But Trent wasn"t listed on that page. Trent wasn"t even in that part of the book. The heading of this particular chapter of listings was,"Non-Cl.u.s.ter Planets Between Huyla and Claire."It described the maverick solar systems not on regular trade routes and requiring long voyages from commercial s.p.a.ceports if anybody was to reach them. People rarely wanted to.
Link stared. He found signs that this had been repeatedly referred to by somebody with engine oil on his fingers. One page had plainly been read and re-read and re-read. The margin was darkened as if an oily thumb had held a place there while the item was gloated over.
From any normal standpoint it was not easy to understand.
"SORD," said theDirectory.There followed the galactic coordinates to three places of decimals."Yel.
sol-type approx. 1.4 sols ma.s.s, mny faculae all times, spectrum-"
The spectrum symbols could be skipped. If one wanted to be sure that a particular sun was such-and-such, one would take a spectro-photo and compare it with theDirectory.Otherwise the spectrum was for the birds. Link labored over the abbreviations that compilers of reference books use to make things difficult.
"3rd. pl. blved. hab. ox atm. 2/3 sea nml brine, usual ice-caps cloud-systems hab. est. 1."
Then came the interesting part. In the clear language that informative books use with such reluctance, he read: "This planet is said to have been colonized from Surheil 11 some centuries since, and may be inhabited, but no s.p.a.ceport is known to exist. The last report on this planet was from a s.p.a.ceyacht some two centuries ago. The yacht called down asking permission to land and was threatened with destruction if it did. The yacht took pictures from s.p.a.ce showing specks that could be villages or the ruins of same, but this is doubtful. No other landings or communications are known. Any records which might have existed on Surheil 11 were destroyed in the Economic Wars on that planet."
In theGlamorgan"scontrol room, Link was intrigued. He went back to the abbreviations and deciphered them. Sord was a yellow sol-type sun with a ma.s.s of 1.4 sols and many faculae. Its third planet was believed habitable. It had an oxygen atmosphere, two-thirds of its surface was sea, the sea was normal brine and there were the usual ice caps and cloud systems of a planet whose habitability was estimated at one.
And two centuries ago its inhabitants had threatened to smash a s.p.a.ceyacht which wanted to land on it.
According to Thistlethwaite, the bill for last evening"s relaxation, for Link, amounted to twenty-some years to be served in jail. Even with some sentences running concurrently, it was preferable not to return to Trent. On the other hand- But it didn"t really need to be thought about. Thistlethwaite plainly intended to go to Sord Three, whose inhabitants strongly preferred to be left alone. But they seemed to have made an exception in his favor.
He was so anxious to get there and so confident of a welcome that he"d bought theGlamorganand loaded her up with freight, and he"d taken an unholy chance in his choice of a ship. He"d taken another in depending on Link as an astrogator. But it would be a pity to disappoint him!
So Link carefully copied down in the log the three coordinates of Sord Three, and hunted up its proper solar motion, and put that in the log, and then put the figures for Trent in the computer and copied the answer in the log, too. It seemed the professional thing to do. Then he sc.r.a.ped away frost from the ports and got observations of theGlamorgan"scurrent heading, and went back to the board and adjusted that.
He was just entering the last item in the log when Thistlethwaite came in. His hands were black from the work he"d done, and somehow he gave the impression of a man who had used up all his store of naughty words and still was unrelieved.
"Well?" asked Link pleasantly.
"We"re leakin" air," said the whiskered man bitterly. "It"s whistlin" out! Playin" tunes as it goes! I had to seal off the s.p.a.ceboat blister. If we need that s.p.a.ceboat we"ll be in a fix! When my business gets goin", I"ll never use another junk ship like this! You raised h.e.l.l in that take-off!"
"It"s very bad?" asked Link.
"I shut off all the compartments I couldn"t seal tight," said Thistlethwaite bitterly. "And there"s still some leakage in the engine room, but I can"t find it. I ain"t found it so far, anyways."
Link said, "How"s the air supply?"
"I pumped up on Trent," said the little man. "If they"d known, they"d ha" charged me for that, too!"
"Can we make out for two weeks?" asked Link.
"We can make out for ten!" snapped the whiskery one. "There"s only two of us an" we can seal off everything but the control room an" the engine room an" a way between "em. We can go ten weeks."
