Now that the hexan threat that had so long oppressed the humanity of the Sirius was lifted, that dull gray football of armor steel was filled with relief and rejoicing as the pilot laid his course for Europa. Lounges and saloons resounded with noise as police, passengers, and such of the crew as were at liberty made merry. The control room, in which were grouped the leaders of the expedition and the scientists, was orderly enough, but a noticeable undertone of gladness had replaced the tense air it had known so long.
"Hi, men!" Nadia Stevens and Verna Pickering, arms around each other's waists, entered the room and saluted the group gaily before they became a part of it.
"'Smatter, girls--tired of dancing already?" asked Brandon.
"Oh, no--we could dance from now on," Verna assured him. "But you see, Nadia hadn't seen that husband of hers for fifteen minutes, and was getting lonesome. Being afraid of all you men, she wanted me to come along for moral support. The real reason I came, though," and she narrowed her expressive eyes and lowered her voice mysteriously, "is that you two physicists are here. I want to study my chosen victims a little longer before I decide over which of you to cast the spell of my fatal charm."
"But you can't do that," he objected, vigorously. "Quince and I are going to settle that ourselves some day--by shooting dice, or maybe each other, or...." he broke off, listening to an animated conversation going on behind them.
"... just simply outrageous!" Nadia was exclaiming. "Here we saved his life, and I fed him a lot of my candy, and we went to all the trouble of bringing their ship back here almost to Jupiter for them, and then they simply dashed off without a word of thanks or anything! And he always acted as though he never wanted to see or hear of any of us again, ever! Why, they don't think straight--as Norman would say it, they're full of little red ants! Why, they aren't even human!"
"Sure not." Brandon turned to the flushed speaker. "They couldn't be, hardly, with their make-up. But is it absolutely necessary that all intelligent beings should possess such an emotion as gratitude? Such a being without it does seem funny to us, but I can't see that its lack necessarily implies anything particularly important. Keep still a minute," he went on, as Nadia tried to interrupt him, "and listen to some real wisdom. Quince, you tell 'em."
"They are, of course, very highly developed and extremely intelligent; but it should not be surprising that intelligence should manifest itself in ways quite baffling to us human beings, whose minds work so differently. They are, however ... well, peculiar."
"I won't keep still!" Nadia burst out, at the first opportunity. "I don't want to talk about those hideous things any more, anyway. Come on, Steve, let's go up and dance!"
Crowninshield turned to Verna, with the obvious intention of leading her away, but Brandon interposed.
"Sorry, Crown, but this lady is conducting a highly important psychological research, so your purely social claims will have to wait until after the scientific work is done."
"Why narrow the field of investigation?" laughed the girl. "I'd rather widen it, myself--I might prefer a general, even to a physicist!"
They went up to the main saloon and joined the melee there, and after one dance with Verna--all he could claim in that crowd of men--Crowninshield turned to Brandon.
"You two seem to know Miss Pickering extraordinarily well. Would I be stepping on your toes if I give her a play?"
"Clear ether as far as we're concerned." Brandon shrugged his shoulders. "She's been kicking around under foot ever since she was knee high to a duck--we gave her her first lessons on a slide rule."
"Don't be dumb, Norman. That woman's a knock-out--a riot--a regular tri-planet call-out!"
"Oh, she's all x, as far as that goes. She's a good little scout, too--not half as dumb as she acts--and she's one of the squarest little aces that ever waved a plume; but as for playing her--too much like our kid sister."
"Good--me for her!" and they made their way back down to the control room.
Stevens, after his one dance with Nadia, had already returned. Brandon and Crowninshield found him seated at the calculating machine, continuing a problem which already filled several pages of his notebook.
"'Smatter, Steve? So glad to see a calculator and some paper that you can't let them alone?"
"Not exactly--just had a thought a day or so ago. Been computing the orbit of the wreckage of the Arcturus around Jupiter. Think we should salvage it--the upper half, at least. It was left intact, you know."
"H ... m ... m. That would be nice, all right. Dope enough?"
"Got the direction solid, from my own observations; the velocity's a pretty rough approximation though. But after allowing for my probable error, it figures an ellipse of low eccentricity, between the orbits of Io and Europa. Its period is short--about two days."
"Isn't it wonderful to have a brain?" Brandon addressed the room at large. "The kid's clever. Nobody else would have thought of it, except maybe Westfall. Let's see your figures. Um ... m ... m. According to that, we're within an hour of it, right now." He turned to the pilot and sketched rapidly.
"Get on this line here, please, and decelerate, so that the stuff'll catch up with us, and pass the word to the lookouts. Stevens and I will take the bow plates.
