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  The noise came from the equipment!

  He saw Rhodan take out his micro-transmitter and heard him speak into it swiftly. He could make out a part of the answer that was given, ostensibly by Capt. Gorlat.

  "Suddenly very hot... powerful storm, sir..."

  Rhodan nodded, replying: "We're coming up!"

  Atlan turned to the tunnel mouth and again swung himself into it. Rhodan followed him.

  "What's wrong?" the Arkonide asked. "What's it all mean?"

  Rhodan sounded amazingly calm. "I think that somebody has thrown us into their own time reference or else the whole planet's been jogged into ours. I'm not sure which way it's gone, of course. We'll find out more upstairs."

  It seemed to Atlan as though scales had dropped from his eyes. Naturally—that was it! Their own time-reference was now no different than that of the equipment and the Solitude Intelligence down here in the cave—nor that of the bushes and grasses above on the plain. They could now hear the humming of the various apparatuses and sense the movement of the wind, things that had functioned too slowly to be perceived before.

  And the sudden heat? Atlan wiped sweat from his forehead and regarded the wetness of his hand in incredulous amazement. Where did the heat come from?

  What is temperature, he thought. A measurement for the mean velocity of molecules. Naturally they move faster than before and naturally there would be an irregular rise in temperature at the moment when both time-references assimilated each other.

  Assimilated! Who in the devil had caused them to come together like this?

  Just then the rope struck his face. Without interrupting his train of thought he reached for it and drew himself upward. Above at the edge of the hole was Capt. Gorlat, already composed again and ready with a smile of greeting.

  Atlan stepped away from the hole and marveled at how soft the grass had become all of a sudden. But in the next moment he thought how stupid it was to marvel at it. The grass would naturally also be subject to the real-time conversion.

  Behind him, Rhodan crawled up out of the hole. "Turn off the barrier field!" he called to Gorlat even before he was over the edge.

  Gorlat complied. The faint shimmering that had hung like a hazy bell-shape over the cave entrance suddenly disappeared.

  Above the sound of the wind they could hear the crackling of branches among the bushes, accompanied by loud curses in a voice that was unmistakable. "How the blazes is a man supposed to put up with this lousy heat...?!"

  "Come over here!" called Rhodan. "The barrier field is turned off."

  Reginald Bell stomped into view between two thorn bushes snapping off branches in the process. "Before you explain anything," he blurted out, "Tompetch has the eight ships on his screen again."

  Rhodan nodded calmly as though he hadn't expected anything else. "Of course!" he answered. "And now they're moving faster—right?"

  "A heck of a lot faster," Bell confirmed.

  "OK, now listen, Bell," Rhodan went on. "I want you and Atlan to climb down into the hole. You know what's happened. We don't need the time-contractor any more for communicating with the Solitude Intelligence. Our time-frames have been equalized. One of you two should make it clear that we are friends and want to help it... and of course find out if it knows anything about the transit of Wanderer or about the Druufs. And you have to do it fast. Our time advantage over the Druufs is kaput."

  Bell nodded. "And what do you intend to do?" he asked.

  "I have to worry about the ship," Rhodan answered, already half underway. "We don't know what's happened there. Gorlat, you come with me. Atlan, tell him that he doesn't have to worry about the bomb anymore."

  Then he disappeared into the bushes and Capt. Gorlat followed close behind him.

  • • •

  Mikel Tompetch sat before his miniature tracking equipment. He saw four of the eight alien ships disappear behind the radar horizon and the other four began to drop downward—which in his opinion would bring them to the spot where he was now.

  The bushes crackled in front of him and Rhodan appeared close behind him came Gorlat. Tompetch quickly wiped the sweat from his brow and sprang to his feet.

  Rhodan briefed him quickly on what had happened and told him that in his opinion the current phenomena were attributable to a mutual assimilation of the two time-frames.

  Tompetch assured him that with the exception of the heat he was doing fine and that nobody should worry about him. He promised to notify them just as soon as the four alien ships had come to within 30 miles of their location.

  Rhodan and Gorlat got into the flier. Rhodan took the pilot's seat and lifted the shuttlecraft vertically out of the foliage, taking a course through the night in the direction of the K-238.

  "Sir," said Gorlat suddenly, "may I ask a question?"

  "Shoot!" Rhodan encouraged him. "What do you want to know?"

  "When the time transformation happened, the temperature jumped. That's logical, because naturally the molecules of our time-rate move faster than the others. But if the actual time-lapse factor were operating in this case—I mean 72000—all of us would be fried to a crisp by now, wouldn't we?"

  Rhodan smiled. "You would have to ask me a question I can't answer myself," he said. "You're absolutely right. It's true that the temperature has risen but not as much as one might have expected." He shrugged. "We can only assume that the distortion factor doesn't have the same effect with all phenomena. I don't know if that answer satisfies you or not but in any case I don't know of a better one... at least not now."

  Gorlat accepted this and stared through the window into the night ahead in order to look for the K-238. It seemed unusual to him that the darkness was no longer brownish in its effect. Rather, it seemed to be black or dark blue. But since it was hard to ascribe any kind of color to darkness he considered his observation to be a doubtful one so he said nothing about it.

