“The tape record.” Dane spoke his
first thought aloud.
“The only one of your possessions that stranger did not
bring with him,” Jellico replied.
“And the box?”
“Not here. It might only have been bait.”
Somehow Dane did not believe that. The woman’s actions, as
he remembered them, argued otherwise. Or had they been meant to
center his attention wholly on the shipment so he would be
unprepared for her attack?
He knew that those crowded into the small sick bay had heard
every detail of what he had relived. The probe not only broadcast
but also taped it for the record while he was under, so all the few
facts were plain.
“How did I get from the Deneb to the inn?” he
wondered. There was something else, a small teasing memory of a
face so fleetingly seen that he could not be sure. Had or had he
not sighted in the outer room of the inn as he staggered out the
man who had sat so silently when he had been struck down? He could
not be sure.
“They could have carried you in as a drunk,” Ali
remarked. “Would be common enough in off-port. And I take it
you did not stop to make inquiries when you left.”
“Had to get back to the ship,” Dane returned. He was
thinking of the box that had seemed so important to the woman. It
had not been large, small enough, in fact, to hide. But they had
searched the treasure room, his cabin—
“The box—”
Captain Jellico stood up. “About so big, wasn’t
it?” He sketched dimensions in the air.
Dane agreed.
“All right. We’ll hunt it.”
Though he longed to join in that search, Dane was now tied to the bunk by his own weakness. The secondary shot Tau had
given him was wearing off. He was suddenly so sleepy that he could
not fight the drowsiness. But he knew that any search the captain
organized would be down to the very plates that made up the
Queen.
And the search, thorough though it was, revealed nothing, as
Dane discovered when he roused, feeling much more himself than he
had since leaving the Deneb. They had a dead man in deep freeze and
nothing else, save the probe tape, which Captain Jellico played
over again until Dane loathed hearing it, always hoping for some
small new detail. There was only one thing to add to that account,
the chance that the man in the inn who had witnessed his leaving
had been also in the Deneb.
“If that was true, he must have had a shock,” the
captain mused. “But it was too late for him to change their
plans then. And we can’t do any more until we get to the
local Patrol post on Trewsworld. I’ll take word-oath that
there is no box hidden where we looked.”
“That woman,” the com-tech, Tang Ya, said between
sips of Terran coffee in the mess cabin where Dane had gone on his
first excursion out of sick bay, “she was alien. I’ve
been wondering—” From the inner pocket of his tunic, he
pulled a sketch block. In sharp, set lines on it a figure was
boldly presented. He put it before Dane. “Look like
her?”
Dane was startled. As with all the crew, Tang Ya had his hobby
to relieve the tedium of long voyages. But to Dane’s
knowledge, it was the creation of miniature electronic devices,
toys. He had not known the Martian com-tech was also an artist, or
enough of one to produce the picture he now saw.
He studied it critically, not for the skill of the work but for
likeness to face and figure of his memory.
“The face—it was narrower at the chin; the
eyes—they seemed to slant more, unless the mask made them
just seem so.”
Ya took up the block, pressed a small indentation on its rim,
and the lines Dane thought set altered into the shape he had
suggested.
“Yes!” But he was still amazed at the
alteration.
The com-tech again laid the block on the table, sliding it along
to Captain Jellico, who studied it for a long moment before he in
turn passed it to Tau, and from the medic it went to Steen Wilcox. The astrogator picked it up and held it
closer to the light.
“Sitllith—”
The word meant nothing to Dane but apparently did to the
Captain, for he almost snatched the plaque back from his
second-in-command to give it a second intent examination.
“You’re sure?”
“Sitllith!” Wilcox was certain. “But it
doesn’t fit.”
“No,” Jellico agreed angrily.
“Just what is Sitllith—or who?” Tau asked.
“What and who both,” replied Wilcox.
“Alien-humanoid, but really alien to the
tenth—”
Dane started, leaning forward to view the picture where it lay
before the captain. Alien to the tenth! Xenobiology was a required
study for cargo masters, as it was on them that first contact for
trade with alien races often rested. Their study of alien customs,
desires, and personality factors never ended, but he had never
believed that so humanoid a form could contain so alien a
personality as Wilcox had stated. It was rather like saying that a
Terran snake’s identity went about clad in flesh and bones
such as his own.
“But she—she talked rationally. She—she was
very humanoid—” he protested.
“She also poisoned you,” the astrogator replied
dryly. “Not with any concoction smeared on her nail either.
