Space Captain

VIII

Things added up perfectly to a total of pure frustration. The Cytheria had been taken by pirates at some time which could have been anything up to twenty-two days before. At the time of her capture, the pirates knew that some of their companions were prisoners and were to be tried and doubtless executed on Manaos. Therefore she hadn't been looted and abandoned in emptiness. She'd been reserved for the task she'd just performed, of securing the official answer to their ultimatum. Her passengers and crew might or might not have been murdered at the time of her capture or any instant later. It was not possible to know.

These items fitted together. In making a demand for the exchange of captured pirates for captured spacemen and space travelers, the pirates must have named some way by which their demand could be answered. That hadn't been revealed on Manaos, but the Yarrow had been permitted to lift off for Loren with a flat mail sack before any other space craft was permitted to leave the planet. One thin, flat, official letter was probably the only postal matter in it. It was most likely the Manaos' government's answer to the threat.

Other things fitted in. If the Bear was both privateer and pirate, it would know the Loren spaceport and its personnel. It would know that the already-captured Cytheria could be sent there to pick up mail with no real danger of not being able to leave again. The fact that all interstellar communications traveled by ship made such an arrangement the only practical one. The other extraneous attempt to stop the Yarrow near the double yellow sun was simply proof that the pirates couldn't communicate with each other over vast distances. They got their supplies and information and delivered their loot—and now prisoners—at some base somewhere. Not all of them would be fully informed at any one time. The ship by the double star wasn't.

But the lack of any information about where that base might be—and a base was necessary—was frenziedly frustrating. Trent fiercely demanded information about the contacts of the Bear's crew on Loren when as a privateer she happened to be in port. If the crewmen were recruited from the local population—

They weren't. The Bear had appeared off Loren two years before. Its skipper proposed a deal to the local authorities. The Bear offered to act as a privateer for Loren, artifically supplying the planet with off-planet goods. Loren would pay for them in ghil fiber on presentation of the receipts the Bear would give its victims. It would be a process for forcing the trade that Loren's economic crisis had driven away. To have even the color of lawfulness, of course, a privateer had to be owned on the planet it seized goods for. So Marian's father had formally purchased the Bear, but it was strictly a legal fiction. The Bear's skipper was her true owner. The Bear had brought in some cargoes. It got information and some supplies from Loren. But no man of its crew belonged there. There was nothing to be learned about their actual base from casual hints they'd dropped. They hadn't dropped any.

It was a dead-end query. It led nowhere. But nobody else on Loren had thought to ask even that. Trent surrendered Marian's letter to the authorities. It proved that she should have been aboard the Cytheria. The behavior of that ship proved that it had been captured, unquestionably while she was aboard. Her father became as horror-struck as Trent assured himself he wasn't. All the resources of Loren were immediately available for anything that could conceivably be done. And Trent became automatically the man to whom proposals were offered and suggestions made and questions presented.

He had questions of his own. He gave orders for a study of every bit of information about every planet within a light-century. The Galactic Directory wouldn't tell if there were one whose colonists had ceased to have normal space-communication with the rest of the Pleiads—the reason, pirates—or else one which could have had a pirate's base built on it. The second alternative was not too likely. Criminal enterprises are inherently destructive. A specially built base would be constructive. It would mean investment of capital, in fact, construction. The bare idea of building something would be alien to a piratical enterprise. It wouldn't be done.

The searching of records was a reasonable idea, but it was based on the assumption that pirates would maintain their ships in the manner of ship owners, keeping them in repair. But pirates wouldn't keep ships in repair. Instead, they'd abandon them for better-found ships as they captured them. So the urgent search of records was apparently futile.

But the news of such quests did bring one of the Yarrow's crewmen to Trent with an observation he'd made while the Cytheria was aground. He'd heard, naturally, of the search for a probably tiny colony whose landing-grid was at the service of pirates. He was one of the salvage-crew Trent had recruited for the Hecla. He'd been making a final weld on the Yarrow's bow-plates when the Cytheria touched ground. He'd seen lumps of frozen mud on the tips of her landing-fins. He came to Trent to report that wherever the Cytheria had been, it hadn't been to a Pleiad spaceport. He knew the Pleiad spaceports. They were solidly paved. The Cytheria had landed somewhere where there wasn't a landing-grid. She'd landed by rockets, ordinarily an emergency landing-system only. She'd taken off again. There was mud on her landing-fins. So there was no use looking for a known spaceport that pirates might have seized.

Trent barked orders. He had no authority to give orders, but nobody else had orders to give. He was obeyed. He sent a ground-car burning up the highway to the ghil plantation he'd visited only hours earlier. The scientist there, with specimens of vegetation from thirty other planets growing in plastic cubicles was to be picked up and brought to him right away!

And Trent went out on the spaceport tarmac to see if by any possible chance any fragments of that mentioned mud had been left behind by the Cytheria.

He was, as it happened, just in time to keep tidy-minded spaceport employees from cleaning up and disposing of the left-behind mud as refuse.

It was nearly an hour before the white-haired scientist arrived from the ghil plantation research laboratory. Trent was pacing up and down, his hands clenching and unclenching, alternating between rage that he hadn't been at the spaceport when the Cytheria came in—she'd never have lifted off again without a fight—and bitter despair because all his most appalling suspicions seemed to have been proven true.

Meanwhile the lumps of soil from the Cytheria's landing-fins melted. Exposed to a vacuum, water boils, and in boiling loses heat, so that when a certain portion of it has boiled away the remainder becomes ice. The first human-made artificial ice was made by the operation of a vacuum-pump on a flask of water. Wherever the Cytheria had landed before Loren, mud sticking to her fins had been carried away, frozen solid in space. It remained firmly fixed until the slight shock of landing on the Loren tarmac jolted it loose. The now-softened fragments amounted to a total of nearly a bushel of top-soil and plant-fragments.

The ground-car with the ghil plantation scientist arrived. Trent stood tensely by while he examined the material that so nearly had escaped being thrown away. The examination was exhaustive, done with pursed lips and an air of intense but academic interest. At long last he shook his head.

"I've plant samples from thirty worlds," he said regretfully, "but not from this one. Most interesting! This thready specimen is functionally a congener of grasses. It is a ground-cover plant. This one—I've never seen this leaf-shape or this triform stem before, and this—" He shook his head. "It looks like part of a symbiotic unit. Perhaps its companion-organism—"

'Where's it from?" demanded Trent.

"I haven't the least idea," said the scientist ruefully. "Not the least idea. But I hope I can take these specimens! They've been frozen, but possibly there may be spores or… or something that in a proper environment will revive and develop. They're most interesting!"

"We've got to know the planet they came from!" snapped Trent. "We've got to!"

The short man again shook his head.

"Nobody knows all the plants in the galaxy," he said in mild defensiveness. "Nobody! But of course—it's from a planet very nearly the size of this one. The stalks would be thinner on a lighter world, and thicker where the gravity was greater. The sun is type G, because of the exact variant of chlorophyll that has this special tint to use that kind of light. The cell-forms suggest a trace of sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere; not much, but a trace. And the soil says conclusively that there is much volcanic activity, because it contains volcanic ash in every stage of disintegration from fresh ash to, hmmm, sludge. But I bore you."

"Keep on!" said Trent.

"The temperature range," said the short man, "would be of the order of fifteen to forty-five degrees centigrade, which one knows by the evaporation-rates the leaf-surfaces imply. The planet's axis will be nearly at a right angle to the ecliptic, because there are practically no seasons, and I'd estimate the annual rainfall at about two meters per standard year." Then the ecologist said apologetically, "But that's all. I'm sorry I can't tell you anything really useful. But there simply isn't any information to tell what planet this material comes from."

"You're wrong," said Trent. "You have told me!"

Thirty minutes later the Yarrow lifted off to space from the Loren landing-grid. When it was well on its way, Trent painstakingly read in the Galactic Directory for this sector. He'd studied every planet within a light-century with no reason to guess at one rather than another, until the plant ecologist told him. He read:

… mass approximately 1/325000 sol. Acceleration due to gravity, 975 cm.-sec. Solar const. 1.94 small cal. min. Mean bar. pres. 794 mm. mercury. Rotation period 26.30 hr. Atm. 72.6% N, 27.5% O, .08% CO₂, .04% SO₂…

The description in the Directory was of a planet not individually named, but known as Kress Three because it lay in the third orbit out from the sun called Kress. It was the only planet within a hundred lightyears whose physical constants matched the description given by the mud dropped from the Cytheria's fins. The Yarrow drove for it with all the speed two overdrive coils in one ship's hull could make possible.

