Chapter II: Part 2

"You sit over there," said Stan. He pointed to an intersection of the criss-crossing girders. "It takes power to travel near a planet. My power bank is half drained already. I'd better fill it up again."

He got out his cutting-torch. He turned it upon a motor-housing. The plastic coating frizzled and smoked. It peeled away. Metal flared white-hot and melted.

There was a monstrous creaking. All the plates in a square mile turned. Swiftly. Only a desperate leap saved Stan from a drop to the desert thirty stories below.

The great slabs pointed their edges to the sky. Stan waited. Esther said startledly;

"That was on purpose, Stan!"

"Hardly," said Stan. "They'll turn back in a minute."

But they did not turn back. They stayed tilted toward the dawning sky.

"You may be right, at that," said Stan. "We'll see. Try another place."

Five minutes later they landed on a second huge slab of black metal, miles away. Without a word, Stan ensconced Esther on the small platform formed by crossing girders. He took out the torch again. The tiny, blue-white flame. Smoke at its first touch. Metal flowed.

With a vast cachinnation of squeakings, a mile-square section shifted like the first....

"Something," said Stan grimly, "doesn't want us to have power. Maybe they can stop us, and maybe not."

The swelling which was the motor-housing was just within reach from the immovable girder crossing on which Esther waited. Stan reached out now. The torch burned with a quiet fierce flame. A great section of metal fell away, exposing a motor exactly like the one he'd first examined--slabs of allotropic graphite and all. He thrust in and cut the cables. He reached in with the charging clips--

There was a crackling report in the space skid's body. Smoke came out.

* * * * *

Stan examined the damage with grimly set features.

"Blew another fuse," he told Esther. "We're licked. When I took power the first time, I ruined a motor. It's been found out. So the plates turned, today, to--scare me away, perhaps, as soon as I cut into another. When I didn't scare and severed the cables, high-voltage current was shot into them to kill me or ruin whatever I was using the power for. Whether there's life here or not, there's intelligence--and a very unpleasant kind, too!"

He re-fused the skid, scowling.

"No attempt to communicate with us!" he said savagely. "They'd know somebody civilized cut into that motor-housing! They'd know it was an emergency! You'd think--"

He stopped. A faint, faint humming sound became audible. It seemed to come from nowhere in particular--or from everywhere. But it was not the formless humming of a rising wind. This sound was a humming punctuated by hurried, rhythmic clankings. It was oddly like the sound of cars traveling over an old-fashioned railway--one with unwelded rail joints. Then Esther jerked her head about.

"Stan! Look there!"

Something hurtled toward them in the gray dawn light. It was a machine. Even in the first instant of amazement, Stan could see what it was and what it was designed to do. It was a huge, bulbous platform above stiltlike legs. At the bottoms of the legs were wheels. The wheels ran on the cross-girders as on a railroad track, and the body of the thing was upraised enough to ride well above the sidewise-tilted slabs. There were other wheels to be lowered for travel on the girders which supported the slabs.

It was not a flying device, but a rolling one. It could travel in either of two directions at right angles to each other, and had been designed to run only on the great grid which ran beyond the horizon. It was undoubtedly a maintaining machine, designed to reach any spot where trouble developed, for the making of repairs, and it was of such weight that even the typhoonlike winds of a normal day on this world could not lift it from its place.

It came hurtling toward them at terrific speed. It would roll irresistibly over anything on the girders which were its tracks.

"Get on!" snapped Stan. "Quick!"

Esther moved as swiftly as she could, but space suits are clumsy things. The little skid shot skyward only part of a second before the colossus ran furiously over the place where they had been. A hundred feet beyond, it braked and came to a seemingly enraged stop. It stood still as if watching the hovering, tiny skid with its two passengers.

"It looks disappointed," said Stan dourly. "I wonder if it wants to chase us?"

He sent the skid darting away. They landed. In seconds the vibration caused by the huge machine's motion began and grew loud. They saw it race into view. As it appeared, instantly a deafening clamor began. Slabs in all directions rose to their vertical position, so that the two humans could not dodge from one row of girders to another. And then with a roar and a rush the thing plunged toward them once more.

Again the skid took off. Again the huge machine overran the spot where they had been, then stopped short as if baffled. Stan sent his odd craft off at an angle. Instantly the gigantic thing was in motion, moving in lightning speed in one direction, stopping short to move on a new course at right angles to the first, and so progressing in zigzag but very swift pursuit.

"'Won't you land so I can crush you?' said the monster to us two," said Stan dryly. "They won't let us have any more power, and we haven't any more to waste. But still--"

He listened to his suit-radio, twisting the tuning dials as he sent the skid up in a spiral.

"I'm wondering," he observed, "if they're trying to tell us something by radio. And meanwhile I'd like a more comprehensive view of this damned checkerboard!"

A faint, faint, wavering whine came into the headphones.

"There's something," he commented "Not a main communication wave, though. A stray harmonic--and of a power beam, I think. They must use plenty short waves!"

