_On a bleak, distant unchartered world two ships lay wrecked and a
lone man stared at a star hyacinth. Its brilliance burned into his
retina ... and he knew that men could easily kill and kill for that
one beauty alone._
The robbery of the Dosey Asteroids Shipping Station in a remote and
spottily explored section of space provided the newscasting systems of
the Federation of the Hub with one of the juiciest crime stories of the
season. In a manner not clearly explained, the Dosey Asteroids Company
had lost six months' production of gem-quality cut star hyacinths
valued at nearly a hundred million credits. It lost also its Chief
Lapidary and seventy-eight other company employees who had been in the
station dome at the time.
[Illustration]
All these people appeared at first to have been killed by gunfire, but a
study of their bodies revealed that only in a few instances had gun
wounds been the actual cause of death. For the most part the wounds had
been inflicted on corpses, presumably in an attempt to conceal the fact
that disaster in another and unknown form had befallen the station.
The raiders left very few clues. It appeared that the attack on the
station had been carried out by a single ship, and that the locks to the
dome had been opened from within. The latter fact, of course, aroused
speculation, but led the investigators nowhere.
Six years later the great Dosey Asteroids robbery remained an unsolved
mystery.
* * * * *
The two wrecked spaceships rested almost side by side near the tip of a
narrow, deep arm of a great lake.
The only man on the planet sat on a rocky ledge three miles uphill from
the two ships, gazing broodingly down at them. He was a big fellow in
neatly patched shipboard clothing. His hands were clean, his face
carefully shaved. He had two of the castaway's traditional possessions
with him; a massive hunting bow rested against the rocks, and a minor
representative of the class of life which was this world's equivalent of
birds was hopping about near his feet. This was a thrush-sized creature
with a jaunty bearing and bright yellow eyes. From the front of its
round face protruded a short, narrow tube tipped with small, sharp
teeth. Round, horny knobs at the ends of its long toes protected
retractile claws as it bounded back and forth between the bow and the
man, giving a quick flutter of its wings on each bound. Finally it
stopped before the man, stretching its neck to stare up at him, trying
to catch his attention.
He roused from his musing, glanced irritably down at it.
"Not now, Birdie," he said. "Keep quiet!"
The man's gaze returned to the two ships, then passed briefly along a
towering range of volcanos on the other side of the lake, and lifted to
the cloudless blue sky. His eyes probed on, searching the sunlit, empty
vault above him. If a ship ever came again, it would come from there,
the two wrecks by the lake arm already fixed in its detectors; it would
not come gliding along the surface of the planet....
Birdie produced a sharp, plaintive whistle. The man looked at it.
"Shut up, stupid!" he told it.
He reached into the inner pocket of his coat, took out a small object
wrapped in a piece of leather, and unfolded the leather.
Then it lay in his cupped palm, and blazed with the brilliance of twenty
diamonds, seeming to flash the fires of the spectrum furiously from
every faceted surface, without ever quite subduing the pure violet
luminance which made a star hyacinth impossible to imitate or, once
seen, to forget. The most beautiful of gems, the rarest, the most
valuable. The man who was a castaway stared at it for long seconds, his
breath quickening and his hand beginning to tremble. Finally he folded
the chip of incredible mineral back into the leather, replaced it
carefully in his pocket.
When he looked about again, the sunlit air seemed brighter, the coloring
of lake and land more vivid and alive. Once during each of this world's
short days, but no oftener, he permitted himself to look at the star
hyacinth. It was a ritual adhered to with almost religious strictness,
and it had kept him as sane as he was ever likely to be again, for over
six years.
It might, he sometimes thought, keep him sane until a third ship
presently came along to this place. And then ...
The third ship was coming along at the moment, still some five hours'
flight out from the system. She was a small ship with lean, rakish
lines, a hot little speedster, gliding placidly through subspace just
now, her engines throttled down.
Aboard her, things were less peaceful.
* * * * *
The girl was putting up a pretty good fight but getting nowhere with it
against the bull-necked Fleetman who had her pinned back against the
wall.