  Besides, he found it much more disturbing that the K-238 was nowhere to be seen. Certainly it was dark but such a colossal object as the ship ought to be noticeable even in the darkness.

  Without a word Rhodan hit his controls and flew the light flier though a tight curve. The contour scanner revealed a wide earth trench that was 30 feet deep. It was the trench in which the K-238 had landed. Gorlat remembered that the ship had stood where the trench made a wide indentation in the plain for several hundred yards—and that indentation stood out clearly on the scanner screen.

  But not the ship.

  Rhodan slowed his flight and let the flier sink slowly down into the earth depression. Gorlat flashed a light outside through the window and saw that the ground was intact. The hydraulic landing struts that had supported the ship had not left any indentations behind.

  The K-238 had disappeared!

  "Put in a call to Tompetch!" said Rhodan suddenly. "Ask him what's become of the four alien ships."

  Gorlat carried out the order.

  Tompetch's powerful voice came back: "They came down to about a 50-mile altitude," he answered." They stopped there but after awhile they started climbing again. They're off about 125 miles now and are moving so fast that you'd think they're never coming back to Solitude again."

  "Did you catch sight of a fifth ship?" asked Rhodan, leaning toward the microphone that Gorlat was holding.

  "No sir," answered Tompetch with a note of surprise in his voice. "The other four are still on the other side of the horizon."

  "Then take your equipment," ordered Rhodan, "and try to locate the cave entrance. When you've found it, burn away a few of the bushes with the disintegrator so that we can land there. We don't need any more advance posts. Is that clear?"

  "Yes sir," answered Tompetch.

  Rhodan guided the flier up into the air and turned back high above the bushes, heading for the cave entrance. After awhile they saw Tompetch down below moving like a dark shadowy as he stamped through the underbrush and either tore up or pushed. aside whatever stood in his way. The wind swept more gently ove
r the plain now, just slightly moving the thorny bushes.

  Tompetch arrived at the cave entrance at the same time as the ship. According to his assignment, he drew out the disintegrator and in a few moments cleared away an area of about 30 square yards. Rhodan guided the air-car down slowly and heading for the cave entrance.

  Tompetch stood close to the craft as though he were bursting with questions.

  The K-238 has disappeared," said Rhodan. "We're going to have to work out a new battle plan. Tell Bell and the Arkonide to come up here!"

  5/ THE BOMB!

  "The question as to who is responsible for a cross-assimilation of time-frames is actually of relative unimportance," Rhodan concluded after a short briefing. "We have to assume that the Druufs have a means of taking people from other time-planes and transferring them to their own at will. But fundamentally it doesn't make any difference to us to speak of."

  "We have to put up with the fact that we're now living according to Solitude's real-time frame of reference. While 24 hours are going by for us here, outside in our own universe only 1.2 seconds have passed. Nevertheless, we don't know just how this whole time-displacement situation will work out when we come back out of it."

  "Moreover, our ship has disappeared. So our most urgent task is to find a way of getting off Solitude and returning to the Drusus. Such things as locating Wanderer or finding out something new about the Druufs only have second priority now... since anyway we can rest assured that the Druufs themselves will be concerned about us. A few of them still seem to be present on Solitude, because I'm sure the K-238 didn't fly off by itself—and Tompetch hasn't picked up any trace of it in outer space."

  Rhodan saw that everybody was staring at the ground. They were not happy about the situation. And no wonder! By way of changing the subject, he asked Bell: "How does it look down below? Has there been any response yet from the Solitude entity?"

  Bell nodded. "Yes. He's received your first thought message and believes that we are friends. At least that's the way I get it. But after that there was a jumbled mess of strange thoughts that I couldn't make out at all. I think it'd be best if you went down there."

  Atlan also confirmed that he hadn't been able to decipher the alien thoughts.

  Rhodan got to his feet. "Good, I'll go down again and give it a try. We need at least three lookouts up here on top. I know that you haven't had any decent sack time for quite awhile but you still have to keep your eyes open. It's better not to sleep at all than to sleep forever—right?"

  Then he went down into the hole, followed by Atlan.

  Without hesitation, Rhodan jumped down from the tunnel mouth into the cellar-like room. The first thing that caught his attention was the fact that in their absence somebody had set the small a-c generator into operation. It's rpm was at least 1800, or 30 revolutions per second, and when he came close to it he could hear it whistle faintly.

  He thought: if he hadn't pulled that wire loose they'd have all been blown up by now.

  Behind him he heard the Arkonide come into the room from the tunnel.

  "Did either of you two turn that thing on?" asked Rhodan.

  Atlan didn't know what he meant but he finally pointed to the generator. "You mean that? No. Aha! So it's running! Apparently our friends the Druufs take a dim view of our paying our six-crated chums here a visit."

  Rhodan nodded "By this time they must be well aware that something's wrong with their bomb. I wouldn't be surprised if they came here to take a look."

  "I wouldn't object," growled Atlan menacingly. "I'd be glad to let them know what I think of ship stealers."