That was from a gland in her finger! As to how she could appear so
close to the human norm, I don’t know that. Conditioning
might have something to do with it. But a Sitllith on Xecho! They
are thought to be planet-bound, to have so great a fear of the open
that any attempt to rise from the surface of their world brings
about self-death—they frighten themselves to death. Their
world is infrared light, so we don’t visit them much. I saw
just one, in deep freeze back at a lab on Barbarrossa. And it was
immature. Its poison sack was empty. It had gone after a Survey
scout and stowed away in his ship when he lifted. When it found it
was in space”—Wilcox shrugged—“that was
the end. He brought it back in deep freeze. But you had an adult,
operating off her own world, and I would have sworn that was
impossible.”
“Nothing is impossible,” Tau said. He was right, as
all spacemen knew. What would be wildly impossible, improbable, not to be believed on one world, might prove commonplace
on another planet. Wild nightmares on Terra were upright and worthy
citizens (if not by Terran standards) on alien soil. Customs so
bizarre as to be unbelievable became ritual by law elsewhere. So,
long ago spacemen, and even more Free Traders, who hunted the
lesser known and newly opened planets, had come to believe
anything, no matter how incredible it might seem to the
planet-bound.
Jellico picked up the sketch again. “This can be fixed to
stay?” he asked the astrogator.
“Press in the middle—then the impression will be
locked until you wish to release it.”
“We have a dead man, a mask”—Wilcox set down
his empty mug—“an alien supposed to be planet-bound but
appearing parsecs from its or her native world, a box that has
vanished, and a cargo master back from the dead—and no
solution so far. Unless we can find a hint or two before we
planet—”
“We have something else.” Frank Mura stood in the
doorway. Though he spoke in his usual quiet tone, there was
something in his voice that drew their attention. “We have
two missing brachs.”
“What in the—!” Jellico was on his feet.
Because his main interest was that of a xenobiologist, he had spent
time observing the animals from Xecho, even taking them to his
cabin on occasion for freedom from their cage. Since Queex, the
hideous hoobat whose cage hung there, objected so strenuously to
their coming that Jellico’s usual method of quieting the
parrot-crab-toad, that of a smart blow on the floor of its cage to
jar it into silence had not sufficed, he had had to transfer Queex
elsewhere for the duration of the brachs’ visit.
“But the cage lock,” he added to his first
protest.
Mura extended a hand. Between his fingers was a thin wire,
twisted at one end. “This was in that,” he stated.
“By the Seven Names of Trutex!” Ali took the bit of
wire and held it up, twirling it between thumb and finger. “A
pick-lock!”
“It was pulled,” Mura continued, “from the
netting—inside the cage.”
He certainly had all their attention now. Twisted from
inside the cage? But that must mean—Dane’s
earlier complacent acceptance of the impossible when it dealt with Sitlliths
balked at accepting this particular revelation. Inside the cage
meant that the brachs had twisted it free. But the brachs were
animals, and not particularly bright animals at that. If he
remembered rightly, and he should, for that rating was part of the
invoices, they did not rank as high on the learning scale as
Sinbad, who was now sitting in the far corner of the mess cabin
industriously washing his face.
“Let me see that!” Jellico took the wire and studied
it with the same concentration he had given to the picture
“Broken off—and, yes, it is a pick-lock.”
“The brachs,” Mura repeated, “are
missing.”
They could not be in the holds, Dane thought. Those were sealed.
That left the engine room, the sick bay, their personal cabins, the
control section, and a few other places, none of which could afford
much protection for two escaped animals, while the intense search
earlier for the box had certainly acquainted the crew with every
possible space.
Now they had another hunt. Two animals, perhaps frightened, and
with the female pregnant, so that she should not be alarmed, must
be handled with more caution. Jellico set up a search party
consisting only of those who had had contact with the brachs, since
strangers might only send them into some desperate and damaging
flight. He called instructions to Stotz in the engine room and
ordered the engineer, the two tube men, Kosti and Weeks, together
with Ali, who was to return there forthwith, to stay put until
their section of the ship was declared empty of brachs.
Wilcox and Ya were to join Shannon on watch duty at the
controls, search that section, and seal themselves in and any
wandering brach out, leaving the actual search to Dane, Tau, Mura,
and the captain, who had petted, fed, and cared for the live cargo.
As an added precaution, Sinbad was shut up in the galley.
When the engine room and the control cabin both reported crew
in, brachs not present, the other four began. Dane made his way
down to the cargo level, but the seals there were intact. There was
no way they could have gotten into the holds. The thought of the
pick-lock still bothered him. How had the brachs done that? Or had
they? Was it only meant to seem that they had freed themselves? But
no member of the crew would play such a senseless prank. And the stranger was dead, in a freeze compartment. Dane’s
imagination suggested a very macabre explanation, and he found
himself turning almost against his will to a side passage, to
another compartment door. That, too, was sealed, and he knew with
relief that that wild speculation was truly impossible. The dead
did not come to life and walk again.
