Sergeant Madden yawned. It seemed pathetic to him that young cops like
Willis and even Timmy referred so often to Huks. There weren't any, any
more. Being a cop meant carrying out purely routine tasks, nowadays.
They were important tasks, of course. Without the cops, there couldn't
be any civilization. But Willis and Timmy didn't think of it that way.
Not yet. To them being a cop was still a matter of glamour rather than
routine. They probably even regretted the absence of Huks. But when a
man reached Sergeant Madden's age, glamour didn't matter. He had to
remember that his job was worth doing, in itself.
"Yeah," said Sergeant Madden. "There was quite a time with those Huks."
"Did you ... did you ever see a Huk, sir?" asked Willis.
"Before my time," said Sergeant Madden. "But I've talked to men who
worked on the case."
* * * * *
It did not occur to him that the Huks would hardly have been called a
"case" by anybody but a cop. When human colonies spread through this
sector, they encountered an alien civilization. By old-time standards,
it was quite a culture. The Huks had a good technology, they had
spaceships, and they were just beginning to expand, themselves, from
their own home planet or planets. If they'd had a few more centuries of
development, they might have been a menace to humanity. But the humans
got started first.
There being no longer any armies or navies when the Huks were
discovered, the matter of intelligent nonhumans was a matter for the
cops. So the police matter-of-factly tried to incorporate the Huk
culture into the human. They explained the rules by which human
civilization worked. They painstakingly tried to arrange a sub-precinct
station on the largest Huk home planet, with Huk cops in charge. They
made it clear that they had nothing to do with politics and were simply
concerned with protecting civilized people from those in their midst who
didn't want to be civilized.
The Huks wouldn't have it. They bristled, proudly. They were defiant.
They considered themselves not only as good as humans--the cops didn't
care what they thought--but they insisted on acting as if they were
better.
They reacted, in fact, as humans would have done if just at the
beginning of their conquest of the stars, they'd run into an expanding,
farther-advanced race which tried to tell them what they had to do. The
Huks fought.
"They fought pretty good," said Sergeant Madden tolerantly. "Not
killer-fashion--like delinks. The Force had to give 'em the choice of
joining up or getting out. Took years to get 'em out. Had to use all the
off-duty men from six precincts to handle the last riot."
The conflict he called a riot would have been termed a space battle by a
navy or an army. But the cops operated within a strictly police frame of
reference, which was the reverse of military. They weren't trying to
subjugate the Huks, but to make them behave. In consequence, their
tactics were unfathomable to the Huks--who thought in military terms.
Squadrons of police ships which would have seemed ridiculous to a
fighting-force commander threw the Huks off-balance, kept them
off-balance, did a scrupulous minimum of damage to them, and thereby
kept out of every trap the Huks set for them. In the end the cops
supervised and assisted at the embittered, rebellious emigration of a
race. The Huks took off for the far side of the galaxy. They'd neither
been conquered nor exterminated. But Sergeant Madden thought of the
decisive fracas as a riot rather than a battle.
"Yeah," he repeated. "They acted a lot like delinks."
Patrolman Willis spoke with some heat about delinks, who are the bane of
all police forces everywhere. They practice adolescent behavior even
after they grow up--but they never grow up. It is delinks who put
stink-bombs in public places and write threatening letters and give
warnings of bombs about to go off--and sometimes set them--and stuff
dirt into cold rocket-nozzles and sometimes kill people and go
incontinently hysterical because they didn't mean to. Delinks do most of
the damaging things that have no sense to them. There is no cop who has
not wanted to kill some grinning, half-scared, half-defiant delink who
hasn't yet realized that he's destroyed half a million credits' worth of
property or crippled somebody for life--for no reason at all.
Sergeant Madden listened to the denunciation of all the delink tribe.
Then he yawned again.
"I know!" he said. "I don't like 'em either. But we got 'em. We always
will have 'em. Like old age."
Then he made computations with a stubby pencil and asked reflectively:
"When're you coming out of overdrive?"
Patrolman Willis told him. Sergeant Madden nodded.
"I'll take another nap," he observed. "We'll be there a good twenty-two
hours before the _Aldeb_."