It was related of one of the earlier known explorers, back on ancient Earth, that when he bound across what was then believed a boundless sea, he encouraged his frightened crew by discovering floating tree-branches in the ocean. They must have come from land, and could only have come from land ahead.

Captain Trent of the Yarrow had better information and a totally unlike purpose. But he was as much relieved when on the second day out from Loren the Yarrow's drive-detector reported another ship in overdrive within detector-range. The other ship was ahead. Captain Trent cut down his speed, and overhauled the other space craft in a very leisurely fashion. He caught up to it, but at a discreet distance to one side. There was no question of blowing drives. The Yarrow went by, slowly, as if only very slightly faster than its unseen companion. The other ship neither sheered off nor closed in. Had it been a merchantman, it would probably have sheered off. A pirate might have closed in. Doing neither, and yet moving on the same course, each identified the other to its own satisfaction. Trent was confident that the other ship was the Cytheria, bound for the pirate's base of operations. Very probably the Cytheria identified the Yarrow as that pirate vessel presumably receiving the attentions of an armed ship from Loren, back by the double yellow sun.

The Yarrow went on. It passed the Cytheria and left it astern. In due time the Cytheria's drive-whine ceased to register on the Yarrow's detector. Trent had made no move against it, yet only a relatively short time ago he'd have abandoned all else and turned toward it. He'd have blown its drives and blasted a way into it with shaped charges if it hesitated to surrender, and he'd have gone raging through it like death itself. But that was when he believed Marian aboard it.

Now he was sure she wasn't. Because the Cytheria had landed somewhere between its capture and its call for mail on Loren. It would have landed to put off prisoners, most probably, and cargo, certainly, to have her light for her errand. With no cargo she was safe against stoppage by any burdened vessel. So Trent was confident that if Marian had been alive so long after the Cytheria's capture she'd been landed on the world of the botanical specimens from her landing-fins. And in passing her as he'd done, Trent had gotten an exact bearing to her destination, which was his. But he wasn't through with her yet.

He knew the world to which the Cytheria should be bound. But he needed a guide to the exact spot, the precise location, the exact place among scores of millions of square miles of planetary surface to which pirate ships would resort. Finding a black grain on a sandy beach would be a promising project by comparison. But Trent left the Cytheria behind and went on to Kress Three.

McHinny came into the control room, humiliated and desperate. He wanted Trent's promise to try out his marvellous pirate-frustrating invention once more. During the waiting time on Loren he'd taken no part in the repair work. He'd labored frantically to rebuild his gadget yet again. It had been tried twice; and now it was rebuilt for a third test in combat. It couldn't be said that McHinny was resolved. He was frantic to force the acceptance of his genius. He was truculent and waspish and bitterly on the defensive, but he'd built the contrivance all over again. Now, he said defiantly, he'd found the weakness in his former design.

The trouble was that he hadn't allowed for a Lawlor drive in operation in the ship his device was to make helpless. When tested before the Yarrow's owners, it was tested against a ship in overdrive, but not moving. It was lying in an overdrive field which kept it out of normal space. With a Lawlor drive operating in overdrive, the gadget blew itself out. But, with the new modification, it would blow out not only the pirate's overdrive, but the Lawlor drive too. The weak point was not only eliminated, the device became an infinitely better weapon against pirates.

It was not his nature to be humble or to ask a favor. He was much more likely to be scornful and to demand. But this time he was nearly human. He asked almost tearfully for one more chance to prove his device, and hence his genius.

"All right," said Trent. He felt impatient. "If the opportunity offers, we'll try it again. But only if the opportunity offers! What we're about is too tricky to let us take any chance we can avoid."

McHinny couldn't refrain from a truculent statement. "You won't be taking any chances this time!"

Trent nodded. He was impatient. He was very, very busy. He had to keep himself from hoping on Marian's account. He had to remind himself that she was undoubtedly dead. He had to keep his mind furiously busy lest it begin to spin out reasons to hope. And what he had to do was not to be carried out by a man deceiving himself in any fashion. It had to be arranged and carried out in cold blood, with only one purpose, an utterly ruthless and merciless destruction of any man however remotely connected with pirate operations in the Pleiads.

It happened, though, that he was deceiving himself. In actual cold blood he wouldn't have felt the deep hatred and killing hunger that filled him. He wouldn't have experienced moments when his voice was thick with fury, though he denied it, and when his hands tended to clench and unclench of themselves as if lusting to do murder. But he was able to tell himself that this was not on Marian's account alone. This was righteous fury, normal hatred; the reaction of any honorable man to the fact that pirates made a business of murder for their strictly personal benefit.

