Chapter V: Part 5

"That was no guess, it was a practiced estimate. I can come closer than that with some thought. After all, a shoe salesman should be able to call off the sizes of the shoes he sees on the street, and you know the Classical Chinese Carpenter?"

"No."

"The Chinese Carpenter is an oriental who comes in and takes a careful look where the plaster fell out of the ceiling, and then goes away and cuts a hunk of plasterboard that exactly fits the holes without any cutting or even shaving."

Carolyn laughed politely.

"But this is neither here nor there. There are two things to consider: one is breakfast and the other is that we are on our way, but your pilot does not know where he's going."

"Can you strike a line between Terra and Polaris at a distance of three hundred million miles?"

"Duck soup," replied Farradyne. "But how fast?"

"Zero with respect to Terra at three hundred million."

"Let's go up and start computing," he suggested. "I'll construct you some grub after we get the first approximation and we get the ship on the preliminary correction course."

He led her up to the course computer in the control room where she added the time of rendezvous to the rest of the figures. He plucked at the keyboard steadily for a minute, then sat back while the calculator machine went through the program of arithmetical operations for which it was designed. He took the punched paper strip from the machine and fed it into the autopilot, and then said, "Now we'll go below and eat."

"You haven't been waiting for me?"

He nodded, hoping that he looked a bit lovesick.

"You shouldn't have."

They went below and she eyed the dirty dishes with womanly amusement. "You are a sweet sort of liar, Charles," she said, turning and coming into his arms.

He returned her kiss, thinking, these are the "dames" that try men's souls.

14

Carolyn's eyes were fastened on the telescope, her attention was rapt. There was a tiny signal pip at the extreme range on the long-range radar that controlled the telescope, but the object was still too far away. The range was closing slowly, but they would meet somewhere out there, three hundred million miles above Terra to the astronomical North.

Farradyne knew his instruments and his attention was therefore free to think of other matters. Carolyn was busy at the "scope," so Farradyne carefully and quietly slipped a long fluorescent lamp from its terminals and stood it carefully on one end beside him. He balanced it carefully and took a couple of silent steps toward Carolyn before the tube lost its balance and fell to the floor with an ear-shattering explosion.

It even shocked Farradyne, who knew it was coming.

Carolyn reacted like a person stabbed with a red-hot spear. Every muscle in her body tensed as her nervous system twitched and she stood there for a full ten seconds as stiff as a figure of concrete while the shock gripped her. Then adrenalin poured into her veins and she started to bundle up muscularly at the same time that she realized that there really was no danger. Farradyne could see the relaxation of her body taking place almost inch by inch.

The tension crept out of her silently until her breasts began to fall in a shuddering exhalation. Then she sighed, and her tuneful voice was a wordless trill of relief.

Farradyne's attention snapped into full awareness and he felt a thrill of exultation run through him. Carolyn Niles' voice was a quavering trill in _three lilting tones_.

Then the spell was gone and she relaxed against a brace holding one hand under her left breast and breathing heavily. "What on earth--?"

"Lamp fell out of its moorings," said Farradyne. "My fault. That's one of the pre-flight check-ups that I didn't have time to make this morning. Stay where you are and I'll clean up this mess."

"Do you mind if I sit down? I haven't been that startled in years. I thought the ship had exploded."

"Park yourself in the pilot's seat," he said. "But be careful. Broken fluorescent tubing is doubly dangerous. The gook they put on the inside is as poisonous as hell and the glass is as sharp as a razor."

She nodded and picked her way through the glass. She looked up at him and said, "You don't seem to have been startled at all."

"I had a few millionths of a second to get my nerves in readiness," he said. "I saw it come down. You took a beating."

"I guess I did," she admitted weakly.

Farradyne laughed; it was a forced laugh but he hoped it was convincing. "Someone told me once that when a person is excited he always reverts to his native tongue." Her eyes widened and her mouth started to open, but Farradyne went on as though he hadn't been watching avidly for some sign. "But I didn't think your native tongue was Upper Irish Banshee."

Her eyes half-closed and her mouth snapped back from slack wonder to toned self-control. "What did I say?" she asked with a half-humorous smile, which Farradyne knew to be false.

"It sounded like, 'I am slain to pieces' but I don't know Upper Irish Banshee very well."

"You're making fun of me," she complained pettishly.

"No I'm not. Not really. Anyone can be scared right out of his skin when something like that happens unexpectedly."

"All right," she said, and the humor was gone from her voice. "So you are not making fun of me. You've been playing a very serious game with me, haven't you?"

Farradyne thought fast but came up with only, "What makes you think--"

"Let's drop our masks, Charles."

"Masks? Look, Carolyn, I'd rather go clean up this glass."

"Sweep it up, then. But while you're cleaning up, we'll talk seriously."

"About what?" He got a brush from the locker and a square of cardboard from the bottom of a ream of paper, and started to collect the debris.

"What do you know about our language?"

"Damned little. Frankly, I'd had only a very insecure suspicion right up to the moment that you admitted it that there was any language involved."

"So I gave it away myself?"

"Yes."

