Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 22, 2025
But darkness fell, and he scrambled back to the Niccola's hull as a disorderly parade of stars went by above him. He pantingly waited fresh attack. He felt something and it was the object Taine had meant to offer as a return present to the Plumies. It was unquestionably explosive, either booby-trapped or timed to explode inside the Plumie ship.
"Three items, sir," said Baird. He drew a deep breath. "For the first, sir, the Plumie ship is unarmed. They've tractor and pressor beams for handling material. They probably use them to build their cairns. But they weren't meant for weapons. The Plumies, sir, hadn't a thing to fight with when they drove for us after we detected them." The skipper blinked hard. "Are you sure of that, Mr. Baird?"
The range is too short for atomics." Baird felt curiously divided in his own mind. He disliked Taine very much. Taine was arrogant and suspicious and intolerant even on the Niccola. But Taine had been right twice, now. The Plumie ship had crept closer by pure trickery. And it was right to remove atomic war heads from the rockets. They had a pure-blast radius of ten miles.
He helped Diane to a chair which was fastened to the floor-which-was-now-a-wall and she wedged herself fast and began a review of what each of the outside scanners reported. Baird called for more batteries. Power for the radar and visions was more important than anything else, just then. If there were more Plumie ships ... Electricians half-floated, half-dragged extra batteries to the radar room.
He grasped a handrail and demonstrated the speed with which things fell in normal ship-gravity. He used a pocket communicator for the falling weight. It was singularly easy to say some things, even highly technical ones, because they'd be what the Plumie would want to know. But quite commonplace things would be very difficulty to convey. Diane's voice came out of the communicator.
But there were also technical surprises. Baird was taken immediately to the Plumie ship's engine room, and Diane heard the sharp intake of breath with which he appeared to recognize its working principle. There were Plumie engineers working feverishly at it, attempting to discover something to repair. But they found nothing. The Plumie drive simply would not work.
Do so." His speaker clicked off. Baird said: "It's in our laps. Diane. And yet we have to follow orders. Send the first roll." Diane had a tape threaded into a transmitter. It began to unroll through a pickup head. She put on headphones. The tape began to transmit toward the Plumie.
If we headed back to base in the Plumie ship with its Dirac pusher, we'd all be dead of old age before we'd gone halfway." "But unless we take it," raged Taine, "we hit this sun in fourteen days! We don't have to die now! We can land on the oxygen planet up ahead! We've only to kill these vermin and take their ship, and we'll live!" Diane's voice said dispassionately: "Report.
He pressed the skipper's call and said evenly: "Sir, I request permission to attempt to communicate with the Plumie ship. We're ordered to try to make friends if we know we've been spotted." Taine had evidently just reached the navigation room. His voice snapped from the speaker: "I advise against that, sir! No use letting them guess our level of technology!"
And without that theory one simply couldn't explain a magnetronic drive. They left the engine room. They visited the rocket batteries. The generator room was burned out, like the drive, by the inconceivable lightning bolt which had passed between the ships on contact. The Plumie was again puzzled.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking