Pariah Planet Part 14

He collapsed.

Calhoun very soberly tied them hand and foot and laid them out comfortably on the floor. Maril watched, white-faced, her hand to her throat. "What have you done to them? Are they dead?"

"No," said Calhoun, "just drugged. They'll wake up presently."

Maril said in a tense and desperate whisper;

"You're--betraying us! You're going to take us to Weald."

"No," said Calhoun. "We'll only orbit around it. First, though, I want to get rid of those d.a.m.ned packed-up cultures. They're dead, by the way.

I killed them with supersonics a couple of days ago, while a fine argument was going on about distance-measurements by variable Cepheids of known period."

He put the four boxes carefully in the waste-disposal unit. He operated it. The boxes and their contents streamed out to s.p.a.ce in the form of metallic and other vapors. Calhoun sat at the control-desk.

"I'm a Med Service man," he said detachedly. "I couldn't cooperate in the spread of plague, anyhow, though a useful epidemic might be another matter. But the important thing right now is not keeping Weald busy with troubles to increase their hatred of Dara. It's getting some food for Dara. And driblets won't help. What's needed is in thousands of tons,--or tens of thousands." Then he said; "Overdrive coming, Murgatroyd! Hold fast!"

The universe vanished. The customary unpleasant sensations accompanied the change. Murgatroyd burped.

CHAPTER 6

A large part of the firmament was blotted out by the blindingly bright half-disk of Weald, as it shone in the suns.h.i.+ne. It had ice-caps at its poles, and there were seas, and the mottled look of land which had that carefully maintained balance of woodland and cultivated areas which was so effective in climate control. The Med s.h.i.+p floated free, and Calhoun fretfully monitored all the beacon frequencies known to man.

There was relative silence inside the s.h.i.+p. Maril watched Calhoun in a sort of despairing indecision. The four young blueskins still slept, still bound hand and foot upon the control-room floor. Murgatroyd regarded them, and Maril, and Calhoun in turn, and his small and furry forehead wrinkled helplessly.

"They can't have landed what I'm looking for!" protested Calhoun as his search had no result. "They can't. It would be too sensible for them to have done it!"

Murgatroyd said "_Chee!_" in a subdued voice.

"But where the devil did they put them?" demanded Calhoun. "A polar orbit would be ridiculous! They--" Then he grunted in disgust. "Oh! Of course! Now, where's the landing-grid?"

He worked busily for minutes, checking the position of the Wealdian landing-grid--mapped in the Sector Directory--against the look of continents and seas on the half-disk so plainly visible outside. He found what he wanted. He put on the s.h.i.+p's solar-system drive.

"I wish," he complained to Maril, "I wish I could think straight the first time! And it's so obvious! If you want to put something out in s.p.a.ce, and not have it interfere with traffic, in what sort of orbit and at what distance will you put it?"

Maril did not answer.

"Obviously," said Calhoun, "you'll put it as far as possible from the landing-pattern of s.h.i.+ps coming in to the s.p.a.ce-port. You'll put it on the opposite side of the planet. And you'll want it to stay out of the way, where anybody can know it is at any time of the day or night without having to calculate anything. So you'll put it out in orbit so it will revolve around Weald in exactly one day, neither more or less, and you'll put it above the equator. And then it will remain quite stationary above one spot on the planet, a hundred and eighty degrees longitude away from the landing-grid and directly over the equator."

He scribbled for a moment.

"Which means forty-two thousand miles high, give or take a few hundred, and--here! And I was hunting for it in a close-in orbit!"

He grumbled to himself. He waited while the solar-system drive pushed the Med s.h.i.+p a quarter of the way around the bright planet below. The sunset line vanished and the planet's disk became a complete circle.

Then Calhoun listened to the monitor earphones again, and grunted once more, and changed course, and presently made a noise indicating satisfaction.

Again presently he abandoned instrument-control and peered directly out of a port, handling the solar-system drive with great care. Murgatroyd said depressedly;

"_Chee!_"

"Stop worrying," commanded Calhoun. "We haven't been challenged, and there is a beacon transmitter at work, just to make sure that n.o.body b.u.mps into what we're looking for. It's a great help, because we do want to b.u.mp,--gently."

