Checkpoint Lambda

CHAPTER 2

But the liner checked its motion. It stopped some five miles away, where it was merely a silver splinter in space, far beyond the mile-thick asteroid with the impact-craters on its surface. The skipper’s voice came, dourly, “We’ll watch him over.”

Then Scott said measuredly, “I left orders with the liner’s skipper, you know.”

He held on to the tentacle while his fate was debated. He heard the faintest possible sounds. A microphone was open somewhere. There was argument. He heard voices.

“…crazy fool! He’ll…” “…that liner…” “…told you to take…” “…what’s wrong with…” “…he can’t do anything…” Then a sneering, “…nice company for Janet…” And then an authoritative “…Bring him aboard. Then we’ll decide…”

Scott clung to the end of the tentacle. The liner floated in space, miles away. Her skipper would be watching, of course, and he was showing a sudden perceptiveness. He’d moved the liner. Sound thinking. He wasn’t trying to communicate with Scott. Proper behavior—leaving the conduct of this affair to a Patrol man. With a man ready to throw the liner into overdrive, it was safe from destruction by—say—a rocket missile, if any had been gotten to the buoy in the guise of freight. But anything that looked suspicious or unusual would send the liner away, for the sake of her passengers. Anything causing alarm on the liner would be distinctly unwise. Anything causing the liner to linger near the buoy, on orders from Scott with the authority of the Patrol behind him, could be disastrous to an illegal enterprise, because if the Golconda ship appeared and found itself not alone at the checkpoint, it would be very cagey toward both the buoy and the liner. So nobody on the buoy wanted the liner to be dissatisfied.

Scott held on to the tentacle. It began to retract once more. Now it drew him smoothly and steadily toward Checkpoint Lambda. That golden-colored object grew larger, became huge, turned monstrous. Its welded outer hull-surface was very near …

Scott’s magnetic shoe-soles touched and clung with that peculiar sticky adhesion which never felt really dependable. He released the tentacle, which went into its small hole in the electroplated metal of the buoy’s hull. There was a door there, which did not open. Scott was isolated on the outer skin of what once had been a liner of some thousands of tons capacity. He waited. The scarred and pitted asteroid-fragment seemed overhead. It looked as if it should be falling upon Scott, to crush him. But Scott was accustomed to that sort of illusion. He waited to be admitted. He guessed grimly that either much preparation for his reception was going on, or else that the buoy waited for the liner to go away.

Presently he said in a bored voice, “I’m waiting to come in a lock.”

His tone was the kind that already-disturbed men halfway through a crime would not be ready for. It didn’t match the situation. They should be uneasy, not knowing whether he knew anything or had guessed everything. A bored tone didn’t fit! Criminals in an act of law-breaking could be baffled. They might be uneasy.

They were. There was a delay of perhaps three-quarters of a minute. Then there were clankings, reaching the air in Scott’s space suit through his metal soles. A lock-door swung out and open. Scott went unhurriedly to it. He entered, and the sudden tug of artificial gravity restored sensations of up and down. He very matter-of-factly closed the outer door. He felt his suit go limp as air came in. He opened the inner lock-door and walked out of the lock into the ship-turned-space buoy.

There was nobody to greet him. There was no one in sight at all. He heard faint music—Thallian mood-music. He stood still for a moment, awaiting challenge. Then he shrugged and got out of his space suit. He put it on a chair, tugged his uniform into shape, and walked briskly ahead. He knew, of course, that he was watched; if not directly, then by closed-circuit viewers set up somewhere.

He headed for the control room. It was the one part of the ship officially occupied by Patrol personnel, who operated the checkpoint equipment and occasionally adjusted the buoy’s position with reference to the marker-asteroid outside. The buoy had been elegant, once. High ceilings—there was no need to save room in a ship of space—and decorative woods and thick carpets gave this deck the look and feel of an old-fashioned hotel. There was a desk for a room clerk. Nobody was there. Scott passed the door of the dining saloon, which somehow looked more like a restaurant. At one side there was a tiny theater for solidograph film shows.

