Chapter 6

A large part of the firmament was blotted out by the blindingly bright half-disk of Weald, as it shone in the sunshine. It had ice-caps at its poles, and there were seas, and the mottled look of land which had that carefully maintained balance of woodland and cultivated areas which was so effective in climate control. The Med Ship floated free, and Calhoun fretfully monitored all the beacon frequencies known to man.

There was relative silence inside the ship. Maril watched Calhoun in a sort of despairing indecision. The four young blueskins still slept, still bound hand and foot upon the control-room floor. Murgatroyd regarded them, and Maril, and Calhoun in turn, and his small and furry forehead wrinkled helplessly.

“They can’t have landed what I’m looking for!” protested Calhoun as his search had no result. “They can’t. It would be too sensible for them to have done it!”

Murgatroyd said “Chee!“ in a subdued voice.

“But where the devil did they put them?” demanded Calhoun. “A polar orbit would be ridiculous! They--” Then he grunted in disgust. “Oh! Of course! Now, where’s the landing-grid?”

He worked busily for minutes, checking the position of the Wealdian landing-grid--mapped in the Sector Directory--against the look of continents and seas on the half-disk so plainly visible outside. He found what he wanted. He put on the ship’s solar-system drive.

“I wish,” he complained to Maril, “I wish I could think straight the first time! And it’s so obvious! If you want to put something out in space, and not have it interfere with traffic, in what sort of orbit and at what distance will you put it?”

Maril did not answer.

“Obviously,” said Calhoun, “you’ll put it as far as possible from the landing-pattern of ships coming in to the space-port. You’ll put it on the opposite side of the planet. And you’ll want it to stay out of the way, where anybody can know it is at any time of the day or night without having to calculate anything. So you’ll put it out in orbit so it will revolve around Weald in exactly one day, neither more or less, and you’ll put it above the equator. And then it will remain quite stationary above one spot on the planet, a hundred and eighty degrees longitude away from the landing-grid and directly over the equator.”

He scribbled for a moment.

“Which means forty-two thousand miles high, give or take a few hundred, and--here! And I was hunting for it in a close-in orbit!”

He grumbled to himself. He waited while the solar-system drive pushed the Med Ship a quarter of the way around the bright planet below. The sunset line vanished and the planet’s disk became a complete circle. Then Calhoun listened to the monitor earphones again, and grunted once more, and changed course, and presently made a noise indicating satisfaction.

Again presently he abandoned instrument-control and peered directly out of a port, handling the solar-system drive with great care. Murgatroyd said depressedly;

“Chee!“

“Stop worrying,” commanded Calhoun. “We haven’t been challenged, and there is a beacon transmitter at work, just to make sure that nobody bumps into what we’re looking for. It’s a great help, because we do want to bump, --gently.”

Stars swung across the port out of which he looked. Something dark appeared, --and then straight lines and exact curvings. Even Maril, despairing and bewildered as she was, caught sight of something vastly larger than the Med Ship, floating in space. She stared. The Med Ship maneuvered very cautiously. She saw another large object. A third. A fourth. There seemed to be dozens of them.

They were space-ships, huge by comparison with Aesclipus Twenty. They floated as the Med Ship did. They did not drive. They were not in formation. They were not at even distances from each other. They did not point in the same direction. They swung in emptiness like derelicts.

Calhoun jockeyed his small ship with infinite care. Presently there came the gentlest of impacts and then a clanking sound. The appearance out the vision-port became stationary, but still unbelievable. The Med Ship was grappled magnetically to a vast surface of welded metal.

Calhoun relaxed. He opened a wall-panel and brought out a vacuum suit. He began briskly to get it on.

“Things move smoothly,” he commented. “We weren’t challenged. So it’s extremely unlikely that we were spotted. Our friends on the floor ought to begin to come to shortly. And I’m going to find out now whether I’m a hero or in sure-enough trouble!”

Maril said drearily;

“I don’t know what you’ve done, except--”

Calhoun blinked at her, in the act of hauling the vacuum suit over his shoulders.

“Isn’t it self-evident?” he demanded. “I’ve been giving astrogation lessons to these characters. I certainly didn’t do it to help them dump germ-cultures on Weald! I brought them here! Don’t you see the point? These are space-ships. They’re in orbit around Weald. They’re not manned and they’re not controlled. In fact, they’re nothing but sky-riding storage bins!”

He seemed to consider the explanation complete. He wriggled his arms into the sleeves and gloves of the suit. He slung the air-tanks over his shoulder and hooked them to the suit.

“I’ll be back,” he said. “I hope with good news. I’ve reason to be hopeful, though, because these Wealdians are very practical men. They have things all prepared and tidy. I suspect I’ll find these ships with stores of air and fuel--maybe even food--so that if Weald should manage to make a deal for the stuff stored out here in them, they’d only have to bring out crews.”

He lifted the space-helmet down from its rack and put it on. He tested it, reading the tank air-pressure, power-storage, and other data from the lighted miniature instruments visible through pinholes above his eye-level. He fastened a space-rope about himself, speaking through the helmet’s opened face-plate.

“If our friends should wake up before I get back,” he added, “please restrain them. I’d hate to be marooned.”

He went waddling into the airlock with the coil of space-rope over one vacuum-suited arm. The inner lock door closed behind him A little later Maril heard the outer lock open. Then soundlessness.

Murgatroyd whimpered a little. Maril shivered. Calhoun had gone out of the ship to nothingness. He’d said that what he was looking for--and what he’d found--was forty-two thousand miles from Weald. One could imagine falling forty-two thousand miles, where one couldn’t imagine falling a light-year. Calhoun was walking on the steel plates of a gigantic space-ship which floated among dozens of its fellows, all seeming derelicts and seemingly abandoned. He was able to walk on the nearest because of magnetic-soled shoes. He trusted his life to them and to a flimsy space-rope which trailed after him out the Med Ship’s airlock.

