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  Rhodan brought the ship to a velocity of 9.3 miles per second. In order to keep following the surface curvature of the planet he had to activate a radial acceleration in order not to be driven out into deep space. Once he had his course established he decided the time had come to explain what he had in mind.

  "We'll go take a look at the four alien ships," he explained. "There won't be any risk involved because with their slow time-ratio they are helpless compared to us. Actually this hasn't anything to do with our search for Wanderer but I think we shouldn't lose an opportunity to closely observe the aliens, who probably have something to do with the Druufs."

  In a short time the K-238 passed the day-night border and moved once more into the light of the green sun, which glowed against the purple-red background of the alien void. The automatic pilot activated the retropulsion when the precalculated point was reached. Braking swiftly, the ship dove into the atmosphere again and headed like an arrow toward the surface.

  On the viewscreens appeared a broad endless plain which was mainly covered with bushes, through which a number of wide rivers were flowing. Rhodan inspected the terrain with some dissatisfaction. He explained his feelings to Atlan. "Landing in this kind of terrain is like presenting ourselves on a silver platter to the enemy. If you spot a likely hiding place, Admiral, let me know."

  But the 'Admiral' couldn't help him and neither could the much more reliable contour-scanner. This device operated as a kind of microwave plumbline which registered uneven areas and ground protuberances; however, it was unable to detect any land rise that projected more than 50 feet above the surface of the plain. Since the K-238 had an imposing diameter of 200 feet, even the most favorable location would still leave 150 feet of its contour uncovered.

  These considerations suddenly became immaterial when Reginald Bell announced that his tracking instruments had gone blank. He had no trace on the four ships that had presumably landed in this region nor of the four which had remained out in space. The local vicinity and the outer void were empty, as if the alien ships had simply been blown away.

  Rhodan subjected the tracking radar to a brief inspection and discovered that it was operating as faultlessly as ever. What he did not find was an explanation for the fact that the eight space vehicles had suddenly disappeared.

  But now it was Atlan's turn to smirk triumphantly. "I've just regained my self-esteem, Barbarian. What did we calculate was the actual speed of light in this universe?"

  "Slightly over 2.5 miles per second," replied Rhodan disconcertedly. "Why do you... Oh man! This time the lights were out on my side! You're perfectly correct: we have to take such an effect into consideration."

  Bell and Tompetch looked at him wonderingly. Even on Gorlat's smiling face there was a trace of puzzlement.

  Rhodan explained: "The velocity of light in this time dimension is naturally subject to the same temporal distortion as all other time-related values. On Solitude and in this continuum in general, light speed amounts to 2.58 miles per second. The K-238 outstripped that considerably during its flight to our present location and in doing so it produced a strange phenomenon. If any physical body exceeds the speed barrier imposed by Nature—that is without using some superior transport medium such as hyperspace, for example—then what happens?"

  Bell brushed a hand through his red stubble of hair and attempted an answer: "Well, just to carry out a mental experiment—if the speed of light is exceeded, without using such a superior transport medium, it would lead to a loss of causality." His inflection seemed to indicate that he had memorized this from somewhere, a fact which he proceeded to confess. "Frankly, I got that out of a text-book. I'd be happy if somebody could tell me what it means."

  He looked at Rhodan with a wink and Rhodan asked himself what he might have in mind. Bell had joined Perry Rhodan in absorbing the entire complex of Arkonide knowledge in the course of a few days of intensive hypno-schooling. Bell was not likely to be without an answer regarding ultimate questions in the physical sciences. He wanted to give somebody else a chance to shine. But who?

  "I can explain it, sir," offered Tompetch from the rear of the group. "You can express the loss of causality like this. If I turn a switch and am able to take the current flow through the conductor faster than speol, then the lamp would have started to burn before I turned the switch!"

  Bell started to grin but without letting Tompetch see it.

  "Good, Lieutenant," said Rhodan with a smile. "So what we have here is not exactly a time-reversal but a phenomenon that has the same effects. Loss of causality can't very well be grasped conceptually—at least not in its entirety. Of course examples can be invented like the one Lt. Tompetch gave us... or the case where eight spaceships that were just here suddenly disappear, to stay with our original subject."

  "Which has the advantage over the former example," added the Arkonide, "that it was not invented... as we can see."

  Bell cleared his throat for attention. "By way of ending the conversation: we can't even say how far we've knocked our causalities out of the box. We haven't any idea whether the eight ships were here way ahead of us: and disappeared in the meantime or if they'll arrive later... maybe in a couple of hours or in a couple of thousand years. We don't know any of these things; but I assume we're going to land in spite of it all and have ourselves a look around. I mean—since we more or less made up our minds to look for another Solitude intelligence."

  "There's no objection to that, Commander!" laughed Rhodan. "We will make a landing."

  • • •

  The K-238 lay in a ground depression; It was not the deepest one in the area but it was a place where the ship could manoeuvre in and out more easily. And after all it was no longer important whether the hull of the ship towered 150 or 135 feet above the plain.

  This time Bell and Rhodan left the K-238 in a shuttle-craft to make a reconnaissance flight while Atlan remained on board with Gorlat and Tompetch.