But he was searching the deadly monotony of the grid below him as he spoke. Suddenly, he pointed. All the area below them to the horizon was filled with geometric shapes of grids and squares. But one space was different from the rest. Four squares were thrown into one, there. And as the skid dived for a nearer view, that one square was seen to be a deep, hollow shaft going down toward the very vitals of this world. As Stan looked, though, it filled swiftly with something rising from its depths. The lifting thing was a platform, and things moved about on it.

"That's that!" said Stan hardly.

He shot the skid away in level flight at topmost speed, with the great rolling machine following helplessly and ragingly on its zigzag course below.

The horizon was dark, now, with the coming night. As Stan lifted for the rocketlike trajectory that would take him back to the polar regions, the white sun sank fiercely. There was a narrow space on which the rays smote so slantingly that the least inequality of level was marked by shadow. Gigantic sand dunes were outlined there. But beyond, where the winds began, there was only featureless swirling dust.

Stan was very silent all the way back. Only, once, he said calmly, "Our power units will soak up a pretty big charge in a short time. We packed away some power before the fuse blew."

There was no comment for Esther to make. There was life on the planet. It was life which knew of their existence and presence--and had tried to kill them for the theft of some few megawatts of power. It would not be easy to make terms with the life which held other life so cheaply.

With the planet's only source of power now guarded, matters looked less bright than before. But after they had reached the icecap, and when they slanted down out of the airlessness to the spot which was their home because their seeds had been planted there--as they dived down for a landing, their real situation appeared.

There was a colossal object with many pairs of legs moving back and forth over the little space where their food plants sprouted. In days, those plants would have yielded food. They wouldn't yield food now.

Their garden was being trampled to nothingness by a multilegged machine of a size comparable to the other machine which had chased them on the grid. It was fifty feet high from ground to top, and had a round, tanklike body all of twenty feet in diameter. Round projections at one end looked like eyes. It moved on multiple legs which trampled in orderly confusion. It stamped the growing plants to pulped green stuff in the polar sand. It went over and over and over the place where the food necessary for the humans' survival had promised to grow. It stamped and stamped: It destroyed all hope of food. And it destroyed all hope.

Because, as Stan drove the skid down to see the machine more clearly, it stopped in its stamping. It swung about to face him, with a curiously unmachinelike ferocity. As Stan veered, it turned also. When he sped on over it and beyond, it wheeled and came galloping with surprising speed after him.

Then they saw another machine. Two more. Three. They saw dark specks here and there in the polar wastes, every one a machine like the one which had tramped their food supply out of existence. And every one changed course to parallel and approach the skid's line of travel. If they landed, the machines would close in.

There was only so much power. The skid could not stay indefinitely aloft. And anywhere that they landed--

* * * * *

But they did land. They had to. It was a thousand miles away, on the dark side of the planet, in a waste of sand which looked frozen in the starlight. The instant the skid touched ground, Stan made a warning gesture and reached over to turn off Esther's suit-radio. He opened his own face-plate and almost gasped at the chill of the midnight air. With no clouds or water vapor to hinder it, the heat stored up by day was radiated out to the awful chill of interstellar space at a rate which brought below zero temperatures within hours of sundown. At the winter pole of the planet, the air itself must come close to turning liquid from the cold. But here, and now, Stan nodded in his helmet as Esther opened her face-plate.

"No radio," he told her. "They'll hardly be able to find us in several million square miles if we don't use radio. But now you get some sleep. We're going to have a busy time, presently!"

Esther hesitated, and said desperately, "But--who are they? What are they? Why do they want to kill us?"

"They're the local citizens," said Stan. "I was wrong, there are inhabitants. I've no more idea what they may be like than you have. But I suspect they want to kill us simply because we're strangers."

"But how could an intelligent race develop on a planet like this?" demanded Esther unbelievingly. "How'd they stay alive while they were developing?"

Stan shrugged his shoulders.

"Once you admit that a thing is so," he said dryly, "you can figure out how it happened. This sun is a dwarf white star. That means that once upon a time it exploded. It flared out into a nova. Maybe there were other planets nearer to it than this, and they volatilized when their sun blew up. Everything on this planet, certainly, was killed, and for a long, long time after it was surely uninhabitable by any standard. There's a dwarf star in the Crab Nebula which will melt iron four light-hours away--land that was a nova twelve hundred years ago. It must have been bad on this planet for a long time indeed.

"I'm guessing that when the first explosion came the inner planets turned to gas and this one had all its seas and forests and all its atmosphere simply blasted away to nothingness. Everything living on its surface was killed. Even bacteria in the soil turned to steam and went off into space. That would account for the absolute absence of life here now."

"But--" said Esther.

