Pandit looked at the crate. There were no markings on it anywhere. The wood looked new, but that meant absolutely nothing. In the dry heat of the Empty Places, wood would last a century, a millennium. They could not tell how old it was.
"Ready?" Sria Krishna called from the controls.
Pandit had secured the crate in the cargo bay. "Ready," he responded.
Moments later acceleration thrust them back in the twin pilot seats.
Sria leveled the jet at twenty thousand and they sped at eight hundred miles an hour toward the city and the s.p.a.cefield just beyond it.
"Do you wonder about it?" Sria asked after a while.
"About what?"
"The cargo."
"We aren"t supposed to."
"I know." Sria laughed. "I"m a woman, you see."
Pandit grinned at her. "Curiosity," he said. "A woman"s trait on any world."
Sria got up from the pilot chair but Pandit placed his hand on her shoulder and gently shoved her down again. "They have a televid unit aboard," he said, "remember?"
Sria nodded. The jet sped on.
They landed at the s.p.a.cefield. They were the fourth jet down and one of the other three had taken off on the return leg of the flight. A Denebian Pandit had never seen before was supervising the loin-cloth garbed laborers loading the crates aboard a Denebian s.p.a.ceship. With Sria he delivered their crate on the trundle-sled, returned with the sled to their jet, and took off.
Just short of four hours from the time they started they returned to the Empty Places. They had gained a little time and were the second team down. From the jet ahead of them, Raj Shiva led a puny, middle-aged co-pilot.
Orkap stood in the underground storage room. Looking at his wrist chrono he said to the four Ophiuchans who came down the ramp: "You made fine time." Raj Shiva"s puny companion said something, but Raj Shiva grabbed his arm and they began to load a second crate. Pandit and Sria loaded theirs in silence.
They made their second round trip in four hours exactly. It was completely dark when they returned to the Empty Places. Sria was worried they would overshoot the cargo point, but Pandit brought the little jet down within a few hundred yards of its takeoff point.
They could see nothing when they shut off the jet"s running lights, except for the glow which came from the underground room. They reached it and went down the ramp. Pandit judged that half the crates were gone now. He took a quick tour of the dimly-lit room while Sria got the trundle-sled into position against one of the crates.
"n.o.body here," Pandit said in a whisper. "The Denebian must be sleeping in the sand-sled."
"Yes," Sria said a little breathlessly.
"I was thinking--"
"What?" Sria said. "Don"t stop."
"If we wanted to examine one of the boxes, it would be suicide to open the one we take. But we could open one of them down here, see what it is, take another for ourselves--"
"You would do this?" Sria asked him. "Why?"
Pandit shrugged. "I have eyes," he said. "Our gurus did not broadcast the death-wish to outworlders until the Denebians came. Then they started. Have the Denebians sold them on the idea?"
"I don"t know," Sria said.
"Well, let"s a.s.sume they have. Why? Why would they do such a thing, Sria?"
"Let me get this straight, Pandit. First, you think the gurus actually are making the outworlders kill themselves?"
"Of course," Pandit said. "It"s mental suggestion, on a scale only our gurus are capable of. But don"t you see, Sria, they wouldn"t do it on their own. The gurus are dirty, careless about their bodies--but terribly arrogant. Left alone, they wouldn"t think the outworlders important enough to be concerned over one way or another. They certainly wouldn"t kill them."
"Go on," Sria urged.
"All right. The gurus have great knowledge of the mystical, but externally they"re naive. Let"s suppose someone came along--the Denebians in this case--and found something they wanted very badly on Ophiuchus. These crates here, Sria. What would they do? They"d go to the gurus and convince them--it wouldn"t be difficult--that any intercourse with outworlders would be harmful to Ophiuchus, that the outworlders want to colonize and exploit our world, that sort of thing. While the gurus are stewing it over, the Denebians could have prepared this shipment here--whatever it is--for departure. But the gurus, too well convinced by them, could have acted sooner than they expected, making it all but impossible for the small handful of outworlders, the Denebians among them, to go abroad without fear of taking their own lives. Perhaps a few, like Orkap and that other Denebian, are not at all suicide-p.r.o.ne.
Perhaps a few can withstand it. As for the rest, it"s indoors and away from the mental influence of the gurus, or off Ophiuchus entirely. Which would leave the Denebians with a problem they hadn"t thought of." His words made sense.
"Yes!" cried Sria excitedly. "Now that they have their valuable cargo ready to go, how can they get it off Ophiuchus without help?"
"We," said Pandit softly, "are that help."
Sria asked: "What are you going to do about it?"
"I don"t know. I honestly don"t. I never had anything against the outworlders. How could I? We"re all progeny of outworlders who came here almost five hundred years ago from a place called India on Earth. But the gurus--"
"--have been deceived. You said so yourself."
Pandit was sweating, and it was more than the heat which made him sweat.
He paced up to the crates, then back again, then to the crates. Suddenly he said, "All right. All right, I"ll do it. Someone"s got to find out what the Denebians want here."
And Pandit began to pry at one of the boxes with a knife he carried in his loin cloth. Sria said, "I"ll keep watch. You call me when it"s opened."
"Maybe you ought to get out of here. In case anything happens, I don"t want to get you involved."
But Sria went up the ramp and crouched there, waiting, watching. The desert was very quiet, entirely windless, and hot even at night. Stars sprinkled the sky overhead and far off she thought she heard the distant whine of a jet. "Hurry," she called. From below she heard the sound of wood being pried away from wood. She heard, or imagined she heard, the jet coming closer. "Hurry!" she called softly.
Finally three words drifted up to her. "Come here, Sria." She felt a little relieved. Now that he"d finished.
She listened for the jet. Now she heard nothing. She went swiftly down the ramp.
Pandit stood before one of the crates, perspiring freely. He had pried loose one of the side walls and a smooth metal surface with stenciled lettering on it was exposed.
He said: "I can"t read that. It"s a language I never saw before."
Sria bent closer and looked at the stenciled lettering. A voice, not Pandit"s, said: