hull and streaked after their brothers. Theymoved in utterly silent, straight-lined, ravening ferocity toward theirtarget. Baird thought irrelevantly of the vapor trails of anatmosphere-liner in the planet's upper air.
The ruled-line straightness of the first six rockets' course abruptlybroke. One of them veered crazily out of control. It shifted to an almostright-angled course. A second swung wildly to the left. A third andfourth and fifth--The sixth of the first line of rockets made a great,sweeping turn and came hurtling back toward the _Niccola_. It was like anightmare. Lunatic, erratic lines of sunlit vapor eeled before thebackground of all the stars in creation.
Then the second half-dozen rockets broke ranks, as insanely andirremediably as the first.
Taine's voice screamed out of a speaker, hysterical with fury:
"_Detonate! Detonate! They've taken over the rockets and are throwing 'emback at us! Detonate all rockets!_"
The heavens seemed streaked and laced with lines of expanding smoke. Butnow one plunging line erupted at its tip. A swelling globe of smokemarked its end. Another blew up. And another--
The _Niccola's_ rockets faithfully blew themselves to bits on commandfrom the _Niccola's_ own weapons control. There was nothing else to bedone with them. They'd been taken over in flight. They'd been turned andheaded back toward their source. They'd have blasted the _Niccola_ tobits but for their premature explosions.
There was a peculiar, stunned hush all through the _Niccola_. The onlysound that came out of any speaker in the radar room was Taine's voice,high-pitched and raging, mouthing unspeakable hatred of the Plumies, whomno human being had yet seen.
* * * * *
Baird sat tense in the frustrated and desperate composure of the man whocan only be of use while he is sitting still and keeping his head. Thevision screen was now a blur of writhing mist, lighted by the sun andtorn at by emptiness. There was luminosity where the ships hadencountered each other. It was sunshine upon thin smoke. It was like theinsanely enlarging head of a newborn comet, whose tail would be formedpresently by light-pressure. The Plumie ship was almost invisible behindthe unsubstantial stuff.
But Baird regarded his radar screens. Microwaves penetrated the mist ofrapidly ionizing gases.
"Radar to navigation!" he said sharply. "The Plumie ship is stillapproaching, dancing as before!"
The skipper said with enormous calm:
"_Any other Plumie ships, Mr. Baird?_"
Diane interposed.
"No sign anywhere. I've been watching. This seems to be the only shipwithin radar range."
"_We've time to settle with it, then_," said the skipper. "_Mr. Taine,the Plumie ship is still approaching._"
Baird found himself hating the Plumies. It was not only that humankindwas showing up rather badly, at the moment. It was that the Plumie shiphad refused contact and forced a fight. It was that if the _Niccola_ weredestroyed the Plumie would carry news of the existence of humanity and ofthe tactics which worked to defeat them. The Plumies could prepare anirresistible fleet. Humanity could be doomed.
But he overheard himself saying bitterly:
"I wish I'd known this was coming, Diane. I ... wouldn't have resolved tobe strictly official, only, until we got back to base."
Her eyes widened. She looked startled. Then she softened.
"If ... you mean that ... I wish so too."
"It looks like they've got us," he admitted unhappily. "If they can takeour rockets away from us--" Then his voice stopped. He said, "Holdeveryth
ing!" and pressed the navigation-room button. He snapped: "Radarto navigation. It appears to take the Plumies several seconds to takeover a rocket. They have to aim something--a pressor or tractor beam,most likely--and pick off each rocket separately. Nearly forty secondswas consumed in taking over all twelve of our rockets. At shorter range,with less time available, a rocket might get through!"
The skipper swore briefly. Then:
"_Mr. Taine! When the Plumies are near enough, our rockets may strikebefore they can be taken over! You follow?_"
Baird heard Taine's shrill-voiced acknowledgment--in the form ofpractically chattered orders to his rocket-tube crews. Baird listened,checking the orders against what the situation was as the radars saw it.Taine's voice was almost unhuman; so