  So far Rhodan hadn't gone to the trouble of adjusting his watch or putting an overlay dial on its face so that it would show true Solitude time. He had to judge by the sun's position and he knew that it was fairly late in the afternoon. At the most they had about three hours of day-light left for their search. From then on they would have to use the infra-red equipment.

  The broad plain offered an aspect that was chiefly somnolent and monotonous. The dense brushwood covered the ground completely, reaching an average height of about six feet. Trees were so rare that a lonely wanderer could have used them as landmarks without any difficulty. The rivers, two of which the small flier negotiated, were unusually broad but offered no other variation.

  After an hour and a half or so, Rhodan turned the flier back toward the K-238. However he took another course in the return trip in order not to waste time and that was how they discovered the hole—at a time when their eyes had begun to smart from such a long session of visual observation.

  It was a small, insignificant opening in the brush-covered ground, just large enough to be seen through the maze of green leaves and branches.

  Rhodan lowered the flier and held it in a hovering position above the bush tops because he couldn't find a suitable landing spot. Bell jumped down but cursed loudly when his face was scratched by thorns. He carefully examined the hole in the ground and discovered that it was lined with the same plastic coating as the other shaft where the Solitude entity had been found.

  "OK!" called Rhodan. "Better get back here or the Druufs are liable to get suspicious."

  Bell made heroic exertions in order to climb up the thickest branch he could find, where he finally reached a point high enough to grasp the lower rim of the craft. When he finally succeeded in swinging on board he glanced reproachfully at Rhodan.

  "I hope the next time you don't pull rank on me, so's you can go yourself."

  • • •

  Rhodan found a suitable landing place within 250 feet of the hole. It was one of the rare gaps in the foliage where only a few, branches
had to be pulled aside to accommodate the flier. After making the landing, he notified Atlan immediately concerning the discovery. He asked him to get the same equipment ready that they had used before and then told him to stand by with Gorlat and Tompetch to be picked up.

  Reginald Bell unloaded the weapons from the flier, whereupon Rhodan flew back to the ship to pick up the three other men and the equipment. To cover the period of their absence, Capt. Gorlat had taken extensive security measures. When the shuttle-craft moved out of the cargo lock the ship was automatically sealed off from its surroundings by the defense screen, which was triggered to turn on by itself when they left. To turn it off again a code sender was required. There were only two senders available. One of them Rhodan himself carried in his pocket; the other was placed in a safe spot not far from the K-238.

  Meanwhile, Lt. Tompetch had observed the tracking instrument up until the last moment of departure and he reported that the eight alien ships had not yet reappeared.

  When the small craft came down through the small gap in the foliage and landed, they found Bell still sitting beside his pile of weapons. He looked as though the short time of being alone had been sufficient to make him a victim of the melancholy mood that could be induced by the monotonous landscape.

  For the time being the equipment was left on the loading deck of the flier. Rhodan took time out to explain his plan in every detail.

  "Our most important objective is to prevent any interference by the Druufs while we're in contact with the Solitude Intelligence. This means we have to block that two-peaked hypercom signal and keep it from reaching the demolition bomb that's probably been stashed in this cave as it was in the other one. This we can do, perhaps, with the help of an interference transmitter. Our own transmitter will be operating at our own time-rate and will be far faster than the alien transmitter as far as reaction is concerned. Its circuits are so arranged that it will beam out an interference signal as soon as the enemy's triggering signal starts coming in. So the trigger signal and the interference beam will cancel each other out.

  "To reduce all risks we'll also generate a barrier field around the cave entrance. It should prevent any conceivable influences from getting in to us from the outside."

  "Third, one of us will always he stationed at the small tracker we have on board the flier. If the eight alien ships show up again, we have to know about it immediately."

  "And finally, we have here all the equipment necessary for getting into communication with the Solitude Intelligence a psychograph, a telepathy amplifier, a recorder and memory storage unit, plus a time-accelerator that will condense the telepathic transmissions and recordings into a manageable time-span.

  "First of all it may as well be said that the task we have here before us could take a couple of weeks to handle, under the circumstances. If what we pick up during our contact with the Solitude Intelligence turns out to be very promising and informative—which we can determine within a couple of days—then we can probably arrange to leave the recorder gear running down in the cave while we're attending to other things. It's of course too much to expect that the Druufs are going to leave us alone indefinitely, now that they've caught wind of out presence here." He looked at his companions, one by one, and saw that nobody had anything to say. So he wound up the briefing: "It's best we get started right away. We only have a few more minutes of light to work by."

  They set up the interference transmitter and the barrier field generator in the vicinity of the cave entrance but with about a 30-foot gap between them so that neither piece of equipment could be influenced by stray effects of the other.

  Meanwhile Lt. Tompetch had taken over the post of radar operator for the tracking function while Bell became communications man—both of them remaining outside the barrier screen. Inside the screen, Capt. Gorlat posted himself at the edge of the hole, while the task of making contact with the Solitude Intelligence was reserved for Rhodan and the Arkonide.