"But," said Stan, "the people--call them people--who lived here were civilized even then. They knew what was coming. If they hadn't interstellar drive, flight would do them no good. They'd have nowhere to go. So maybe they stayed. Underground. Maybe they dug themselves caves and galleries five--ten--twenty miles down. Maybe some of those galleries collapsed when the blow-up came, but some of the people survived. They'd stayed underground for centuries. They'd have to! It might be fifty thousand years they stayed underground, while Khor Alpha blazed less and less fiercely, and they waited until they could come up again.

"There was no air for a while up here. They had to fight to keep alive, down in the planet's vitals. They made a new civilization, surrounded by rock, with no more thought of stars. They'd be hard put to it for power, too. They couldn't well use combustion, with a limited air supply. They probably learned to transform heat to power direct. You can take power--electricity--and make heat. Why not the other way about? For maybe fifty thousand years, and maybe more, they had to live without even thinking of the surface of their world. But as the dwarf star cooled off, they needed its heat again."

He stopped. He seemed to listen intently. But there was no sound in the icy night. There were only bright, unwinking stars and an infinity of sand--and cold.

"So they dug up to the surface again," he went on. "Air had come back, molecule by molecule from empty space, drawn by the same gravitation that once had kept it from flying away. And the fused-solid rock of the surface, baked by day and frozen by night, had cracked and broken down to powder. When air came again and winds blew, it was sand. The whole planet was desert. The people couldn't live on the surface again. They probably didn't want to. But they needed power. So they built that monster grid they're so jealous of."

"You mean," Esther demanded incredulously, "that's a generator?"

"A transformer," corrected Stan. "Solar heat to electricity. Back on Earth the sun pours better than a kilowatt of energy on every square yard of Earth's surface in the tropics--over three million kilowatts to the square mile. This checkerboard arrangement is at least a hundred and fifty by two hundred miles. The power's greater here, but, on Earth, that would mean ninety thousand million kilowatts. More than a hundred thousand million horsepower--more than the whole Earth uses even now!

"If those big slabs convert solar radiation into power--and I charged up the skid from one of them--there's a reason for the checkerboard, and there's a reason for dumping the sand--it would hinder gathering power--and there's a reason for getting upset when somebody started to meddle with it. And they're upset! They'll have the conservation of moisture down to a fine point, down below, but they made those leggy machines to haul more water, from the poles. When they set them all to hunting us, they're very much disturbed! But luckily they'd never have worked out anything to fly with underground and they're not likely to have done so since--considering the storms and all."

There was a short silence. Then Esther said slowly, "It's--very plausible, Stan. I believe it. And they'd have no idea of space travel, so they'd have no idea of other intelligent races, and actually they'd never think of castaways. They wouldn't understand, and they'd try to kill us to study the problem we presented. That's their idea, no doubt. And they've all the resources of a civilization that's old and scientific. They'll apply them all to get us--and they won't even think of listening to us! Stan! What can we do?"

Stan said amusedly, there in the still, frigid night of an unnamed planet, "Why--we'll do plenty! We're barbarians by comparison with them, Esther, and barbarians have equipment civilized men forget. All savages have spears, but a civilized man doesn't even always carry a pocketknife. If we can find the _Erebus_, we can probably defy this whole planet--until they put their minds to developing weapons. But right now you go to sleep. I'll watch."

Esther looked at him dubiously. Five days of sandstorms should have buried the little yacht irrecoverably.

"If it's findable," she said. Then she added wistfully, "But it would be nice to be on the _Erebus_ again. It would feel so good to walk around without a space suit! And--" she added firmly, "after all, Stan, we are engaged! And if you think I like trying to figure out some way of getting kissed through an opened face-plate--"

Stan said gruffly, "Go to sleep!"

* * * * *

He paced up and down and up and down. They were remarkably unlike castaways in the space tale magazines. In those works of fiction, the hero is always remarkably ingenious. He contrives shelters from native growths on however alien a planet he and the heroine may have been marooned; he is full of useful odd bits of information which enable him to surprise her with unexpected luxuries, and he is inspired when it comes to signaling devices. But in five days on this planet, Stan had been able to make no use of any natural growth because there weren't any. He'd found no small luxuries for Esther because there was literally nothing about but sand. And there was strikingly little use in a fund of odd bits of information when there was only desert to apply it to--desert and sandstorms.

What he'd just told Esther was a guess; the best guess he could make, and a plausible one, but still a guess. The only new bit of information he'd picked up so far was the way the local inhabitants made electric motors. And he had to bet his and Esther's life on that!

He watched the chrono. And a good half hour before night would strike the checkerboard grid, he was verifying what few preparations he could make. A little later he waked Esther. And just about twenty minutes before the sunset line would reach the grid, they soared upward to seek it. If Stan's plan didn't work, they'd die. He was going to gamble their lives and the last morsel of power the skid's power unit contained, on information gained in two peeps at slab-motors on the grid, and the inference that all motors on this planet would be made on the same principle. Of course, as a subsidiary gamble, he had also to bet that he in an unarmed and wrecked space yacht could defy a civilization that had lived since before Khor Alpha was a dwarf star.