The little squad ship went on at an improbable multiple of the speed of
light. After all, this was a perfectly normal performance. Just an
ordinary bit of business for the cops.
* * * * *
Sergeant Madden belched when the squad ship came out of overdrive. He
watched with seeming indifference while Patrolman Willis took a spectro
on the star ahead and to the left, and painstakingly compared the
reading with the ancient survey-data on the Procyron system. It had to
match, of course, unless there'd been extraordinarily bad astrogation.
Willis put the spectroscope away, estimated for himself, and then
checked with the dial that indicated the brightness of the still
point-sized star. He said:
"Four light-weeks, I make it."
Sergeant Madden nodded. A superior officer should never do anything
useful, so long as a subordinate isn't making a serious mistake. That is
the way subordinates are trained to become superiors, in time. Patrolman
Willis set a time-switch and pushed the overdrive button. The squad ship
hopped, and abruptly the local sun had a perceptible disk. Willis made
the usual tests for direction of rotation, to get the ecliptic plane. He
began to search for planets. As he found them, he checked with the
reference data. All this was tedious. Sergeant Madden grunted:
"That'll be it," he said, and pointed. "Water world. It's the color of
ocean. Try it."
Patrolman Willis threw on the telescope screen. The image of the distant
planet leaped into view. It was Procyron III. The spiral cloud-arms of a
considerable storm showed in the southern hemisphere, but in the north
there was a group or specks which would be the planet's only solid
ground--the archipelago reported by the century-old survey. The
_Cerberus_ should have been the first ship to land there in a hundred
years, and the squad ship should be the second.
Patrolman Willis got the squad ship competently over to the planet, a
diameter out. He juggled to position over the archipelago. Sergeant
Madden turned on the space phone. Nothing. He frowned. A grounded ship
awaiting help should transmit a beam signal to guide its rescuer. But
nothing came up from the ground.
Patrolman Willis looked at him uncertainly. Sergeant Madden rumbled and
swung the telescope below. The surface of the planet appeared--deep
water, practically black beneath a surface reflection of daytime sky.
The image shifted--a patch of barren rocks. The sergeant glanced at the
survey picture, shifted the telescope, and found the northern-most
island. He swelled the picture. He could see the white of monstrous surf
breaking on the windward shore--waves that had gathered height going all
around the planet. He traced the shoreline. There was a bay up at the
top.
He centered the shoreline of the bay and put on maximum magnification.
Then he pointed a stubby forefinger. A singular, perfectly straight
streak of black appeared, beginning a little distance inland from the
bay and running up into what appeared to be higher ground. The streak
ended not far from a serpentine arm of the sea which almost cut the
island in half.
"That'll be it," said Sergeant Madden, rumbling. "The _Cerberus_ had to
land on her rockets. She had some ground speed. She burned a ten-mile
streak on the ground, coming down." He growled. "Commercial skippers!
Should've matched velocity aloft! Take her down."
The squad ship drove for ground.
Patrolman Willis steadied the ship no more than a few thousand feet
high, above the streak of scorched ground and ashes.
"It was heading inland, all right," rumbled Sergeant Madden. "Lucky! If
it'd been heading the other way, it could've gone out and landed in the
sea. That would ha' been a mess! But where is it?"
The squad ship descended farther. It followed the lane of carbonized
soil. That marking narrowed--the _Cerberus_ had plainly been descending.
Then the streak came to an end. It pinched out to nothing. The
_Cerberus_ should have been at its end.
It wasn't. There was no ship down on Procyron III.
* * * * *
The matter ceased to be routine. If the liner's drive conked out where
Procyron III was the nearest refuge planet, it should have landed here
at least six days ago. Some ship had landed here recently.
"Set down," grunted Sergeant Madden.
Patrolman Willis obeyed. The squad ship came to rest in a minor valley,
a few hundred yards from the end of the rocket-blast trail. Sergeant
Madden got out. Patrolman Willis followed him. This was a duly surveyed
and recommended refuge planet. There was no need to check the air or
take precautions against inimical animal or vegetable life. The planet
was safe.
They clambered over small rocky obstacles until they came to the end of
the scorched line. They surveyed the state of things in silence.
