EVEN AFTER HE had the glasses focused he could not be sure that
he saw more than just one strangely shaped vehicle and the two men
by it. To Dane’s angle of sight the party appeared to be
fully exposed to those in the Queen. And he wondered why the
Traders had not attacked—if this was the enemy.
“Right out in the open—” he said aloud. But
Rip was not so sure.
“I don’t think so. There’s a ridge there.
Visibility’s poor now, but it would show in sunlight. With a
stun rifle—”
Yes, with a stun rifle, and this elevation to aid him, a man
might pick off those foreshortened figures—even with the
range as great as it was. Unfortunately their full armament now
consisted of only short range weapons—the close-to-innocuous
sleep ray rods, and the blasters—potent enough, but only for
in-fighting.
“Might as well wish for a bopper while you’re about
it,” Dane commented.
Both flitters had disappeared from the landing place near the
ship. He supposed they had been warped in for safety. Now he swept
the ground slowly, trying to pick out any shape which did not seem
natural. And within five minutes he was sure he had pinpointed at
least as many posts of two or three watchers staked out in an
irregular circle about the ship. Four of the groups had
transportation—machines which resembled their own crawlers to
some degree but were narrower and longer, as if they had been
designed to negotiate the valleys of this planet.
“Speaking of boppers,” Rip’s voice startled
Dane because of its tenseness, “What’s that? Over
there—”
Dane’s glasses obediently turned west.
“Where?”
”See that rock that looks a little like a hoobat’s
head—to the left of that.”
Dane searched for a rock suggesting Captain Jellico’s pet
monstrosity. He finally found it. To the left—now—yes!
A straight barrel. Was that—could that be the barrel of a
portable bopper, wheeled into a position which commanded the ship,
from which it could drop its deadly little eggs right under her
fins?
A bopper couldn’t begin to make any impression on a sealed
ship, that was true. But it could and would bring sudden death to
those venturing out into the gas which burst from its easily
shattered ammunition. One had to take a bopper seriously.
“Space!” he spit out. “We must have strayed
into a darcon’s nest—”
“With the clawed one breathing down our necks into the
bargain,” agreed Rip. “Why doesn’t the Queen
lift? They could sit down anywhere and pick us up later. Why stay
here boxed in?”
“Do you not think?” asked Mura, “that perhaps
the odd behaviour of our ship may have something to do with the
wrecks? That maybe if the Queen takes to the air she might become
as they are?”
“I’m no engineer,” Dane said, “but I
don’t see how they could bring her down. They haven’t
any big stuff lined up out there. It’d take a maul to push
her off course—”
“Did you see any signs of an attack by a maul on the
Rimbold? There were none. She crashed as if she were drawn to this
planet by some force she could not resist. Those who wait down
there may have the secret of such a force. It could be that they
rule not only the surface of Limbo, but some portion of the heavens
above—”
“You think that the installation is a part of it?”
Rip inquired.
“Who knows?” the steward’s quiet voice
continued.”It might well be.” He was watching the plain
through his own glasses. “I would like to slip down there
after nightfall and prowl about. If we could have a quiet and
informative talk with one of those sentries—”
Mura’s tone did not change, he was his usual placid,
un-excited self. But Dane knew that the last person he would care
to change places with at that particular moment was one of the
sentries Mura wished to “talk”.
“Hmmm—” Rip was studying the terrain.
“It might be done at that. Or a man could get to the Queen
and find out what this was all about—”
“You don’t think we could reach them by com?”
suggested Dane. “We’re close enough for a clear
reception.”
“Notice those helmets on the sentries’ heads?”
Rip pointed out. “I’ll bet you earth-side pay that
they’re linked up on our frequency now. If we talk
they’ll listen—not only listen but get a fix on us. And
they know this ground better than we do. Would you like to play
hide and seek across this country in the dark?”
Dane decidedly would not. But it was difficult to relinquish
using the coms. So easy to just call and find out what might take
hours and hours of spying and risk to discover by themselves. Only,
as the Masters had dinned into them for years back in the Pool,
there were few easy short cuts in Trade. It was a matter of using
your wits from first to last, of being able to improvise on the
spur of the moment such dodges as would save your profit, your ship
or your skin. And the last two precious articles appeared to be at
stake on this occasion.