There now remained the personal cabins, those of the engineering
staff first. None of them were luxuriously furnished, and their
cramped compactness meant that the men who lived in them were
forced into meticulous neatness if they were not already that way
by habit. There were no lockers, no storage compartments open. He
went into each and inspected any possible hiding place, and those
of the right size were very few. Each fresher, though the door
might be firmly shut, was opened. There was nothing.
Next level up—Van Ryke’s combined living quarters
and office. Dane stepped inside. Nothing here. Not for the first
time since this began, he wished that its usual inhabitant was on
board now. They needed Van Ryke. The cargo master’s years of
experience in all the mazes of trade and alien dealing were, for
Dane, the best preparation for solving what had happened now.
The treasure hold across from the cargo master’s quarters—seal safely intact, just as he had left it. Next
level—junior officers’ quarters, Rip’s cabin
facing his, the hydro garden, the galley, Mura’s section.
This was to be the extent of his own exploration, and not all of
it, as Mura would cover his quarters and the hydro. Dane had only
his cabin and Rip’s.
He took Rip’s first—all in order—then his own.
As he opened the door, only a fraction of off aim saved him. A stun
beam clicked along above his ear, sending him reeling back into the
corridor. He managed to push shut the slide door and leaned there,
holding his spinning head, trying to think coherently.
Someone—something—inside was armed with a stunner and
had tried to down him when he entered. Had there been another
intruder beside the dead man? That was the only possible
explanation. He lurched along to the nearest com mike and thumbed
the red alert.
“What—?” Wilcox’s voice demanded, but it
sounded very faint and far away as if the jolt that had brushed
Dane had left him partially deaf.
“Someone—my cabin—stunner—” He got
out the warning. He was watching the door, though he was not sure
how, unarmed, he could prevent that other from leaving if he wanted
to.
But if the intruder in Dane’s cabin realized he had the
advantage, he did not try to use it to force his way out. The
Terran tried to think of where any stowaway might have hidden. The
interior of the flitter maybe—though to take the acceleration
of lift-off, plus the wrench of translation into hyper, without any
safeguards would knock most men out. Of course, this might not be a
human at all.
There was a clatter on the ladder as Jellico swung down. And
Frank Mura came at the same moment from the hydro. Tau followed the
captain. The medic went at once to Dane.
“Clipped me with a stunner,” he explained.
“Still in there?” Jellico looked to the cabin.
“Yes.”
“All right. Tau, how about sleep gas through the air
duct?”
The medic pushed Dane closer to the wall with an order of
“Stay put!” and then climbed back to his lab on the
next level. He returned with a small container and a length of
tubing, which he handed over to the captain. “All
ready.”
“Did you see who it was?” Tau asked as the captain
stepped into Rip’s cabin and began unscrewing the mesh
protector over the air duct.
“No. All happened too fast. After he clipped me, I
couldn’t see straight, anyway. But where could a stowaway
have been—in the flitter?”
“Through lift-off? Well, maybe,” Tau conceded,
“if he were really tough. But into hyper—I doubt it,
unless he took the jump in Shannon’s bunk. Shannon was on
duty, and the dead man was in yours—”
They could see Jellico through the open door, inserting the
tubing, pushing it along with care as he stood on Rip’s bunk,
his shoulders hunched, concentrating on what he could see of the
tube’s reptilian passage until it reached the grill of
Dane’s quarters. Then he made more delicate movements, and
Dan guessed he was maneuvering the end of the tube to strike
against the grill so that the released gas would go directly into
the closed cabin.
“Now!” His grip tightened on the small container in
one hand, while with the other he held the mask Tau handed him over his own nose and mouth against any back draft from the
tube. The wait for the container to be emptied seemed endless to
Dane. He was shaking off the effects of the stunner touch. Finally
Jellico pulled back the tube and dropped to the deck.
“If whoever is in there breathes,” he said with dour
satisfaction, “he’s out now.”
That statement sounded odd to Dane, almost as if the captain
might share that monstrous suspicion about the dead returned to
life again.
Dane reached the door first. It was not locked from the inside
but gave easily, so they could see in, the masks supplied by Tau
now in use by them all, while the medic was using a sucker to draw
the fumes out of the air.
Dane so fully expected to see a man that for a second or two he
was disconcerted when he sighted nothing of the kind. What lay on
the floor of the cabin, one forepaw still resting on the stunner,
was the male brach, while curled on the bunk lay the female. And
both were unconscious.
“The brachs!” Dane went down on one knee and touched
the feathery covering of the male before he believed it true. But
it was the brach. There was no one else here. The animal had used
the stunner with the intelligence of a man brought to bay. Dane
glanced at the captain and for the first time in his service aboard
the Queen saw Jellico startled out of his usual
impassivity.
But Tau had crowded past Dane and was bending over the female
brach to make a quick examination.
“She’s in labor. Let me through!” He gathered
up the limp animal and stepped over the inert male.
“What about it?” Dane looked from the captain to
Mura and back to the male brach. “It—it must have used
the stunner. But—”
“A trained brach?” suggested the steward.
“Conditioned perhaps to use a weapon under certain
circumstances?”
“Maybe,” Jellico conceded. “But I don’t
know. Frank, can you make that cage break-proof?”
“Put a chain on, rig an alarm—” Mura listed
the possibilities. He came forward to lean over and stare down at
the sleeping animal. Dane picked up the stunner and thrust it into
the nearest compartment, which he slammed shut.
“An animal,” Mura said. “I swear it
is—was—an animal. I have seen brachs. These acted no differently. Why, when I
filled their feed bin—” He paused, a slight frown
drawing his black brows closer together.
“You filled their feed bin and what happened?” the
captain wanted to know.
“This one, the male, watched me latch it. Then he reached
through the bars and shook the fastenings. I thought he only wanted
more of the renton leaves, and I gave him some. But now I think he
was trying the door lock.”
“Well, let’s get him back in the cage before he
wakes up,” Jellico said. “And use the chain and the
alarm, Mura. We might set a video on and hook it to general screen
cast as a precaution. I want a record of what happens when he wakes
up.”
Mura lifted the brach and carried it back to the cage. Both
Jellico and Dane watched him take the precautions that had been
suggested. Then Ya was called to rig the video so that they could
keep the animal under watch as if he were a suspect in a cell, a
snooper on him.
“Who is responsible for this shipment?” Jellico
turned to Dane.
“The Norax lab. All the papers are correct. They are to be
sent through to the Simplex people on Trewsworld—authorized
project by Council permission.”
“Nothing about mutants?”
“No, sir. Perfectly ordinary listing. It had all the
proper notations, and the Norax people themselves sent a tech with
the cage. He set it up and brought in the food and a diet list for
Mura.”
“He set up the cage,” repeated Jellico thoughtfully.
The captain raised his hand and set it against the wall above the
cage. “Did he pick this particular spot?”
Dane tried to remember. The tech had come on board with two men
carrying the cage. Had he picked the place? No, not exactly, and
Mura had the answer.
“No, sir. I said here—easier to keep an eye on the
animals. But I don’t understand. The female—she had a
month yet to go. The kits were to be born on Trewsworld.”
Captain Jellico slapped the bulkhead behind the cage almost as
if he were testing its solid substance.
“Treasure hold below right here,” he said. But Dane
could see no connection between that and the weird behavior of a pair of brachs—other than that this whole voyage was one
mystery after another.
Jellico did not explain. Instead, he hunkered down and asked
Mura to explain the details of the fastening. Then Ya came to set
up the improvised snooper, which, to Dane’s mystification,
the captain insisted be concealed from the inhabitant of the cage
so that, when the brach awoke, he would not know he was under
observation, as if the animal was now a criminal suspect.
All arranged to his satisfaction, Jellico gave a final order to
leave the animal alone and for all of them to keep away as much as
possible from the cage. Dane, after giving a last look at the
peacefully sleeping creature, which, even now, he could hardly
believe tried to beam him with his own weapon, went back to his
cabin, stretched on his bunk, and tried vainly to make sense of
what had happened. He had been through crises before on the
Queen, but never had there been so inexplicable a series
of happenings. Animals that acted with intelligence, a dead man
wearing his face, the alien woman—it was as fantastic as a
tridee story tape.
Video—what did the captain expect to pick up by the
snooper? What of Mura’s suggestion that the brach had been
conditioned to attack a man? That such a thing was possible was not
beyond the bounds of possibility.
Dane rolled off the bunk and went to look up the record of the
brach shipment. It was very straightforward, just as he
remembered—two brachs, male and female, consigned from the
Norax lab on Xecho to the Simplex Ag station on Trewsworld. He had
every permit filled out correctly, and unless someone had spent a
fortune for forgeries, it was as it should be.
Nevertheless, he pulled out that tape and ran it through for
duplication. He had just finished when the com gave an alerting
whistle.
“Screen,” came Jellico’s voice. Dane reached
up and triggered the small video screen.