"That's a good idea," he went on to Stevens, as they took their places at main and auxiliary ultra-banks. "Lot of plunder in that ship. Instruments, boats, and equipment worth millions, besides most of the junk of the passengers--clothes, trunks, trinkets, and what-not. You're there, bucko!"
"Thanks, Chief," ... and they fell silent, watching the instruments carefully, and from time to time making computations from the readings of the acceleration and flight meters.
"There she is!" An alarm bell had finally sounded, the ultra-lights had flared out into space, and upon both screens there shone out images of the closely clustered wreckage of the Arcturus. But both men were more interested just then in the mathematics of the recovery than in the vessel itself.
"Missed it eight minutes of time and eleven divisions on the scale," reported Stevens. "Not so good."
"Not so bad either--I've seen worse computation." Thus lightly was dismissed a mathematical feat which, a few years earlier, before the days of I-P computers, would have been deemed worthy of publication in "The Philosophical Magazine."
Director Newton was called in, and it was decided that the many small fragments of the vessel were not worth saving; that its upper half was all that they should attempt to tow the enormous distance back to Tellus. The pace of the Sirius was adjusted to that of the floating masses, and tractor beams were clamped upon the undamaged portion of the derelict, and upon the two slices from the nose of the craft. A couple of the larger fragments of wreckage were also taken, to furnish metal for the repairs which would be necessary. Acceleration was brought slowly up to normal, and the battle-scarred cruiser of the void, with her heavy burden of inert metal, resumed her interrupted voyage toward Europa; the satellite upon which the passengers and crew of the ill-fated Arcturus had been so long immured. On she bored through the ether, detector screens full out and greenly scintillant Vorkulian wall-screens outlining her football shape in weird and ghastly light; unafraid now of any possible surviving space-craft of the hexans.
But if the hexans detected her, they made no sign. Perhaps their fleet had been destroyed utterly; perhaps it had been impressed upon even their fierce minds that those sparkling green screens were not to be molested with impunity! The satellite was reached without event and down into the crater landing shaft the two enormous masses of metal dropped.
Callisto's foremost citizens were on hand to welcome the Terrestrial rescuers, and revelry reigned supreme in that deeply buried Europan community. All humanity celebrated. The Callistonians rejoiced because they were now freed from the age-old oppression of the hexan hordes; because they could once more extend their civilization over the Jovian satellites and live again their normal lives upon the surface of those small worlds.
The Terrestrials were almost equally enthusiastic in the reunion that marked the end of the long imprisonment of the refugees.
As soon as the hull of the Arcturus had been warmed sufficiently to permit inspection, its original passengers were allowed to visit it briefly, to examine and to reclaim their belongings. Of course, some damage had been done by the cold of interplanetary space, but in general everything was as they had left it. Stevens and Nadia were among the first permitted aboard. They went first to the control room, where Stevens found his bag still lying behind Breckenridge's desk, where he had thrown it when he first boarded the vessel. Then they made their way up to Nadia's stateroom, which they found in meticulous order and spotless in its cleanliness--there is neither dust nor dirt in space. Nadia glanced about the formal little room and laughed up at her husband.
"Funny, isn't it, sweetheart, how little we know what to expect? Just think how surprised I would have been, when I left this room, if I had been told that I would have a husband before I got back to it!"
Breckenridge's first thought was for his precious triplex automatic chronometer, which he found, of course, "way off"--six and three-tenths seconds fast. Having corrected the timepiece from that of the Sirius, he immersed himself in the other delicate instruments of his department--and he was easy to find from that time on.
Overcrowded as the Sirius already was, it was decided that the original complement of the Arcturus should occupy their former quarters aboard her during the return trip. To this end, corps of mechanics set to work upon the salvaged hulk. Heavy metal work was no novelty to the Callistonian engineers and mechanics, and the Sirius also was well equipped with metal-working machines and men. Thus the prow was welded; armored, insulating air-breaks were built along the stern, which was the plane of hexan cleavage, electrical connections were restored; and lastly, a set of the great Vorkulian wall-screen generators, absorbers, and dissipators was installed, with sufficient accumulator capacity for their operation. Director Newton studied this installation in silence for some time, then went in search of Brandon.
"I hadn't considered the possibility of being attacked again between here and Tellus, but there's always the chance," he admitted. "If you think that there is any danger, we will crowd them all into the Sirius. It will not be at all comfortable, but it will be better than having any more of us killed."