“At least,” Rip was continuing, “we are sure
now that more than Rich and his hand-picked boys are
involved.”
“Yes,” Mura nodded, “it would seem that the
forces ranged against us are numerically stronger.” His
glasses coursed from one group of hidden men to the next, until he
had made the complete circle concealed from those aboard the Queen.
“There are perhaps fifteen out there.”
“To say nothing of reinforcements they may have back in
the mountains. But who in the Black Reaches of Outer Space are
they?” Rip asked of the air about them.
“Something is about to happen,” Mura stiffened, his
attention settling on one spot.
Dane followed the steward’s lead. The other was right.
One of the besiegers had walked boldly out of cover and now
approached the ship, waving vigorously over his head the age-old
sign for parley—a strip of white cloth.
For a moment or two it appeared as if the Queen was not going to
answer that. And then the hatch opened far above the surface of the
ground. No ramp was lowered. Instead a figure paused in the opening
and Dane recognized Captain Jellico.
The bearer of the white flag hesitated some distance away.
Though the watchers could not see too clearly in the growing dusk,
they could hear, for a voice crackled in their helmet phones, thus
proving Rip right—the coms of the raiders were on the same
band as their own.
“Thought it over, Captain? Ready to be
sensible?”
“Is that all you want to know?” Jellico’s
rasp could not be mistaken. “I gave you my decision last
night.”
“You can sit here until you starve, Captain. Just try to
get off-world—”
“If we can’t get off—neither can you get
in!”
“And there he speaks the truth,” Mura observed.
“Nothing they have down there is capable of forcing an
entrance to the Queen. And if they are able to smash her—she
will be of no use to them.”
“You think that that is what they are after—the
Queen?” hazarded Dane.
Rip snorted. “That’s obvious. They don’t want
her to lift—they have a use for her. I’ll bet that
Rich brought us here just to get the Queen.”
“There is the matter of supplies, Captain,” the
besieger’s voice purred in their earphones. “We can
afford to sit here half a year if it is necessary—you cannot!
Come, do not be so childish. We have offered you a fair deal all
round. And you have been caught in a pinch, have you not? Your
ready funds went at the auction when you bought trading rights
here. Well, we are offering you better than trading rights. And we
have the patience to sit it out.”
But, if the speaker had the patience he vaunted, one of his fellows did not. Through the air came the crack of a stun rifle.
Jellico either ducked or fell back into the ship and the hatch was
dapped to. The three Traders on the cliff sat very still. It
appeared that the man with the flag had not expected that move on
the part of his own side. He stayed where he was for a moment
before he dropped the treacherous strip of white and dived for the
cover of an outcrop, from which point he squirmed back to his
original post.
“That was not planned,” remarked Mura.
“Someone was a fraction impatient. He will suffer for his
zeal—since he has just put an end to the chance of future
negotiation.”
“Do you think the Captain was hurt?” Dane asked.
“The old man knows all the tricks,” Rip did not seem
worried. “I’d say he got out in a hurry. But now
they’ll have to starve him into surrender. That shot is not
going to get our men to come out with their hands
up—”
“Meanwhile,” Mura dropped his glasses to his knee,
“there is the little matter of our own action. We might be
able to slip through those lines in the dark, but with the ship
sealed, how can we get in? They are not going to lower a line at
the first hail out of the night. Not now.”
Dane gazed across the rough ground which lay between the heights
on which he perched and the distant ship. Yes, it might be simple
to avoid the sentry post of the besiegers, they would be more
intent on the ship than on the territory behind their own lines.
Maybe they did not even know that some of the Queen’s crew
had escaped their trap. But, having reached the ship, how could one
get on board?
“A problem, a problem,” Mura murmured.
“Aren’t we on a level with the control section
here?” Rip asked suddenly. “Maybe we could rig up some
kind of a signal to let them know we were sending someone
in—”
Dane was willing to try. He squinted along the line from where
he sat to the nose of the ship.