He saw a girl. She was seated as if watching a film on the round screen Scott couldn’t quite glimpse. There was muted music. She did not turn her head. She continued to look at the invisible screen as Scott passed the doorway.

He almost hesitated. He hadn’t guessed at women involved in this affair! But she must be watched. There was a specific line of action he must follow if the situation here was to be handled properly. Something had to be done and only he was available to try to do it.

He went confidently to the control room door. Since he was appointed to command here, it made a good impression for him to seem to know a lot about his ship and what he expected of it.

He opened the control room door and two men in Patrol uniforms hastily got to their feet. They weren’t Patrol personnel. Uniforms or no uniforms, they were civilians. They saluted with an obvious attempt to be military. Scott raised his eyebrows. He only nodded in reply. One didn’t salute on active duty in the Patrol. He glanced here and there. There was a sort of timetable that can be deduced from neglected military quarters. Some things show it if they’re not attended to every day. Other items of housekeeping became noticeable a little later. This control room had been occupied. Overflowing ashtrays proved it. But proper Patrol housekeeping hadn’t been done for nearly a week. He could tell.

The two civilians-in-uniform stood stiffly at what they thought was attention. Scott looked at them with a deliberately enigmatic air. Then he said drily, “Rest.”

They relaxed, apparently satisfied that they’d passed inspection. Scott went to the checkpoint commander’s desk and seated himself. He turned the chair around and faced them. Then he said, “Before he was killed, did Lieutenant Thrums say anything about the Five Comets?”

His predecessor in command had been named Thrums. Scott assumed casually that he was dead. The two pseudo-Patrol privates jumped a little.

“Ye—no, sir,” said one of the two. “He didn’t.”

“Maybe,” said Scott gently, “he didn’t confide it to you. But he was much concerned. Or maybe he didn’t have a chance to tell you before he was killed?”

This was hardly the line an unsuspicious new commanding officer would take. On the other hand it wasn’t the way a merely suspicious man would act. The two men in Patrol uniform gaped at him. One of them said uneasily, “He—Lieutenant Thrums, sir—he’d been glum for a long time. So one day he went into an air-lock and closed the inner door and opened the outer one. Then he—walked out, sir. We—we didn’t recover the body.”

Scott raised his eyebrows again.

“Remarkable!” he said in gentle irony. “It was a remarkable achievement! If the lock was pumped empty, anyone else would have died of oxygen-lack before the outer door could be opened. Or if he let the air escape to space by emergency bleed, explosive decompression would have knocked him cold and he couldn’t have opened the door anyhow. Think of a better story and tell it to me later, will you? But right now—”

He snapped at them.

“Go get the top civilian here! The boss! The man people take orders from! He’s gotten you into a hell of a fix. I have to get you out of it, if you’re to be gotten out.”

One of the badly uniformed men reached for a communicator. Scott barked, “I said go get him! I didn’t say phone him! Get him!”

The two pseudo-troopers almost fell over each other getting out of the door. They were evidently not part of the killing members of a criminal group. An enterprise like the one in hand would need more organization than a bank-robbery or a more or less normal attempt at kidnaping or murder. If it went on from the seizure of Lambda to the capture of the Golconda Ship, it would be even more complicated. Men who could handle blasters would be needed, of course. But men who could carry on ordinary checkpoint routine were called for, too. The Patrol uniform-wearers would be small crooks, called into this really big operation for some supposed special skills.

Scott leaned forward to the desk microphone and pressed the G.C. button for a general communication to every compartment in the checkpoint buoy.