They soared out of atmosphere on a trajectory that saved power but was weirdly unlike any normal way of traveling from one spot on a planet's surface to another. Beneath them lay the vast expanse of the desert, all dense, velvety black except for one blindingly bright area at its western rim. That bright area widened as they neared it, overtaking the day. Suddenly the rectangular edges of the grid shed appeared, breaking the sharp edge of dusk.

The _Erebus_ had grounded about fifty miles northward from the planet's solitary structure. Stan turned on his suit-radio and listened intently. There was no possible landmark. The dunes changed hourly during the day and on no two days were ever the same. He skimmed the settling sand clouds of the dusk belt. Presently he was sure he had overshot his mark.

He circled. He circled again. He made a great logarithmic spiral out from the point he considered most likely. The power meter showed the drain. He searched in the night, with no possible landmark. Sweat came out on his face.

Then he heard a tiny click. Sweat ran down his face. He worked desperately to localize the signal Esther had set to working in the yacht before she left it. When at last he landed and was sure the _Erebus_ was under the starlit sand about him, he looked at the power gauge and tensed his lips. He pressed his space helmet close to Esther's, until it touched. He spoke, and his voice carried by metallic conduction without the use of radio.

"We might make it if we try now. But we're going to need a lot of power at best. I'm going to gamble the local yokels can't trace a skid drive and wait for morning, to harness the whirlwinds to do our digging for us."

Her voice came faintly back to him by the same means of communication.

"All right, Stan."

She couldn't guess his intentions, of course. They were probably insane. He said urgently:

"Listen! The yacht's buried directly under us. Maybe ten feet, maybe fifty, maybe Heaven knows how deep! There's a bare chance that if we get to it we can do something, with what I know now about the machines in use here. It's the only chance I know, and it's not a good one. It's only fair to tell you--"

"I'll try anything," said her voice in his helmet, "with you."

He swallowed. Then he stayed awake and desperately alert, his suit-microphones at their highest pitch of sensitivity, during the long and deadly monotonous hours of the night.

There was no alarm. When the sky grayed to the eastward, he showed her how he hoped to reach the yacht. The drive of the skid, of course, was not a pulsatory field such as even the smallest of space yachts used. It was more nearly an adaptation of a meteor-repeller beam, a simple reactive thrust against an artificial-mass field. It was the first type of drive ever to lift a ship from Earth. For take-off and landing and purposes like meteor mining it is still better than the pulsating-field drive by which a ship travels in huge if unfelt leaps. But in atmosphere it does produce a tremendous black-blast of repelled air. It is never used on atmosphere-flyers for that very reason, but Stan proposed to make capital of its drawback for his purpose.

When he'd finished his explanation, Esther was more than a little pale, but she smiled gamely.

"All right, Stan. Go ahead!"

"We'll save power if we wait for the winds," he told her.

Already, though, breezes stirred across the dawn-lit sand. Already they were hot breezes. Already the fine, impalpable sand dust which settled last at nightfall was rising in curious opaque clouds which billowed and curled and blotted out the horizon. But the grid was hidden by the bulge of the planet's surface.

Stan pointed the little skid downward in a hollow he scooped out with his space-gloved hands. He set the gyros running to keep it pointed toward the buried yacht. He had Esther climb up behind him. He lashed the two of them together, and strapped them to the skid. And he waited.

In ten minutes after the first sand grains pelted on his armor, the sky was hidden by the finer dust. In twenty there were great gusts which could be felt even within the space suits. In half an hour a monster gale blew.

Stan turned on the space skid's drive. It thrust downward toward the sand and the buried yacht. It thrust upward against the air and pelting sand.

In three-quarters of an hour the sandstorm had reached frenzied violence--but the skid pushed down from within a little hollow. Its drive thrust up a spout of air. That spout drew sand grains with it. But it was needful to increase the power. After an hour a gigantic whirlwind swept around them. It tore at the two people and the tiny machine. It sucked up such a mass of powdery sand particles that their impact on the space suits was like a savage blow.

Emptiness opened beneath the skid as sand went whirling up in a sandspout the exact equivalent of a waterspout at sea. Stan and Esther and the skid itself would have been torn away by its violence but that the skid's drive was on full, now. The absurd little traveler thrust sturdily downward. When sand was drawn away by wind, it burrowed down eagerly to make the most of its gain.

Its back-thrust kept a steady, cone-shaped pressure on the sand which would have poured in upon it. Stan and Esther were buried and uncovered and buried again, but the skid fought valorously. It strove to dig deeper and to fling away the sand that would have hidden it from view. It remained, actually, at the bottom of a perpetually filling pit which it kept from filling by a geyser of upflung sand from its drive.

* * * * *

In twenty minutes another whirlwind touched the pit briefly. The skid--helped by the storm--dug deeper yet. There came other swirling maelstroms....

The nose of the skid touched solidity. It had burrowed down nearly fifty feet, with the aid of whirlwinds, and come to the yacht _Erebus_.

