The Pirates of Ersatz Part 19

"_You there!_" boomed a voice with deafening volume. "_You're in our clear-s.p.a.ce! Sheer off!_"

The volume of a signal in s.p.a.ce varies as the square of the distance.

This voice was thunderous. It came apparently from a nearby, pot-bellied tripper s.h.i.+p of really ancient vintage. Rows of ports in its sides had been welded over. It had rocket tubes whose size was indicative of the kind of long-obsolete fuel on which it once had operated. Slenderer nozzles peered out of the original ones now. It had been adapted to modern propellants by simply welding modern rockets inside the old ones.

It was only half a mile away.

Hoddan's s.p.a.ceboat floated on. The relative position of the two s.h.i.+ps changed slowly. Another voice said indignantly:

"_That's the same thing that missed us by less than a mile! You, there!

Stop acting like a squig! Get on your own course!_"

A third voice;

"_What boat's that? I don't recognize it! I thought I knew all the freaks in this fleet, too!_"

A fourth voice said sharply:

"_That's not one of us! Look at the design! That's not us!_"

Other voices broke in. There was babbling. Then a harsh voice roared:

"_Quiet! I order it!_" There was silence. The harsh voice said heavily, "_Relay the image to me._" There was a pause. The same voice said grimly: "_It is not of our fleet. You, stranger! Identify yourself! Who are you and why do you slip secretly among us?_"

Hoddan pushed the transmit b.u.t.ton.

"My name is Bron Hoddan," he said. "I came up to find out why three s.h.i.+ps, and then nine s.h.i.+ps, went into orbit around Darth. It was somewhat alarming. Our landing grid's disabled, anyhow, and it seemed wisest to look you over before we communicated and possibly told you something you might not believe. But you surely don't expect to land all this fleet! Actually, we can't land any."

The harsh voice said as grimly as before:

"_You come from the planet below us? Darth? Why is your s.h.i.+p so small?

The smallest of ours is greater._"

"This is a lifeboat," said Hoddan pleasantly. "It's supposed to be carried on larger s.h.i.+ps in case of emergency."

"_If you will come to our leading s.h.i.+p_," said the voice, "_we will answer all your questions. I will have a smoke flare set off to guide you._"

Hoddan said to himself:

"No threats and no offers. I can guess why there are no threats. But they should offer something!"

He waited. There was a sudden huge eruption of vapor in s.p.a.ce some two hundred miles away. Perhaps an ounce of explosive had been introduced into a rocket tube and fired. The smoke particles, naturally ionized, added their self-repulsion to the expansiveness of the explosive's gases. A cauliflowerlike shape of filmy whiteness appeared and grew larger and thinner.

Hoddan drove toward the spot with very light touches of rocket power. He swung the boat around and killed its relative velocity. The leading s.h.i.+p was a sort of gigantic, shapeless, utterly preposterous ark-like thing.

Hoddan could neither imagine a purpose for which it could have been used, nor a time when men would have built anything like it. Its huge sides seemed to be made exclusively of great doorways now tightly closed.

One of those doorways suddenly gaped wide. It would have admitted a good-sized modern s.h.i.+p. A nervous voice essayed to give Hoddan directions for getting the s.p.a.ceboat inside what was plainly an enormous hold now pumped empty of air. He grunted and made the attempt. It was tricky. He sweated when he cut off his power. But he felt fairly safe.

Rocket flames would burn down such a door, if necessary. He could work havoc if hostilities began.

The great cargo door swung shut. The outside-pressure needle swung sharply and stopped at thirty centimeters of mercury pressure. There was a clanging. A smaller door evidently opened somewhere. Lights came on--old-fas.h.i.+oned glow tubes. Then figures appeared through a door leading to some other part of this s.h.i.+p.

Hoddan nodded to himself. The costume was odd. It was awkward. It was even primitive, but not in the fas.h.i.+on of the soiled but gaudily colored garments of Darth. These men wore unrelieved black, with gray s.h.i.+rts.

There was no touch of color about them. Even the younger ones wore beards. And of all unnecessary things, they wore flat-brimmed hats--in a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p!

Hoddan opened the boat door and said politely:

"Good morning. I'm Bron Hoddan. You were talking to me just now."

The oldest and most fiercely bearded of the men said harshly:

"I am the leader here. We are the people of Colin." He frowned when Hoddan's expression remained unchanged. "The people of Colin!" he repeated more loudly. "The people whose forefathers settled that planet, and brought it to be a world of peace and plenty--and then foolishly welcomed strangers to their midst!"

"Too bad," said Hoddan. He knew what these people were doing, he believed, but putting a name to where they'd come from told him nothing of what they wanted of Darth.

"We made it a fair world," said the bearded man fiercely. "But it was my great-grandfather who destroyed it. He believed that we should share it.

It was he who persuaded the Synod to allow strangers to settle among us, believing that they would become like us."

Hoddan nodded expectantly. These people were in some sort of trouble or they wouldn't have come out of overdrive. But they'd talked about it until it had become an emotionalized obsession that couldn't be summarized. When they encountered a stranger, they had to picture their predicament pa.s.sionately and at length.

This bearded man looked at Hoddan with burning eyes. When he went on, it was with gestures as if he were making a speech, but it was a special sort of speech. The first sentence told what kind.

"They clung to their sins!" said the bearded man bitterly. "They did not adopt our ways! Our example went for naught! They brought others of their kind to Colin. After a little they laughed at us. In a little more they outnumbered us! Then they ruled that the laws of our Synod should not govern them. And they lured our young people to imitate them--frivolous, sinful, riotous folk that they were!"

Hoddan nodded again. There were elderly people on Zan who talked like this. Not his grandfather! If you listened long enough they'd come to some point or other, but they had arranged their thoughts so solidly that any attempt to get quickly at their meaning would only produce confusion.

"Twenty years since," said the bearded man with an angry gesture, "we made a bargain. We held a third of all the land of the planet, but our young men were falling away from the ways of their fathers. We made a bargain with the newcomers we had cherished. We would trade our lands, our cities, our farms, our highways, for s.h.i.+ps to take us to a new world with food for the journey and machines for the taming of the planet we would select. We sent of our number to find a world to which we could move. Ten years back, they returned. They had found it. The planet Thetis."

Again Hoddan had no reaction. The name meant nothing.

"We began to prepare," said the old man, his eyes flas.h.i.+ng. "Five years since, we were ready. But we had to wait three more before the bargainers were ready to complete the trade. They had to buy and collect the s.h.i.+ps. They had to design and build the machinery we would need.

They had to collect the food supplies. Two years ago we moved our animals into the s.h.i.+ps, and loaded our food and our furnis.h.i.+ngs, and took our places. We set out. For two years we have journeyed toward Thetis."

Hoddan felt an instinctive respect for people who would undertake to move themselves, the third of the population of a planet, over a distance that meant years of voyaging. They might have tastes in costume that he did not share, and they might go in for elaborate oratory instead of matter-of-fact statements, but they had courage.

"Yes, sir," said Hoddan. "I take it this brings us up to the present."

"No," said the old man, his eyes flas.h.i.+ng. "Six months ago we considered that we might well begin to train the operators of the machines we would use on Thetis. We uncrated machines. We found ourselves cheated!"

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Hoddan found that he could make a fairly dispa.s.sionate guess of what advantage--say--Nedda's father would take of people who would not check on his good faith for two years and until they were two years' journey away. The business men on Krim would have some sort of code determining how completely one could swindle a customer. Don Loris, now--

"How badly were you cheated?" asked Hoddan.

"Of our lives!" said the angry old man. "Do you know machinery?"

"Some kinds," admitted Hoddan.