“All personnel attention!” he said sharply. “I am Lieutenant Scott, Space Patrol, assigned to the command of this installation. I have just come aboard. The liner on which I came is lying off Lambda, ready to take on any passengers who may wish to avoid the danger the checkpoint faces. The Five Comets of Canis Lambda are headed sunward now. Computation has shown that the nuclei, the heads, of not less than four of the five will cross our orbit at just the time we should be there. The head of a comet is a swarm of meteoric bodies, hundreds of millions of them, traveling in a clump hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of miles across. Two previous robot check-points at this station were destroyed by such encounters. This installation is not able to move fully out of the way. It has only solar-system drive. But I intend to stay aboard and take emergency measures already planned. But it will be a risky business—an extremely risky business! I urge all passengers and as many of the crew as can be spared to transfer to the liner now waiting nearby. You will have to hurry. The liner will wait no longer than half an hour, because it has the safety of its own passengers to think of. Repeat. You will have to hurry! But I urge all non-essential personnel and all passengers to transfer immediately.”

He clicked off the microphone. He expected absolutely nothing from the announcement he’d made. Maybe those who now controlled the buoy would have a good laugh. But it would prepare their minds for uneasiness. Ultimately—

The traditions of the Patrol were many and varied. A Space Patrol man might send for help, but he never waited for it. When a problem seemed insoluble, a Patrol man did what he could to change some part of it, which at worst might cause confusion, and at best might cause it to fall apart. Scott had an appallingly complicated problem on his hands. But if he handled it right and had some luck, he might prevent the capture of the Golconda ship without allowing the destruction of the checkpoint. He might even manage to save the lives of legitimate passengers and crewmen—if any were left alive. But that was questionable. In any case he wasn’t planning to capture criminals right now. The Patrol saved lives before it made captures.

The two pseudo-patrol men came back to the control room. With them there was a short, plump civilian. He seemed wryly amused.

“Ho-ya, Lieutenant,” he said blandly. “I was afraid it was you.”

“They tell me,” said Scott formidably, “that you boss operations here.”

“Partly, partly,” said the plump man as blandly as before. “My name’s Chenery. Don’t you know me?”

“No,” said Scott.

“My name’s Chenery,” insisted the plump man. “You saved my life once. You’d ought to remember that!”

“I don’t,” said Scott.

“I was in trouble,” said Chenery, speaking cheerily. “Bad trouble! I was headed for the gas-chamber for something I didn’t do. Honest! And you found out I hadn’t done it, so they gassed somebody else and didn’t gas me. And now I’m an honest man and I run the hotel here. Because of you! I appreciate that!”

Scott dismissed the statement. He said, “You heard the announcement I just made. I’ve a job to do. I want to meet the men who won’t go aboard the liner. Trying to keep the Five Comets from smashing us is going to be tricky. I need to know the men who’ll help me do it. I need to know the buoy. I want you to guide me and introduce me.”

“Right!” said the plump man, cordially. “You did me a favor once. I’ll do you one now! I’ll show you over the ship and I’ll bring you back here safe and sound!”

“Very good,” said Scott curtly. He stood up and addressed the two men in uniform. “You stay on duty here. If the liner calls, tell her skipper I’ll call him back shortly.”

“Yes, sir!” said the taller of the two. He saluted with something of a flourish. It was irritating. Scott felt a certain impatient urge to tell him that the Patrol did not salute except on formal occasions. But he didn’t. Instead, he followed the plump man out of the control room.

There was a peculiar silence in the halls and corridors of the buoy. The only sound anywhere was the faint and muted Thallian mood-music coming from the miniature theater. The plump man padded on ahead, making curious sucking noises with his lips. He seemed to think deeply. Presently he shook his head.

“Funny!” he said reflectively. “Plenty funny! Here’s a man who saved my life. You still don’t remember? Chenery?”

“No,” said Scott. Nobody in the Patrol remembered all the names of all the people he encountered in the way of business.

“It was on Glamis,” said Chenery. “They had me cold! I was headed straight for the gas-chamber—and you turned up the proof of who it really was. And you don’t remember!”

“No,” admitted Scott. “I don’t.”

“That kind of hurts my feelings,” said Chenery. “But I’ll think it over. Whether you remember me or not, you did me a favor. And we meet each other here. It’s a small galaxy!”