“The tape record.” Dane spoke his
first thought aloud.
“The only one of your possessions that stranger did not
bring with him,” Jellico replied.
“And the box?”
“Not here. It might only have been bait.”
Somehow Dane did not believe that. The woman’s actions, as
he remembered them, argued otherwise. Or had they been meant to
center his attention wholly on the shipment so he would be
unprepared for her attack?
He knew that those crowded into the small sick bay had heard
every detail of what he had relived. The probe not only broadcast
but also taped it for the record while he was under, so all the few
facts were plain.
“How did I get from the Deneb to the inn?” he
wondered. There was something else, a small teasing memory of a
face so fleetingly seen that he could not be sure. Had or had he
not sighted in the outer room of the inn as he staggered out the
man who had sat so silently when he had been struck down? He could
not be sure.
“They could have carried you in as a drunk,” Ali
remarked. “Would be common enough in off-port. And I take it
you did not stop to make inquiries when you left.”
“Had to get back to the ship,” Dane returned. He was
thinking of the box that had seemed so important to the woman. It
had not been large, small enough, in fact, to hide. But they had
searched the treasure room, his cabin—
“The box—”
Captain Jellico stood up. “About so big, wasn’t
it?” He sketched dimensions in the air.
Dane agreed.
“All right. We’ll hunt it.”
Though he longed to join in that search, Dane was now tied to the bunk by his own weakness. The secondary shot Tau had
given him was wearing off. He was suddenly so sleepy that he could
not fight the drowsiness. But he knew that any search the captain
organized would be down to the very plates that made up the
Queen.
And the search, thorough though it was, revealed nothing, as
Dane discovered when he roused, feeling much more himself than he
had since leaving the Deneb. They had a dead man in deep freeze and
nothing else, save the probe tape, which Captain Jellico played
over again until Dane loathed hearing it, always hoping for some
small new detail. There was only one thing to add to that account,
the chance that the man in the inn who had witnessed his leaving
had been also in the Deneb.
“If that was true, he must have had a shock,” the
captain mused. “But it was too late for him to change their
plans then. And we can’t do any more until we get to the
local Patrol post on Trewsworld. I’ll take word-oath that
there is no box hidden where we looked.”
“That woman,” the com-tech, Tang Ya, said between
sips of Terran coffee in the mess cabin where Dane had gone on his
first excursion out of sick bay, “she was alien. I’ve
been wondering—” From the inner pocket of his tunic, he
pulled a sketch block. In sharp, set lines on it a figure was
boldly presented. He put it before Dane. “Look like
her?”
Dane was startled. As with all the crew, Tang Ya had his hobby
to relieve the tedium of long voyages. But to Dane’s
knowledge, it was the creation of miniature electronic devices,
toys. He had not known the Martian com-tech was also an artist, or
enough of one to produce the picture he now saw.
He studied it critically, not for the skill of the work but for
likeness to face and figure of his memory.
“The face—it was narrower at the chin; the
eyes—they seemed to slant more, unless the mask made them
just seem so.”
Ya took up the block, pressed a small indentation on its rim,
and the lines Dane thought set altered into the shape he had
suggested.
“Yes!” But he was still amazed at the
alteration.
The com-tech again laid the block on the table, sliding it along
to Captain Jellico, who studied it for a long moment before he in
turn passed it to Tau, and from the medic it went to Steen Wilcox. The astrogator picked it up and held it
closer to the light.
“Sitllith—”
The word meant nothing to Dane but apparently did to the
Captain, for he almost snatched the plaque back from his
second-in-command to give it a second intent examination.
“You’re sure?”
“Sitllith!” Wilcox was certain. “But it
doesn’t fit.”
“No,” Jellico agreed angrily.
“Just what is Sitllith—or who?” Tau asked.
“What and who both,” replied Wilcox.
“Alien-humanoid, but really alien to the
tenth—”
Dane started, leaning forward to view the picture where it lay
before the captain. Alien to the tenth! Xenobiology was a required
study for cargo masters, as it was on them that first contact for
trade with alien races often rested. Their study of alien customs,
desires, and personality factors never ended, but he had never
believed that so humanoid a form could contain so alien a
personality as Wilcox had stated. It was rather like saying that a
Terran snake’s identity went about clad in flesh and bones
such as his own.
“But she—she talked rationally. She—she was
very humanoid—” he protested.
“She also poisoned you,” the astrogator replied
dryly. “Not with any concoction smeared on her nail either.