"Then," said Link relievedly, "we"re all right." He made final adjustments. "The engines are all right?"
He looked up pleasantly, his hand on a switch.
"With coddlin"," said Thistlethwaite. "What"re you doin"?" he demanded suspiciously. "I ain"t give you-"
Link threw the circuit completing switch. The universe seemed to reel. Everything appeared to turn inside out, including Link"s stomach. He had the feeling of panicky fall in a contracting spiral. The lights in the control room dimmed almost to extinction. The whiskery man uttered a strangled howl. This was the normal experience when going into overdrive travel at a number of times the speed of light.
Then, abruptly, everything was all right again. The vision ports were dark, but the lights came back to full brightness. TheGlamorganwas in overdrive, hurtling through emptiness very, very much faster than theory permitted in the normal universe. But the universe immediately around theGlamorganwas not normal. The ship was in an overdrive field, which does not occur normally, at all.
"What the h.e.l.l"ve you done?" raged Thistlethwaite. "Where you headed for? I didn"t tell you-"
"I"m driving the ship," said Link pleasantly, "for a place called Sord Three. There ought to be some good business prospects there. Isn"t that where you want to go?"
The little man"s face turned purple. He glared.
"How"d you find that out?" he demanded ferociously.
"Well, I"ve got friends there," said Link untruthfully. The little man leaped for him, uttering howls of fury.
Link turned off the ship"s gravity. Thistlethwaite wound up bouncing against the ceiling. He clung there, swearing. Link kept his hand on the gravity b.u.t.ton. At any instant he could throw the gravity back on, and as immediately off again.
"Tut, tut!" said Link reproachfully. "Such naughty words. And I thought you"d be pleased to find your junior partner displaying energy and enthusiasm and using his brains loyally to further the magnificent business enterprise we"ve started!"
Chapter 2.
TheGlamorganbored on through s.p.a.ce. Not normal s.p.a.ce, of course. In the ordinary sort of s.p.a.ce between suns and planets and solar systems generally, a ship is strictly limited to ninety-eight-point-something per cent of the speed of light, because ma.s.s increases with speed, and inertia increases with ma.s.s. But in an overdrive field the properties of s.p.a.ce are modified. The effect of a magnet on iron is changed past recognition. The effect of electrostatic stress upon dielectrics is wholly abnormal. And inertia, instead of multiplying itself with high velocity, becomes as undetectable as at zero velocity. In fact, theory says that a ship has no velocity on an overdrive field. The speed is of the field itself. The ship is carried. It goes along for the ride.
But there was no thinking about such abstractions on theGlamorgan.The effect of overdrive was the same as if the ship did pierce s.p.a.ce at many times the speed of light. Obviously, light from ahead was transposed a great many octaves upward, into something as different from light as long wave radiation is from heat. This radiation was refracted outward from the ship by the overdrive field, and was therefore without effect upon instruments or persons. Light from behind was left there. Light from the sides was also refracted outward and away. TheGlamorganfloated at ease in a hurtling, unsubstantial s.p.a.ce-stress center, and to try to understand it might produce a headache, but hardly anything more useful.
But though theGlamorganin overdrive attained the end of speed without the need for velocity, the human relationship between Link and Thistlethwaite was less simple. The whiskery little man was impa.s.sioned about his enterprise. Link had guessed his highly secret destination, and Thistlethwaite was outraged by the achievement. Even when Link showed him how Sord Three had been revealed as the objective of the voyage, Thistlethwaite wasn"t mollified. He clamped his lips shut tightly. He refused to give any further intimation about what he proposed to do when he arrived at Sord Three. Link knew only that he"d touched ground there in a s.p.a.ceboat with one companion and they"d left with a valuable cargo, and now Thistlethwaite was bound back there again, if Link could get him there.
There were times when it seemed doubtful. Then Link blamed himself for trying it. Still, Thistlethwaite had chosen theGlamorganon his own and had gotten as far as Trent in her. But there were times when it didn"t appear that the ship would ever get anywhere else. The log book had a plenitude of emergencies written in its pages as theGlamorganwent onward.
She leaked air. They didn"t try to keep the inside pressure up to the standard 14.7 pounds. They compromised on eleven, because they"d lose less air at the lower pressure. Even so, the fact that the Glamorganleaked was only one of her oddities. She also smelled. Her air system was patched and her generators were cobbled, and at odd moments she made unrefined noises for no reason that anybody could find out. The water pressure system sometimes worked and sometimes did not. The refrigeration unit occasionally turned on when it shouldn"t and sometimes didn"t when it should. It was wise to tap the thermostat several times a day to keep frozen stores from thawing.
