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Updated: June 21, 2025
Then Taine's voice snapped: "Rocket crews, arm even-numbered rockets with chemical explosive warheads. Leave odd-numbered rockets armed with atomics. Report back!" Diane strained her ears for possible re-transmission of the Niccola's signals, which would indicate the Plumie's willingness to try conversation. But she suddenly raised her hand and pointed to the radar-graph instrument.
It was an excellent way to avoid observation. On the other hand, the Niccola had been mapping, which was bound to attract attention. Now each ship knew of the other's existence. Since the Niccola had been detected, she had to carry out orders and attempt a contact to gather information. Baird verified that the Niccola's course was exact for interception at her full-drive speed.
Niccola's genius, no less vivid and life-giving than that of Giotto, infused into the hard and formal manner of his immediate predecessors true nature and true art.
The fact that there had been a collision, that the Niccola's engines were melted to unlovely scrap, that the Plumie ship was now welded irremovably to a side-keel, and that a Plumie was signaling to humans while both ships went spinning through space toward an unknown destination these things did not affect the obligations of the radar room.
The Niccola's rockets faithfully blew themselves to bits on command from the Niccola's own weapons control. There was nothing else to be done with them. They'd been taken over in flight. They'd been turned and headed back toward their source. They'd have blasted the Niccola to bits but for their premature explosions. There was a peculiar, stunned hush all through the Niccola.
He leaped briskly toward nothingness. There came quick darkness once more, and Baird struggled erect despite the adhesiveness of the Niccola's hull. When he was fully upright, sick with horror at what had come about, there was sunlight yet again, and men were coming out of the Niccola's air lock, and the Plumie who'd leaped for space was pulling himself back to his own ship again.
The Niccola's cobalt-steel hull became more than saturated with the drive-field, and it leaped madly upon an evasion course And it very nearly got away. It was swinging clear when the Plumie ship drifted within fathoms. It was turning aside when the Plumie ship was within yards. And it was almost safe when the golden hull of the Plumie shadowed now by the Niccola itself barely scraped a side-keel.
Obviously, the Plumies did. They'd handled the Niccola's rockets with beams which charged the golden ship to billions of volts. And when the silicon-bronze Plumie ship touched the cobalt-steel Niccola why that charge had to be shared. It must have been the most spectacular of all artificial electric flames. Part of the Niccola's hull was vaporized, and undoubtedly part of the Plumie.
It was now some thirty millions of miles back and twenty to one side. The sun, ahead, flared and flamed in emptiness against that expanse of tinted stars. Jon Baird worked steadily in the Niccola's radar room. He was one of those who hoped that the Plumies would not prove to be the natural enemies of mankind. Now, it looked like this ship wouldn't find out in this solar system.
Much of Niccola's biography reads like a legend in his pages the popular and oral tradition of a great man, whose panegyric it was more easy in the sixteenth century to adorn with rhetoric than to chronicle the details of his life with scrupulous fidelity.
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