That was from a gland in her finger! As to how she could appear so
close to the human norm, I don’t know that. Conditioning
might have something to do with it. But a Sitllith on Xecho! They
are thought to be planet-bound, to have so great a fear of the open
that any attempt to rise from the surface of their world brings
about self-death—they frighten themselves to death. Their
world is infrared light, so we don’t visit them much. I saw
just one, in deep freeze back at a lab on Barbarrossa. And it was
immature. Its poison sack was empty. It had gone after a Survey
scout and stowed away in his ship when he lifted. When it found it
was in space”—Wilcox shrugged—“that was
the end. He brought it back in deep freeze. But you had an adult,
operating off her own world, and I would have sworn that was
impossible.”
“Nothing is impossible,” Tau said. He was right, as
all spacemen knew. What would be wildly impossible, improbable, not to be believed on one world, might prove commonplace
on another planet. Wild nightmares on Terra were upright and worthy
citizens (if not by Terran standards) on alien soil. Customs so
bizarre as to be unbelievable became ritual by law elsewhere. So,
long ago spacemen, and even more Free Traders, who hunted the
lesser known and newly opened planets, had come to believe
anything, no matter how incredible it might seem to the
planet-bound.
Jellico picked up the sketch again. “This can be fixed to
stay?” he asked the astrogator.
“Press in the middle—then the impression will be
locked until you wish to release it.”
“We have a dead man, a mask”—Wilcox set down
his empty mug—“an alien supposed to be planet-bound but
appearing parsecs from its or her native world, a box that has
vanished, and a cargo master back from the dead—and no
solution so far. Unless we can find a hint or two before we
planet—”
“We have something else.” Frank Mura stood in the
doorway. Though he spoke in his usual quiet tone, there was
something in his voice that drew their attention. “We have
two missing brachs.”
“What in the—!” Jellico was on his feet.
Because his main interest was that of a xenobiologist, he had spent
time observing the animals from Xecho, even taking them to his
cabin on occasion for freedom from their cage. Since Queex, the
hideous hoobat whose cage hung there, objected so strenuously to
their coming that Jellico’s usual method of quieting the
parrot-crab-toad, that of a smart blow on the floor of its cage to
jar it into silence had not sufficed, he had had to transfer Queex
elsewhere for the duration of the brachs’ visit.
“But the cage lock,” he added to his first
protest.
Mura extended a hand. Between his fingers was a thin wire,
twisted at one end. “This was in that,” he stated.
“By the Seven Names of Trutex!” Ali took the bit of
wire and held it up, twirling it between thumb and finger. “A
pick-lock!”
“It was pulled,” Mura continued, “from the
netting—inside the cage.”
He certainly had all their attention now. Twisted from
inside the cage? But that must mean—Dane’s
earlier complacent acceptance of the impossible when it dealt with Sitlliths
balked at accepting this particular revelation. Inside the cage
meant that the brachs had twisted it free. But the brachs were
animals, and not particularly bright animals at that. If he
remembered rightly, and he should, for that rating was part of the
invoices, they did not rank as high on the learning scale as
Sinbad, who was now sitting in the far corner of the mess cabin
industriously washing his face.
“Let me see that!” Jellico took the wire and studied
it with the same concentration he had given to the picture
“Broken off—and, yes, it is a pick-lock.”
“The brachs,” Mura repeated, “are
missing.”
They could not be in the holds, Dane thought. Those were sealed.
That left the engine room, the sick bay, their personal cabins, the
control section, and a few other places, none of which could afford
much protection for two escaped animals, while the intense search
earlier for the box had certainly acquainted the crew with every
possible space.
Now they had another hunt. Two animals, perhaps frightened, and
with the female pregnant, so that she should not be alarmed, must
be handled with more caution. Jellico set up a search party
consisting only of those who had had contact with the brachs, since
strangers might only send them into some desperate and damaging
flight. He called instructions to Stotz in the engine room and
ordered the engineer, the two tube men, Kosti and Weeks, together
with Ali, who was to return there forthwith, to stay put until
their section of the ship was declared empty of brachs.
Wilcox and Ya were to join Shannon on watch duty at the
controls, search that section, and seal themselves in and any
wandering brach out, leaving the actual search to Dane, Tau, Mura,
and the captain, who had petted, fed, and cared for the live cargo.
As an added precaution, Sinbad was shut up in the galley.
When the engine room and the control cabin both reported crew
in, brachs not present, the other four began. Dane made his way
down to the cargo level, but the seals there were intact. There was
no way they could have gotten into the holds. The thought of the
pick-lock still bothered him. How had the brachs done that? Or had
they? Was it only meant to seem that they had freed themselves? But
no member of the crew would play such a senseless prank. And the stranger was dead, in a freeze compartment. Dane’s
imagination suggested a very macabre explanation, and he found
himself turning almost against his will to a side passage, to
another compartment door. That, too, was sealed, and he knew with
relief that that wild speculation was truly impossible. The dead
did not come to life and walk again.
