The Pornian paled at this bloodthirsty threat and switched off his receiver.

  “Hey!” shouted Alex. “Come back there!”

  “Never mind, Coordinator,” said Captain Jax. “We’re overhauling him.”

  The Sudbriggan was a glinting speck, lost among the stars, but a glance at the radar tracker told Alex that the courier boat was, indeed, gaining on the slower hospital ship. He mopped his brow in some relief. His chance of catching the other vessel in time to mollify its skipper and prevent a report looked pretty good after all. He began turning over in his mind the form his apology would take.

  He had assumed that the Sudbriggan had taken off in a random sunward direction, and had no idea that the backbone of the Pornian Navy was close at hand. Consequently, the dreadnaught took him completely by surprise.

  One minute, the viewscreen gleamed only with stars. Then all at once, looming up and growing with hideous speed, was the titanic figure of the space battleship, gun turrets glimmering ominously in the light of the distant sun.

  “What is this farce?” demanded the Lord High Admiral angrily, looking at the boat in his tracer screen. He could make out the legend Space Patrol Ship Number One on its bow. What was it, and why was so minute a thing hurling itself so viciously on the great, and invincible super-dreadnaught?

  He twined his boneless hands thoughtfully. Some­thing occurred to him. What was it the captain of the Sudbriggan had said?

  Secret weapon!

  “Fire guns!” bawled the suddenly panic-stricken Admiral, clutching the intercom mike. “Fire torpedo! Fire One, fire Two, fire Three! Fire everything! Shoot that ship down before it hits us!”

  Gun crews who have looked on their drills as a sort of pleasant exercise, are not at their peak when suddenly ordered without even the preamble of a battle alert to fire their weapons. Such an unexpected command breeds a certain amount of confusion. Nevertheless, they did their best.

  Atomic explosions began to blossom about the hurtling Fearless, but in the vacuum of space a shell has to make a direct hit to do any significant harm. Therefore the guns gave way to the space torpedoes that leaped out at the enemy, each as big as the courier boat itself.

  Now this was unfortunate. The torpedoes were equipped with the latest tracking devices to find their own targets. But it had been assumed that such targets would be destroyers, at the very least, since nothing smaller could possibly menace the new battleship. So simple preventive circuits had also been installed to keep them from homing on each other.

  Thus when they reached the Fearless and matched velocities and accelerations, they didn’t know what to do next. They trailed undecidedly after the Hoka ship, their computers clicking madly. One computer must have gone insane, for that torpedo blew itself up. The rest moved hesitantly toward their own ship.

  The Admiral shivered in his quarters, gripping the arms of his chair and praying for a hit and regretting the day he had ever let the Racialist Party leaders talk him into figureheading the Navy. His wife had warned him against it and his wife always knew best. It was all very well strutting around in gold braid; but he might have suspected there would be a catch to it. And sure enough there was.

  He might have known there was a real Space Patrol. He might have known a bloodthirsty race like the humans wouldn’t really let a peaceful world like his own get away with a little rearming.

  “Please,” prayed the Admiral, rolling his eye-stalks toward the ceiling of his cabin. “Please. A direct hit. Just one.”

  “But I only want to apologize!” yelled Alex into the blank communicator screen, holding frantically onto the board while the Fearless rocked to the nearby explosions. “Sudbriggan. Dreadnaught. Anybody. Its all a mistake. I just want to apologize, dammit!”

  “What’s the old man up to?” Lon Meters asked Captain Jax as they both clung to their pilot chairs.

  “I can’t tell you,” replied the captain with a knowing wink. “But I’ll give you this much of a hint. Underneath that bluff exterior, the Coordinator’s mighty shrewd. Mighty shrewd.”

  “Oh,” said the exec. They nodded understandingly together.

  All good things must come to an end; and the famous Space Patrol-Pornian battle was no exception. Aboard the enormous ship they opened a safety port to admit the fleeing Sudbriggan. It flashed inside, but before they could close the port again, the Fearless, moving too fast for Alex to stop her in time, had also entered.

