coming in, only a few hours out. Police ships!”
Herb had lifted his cup and now with a clatter it fell to the table, breaking. The liquor dripped to the floor.
Gary flared at him. 'What's the matter with you?' he asked. 'You get the shakes every time you get anywhere near a drink.”
'That message Gary got,' Tommy was saying. 'There must have been something wrong. Maybe the ships were out near Neptune when they were ordered out here.”
'What would they be doing out near Neptune?' snapped Herb.
Tommy shrugged. 'Police ships are always snooping around,' he said. 'You find them everywhere.”
They stared at one another in a deathly silence.
'They can't stop us now,' whispered Caroline. 'They just can't.”
'There's still a couple of hours before the space warp contact with the Engineers would be broken if we set it up now,' said Tommy. 'Maybe we could make it. The ship is ready.”
'Ask the Engineers,' said Gary. 'Find out how soon they can get us there.”
Kingsley's voice thundered commands. 'Caroline,' he was shouting, 'get the Engineers! Find out if it would be safe to start now. Tommy, get out the spaceship! The rest of you grab what stuff we need and get down to the field.”
The room was a swirl of action. All of them were rushing for the door.
Kingsley was at the telephone, talking to Andy. 'Get the hangar doors open,' he was shouting. 'Warm up the tubes. We're taking off.”
Through the thud of running feet, the rumbling of Kingsley's voice, came the high-pitched drone of the thought-machine sending set. Caroline was talking to the Engineers.
More snatches of telephone conversation. Kingsley talking with Jensen now.
'Get down to the power house. Stand ready to give us all the juice you have. The leads will carry everything you can throw into them. We'll need a lot of power.”
Gary was struggling into his space-armor when Caroline came into the room.
'We can make it,' she shouted excitedly. 'The Engineers say we'll be there in almost no time at all. Almost instantaneous.”
Gary held her spacesuit for her while she clambered into it, helped her fasten down the helmet. Kingsley was puffing and grunting, hauling the space-armor over his portly body.
'We'll beat them,' he was growling. 'Damn them, we'll beat them yet! No government is going to tell me what I can do and what I can't do.”
Out of the air lock, they raced down the path to the field. In the center of the field reared the ghostly machine, like a shimmering skeleton standing guard over the bleakness that was Pluto. As he ran, Gary glanced up and out into space.
A voice sang in his brain, the voice of his own thoughts: 'We're coming!
Hang on, you Engineers! We're on our way. Little puny man is coming out to help you. Mankind, is marching to another crusade! To the biggest crusade he has ever known!”
Tommy Evans' mighty ship was at the far end of the field, a gleaming thing of silver, with the tubes a dull red, preheated to stand the sudden flare of rocket blasts in the deadly cold of Pluto's surface.
Yes, thought Gary, another crusade. But a crusade without weapons. Without even knowing who the enemy might be. Without a definite plan of campaign.
With no campaign at all. With just an ideal and the sound of bugles out in space. But that was all man had needed ever. Just an ideal and the blaring of bugles.
Caroline cried out in wonder, almost in fear, and Gary glanced toward the center of the field.
The machine was gone! Where it had stood there was nothing, no faintest hint it had ever stood there. Just empty field and nothing else.
'Jensen turned on the power!' Kingsley shouted. 'The machine is warped into another dimension. The road is open to the Engineers.”
Gary pointed out into space. 'Look,' he yelled.
A faint, shimmering circle of light lay far out into the black depths. A slow wheel of misty white. A nebulous thing that hadn't been there before.
'That's where we go,' said Kingsley, and Gary heard the man's breath whistling through his teeth. 'That's where we go to reach the Engineers.”
Chapter Seven
Tommy's nimble fingers flew over the rocket bank, set up a take-off pattern. His thumb tripped the firing lever and the ship surged up from the field with the thunder of the rocket blasts shuddering through its frame-work.
'Hit dead center,' warned Kingsley and Tommy nodded.
'Don't you worry,' he snorted. 'I will hit it.”
'I'd like to see the look on the face of them dumb cops when they reach Pluto and find us gone,' said Herb.
'Thought they were putting over a fast one on us.”
'It'll be all right if they don't set down right into that machine down there,' Gary declared. 'If they did that something would happen to them…
and happen awful fast.”
'I told Ted to warn them away from it,' Kingsley said. 'I don't think they'd hurt the machine, but they would sure get messed up themselves. They may try to destroy it, and if they do, they're in for a real surprise.
Nothing could do that.' He chuckled. 'Stilled atomic-whirl and rigid space-curvature,' he said. 'There's material for you!”
The ship lanced swiftly through space, heading for that wheeling circle of misty light.
'How far away would it be?' Gary asked and Kingsley shook his head.
'Not too far,' he said. 'No reason for it being too far away.”
They watched it through the vision plate, saw the wheel of light expand, become a great spinning, frosty rim that filled the plate and in its center a black hole like a hub.
Tommy set up a corrective pattern and tripped the firing lever. The cross-hairs on the destination panel bore dead center on the night-black hub.
The wheel of light flared out, the hub became bigger and blacker, a hole in space… as if one were looking through it into space, but into a space where there were no stars.
The light disappeared. Just the black hub remained, filling the vision plate with inky blackness. Then the ship was flooded with that same blackness, a cloying, heavy blackness that seemed pressing in upon them.
Caroline cried out softly and then choked back the cry, for the blackness was followed almost instantly by a flood of light.
The ship was diving down toward a city, a monstrous city that jerked Gary's breath away. A city that piled height on height, like gigantic steps, with soaring towers that pointed at them like Titan fingers. A solid, massive city of gleaming white stone and square, utilitarian lines, a city that covered mile on mile of land, so that one could see no part of the planet that bore it, the city stretching from horizon to horizon.
Three suns blazed in the sky; one white, two a misty blue, all three pouring out a flood of light and energy that, Gary realized, would have made Sol seem like a tiny candle.
Tommy's fingers flew over the rocket banks, setting up a braking pattern.
But even as he did, the speed of the ship seemed to slow, as if they were driving into a soft, but resistant cushion.
And in their brains rang a voice of command, a voice telling them to do nothing, that they and their ship would be brought down to the city in safety. Not so much like words as if each one of them had thought the very thought, as if each one of them knew exactly what to do.
Gary glanced at Caroline and saw her lips shape a single word. 'Engineers.”