The overdrive field generator was also a subject for nightmares. Link didn"t understand overdrive, but he did know that a field shouldn"t be kept in existence by hand-wound outer layers on some of the coils, with wedges driven in to keep contacts tight which ought to be free to cut off in case of emergency. But it could be said that everything about the ship was an emergency. Link would have come to have a very great respect for Thistlethwaite because he kept such tinkered wreckage working. But he was appalled at the idea of anybody deliberately trusting his life to it.
The thing was, he realized ultimately, that Thistlethwaite was an eccentric. The galaxy is full of crackpots, each of whom has mysterious secret information about illimitable wealth to be found on the nonexistent outer planets of rarely visited suns, or in the depths of the watery satellites of Cepheids. But crackpots only talk. Their ambition is to be admired as men of mystery and vast secret knowledge. They will never try actually to find the treasures they claim to know about. If you offer to provide a ship and crew to pick up the riches they describe in such detail, they"ll impose impossible conditions. They don"t want to risk their dreams by trying to make them come true.
But Thistlethwaite wasn"t that way. He wasn"t a crackpot. In his description of the wealth awaiting him, Link considered that he must be off the beam. There was no such treasure in the galaxy. But he"d been on Sord Three, and he"d had some money-enough to buy theGlamorganand her cargo-and he was trying to get back. He"d cut Link in out of necessity, because theGlamorganhad to get off Trent when she did, or not get off at all. So Thistlethwaite was not a crackpot. But an eccentric, that he was!
Fuming but resolute, the little man tried valiantly to make the ship hold together until his project was completed. From the beginning, four compartments besides the s.p.a.ceboat blister were sealed off because they couldn"t be made airtight. A fifth compartment lost half a pound of air every hour on the hour. Thistlethwaite labored over it, daubing extinguisher foam on joints and cracks until he found where the foam vanished first. Then he lavishly applied sealing compound. This was not the act of a crackpot who only wants to be admired. It was consistent with a far-out mentality which would run the wildest of risks to carry out a purpose. Moreover, when after days of labor he still couldn"t bring the air loss down below half a pound a day, he sealed off that compartment too. TheGlamorganhad been a tub to begin with. Now she displayed characteristics to make a reasonably patient man break down and cry.
Link offered to help in the sealing-off process. Thistlethwaite snapped at him.
"You tend to your knitting and I"ll tend to mine," he said acidly. "You"re so smart at workin" out things I want to keep to myself."
"I only found out where we"re going," said Link. "I didn"t find out why."
"To get rich," snapped Thistlethwaite. "That"s why! I want to get rich! I spent my life bein" poor. Now I want to get kowtowed to! My first partner got money and he couldn"t wait to enjoy it. I"ve waited. I"m not telling anybody anything! I know what I"m goin" to do. I got a talent for business. I never had a chance to use it. No capital. Now I"m going to get rich and do things like I always wanted to do."
Link asked more questions and the little man turned waspishly upon him.
"That"s my business, like runnin" this ship to where we"re goin" is yours! You leave me be! I"m not riskin"
you knowin" what I know. I"m not takin" the chance of you figurin" you"ll do better cheating me than playin" fair."
This was shrewdness, after a fashion. There are plenty of men who quite simply and naturally believe that the way to profit in any enterprise is to double-cross their a.s.sociates. The whiskery man had evidently met them. He wasn"t sure Link wasn"t one of them. He kept his mouth shut.
"Eventually," said Link, "I"m going to have to come out of overdrive to check my course. Is that all right with you?"
"That"s your business!" rasped Thistlethwaite. "You tend to your business and I"ll tend to mine!"
He disappeared, prowling around the ship, checking the air pressure, spending long periods in the engine room and not infrequently coming silently and secretly up the stairway to the control room to regard Link with inveterate suspicion.
It annoyed Link. So when he determined that he should break out of overdrive to verify his position-a dubious business considering the limits of his knowledge-he did not notify Thistlethwaite. He simply broke out of overdrive.