  If it had not been for the fantastic safety devices inside the dreadnaught, the episode would have ended then and there. But as it was, the absorber fields channeled the terrific kinetic energy of the two vessels into the dreadnaught’s accumulators, and they lay inert in the belly of the monster. The port clanged to behind them.

  The torpedoes decelerated as their circuits informed them that they were almost upon their mother craft. They milled about in space, their computers gibbering. One torpedo, perhaps equipped with a better-than-average “brain,” went up and sniffed at the safety port, wagging its tail rather wistfully.

  The Sudbriggan had been the first to enter. Its crew boiled from the airlock and scrambled toward the safety of the dreadnaught’s interior. A few minutes later, Alex opened the lock of the Fearless and stuck his nose out. He jerked it hastily back as a raybeam shot past it and splattered on the hull of the Patrol boat. This was too much. After being shanghaied, kept up for two nights to make calculations, threatened with internment, and shot at, Alex finally lost his temper. He went storming back to the bridge.

  “Give me a raythrower!” he roared.

  “Hadn’t you better get into a suit first, sir?” asked Lon Meters.

  Alex did a double take. All along the main corridor, he could see the Hokas scrambling into things that looked like a cross between a spacesuit and a set of medieval armor. The exec was holding out one tailored more nearly to human proportions.

  “What?” said Alex.

  “Combat armor, sir,” said Captain Jax proudly. “We used the ship’s tools and made it out of the spare meteor plating in the hold.”

  Alex goggled. The labor in fashioning the suits must have been heartbreaking. Even given the ship’s machine tools, the collapsed steel of meteor plating was almost unworkable. For a second he wavered between, admiration and a desire to blow his top at this latest outrage on his property. Then he remembered the near-singe his nose had taken, and began donning the armor without a word.

  “Battle ax,” said Captain Jax.

  “Battle ax,” repeated the exec, handing a wicked-looking double-bitted weapon to Alex.

  “Raythrower,” said the captain.

  “Raythrower,” repeated the exec, offering a gun.

  Alex grabbed the Holman with his first real enthusiasm since this trip started. A smile was forming on his lips when he realized that the object was entirely too heavy to be what it appeared to be.

  He inspected it. “What’s this?” he demanded.

  “The raythrower, sir?” Captain Jax looked a little crestfallen. “We had some trouble with them, Coordinator. We sent off our boxtops according to orders over the video, but when we got these, they wouldn’t shoot.”

  “Sabotage,” supplied Lon Meters.

  “Exactly,” said the captain. “So we fixed them up to fire regular bullets like the Western shooting irons. You see—”

  He pressed the firing button on his imitation Holman, and a slug whanged off the low ceiling of the bridge. Alex ducked before remembering that his new clothes were bullet proof. He straightened, groaned as he looked at the clumsy weapon, and then, with a sigh, holstered it and clumped his way toward the airlock. At least his present equipment would protect him until he could get to some Pomian officer and explain the case—

  But his last feeble intentions of legality were destroyed when he led his Hokas into the first corridor branching from the entry port. A barrage of rays from behind a hastily erected wall of office furniture made his armor glow and sparkle. He tingled with the shock of secondary radiation.

  Plainly, the aliens weren’t going to give him a chance to parley.

  “That’s enough!” he bellowed in a rage, his voice coming weirdly from the air holes in the top of his helmet. “Let’s clean up the whole blinking ship!”

  And he charged forward like a miniature tank, using the sheer mass of his armor to break through the barricade and send the defenders scooting before him in terror.

  “The old man’s finally got his dander up,” said the exec to the captain.

  “Yep,” answered Jax. “That he has. But let me tell you something, boy. Underneath that dander there’s a heart of pure, eighteen-carat, solid gold!”

  The true story of the cleaning up of the Pornian dreadnaught will never be adequately told, for words are insufficient to describe it.