There now remained the personal cabins, those of the engineering
staff first. None of them were luxuriously furnished, and their
cramped compactness meant that the men who lived in them were
forced into meticulous neatness if they were not already that way
by habit. There were no lockers, no storage compartments open. He
went into each and inspected any possible hiding place, and those
of the right size were very few. Each fresher, though the door
might be firmly shut, was opened. There was nothing.
Next level up—Van Ryke’s combined living quarters
and office. Dane stepped inside. Nothing here. Not for the first
time since this began, he wished that its usual inhabitant was on
board now. They needed Van Ryke. The cargo master’s years of
experience in all the mazes of trade and alien dealing were, for
Dane, the best preparation for solving what had happened now.
The treasure hold across from the cargo master’s quarters—seal safely intact, just as he had left it. Next
level—junior officers’ quarters, Rip’s cabin
facing his, the hydro garden, the galley, Mura’s section.
This was to be the extent of his own exploration, and not all of
it, as Mura would cover his quarters and the hydro. Dane had only
his cabin and Rip’s.
He took Rip’s first—all in order—then his own.
As he opened the door, only a fraction of off aim saved him. A stun
beam clicked along above his ear, sending him reeling back into the
corridor. He managed to push shut the slide door and leaned there,
holding his spinning head, trying to think coherently.
Someone—something—inside was armed with a stunner and
had tried to down him when he entered. Had there been another
intruder beside the dead man? That was the only possible
explanation. He lurched along to the nearest com mike and thumbed
the red alert.
“What—?” Wilcox’s voice demanded, but it
sounded very faint and far away as if the jolt that had brushed
Dane had left him partially deaf.
“Someone—my cabin—stunner—” He got
out the warning. He was watching the door, though he was not sure
how, unarmed, he could prevent that other from leaving if he wanted
to.
But if the intruder in Dane’s cabin realized he had the
advantage, he did not try to use it to force his way out. The
Terran tried to think of where any stowaway might have hidden. The
interior of the flitter maybe—though to take the acceleration
of lift-off, plus the wrench of translation into hyper, without any
safeguards would knock most men out. Of course, this might not be a
human at all.
There was a clatter on the ladder as Jellico swung down. And
Frank Mura came at the same moment from the hydro. Tau followed the
captain. The medic went at once to Dane.
“Clipped me with a stunner,” he explained.
“Still in there?” Jellico looked to the cabin.
“Yes.”
“All right. Tau, how about sleep gas through the air
duct?”
The medic pushed Dane closer to the wall with an order of
“Stay put!” and then climbed back to his lab on the
next level. He returned with a small container and a length of
tubing, which he handed over to the captain. “All
ready.”
“Did you see who it was?” Tau asked as the captain
stepped into Rip’s cabin and began unscrewing the mesh
protector over the air duct.
“No. All happened too fast. After he clipped me, I
couldn’t see straight, anyway. But where could a stowaway
have been—in the flitter?”
“Through lift-off? Well, maybe,” Tau conceded,
“if he were really tough. But into hyper—I doubt it,
unless he took the jump in Shannon’s bunk. Shannon was on
duty, and the dead man was in yours—”
They could see Jellico through the open door, inserting the
tubing, pushing it along with care as he stood on Rip’s bunk,
his shoulders hunched, concentrating on what he could see of the
tube’s reptilian passage until it reached the grill of
Dane’s quarters. Then he made more delicate movements, and
Dan guessed he was maneuvering the end of the tube to strike
against the grill so that the released gas would go directly into
the closed cabin.
“Now!” His grip tightened on the small container in
one hand, while with the other he held the mask Tau handed him over his own nose and mouth against any back draft from the
tube. The wait for the container to be emptied seemed endless to
Dane. He was shaking off the effects of the stunner touch. Finally
Jellico pulled back the tube and dropped to the deck.
“If whoever is in there breathes,” he said with dour
satisfaction, “he’s out now.”
That statement sounded odd to Dane, almost as if the captain
might share that monstrous suspicion about the dead returned to
life again.
Dane reached the door first. It was not locked from the inside
but gave easily, so they could see in, the masks supplied by Tau
now in use by them all, while the medic was using a sucker to draw
the fumes out of the air.
Dane so fully expected to see a man that for a second or two he
was disconcerted when he sighted nothing of the kind. What lay on
the floor of the cabin, one forepaw still resting on the stunner,
was the male brach, while curled on the bunk lay the female. And
both were unconscious.