"With that outfit they'll be as safe as we will," the scientist assured him. "They can stand as much grief as we can. We'll do the fighting for the whole outfit from here, and anything we meet will have to take us before they can touch them. So they had better ride it there, where they'll have passengers' accommodations and be comfortable. As to danger, I don't know what to expect. They may all be gone and they may not. We're going to expect trouble every meter of the way in, though, and be ready for it."
Everything ready and thoroughly tested, and stream of power flowing into the Arcturus from the cosmic receptors of her sister ship, the passengers and their new possessions were moved into their former quarters. There was a brief ceremony of farewell, the doors of the airlocks were closed, the careful check-out was gone through, and the driving projectors of the Sirius lifted both great vessels up the shaft, slowly and easily. And after them, as long as they could be seen, stared the thousands of Callistonians who thronged the great shaft's floor. Many of the spectators were not, strictly speaking, Callistonians at all. They were really Europans, born and reared in that hidden city which was to have been the last stronghold of Callisto's civilization. In that throng were hundreds who had never before seen the light of the sun nor any of the glories of the firmament, hundreds to whom that brief glimpse was a foretaste of the free and glorious life which was soon to be theirs.
Up and up mounted that powerful tug-boat of space, with her heavy barge, falling smoothly upward at normal acceleration. Below her first Europa, then mighty Jupiter, became moons growing smaller and smaller. In their stateroom Nadia's supple waist writhed in the curve of Stevens' arm as she turned and looked up at him with sparkling eyes.
"Well, big fellow, how does it feel to be out of a job? Or are you going over there every day on a tractor beam to work, as Norman suggested?"
"Not on your sweet young life!" he exclaimed. "Norm thought he was kidding somebody, but it registered zero. It gives me the pip to loaf around when there's a lot of work to do, but this is entirely different. Nothing's driving us now, and a fellow's entitled to at least one honeymoon during his life. And what a honeymoon this is going to be, little spacehound of my heart! Nothing to do but love you all the way from here to Tellus! Whoopee!"
"Oh, there's a couple of other things to do," she reminded him gaily. "You've got to smoke a lot of good cigarettes, I must eat a lot of Delray's chocolates, and we both really should catch up on eating fancy cooking. Speaking of eating, isn't that the second call for dinner? It is!" and they went along the narrow hall toward the elevator. To these two the long journey was to seem all too short.
Long though the voyage was, it was uneventful. The occupants of the two vessels were in constant touch with each other by means of the communicators, and there was also much visiting back and forth in person. Stevens and Nadia came often to the Sirius, and were accompanied frequently by Verna Pickering, who claimed anew her ancient right of "kicking around under foot," wherever Brandon and Westfall might chance to be--and at such times General Crowninshield was practically certain to appear. And upon days when the beautiful brunette did not appear, the commandant generally found it necessary to inspect in person something in the Arcturus.
Day after day passed, and even the new and ultra-powerful detector screens of the Sirius remained unresponsive and cold. Day after day the plates before the doubled lookouts and observers remained blank. Power flowed smoothly and unfailingly into the cosmic receptors, and the products of conversion were discharged with equal smoothness and regularity from the forty-five gigantic driving projectors. The tractor beam held its heavy burden easily and the generators functioned perfectly. And finally a planet began to loom up in the stern lookout plates.
Verna, the irrepressible, was in the control room of the Sirius, quarreling adroitly with Brandon and deftly flirting with Crowninshield. Glancing into the control screen she saw the planet in its end block, then studied the instruments briefly.
"We're heading for Mars!" she declared with conviction. "I thought it looked that way yesterday, but supposed it must be only apparent--a trick of piloting or something about the orbit. I thought of course you were taking us back home--but you can't possibly get to Tellus on any such course as this!"
"Sure not," Brandon replied easily. "Certainly it's Mars. Isn't that where the Arcturus started out for? Whoever said we were going to Tellus? Of course, if any of the passengers want to go right back the IPC will undoubtedly furnish transportation gratis. But paste this in your hat, Verna, for future reference--when spacehounds start out to go anywhere they go there, even if they have to spend a year or so on minus time to do it!"
Closer and closer they approached the red planet, swinging around in a wide arc in order to make their course coincide exactly with the pilot ray of check station M14, which was now precisely in its scheduled location in space. At the chief pilot's desk in the control room of the Arcturus, Breckenridge checked in with the station, then calculated rapidly the instant of their touching the specially-built bumper platforms of spring steel, hemp, and fiber which awaited them upon the Martian dock of the Interplanetary Corporation. Within range of the terminal, he plugged into it, waited until the tiny light flashed its green message of attention, and reported.