  For a century or more, no civilized entity had been seriously threatened by organized violence. On top of this fact was another: that the advanced military minds who designed this battleship would have tut-­tutted in horror if they had been asked how the crew was to defend it against a boarding party. With icy politeness they would have pointed out that boarding vanished with wooden ships, and that no enemy vessel could approach within three thousand kilometers of this giant without being destroyed. Thus few of the crew had hand guns, and fewer still knew how to use them. So everywhere through the huge ship could be seen shrieking herds of tall Pornians fleeing before one or two small armored figures waving battle axes. It was like a host of Frankenstein dolls let loose in an enormous home for old ladies. Such of the crew of the dreadnaught as was not assailed—and after all, a hundred Hokas could reach only a fraction of the total acreage inside—stayed by its posts, shivering and hoping there would be no orders to counter­attack.

  To be sure, there was one center of resistance. When the news reached the Admiral that the crew of the Space Patrol boat had effected an entrance, he gathered his personal staff around him on the bridge and resolved to die fighting. His followers unlimbered a mobile disintegrator, trained it on the doorway, and waited.

  Meteor plating is good protection against hand guns. But it is about as useful as wet cardboard against the full power of a mobile disintegrator. Alex, leading a dozen Hokas around a bend in the main corridor, came full upon the bridge. The Pornians let off a panicky, ill-timed bolt which tore a hole through three floors above. Alex beat a hasty retreat, struggling to restrain the Hokas, who were all for rushing the gun.

  “Look,” he said grimly, when he finally had them settled down, “are Jax and Lon here?”

  “Here, Coordinator.”

  “On green—I mean, aye, aye, sir.”

  “Well, look,” said Alex. “That mobile unit isn’t like a hand gun—that is, it doesn’t have a self-contained power source. It gets its energy from a cable run directly to the ship’s generators.” As a former TISS man, Alex had of course been given training in the Solar Guard. “Now, what I want you to do is hunt around for the central power control room—it ought to be on this level—and pull every switch you find there. One of them should shut off the juice to that mobile.”

  The two little armored figures nodded their anony­mous heads and toddled off down the corridor. Alex and the rest sat down to wait.

  “Mighty smart, the old man,” said Lon Meters as they trudged along. “Imagine him knowing the way Malevonian ships are put together.”

  “There isn’t much that goes on in the universe that the Coordinator of the Space Patrol doesn’t know,” replied Jax Bennison complacently. “Why, I imagine nobody will ever know how many spy rays the old man has in places, and how many undercover agents at work.”

  “Lonely life, though,” said Lon sadly. “Can’t trust anyone, the old man can’t. The responsibility for the safety of all civilization rests on his shoulders.” He paused, then went on: “Which of us do you think he’s picked to take his place when his time comes?”

  They had, by now, explored up and down several halls and looked into a number of luxurious apartments for the top officers of the dreadnaught. Now they came to a small door with a sign stenciled on it in the spatial English:

  DANGER

  DO NOT ENTER

  “Ah-ha,” said Lon.

  “This’ll be it,” said Jax. He swung his battle ax at the lock, and the door—being unlocked—bounced open. They stepped inside.

  “Yep,” said Captain Jax, looking about him with satisfaction at the ranked masses of levers, wheels, buttons, and switches. “This is it, all right. Executive Meters, you take that side and I’ll take this.”

  They started yanking levers.

  Coughing, choking, sneezing, and gurgling, the Lord High Admiral of the Pornian Navy sloshed his way forward to surrender.

  “My sword, sir,” he said with what dignity he could summon up.

  Alex accepted it.

  “The ship, sir, is yours,” coughed the Admiral. Then his official manner broke down “But if turning on the fire extinguisher sprinklers, the fumigation system, the leak-detector smoke system, the emergency radionic­-heating system, the emergency refrigeration system, and directing the sewers into the deck-flushing system isn’t a dirty way to fight, I’d like to know what is.”

  Alex ignored his resentment.

  “The terms for your surrender are these,” he began sternly.

  “Yes, sir,” said the Admiral in a meek voice.