They were now on the deck level below the control room, where the desk arrangement of an old fashioned hotel stood unused and gathering dust. The need for dust particles to maintain a proper ion-content in a space craft’s air was an old story, but one could tell how long it had been since conscientious housekeeping was done there. Scott estimated seven days, which was in good agreement with the results of poor housewifery in the control room.

Chenery turned into the small theater. The girl still sat there, her head turned toward the screen. But she did not seem to be watching it. It was as if she gazed blindly at it while her thoughts—desperate thoughts—were altogether elsewhere.

“Janet,” said Chenery amiably, “here’s somebody for you to know. He’s Lieutenant Scott, Space Patrol. He just came aboard to take command of the buoy.”

The girl turned her head as if reluctantly. Her eyes fell upon Scott. She saw his uniform. She looked at his face. Then a swift succession of emotions showed themselves. She was astonished, almost incredulous. Then a somehow terrible hope began to show. But Chenery said blandly, “He came aboard all by himself to take charge of things.”

The girl’s face lost its look of hope, and bitter disappointment took its place. Then she glanced at Chenery and back at Scott and a sorrowful compassion showed in her eyes.

“I’m showing him over the place,” said Chenery brightly. “Did you hear him telling everybody to get ready to leave here and get on a liner he’s got waiting?”

“I—didn’t really listen,” said the girl.

“He’ll explain—probably,” said Chenery with some zest. “He’s an old friend of mine. He don’t remember it, but he did me a big favor once. He wants to go over the buoy. Want to come along?”

The girl looked at him unhappily.

“It’ll be okay,” Chenery assured her. “I gave Bugsy a good talkin’ to. And I’ll be right there. Me and the Lieutenant. It’ll be okay, and you can look in the hospital with us right along.”

The girl stood up. The look of total hopelessness on her face was somehow harrowing. Scott revised an automatic first guess that against all probability, a woman or women were involved in this affair. This girl wasn’t normally an associate of criminals. She was involved, but against her will. And she looked forward without the least hope of escape to disaster more complete than she’d known up to now.

“Janet,” explained Chenery cheerily, “she’s a nurse. She’s been takin’ care of a couple of characters down in the hospital. They were on a ship goin’ from where they’d been caught to where they’d be gassed. They tried to pull off a trick. They thought they’d burn down their guards and take their ship all by themselves. But they didn’t. They got burned down themselves. So they were shifted from the ship they were burned on because they needed a hospital and we got one. Janet’s the nurse.”

Scott said nothing. He realized that his pose of ignoring everything that was wrong here was paying off admirably. Lambda had been taken over by criminals because the Golconda Ship was coming to port here. It might be necessary to convince somebody that everything was normal on the space buoy before they’d make fast alongside. So Scott was being used to test the look of things. So long as he pretended to accept conditions here as commonplace, the members of the criminal enterprise would be heartened. If he showed suspicion, they wouldn’t. But he’d be killed after the liner waiting outside had gone on its way. That was self-evident. Still, for the better part of half an hour there’d probably be no attempt to murder him. He had walked into the parlor of men waiting to capture the Golconda Ship. They were watching to see his reactions.

He followed Chenery down another level of stairs. Here were cabins for passengers shifted from their liners to the buoy in order to shift back to other liners going where they wanted to be. Scott did not pretend to be interested in the cabins. It was all too likely that in some of them he’d find evidence of murders done. It was not wise to uncover anything of that sort just now. But Scott was aware that Janet was very pale as he glanced down a corridor.

He saw a scorched place on the wall. It wasn’t especially conspicuous, but a blaster-bolt had made it, and blasters weren’t normally fired in the passenger-quarters on ships of space. Scott ignored it.

They descended again. There were three levels of passenger cabins, and plainly they were all unoccupied just now. On the last of the cabin decks, though, there was the sound of snoring and a faint, faint odor of drink.

“Somebody,” said Chenery brightly, “didn’t hear your little speech, Lieutenant. Maybe we’ll wake him up to leave us. But not now. Not just yet!”