There should have been merely an instant of intolerable vertigo and of intense nausea, and then the sensation of a spiral fall toward infinity, but nothing more. Those sensations occurred. But as they began there was also a wild, rasping roar in the engine room. Lights dimmed. Thistlethwaite howled with fury and flung himself down into an inferno of blue arcs and stinking scorched insulation. In that incredible nightmare-like atmosphere he hit something with a stick. He pulled violently on a rope. He spun a wheel rapidly. And the arcs died. The ship"s ancient air system began to struggle with the smoke and smells.
It took him two days to make repairs, during which he did not address one syllable to Link. But Link was busy anyhow. He was taking observations and checking the process with thePractical Astrogatoras he went along. Then he used the computer to make his observations mean something. He faithfully wrote all these exercises in the ship"s log. It helped to pa.s.s the time. But when determination of the ship"s position by three different methods gave the same result, he arrived at the astonishing conclusion that the Glamorganwas actually on course.
He was composing a tribute to himself for the feat when Thistlethwaite came bristling into the control room.
"I fixed what you messed up," he said bitterly. "We can go on now. But next time you do something, don"t do it till you ask me, and I"ll fix it so you can. You could"ve wrecked us."
Link opened his mouth to ask what could be a more complete wreck than theGlamorganright now, but he refrained. He arranged for Thistlethwaite to go down into the engine room. He shouted down the stairways. Thistlethwaite bellowed a reply. Link checked the ship"s heading again, glanced at the ship"s chronometer, and threw the overdrive on.
Nothing happened except vertigo and nausea and the feeling of falling in a spiral fashion toward nowhere at all. TheGlamorganwas again in overdrive. The little man came in, brushing off his hands.
"That"s the way," he said truculently, "to handle this ship!" Link scribbled a memo of the instant the Glamorganhad gone into overdrive.
"In two days, four hours, thirty-three minutes and twenty seconds," he observed, "we"ll want to break out again. We ought to be somewhere near Sord, then."
"If," said Thistlethwaite suspiciously, "if you"re not tryin" to put something over on me!"
Link shrugged. He"d begun to wonder, lately, why he"d come on this highly mysterious journey. In one sense he"d had good reason. Jail. But now he began to be restless. He wore a stake-belt next to his skin, and in it he had certain small crystals. There were people who would murder him enthusiastically for those crystals. There were others who would pay him very large sums for them. The trouble was that he had no specific idea of what he wanted to do with a large sum. Small sums, yes. He could relax with them. But large ones- He felt a need for the pleasingly unexpected. Even the exciting.
One day pa.s.sed and he was definitely impatient. He was bored. He couldn"t even think of anything to write in the log book. There"d been a girl about whom he"d felt romantic, not so long ago. He tried to think sentimentally about her. He failed. He hadn"t seen her in months and she was probably married to somebody else now. The thought didn"t bother him. It was annoying that it didn"t. He craved excitement and interesting happenings, and he was merely heading for a planet that hadn"t made authenticated contact with the rest of the galaxy in two hundred years, and then had promised to shoot anybody who landed. He was only in a leaky ship whose machinery broke down frequently and might at any time burn out.
He was, in a word, bored.
The second day pa.s.sed. Four hours, thirty-three minutes remained. He tried to hope for interesting events. He knew of no reason to antic.i.p.ate them. If Thistlethwaite were right, there would be only business dealings aground, and presently an attempt to get to somewhere else in theGlamorgan,and after that- The whiskery man went down into the engine room and bellowed that everything was set. Link sat by the control board, leaning on his elbows, in a mood of deep skepticism. He didn"t believe anything in particular was likely to happen. Especially he didn"t believe in Thistlethwaite"s story of fabulous wealth.
There was nothing as valuable as Thistlethwaite described. Such things simply didn"t exist. But since he"d come this far- Two minutes to go. One minute twenty seconds. Twenty seconds. Ten . . . five . . . four . . . three . . .
two . . . one!
He flipped the overdrive switch to off. There were the customary sensations of dizzy fall and vertigo and nausea. Then theGlamorganfloated in normal s.p.a.ce, and there was a sun not unreasonably far away, and all the sky was stars. Link was even pessimistic about the ident.i.ty of the sun, but a spectro-photo identified it. It was truly Sord. There were planets. One. Two. Three. Three had ice-caps; it looked as if two-thirds of its surface was sea, and in general it matched theDirectory"sdescription. It might . . . just possibly . . . be inhabited.