"I knew you were smart, Charles. But none of us thought that you were smart enough--"

"Thanks, m'lady."

"Stop it!" she cried. "What do you want of me?"

"What do I want of anybody?" he whispered in a voice thick with anger. "I had four brutal years clipped out of the middle of my life by a three-voiced unknown party who wanted to commit suicide bad enough to take thirty-three innocent victims along with him. They blamed it on Hot-Rock Farradyne, the spur-wearing spaceman." His voice came back and he was half-roaring. "I've seen the results of the hellflower in a ruined personality that might have been a brilliant and gracious woman. I've seen a man plugged through the middle, to die at my feet. And on top of that, I've seen a family of prosperous stability calmly making their place in 'society' by dealing in the stinking things that brought the ruin and the death to millions." His voice calmed to a cold, brittle determination. "What do I want of you? Your lovely, flawless hide skinned alive and spread seductively before a fireplace. That's all."

She shrank away from him; looked wildly at the stairway and back into his face as she realized there was no place in the spacecraft where she could hide.

He sneered at her fear. "I'm not going to hurt you, now." His voice was heavy with derision. "You're beneath my hurting you."

Carolyn drew herself together; somehow her self-confidence was returning; perhaps it was the realization that he was not going to do anything violent. "Why take your hatred out on me?" she asked. "Have I done anything but--"

"You?" he asked. "You? How in hell should I know what slimy game you are playing? You're all painted out of the same can, and the color is black. I know that I am not the guy responsible for the Semiramide affair, but who's to prove it? Who's the character that started tossing the con-rods out of the Lancaster? What was your former boyfriend doing on my ship? Setting me up for another kiss-off? Jesus Christ, woman, you'll be asking me not to take these things personally next!"

"You shouldn't. They're the fortunes of war."

Farradyne roared, so loud that his voice echoed and reechoed up and down the ship. "Fortunes of war be damned!" Then he stopped suddenly and looked at her again. "War?" he asked. "Between whom or between what and where? Who and what are you and your ilk? I--" He sat down and put one hand to his head. Carolyn started to speak. "Charles--" but he looked up and said, "Shut the hell up and let me think!"

"But I--"

"Shut up or I'll slap you shut!" Farradyne meant it, and Carolyn must have understood that slapping her senseless did not conflict with his aversion to violence. Not now. Not any more.

He had enough evidence to make a shrewd guess if he could only sort out the hodgepodge, throw out the dross, hang the material end to end and then take an impersonal look at it to fill in the gaps.

Some of it had to do with a combined suicide and wanton mass-murder in a wrecked spacecraft; he should study that incident with the view of discovering why it was done, and not why it had been done to Charles Farradyne. There were the Nileses who probably went to church on Sunday, belonged to the Chamber of Commerce and the Ladies' Aid and the Civic Welfare and considered running hellflowers a proper business. And the daughter, Carolyn, who wanted marriage and a home and a bunch of kids to bring up into the same hellish business so well run by their grandfather--just as she had been raised. Something important hinged on the triple-toned voice which now had become more than a hasty impression made under stress and excitement. Women who were immune to the solar system's most devastating narcotic and used their immunity to deal in the things with safety, bringing ruin to other women. It was more than jealousy between women, it went farther than that. It was a form of warfare, and this idea indicated an organization large and well-integrated; capable of out-maneuvering capable and brilliant men who had dedicated their lives to stamping out the racket--and who died under the juggernaut instead of destroying it.

Well, there it was and what could he make of it?

No, there was more to be added. Brenner-Hughes, who tried to remove the control rods of the reaction pile, and who was immune to marcoleptine. That was an oddly shaped piece of the puzzle that suddenly dropped into place with a click and coupled up two isolated chunks to make one solid corner.

Farradyne put himself in the position of Professor Martin, who might have been a survivor of the Lancaster foundering. Martin might ask why someone had tried to kill him, just as Farradyne had so often asked himself why Party X had tried to kill Farradyne in the Semiramide. The answer was that Brenner-Hughes had not directed his efforts at Martin, but at Farradyne, who had some knowledge that was dangerous to the hellflower ring. Martin would have been the same sort of innocent victim to the second episode as Farradyne had been to the first. Party X had wrecked the Semiramide because there was someone aboard with dangerous knowledge. There was a coldly operating group of persons, immune themselves to drugs, who were efficiently undermining the rest of the human race by preying on weakness, lust and escapist factors that lie somewhere near the surface in the strongest of human characters.

He raised his head and looked at Carolyn Niles.

She faced him squarely and asked, "Have you figured it out?"

"I think so," he said coldly. "There are a couple of gaps yet which you can fill in."

"What makes you think I'll do it?"

"You'll do it," he said in a brittle voice. "For instance, what are you, real or artificial mutant?"

Her laugh was strained and cynical. "Brilliant!" she said. "_Homo Superior_, Charles."

"All right then, keep it clammed. But we'll find out."

"You haven't found out yet," she remarked pointedly.

"We didn't always have electric lamps, either."

