A Logic Named Joe Part 35

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 Thal, 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."

Thal 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 Thal 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?"

Thal 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 s.p.a.ceport.

"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 Thal rode industriously toward the place from which those emissaries had come.

All was tranquil. All was calm. Once they saw a dust cloud, and Thal turned aside to a providential wooded copse, in which they remained while a cavalcade went by. Thal explained that it was a feudal chieftain on his way to the s.p.a.ceport town. It was simple discretion for them not to be observed, said Thal, 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 ma.s.sacre. 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 reemergence 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 ma.s.sive, stark, unornamented keep. But his eyes did not stay on the castle for long. He saw the s.p.a.ceboat 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 Thal. "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."

Thal 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 s.p.a.ceboat lifeboat that had landed the emissaries from Walden. That it landed so close to the s.p.a.ceport, of course, was no accident. It was known on Walden that Hoddan had taken s.p.a.ce-pa.s.sage 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 s.p.a.ceport. 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 grunted a greeting and looked at them speculatively. "Those two characters from Walden," he observed, "sent me to get 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 s.p.a.ceboat had not been looted simply because locks, there, were not made with separate vibration-checks to keep vibration from loosening them. On s.p.a.ceboats 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 s.p.a.ceboat 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 un.o.bstructed view in all directions. He was satisfied.

The knocks became bangings. Something approaching indignation could be deduced. The guards around the s.p.a.ceboat felt that Hoddan was taking an unfair amount of time to pick the cream of the loot inside.

He got a gla.s.s of water. It was excellent. A second. The hangings became violent hammerings.

Hoddan seated himself leisurely in the pilot's seat and turned small k.n.o.bs. He waited. He touched a b.u.t.ton. 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 s.p.a.ceboat'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 takeoff 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 s.p.a.ceport and the town rushed toward a spot beneath the s.p.a.ceboat'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 he 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...o...b..t 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 s.p.a.cephone. Its reception indicator was piously placed atground.He shifted it to s.p.a.ce, 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 pa.s.sion, "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 s.p.a.ce-fleet. There was no reason why ships of s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ceport 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 s.p.a.cecraft 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 pa.s.senger-liner with the elaborate ornamentation that in past generations was considered suitable for s.p.a.ce. 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 s.p.a.ceyacht. 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 s.p.a.ce. One would have to scavenge half the galaxy to bring together so many crazy, overage 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.

Chapter 7.

The s.p.a.ceboat floated on upon a collision course with the arriving fleet. That would not mean, of course, actual contact with any of the strange vessels themselves. Crowded as the sunlit specks might seem from Darth's night-side shadow, they were sufficiently separated. It was more than likely that even with ten-mile intervals the ships would be considered much too crowded. But they came pouring out of emptiness to go into a swirling, plainly pre-intended orbit about the planet from which Hoddan had risen less than an hour before.

It was a gigantic traffic tangle, and Hoddan's boat drifted toward and into it. He counted a hundred ships, then . . . Long before he gave up, he'd numbered two hundred forty-seven of the oddities swarming to make a whirling band-a ring-around the planet Darth.

He was fairly sure that he knew what they were, now. But he could not possibly guess where they came from. And most mysterious of all was the question of why they'd come out of faster-than-light drive to make of themselves a celestial feature about a planet which had practically nothing to offer to anybody.

Presently the s.p.a.ceboat was in the very thick of the fleet. His communicator spouted voices whose tones ranged fromba.s.so profundoto high tenor, and whose ideas of proper astrogation seemed to vary more widely still.

"You there!" boomed a voice with deafening volume. "You're in our clear-s.p.a.ce! Sheer off!"

The volume of a signal in s.p.a.ce varies as the square of the distance. This voice was thunderous. It came apparently from a nearby, potbellied ship of ancient vintage.

Hoddan's s.p.a.ceboat floated on. The relative position of the two ships changed slowly. Another voice said indignantly: "That's the same thing that missed us by less than a mile! You, there! Stop acting like a squig! Get on your own course!"

A third voice: "What boat's that? I don't recognize it! I thought I knew all the freaks in this fleet, too!"

A fourth voice said sharply: "That's not one of us! Look at the design! That's not us!"

Other voices broke in. There was babbling. Then a harsh voice roared: "Quiet! I order it!" There was silence. The harsh voice said heavily, "Relay the image to me." There was a pause. The same voice said grimly: "It is not of our fleet. You, stranger! Identify yourself! Who are you and why did you slip secretly among us?"

Hoddan pushed the transmit b.u.t.ton.

"My name is Bron Hoddan," he said. "I came up to find out why three ships, and then nine ships, went into orbit around Darth. It was somewhat alarming. Our landing-grid's disabled, anyhow, and it seemed wisest to look you over before we communicated and possibly told you something you might not believe."

The harsh voice said as grimly as before: "You come from the planet below us? Darth? Why is your ship so small? The smallest of ours is greater."

"This is a lifeboat," said Hoddan pleasantly. "It's supposed to be carried on larger ships in case of emergency."

"If you will come to our leading ship," said the voice, "we will answer all your questions. I will have a smoke flare set off to guide you."

Hoddan said to himself: No threats and no offers. I can guess why there are no threats. But they should offer something!

He waited. There was a sudden, huge eruption of vapor in s.p.a.ce some two hundred miles away.

Perhaps an ounce of explosion had been introduced into a rocket tube and fired. The smoke particles, naturally ionized, added their self-repulsion to the expansiveness of the explosive's gases. A cauliflower-like shape of filmy whiteness appeared and grew larger and thinner.

