She called him. He couldn't imagine how he had overlooked it. Perhaps
because it was so obviously _there_! It was an ordinary enough safe,
from what they could see of the front of it; and there was a tiny key
in its lock.
They looked at it thoughtfully.
"You didn't try to open it, did you?" Channok inquired.
"No," said Peer; "because--"
"That's what I was thinking," Channok admitted.
There had been, they had decided, at least two groups working against
each other in the ship. The dead man had been in charge of the
antibiotic. Perhaps the woman had been on his side, perhaps not. But
the eight other men had acted together and had controlled the ship.
What action or threat of theirs had caused the dead man to release his
terrible weapon would be hard to discover now. But he had done it, and
the eight men had abandoned the _Ra-Twelve_ promptly, leaving the woman
locked in her cabin....
It looked pretty much as if she had been the one who had switched the
drives to full speed--before jumping out into space. A pretty tough,
desperate lot all around, in Channok's opinion. The _Ra-Twelve's_ log
offered the information that they had left Dardrea three calendric
days earlier, but had been of no further help in identifying crew or
passengers. That most of them were professional criminals, however,
seemed a pretty safe bet--as Peer had pointed out, in voyageur terms,
amateurs didn't play around with taboo-weapons like a bottled lich!
Also, amateurs--Peer and Channok, for example--could have sense enough
not to blunder into a booby-trap....
"He'd know, of course," Channok said reflectively, "that everybody
would be wondering what's hidden in that safe! And it could be anything
up to and including full instructions on how to set up an artificial
culture of antibiotics. Plenty of governments would pay twenty times
what the _Ra-Twelve_ is worth as salvage for that kind of information.
But it's nothing _we_ need to know."
"Not that bad," Peer agreed.
"And the guy who opens that wall-safe had better be an armaments
expert! Which we're not. But now, crew-member Peer, if we want to get
Santis' cargo cached on Old Nameless before I fall asleep, we ought
to get started. Idle curiosity is something we can satisfy some other
time."
"Two hours past your sleep-period right now!" said Peer, glancing at
her wrist-watch. "Tsk, tsk! That always makes you so grouchy."
Half an hour later, they were on their way--Channok in the _Ra-Twelve_,
Peer in the _Asteroid_, keeping as close to each other as two ships
in flight could safely get. With the red glare of the Old Nameless
sun a trifle off-center before him, Channok settled down in the most
comfortable pilot-seat he'd ever found on any ship and decided he could
relax a trifle. Peer was obviously having a wonderful time doing her
first solo-piloting job on a ship of the _Asteroid's_ size; and since
she'd run and landed the _Asteroid_ any number of times under his
supervision, he wasn't worried about her ability to handle it. However,
he continued to check in on her over the communicators every five
minutes or so, and grinned at the brisk, spacemanlike replies he got in
return. Crew-member Peer was on her best behavior right now!
By and by, then--he couldn't have said just when it started--Channok
began to realize that some very odd things were happening around him--
* * * * *
It appeared that the Thing he had put out for burial in a space-crate
hadn't liked the idea of being left alone. So it was following him.
Channok decided uneasily that it might be best to ignore it. But it
kept coming closer and closer until, finally, the crate was floating
just outside the _Ra-Twelve's_ control room port, spinning slowly like
a running-down top.
The crate stayed shut, but he knew the Thing inside it was watching him.
"That's my ship," the Thing remarked presently.
Channok ignored it.
"And you're all alone," said the Thing.
"No, I'm not!" said Channok. "Peer's with me."
"Peer's gone back to Santis," said the Thing. "You're all alone!
Except," it added, "for me."
"Well, good-by!" Channok said firmly. There was no point in getting too
chummy with it. He punched the _Ra-Twelve's_ drives down as far as they
would go, and the crate vanished.
How that ship could travel! Nothing could hope to keep up with him
now--except, perhaps, that round, red glare of light just behind the
_Ra-Twelve_.
That was actually overtaking him, and fast. It was coming up like
a cosmic police-ship, with a huge, hollow noise rushing before it.
Channok listened apprehensively. Suddenly, there were words:
"WHOO-WHOOO!" it howled. "_This is the Space Ghost!_"
He shot up out of his chair like a jabbed cat, knocking it over, and
glared around.
The _Ra-Twelve's_ control room lay brightly lit and silent behind him.
"Ha-ha!" Peer's chuckle came from the communicator. "That woke you up,
I bet! Was that you that fell over?"
