The Pirates of Zan

CHAPTER SIX

WHEN FRANTIC bangings on the propped-shut door awakened him next morning, he confusedly imagined that they were noises in the communicator headphones.

But suddenly he opened his eyes. Somebody banged on the door once more. A voice cried angrily:

“Bron Hoddan! Wake up or I’ll go away and let whatever happens to you, happen! Wake up!”

It was the voice of the Lady Fani, at once indignant, tearful, solicitous and angry.

“Hello. I’m awake. What’s up?”

“Come out of there!” cried Fani’s voice, simultaneously exasperated and filled with anxiety. “Things are happening! Somebody’s here from Walden! They want you!”

Hoddan could not believe it. It was too unlikely. But he opened the door and Thai came in, and Fani followed.

“Good morning,” said Hoddan automatically.

Thai said mournfully:

“A bad morning, Bron Hoddan! A bad morning! Men from Walden came riding over the hills.”

“How many?”

“Two,” said Fani angrily. “A fat man in a uniform, and a young man who looks like he wants to cry. They had an escort of retainers from one of my father’s neighbors. They were stopped at the gate, of course, and they sent a written message to my father, and he had them brought inside right away!”

Hoddan shook his head.

“They probably said that I’m a criminal and that I should be sent back to Walden. How’d they get down? The landing-grid isn’t working.”

“They landed in something that used rockets,” Fani said viciously. “It came down close to a castle over that way — only six or seven miles from the spaceport. They asked for you. They said you’d landed from the last liner from Walden. And because you and Thai fought so splendidly, why everybody’s talking about you. So the chieftain over there accepted a present of money from them, and gave them horses as a return gift, and sent them here with a guard. Thai talked to the guards. The men from Walden have promised huge gifts of money if they help take you back to the thing that uses rockets.”

“I suspect,” said Hoddan, “that it would be a spaceboat. Yes. With a built-in, tool-steel cell to keep me from telling anybody how to make—” He stopped and grimaced. “They’d take me to the spaceport in a soundproof can and I’d be hauled back to Walden. Fine!”

“What are you going to do?” asked Fani anxiously. Hoddan’s ideas were not clear. But Darth was not a healthy place for him. It was extremely likely, for example, that Don Loris would feel that the very bad jolt he’d given that astute schemer’s plans, by using stun-pistols at the spaceport, had been neatly canceled out by his rescue of Fani. He would regard Hoddan with a mingled gratitude and aversion that would amount to calm detachment. Don Loris could not be counted on as a really warm, personal friend.

On the other hand, the social system of Darth was not favorable to a stranger with an already lurid reputation for fighting. Another disadvantage was that his weapons would be useless unless frequently recharged; he couldn’t count on always being able to do that.

As a practical matter, his best bet was probably to investigate the nine inexplicable ships overhead. They hadn’t cooperated with the Waldenians. It could be inferred that no confidential relationship existed up there. It was even possible that the nine ships and the Waldenians didn’t know of each other’s presence. There is a lot of room in space. If both called on ship-frequency and listened on ground-frequency, they would not have picked up each others’ summons to the ground.

“You’ve got to do something!” insisted Fani. “I saw father talking to them! He looked happy, and he never looks happy unless he’s planning some skulduggery!”

“I think,” said Hoddan, “that I’ll have some breakfast, if I may. As soon as I fasten up my shipbag.”

Thai said mournfully:

“If anything happens to you, something will happen to me too, because I helped you.”

“Breakfast first,” said Hoddan. “That, as I understand it, should make it disgraceful for your father to have my throat cut. But beyond that…” He said gloomily, Thai, get a couple of horses outside the wall. We may need to ride somewhere. I’m very much afraid we will. But first I’d like to have some breakfast.”

“But aren’t you going to face them? You could shoot them!” Fani said.

Hoddan shook his head.

“It wouldn’t solve anything. Anyhow a practical man like your father won’t sell me out before he’s sure I can’t pay off better. I’ll bet on a conference with me before he makes a deal.”

Fani stamped her foot.

“Outrageous! Think what you saved me from!”

But she did not question the possibility, Hoddan observed.

“A practical man can always make what he wants to do look like a noble sacrifice of personal inclinations to the welfare of the community.” Hoddan commented. “Now I’ve decided that I’ve got to be practical myself, and that’s one of the rules. How about breakfast?”

