Chapter III

Hale did not feel well at all. He kept putting one foot in front of the other, pushing himself through the blue sand, but he would much rather have crawled into the shade and gone to sleep. His brow was feverish, and his arms and legs and neck felt stiff. It had been two days since he had been caught in the rain, and his sniffles and sneezes had developed into congested lungs and a stopped-up nose. He felt like hell.

The sun was low in the evening sky, but the air was warm and soothing. He was quite a distance from the mountains now, and there was no longer much of a fog at night.

Hale squinted his eyes at the sun.

"Dab it," he said aloud, "I'm dot godda walk eddybore today! I'b godda sit dowd ad relax."

Fever, plus loneliness, plus acute boredom, had started him in the relatively harmless pastime of talking to himself. He had come a long way on the hard-packed blue sand--which was easier to travel over than the rocky shelf above it--and his food had almost reached the halfway point.

He sat down in the shelter of the cliff, unstrapped his pack, and rummaged inside. Where the hell was the blasted aspirin? There. He took out the bottle and gave himself a massive fifteen-grain dose. Maybe it would make him feel better. He didn't like to use medicine; it made him seem weak in his own eyes. But there are times when necessity is the mother of prevention.

He ate, although he wasn't hungry. He was grateful for only one thing: the synthetics were absolutely tasteless. The head congestion had taken care of that.

Afterwards, he impatiently took another ten grains of aspirin, and, still feeling terrible, he curled up to sleep.

He woke up when something prodded him. He was instantly awake, but he didn't move except to open his eyes.

Standing over him were two men dressed in long gray-brown robes which were tied at the waist with braided ropes. One of them was pointing a tube at him that looked suspiciously like a missile weapon.

They were heavily bearded, but the beards were neatly trimmed, and their hair was brushed back and cropped reasonably short.

The man with the gun said something in a commanding tone of voice and gestured with his free hand. Hale didn't understand the command, but the gesture plainly meant "Get up!"

Leland Hale was never a man to argue with a gun. He stood up slowly.

As he did, the expressions on the faces of the two men altered slightly. Hale couldn't understand the new expressions at first, hidden as they were by the beards. Then, as they backed away a little, he understood. The men were no more than five eight; he towered a good ten inches above them.

The armed man spoke again, waving the gun. Hale interpreted this as "All right, let's go." He complied. He didn't know where they were taking him, but almost anything was better than being alone. He wasn't too worried; he'd been in plenty of tight spots before. Jailbreaking was nothing new to Leland Hale.

It was just barely dawn. The sky was light, but the edge of the sun had not quite shown itself over the eastern horizon, far out to sea.

The trio walked along silently for a couple of miles, then they topped a little rise and went up a long slope to the top of the cliff. Below him, Hale saw a village. Taun. He realized that if he had been walking along the ridge instead of on the shore, he would have seen the town the night before.

Down the slope they went, heading for the little cluster of houses surrounding the small bay.

* * * * *

There weren't many people in the streets of the small town, although there seemed to be plenty of activity around the docks. Hale could see tilled fields to the west of the settlement, where there were people already at work.

A third man in a gray-brown robe met them in the middle of one of the cobblestone streets and asked something of Hale's guards. They stopped, and a long conversation followed. Hale strained his ears to catch the words.

At first, it was complete gibberish, but Hale knew what key words to listen for, and gradually he picked up more and more.

As on every inhabited planet of the galaxy, the language of Cardigan's Green was derived from Terran--basically English, with large additions of Russian, Chinese, and Spanish. Hale had traveled a great deal in his life--partly by choice and partly because often he had no choice. He had heard and spoken a hundred different dialects of Terran, and the assimilation of a new derivation was almost automatic.

The two guards were telling the new man that they had found a stranger on the beach, and describing in detail how it had come about. They were, it seemed, going to take him to the Village Officer--whoever that might be.

The third man told them that the Officer was away somewhere--Hale didn't catch it.

The guard who carried the gun said that Hale would be taken to "the brig" to await the Officer's pleasure.

The third man nodded and hurried off, while Hale was prodded onward.

"The brig" proved to be a small building with a heavy iron door and thick iron bars at the windows. Hale didn't like the looks of the place, but he didn't like the feel of the missile weapon at his back, either. In he went.

He took his pack off and submitted to search. Then the guards went outside, taking the pack with them. The heavy door rang like a bell when they slammed it. A second clang indicated a bar across the door.

"I'll be damned," said Hale softly. "I run seventy thousand light years to stay out of one jail and walk right into another."

He listened to his own voice and noted with satisfaction that his congestion was clearing up.

There were voices outside. Hale strolled over to the window to listen.

"What is he? An Islander?" asked a voice. Hale hadn't heard it before; obviously another seeker after knowledge--a local busybody.

"He's an Islander, all right," said one of the guards. "He wears their clothing." Hale was wearing a standard spaceman's zipsuit and his insulation jacket.

"But what would an Islander want to come here for? None of them have left the Island since their ship landed, twelve years ago."