Carolyn shook her head in a superior manner. "You did not discover this thing either," she said calmly. "You were shown most of it deliberately."

"Indeed?" His voice was sarcastic.

"We knew that someone high-up and undercover had furnished you with a spacecraft and a forged license and set you to running into us, hoping that your reputation would establish you as a racketeer. He used you efficiently, so we used you more efficiently. There are two ends to a fishline, Charles, and the fish and the fisherman never meet until one pulls the other in. We caught Howard Clevis on the wrong end of the line, so to speak. We also--"

"You caught Clevis?"

"As soon as we knew who your contact was we pulled him in. So if you are expecting a flight of military craft to come racing up in time to intercept the rendezvous ship we have out there, forget it. The military are still on the landing blocks at the spaceport."

Farradyne whirled and peered into the radar. The single pip was close and closing the range swiftly but there was nothing else on the "scope." It was a huge ship, if the size of the radar response meant anything and Farradyne peered into the coupled telescope.

Nothing like it could ever have been built in secret anywhere among the habitable planets of the solar system. The size of it was such that the metal alone, even if one piece were placed with each manufacturer to conceal the process, would have attracted notice, and the rest of the project would require the resources of a planet to feed it and the men that built it. It would be like trying to build a four-hundred-inch telescope in secret; the very least that could happen would be some avid press agent taking note of a massive casting and using it in an advertisement, and that would start the parade.

Farradyne turned away from the telescope. "Baby, what a sucker you played me for!" he jeered. "So I was to be your lover, your husband? Together, hand in hand we go to cement the first interstellar union. The mating of a jackass and a triple-tongued canary, that the fruit of such union will be half-assed and bird-brained." Farradyne's voice went hard. "Well, if it's war your people want, we'll give it to you!"

Farradyne strode across the room toward the controls and as he came, Carolyn's hand moved swiftly, catching up the microphone in a single swoop and bringing it to her mouth. She had had the radio turned on all the while, obviously, and Farradyne's tirade had been going out.

Carolyn cried a sing-songy rhythm into the mike. It reminded Farradyne of an exotic trio chanting a ritual celebration of some heathen rite of sacrifice.

He slapped the microphone out of her hand; the thing hurled out to the end of its cord and jerked free, to crash against the far wall leaving the cord-ends dangling open like a raw sore.

He caught her by the hair, lifted her out of the seat and hurled her across the room. She fell and went rolling in a welter of arms and legs until she came up against the wall beside the mike. She scooped it up and hurled it at Farradyne's head, but he caught it in one hand and dropped it to the floor.

He dropped into the seat and hit the levers with both hands. The Lancaster surged upward, throwing Carolyn back to the floor in a painful heap. The acceleration rose to three gravities, then to four.

"This trick we take," he gloated.

Carolyn moaned; it sounded like attempted laughter.

He looked into the radarscope and saw that despite his four gravities of acceleration the monstrous spacecraft was matching him and closing the range.

15

Farradyne watched Carolyn uncaringly as she fought herself out of the crumpled position and succeeded in flopping over on her back where the four gravities were not making her body press against her arms and legs. She spreadeagled on the floor and her chest labored with the effort. Then she relaxed, because four gravities are not too uncomfortable when lying on the back, even though the floor below is hard.

"Forget it, Charles," she said slowly, and with some difficulty. "You can't run away from a ship--that can go--faster than light."

"I can try."

"You can't win."

The radio speaker came alive, "Surrender, Farradyne! Stop and submit or we fire!"

Farradyne's lips tightened as he fought the controls so that the ship slid sidewise, putting another vector in its course. He twirled the volume knob to zero on the radio with a violent twist of his wrist. "They're your friends, and they don't mind killing you," he sneered.

"I'm not afraid to die."

"I am," grunted Farradyne. "I have some knowledge that I don't want to die without telling."

"That's why I'm willing--to keep you from telling."

His hands danced on the levers and the Lancaster turned end for end and sped back at the huge craft almost on a sideswiping course. Out here intrinsic velocity meant nothing, the only thing that counted was the Lancaster's velocity with respect to the velocity of the spacecraft from the stars. He had one advantage, his ship was smaller and therefore it must be more maneuverable. Furthermore he had the advantage of surprise. He could go where he pleased, and the other pilot must follow him. Since Farradyne's changes of pace and course would come without warning, each switch would take a few fractions of a second to follow. On land a few fractions of a second mean little, but in space they mean miles. On land a quartering flight meant closing of the range; in space where the pursuer could not dig a heel into the ground and turn on a dime, quartering flight meant adding another vector to the course.

He widened the gap.

Somehow Farradyne realized that because a ship could exceed the speed of light, it did not follow that the ship would be able to catch an elusive quarry.

He looked at Carolyn, plastered against the floor by four gravities and realized that her race could be no more hardy than his, and therefore four gravities was about all they could take over an extended period of time. Maybe the more hardened space-dogs could take five or six, with training and special seats and wearing equipment. His outfit protected him more than the flimsy stuff she wore.