He strapped the shipbag shut on the stun-pistols his pockets would not hold. He made a minor adjustment to the communicator. It was not ruined, but nobody else could use it without much labor finding out what he’d done. This was the sort of thing his grandfather on Zan would have advised. His grandfather’s views were explicit.

“Helping one’s neighbor,” the old man had said frequently, “is all right as a two-way job. But maybe he’s laying for you. You get a chance to fix him so he can’t do you no harm and you’re a lot better off and he’s one hell of a better neighbor!”

This was definitely true of the men from Walden. Hoddan guessed that Derec was one of them. The other would represent the police or the planetary government. It was probably just as true of Don Loris and others.

Hoddan found himself disapproving of the way the cosmos was designed.

As he sat at breakfast, Fani looked at him with interesting anxiety; he was filled with forebodings. The future looked dark. Yet what he asked of fate and chance was so simple! He asked only a career, riches, and a delightful girl to marry and the admiration of his fellow citizens. Trivial things! But it looked like he’d have to do battle for even such minor gifts of destiny!

Fani watched him eat.

“I don’t understand you,” she complained. “Anybody else would be proud of what he’d done and angry with my father. Or don’t you think he’ll act ungratefully?”

“Of course I do!” said Hoddan.

“Then why aren’t you angry?”

“I’m hungry,” said Hoddan.

“And you take it for granted that I want to be properly grateful,” said Fani in one breath, “and yet you haven’t show the least appreciation of my getting two horses over in that patch of woodland yonder!” she pointed and Hoddan nodded. “Besides having Thai there with orders to serve you faithfully-”

She stopped short. Don Loris appeared, beaming, at the top of the steps leading from the great hall where the conferences took place. He regarded Hoddan benignly.

“This is a very bad business, my dear fellow,” he said benevolently. “Has Fani told you of the people who arrived from Walden in search of you? They tell me terrible things about you!”

“Yes,” said Hoddan. He prepared a roll for biting. He continued, “One of them, I think, is named Derec. He’s to identify me so good money isn’t wasted paying for the wrong man. The other man’s a policeman, isn’t he?” He reflected a moment. “If I were you, I’d start talking at a million credits. You might get half that.”

He bit into the roll as Don Loris looked shocked.

“Do you think,” he asked indignantly, “that I would give up the rescuer of my daughter to emissaries from a foreign planet to be locked in a dungeon for life?”

“Not in those words,” conceded Hoddan. “But after all, despite your deep gratitude to me, there are such things as one’s duty to humanity as a whole. And while it would cause you bitter anguish if someone dear to you represented a danger to millions of innocent women and children — still, under such circumstances you might feel it necessary to do violence to your own emotions.”

Don Loris looked at him with abrupt suspicion. Hoddan waved the roll.

“Moreover,” he observed, “gratitude for actions done on Darth does not entitle you to be judge of my actions on Walden. While you might and even should feel obliged to defend me in all things I have done on Darth, your obligation to me does not extend to uphold my acts on Walden.” Don Loris looked extremely uneasy.

“I may have thought something like that,” he admitted. “But-”

“So that,” continued Hoddan, “while your debt to me cannot and should not be overlooked, nevertheless—” Hoddan put the roll into his mouth and spoke less clearly ” — nevertheless you feel that you should give consideration to the claims of Walden to inquire into my actions while there.” He chewed, swallowed, and said gravely: “And can I make death rays?”

Don Loris brightened. He drew a deep breath of relief. He said complainingly:

“I don’t see why you’re so sarcastic! Yes. That is a rather important question. You see, on Walden they don’t know how to. They say you do. They’re very anxious that nobody should be able to. Because, while in unscrupulous hands such an instrument of destruction would be most unfortunate… Ah… under proper control…”

“Yours,” said Hoddan.

“Say ours,” said Don Loris hopefully. “With my experience of men and affairs, and my loyal and devoted retainers—”

“And cozy dungeons,” said Hoddan. He wiped his mouth. “No.”

Don Loris started violently.

“No, what?”

“No death rays,” said Hoddan. “I can’t make ’em. Nobody can. If they could be made, some star somewhere would be turning them out, or some natural phenomenon would let them loose from time to time. If there were such things as death rays, all living things would have died, or else would have adjusted to their weaker manifestations and developed immunity so they wouldn’t be death rays any longer. As a matter of fact, that’s probably been the case, some time in the past. So far as the gadget goes that they’re talking about, it’s been in use for a half-century in the Cetis cluster. Nobody’s died of it yet.”