  Rhodan was at a high pitch of excitement now and did not wait for Atlan. He went down into the tunnel and thrust forward to the end of it, where he found a room that matched the other one to a hair. While Atlan came crawling behind him, Rhodan jumped down into the room from the tunnel and again stopped in front of the heavily connected boxes. After a few minutes he sensed the same kind of headache that he had experienced the previous night, which had led him to suspect that the subterranean room harbored a thinking entity of some kind.

  He set up the recorder equipment and the time-accelerator on top of the first box and connected them in such a way that the memory-storage recorder would collect the impulses from the telepathic amplifier and then run the completed thoughts through the time-contraction machine. But he interchanged the input and output leads of the time-contractor so that instead of compressing time the device acted as a time-magnifier. This served to adapt the speed or the time-lapse rate of his own thoughts to the alien real-time of the Solitude Intelligence.

  Only after he had convinced himself that the devices were working perfectly did he make use of the special hookup. He jammed the metal ring of the telepathic amplifier down on his head and concentrated on sending a thought message:

  We are your friends! We are bringing help.

  He finally found that it was easier to articulate the words out loud at the same time. Meanwhile, Atlan had also entered from the tunnel and was puttering about near the side wall. When he heard Rhodan speak, he turned to look at him in astonishment.

  Rhodan removed the ring from his head. "It'll take an hour yet," he said, "before the Entity will have absorbed and understood that."

  "Then you have time, my friend, to take a look at this over here," answered Atlan, beckoning to him. "Come on over here... I think I've found something interesting."

  Rhodan turned to weave his way among festoons of wires and closely positioned pieces of equipment. When he reached the Arkonide he saw a case or a box that was about the size of a family medicine chest suspended against the wall. A single wire entered one end of it. Following the wire back to its other end he discovered that it emerged from a device that seemed to be made up of only two electrical coils. One coil was thick, consisting of many turns of wire, whereas the other was smaller and only loosely wound with a few turns.

  "Oh no!" he exclaimed incredulously. "It can’t be that simple!"

  Atlan tapped the 'medicine cabinet' on the wail. "Nevertheless I'll wager that the bomb is hidden in here."

  Rhodan took a closer look at the two-coil apparatus. Upon careful inspection there seemed to be no doubt that it was some kind of spark induction device in other words, where a low-tension alternating current was transformed to a high-tension alternating current, with the spark-gap built into the secondary lead. The primary coil drew its current from a small generator, which in turn could be activated by the two-peak hypercom signal.

  The actual spark-gap was located in the explosive material that was in the box on the wall. So in order to render the bomb inoperable it was only necessary to interrupt one of the leads at either end. Rhodan reached for the thin wire that led from the generator to the primary winding and jerked it loose.

  "There!" he said cheerfully. "That's one more item taken care of!"

  At the same moment his dull headache disappeared. He had been experiencing the pain continuously but had almost gotten used to it. He was perplexed for a few moments, thinking that perhaps the tearing out of the wire had somehow disturbed one of the life functions of the Solitude Intelligence. But then he realized this Being would naturally have to cease sending out thoughts as soon as it began to receive and attempt to comprehend the ongoing impulses from the time-contractor. The fact that the two events occurred at the same time was merely a matter of coincidence.

  He breathed a sigh of relief and pointed to one of the six boxes. "He's beginning to understand."

  The Arkonide raised his brows in surprise. "How do you know... no more headache?"

  "Precisely."

  Atlan
looked at his watch. "One hour yet," he muttered. "Perhaps in the meantime we can make an attempt to figure out what all this equipment down here is for."

  He turned, looking from one apparatus to the other, and finally chose one that appeared to be comparatively uncomplicated. Rhodan heard him muttering to himself but he couldn't understand a word he was saying. He agreed with Atlan that the time must not slip by without being utilized and he began to look around for a piece of equipment he might investigate with some hope of success.

  However he had hardly made up his mind when something happened that upset all of his plans for the present.

  Everything happened so swiftly that neither Atlan nor Rhodan were able to say afterwards what made them first notice the sudden change. In the fraction of a second the temperature in the cave became so severe that it threatened to suffocate the two men. Simultaneously a muffled roaring sound filled the room. Rhodan was still facing the side wall, where he saw the wire fall to the floor which he had torn from the primary pole of the spark inductor only moments before.

  That settled it—at least for him. He knew what was happening. In the slow, alien time-rate the wire would have taken another few hours to fall to the floor. Whatever may have occurred, one fact was obvious: it had caused a change in the relative time-ratios.

  Things happened differently with Atlan. He remembered that he had already experienced such a sudden surge of temperature: that is, when the explosion had started in the other cave. Taking care not to injure himself, he crept agilely between the equipment cases and under the interconnecting cables, finally swinging up into the tunnel.

  "Rhodan!" he shouted. "Get a move on, man! That bomb is going off!"

  Only then did he become aware of the muffled roaring sound in the room and he realized that this had no connection with his other experience. Rhodan's apparent calmness did the rest for him. He jumped down from the tunnel opening and placed his hand on a tall, narrow cabinet that stood near the forward wall. He felt it vibrate. He placed his ear to the metal and heard a deep humming sound.