And, whether in cold blood or hot, his brain worked well enough. He got the Yarrow into orbit around Kress Three without provoking any sign that she had been detected. He even found a hiding place for her in a peculiar, bumbling aggregation of mountain-sized boulders tumbling around the smoky planet in an orbit like a moon.

So far, everything was almost ludicrously simple.

The planet Kress Three was of typical third-planet size among the solar systems of type G suns. It was a little smaller than Manaos, and a little larger than Sira, and very nearly the same as Loren. There were, naturally, only very slight differences in gravity among the four of them. Kress Three should have had ice-caps. It didn't. Its axis was parallel to the axis of its sun, and therefore normal to the ecliptic, and there would be no perceptible seasons such as summer or winter anywhere. Its atmosphere had a rather high CO₂ content, so the hot-house effect of carbon dioxide in trapping solar heat would operate. It would be warm. Also, there was a good trace of sulphur dioxide in its atmosphere. This meant that the seas would be acid, which modified everything. And there were volcanoes.

Trent surveyed it with angry, questing eyes from the Yarrow's hiding-place among the mountains bumbling into each other in their orbit. Down below, on the planet, there were lines of volcanoes, nowhere very far from a sea. There were areas where the ground was barely visible because of local smoke. There were coastlines, here and there, where steam bubbled up and swirled hugely in white clouds, some of them scores of miles in length.

But there were no highways, which can be seen from space much sooner than cities of ordinary size. There were places, to be sure, where vegetation flourished, but also there were vast fields of lava, not all of it cold, on which certainly no plants and perhaps no bacteria could live. Trent searched feverishly. The pirate's base could not be on a plain of un-cooled lava. It could hardly be where mountains smoked and poured molten rock down their sides. There were islands in the acid seas, but they were small and unlikely places for pirates to use.

The Yarrow floated among the huge boulders which dwarfed her. The planet revolved underneath her. Trent fidgeted bitterly. The radar-detectors insisted that there was no radar-scanning of the sky above the unpleasant, smoky planet. Trent hadn't expected it. Radars need to be watched conscientiously. In the pirate base they simply wouldn't be, if only because they couldn't be expected to report anything near a useless planet far from any normal, colonized world. Only passive devices like drive detectors, calling attention to their own reports, would be really useful. So Trent had taken up this position on normal, Lawlor drive, and so hadn't disturbed anybody. An overdrive would have been a different matter.

Evidence for it came before the planet had made one revolution under the Yarrow's hiding place in space. The space-phone speaker in the ceiling of the control room clicked, loudly, and then a voice said, "What ship's that?"

The Yarrow's mate jumped visibly. Trent nodded. He pointed to the space-phone cut-off. It was turned to "receive only." The Yarrow could receive transmissions from other ships in normal space, but the microphone would not transmit. The receiver had picked up a voice from the ground below to a ship that must just have come out of overdrive.

"Who would it be?" demanded another voice sourly. "We're coming in."

A pause. The first voice again, "Who's that talking?"

The second voice, as sourly as before; "Go to hell, will you? This is the Cytheria. Back from getting the mail on Loren. Where'm I landing?"

"Same place you took off from. Any trouble?"

"Grid man started to ask questions. We lifted by rocket. Picked up another ship's drive on the way. You hear it?"

"No. Nothing," said the first voice. "Shoot a flare."

Trent took a deep breath. This was a break. He'd beaten the Cytheria here. She was going to land, of course, in normal space. There was no other solidity. And she was going to shoot a flare to allow of her location from the ground, so she could be talked down where there was no landing-grid, and yet a particular place of landing was requisite.

He saw the flare, a strictly emergency device when a ship couldn't be found by the grid-operator where it ought to be. This was a luridly red ball of flame, giving off millions of candlepower of crimson light. Trent got it centered on a vision-screen and turned up the magnification. He saw the Cytheria, a glittering rounded form in emptiness. He heard the voices.

"You're too far east." That would be galactic east, of course, not east on the planet now a gibbous disk beyond the Cytheria. "That's better … A little more." Then, "Good enough. We'll fine it when you get lower. Start down."

Trent watched the magnified image of the Cytheria. It was still tiny. It moved swiftly down toward the planet's surface. That would be the Lawlor drive helping to aim and control it on the way down, and making those fine adjustments a rocket designed for emergency use couldn't be expected to take.