“It will have to be done very soon,” Mura warned.
“Night is coming fast.”
Rip looked up at the sky. The sun of the morning had long since vanished. Leaden clouds hung over them. And it was clearly
twilight.
“Suppose we made a shelter—maybe out of our
tunics—and lit a torch in it. The range of the light would
be limited at the sides—it could not be seen from below. But
those on the Queen might catch it—”
The steward’s answer was to unbuckle his equipment belt
and pull at the seal latch of his tunic. Dane hurriedly followed
his example. Then they crouched shivering in the cold, holding
their tunics as side screens, while Rip squatted between, flashing
his torch on and off in the distress signal of the Trading code. It
was such a slim chance, someone would have to be in the control
cabin watching at just the right angle to catch that click, click,
click of light—a mere pinprick of radiance.
Then the night beacon of the Queen flashed on, striking up into
the grey sky as it had fought the fog a day earlier. Only now it
lit the surrounding clouds. And as the three on the cliff watched,
hoping to read in this some reply to their improvised com, the
yellowish beam took on a ruddier tinge.
Mura sighed with relief. “They have read
us—”
“How do you know?” Dane could see nothing to lead
the steward to believe that.
“They had switched on the storm ray. See, now it fades
once more. But they read us!” He was smiling as he donned his
tunic. “I would suggest that we compose a proper message
among us and also inform Wilcox of this development. If we can
communicate with the Queen, even if she cannot with us, something
may be done to our advantage after all.”
So they went down to the crawler. It did not take long to relay
the news.
“But they cannot answer us,” Wilcox put his finger
on the weakness of the whole set up. “They wouldn’t
have used the storm ray if they had had any other means of letting
us know they read you—”
“We’ll have to send someone in. Now we can signal
that he is coming and they will be waiting to take him
aboard,” Rip said eagerly.
Wilcox’s manner suggested that he did not wholly agree
with that plan. But though they discussed it point by point, there
did not seem to be any other solution.
Mura got to his feet, “The dark is coming fast. We must
decide upon a plan at once, for the climb to our signal post is not
one to be taken when it cannot be seen. Who is to go and when?
That much we can send in code—”
“Shannon,” Wilcox singled out the
astrogator-apprentice, “this is the time those cat’s
eyes of yours will come in handy. You can see as much in the dark
as Sinbad—or you seemed to that time on Baldur. Want to try
to make it at, say,” he consulted his watch,
“twenty-one hours? That will give our playmates on the sentry
posts time to settle down.”
Rip’s beaming face was answer enough. And he was humming
as the three once more ascended the rock and took over the task of
sending the message.
“You will add,” Mura remarked, “that your safe
arrival is to be signalled back to us with the storm ray. We would
like to rejoice in your success.”
“Sure, man. But I’m not worrying,” Rip’s
natural buoyancy was returning for the first time since he had made
that horrible discovery in the wrecked Rimbold. “This is a
stroll compared to that job we had on Baldur.”
Mura looked grave. “Never underestimate what may stand
against you. You are experienced enough in Trade to remember that,
Rip. This is no time to take unnecessary chances—”
“Not me, man! I’ll be as silent and slippery as a
snake out there. They will never know I passed by.”
Once again the steward and Dane shed their tunics and shivered
in the damp cold as Rip flashed the news of his mission across to
the silent, sealed ship. There was no answer but they were certain
that after their first essay at communication there had been a
watcher stationed to wait for a second message.
It was arranged that Mura and Dane were to bed down on the
heights while Rip went back to the crawler and waited to set out
from there. When the astrogator-apprentice disappeared below, Dane
moved rocks to provide them with a windbreak.
They had no source of warmth but their nearness to each other,
so they crouched together in the pocket Dane had devised with
nothing to do but wait out the hours until the signal came that Rip
had reached his goal.
“Lighting up,” Mura murmured.
The beam from the Queen still beaconed in the night. But what
Mura referred to were the sparks of fire which marked the fixed
posts of the unknown sentries.
“Make it easier for Rip—he’ll be able to avoid
them,” ventured Dane but his companion disagreed.