Here at least he was on an equal footing with the other spacer. It was obvious to Farradyne that interstellar velocities did not depend in any way upon reaching that speed by plain acceleration. A force field of some unknown kind was needed, and this force field must not be one that permitted the body to stand, say a thousand gravities or this force field would go on and the other ship would catch him as easily as a greyhound could catch a rabbit--and here in space there were no brambles in which to hide.

He snapped his Lancaster around and crossed behind the course of the other ship. Again he widened the gap.

He had only one thing to worry about. To the present moment and until it became evident that he would get free of pursuit, this new and sudden enemy was hoping to take him alive. So until it became evident that he could make his escape he had nothing to fear. Once he was free of them, he would have to face the terror of target-seeking missiles capable of several hundred gravities of acceleration and equally capable of turning in midflight if he managed to make them miss him.

He wished desperately for a cargo of bowling balls or steel castings that he could strew in his wake. He cursed his lack of foresight in not having the control rods replaced, because a few of them might have done the trick.

Farradyne stopped cursing. He struggled to the computer and played a long tune on the keys, ignoring the fact that the enemy had finally lined up on his course from behind again and was closing range. Recollection of Brenner-Hughes and the depredations in the pile-bay had started a train of thought that Farradyne followed with growing interest. It was long and involved and it depended upon a large amount of luck, good planning and ability. He hoped all three were with him.

The Lancaster made one more complex turn as the end of the punched tape entered the autopilot. Then, if Farradyne's computations were correct, the Lancaster's nose was pointed at Terra.

The spaceliner behind, fooled again, made a turn and began to pick up the space that had been lost.

Farradyne saw that he had plenty of time. He waited until the punchings on the tape cut the drive a bit, and then he went below and came back into the control room with Brenner-Hughes' space-suit. He got out patching material and carefully repaired the triangular rip. He cleaned out the strong-locker, putting the greenbacks into one of the many pouches of the suit. Then he set about checking it, testing the air-supply and purifier, filling the food pouch and the water tank. Men had been known to last seventy-two hours in a suit like this without any discomfort other than the confinement. The primary danger was running out of oxygen and the secondary danger was thirst. How much longer than the three days depended upon the character of the man and when he had last eaten and taken his fill of water.

The suit was checked to Farradyne's satisfaction and he started to put it on. "How handy are your friends with that big spacer?" he asked.

"Good enough," she said.

"You'd better pray for them to be better," he said. "Because your life depends upon how handy they are."

"Charles, you can't possibly make it."

Farradyne paused; he wanted to take time for a last cigarette. He lit one and puffed before he said, "Honeychild, I could outguess that gang until Sol freezes over, except that sooner or later they'll get sick and tired of the chase and end it by launching a target-seeking missile and that would be that. I have no intention of sitting here and letting them catch me, either."

"So what are you going to do?"

Farradyne reached up and stopped the clock. "I've punched a very interesting autopilot tape. It'll dodge and swoop along at about four gravities and lead your pals a long and devious way after you and I part company. Four gee is enough to keep you flat on your attractive behind so you can't louse it up. Since you can't measure time too accurately, when they grab you, you won't be able to tell 'em just when I took off and they'll have a fine time combing space for a man-sized mote, making his course to Terra."

"Charles?"

Farradyne snubbed his cigarette out and dropped on his hands and knees so that he could look down into her face. "You've pitched me many a low, soft curve to the inside," he told her quietly. "Now you are lying there looking helpless, with those big eyes telling me that I am leaving you here to die. Good act, Carolyn, but this time you didn't think it out far enough. By now you should have known Farradyne well enough to realize that staying here will kill us both because I won't be taken alive! By scramming, maybe we'll both live. This is one battle you lose. And the last. But maybe we'll meet somewhere again to take it up later."

He bent down with a cynical smile and kissed her on the lips. To his surprise he found her lips responsive, but he had neither the time nor inclination to carry the emotion any further.

"So long, Carolyn," he chuckled. "Some of this has been a lot of fun."

He finished donning the space-suit and then with a careless wave of his hand he went down the stairs. She was not looking at him, but at the ruined microphone and the raw cord-ends, and the radio equipment far out of her reach. Panic showed in her face and it gave her some strength, but not enough to fight the four gravities that held her flat.

Then as Farradyne lost sight of her, his jaunty self-confidence faded. Up until not too long ago he had been complimenting himself on being able to find out more about the hellflower operation than the Sandmen. Now he knew the hellflower gang had been using him in a more efficient manner than Clevis and the Solar Anti-Narcotics Department. It became obvious to Farradyne that fighting a gang of cut-throats and fighting an enemy race of intelligent people were about as different as he really was from the brilliant operator he imagined himself to be.

It also required that he change his plans for escape. He knew that he could flee the big ship and had a fine chance of being picked up by a Space Guard scooter as soon as he could get within calling distance of Luna.

But the chances were high that the hellflower people would have their entire undercover outfit alerted and at the first touch of radio call they would be swarming the neighborhood to pick him up. He would call and several ships would answer; there would be a lot of calling back and forth with the result that some "commercial spaceliner" would pick him up, reporting the incident to the Space Guard, who would not even take off from the station on Luna. Then Farradyne would be delivered right back to the place he was leaving now.