Stars swung across the port out of which he looked. Something dark appeared,--and then straight lines and exact curvings. Even Maril, despairing and bewildered as she was, caught sight of something vastly larger than the Med s.h.i.+p, floating in s.p.a.ce. She stared. The Med s.h.i.+p maneuvered very cautiously. She saw another large object. A third. A fourth. There seemed to be dozens of them.

They were s.p.a.ce-s.h.i.+ps, huge by comparison with Aesclipus Twenty. They floated as the Med s.h.i.+p did. They did not drive. They were not in formation. They were not at even distances from each other. They did not point in the same direction. They swung in emptiness like derelicts.

Calhoun jockeyed his small s.h.i.+p with infinite care. Presently there came the gentlest of impacts and then a clanking sound. The appearance out the vision-port became stationary, but still unbelievable. The Med s.h.i.+p was grappled magnetically to a vast surface of welded metal.

Calhoun relaxed. He opened a wall-panel and brought out a vacuum suit.

He began briskly to get it on.

"Things move smoothly," he commented. "We weren't challenged. So it's extremely unlikely that we were spotted. Our friends on the floor ought to begin to come to shortly. And I'm going to find out now whether I'm a hero or in sure-enough trouble!"

Maril said drearily;

"I don't know what you've done, except--"

Calhoun blinked at her, in the act of hauling the vacuum suit over his shoulders.

"Isn't it self-evident?" he demanded. "I've been giving astrogation lessons to these characters. I certainly didn't do it to help them dump germ-cultures on Weald! I brought them here! Don't you see the point?

These are s.p.a.ce-s.h.i.+ps. They're in orbit around Weald. They're not manned and they're not controlled. In fact, they're nothing but sky-riding storage bins!"

He seemed to consider the explanation complete. He wriggled his arms into the sleeves and gloves of the suit. He slung the air-tanks over his shoulder and hooked them to the suit.

"I'll be back," he said. "I hope with good news. I've reason to be hopeful, though, because these Wealdians are very practical men. They have things all prepared and tidy. I suspect I'll find these s.h.i.+ps with stores of air and fuel--maybe even food--so that if Weald should manage to make a deal for the stuff stored out here in them, they'd only have to bring out crews."

He lifted the s.p.a.ce-helmet down from its rack and put it on. He tested it, reading the tank air-pressure, power-storage, and other data from the lighted miniature instruments visible through pinholes above his eye-level. He fastened a s.p.a.ce-rope about himself, speaking through the helmet's opened face-plate.

"If our friends should wake up before I get back," he added, "please restrain them. I'd hate to be marooned."

He went waddling into the airlock with the coil of s.p.a.ce-rope over one vacuum-suited arm. The inner lock door closed behind him A little later Maril heard the outer lock open. Then soundlessness.

Murgatroyd whimpered a little. Maril s.h.i.+vered. Calhoun had gone out of the s.h.i.+p to nothingness. He'd said that what he was looking for--and what he'd found--was forty-two thousand miles from Weald. One could imagine falling forty-two thousand miles, where one couldn't imagine falling a light-year. Calhoun was walking on the steel plates of a gigantic s.p.a.ce-s.h.i.+p which floated among dozens of its fellows, all seeming derelicts and seemingly abandoned. He was able to walk on the nearest because of magnetic-soled shoes. He trusted his life to them and to a flimsy s.p.a.ce-rope which trailed after him out the Med s.h.i.+p's airlock.

Time pa.s.sed. A clock ticked in that hurried tempo of five ticks to the second which has been the habit of clocks since time immemorial. Very small and trivial noises came from the background tape, preventing utter silence from hanging intolerably in the s.h.i.+p. They were traffic-sounds, recorded on a world no one knew how many light-years distant, and n.o.body knew when. There were sounds as of voices, too faint to suggest words, but imparting a feel of life and activity to a soundless s.h.i.+p.

Maril found herself listening tensely for something else. One of the four bound blueskins snored, and stirred, and slept again. Murgatroyd gazed about unhappily, and swung down to the control-room floor, and then paused for lack of any place to go or thing to do. He sat down and began half-heartedly to lick his whiskers. Maril stirred.

Murgatroyd looked at her hopefully.

"_Chee?_" he asked shrilly.

She shook her head. It became a habit to act as if Murgatroyd were a human being.