  Rhodan sat on the floor in front of the six boxes. He turned on the telepathic amplifier and placed the metal ring receptor-transmitter on top of his head. He closed his eyes in concentration and said: "I am your friend. Speak to me!"

  At first he received nothing more than a mental impression of raven-black darkness. Then a bright spot appeared suddenly in the darkness and began to rotate back and forth as though forming a faint pattern. The spot had the form of a cylinder, several times appearing to blaze up heatedly to a melting point, then cooling again.

  After that followed another image. It was that of a man. At first it was somewhat vague but then it came Rapidly into focus as though the thought behind it had become more precisely formulated. Rhodan was not surprised when he finally recognized himself. He tried to figure out what he was doing. He didn't succeed but he had an impression that this represented a friendly meeting between himself and the Solitude Intelligence.

  All of which helped him to understand the imagery. It meant: I am also your friend.

  He was pleased by his rapid progress and the Solitude Entity appeared to take notice of his satisfaction. A bright glow swept rapidly across the image in Rhodan's mind.

  Then it disappeared to be replaced by another: broad meadowlands covered by an enormous number of sea cows who turned luxuriously in the grass, apparently occupied with nothing more than letting the sun shine on their bellies.

  A simplified representation, thought Rhodan quickly. Naturally they had more to do than just wallow about in the grass. The image was supposed to illustrate that they were happy—or used to be.

  The image changed suddenly. At first one section of it was magnified; then a spindle-shaped. Something appeared beside the insert, which he failed to recognize at first. When a hole appeared in the Something and a file of glittering points came marching out over a landing ramp, he realized it must be a spaceship. He had been confused by the false perspective. The sea cow in the image was equally as large as the ship.

  The view he was now getting excited him. If he was not being deceived by all this he might quickly obtain his first look at a few of the Druufs—that is, if the Solitude Intelligence didn't persist in representing itself as large as the ship and making the Druufs as small as pinheads.

  The image changed again. One of the glittering light points was captured by the mental camera and magnified. Rhodan held his breath but then what he finally saw was nothing more than one of the strangely-shaped Druuf-robots that they had come up against on several previous occasions. This one had the form of a diamond, more or less as though shaped by a drunken diamond-cutter. There were multiple small surfaces, all of them dissimilar and set against each other at random angles.

  A new image: the robot legions fell upon the unsuspecting sea cows. The latter made no effort to defend themselves, even though they must have realized already that their lives were at stake. Rhodan thought he could make out a thermometer-shaped object which each robot used to insert into the nose or mouth of each captured sea cow. Whereupon the mistreated victim became motionless. Probably, thought Rhodan, they had lost consciousness.

  The Solitude Intelligence did not seem to have any thought-memory of what happened after that, as indicated by a few seconds of imageless darkness. Just when Rhodan thought that the communication was at an end, one more image appeared: it was that of the room in which he was presently located.

  With certain exceptions: a sea cow hovered above the six boxes that stood in the center of the room. It seemed to be not an actual part of the image but rather a superimposure. Suddenly its body began to break into pieces. One piece fell into the first box, a second piece into the second box and so on until six pieces had been distributed into the six boxes.

  The image presented difficulties for Rhodan. Was it supposed to mean that the Druufs or rather their robots had hacked up each Solitude Intelligence into six pieces and store them in six separate boxes? If so—why?

  The amplifier seemed to respond obediently to the question, developing the theme further: as though in answer, two images now appeared, flashing repeatedly before him. The first of the image pair showed a 'whole' sea cow, which moved like a snake, and the second revealed a dismembered sea cow whose individual parts hung motionlessly within the frame of the image.

  Rhodan finally comprehended: the dismemberment incapacitated the physical functions of the sea
cow. Only the mental or psychic function remained, perhaps, unimpaired.

  This thought had no sooner come to him than the sequence of images ended. The Solitude Intelligence had perceived that he understood what it wanted to convey to him.

  Rhodan was so pleased with the results that he surprised Atlan with an audible reply. "Alright! Just hang in there, old fellow!"

  • • •

  The 'sitting', as Reginald Bell referred to it later, had lasted more than three hours. Rhodan was fairly exhausted when he came back through the tunnel and climbed the rope, preparatory to telling the crew what he had found out.

  "The Solitude Intelligences are unisexed, non-humanoid creatures. About a million of them live on this planet. I don't know anything yet about the status of their civilization or their technical capabilities and such related items. At any rate, they seem to have led a very happy and peaceful existence until a couple of Druuf ships landed here about three years ago. Entire armies of robots proceeded to capture and corral the Solitude beings—which they achieved swiftly and easily because the Solitude people were accustomed to living in great herds—after which they took them down into the caves. Of course, as we suspected, the caves must have been created by the robots, since they were not here previously.

  "The Solitude creatures were separated into six parts each—which perhaps may indicate that the Druuf mathematics use a six-base method or some related non-decimal system. Then they brought each set of the six pieces under-ground and put them in six boxes. The purpose of this dismemberment was to render the captives immobile and to make it impossible for them to escape from their cave prisons. However, even though cut into pieces, the captives' mental or psychic faculties were not impaired or extinguished. And that was what the Druufs were depending on in the long run.