He paused by the spacelock and cracked the big portal, and stood there eyeing the huge starship, a tiny dot in the distance below, visible only because its reaction flare limned the ship, making an annular object against the cold twinkling stars. He kept the spacelock open long enough to make it look like a real escape to Carolyn, who would be watching the indicator lamp and marking the time.

Then he closed the spacelock and went down and down in the Lancaster until he found the lowermost inspection cubby. He crawled in and closed the hatch behind him. He settled down to wait with about the same amount of wondering concern as the school boy summoned to the principal's office without being told why.

Even the small amount of evidence that he now could use had been given to him as bait to catch the one man who would be willing to listen to him. He groaned and swore aloud and the sound of his voice echoed and reechoed within the confines of his helmet.

Time creaked past and the Lancaster turned and curved according to the punchings on the autopilot tape. Farradyne had only one prayer--that the enemy would not get tired of the chase and fire a missile that would end the whole game with a wave of intolerable heat and indescribably bright light. Only Carolyn's presence aboard might prevent that until the last moment.

Then the hour-period ended with the Lancaster pointing up and a quartering course from Terra and Sol and a long, long way from the point of supposed escape. Not long after that Farradyne felt the clink of the magnetic grapples.

He tensed again. Would they fine-comb the Lancaster? Or would the inevitable question and answer session that must ensue, once they found Carolyn alone, convince them that he had abandoned ship? Would they take her off and blast the Lanc' or would they deem it of value and keep it?

His mind went on and on--how good was the radar? How alert was their radar operator? Were both good enough to state unequivocally that there had been no minute object leaving the ship on a tangential course, or would there have been the usual clutter of noise and interference and lack of anticipation so that someone could assume that he had left the ship? Someone was going to get chewed for it in any case. Then assuming that the enemy considered the ship valuable, where would they take it and what would they do with it?

Far from feeling gratified at his maneuver, Farradyne was only satisfied to be alive and temporarily out of the hands of the enemy. What happened from here on in must be played by ear against an unknown score for three voices.

The drive of the Lancaster dropped from four gravities to about one, and Farradyne could hear, dimly, the clumpings of heavy feet coming in through the rooms above him. Then the drive diminished again, remaining at about a quarter-gravity or maybe less, and there were sounds of feet above his head. He tensed and he tasted the acid in his mouth; he found his heavy automatic and clutched it clumsily in the heavy space-glove. Capture might be preferable to death, except that Farradyne was fairly well convinced that the enemy could not permit him to stay alive with what he knew about them, even though it was precious little and unsupported.

The cubby he was hiding in was angularly shaped; to one side was space beyond the hull-plates. Inside was the water-jacket that cooled the throat of the reaction motor. Farradyne moved quietly around the central pillar until he was on the opposite side from the inspection hatch and settled down again.

On the plates above his head there were footsteps and the scraping of something heavy being hauled across the deck.

He heard the sound of triple-tongued voices barking musical and discordant sounds, distorted and muffled by the deck and the helmet he wore. One fiddled with the inspection hatch and Farradyne found the scuttlebutt and valved the air out into space knowing the enemy would have a hard time cracking the hatch against the pressure of one atmosphere. They gave up after a moment; then came the sound of drilling on the deckplates above him. A cloud of whitish vapor spurted downward and the sound of alien voices rose sharply as the drill came through. Three more spurts of escaping air blasted downward and skirred around the room to go in a fading draw toward the scuttlebutt.

Plugs filled the four holes and Farradyne turned his head torch on them. They were heavy self-tapping bolts being turned in from above.

The maneuver was repeated three times, ninety degrees apart. Then there was a softer sound of scraping and gradually the clumping of feet and the sound of men at work faded away.

Farradyne took a deep breath and realized that his skin was itching from the cold perspiration of fear that bathed him. The taste in his mouth was brackish and his heart was pounding, his breath shallow and rapid. He opened his mouth to gasp and discovered that he had been clenching his teeth so hard that his jaw ached and his molars hurt.

He closed the scuttlebutt, but did not valve any air into his hiding place. He put the top of his helmet against the deckplate above him and listened. Far above he could hear them, still at work but they were going higher and higher in the ship. He relaxed, waiting....

Three more hours passed, as nerve-wracking a three hours as Farradyne had ever spent. Then, with absolutely no warning the drive went off completely. He floated from the deck and scrabbled around to grab a stanchion. He held on, finally getting his magnetic shoes against a girder where they held him at an odd angle.

The drive went on to a full one gravity and hurled Farradyne flat against the bottom of the cubby, wrenching his ankles slightly. The drive went off again, on and finally off. This time it stayed off.

Floating free, with only his feet for mooring, was like resting in a tub of body-temperature water, and as the lulling muscle-freeing sensation went on and on, Farradyne dozed. From the doze, which was fitful for quite some time, he dropped off into a deep slumber.

16

Farradyne awoke to the pressure of about one gravity and he consulted his watch. Either fourteen hours had passed, or thirty-eight, but he could not believe the latter. A full clock-around was hardly possible for Farradyne, even when he was dead tired, so one clock-around plus fourteen hours was unthinkable.