Time passed. A clock ticked in that hurried tempo of five ticks to the second which has been the habit of clocks since time immemorial. Very small and trivial noises came from the background tape, preventing utter silence from hanging intolerably in the ship. They were traffic-sounds, recorded on a world no one knew how many light-years distant, and nobody knew when. There were sounds as of voices, too faint to suggest words, but imparting a feel of life and activity to a soundless ship.

Maril found herself listening tensely for something else. One of the four bound blueskins snored, and stirred, and slept again. Murgatroyd gazed about unhappily, and swung down to the control-room floor, and then paused for lack of any place to go or thing to do. He sat down and began half-heartedly to lick his whiskers. Maril stirred.

Murgatroyd looked at her hopefully.

“Chee?“ he asked shrilly.

She shook her head. It became a habit to act as if Murgatroyd were a human being.

“N-no,” she said unsteadily. “Not yet.”

More time passed. An unbearably long time. Then there was the faintest of clankings. It repeated. Then, abruptly, there were noises in the airlock. They continued. They were fumbling noises.

The outer airlock door closed. The inner door opened. Dense white fog came out of it. There was motion. Calhoun followed the fog out of the lock. He carried objects which had been weightless, but were suddenly heavy in the ship’s gravity-field. There were two space-suits and a curious assortment of parcels. He spread them out, flipped aside the face-plate, and said briskly;

“This stuff is cold! Turn a heater on it, will you Maril?”

He began to work his way out of his vacuum-suit.

“Item,” he said. “The ships are fuelled and provisioned. A practical tribe, the Wealdians! The ships are ready to take off as soon as they’re warmed up inside. A half-degree sun doesn’t radiate heat enough to keep a ship warm, when the rest of the cosmos is effectively near zero Kelvin. Here, point the heaters like this.”

He adjusted the radiant-heat dispensers. The fog disappeared where their beams played. But the metal space-suits glistened and steamed, --and the steam disappeared within inches. They were so completely and utterly cold that they condensed the air about them as a liquid, which reëvaporated to make fog, which warmed up and disappeared and was immediately replaced.

“Item,” said Calhoun again, getting his arms out of the vacuum-suit sleeves. “The controls are pretty nearly standard. Our sleeping friends will be able to astrogate them back to Dara without trouble, provided only that nobody comes out here to bother us before they leave.”

He shed the last of the space-suit, stepping out of its legs.

“And,” he finished wrily, “I brought back an emergency supply of ship-provisions for everybody concerned, but find that I’m idiot enough to feel that they’ll choke me if I eat them while Dara’s still starving.”

Maril said;

“But--there isn’t any hope for Dara! No real hope!”

He gaped at her.

“What do you think we’re here for?”

He set to work to restore his four recent students to consciousness. It was not a difficult task. The dosage, mixed in the coffee he had given them earlier, was a light one. Calhoun took the precaution of disarming them first, but presently four hot-eyed young men glared at him.

“I’m calling,” said Calhoun, holding a blaster negligently in his hand, “I’m calling for volunteers. There’s a famine on Dara. There’ve been unmanageable crop-surpluses on Weald. On Dara, the government grimly rations every ounce of food. On Weald, the government has been buying up surplus grain to keep the price up. To save storage costs, it’s loaded the grain into out-of-date space-ships it once used to stand sentry over Dara to keep it out of space when there was another famine there. Those ships have been put out in orbit, where we’re hooked on to one of them. It’s loaded with half a million bushels of grain. I’ve brought space-suits from it, I’ve turned on the heaters in its interior, and I’ve set its overdrive unit for a hop to Dara. Now I’m calling for volunteers to take half a million bushels of grain to where it’s needed. Do I get any volunteers?”

He got four. Not immediately, because they were ashamed that he’d made it impossible to carry out their original fanatic plan, and now offered something much better to make up for it. They raged. But half a million bushels of grain meant that people who must otherwise die might live.

Ultimately, truculently, first one and then another angrily agreed.

“Good!” said Calhoun. “Now, how many of you dare risk the trip alone? I’ve got one grain-ship warming up. There are plenty of others around us. Every one of you can take a ship and half a million bushels to Dara, if you have the nerve?”

The atmosphere changed. Suddenly they clamored for the task he offered them. They were still acutely uncomfortable. He’d bossed them and taught them until they felt capable and glamorous and proud. Then he’d pinned their ears back. But if they returned to Dara with four enemy ships and unimaginable quantities of food with which to break the famine...

There was work to be done first, of course. Only one ship was so far warming up. Three more had to be entered, in space-suits, and each had to have its interior warmed so breathable air could exist inside it, and at least part of the stored provisions had to be brought up to reasonable temperature for use on the journey. Then the overdrive unit had to be inspected and set for the length of journey that a direct overdrive hop to Dara would mean, and Calhoun had to make sure again that each of the four could identify Dara’s sun under all circumstances and aim for it with the requisite high precision, both before going into overdrive and after breakout. When all that was accomplished, Calhoun might reasonably hope that they’d arrive. But it wasn’t a certainty.

Still, presently his four students shook hands with him, with the fine tolerance of young men intending much greater achievements than their teacher. They wouldn’t speak on communicator again, because their messages might be picked up on Weald.

Of course for this action to be successful, it had to be performed with the stealth of sneak-thieves.

What seemed a long time passed. Then one ship turned slowly upon some unseen axis. It wavered back and forth, seeking a point of aim. A second twisted in its place. A third put on the barest trace of solar-system drive to get clear of the rest. The fourth...

One ship vanished. It had gone into overdrive, heading for Dara at many times the speed of light. Another. Two more.