Trent said over his shoulder to the mate, "Use a camera on the vision-screen. We're going to need pictures."

He watched tensely. There was a promontory jutting out into the sea. It was a good landmark. There were mountains inland. One of them smoked. The Cytheria went down and down, dwindling. The first voice he'd heard made curt comments from time to time. That voice was aground. The voice coming from the Cytheria replied. Profanely.

He heard the camera clicking. The mate was photographing the vision-screen with its pictures of an extremely tiny ship growing smaller and ever smaller as it descended.

Then there were heavy rocket fumes. White smoke. The Cytheria's rockets were slowing her, now, to make a gentle landing. Up to this moment they had merely checked her descent. Now they had to stop it. The Lawlor drive became more important. It could neither take a ship off nor land one, but in cooperation with rockets the results were admirable.

It landed. Rocket fumes blew away. The space-phone said sardonically, "Welcome to our city! Fancy seeing you here!"

The voice which was the Cytheria swore wearily. There was a clicking in the space-phone speaker. Somewhere, a phone had been turned off.

Trent found fury shaking him. Then he said evenly, "I hope those pictures came out well. We're going to need them."

The mate pulled out the long strip of film. He peeled off the paper strip of positive. He glanced at it and held it out to Trent.

"These will do," said Trent. "Get them printed as big as they'll stay sharp. They're our maps."

The mate disappeared. He looked dubious. But he would manage somehow to get the small, self-developed pictures reproduced. In the ordinary course of business, written records were normally photocopied as routine. The mate went to wrestle with the copier. Trent pressed the all-hands button, and his voice echoed through every compartment of the ship.

"All hands," he said icily. "I'm going aground. There'll be some fighting and some loot. Anybody who wants to be ship-keeper can stay aboard. He gets no fighting and no loot. Everybody who's looking for action get set. He does get fighting, and he does get loot."

He made no reference to nobler reasons for landing on a pirate-occupied planet where there would certainly be more pirates than the party the Yarrow could send to ground. He didn't speak of the possible rescue of prisoners whom the pirates would otherwise murder. In fact, he appealed only to the combative and the mercenary instincts of his spacemen. But that was immediately understandable. Actually, an exactly similar appeal by another ship captain might have produced no volunteers at all. But Trent had actually to choose two men to leave behind with the mate as ship-keepers. There'd be McHinny left aboard, too.

But for whatever reason, the crew of the Hecla, the salvage crew, and the crew of the Yarrow were ready to follow Trent anywhere. They'd been in action with him before, but their confidence in him didn't come from that. The real reason was that he'd led them in a stupendous brawl in the dives outside the Sira spaceport.

He listed the equipment he wanted each man to carry. Satchel-bombs, two per man. They were shaped-charge bombs, and they were highly dependable for demolition. There were detonator-bombs, used by police for the moral effect of their sound. Trent mentioned modifications that could be made to them so they'd have more effect, though they'd be less moral. It involved nuts and bolts and broken welding-rod and scrap-iron.

They'd also carry small-arms. Rifles, yes. Pistols, definitely. As the Yarrow's crewmen envisioned themselves festooned with such an armament, an extraordinary atmosphere of cheer and enthusiasm developed. He ordered masks against their own fog-gas bombs, and he insisted that each man carry ample ammunition.

When they gathered, crowding, to get into the Yarrow's spaceboats, the feel of things was curiously like a no-longer-remembered incident in the life of a Captain Trent of the late eighteenth century. That Captain Trent had taken three-quarters of his ship's crew in that ship's small boats, and rowed into a harbor with them in the murky blackness of a starless, moonless, abysmally dark night. That Captain Trent was leading a cutting-out expedition nobody else would have tried. He happened to succeed.

This Captain Trent pocketed folded maps, which were actually parts of the ground surface of the planet they were to land on. He got into the lead boat, having given instructions to all his followers.

The spaceboats headed down for the planet. Captain Trent's expression changed when they were well on their way. There was zestful, uniformed anticipation all around him. But in the blackness of the spaceboat Trent's face went bleak.

He was thinking, of course, that this foray was too late. If he'd been here upon this errand long enough ago, it could have accomplished something. Maybe. But now it was much too late.

Marian, he assured himself bitterly, was dead. She must be. He couldn't but be too late.