Further downward—sternward—there was a deck for freight, passenger-freight. There was baggage here. On an average, a space passenger carried twice as much baggage as he needed across the space between worlds. Nobody quite realized that shops on a planet a light-century from home would stock just about the same articles one could buy around the corner. So space travelers carried mountains of baggage. But it was possible to guess the number of passengers by a glance around the luggage-hold. Scott made a guess. Then he realized that men traveling to commit crime would travel light because they’d expect to abandon other possessions when they took the Golconda Ship. There was baggage of the sort normal passengers carry. Scott had a feeling now that they’d never claim it. The girl’s utter hopelessness told him much. But he guessed at seven legitimate passengers and perhaps as many as twenty others. He wondered if the baggage master thought it strange when so many travelers with so little baggage had begun to accumulate in Lambda. It wasn’t likely he’d been alarmed, though.

Down more deck levels. Two of them were luridly lighted by glow-bulbs exactly reproducing the light-quality of a yellow Type G sun. Here were hydroponic gardens, growing lushly in the brightness, taking carbon dioxide and excess moisture from the air and supplying fresh foodstuffs to the Lambda’s company. The third garden level was dark, because plants required periods of darkness as well as of light if they were to grow and bear fruit.

So far there’d been no living being in sight. Scott was sure that there were many more men aboard. Only chosen ones would have been authorized to show themselves, because they’d be too much of a type to be convincingly either travelers or crewmen. They’d be blaster-men, with the expressions and the sharp and snappy costuming of their kind. And they’d be amused at Scott’s seeming innocence, and they might show it. But it was desirable to know how far Scott could remain innocent of what had taken place here, and what was in prospect. It occurred to Scott that Chenery might have had the idea for the test.

In the main freight space, though, there were two men. This was a warehouse level which once had been a freight hold of an interstellar ship. These two had hairy chests showing and soiled work trousers exuding odors from long-ago-handled freight. They had a fali-board set on a box between them, with the pieces for the game arranged on the triangular pattern of the board. But the men were placed on the board at random: An outlaw-piece was on a black triangle. The game wasn’t a game. These men were acting the parts of freight handlers with no notion of how such parts should be played. They looked up cordially when Chenery said, “Ho-ya! This is Lieutenant Scott, the new Patrol officer. He wants to know how things are goin’.”

“Pretty good! Pretty good!” said one of them. He spoke to Scott. “About goin’ on that liner, Loot’nt, we figure if you’re goin’ to stay we’ll stay with you an’ do what we can to help. Okay?”

“Splendid,” said Scott. He carefully kept all irony out of his voice and avoided another glance at the fali-board, which a fall enthusiast would have found unbelievable. He gestured for Chenery to lead on.

They reached the main engine room, larger and more spacious even than a cargo hold. In its center there remained the mounting that had held the ship’s overdrive unit. This buoy had been refitted for its present use at some space port aground, and had been driven to its present position in overdrive, because otherwise the journey would have taken generations of time. But after its arrival, the overdrive unit was removed because the buoy was to stay here for always. The solar system drive remained, of course. Occasionally, for very brief periods it had to be run to adjust the position of the checkpoint to that of the marker-asteroid. The asteroid’s positions had been calculated far into the future, and it was simpler to match it than to try to keep to a scheduled placing with shiftings bound to occur when liners stopped and hooked on and loaded or unloaded freight. But Lambda had no other use for drives. Not in ordinary times.

A man in oily garments appeared from behind a disconnected switchboard. He waved a hand and Chenery led the way toward him. Again he introduced Scott, identifying the oily man as the buoy’s engineer. But Scott noted that his face and hands showed no trace of the oil so liberally present on his clothing.

“I heard your speech, Lieutenant,” said the man in oily clothes. “But you’re going to stay, so I stay too.”

“Everything’s in good shape, then,” observed Scott.

“Yes, sir! Everything! I’ve got a couple of hands—off-duty now—who’re good! When you want something done, you call on us!”

Scott said drily, “I’ll do that. We may have a tricky time before us, dodging comets.”

“You’ll have all the rudder you need,” the engineer assured him, beaming. “For any kind of driving!”