"Aw-awk!" breathed Channok. Articulation came back to him. "All right,
crew-member Peer! Just wait till we get to Old Nameless! I'll fix you
good!"
"Shall I tell you the story now about the Horror Ship from Mizar?" Peer
inquired intrepidly.
"Go right ahead," Channok challenged, righting his chair and settling
back into it. "You can't scare me with that sort of stuff!" He began
checking their position.
He must have been asleep for quite a while! The Nameless System was
less than two hours ahead now. He switched on the front screen; and the
sun swam up like a big, glowing coal before him. He began checking for
the seventh planet.
"Well," he reminded the communicator grimly, "you were going to tell me
a story."
The communicator remained silent a moment.
"I don't think I will, anyway," Peer said then, rather quietly.
"Why not?" Channok inquired, getting his screen-viewer disentangled
from a meteor-belt in the Nameless System.
"I made that Space Ghost too good!" whispered Peer. "I'm getting scared
myself now."
"Aha!" said Channok. "See what behaving like that will get you?" He got
Old Nameless VII into the viewer.
The communicator remained still. He looked over at it.
"Of course, there's really nothing to be scared of!" he added
reassuringly.
"How do you know?" quavered Peer. "I'm all alone."
"Nonsense!" Channok said heartily. "I can see the _Asteroid_ right over
there on the screen! You can see me, can't you?"
"Sure," said Peer. "That's a long way off, though. You couldn't do
anything!"
"It's not safe for two ships to travel much closer together," Channok
reminded her. "We're only two hours from Old Nameless right now--I'm
already focussed on it."
"I've been focussed on it for an hour," said Peer. "While you were
snoring," she added. "Two hours is an awful long time!"
"Tell you what," suggested Channok. "I'll race you to it. The
_Ra-Twelve's_ a mighty fast boat--" He checked himself. He'd only
dreamed that, after all.
"Let's go!" Peer said briefly.
* * * * *
He let Peer stay just ahead of him all the way in, though the
stream-lined derelict probably could have flown rings around the
_Asteroid_, at that. Just an hour later, they went around Old Nameless
VII twice, braking down, and then coasted into its atmosphere on their
secondary drives.
"That's the place," Peer's voice said suddenly. "I can see the old
Mound in the plain! In the evening strip, Channy--that straight-up
cliff!"
He set the _Ra-Twelve_ down first, at the base of a mountain that
reared up almost vertically for eighteen thousand feet or so out of a
flat, dimly-lit stretch of rocky desert land.
The _Asteroid_ came down in a very neat landing, two hundred yards
away. He got there on the run, just as the front lock opened. Peer
came tumbling out of it into his arms and hung on fiercely, while her
skipper hugged her.
"Let that scare be a lesson to you!" he remarked when he set her down.
"It certainly will," said Peer, still clutching his arm as they started
over to the _Ra-Twelve_. "That old Space Ghost had me going!"
"Me, too," he confessed; "just for a moment, anyway! Well, let's get
busy."
They went over the _Ra-Twelve_ again from bow to stern, to make sure
there was nothing they would want to take along immediately, and found
there wasn't. They gave the unopened wall-safe a last calculating
regard, and decided once more that they'd better not. Then they shut
off everything, closed the front lock behind them and safetied it with
the dock bolts.
The plain was darkening when they came out, but the top of the mountain
still glowed with red light. They climbed into the _Asteroid_, and
Channok closed the lock. He started for the control desk then; but
Peer beat him to it and anchored herself into the seat of command
with hands, knees and feet. It became apparent almost at once that he
couldn't get her out of it without running the risk of pulling off her
head.
"Now look here, crew-member Peer," he said persuasively, "you know good
and well that if these top-heavy cargo crates have one weakness, it's
the take-off!"
"It could be the pilot, too," Peer said meaningly. "I've been studying
the manual, and I've watched you do it. It's my turn now."
He considered her thoughtfully.
"Suppose you die of old age, all of a sudden?" argued Peer. "Wouldn't
want me to sit here alone without knowing even how to take her off,
would you?"
That did it.
"Go ahead," said Channok with dignity, taking a position back of the
chair. "Go right ahead! This decrepit old man of twenty-eight is going
to stand right here and laugh himself sick!"
"You'll be sick, all right," promised Peer. "But it won't be from
laughing! I'll read that chapter out of the manual to you sometime."
She _had_ studied it, too, he decided. She sat perched forward on the
edge of the chair, alert and cocky, and went through the starting
operations without hitch or hesitation. The _Asteroid_ rumbled beneath
them, briefly building up power....