Don Loris looked bitterly disappointed.

“That’s the truth?” he asked unhappily. “Honestly? That’s your last word on it?”

“Much said Hoddan, “much as I hate to spoil the prospects of profitable skulduggery, that’s my last word and it’s true.”

“But those men from Walden are very anxious!” protested Don Loris. “There was no ship available, so their government got a liner that normally wouldn’t stop here to take an extra lifeboat aboard. It came out of overdrive in this solar system, let out the lifeboat, and went on its way again. Those two men are extremely anxious!”

“Ambitious, maybe,” said Hoddan. “They’re prepared to pay to overcome your sense of gratitude to me. Naturally, you want all the traffic will bear. I think you can get a half-million.”

Don Loris looked suspicious again.

“You don’t seem worried,” he said fretfully. “I don’t understand you!”

“I have a secret,” said Hoddan.

“What is it?”

“It will develop,” said Hoddan.

Don Loris hesitated and essayed to speak, and thought better of it. He shrugged his shoulders and went slowly back to the flight of stone steps. He descended. The Lady Fani started to wring her hands. Then she said hopefully: “What’s your secret?”

“That your father thinks I have one,” said Hoddan. “Thanks for the breakfast. Should I walk out the gate, or—”

“It’s closed,” said the Lady Fani forlornly. “But I have a rope for you. You can go down over the wall.”

“Thanks,” said Hoddan. “It’s been a pleasure to rescue you.”

“Will you…” Fani hesitated. “I’ve never known anybody like you before. Will you ever come back?” Hoddan shook his head at her.

“Once you asked me if I’d fight for you, and look what it got me into! No commitments.”

He glanced along the battlements. There was a fairly large coil of rope in view. He picked up his bag and went over to it. He checked the fastening of one end and tumbled the other over the wall.

Ten minutes later he trudged up to Thai, waiting in the nearby woodland with two horses.

“The Lady Fani,” he said, “has the kind of brains I like. She pulled up the rope again.”

Thai did not comment. He watched morosely as Hoddan made the perpetually present shipbag fast to his saddle and then distastefully climbed aboard the horse.

“What are you going to do?” asked Thai unhappily. “I didn’t make a parting-present to Don Loris, so I’ll be disgraced if he finds out I helped you. And I don’t know where to take you.”

“Where,” asked Hoddan, “did those characters from Walden come down?”

Thai told him. At the castle of a powerful feudal chieftain, on the plain, some four miles from the mountain range, and six miles this side of the spaceport.

“We ride there,” said Hoddan. “Liberty Is said to be sweet, but the man who said that didn’t have blisters from a saddle. Let’s go.”

They rode away. There would be no immediate pursuit, and possibly none at all. Don Loris had left Hoddan at breakfast on the battlements. The Lady Fani would make as much confusion over his disappearance as she could. But there’d be no search -for him until Don Loris had made his deal.

Hoddan was sure that Fani’s father would have an enjoyable morning. He would relish the bargaining session. He’d explain in great detail how valuable had been Hoddan’s service to him, in rescuing Fani from an abductor who would have been an intolerable son-in-law. He’d grow almost tearful as he described his affection for Hoddan, and how he loved his daughter. He would observe grievedly that they were asking him to betray the man who had saved for him the solace of his old age. He would mention also that the price they offered was an affront to his paternal affection and his dignity. Either they’d come up or the deal was off!

But meanwhile Hoddan and Thai rode industriously toward the place from which those emissaries had come.

All was tranquil. All was calm. Once they saw a dust cloud, and Thai turned aside to a providential wooded copse, in which they remained while a cavalcade went by. Thai explained that it was a feudal chieftain on his way to the spaceport town. It was simple discretion for them not to be observed said Thai, because they had great reputations as fighting men. Whoever defeated them would become prominent at once. So somebody might try to pick a quarrel under one of the finer points of etiquette when it would be disgrace to use anything but standard Darthian implements for massacre. Hoddan admitted that he did not feel quarrelsome.

They rode on after a time, and in late afternoon the towers and battlements of the castle they sought appeared. The ground here was only gently rolling. They approached it with caution, following the reverse slope of hills. At last they penetrated horse-high brush to the point where they could see it clearly.