Scott reacted almost visibly to this remarkable statement. But he nodded and turned to Chenery, and Chenery led the way further astern, downward.

On the way Scott reflected upon the man’s assurance that Lambda had plenty of rudder. A space craft didn’t have a rudder. It couldn’t. There was nothing in space for a rudder to act on, whether between worlds or stars. Off-ground, a ship was steered by tiny drive-engines which on demand pushed its bow to the right or left, and its stern to left or right. They could also turn the bow—and the ship—up or down. Eight miniature drives, four in the bow and as many in the stern, would swing a ship in any direction. They could even spin it like a top with no forward drive at all, which was unthinkable for a ship with a rudder. But the alleged engineer of Checkpoint Lambda plainly didn’t know it. It was evidence that though the men recruited to seize the Golconda Ship might be good at handling blasters, they weren’t spacemen.

The inspection party of Scott and Janet and Chenery reached the hospital at the very stern of the ship. It was there because nowhere else would it have been practical to lessen or cut off artificial gravity if a patient’s need required it. There were glittering white plastic walls. There were soundless floors. There were hospital rooms with equipment ranging from aseptic environment rooms for contagious illness to the items needed for surgery and even dentistry. There were two men seated in a corridor outside a door made of steel bars. Beyond, there was a door with a lighted sign above it. Lifeboat. Do Not Enter.

“Ho-ya!” said Chenery. “This’s Lieutenant Scott, the new Patrol officer.” To Scott he said, “These two characters are the guards for the patients I told you about.” Then he added to Janet, “Y’want to look the patients over, Janet?”

The girl went silently into the barred room. Scott heard her asking murmured routine questions of the two patients. She changed a dressing on a badly burned arm. The faint, unpleasant odor of a blast-burn reached Scott’s nostrils. At least that was authentic. It couldn’t be faked.

“The lieutenant,” said Chenery amiably, “wants everybody that’ll go, off the buoy to a liner he’s got waiting. He says there’s a chance a comet’ll smash us. But he’s goin’ to stay aboard and try to pull through it. You two, what d’you say?”

The two men here were singularly hard-featured. They didn’t look like guards. They looked bored and scornful.

“The patients can’t be moved,” said one of them. He made no particular effort to seem other than derisive. “So y’couldn’t expect us to desert ‘em, would you? Us bein’ faithful to our duty?”

The tone was definitely sarcastic. Chenery said angrily, “That’s no way—”

“Maybe you can say it better,” said the second man truculently. “We ain’t takin’ orders from you!”

Chenery glared. He opened his mouth to speak, and stopped. The girl came out of the barred room. The two supposed guards smirked at her. One, with a derisive glance at Chenery, reached out his hand deliberately to touch her.

Scott took one step and made a chopping motion with his hand. It landed exactly right. Strangling, the man who’d reached for Janet went down. There was a muffled clatter. A blaster spun a half-turn on the floor. Scott paid no attention to it. He faced the second man, with no weapon drawn but with an expression of such curiosity that the other man gave back apprehensively.

Scott said nothing. Chenery said, somehow shrilly, “Dammit, you tell Bugsy—”

Scott reached out to Chenery. He whirled him about and thrust him through the door behind him. He swept the girl through that same doorway. His motions were smooth and precise, as if rehearsed. He faced back to the second would-be guard of the two injured men. He looked at him, and the man instinctively gave ground again. Scott picked up the blaster the first man had lost from its holster. “You’d better tell Bugsy,” he said evenly, “that I want to talk to him. I’ll be in the control room. He can come there. And tell him I’m liable to get impatient if he doesn’t come soon!”

The hospital corridor door closed behind him. He turned to find Chenery in the act of actually wringing his hands. Janet was paler than he’d seen her before, which was very pale indeed.

“Back to the control room,” he said shortly. “I’ve got to speak to the liner. By the way, who’s Bugsy?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He led the way briskly. Janet came close behind him. Chenery brought up the rear. He made agitated, whimpering sounds. They went through the engine room. The engineer wasn’t visible. But on the level above the warehouse space Scott turned aside from the way by which they’d descended. Chenery said miserably, “Hey! Not that way—”

“Yes,” said Scott. “This way.”