A tediously long time later theGlamorganfloated in orbit around the third planet out from its sun. Mottled land ma.s.ses whipped by below. There were seas, and more land ma.s.ses.
Thistlethwaite watched in silence. There could be no communication with the ground, even if the ground was prepared to communicate. TheGlamorgan"scommunication system didn"t work. Link waited for the little man to identify his destination. When it was named there would probably be trouble.
"No maps," said Thistlethwaite bitterly, on the second time around. "I asked Old Man Addison for a map but he hardly knew what I meant. They never bothered to make "em! But Old Man Addison"s Household is near a sea. Near a bay, with mountains not too far off."
Link was not relieved. It isn"t easy to find a landmark of limited size on a large world from a ship in s.p.a.ce that has no maps or even a working communicator. But on the fourth orbital circuit, clouds that had formerly hidden a certain place had moved away. Thistlethwaite pointed.
"That"s it!" he said, scowling as if to cover his own doubts. "That"s it! Get her down yonder!"
Link took a deep breath. Standard s.p.a.ceport procedure is for a ship to call down by communicator, have coordinates supplied from the ground, get into position, and wait. Then the landing grid reaches out its force fields and lets the ship down. It is neat, and comfortable, and safe. But there was no landing grid here. There was no information. And Link had no experience, either.
He made one extra orbit to fix the indicated landing point in his mind and to try to guess at the relative speed of ship and planetary surface. On the seventh circling of the planet, he swung the ship so it traveled stern-first and its emergency rockets could be used as retros. The drive engine would be useless here.
Thistlethwaite stayed in the control room to watch. He chewed agitatedly on wisps of whisker.
The ship hit atmosphere. There was a keening, howling sound, as if the ancient hull were protesting its own destruction. There were thumpings and b.u.mpings. Loose plates rattled at their rivets and remaining welds.
Something came free and battered thunderously at other hull plates before it went crazily off to nowhere.
Vibration began. It became a thoroughly ominous quivering of all the ship. Link threw over the rocket lever, and the vibration ceased to increase as the emergencies bellowed below. He gave them more power, and more, until the deceleration made it difficult to stand. Then, at very long last, the vibration seemed to lessen a very little.
The ship descended into a hurricane of wind from its own motion. Unbelievable noises sounded here and there. The hole where a plate had torn away developed an organ tone with the volume of a baby earthquake"s roar.
The ship hurtled on. Far ahead there was blue sea. Nearer, there were mountains. There was a sandy look to the surface of the soil. Clouds enveloped the ship, and she came out below them, bellowing, and Link gave the rockets more braking power. But the ground still seemed to race past at an intolerable speed. He tilted the ship until her rockets did not support her at all, but only served as brakes.
Then she really went down, wallowing. He fought her, learning how to land by doing it, but without even a close idea of what it should feel like. Twice he attempted to check his descent at the cost of not checking motion toward the now-not-so-distant sh.o.r.eline. He began to hope. He concentrated on matching speed with the flowing landscape.
He made it. The ship moved almost imperceptibly with respect to such landmarks as he could see.
Something vaguely resembling a village appeared, far below, but he could not attend to it. The ship suddenly hovered, no more than five thousand feet high. Then Link, sweating, started to ease down.
Thistlethwaite protested agitatedly, "I saw a village! Get her down! Get her down!"
Link cut the rockets entirely; the ship began to drop like a stone, and he cut them in again and out and in.
TheGlamorganlanded with a tremendous crash. It teetered back and forth, making loud grinding noises.
It steadied. It stopped.
Link mopped his forehead. Thistlethwaite said accusingly, "But this ain"t where we shoulda landed! We shoulda stopped by that village! And even that ain"t the one I want!"
"This is where we did land," said Link, "and lucky we made it! You don"t know how lucky!"
He went to a port to look out. The ship had landed in a sort of hollow, liberally sprinkled with boulders of various shapes and sizes. Sandy hillocks with spa.r.s.e vegetation on their slopes appeared on every hand. Despite the ship"s upright position, Link could not see over the hills to a true horizon.
"I"ll go over to that village we saw comin" down," said Thistlethwaite importantly, "an" arrange to send a message to my friends. Then we"ll get down to business. And there"s never been a business like this one before in all the time since us men stopped swappin" arrowheads! You stay here an" keep ship."