The Pirates of Ersatz Part 18

"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--the 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 deathrays 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 entrance 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 boat 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 visionscreens, which provided the control room--indeed, all 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 bangings 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 visionscreens 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 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, and 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 him. 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 starshine 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 forebears 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 be 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 climbing straight up, and if they all dropped equally he'd be moving straight down. It was not a complex method, and it worked.

Presently he relaxed. He sped swiftly back past midday and 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.ce phone. Its reception-indicator was piously placed at "Ground." 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 nonoperative 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, and wrangled, and formally reported, and now and again one admonished disputants to a proper discipline of language.

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, antiquated freighter of a design 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 crews' quarters in long blisters built outside the gigantic tank which was the ship itself.

There was a needle-sharp s.p.a.ce yacht. 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 separately a 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, 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 could not yet be guessed, but--

Hoddan watched absorbedly. He couldn't know what was toward, but there was some emergency. It could be in the line of what an electronic engineer could handle. If so--why--it could mean an opportunity to accomplish great things, and grow rich, and probably marry some delightful girl and be a great man somewhere--an a.s.sortment of ambitions one could not easily gratify on Zan, or Walden, or Darth.

VII

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 improbable 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.

There was inevitable confusion, though, and the s.p.a.cephone proved it.

There were disputes between freakish ships when craft with the astrogational qualities of washtubs tried to keep a.s.signed positions, and failed, and there were squabbles when ships had to pa.s.s close together. One had to shut off its drive-field to keep from blowing the fuses of both.

But there were some ships which proceeded quietly to their positions and others which did the same after tumult amounting to rebellion. And naturally there were a few others which seemed incapable of co-operation with anybody. They went careening through the other ships' paths in what must have seemed to the planet's sunset area like a most unlikely dancing of brand-new stars.

It was a gigantic traffic tangle, and Hoddan's boat drifted toward and into it. He'd counted a hundred ships long before. His count now pa.s.sed two hundred and continued. Before he gave up he'd numbered two hundred forty-seven s.p.a.ce-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 from ba.s.so profundo to high tenor, and whose ideas of proper astrogation seemed to vary more widely still.