He put his slumber at fourteen hours and then set his mind on other, more important things.

The ship was silent. His suit hung from him limply, indicating that air had seeped into the cubby again. He tried the scuttlebutt but no hiss of air came. The Lancaster was a-planet.

It might be Terra, Venus or Pluto according to the pull of gravity, but Farradyne did not think it likely to be any one of the three. He suspected that whatever the gizmo was the enemy had installed on the deck above him, it had something to do with transcending the limiting velocity of light. He was probably grounded on enemy soil ... somewhere.

For a moment his mind grappled with the problem of interstellar travel and lost the fight. It was possible, proven by the starship of the aliens. But to come aboard with a gadget under one arm and install it, like putting in a radio set, seemed entirely too simple. On the other hand, Farradyne was sufficiently aware of basic physics to understand that anything that could be used to create a condition where gross matter could exceed the velocity of light would be something that did not have to perform in conjunction with a matter-operated reaction motor. He remembered, dimly, some fanciful theories written by some of the white-tower boys in one of the big universities. These had been experiments in field-theory and group-theory which had indicated that under certain conditions, some rather minute spherical volumes of space could be made to misbehave.

The difference was that with the physicists and their operations, a vast room full of gear had been used to make a five millimeter sphere, and the contrast was marked.

The meat of this matter was that the gizmo that made it possible to travel faster than light must be some sort of field-generator, and such a field-generator might well be packaged in small form for installation. Whatever the science and whatever the location, Farradyne could not hope to learn anything penned up here.

Again he listened. The ship was silent as the proverbial grave. He cracked the inspection hatch and peered out. It was dark as the grave, too.

Boldly he opened the hatch and stepped out. Under the light of his headlamp, Farradyne inspected four rectangular metal boxes, painted a nondescript gray. Cables led from one to another, terminating in white metal connectors. The boxes were bolted to the deck by the self-tapping bolts that had come through his ceiling.

From one of the boxes ran a cable that led to a wall-connector.

Like all other Solarian spacecraft, the Lancaster was well supplied with a network of cables running up and down the length of the ship to serve as test connections and spares for this or that equipment. This made it possible to install some bit of gear for pleasure, comfort or added maneuvering without having to tear half the ship apart to run the necessary wiring.

The enemy had re-connected their multi-line cable to one of the standard Terran connectors and plugged the cable into the Lancaster's cable-plate.

Farradyne could see nothing about the metal boxes that would tell him anything, so he left them and went aloft, cautiously. He doffed the space-suit at the next level and hung it in a suit locker, and continued to walk up the stairway that would lead him to the spacelock and the salon.

Out of one porthole he could see the spaceport. It was broad and dark except for a bouquet of searchlights that drilled into the sky around the rim, a wash of floodlamps that surrounded one of the vast starships many miles distant, and the far-off blur of bright, red light that probably read "Spaceman's Bar" in whatever the natives used for a printed language.

He left the viewport and went higher in his ship until he came to the salon. He peered into it from floor level, but it was dark and untenanted. The spacelock was open and Farradyne looked out of the large round opening across the field to another starship standing a few hundred yards from the Lancaster. The other ship was just as dark as his, except for one small porthole that gleamed like a headlight in the darkness.

The problem of where he was called him to the control room.

He looked into the sky, hunting for familiar constellations. The Pleiades were there, but warped quite a bit and Farradyne found that, while he knew they were distorted as an aggregation of stellar positions, he could not remember their proper relationship. Orion was visible, but the hero had hiked his belt up after a swing of his sword at the mythical enemy. The Great Bear was sitting on his haunches instead of prowling and the smaller Bear had lost his front feet. Cassiopeia had gained some weight, enough to squash her throne and Sirius no longer blazed in Canis Major. Procyon had taken off for parts unknown, while several other bright stars dotted the skies in places where no stars had been on Terra. It was likely that some of these were merely displaced stars, but no one could tell Sirius from anything else without a set of astronomical instruments and a few years of study unless he knew which way Sirius was from this position.

Coldly and calmly Farradyne scanned the skies. Providing they had not travelled more than forty or fifty light years, the constellations before and behind the direct line of flight should be reasonably undistorted, except for those stars that would have been bypassed en route. This would only add a star or two to a constellation behind and subtract the same from a constellation dead ahead. The ones to the side of the line of flight would be misshapen and warped.

It would have been easier if he could have viewed the entire sky, but he had to be content with one hemisphere. If he could find an undistorted constellation with a few stars missing he had come in that direction and, conversely, if there were stars added, he had gone away from it past some of the stars between Sol and this enemy system.

He tried to recall visits to the big stellartarium in New York where the lecturer displayed the skies as seen from various well known stars that were within half a hundred light years of Sol. Certain sky-marks and their displacement would be very helpful, if he could remember them. But he found that he had not been as visually attentive as he might have been, or that he had seen and been entertained and then discarded the data as interesting but useless in a scientific culture that firmly believed in the limiting velocity of light.