“They will be alert for trouble. Probably they have beats
linking each of those with the rest and are doing sentry-go along
them.”
“You mean—they guess that we are here—that
they are only waiting for Rip to come along—”
“That may or may not be true. But they are, of course,
alert for a move from the men in the Queen. Tell me, Thorson, are
you not now aware of something more? Can you not feel it through
this rock?”
Of course he could. That beat of the installation, less heavy
than it had been near the ruins, but faithful in its pattern. And
now there was no fluctuation in its power as the long minutes
dragged wearily by. It was running steadily at full strength.
“That,” Mura continued, “is what ties the
Queen to this earth—”
The jig-saw bits of what they had learned during the past two
days were beginning to fit into a picture. Suppose these strangers
who had enmeshed the Queen for some purpose of their own, did
control a means of crashing her if she tried to lift from Limbo?
It would be necessary to keep that installation, energy
broadcaster, beam, or whatever it was, working all the time or the
ship would make a sneak escape. Those in her must be fitting the
pieces together, too—even if they did not yet know the
Sargasso properties of Limbo.
“Then the only way to get out of here,” said Dane
slowly, “is to find the source of power and—”
“Smash it? Yes. If Rip makes contact—then we must
move to that end.”
”You say ‘if Rip makes contact’. Don’t
you think he’s going to?”
“You are very young in the Service, Thorson. After some
voyages a man becomes very humble. He begins to realize that the
quality we name on Terra ‘luck’ has much to do with
success or failure. We can never honestly say that this or that
plan of action will come to fruition in the manner we hope, there
are too many governing factors over which we have no control. We do
not count on any fact until it is an established reality. Shannon
has many of the odds on his side. He has unusually keen night
sight, a fact we discovered on a similar situation not long ago, he
is used to field work, he is not easily confused. And from here he
has had a chance to study the territory and the positions of the
enemy. The odds are perhaps eighty percent in his favour. But there
remains that twenty percent. He must be ready and we must be ready
to prepare for other moves—until we see the beacon signal
that he has made it.”
Mura’s emotionless voice unsettled Dane. It had the old
illusion-pricking touch of Kamil, refined, made even more pointed
and cutting. Kamil! Where was Ali? Being held by some of those now
ranged about the Queen? Or had he been taken on to the mysterious
source of power?
“What do you suppose they did with Kamil?” Dane
asked aloud.
“He represents to them a source of information about us
and our concerns. As such they would see that he reaches the
guiding brain behind all this. And he will be safe—just as
long as they have a use for him—”
But there was something vaguely sinister in that answer—a
hint twisting Dane’s memory to a scene he did not like to
recall.
“Those men on the Rimbold—Was Rip right? Had they
been blasted?”
“He was right.” The three words were unaccented by
any emotion, and the very gentleness of the reply made it the more
forceful.
They talked very little after that, and only moved about when
the warning stiffness of arm or leg made it necessary. On the plain the beacon continued to point starward from ship without
change.
In spite of the cold and the cramp, the beat of the vibration
was lulling. Dane had to fight to keep awake, using an old trick of
recalling in detail one tape after another in the “Rules of
Stores” he had made his study during the voyage out. If only
he were back in Van Rycke’s cubby now, safely engrossed in
his studies, with nothing more exciting than a sharp piece of
bargaining to look forward to in the morning!
A whistle, low, yet penetrating, reached their ears from the
depths. That was Rip, about to set out on his risky venture. Dane
held his glasses to his eyes, though he knew very well that he
could not follow the other’s progress through the dark.
The rest of the hours seemed days long. Dane watched the beacon
with a single-minded intensity which made his eyes ache. But there
was no change. He felt Mura shift beside him, fumbling in the dark
and a faint glow told him that beneath the shelter of tunic hem the
other was consulting his watch.
“How long?”
“He has been out four hours—”
Four hours! It wouldn’t take a man four hours to reach the
Queen from here. Even if he had to detour and hide out at intervals
to escape the sentries. It looked very much as if that twenty
percent which Mura had mentioned as standing against the success of
Rip’s mission was indeed the part to be dealt with now.