Wellan Dasinger paused in momentary indecision at the entrance to the
half-darkened control section of the speedboat. The scuffle in there
very probably was none of his business. The people of the roving
Independent Fleets had their own practices and mores and resented
interference from uninformed planet dwellers. For all Dasinger knew,
their blue-eyed lady pilot enjoyed roughhousing with the burly members
of her crew. If the thing wasn't serious....
He heard the man rap out something in the Willata Fleet tongue,
following the words up with a solid thump of his fist into the girl's
side. The thump hadn't been playful, and her sharp gasp of pain
indicated no enjoyment whatever. Dasinger stepped quickly into the
room.
He saw the girl turn startled eyes toward him as he came up behind the
man. The man was Liu Taunus, the bigger of the two crew members ... too
big and too well muscled by a good deal, in fact, to make a
sportsmanlike suggestion to divert his thumpings to Dasinger look like a
sensible approach. Besides Dasinger didn't know the Willata Fleet's
language. The edge of his hand slashed twice from behind along the thick
neck; then his fist brought the breath whistling from Taunus's lungs
before the Fleetman had time to turn fully towards him.
It gave Dasinger a considerable starting advantage. During the next
twenty seconds or so the advantage seemed to diminish rapidly. Taunus's
fists and boots had scored only near misses so far, but he began to look
like the hardest big man to chop down Dasinger had yet run into. And
then the Fleetman was suddenly sprawling on the floor, face down, arms
flung out limply, a tough boy with a thoroughly bludgeoned nervous
system.
Dasinger was straightening up when he heard the _thunk_ of the wrench.
He turned sharply, discovered first the girl standing ten feet away with
the wrench in her raised hand, next their second crew member lying on
the carpet between them, finally the long, thin knife lying near the
man's hand.
"Thanks, Miss Mines!" he said, somewhat out of breath. "I really should
have remembered Calat might be somewhere around."
Duomart Mines gestured with her head at the adjoining control cabin. "He
was in there," she said, also breathlessly. She was a long-legged blonde
with a limber way of moving, pleasing to look at in her shaped Fleet
uniform, though with somewhat aloof and calculating eyes. In the dim
light of the room she seemed to be studying Dasinger now with an
expression somewhere between wariness and surprised speculation. Then,
as he took a step forward to check on Calat's condition, she backed off
slightly, half lifting the wrench again.
Dasinger stopped and looked at her. "Well," he said, "make up your mind!
Whose side are you on here?"
Miss Mines hesitated, let the wrench down. "Yours, I guess," she
acknowledged. "I'd better be, now! They'd murder me for helping a
planeteer."
* * * * *
Dasinger went down on one knee beside Calat, rather cautiously though
the Fleetman wasn't stirring, and picked up the knife. Miss Mines turned
up the room's lights. Dasinger asked, "What was this ... a mutiny?
You're technically in charge of the ship, aren't you?"
"Technically," she agreed, added, "We were arguing about a Fleet
matter."
"I see. We'll call it mutiny." Dasinger checked to be sure Calat wasn't
faking unconsciousness. He inquired, "Do you really need these boys to
help you?"
Duomart Mines shook her blond head. "Not at all. Flying the Mooncat is a
one-man job."
"I did have a feeling," Dasinger admitted, "that Willata's Fleet was
doing a little featherbedding when they said I'd have to hire a crew of
three to go along with their speedboat."
"Uh-huh." Her tone was non-committal. "They were. What are you going to
do with them?"
"Anywhere they can be locked up safely?"
"Not safely. Their own cabin's as good as anything. They can batter
their way out of here if they try hard enough. Of course we'd hear them
doing it."
"Well, we can fix that." Dasinger stood up, fished his cabin key out of
a pocket and gave it to her. "Tan suitcase standing at the head of my
bunk," he said. "Mind bringing that and the little crane from the
storeroom up here?"