If Hoddan had been a student of early terrestrial history, he might have remarked upon the re-emergence of ancient architectural forms to match the revival of primitive social systems. As it was, he noted in this feudal castle the use of bastions for flanking fire upon attackers; he recognized the value of battlements for the protection of defenders while allowing them to shoot, and the tricky positioning of sally ports. He even grasped the reason for the massive, stark, unornamented keep. But his eyes did not stay on the castle for long. He saw the spaceboat in which Derec and his more authoritative companion had arrived.

It lay on the ground a half-mile from the castle walls. It was a chubby, clumsy, flattened shape some forty feet long and nearly fifteen wide. The ground about it was scorched where it had descended upon its rocket flames. There were several horses tethered near it, and men who were plainly retainers of the nearby castle reposed in its shade. Hoddan reined in.

“Here we part,” he told Thai. “When we first met I enabled you to pick the pockets of a good many of your fellow countrymen. I never asked for my split of the take. I expect you to remember me with affection.” Thai clasped both of Hoddan’s hands in his. “If you ever return,” he said with mournful warmth, “I am your friend!”

Hoddan nodded and rode out of the brushwood toward the spaceboat lifeboat that had landed the emissaries from Walden. That it landed so close to the spaceport, of course, was no accident. It was known on Walden that Hoddan had taken space-passage to Darth. He’d have landed only two days before his pursuers could reach the planet. And on a roadless, primitive world like Darth he couldn’t have gotten far from the spaceport. So his pursuers would have landed close by, also. But it must have taken considerable courage. When the landing-grid failed to answer, it must have seemed likely that Hoddan’s death rays had been at work.

Here and now, though, there was no uneasiness. Hoddan rode heavily, without haste, through the slanting sunshine. He was seen from a distance and watched without apprehension by the loafing guards about the boat. He looked hot and thirsty. He was both. So the posted guard merely looked at him without too much interest when he brought his dusty mount up to the shadow the lifeboat cast, and apparently decided that there wasn’t room to get into it.

He granted a greeting and looked at them speculatively.

“Those two characters from Walden,” he observed, “sent me to got something from this thing, here. Don Loris told ’em I was a very honest man.”

He painstakingly looked like a very honest man. After a moment there were responsive grins.

“If there’s anything missing when I start back,” said Hoddan, “I can’t imagine how it happened! None of you would take anything. Oh, no! I bet you’ll blame it on me!” He shook his head and said, “Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.”

One of the guards sat up and said appreciatively:

“But it’s locked. Good.”

“Being an honest man,” said Hoddan amiably, “they told me how to unlock it.”

He got off his horse. He removed the bag from his saddle. He went into the grateful shadow of the metal hull. He paused and mopped his face and then went to the boat’s port. He put his hand on the turning-bar. Then he painstakingly pushed in the locking-stud with his other hand. Of course the handle turned. The port opened. The two from Walden would have thought everything safe because it was under guard. On Walden that protection would have been enough. On Darth, the spaceboat had not been looted simply because locks, there, were not made with separate vibration-checks to keep vibration from loosening them. On spaccboats such a precaution was usual.

“Give me two minutes,” said Hoddan over his shoulder. “I have to get what they sent me for. After that everybody starts even.”

He entered and closed the door behind him. Then he locked it. By the nature of things it is as needful to be able to lock a spaceboat from the inside as it is unnecessary to lock it from without.

He looked things over. Standard equipment everywhere. He checked everything, even to the fuel supply. There were knockings on the port. He continued to inspect. He turned on the vision screens, which provided the control-room and the rest of the boat with an unobstructed view in all directions. He was satisfied.

The knocks because hangings. Something approaching indignation could be deduced. The guards around the space-boat felt that Hoddan was taking an unfair amount of time to pick the cream of the loot inside.

He got a glass of water. It was excellent. A second.

The hangings became violent hammerings.

Hoddan seated himself leisurely in the pilot’s seat and turned small knobs. He waited. He touched a button. There was a mildly thunderous bang outside, and the lifeboat reacted as if to a slight shock. The vision screens showed a cloud of dust at the spaceboat’s stern, roused by a deliberate explosion in the rocket tubes. It also showed the retainers in full flight.

He waited until they were in safety and made the standard take-off preparations. A horrific roaring started up outside. He touched controls and a monstrous weight pushed him back in his seat. The rocket swung, lifted, and shot skyward with greater acceleration than before.