EVEN AFTER HE had the glasses focused he could not be sure that
he saw more than just one strangely shaped vehicle and the two men
by it. To Dane’s angle of sight the party appeared to be
fully exposed to those in the Queen. And he wondered why the
Traders had not attacked—if this was the enemy.
“Right out in the open—” he said aloud. But
Rip was not so sure.
“I don’t think so. There’s a ridge there.
Visibility’s poor now, but it would show in sunlight. With a
stun rifle—”
Yes, with a stun rifle, and this elevation to aid him, a man
might pick off those foreshortened figures—even with the
range as great as it was. Unfortunately their full armament now
consisted of only short range weapons—the close-to-innocuous
sleep ray rods, and the blasters—potent enough, but only for
in-fighting.
“Might as well wish for a bopper while you’re about
it,” Dane commented.
Both flitters had disappeared from the landing place near the
ship. He supposed they had been warped in for safety. Now he swept
the ground slowly, trying to pick out any shape which did not seem
natural. And within five minutes he was sure he had pinpointed at
least as many posts of two or three watchers staked out in an
irregular circle about the ship. Four of the groups had
transportation—machines which resembled their own crawlers to
some degree but were narrower and longer, as if they had been
designed to negotiate the valleys of this planet.
“Speaking of boppers,” Rip’s voice startled
Dane because of its tenseness, “What’s that? Over
there—”
Dane’s glasses obediently turned west.
“Where?”
”See that rock that looks a little like a hoobat’s
head—to the left of that.”
Dane searched for a rock suggesting Captain Jellico’s pet
monstrosity. He finally found it. To the left—now—yes!
A straight barrel. Was that—could that be the barrel of a
portable bopper, wheeled into a position which commanded the ship,
from which it could drop its deadly little eggs right under her
fins?
A bopper couldn’t begin to make any impression on a sealed
ship, that was true. But it could and would bring sudden death to
those venturing out into the gas which burst from its easily
shattered ammunition. One had to take a bopper seriously.
“Space!” he spit out. “We must have strayed
into a darcon’s nest—”
“With the clawed one breathing down our necks into the
bargain,” agreed Rip. “Why doesn’t the Queen
lift? They could sit down anywhere and pick us up later. Why stay
here boxed in?”
“Do you not think?” asked Mura, “that perhaps
the odd behaviour of our ship may have something to do with the
wrecks? That maybe if the Queen takes to the air she might become
as they are?”
“I’m no engineer,” Dane said, “but I
don’t see how they could bring her down. They haven’t
any big stuff lined up out there. It’d take a maul to push
her off course—”
“Did you see any signs of an attack by a maul on the
Rimbold? There were none. She crashed as if she were drawn to this
planet by some force she could not resist. Those who wait down
there may have the secret of such a force. It could be that they
rule not only the surface of Limbo, but some portion of the heavens
above—”
“You think that the installation is a part of it?”
Rip inquired.
“Who knows?” the steward’s quiet voice
continued.”It might well be.” He was watching the plain
through his own glasses. “I would like to slip down there
after nightfall and prowl about. If we could have a quiet and
informative talk with one of those sentries—”
Mura’s tone did not change, he was his usual placid,
un-excited self. But Dane knew that the last person he would care
to change places with at that particular moment was one of the
sentries Mura wished to “talk”.
“Hmmm—” Rip was studying the terrain.
“It might be done at that. Or a man could get to the Queen
and find out what this was all about—”
“You don’t think we could reach them by com?”
suggested Dane. “We’re close enough for a clear
reception.”
“Notice those helmets on the sentries’ heads?”
Rip pointed out. “I’ll bet you earth-side pay that
they’re linked up on our frequency now. If we talk
they’ll listen—not only listen but get a fix on us. And
they know this ground better than we do. Would you like to play
hide and seek across this country in the dark?”
Dane decidedly would not. But it was difficult to relinquish
using the coms. So easy to just call and find out what might take
hours and hours of spying and risk to discover by themselves. Only,
as the Masters had dinned into them for years back in the Pool,
there were few easy short cuts in Trade. It was a matter of using
your wits from first to last, of being able to improvise on the
spur of the moment such dodges as would save your profit, your ship
or your skin. And the last two precious articles appeared to be at
stake on this occasion.