  “Your government will dismantle this dreadnaught and build no more ships of the line.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the Admiral. “I, for one, will be happy to get back to civilian life—”

  “You will disband the navy.”

  “Glad to, sir.”

  “You will inform Earth Headquarters of your decisions in these matters, but will not specify the reasons or mention this battle. That is classified information.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you will inform the Racialist Party on Pornia that the Space Patrol, which owes allegiance to no race or system, but is dedicated to the upholding of law and order throughout the galaxy, takes a dim view of their government and demands another planet-wide election wherein other Pornian parties shall be given a fair chance to run for office.”

  The Admiral gulped.

  “Well—I—yes, sir, I guess I can do that. Under the circumstances.”

  “Okay, fine,” said Alex. Signaling the armored figures around him to follow, he turned on his heel and went back toward the entry port.

  When the Fearless was finally settled down on her return trip, Alex called the Hokas together and, speaking over the intercom, addressed them all.

  “Gentlemen of the Space Patrol,” he said crisply, “our mission is accomplished. Well done! But now I must inform you that there will be no more expeditions of the Patrol for an indefinite time.”

  “None?” asked Captain Jax in a wistful tone.

  “None,” said Alex, tossing the keys of the control panel in one hand and clamping firmly onto them as they landed back in his palm. “The Space Patrol is being disbanded as of now until such time as another threat to the galaxy brings us forth to scour the evildoer from the stars and the space between the stars.”

  There was a moment’s sad quietude. Then the exec, Lon Meters, spoke up.

  “But what’s going to become of you, sir?” he asked sympathetically.

  “That,” said Alex, unable to disguise a slight quaver in his voice, “is what I am just about to find out.”

  He waved bravely to the assembled Hoka officers and dismissed them from the bridge and shut the door on them. The new long-range subspace communicator which the dreadnaught’s technicians had installed for him glowed as his trembling fingers put in a call. While the Hoka at the switchboard in far-off Mixumaxu routed his beam, he licked dry lips and ran a shaky finger under his collar.

  The figure of Tanni appeared on the screen. Her arms folded implacably as she recognized him.

  “Well,” she said, “and just where have you been?”

  Weakly, Alexander Jones started to explain.

  The Life of Your Time

  The Emissary had been half a year under way before her people knew that something had gone awry within themselves. They could have noticed earlier—the human organism is that sensitive—but they were too occupied with their work and with getting used to the grotesquerie that gleamed and blazed and shivered and hummed around them. Also, the interior change was very slow…at first.

  Isabel McAndrew broke through to the truth, but not till the end of the seventh month.

  She stirred awake as a chime signaled the start of another watch period. Her husband Arch was moving likewise, beside her in the tiny cabin that was theirs. Gradually his red hair and angular features came from beneath the blanket, as if he were an animal grumbling out of hibernation. (They could have set room temperature higher and done without bed clothes. But they liked cool air for sleeping. Then, too, blankets were a homely remembrance of Earth, such as one needed here where the very stars crawled toward patterns of otherness.) He swung his feet around to the deck, yawned, and stretched.

  But I didn’t touch a drop last “night,” he thought.

  Isabel sat up and regarded him for a long while. Her heart-shaped face was so grave, beneath the tangled dark locks, that he felt a stab of worry.

  “What’s the matter, sweetheart?” he asked. The words dropped out of his mouth one by one, like pellets of buckshot.

  “You,” she murmured. “Me.” Drowsiness fled. Her eyes widened. “Every one of us!”

  “Huh?”

  “The way you feel. Have been feeling. More and more.” Isabel took hold of his arm. She didn’t move fast, though the gesture was almost frantic. “Suddenly, watching you, I know. And I know it’s true of the others.”

  “You mean-Wait.” The physicist curbed himself, wet his lips and said carefully, “All right. For some time I’ve felt, uh, a bit funny. It’s progressive, I think, though too gradual for me to be sure. I didn’t worry about it because, well, what I mainly noticed was that I seemed to be thinking faster than normal. I put it down to being stimulated by our situation. The first manned expedition beyond the Solar System!”