It went up at a lifeboat’s full fall-like rate of climb, leaving a trail of blue-white flame behind it. All the surface of Darth seemed to contract swiftly below. The spaceport and the town rushed toward a spot beneath the spaceboat’s tail. They shrank and shrank. He saw other places. Mountains. Castles. He saw Don Loris’ stronghold. Higher, he saw the sea.

The sky turned purple. It went black with specks of star-shine in it. Hoddan swung to a westward course and continued to rise, watching the star images as they shifted on the screens. The image of the sun, of course, was automatically diminished so that it was not dazzling. The rockets continued to roar, though in a minor fashion because there was no longer air outside in which a bellow could develop.

Hoddan painstakingly made use of those rule-of-thumb methods of astrogation which his piratical fathers had developed and which a boy on Zan absorbed without being aware. He wanted an orbit around Darth. He didn’t want to take time to try to compute it. So he watched the star-images ahead and astern. If the stars ahead rose above the planet’s edge faster than those behind sank down below it, he would lie climbing. If the stars behind sank down faster than those ahead rose up, he would be descending. If all the stars rose equally he’d be moving straight down. It was not a complex method, and it worked.

Presently he relaxed. He sped swiftly toward the sunrise line on Darth. This was the reverse of a normal orbit, but it was the direction followed by the ships up here. He hoped his orbit was lower than theirs. If it was, he’d overtake them from behind. If he were higher, they’d overtake him.

He turned on the spacephone. Its reception indicator was piously placed at ground. He shifted it to space, so that it would pick up calls going planetward, instead of listening vainly for replies from the non-operative landing-grid.

Instantly voices boomed in his ears. Many voices. An impossibly large number of voices. Many, many, many more than nine transmitters were in operation now!

“Idiot!” said a voice in quiet passion, “sheer off or you’ll get in our drive-field!” A high-pitched voice said, ” — and group two take second orbit position.” Somebody bellowed, “But why don’t they answer?” And another voice still, said formally,. “Reporting group five, but four ships are staying behind with tanker, Toya, which is having stabilizer trouble.”

Hoddan’s eyes opened very wide. He turned down the sound while he tried to think. But there wasn’t anything to think. He’d come aloft to scout three ships that had turned to nine, because he was in such a fix on Darth that anything strange might be changed into something useful. But this was more than nine ships — itself an impossibly large space-fleet. There was no reason why ships of space should ever travel together. There were innumerable reasons why they shouldn’t. There was a limit to the number of ships that could be accommodated at any spaceport in the galaxy. There was no point, no profit, no purpose in a number of ships traveling together.

Darth’s sunrise-line appeared far ahead. The lifeboat would soon cease to be a bright light in the sky, now. The sun’s image vanished from the rear screens. The boat went hurtling onward through the blackness of the planet’s shadow while voices squabbled, wrangled, and formally reported.

During the period of darkness, Hoddan racked his brains for the vaguest of ideas on why so many ships should appear about an obscure and unimportant world like Darth. Presently the sunset-line appeared ahead, and far away he saw moving lights which were the hulls of the volubly communicating vessels. He stared, blankly. There were tens. Scores. He was forced to guess at the stark impossibility of more than a hundred spacecraft in view. As the boat rushed onward he had to raise the guess. It couldn’t be, but -

He turned on the outside telescope, and the image on its screen was more incredible than the voices and the existence of the fleet itself. The scope focused first on a bulging, monster. It was an antiquated freighter that had not been built for a hundred years. The second view was of a passenger-liner with the elaborate ornamentation that in past generations was considered suitable for space. There was a bulk-cargo ship, with no emergency rockets at all and the crew’s quarters in long blisters built outside the gigantic tank which was the ship itself. There was a needle-like spaceyacht. More freighters, with streaks of rust on their sides where they had lain aground for tens of years.

The fleet was an anomaly, and each of its component parts was a separate freak. It was a gathering together of all the outmoded and obsolete hulks and monstrosities of space. One would have to scavenge half the galaxy to bring together so many crazy, over-age derelicts that should have been in junk yards.

Then Hoddan drew an explosive deep breath. It was suddenly clear what the fleet was and what its reason must be. Why it stopped here, he could not yet guess.

Hoddan watched absorbedly. There was some emergency. It could be in the line of what an electronic engineer could handle.