“At least,” Rip was continuing, “we are sure
now that more than Rich and his hand-picked boys are
involved.”
“Yes,” Mura nodded, “it would seem that the
forces ranged against us are numerically stronger.” His
glasses coursed from one group of hidden men to the next, until he
had made the complete circle concealed from those aboard the Queen.
“There are perhaps fifteen out there.”
“To say nothing of reinforcements they may have back in
the mountains. But who in the Black Reaches of Outer Space are
they?” Rip asked of the air about them.
“Something is about to happen,” Mura stiffened, his
attention settling on one spot.
Dane followed the steward’s lead. The other was right.
One of the besiegers had walked boldly out of cover and now
approached the ship, waving vigorously over his head the age-old
sign for parley—a strip of white cloth.
For a moment or two it appeared as if the Queen was not going to
answer that. And then the hatch opened far above the surface of the
ground. No ramp was lowered. Instead a figure paused in the opening
and Dane recognized Captain Jellico.
The bearer of the white flag hesitated some distance away.
Though the watchers could not see too clearly in the growing dusk,
they could hear, for a voice crackled in their helmet phones, thus
proving Rip right—the coms of the raiders were on the same
band as their own.
“Thought it over, Captain? Ready to be
sensible?”
“Is that all you want to know?” Jellico’s
rasp could not be mistaken. “I gave you my decision last
night.”
“You can sit here until you starve, Captain. Just try to
get off-world—”
“If we can’t get off—neither can you get
in!”
“And there he speaks the truth,” Mura observed.
“Nothing they have down there is capable of forcing an
entrance to the Queen. And if they are able to smash her—she
will be of no use to them.”
“You think that that is what they are after—the
Queen?” hazarded Dane.
Rip snorted. “That’s obvious. They don’t want
her to lift—they have a use for her. I’ll bet that
Rich brought us here just to get the Queen.”
“There is the matter of supplies, Captain,” the
besieger’s voice purred in their earphones. “We can
afford to sit here half a year if it is necessary—you cannot!
Come, do not be so childish. We have offered you a fair deal all
round. And you have been caught in a pinch, have you not? Your
ready funds went at the auction when you bought trading rights
here. Well, we are offering you better than trading rights. And we
have the patience to sit it out.”
But, if the speaker had the patience he vaunted, one of his fellows did not. Through the air came the crack of a stun rifle.
Jellico either ducked or fell back into the ship and the hatch was
dapped to. The three Traders on the cliff sat very still. It
appeared that the man with the flag had not expected that move on
the part of his own side. He stayed where he was for a moment
before he dropped the treacherous strip of white and dived for the
cover of an outcrop, from which point he squirmed back to his
original post.
“That was not planned,” remarked Mura.
“Someone was a fraction impatient. He will suffer for his
zeal—since he has just put an end to the chance of future
negotiation.”
“Do you think the Captain was hurt?” Dane asked.
“The old man knows all the tricks,” Rip did not seem
worried. “I’d say he got out in a hurry. But now
they’ll have to starve him into surrender. That shot is not
going to get our men to come out with their hands
up—”
“Meanwhile,” Mura dropped his glasses to his knee,
“there is the little matter of our own action. We might be
able to slip through those lines in the dark, but with the ship
sealed, how can we get in? They are not going to lower a line at
the first hail out of the night. Not now.”
Dane gazed across the rough ground which lay between the heights
on which he perched and the distant ship. Yes, it might be simple
to avoid the sentry post of the besiegers, they would be more
intent on the ship than on the territory behind their own lines.
Maybe they did not even know that some of the Queen’s crew
had escaped their trap. But, having reached the ship, how could one
get on board?
“A problem, a problem,” Mura murmured.
“Aren’t we on a level with the control section
here?” Rip asked suddenly. “Maybe we could rig up some
kind of a signal to let them know we were sending someone
in—”
Dane was willing to try. He squinted along the line from where
he sat to the nose of the ship.