Neither of the Fleetmen had begun to stir when Duomart Mines came riding
a gravity crane back in through the door a couple of minutes later, the
suitcase dangling in front of her. She halted the crane in the center of
the room, slid out of its saddle with a supple twist of her body, and
handed Dasinger his cabin key.
"Thanks." Dasinger took the suitcase from the crane, unlocked and opened
it. He brought out a pair of plastic handcuffs, aware that Miss Mines
stood behind him making an intent scrutiny of what could be seen of the
suitcase's contents. He didn't blame her for feeling curious; she was
looking at a variety of devices which might have delighted the eyes of
both a professional burglar and military spy. She offered no comment.
Neither did Dasinger. He hauled Liu Taunus over on his back, fastened
handcuffs about the Fleetman's wrists, then rolled him over on his face
again. He did the same for Calat, hung the suitcase back in the crane,
slung a leg across the crane's saddle and settled into it.
Miss Mines remarked, "I'd look their cabin over pretty closely for guns
and so on before leaving them there."
"I intend to. By the way, has Dr. Egavine mentioned how close we are to
our destination?" Dasinger maneuvered the crane over to Taunus, lowered
a beam to the small of the Fleetman's back and hoisted him up
carefully, arms, head and legs dangling.
The blond girl checked her watch. "He didn't tell me exactly," she said,
"but there's what seems to be a terraprox in the G2 system ahead. If
that's it, we'll get there in around five hours depending on what
subspace conditions in the system are. Dr. Egavine's due up here in
thirty minutes to give me the final figures." She paused, added
curiously, "Don't you know yourself just where we're going?"
"No," Dasinger said. "I'm financing the trip. The doctor is the man with
the maps and other pertinent information."
"I thought you were partners."
"We are. Dr. Egavine is taciturn about some things. I'll bring him back
here with me as soon as I have these two locked away." Dasinger finished
picking up Calat, swung the crane slowly towards the door, the
unconscious Fleetmen suspended ahead of him.
* * * * *
Dr. Egavine stood at the open door to his stateroom as Dasinger came
walking back up the passage from the crew quarters and the storage.
Quist, the doctor's manservant, peered out of the stateroom behind him.
"What in heaven's name were you doing with those two men?" Egavine
inquired, twitching his eyebrows disapprovingly up and down. The doctor
was a tall, thin man in his forties, dressed habitually in undertaker
black, with bony features and intense dark eyes. He added, "They
appeared to be unconscious ... and fettered!"
"They were both," Dasinger admitted. "I've confined them to their
cabin."
"Why?"
"We had a little slugfest in the control section a few minutes ago. One
of the boys was beating around on our pilot, so I laid him out, and she
laid out the other one when he tried to get into the act with a knife.
She says the original dispute was a Fleet matter ... in other words,
none of our business. However, I don't know. There's something decidedly
fishy about the situation."
"In what way?" Egavine asked.
Dasinger said, "I checked over the crew quarters for weapons just now
and found something which suggests that Willata's Fleet is much more
interested in what we're doing out here than we thought."
Egavine looked startled, peered quickly along the passage to the control
section. "I feel," he said, lowering his voice, "that we should continue
this discussion behind closed doors...."
"All right." Quist, a bandy-legged, wiry little man with a large bulb
of a nose and close-set, small eyes, moved back from the door. Dasinger
went inside. Egavine pulled the door shut behind them and drew a chair
out from the cabin table. Dasinger sat down opposite him.
"What did you find?" Dr. Egavine asked.
Dasinger said, "You know Miss Mines is supposed to be the only Fleet
member on board who speaks the Federation's translingue. However, there
was a listening device attached to the inside of the cabin communicator
in the crew quarters. Its settings show that the Willata Fleet people
have bugged each of the Mooncat's other cabins, and also--which I think
is an interesting point--the control section. Have you and Quist
discussed our project in any detail since coming aboard?"
"I believe we did, on several occasions," Egavine said hesitantly.
"Then we'd better assume Taunus and Calat knew that we're looking for
the wreck of the Dosey Asteroids raider, and ..."