"Isn't that obvious? Their Captain Doctor wants to make a deal with the Fisher."

Hale listened patiently, and gradually the situation became clearer.

Out on the island across the channel was a ship. From the title "Captain Doctor," he gathered that it was an IHC ship. It had been there for twelve years.

Hale kept his ears open as more information trickled in. Several more of the townspeople joined the discussion group, and the conversation became livelier. Hale drank it all in, filing and indexing it in his mind. Some of the words used weren't clear at times, but the context helped.

Now, a confidence man is an opportunist; no successful con man can afford to be anything else. He must, above all, be able to talk his way out of, or into, anything. Leland Hale's record speaks for itself; killer, thief, yes--but he was also a damned good con man. As Interstellar Police Commander Desmon Shelley remarked some years later: "Leland Hale could have sold antigravity belts to the crew of a ship in free fall at double price--and even then he would have cheated by leaving out the energy units."

Slowly, an idea began to form in his mind. Someone called the Fisher wanted to make a deal with the people on the island. If he played his cards right, Hale might be able to make a little profit, one way or another.

* * * * *

It was several hours before the Village Officer showed up, and by then Hale had the set-up pretty well in mind. His information was far from complete, but he knew enough to enable him to run a bluff.

The Village Officer was a taller man than the other villagers, though nowhere near as big a man as Hale. His full beard was slightly touched with gray, and there was a streak of silver at each temple. His eyes were dark, and a hawkish nose protruded from his face, almost overshadowing the beard.

"I am Yon the Fisher," he announced. "And you?"

He stood outside the iron door, looking in through the open grillwork.

"Leland Hale. I've come here to hear your terms."

"They are the same," said Yon. "Repair my spaceship. Use replacement parts from your own, if necessary. In return, I and my men will take you to a planet where there is a space-port."

"_Your_ spaceship?" Hale asked pointedly.

Yon's bearded visage smiled a little. "Mine. I bought it legally from Dornis the Fat ten years ago. It fell on his land, therefore, by law, it was his to sell."

"What about the crew?" Hale asked. "It was their ship."

"True. Unfortunately, they died--ah--intestate. The property therefore reverted to our legal government. But our aged Commander would have nothing to do with it, so he ruled that it was the lawful property of Dornis the Fat."

"Very neatly done," said Hale in honest admiration. "All legally sewed up." He knew the claim wouldn't stand up in a court of interstellar law, but he recognized the machinations of a fellow con man when he saw them.

"Thank you," said Yon the Fisher. "Now let's get down to business. You came here for a reason, I assume. Is it a deal, or isn't it? I can be patient; I am on my own home planet. You, on the other hand, have been virtually prisoners for twelve years."

"True," agreed Hale. "I think we can make some sort of agreement along those lines. I was sent to look at your ship."

Yon the Fisher pondered this for a moment, then countered with: "Why?"

"We have to know how badly it's damaged. If it can't be repaired, there's no sense in making any kind of deal, is there?"

"I see. Very well. We will go to my ship. However, we will have to take precautions. You understand, I'm sure."

"Naturally," Hale said.

Hale's hands were bound behind him, and the guard with the gun followed directly behind him.

There are no animals fit for riding purposes which are native to Cardigan's Green, and eking out a bare living from the planet left the colonists no time to develop mechanical aids to transportation. They walked.

Several hours later, Leland Hale was inside the hull of the freighter _Morris_. Under the watchful eye of Yon and his myrmidons, Hale went over the whole vessel, saying as little as possible, and evading the questions that were put to him. When he was finished, his face wore a speculative look, but inside he was feeling positively gleeful. In an hour, at the very most, he, alone, could put the vessel in working order! The original crew of the _Morris_ had almost finished their work when they succumbed to the Plague.

Surely there must be some way he could turn this to his advantage!

"I think it can be done," he said judiciously. "There's not a lot of work to be done, but there are parts missing and so forth.... Hmmmm...." He looked around the control room in which they were standing. It looked like a mess. All the paneling had been taken off the circuit housings to work on the control systems. In the engine section, the refractor domes were still off. The ship didn't look in tip-top shape, but all that would have to be done was a half hour's work on the generators and another half hour to close everything up.

"I don't know how long it will take, though," said Hale.

"I've kept it sealed and kept it clean," said Yon. "I'm no engineer, so I kept my hands off of everything."

"Can you pilot her?" Hale asked.

"Easily. I have the piloting instructions that were left in Cardigan's ship, and I have the astrogation charts from this one." He smiled. "I have had twelve years to study."

Hale had to agree that Yon was probably right. A spaceship practically guides and runs itself when it's in working order. An elementary knowledge of astrogation and a good ship can get a man almost anywhere in the galaxy.

"In that case, Yon," said Hale, smiling his best smile, "I think we can get along. Let bygones be bygones."

"Excellent." Yon was trying hard to conceal his excitement and almost succeeding. "Come; let's go back to Taun and I'll buy you a dinner."