"And they've reversed the beam!" Lents puffed as he turned away from the ampliscope, pulling his sweat-soaked toga away from his fat body with thumb and forefinger. "We're decelerating fast, but we can't feel it because the force acts on every particle of our bodies exactly the same as on the ship——"
"Proving," added Sine, looking out of the port curiously, "that it's a true gravity beam!"
The utter stillness of their ship gave the illusion that she was motionless, and that the sinister stranger was drifting toward them.
"It is a ship!" Lents rumbled. "Look at her ports. But they're shuttered."
"Not a bad idea," Sine agreed. "Protection against pin-point meteorites, anyway." They saw now that the cylinder was slightly rounded at each end, and the end presented to them had at its nose a circular projection, not unlike a very large button, that glowed with a lavender light, which they guessed to be the source of the gravity beam.
They were torn between the excitement of discovery and a very natural apprehension. In the dim past, more than 200,000 years ago, there had been a regular commerce between Earth and the Jovian colonies. But the comet swarm, coming out of the mysterious depths of space, had released to the solar system such swarms of meteorites as to make interplanetary travel in the spatial belt between Mars and Jupiter utterly suicidal. It required the passing of two thousand centuries to thin them out sufficiently to permit the voyage of exploration in which these three men were engaged.
What would these children of Earth look like after 200,000 years of Jovian evolution? Would they be friendly?
They must, at any rate, be curious people. The great cylinder was passing over them, and they had a better conception of its size. It was at least twice as big as the 200-foot diameter Kass had estimated, and fully 1500 feet long. A section of its hull slid open, and the scientists felt the tug of mysterious forces on their own little vessel. They drifted up into the opening, knew that the hatch had closed by the shutting out of the solar glare. But there was no lack of light. They could see the welded plates of the hull by an intense saffron light that came from oval plates set in the wall. More of the gravity buttons were ranged around the room. It appeared that they were regularly used in handling freight. Now, as the little captive ship was tugged here and there, the prisoners could see flashes of that penetrating lavender light that seemed somehow solid.
"Get ready, men!" Sine said, breaking off his absorbed contemplation of their surroundings. "Strap on your belts, and be sure your disintegrator tubes are in their clips."
Lents was already lifting his toga and snapping his weapon belt around his ample waist. A mere strip of flexible metal with pockets for the atobombs and a clip for the delicate little tube—it might easily be taken for a mere ornamental article of apparel.