But it was another hour before accident and fierce efforts on Stan's part combined to let him reach the air-lock door, and maneuver the skid to keep that doorway clear, and for Esther to climb in--followed by masses of slithering sand--and Stan after her.

Inside the buried yacht, Stan fumbled for lights. He made haste to turn off the signaling device that had led him back to it deep under the desert's surface. And it was strangely and wonderfully still here, buried under thousands of tons of sand.

Esther slipped out of her space suit and smiled tremulously at Stan.

"Now?"

"Now," said Stan, "if you want to, you can start cooking. We could do with a civilized meal. And I'll see what I can do toward a slightly less uncertain way of life."

He went forward. The _Erebus_ was a small yacht, to be sure. It was a bare sixty feet over-all, and of course as a pleasure craft it had no actual armament. But within two bulging blisters at the bow the meteor-repellers were mounted. In flight, in space, they could make a two-way thrust against stray bits of celestial matter, so that if a meteor was tiny it was thrust aside, or if too large the _Erebus_ swerved away.

From within, Stan changed the focus of the beams. They had been set to send out tiny reaction beams no larger than a rifle bore. At ten miles such a beam would be six inches across, and at forty a bare two feet. He adjusted both to a quickly widening cone and pointed one up, the other down. One would thrust violently against the sand under the yacht, and the other against the sand over it. The surface sand, at least, could rise and be blown away. The sand below would support the yacht against further settling.

He went back to where Esther laid out dishes.

"I've started something," he told her. "One repeller beam points up to make the sand over our heads effectively lighter so it can be blown away more easily. The storm ought to burrow right down to us, with that much help. After we're uncovered, we may, just possibly, be able to work the ship up to the surface. But after that we've got to do something else. The repellers aren't as powerful as a drive, and it's hardly likely we could lift out of gravity on them. Even if we did, we're a few light-centuries from home. To fix our interstellar drive we need the help of our friends of the grid."

Esther paused to stare.

"But they'll try to kill us!" she protested. "They've tried hard! And if they find us we've no weapons at all--not even a hand-blaster!"

"To the contrary," said Stan dryly, "we've probably the most ghastly weapon anybody ever invented--only it won't work on any other planet than this."

Then he grinned at her. Now, he too was out of his space suit. The food he'd asked her to prepare was out on the table, but he ignored it. He took one step toward her. And then there came a muffled sound, picked up by the outside hull-microphones. It grew in volume. It became a roar. Then the yacht shifted position. Its nose tilted upward.

"The first step," said Stan, "is accomplished. I can't stop to dine. But--"

He kissed her hungrily. Five days--six, now--in space suits with the girl one hopes to marry has its drawbacks. An armored arm around the hulking shoulders of another suit of armor--even with a pretty girl inside it--is not satisfying. To hold hands with three-eighth-inch space gloves is less than romantic. And to try to kiss a girl three-quarters buried in a space helmet leaves much to the imagination. Stan kissed her. It took another shifting movement of the yacht, which toppled them the length of the cabin, to make him stop.

Then he laughed and went to the control room.

Vision screens were useless, of course. The little ship was still most of her length under sand, but the repellers' cones of thrust had dug a great pit down to her. Now Stan juggled the repellers to take fullest advantage of the storm. At times--with both beams pushing up--the ship was perceptibly lifted by uprushing air. And Stan could be prodigal with power, now. The skid was sharply limited in its storage of energy, but all the space between the two skins of the _Erebus_ was a power bank. It could travel from one rim of the Galaxy to the other without exhausting its store. And the upward lift of whirlwinds--once there were six within ten minutes--and the thrusts of the repellers gradually edged the _Erebus_ to the surface.

Before nightfall it no longer lay in a sand pit. It was only half buried in sand. And when the winds died down to merely savage gales, at twilight, and then slowly diminished to more angry gusts, and at long last there was calm without and even the impalpable fine dust that settled last no longer floated in the air, and the stars shone--then Stan was ready.

He turned on the ship's communicator and sent a full-power wave out into the night. He spoke. What he said would be unintelligible, of course, but he said sardonically to the empty desert:

"Yacht _Erebus_ calling! Down on the desert, every drive smashed, and not so much as a hand-blaster on board for a weapon. Maybe you'd like to come and get us!"

Then--and only then--he went and ate the long delayed meal Esther had made ready.

It was half an hour before the microphones gave warning. Then they relayed clankings and poundings and thuddings on the sand. It was the sound of heavy machines marching toward the _Erebus_. Scores of them. The machines separated and encircled the disabled yacht, though they were invisible behind the dunes all about. And then, simultaneously, they closed in.

The landing beams of the _Erebus_ flashed out. Light flickered in the chill darkness. The beams darted here and there.