He had studied the plans of the space buoy when he had been appointed to command it. He made the rest of the way upward by stairs provided for the delivery of baggage and services to the hotel-level rooms. There was nothing secret about the stairway. Scott chose it to check his own familiarity with the space installation he’d never seen before.

They reached the control room. It was empty. Chenery practically blubbered when Scott closed the door behind them. Janet was pale.

“Discipline’s gone,” said Scott ironically. “I told those two privates to stay on duty here.”

Janet said hopelessly, “You didn’t really think they—”

“I was making a joke,” said Scott, ironically. “Chenery, this place should be bugged. Where is it?”

Chenery gulped. Then he reached under the control desk. He wrenched at something. He showed Scott a tiny microphone with thread-like wires attached.

“Good!” said Scott. “Now listen! I know the men I met were primed with answers for me. Quick work! I want to know if there’s anybody who’ll want to leave here. Can anybody leave?”

Janet said quietly, “No. There’s nobody—left to go.”

“Except you,” Scott corrected. “Chenery, she doesn’t belong in this mess. You’re in trouble too, and you know it. But if you’ll help her get on that liner, I’ll let you go with her! I can’t make a better deal than that. You’ll have a chance to disappear before this business is known anywhere but here.”

Chenery swallowed. Then he shook his head, “I got—I started this. It’s too good. It ain’t working out the way I wanted it but—” He swallowed again. “She couldn’t be got away anyhow.”

Scott said, “No?” He pressed a button, grimly. He called, using the inter-ship communicator microphone. There was no answer. He called again. He looked for the light that would indicate a carrier-wave going out. It hadn’t come on. The communicator wasn’t working.

Lips tensed, Scott pressed the trouble-finder stud that all important equipment carried. A separate, battery-operated device went into action. It checked the circuitry and the elements of the space-phone by which Scott had tried to reach the liner. There was a humming sound. Something clicked. A slip of paper rolled out briskly for his inspection.

“Power off,” said the slip. “This unit only.”

“It seems,” said Scott very coldly indeed, “that somebody doesn’t want any messages going out. Which is understandable!”

He turned in his chair. The screens were operating. Only the communicator was turned off from somewhere outside the control room. Scott could see the liner, probably as much as ten miles away. It had drifted out pretty far since Scott came aboard Lambda. It seemed to be waiting to hear from the checkpoint. But before Scott could even try to think how to get power back to the communicator, he realized that the liner was unnaturally still. He’d instructed it to wait half an hour. Much more time than that had passed. So far as the liner-skipper knew, he’d come aboard Lambda and the rest was silence. Calls hadn’t been answered. And there were those huge and increasing misty shapes which were the Five Comets. Comets were not solid. They were swarms of deadly objects, hurtling through emptiness. Even being near them was dangerous though, and the liner-skipper had his passengers to think of.

So the liner was aiming for its next port. Aiming took a long time. Minutes. The liner-skipper was doing the only thing possible. He had no alternative.

The liner seemed to hang absolutely motionless for minutes while its aim was refined to fractions of fractions of seconds of an arc. Scott had a feeling that it called, for one last time. But he couldn’t answer.

The liner flicked out of existence like a bubble bursting. Actually it was wrapped in a cocoon of stressed space which carried it away at many times the speed of light.

Six days from now it would return to normal space and try to tell what its skipper knew about events on Checkpoint Lambda. He didn’t know much. For one thing, he didn’t think of the Golconda Ship in connection with the behavior of the buoy. He’d send Scott’s report and his own information to the Patrol as soon as possible. But it would be a matter of weeks before a Patrol ship reached Canis Lambda to find out what had happened.

Scott looked after the vanished liner for a matter of seconds. Then he said evenly, “So that’s ruled out. Things look pretty sticky. We’ll take a look at the Five Comets again. That situation looks pretty nasty, too.”

It was.