Finally he gave up hoping to establish his whereabouts by visual inspection. He found a small pad of paper and began to make layouts of the familiar constellations as he saw them. Someone among the planets of Sol would be able to measure the angles and changes and come up with the right answer within a few light years, and stars were sufficiently separated so that the chances were good for a reasonable identification.

He put a dozen small pages in his pocket and then took his first look at the control room. He could see nothing changed at first, but then he found a small auxiliary panel beside the pilot's seat which contained a bar-topped toggle switch and three pilot lamps that were different in appearance from the rest of the Lancaster's standard equipment.

He felt an urge to try the toggle, but fought it down. It was too much like playing with toy building blocks made of sub-critical masses of plutonium, and Farradyne wanted to stay alive long enough to watch the downfall of the enemy, not participate in the explosion. Curbing his human curiosity to fiddle with strange gadgets, Farradyne turned away from the board and went to the cupboard where he took out his binoculars.

He was astonished to find out how far away the starship really was, and how big it was when it leaped into closer view in the glasses. It was still as dark as an untenanted building except for that one lighted porthole, but the angle into the cabin beyond was too steep. Farradyne could see nothing more than the corner between the opposite wall and the ceiling. He toyed with the idea of trying to lift himself to the top of the dome, but gave it up because he realized, once he removed the binoculars from his eyes, that the additional few feet of height would not change the distant angle enough to make it worth his while.

The question of what to do next perplexed him. Obviously there was no answer. There could be no plan. He would have to play it by ear again, with the other guy calling the moves. He grunted unhappily; he could not even smoke because he feared to show even the smallest light. But--

Farradyne went down to his galley and opened a can of mixed space rations which he shovelled in cold. It filled him adequately but not tastily and he realized that the best of fine food would have been stowed away in a frenzy of nervous listening for the inevitable sounds of the enemy's return. With haste, Farradyne cleaned up the evidence of his presence, thinking how ridiculous it was to be stealing from his own spacecraft.

He was finishing up this job when the faint glint of a distant flash of light caught his eye. He hurried to the porthole from which the glint had come, and peered out. A large caravan of heavy trucks was snaking around the corner of a distant building and turning onto the spacefield. Their headlamps cut forward like scythes of light, cutting a brilliant path toward the Lancaster.

Farradyne did not deem it wise to sit this out. They might have been heading for the other side of the field, but if they weren't he was trapped. He went aloft to the salon and scuttered down the landing ramp, around the back side of the poised spacer and away from the direction of the trucks, running in the shadow cast by the Lancaster. Five or six hundred yards away was another spacer, and it was completely dark. Farradyne scurried around the widespread tail fins of the monster and stood there, peering at the caravan from between the angle made by the tail fin and the in-curving body of the spacecraft.

The trucks came around the Lancaster, surrounded it in a circle, and then a blaze of lights came, lighting the Terran ship from dome to reaction funnel. Ladders were sent aloft and a huge crane lifted. The calls of workers and the directions of their superintendent came to Farradyne clearly. He wondered what they were doing and saying; except for the three-toned voices that added an audible complement of women and children to the gang, it sounded like any work party on earth yammering in a strange tongue.

He watched for an hour, and then he saw that the distant sky was beginning to show a very faint glow of gray. Sunrise--or perhaps a false sunrise, he could not tell.

He scuttled like a human spider away from the direction of the work party until its flood lights were a distant miniature stage setting. He wound in and among silent, dark spacecraft, avoiding those with lights even though he had to detour wide for the sake of this safety. Eventually he came to the far side of the spaceport.

He cased the place warily from behind the fin of a spacer, looking at the dark, silent buildings and wondering if this gang of aliens had ever heard of night watchmen. He did not trust the quiet darkness of the apparently uninhabited spaceport because he was suspicious and he knew that other people were as suspicious as he was. He was glad that he did not barge in brashly, for along about the first glimmers of real graying sky, a man came out from between two of the buildings waving a searchlight. He sauntered along in front of the nearest building and disappeared between it and the next.

Farradyne skipped across the space and went into the gangway the watchman had just come out of. He walked warily through and came to a high wire fence. Keeping to the building side of the clearance-way between fence and building, Farradyne skulked along in the direction opposite to that taken by the watchman.

He needed a minimum of two items: A set of Planet X clothing and a way out of this rattrap.

He found the way out a few minutes later.

A dim striking of a bell alarmed him until he realized that it was tolling, rather than clamoring an alarm. He followed the tolling for seventeen bongs and came upon a small sentry house perched beside an open gate. As the tolling stopped, the man in the house stretched, yawned and got up, picking up a searchlight. He stepped outside and looked around in a bored manner.

The watchman took one look at the open gate some ten feet from his position and shrugged. He turned his back on it and disappeared between a couple of buildings not far from Farradyne's place.

Farradyne grinned. Obviously it had been so long ago since any trouble had been this way that the guard-system had become lax. Farradyne praised laziness and complacency highly as he sped across the open space on silent feet and passed the gate on his way to the outside.

Dawn was breaking and the chill of the morning nipped at him. He had broken free, but it was just as dangerous for him to remain in front of the open gate as it might have been for him to be roaming around the spaceport in the full light of day. He turned to the right and started to walk along the road toward a group of small buildings a few hundred yards from the spaceport.

The second item Farradyne needed came later. He had sauntered along several deserted streets in the gray of dawn and down a couple of alleys and through a vacant lot or two until he was quite some distance from the spaceport. Here, in a dimly lighted district Farradyne met his Planet X clothing.

The stranger did not have a chance. He had been drinking or sniffing whatever the enemy used for celebration and he had used too much. Farradyne's hard fist came out of somewhere and the stranger went down like a log, silently. Farradyne dragged him into an alley and stripped him to the skin.

His own clothing Farradyne stuffed in a trash barrel, pushing the bundle down below the rest of the rubbish in the hope that the barrel would be collected by a couple of hard-working and uncurious men who would never note the alien cut to the cloth.

He left the fellow naked to suffer both a hangover and a lot of embarrassment.

Then in the pleasantly bright dawn, Farradyne walked boldly down the city street jingling a bunch of native coins in the side pocket of his costume and feeling just a trifle silly, like an introvert at a fancy-dress ball. The trousers were striped gaudily and the loose jacket hugged his waist a bit on the too-tight side. There was a widish hat and a pair of shoes that could have been put on either foot. He looked like a character out of an old-time musical comedy and he hoped that his costume was not the kind worn by Planet X-ians as formal evening wear because then he would look silly to them wandering around in the morning light like a man caught far from home at six ack-emma in a tuxedo.

Eventually he passed a shop window and saw other garb like the junk he was wearing and he felt better.

He had every faith in the belief that people are disciplined against striking up an acquaintance with a total stranger, and so he turned into what was obviously a main thoroughfare and strolled along it until the streets began to fill with people.

17

There was no doubt about the alien quality of the city. But in its functional qualities, it was very familiar. These, he realized, were developments that had been found to be effective over a long time of sheer operation; functions that would have been mechanically similar on any planet no matter how alien, so long as its inhabitants breathed air, ate food and perambulated. Buildings were mostly squarish blocks cut with windows and doors; shops had broad windows for displaying their wares and even the wares were not too exotic. Clothing stores and gewgaw stores and food shops and now and then one that sold stuff that was not to be identified by a stranger.

The streets and alleys and gutters and sidewalks were normal. Traffic ran to the left, however, which gave Farradyne some trouble because he had been used to stepping from the curb and glancing to the right. Drivers squawked at him with their horns and swore at him in their multi-tongued voices. Farradyne forced himself to learn this left-handed traffic problem; he did not want to be handed a traffic ticket, nor did he want to be asked by some policeman for an explanation of his stupidity.

By now the sun was well above the horizon and the streets began to teem. The air began to sing with the noise of people chattering, greeting one another, and generally making a racket resembling a Chinese laundry in an air-raid. He heard the clash of metal on metal and turned to watch a couple of drivers arguing over their dented fenders. As he walked with his head turned, Farradyne bumped into someone and the man chittered something at him angrily. Farradyne nodded humbly and grunted under his breath and hurried on. So did the other man, who merely replied to Farradyne's grunt with a single three-toned discord before veering off and away.

He had to be careful, he told himself; he had found this city so closely resembling a city of his own system that he had become careless. He knew by now that if he conducted himself without attracting attention and if he walked without cringing, no one would think to stop him for questioning.

What had Carolyn said? Something about their springing from the same basic stock some fifty thousand years ago? Well, anyway, these were of the same family of curious apes who were gregarious enough to band together and still individualistic enough to resent any intrusion upon privacy. There would most certainly be three-toned hell to pay if he opened his own trap, but so long as he kept it shut, they had no way of telling him from any of their own kind.

And so he walked among them for hours, until the crowd thinned and the traffic became less boisterous and frantic and the city settled down to the quieter routine.

Farradyne found it hard to place this cosmopolitan culture in the same niche with the society that appeared to be systematically undermining the Solarian civilization. It was quite similar to the paradox he had found in the Niles family. It was as though murder was an honorable enterprise and that the dope-sales were listed on the daily stock exchange under the commodities section.

Farradyne had expected to find some monstrous ugliness here. A police or slave state would not have surprised him; it was such a culture that usually fostered villainy. Instead he found a city much like his own and it was hard for Farradyne to shake off the feeling that the only misunderstanding between them was the age-old barrier of tongue.

Eventually he came upon an ornately carved building that stood with the doors open. People were sauntering in and out with no obvious barrier, and so Farradyne followed one group at a little distance and went into the building.

It could have been any museum on Terra, for the lifeforms displayed were as bizarre as any of the stranger bits of art work on the earth or other of Sol's planets. He came upon a quiet hallway that had a non-scale model of the solar system; it was a working orrery that told Farradyne nothing other than that this system had eleven planets and a batch of satellites. None of the planets had rings like Saturn. He looked for something that could identify the parent sun for him, but he found nothing familiar about any of the displays, except one.