Then the machines appeared. The scene was remarkable. Over the dunes marched gigantic metal monsters, many-legged, with bodies as great as the _Erebus_ itself. Great bulges on their forward parts gave the look of eyes, as if these were huge insects marching to devour and destroy. As the landing-light beams flickered from one to another of them, huge metallic tusks appeared, and toothed jaws--used for excavation. They were not machines designed for war, but they were terrifying, and they could be terrible.

Esther's hand on Stan's shoulder trembled as the monsters closed in. And then Stan, in the unarmed and seemingly defenseless little space yacht, swung the meteor-repeller controls and literally cut them to pieces.

"We're barbarians," said Stan, "compared to these folk. So we've an advantage. It's likely to be only temporary, though!"

* * * * *

He watched the carcasses of the great machines, flicking the landing-light beams back and forth. They were tumbled terribly on the ground. Some were severed in two or three places, and their separate sections sprawled astonishedly on a dune-side. One was split through lengthwise. Another had all of one set of legs cut off clean, and lay otherwise unharmed but utterly helpless.

Out of that incapacitated giant a smaller version of itself crawled. It was like a lifeboat. Stan watched. Other small versions of the great machines appeared. One made a dash at the _Erebus_, and he cut it savagely in two. There was no other attack. Instead, the smaller many-legged machines ran busily from one to another of the wrecks--seeming to gather up survivors--and then went racing away into the dark.

Then there was stillness.

"They knew we saw them," said Stan grimly. "They knew we could smash them. And they realized that we wouldn't unless they attacked again. I wonder what they think of us now?"

"What you did to them was--awful," said Esther. She shuddered. "I still don't know what it was. I never heard of any weapon like that!"

"It could only exist here," said Stan. He grimaced. "We've meteor-repellers. They push away anything in their beam. I narrowed them to their smallest size and put full power into them. That was all."

"But meteor-repellers don't cut!" protested Esther.

"These did," said Stan. "They were working through sand, just that. They pushed it. With a force of eighty tons in a half-inch beam. The sand that was in the beam was shot away with an acceleration of possibly fifty thousand gravities--and more sand kept falling into the beam. Each particle was traveling as fast as a meteor when it hit, over there. When it struck, it simply flared to incandescent vapor. No atomic torch was ever hotter! And there was no end to the sand I threw. You might say I cut those machines up with a sand blast, but there was never such a sand blast as this! It took a barbarian--like me--to think of it!

"Now," he added, "I need to go over to those machines and get some stuff I think they've got in them. That's what I provoked this attack for. But maybe the drivers are laying low to jump on me if I try it. I'll have to wait until nearly dawn. They won't risk waiting until almost time for the sandstorms! Not with fifty miles to travel back to the grid!"

He stayed on guard. Presently he yawned. He stood up and paced back and forth, glancing from time to time at the screen. After a long time Esther said:

"You didn't sleep last night, Stan. Could I watch for a while so you can rest?"

"M'm-m. Yes. If anything stirs, wake me. But I don't look for action here. The real action will be back underground."

He went back into the cabin and threw himself down. Almost instantly he was asleep. Esther watched the vision-plates dutifully. There was silence and stillness everywhere. After a long time she looked in on the sleeping Stan. A little later she looked in again, reached over, and touched his hair gently. Later still she looked in yet again. She kissed him lightly--he did not wake--and went back to the control cabin, to watch the vision-plates.

Nothing happened.

Out in space, though, very many millions of miles away, a tiny mote winked into existence as if by magic, with the cutting off of its Bowdoin-Hall field drive. It hung seemingly motionless for a while, as if orienting itself. It seemed to locate what it sought--and vanished, but again winked into being a bare few thousand miles from the planet's surface.

It did not disappear again. It drove down toward the half-obscured disk at the normal acceleration of a landing drive. Toward dawn it screamed down into atmosphere above the planet's surface. It drove on into the day, and into howling winds and far-flung sand. It rose swiftly, and went winging toward the summer polar cap.

Khor Alpha's single planet had gone unvisited by men during two centuries of interstellar travel, but now there had been three separate visitations within ten days.

The last of the three visitors settled to ground where hoarfrost partly whitened the desert's face. A full-power carrier-wave spread out from it. And in the control room of the _Erebus_ a speaker suddenly barked savagely:

"Stan Buckley! I'm here to kill you! Communicate!"

Esther gasped. She recognized the voice. Rob Torren! Back more than two months before Stan had expected him! The words did not make sense to her. Stan had tried to spare her despair by concealing the fact that Torren's return would be to kill him, under a compact which her presence here made void.

"Rob!" cried Esther softly into the transmitter. "Rob Torren! It's Esther calling! Esther Hume!"

An indescribable sound from the speaker. With trembling hands she adjusted the vision receiver. She looked into the taut, drawn, raging features of Rob Torren. He stared at her out of the screen.

"Stan's asleep, Rob!" cried Esther eagerly. "He didn't expect you back for a long time yet! You're wondering how I got here? Oh--"

Laughing a little, joyously, she told of her desperate voyage to be with Stan when he should be tried, and how her drive had been burnt out by impinging on the drive of the space skid on which Stan had left the _Stallifer_. And of course she told of her subsequent meeting with Stan.