“It will have to be done very soon,” Mura warned.
“Night is coming fast.”
Rip looked up at the sky. The sun of the morning had long since vanished. Leaden clouds hung over them. And it was clearly
twilight.
“Suppose we made a shelter—maybe out of our
tunics—and lit a torch in it. The range of the light would
be limited at the sides—it could not be seen from below. But
those on the Queen might catch it—”
The steward’s answer was to unbuckle his equipment belt
and pull at the seal latch of his tunic. Dane hurriedly followed
his example. Then they crouched shivering in the cold, holding
their tunics as side screens, while Rip squatted between, flashing
his torch on and off in the distress signal of the Trading code. It
was such a slim chance, someone would have to be in the control
cabin watching at just the right angle to catch that click, click,
click of light—a mere pinprick of radiance.
Then the night beacon of the Queen flashed on, striking up into
the grey sky as it had fought the fog a day earlier. Only now it
lit the surrounding clouds. And as the three on the cliff watched,
hoping to read in this some reply to their improvised com, the
yellowish beam took on a ruddier tinge.
Mura sighed with relief. “They have read
us—”
“How do you know?” Dane could see nothing to lead
the steward to believe that.
“They had switched on the storm ray. See, now it fades
once more. But they read us!” He was smiling as he donned his
tunic. “I would suggest that we compose a proper message
among us and also inform Wilcox of this development. If we can
communicate with the Queen, even if she cannot with us, something
may be done to our advantage after all.”
So they went down to the crawler. It did not take long to relay
the news.
“But they cannot answer us,” Wilcox put his finger
on the weakness of the whole set up. “They wouldn’t
have used the storm ray if they had had any other means of letting
us know they read you—”
“We’ll have to send someone in. Now we can signal
that he is coming and they will be waiting to take him
aboard,” Rip said eagerly.
Wilcox’s manner suggested that he did not wholly agree
with that plan. But though they discussed it point by point, there
did not seem to be any other solution.
Mura got to his feet, “The dark is coming fast. We must
decide upon a plan at once, for the climb to our signal post is not
one to be taken when it cannot be seen. Who is to go and when?
That much we can send in code—”
“Shannon,” Wilcox singled out the
astrogator-apprentice, “this is the time those cat’s
eyes of yours will come in handy. You can see as much in the dark
as Sinbad—or you seemed to that time on Baldur. Want to try
to make it at, say,” he consulted his watch,
“twenty-one hours? That will give our playmates on the sentry
posts time to settle down.”
Rip’s beaming face was answer enough. And he was humming
as the three once more ascended the rock and took over the task of
sending the message.
“You will add,” Mura remarked, “that your safe
arrival is to be signalled back to us with the storm ray. We would
like to rejoice in your success.”
“Sure, man. But I’m not worrying,” Rip’s
natural buoyancy was returning for the first time since he had made
that horrible discovery in the wrecked Rimbold. “This is a
stroll compared to that job we had on Baldur.”
Mura looked grave. “Never underestimate what may stand
against you. You are experienced enough in Trade to remember that,
Rip. This is no time to take unnecessary chances—”
“Not me, man! I’ll be as silent and slippery as a
snake out there. They will never know I passed by.”
Once again the steward and Dane shed their tunics and shivered
in the damp cold as Rip flashed the news of his mission across to
the silent, sealed ship. There was no answer but they were certain
that after their first essay at communication there had been a
watcher stationed to wait for a second message.
It was arranged that Mura and Dane were to bed down on the
heights while Rip went back to the crawler and waited to set out
from there. When the astrogator-apprentice disappeared below, Dane
moved rocks to provide them with a windbreak.
They had no source of warmth but their nearness to each other,
so they crouched together in the pocket Dane had devised with
nothing to do but wait out the hours until the signal came that Rip
had reached his goal.
“Lighting up,” Mura murmured.
The beam from the Queen still beaconed in the night. But what
Mura referred to were the sparks of fire which marked the fixed
posts of the unknown sentries.
“Make it easier for Rip—he’ll be able to avoid
them,” ventured Dane but his companion disagreed.
