Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
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 take our rockets away from us " Then his voice stopped. He said, "Hold everything!" and pressed the navigation-room button. He snapped: "Radar to navigation. It appears to take the Plumies several seconds to take over a rocket.
Diane held tightly to Baird's hand, in the radar room. He said evenly: "There'll be volunteers. The Plumies are pretty sporting characters putting up a fight with an unarmed ship, and so on. If there aren't enough other volunteers, the skipper and I will cut them free by ourselves." Diane said, dry-throated: "I'll help. So I can be with you. We've got so little time."
He tore open a pressure-suit cupboard in the wall beside the lock door. "He'll make the Plumies think it's a return-gift for the generator!" He eeled into the pressure suit and zipped it up to his neck. "The man's crazy! He thinks we can take their ship and stay alive for a while! Dammit, our air would ruin half their equipment! Tell the skipper to send help!"
The only sound that came out of any speaker in the radar room was Taine's voice, high-pitched and raging, mouthing unspeakable hatred of the Plumies, whom no human being had yet seen. Baird sat tense in the frustrated and desperate composure of the man who can only be of use while he is sitting still and keeping his head.
Back on ancient Earth, a planet had been too small to hold two races with tools and fire. Historically, that problem was settled when Homo sapiens exterminated Homo neanderthalis. It appeared that the same situation had arisen in space. There were humans, and there were Plumies. Both had interstellar ships. To humans, the fact was alarming.
There might, though, be one or more of those singular, conical, hollow-topped cairns sheltering silicon-bronze plates, which constituted the evidence that Plumies existed. The Niccola went sunward toward the inner planets to see. Such cairns had been found on conspicuous landmarks on oxygen-type planets over a range of some twelve hundred light-years.
When they meet other men, they'll be cagey because they'll remember Taine. But they'll know they can make friends, because we did them a favor when we'd nothing to gain by it. I can offer no reward. But I ask for volunteers to go outside and cut the Plumie ship loose, so the Plumies can go home in safety instead of on into the sun with us!" He glared, and cut off the image.
There was no evidence of interplanetary travel rockets would be more than obvious, and a magnetronic drive had a highly characteristic radiation-pattern so the real purpose of the Niccola's voyage would not be accomplished here. She wouldn't find out where Plumies came from.
Blue-white flames bored savagely into solid metal, and melted copper gave off strangely colored clouds of vapor which emptiness whisked away to nothing and molten iron and cobalt made equally lurid clouds of other colors. There were Plumies in the air lock, watching. At 03 hours 40 minutes ship time, all the men but one drew back. They went inside the Niccola.
They'll help us find the metals we need to build the tools to repair the Niccola, sir. You see the reasoning, sir. We turned them loose to improve the chance of friendly contact when another human ship runs into them. They want us to carry back to be proof that Plumies and men can be friends. It seems that they like us, sir." He stopped for a moment. Then he went on reasonably;
Word Of The Day