"And there are inhabitants here," she finished eagerly, "and they've been trying to kill us."

She was all joy and relief at Torren's arrival. But his face was ravaged by conflicting emotions, all of them intense and all harrowing.

"But--what's the matter, Rob?" she asked. "You look so queer!" Then she added in abrupt, startled doubt. "And Rob! Why did you say you had come back to kill Stan? You were joking, weren't you?"

He raged at her instantly. "He coached you, eh? To pretend you didn't know anything? Trying to make me take you both to safety on a promise of fighting me later? It won't work! I've a line on your wave and I'll be coming! I'll be coming fast! And maybe you've no weapons, but I have! I've a Space Guard one-man ship! I forced the _Stallifer_ to dock at Lora Beta and put me ashore! I got this ship to hunt back for Stan, claiming his recapture as my responsibility! I did plan to have him write you a letter before I killed him, but since you know everything now--"

She saw the beginning of an infuriated movement. Then the screen went blank.

After a moment's frightened irresolution she went to Stan. She woke him, and after the first three words he was sternly alert.

"This sets things up nicely!" he said bitterly. "You didn't know about him, of course, but--our friends of the grid are concocting weapons to destroy us, and now he's streaking here along his locator line to blast us with everything a Space Guard ship can carry! And he'll have long-range stuff! He can burn us to a crisp if we put a repeller beam on him! We can't sand-blast him! We can't--"

He began to struggle swiftly into a space suit. Esther said:

"Wherever you're going, I'm going too!"

"You're not!" he said harshly. "You'll go in the control room with your hands on the beam controls. If some of the local citizens are hiding in those wrecks, you'll smash them if they jump me! I haven't so much as a pocketknife! You've got to be my weapons while I dig into those wrecks!"

* * * * *

He went swiftly out the air-lock with only a cutting-torch in his hands. He fairly ran toward the débris of the attacking army of machines. He reached the first. It had been sliced longitudinally in half by a stream of sand particles traveling at fifty miles or better per second, in a stream of air of the same velocity. Nothing could have withstood such an attack. No material substance in the universe could have resisted it. Four-inch plates of steel and foot-thick girders had been cut through like so much dough, the severed edges gone not to liquid but to vapor in the deadly stream.

The whole mechanism of the machine was exposed. The great biting jaws, designed to tear away huge masses of intermingled sand and ice. The tusks to break loose sections for the jaws to handle. The tanks to contain the precious damp material. The machine had not been made for fighting, but it, alone, could have torn the _Erebus_ to fragments. With an army of such machines--

Stan clambered into the neatly halved shell with his cutting-torch. All about him were small devices, cryptic things, the strictly practical contrivances of a hundred-thousand-year-old civilization. He itched to examine them, but he needed certain bars of allotropic graphite he suspected would be here. They were. The motors which ran the leg movements were motors like those which turned the great slabs. They consisted of slabs of graphite and the metal which slid past them. That was all. Only one special allotrope of graphite makes a motor of such simplicity. Only--

He burdened himself with black, flaky bars, cutting ruthlessly through machinery to which an engineer would have devoted months of study. He had an even dozen of the bars in his arms when a sudden blast rocked him. He whirled, and saw a small cloud of still incandescent vapor and Something which was separating horribly into many steaming pieces. Other Things seemed to leap to smother him under their weight. He could not see them save as vague shapes, but he knew they were there.

Another exploded as Esther, in the _Erebus_ and watching with the infrared scanner, desperately used the weapon which had never existed before and could not be used anywhere save on this one planet.

Stan ran clumsily for the ship over the drifting, powdery sand. Inhumanly resolute unhuman things leaped after him. He saw the flares as Esther destroyed them. He knew that she was wide eyed and trembling and sick with horror at what she had to do.

But he stumbled into the air-lock and dogged it shut behind him. And Esther came running to greet him, not shaking and not trembling and not horrified, but with burning eyes and the fiery anger of a Valkyrie. She was not wearing her space suit.

"They tried to kill you!" she cried fiercely. "They were hiding! They'd have murdered you--"

He put down his bars of allotropic graphite. He reached out to take her in his arms. But--

"Damn these space suits!" he said furiously. "You'll have to wait to be kissed until this job's finished!"

He tore up the flooring hatch above the little ship's drive. He jerked off the housing.

"Keep watch!" he called to the control room. "At least one of the machines must be waiting behind the dunes, hoping for a break!"

He worked with frantic haste, shedding his space suit by convulsive movements. This should have been the most finicky of fine-fitting jobs. To repair a Bowdoin-Hall drive unit by replacing its graphite bars for maximum efficiency is a matter for micrometric precision. But efficiency was not what he wanted, now, but speed. And these bars almost fitted. They were vastly unlike the five-hundred-pound monsters for the grid slabs. These should at least move the ship, and if the ship could be moved--

He had two of them in place and six more to go when the speaker in the control room blared triumphantly.