“The brachs!” Dane went down on one knee and touched
the feathery covering of the male before he believed it true. But
it was the brach. There was no one else here. The animal had used
the stunner with the intelligence of a man brought to bay. Dane
glanced at the captain and for the first time in his service aboard
the Queen saw Jellico startled out of his usual
impassivity.
But Tau had crowded past Dane and was bending over the female
brach to make a quick examination.
“She’s in labor. Let me through!” He gathered
up the limp animal and stepped over the inert male.
“What about it?” Dane looked from the captain to
Mura and back to the male brach. “It—it must have used
the stunner. But—”
“A trained brach?” suggested the steward.
“Conditioned perhaps to use a weapon under certain
circumstances?”
“Maybe,” Jellico conceded. “But I don’t
know. Frank, can you make that cage break-proof?”
“Put a chain on, rig an alarm—” Mura listed
the possibilities. He came forward to lean over and stare down at
the sleeping animal. Dane picked up the stunner and thrust it into
the nearest compartment, which he slammed shut.
“An animal,” Mura said. “I swear it
is—was—an animal. I have seen brachs. These acted no differently. Why, when I
filled their feed bin—” He paused, a slight frown
drawing his black brows closer together.
“You filled their feed bin and what happened?” the
captain wanted to know.
“This one, the male, watched me latch it. Then he reached
through the bars and shook the fastenings. I thought he only wanted
more of the renton leaves, and I gave him some. But now I think he
was trying the door lock.”
“Well, let’s get him back in the cage before he
wakes up,” Jellico said. “And use the chain and the
alarm, Mura. We might set a video on and hook it to general screen
cast as a precaution. I want a record of what happens when he wakes
up.”
Mura lifted the brach and carried it back to the cage. Both
Jellico and Dane watched him take the precautions that had been
suggested. Then Ya was called to rig the video so that they could
keep the animal under watch as if he were a suspect in a cell, a
snooper on him.
“Who is responsible for this shipment?” Jellico
turned to Dane.
“The Norax lab. All the papers are correct. They are to be
sent through to the Simplex people on Trewsworld—authorized
project by Council permission.”
“Nothing about mutants?”
“No, sir. Perfectly ordinary listing. It had all the
proper notations, and the Norax people themselves sent a tech with
the cage. He set it up and brought in the food and a diet list for
Mura.”
“He set up the cage,” repeated Jellico thoughtfully.
The captain raised his hand and set it against the wall above the
cage. “Did he pick this particular spot?”
Dane tried to remember. The tech had come on board with two men
carrying the cage. Had he picked the place? No, not exactly, and
Mura had the answer.
“No, sir. I said here—easier to keep an eye on the
animals. But I don’t understand. The female—she had a
month yet to go. The kits were to be born on Trewsworld.”
Captain Jellico slapped the bulkhead behind the cage almost as
if he were testing its solid substance.
“Treasure hold below right here,” he said. But Dane
could see no connection between that and the weird behavior of a pair of brachs—other than that this whole voyage was one
mystery after another.
Jellico did not explain. Instead, he hunkered down and asked
Mura to explain the details of the fastening. Then Ya came to set
up the improvised snooper, which, to Dane’s mystification,
the captain insisted be concealed from the inhabitant of the cage
so that, when the brach awoke, he would not know he was under
observation, as if the animal was now a criminal suspect.
All arranged to his satisfaction, Jellico gave a final order to
leave the animal alone and for all of them to keep away as much as
possible from the cage. Dane, after giving a last look at the
peacefully sleeping creature, which, even now, he could hardly
believe tried to beam him with his own weapon, went back to his
cabin, stretched on his bunk, and tried vainly to make sense of
what had happened. He had been through crises before on the
Queen, but never had there been so inexplicable a series
of happenings. Animals that acted with intelligence, a dead man
wearing his face, the alien woman—it was as fantastic as a
tridee story tape.
Video—what did the captain expect to pick up by the
snooper? What of Mura’s suggestion that the brach had been
conditioned to attack a man? That such a thing was possible was not
beyond the bounds of possibility.
Dane rolled off the bunk and went to look up the record of the
brach shipment. It was very straightforward, just as he
remembered—two brachs, male and female, consigned from the
Norax lab on Xecho to the Simplex Ag station on Trewsworld. He had
every permit filled out correctly, and unless someone had spent a
fortune for forgeries, it was as it should be.
Nevertheless, he pulled out that tape and ran it through for
duplication. He had just finished when the com gave an alerting
whistle.
“Screen,” came Jellico’s voice. Dane reached
up and triggered the small video screen.