“They will be alert for trouble. Probably they have beats
linking each of those with the rest and are doing sentry-go along
them.”
“You mean—they guess that we are here—that
they are only waiting for Rip to come along—”
“That may or may not be true. But they are, of course,
alert for a move from the men in the Queen. Tell me, Thorson, are
you not now aware of something more? Can you not feel it through
this rock?”
Of course he could. That beat of the installation, less heavy
than it had been near the ruins, but faithful in its pattern. And
now there was no fluctuation in its power as the long minutes
dragged wearily by. It was running steadily at full strength.
“That,” Mura continued, “is what ties the
Queen to this earth—”
The jig-saw bits of what they had learned during the past two
days were beginning to fit into a picture. Suppose these strangers
who had enmeshed the Queen for some purpose of their own, did
control a means of crashing her if she tried to lift from Limbo?
It would be necessary to keep that installation, energy
broadcaster, beam, or whatever it was, working all the time or the
ship would make a sneak escape. Those in her must be fitting the
pieces together, too—even if they did not yet know the
Sargasso properties of Limbo.
“Then the only way to get out of here,” said Dane
slowly, “is to find the source of power and—”
“Smash it? Yes. If Rip makes contact—then we must
move to that end.”
”You say ‘if Rip makes contact’. Don’t
you think he’s going to?”
“You are very young in the Service, Thorson. After some
voyages a man becomes very humble. He begins to realize that the
quality we name on Terra ‘luck’ has much to do with
success or failure. We can never honestly say that this or that
plan of action will come to fruition in the manner we hope, there
are too many governing factors over which we have no control. We do
not count on any fact until it is an established reality. Shannon
has many of the odds on his side. He has unusually keen night
sight, a fact we discovered on a similar situation not long ago, he
is used to field work, he is not easily confused. And from here he
has had a chance to study the territory and the positions of the
enemy. The odds are perhaps eighty percent in his favour. But there
remains that twenty percent. He must be ready and we must be ready
to prepare for other moves—until we see the beacon signal
that he has made it.”
Mura’s emotionless voice unsettled Dane. It had the old
illusion-pricking touch of Kamil, refined, made even more pointed
and cutting. Kamil! Where was Ali? Being held by some of those now
ranged about the Queen? Or had he been taken on to the mysterious
source of power?
“What do you suppose they did with Kamil?” Dane
asked aloud.
“He represents to them a source of information about us
and our concerns. As such they would see that he reaches the
guiding brain behind all this. And he will be safe—just as
long as they have a use for him—”
But there was something vaguely sinister in that answer—a
hint twisting Dane’s memory to a scene he did not like to
recall.
“Those men on the Rimbold—Was Rip right? Had they
been blasted?”
“He was right.” The three words were unaccented by
any emotion, and the very gentleness of the reply made it the more
forceful.
They talked very little after that, and only moved about when
the warning stiffness of arm or leg made it necessary. On the plain the beacon continued to point starward from ship without
change.
In spite of the cold and the cramp, the beat of the vibration
was lulling. Dane had to fight to keep awake, using an old trick of
recalling in detail one tape after another in the “Rules of
Stores” he had made his study during the voyage out. If only
he were back in Van Rycke’s cubby now, safely engrossed in
his studies, with nothing more exciting than a sharp piece of
bargaining to look forward to in the morning!
A whistle, low, yet penetrating, reached their ears from the
depths. That was Rip, about to set out on his risky venture. Dane
held his glasses to his eyes, though he knew very well that he
could not follow the other’s progress through the dark.
The rest of the hours seemed days long. Dane watched the beacon
with a single-minded intensity which made his eyes ache. But there
was no change. He felt Mura shift beside him, fumbling in the dark
and a faint glow told him that beneath the shelter of tunic hem the
other was consulting his watch.
“How long?”
“He has been out four hours—”
Four hours! It wouldn’t take a man four hours to reach the
Queen from here. Even if he had to detour and hide out at intervals
to escape the sentries. It looked very much as if that twenty
percent which Mura had mentioned as standing against the success of
Rip’s mission was indeed the part to be dealt with now.