"Stan Buckley! Tune in! I'm right above your ship! Tune in!"

Stan swore in a sick disgust. Two out of eight was not enough. He was helpless for lack, now, of time. And the corrosive hatred that comes of helplessness filled him. He went into the control room and said drearily to Esther:

"Sorry, my dear. Another twenty minutes and you'd have been safe. I think we lose."

He kissed her, and with fury-steadied fingers tuned in the communication-plate. Rob Torren grinned furiously at him.

"I thought I'd let you know what's happening," said Torren in a voice that was furry with whipped-up rage. "I'm going to go back and report that you were killed resisting arrest. I'm going to melt down the yacht until it could never be identified as the _Erebus_--if anybody ever sees it again! And--maybe you'll enjoy knowing that I did the things I charged you with, and have the proceeds safely banked away! I faked the evidence that proved it on you. And I hoped to have Esther, too, but she's spoiled that by trying to come and help you! Now--"

"Now," said Stan coldly, "you'll stand off a good twenty miles and beam us. You'll take no chances that we might be able to throw a handful of sand at you! You'll be so damned cautious that you won't even come close to see your success with your own eyes! You'll read it off on instruments! You're pretty much afraid of me!"

"Afraid?" raged Rob Torren. "You'll see!"

The communication screen went blank. Stan leaped to the meteor-repeller controls and stared at the vertical vision-plate which showed all the sky above.

"Not the shadow of a chance," he said coldly, "but a beam does make a little glow! If he misses us once--but he won't--maybe I can get in one blast...."

There was tense silence. Deadly silence. The screen overhead showed a multitude of cold, unwinking stars. One of them winked out and on again.

"I'll try--" began Stan.

Then the screen seemed to explode into light. Something flared like a nova in the sky. Intolerable brilliance filled a quarter of the screen--and faded. Swiftly. It went out.

Stan drew a deep breath.

"That," he said softly, "I think was a hundred thousand million horsepower in a power beam. I think our friends the grid makers have been working on armament to fight us with, and I think they've got something quite good! They don't like strangers. Torren was a stranger, and they got a shot at him, and they took it. And now they'll get set to come over here after us. If you'll excuse me, I'll go back to the drive!"

He returned to the cabin where two out of a necessary eight graphite bars were in place. He worked. Fast. No man ever worked so fast or so fiercely or with such desperately steady hands. In twenty minutes he made the last, the final connection. And just as he dropped the hatch in place, Esther called anxiously:

"More machines coming, Stan! The microphones pick them up!"

"Coming!" he told her briskly. He went to the instrument board and threw switches here and there. "The normal thing," he said evenly, "would be to lift from the ground here, on landing drive, and go into field drive out of atmosphere. But we won't do it for two reasons. One is that we have no landing drive. The other is that at normal take-off acceleration, our friends of the grid would take a potshot at us with the thing they used on Rob Torren. With a hundred thousand million horsepower. So--here goes!"

He stabbed a simple push button.

With no perceptible interval and with no sensation of movement, the _Erebus_ was out in deep space. The screens showed stars on every side--all the stars of the Galaxy. And these were not the hostile, immobile, unfriendly stars the first voyagers of space had seen. With the Bowdoin-Hall field collapsing forty times a second, the stars moved visibly. The nearer ones moved more swiftly and the farther ones more slowly, but all moved. The cosmos seemed very small and almost cosy, and the stars mere fireflies and the Rim itself no more than a few miles away from them.

Stan watched. He said, "We're not making much time. Not over six hundred lights, I'd say. But we'll get there."

"And--and when we do--"

"H'm," said Stan. "You can swear Torren said he'd committed the crimes he charged me with and faked the evidence against me. With that testimony, they'll examine the evidence as they do when there are no witnesses. It'll fall down. And I'll be cleared."

"Stan!" said Esther indignantly. "I meant--"

"And when I'm cleared," said Stan, "we'll get married."

"That," admitted Esther, "is what I had in mind."

He kissed her, and stood watching the moving cosmos critically.

"Our friends the grid builders have gotten waked up now," he observed. "They know they're not the only intelligent race in the universe, and they may not like it. They're a fretful crew! But they'll have to be made friends with. And quick, or they might cause trouble! I think I'll apply to be assigned to the task force that will undertake the job. It ought to be interesting! Not a dull moment!"

Esther scowled at him.

"Now," she protested, "you reduce me to being glad we're not making our proper speed! Because after you get back--"

"Listen, my dear," said Stan generously, "I'll promise to come home from time to time. And when I do I'll grab you like this, and kiss you like this--" There was an interlude. "And do you think you'll manage to survive?"

Esther gasped for breath. But she was smiling.

"I--I think I'll be able to stand it," she admitted.

"Good!" said Stan. "Now let's go have some breakfast!"