Hoddan drove toward the spot. He swung the boat around and killed its relative velocity. The leading ship was a sort of gigantic, shapeless, utterly preposterous ark-like thing. Hoddan could neither imagine a purpose for which it could have been used, nor a time when men would have built anything like it. Its huge sides seemed to be made exclusively of great doorways now tightly closed.

One of those doorways gaped wide. It would have admitted a good-sized modern ship. A nervous voice essayed to give Hoddan directions for getting the s.p.a.ceboat inside what was plainly an enormous hold now pumped empty of air. He grunted and made the attempt. It was tricky. He sweated when he cut off his power. But he felt fairly safe. Rocket flames would burn down such a door, if necessary. He could work havoc if hostilities began.

The great door swung shut. The outside-pressure needle swung sharply and stopped at thirty centimeters of mercury pressure. There was a clanging. A smaller door evidently opened somewhere. Lights came on. Then figures appeared through a door leading to some other part of this ship.

Hoddan nodded to himself. The costume was odd. It was awkward. It was even primitive, but not in the fashion of the soiled, gaudily-colored garments of Darth. These men wore unrelieved black, with gray shirts. There was no touch of color about them. Even the younger ones wore beards. And of all unnecessary things, they wore flat-brimmed hats-in a s.p.a.ceship!

Hoddan opened the door and said politely: "Good morning. I'm Bron Hoddan. You were talking to me."

The oldest and most fiercely bearded of the men said harshly: "I am the leader here. We are the people of Colin." He frowned when Hoddan's expression remained unchanged. "The people of Colin!" he repeated more loudly. "The people whose forefathers settled that planet, and made it a world of peace and plenty, and then foolishly welcomed strangers to their midst!"

"Too bad," said Hoddan. He knew what these people were doing, he believed, but putting a name to where they'd come from told him nothing of what they wanted of Darth.

"We made it a fair world," said the bearded man fiercely. "But it was my great-grandfather who destroyed it. He believed that we should share it. It was he who persuaded the Synod to allow strangers to settle among us, believing that they would become like us."

Hoddan nodded expectantly. These people were in some sort of trouble or they wouldn't have come out of overdrive. But they'd talked about it until it had become an emotionalized obsession that couldn't be summarized. When they encountered a stranger, they had to picture their predicament pa.s.sionately and at length.

This bearded man looked at Hoddan with burning eyes. When he went on, it was with gestures as if he were making a speech. But it was a special sort of speech. The first sentence told what kind.

"They clung to their sins!" said the bearded man bitterly. "They did not adopt our ways! Our example went for naught! They brought others of their kind to Colin. After a little they laughed at us. In a little more they outnumbered us! Then they ruled that the laws of our Synod should not govern them. And they lured our young people to imitate them-frivolous, sinful, riotous folk that they were!"

Hoddan nodded again. There were elderly people on Zan who talked like this. Nothisgrandfather! If you listened long enough they'd come to some point or other, but they had arranged their thoughts so solidly that any attempt to get quickly at their meaning would only produce confusion.

"Twenty years since," said the bearded man with an angry gesture, "we made a bargain. We held a third of all the land of the planet, but our young men were falling away from the ways of their fathers. We made a bargain with the newcomers. We would trade our lands, our cities, our farms, our highways, for ships to take us to a new world, and food for the journey and machines for the taming of the planet we would select. We sent some of our number to find a world to which we could move. Ten years back, they returned. They had found it. The planet Thetis."

Again Hoddan had no reaction. The name meant nothing.

"We began to prepare," said the old man, his eyes flashing. "Five years since, we were ready. But we had to wait three more before the bargainers were ready to complete the trade. They had to buy and collect the ships. They had to design and build the machinery we would need. They had to collect the food supplies. Two years ago we moved our animals into the ships, and loaded our food and our furnishings, and took our places. We set out. For two years we have journeyed toward Thetis."

Hoddan felt an instinctive respect for people who would undertake to move themselves, the third of the population of a planet, over a distance that meant years of voyaging. They might have tastes in costume that he did not share, and they might go in for elaborate oratory instead of matter-of-fact statement, but they had courage.

"Yes, sir," said Hoddan. "I take it this brings us up to the present."

"No," said the old man. "Six months ago we considered that we might well begin to train the operators of the machines we would use on Thetis. We uncrated machines. We found ourselves cheated!"

Hoddan found that he could make a fairly dispa.s.sionate guess of what advantage-say-Nedda's father would take of people who would not check on his good faith for two years and until they were two years' journey away.

"How badly were you cheated?" asked Hoddan.

"Of our lives!" said the angry old man. "Do you know machinery?"

"Some kinds," admitted Hoddan.

"Come," said the leader of the fleet.

With a sort of dignity that was theatrical only because he was aware of it, the leader of the people of Colin showed the way. The hold was packed tightly with cases of machinery. One huge crate had been opened and its contents fully disclosed. Others had been hacked at enough to show their contents.

The uncrated machine was a jungle plow. It was a powerful piece of equipment which would attack jungle on a thirty-foot front, knock down all vegetation up to trees of four-foot diameter, shred it, loosen and sift the soil to a three-foot depth, and leave behind it smoothed, broken, pulverized dirt mixed with ground-up vegetation ready to break down into humus. Such a machine would clear tens of acres in a day, turning jungle into farm land ready for crops.

"We ran this for five minutes," said the bearded man fiercely as Hoddan nodded. He lifted a motor hood.