A ship had landed here recently. Its blue-white rocket flames had melted
gulleys in the soil, turned it to slag, and then flung silky, gossamer
threads of slag-wool over the rocks nearby.
At the end of the melted-away hollows, twin slag-lined holes went down
deep into the ground. They were take-off holes. Rockets had burned them
deeply as they gathered force to lift the ship away again.
Sergeant Madden scrambled to the edge of the nearest blast-well. He put
his hand on the now-solidified, glassy slag. It wasn't warm, but it
wasn't cold. The glass-lined hole a rocket leaves takes a long time to
cool down.
"She landed here, all right," he grunted. "But she took off again before
the torp arrived to tell us about it."
Willis protested:
"But, sergeant! She only had one set of rockets! She couldn't have taken
off again! She didn't have the rockets to do it with!"
"I know she couldn't," growled the sergeant. "But she did."
The _Cerberus_, once landed, should have waited here. It was not only a
police regulation; it was common sense. When a ship broke down in space,
the exclusive hope for that ship's company lay in a refuge planet for
ships in that traffic lane. Even lifeboats could ordinarily reach some
refuge planet, for picking up later. They couldn't possibly be located
otherwise. With three dimensions in which to be missed, and light-years
of distance in which to miss them--no ship or boat had ever been found
as much as a light-week out in space. No ship with a crippled drive
could possibly be helped unless it got to a specified refuge world where
it could be found. No ship which had reached a refuge planet could
conceivably want to leave it.
There was also the fact that no ship which had made such a landing would
have extra rockets with which to take off for departure.
The _Cerberus_ had landed. Timmy's girl was on it. It had taken off
again. It was either an impossible mass suicide or something worse. It
certainly wasn't routine.
Patrolman Willis asked hesitantly:
"D'you think, sergeant, it could be Huks sneaked back--?"
Sergeant Madden did not answer. He went back to the squad ship and armed
himself. Patrolman Willis followed suit. The sergeant boobied the squad
ship so no unauthorized person could make use of it, and so it would
disable itself if anyone with expert knowledge tried. Therefore, nobody
with expert knowledge would try.
The two cops began a painstaking quest for police-type evidence to tell
them what had happened, and how and why the _Cerberus_ was missing,
after a clumsy but safe landing on Procyron III and when all sanity
demanded that it stay there, and when it was starkly impossible for it
to leave.
* * * * *
Sergeant Madden and Patrolman Willis were, self-evidently, the only
human beings on a planet some nine thousand miles in diameter. It was
easy to compute that the nearest other humans would be at least some
thousands of thousands of millions of miles away--so far away that
distance had no meaning. This planet was something over nine-tenth
rolling sea, but there were a few tens of thousands of square miles of
solid ground in the one archipelago that broke the ocean's surface. It
was such loneliness as very few people ever experience. But they did not
notice it. They were busy.
They went over the ground immediately about the landing place. Rocket
flame had splashed it, both at the _Cerberus'_ landing and at the
impossible take-off. There was nothing within a hundred yards not burned
to a crisp. They searched outside that area. Sergeant Madden rumbled to
his companion:
"Where'd the other ship land?"
Patrolman Willis blinked at him.
"There had to be another ship!" said Sergeant Madden irritably. "To
bring the extra rockets. The other ship had to've brought 'em. And it
had to have rockets of its own. There's no spaceport here!"
Patrolman Willis blinked again. Then he saw. The _Cerberus_ carried one
set of emergency-landing rockets, for use in a descent on a refuge
planet if the need arose. The need had arisen and the _Cerberus_ had
used them. Then, from somewhere, another set of rockets had been
produced for it to use in leaving. Those other rockets must have come on
another ship. But it was a trifle more complicated than that. The
_Cerberus_ had carried one set of rockets and used them. One. It had
been supplied with another set from somewhere. Two. They must have been
brought by a ship which also used a set of rockets to land by. That made
three. Then the other ship must have had a fourth set for its own
take-off, or it would be grounded forever on Procyron III.
Patrolman Willis frowned.
"We looked pretty carefully from aloft," he said uncomfortably. "If
there'd been another burned-off landing place, we'd have seen it."
"I know," rumbled Sergeant Madden. "And we didn't. But there must've
been another ship aground when the _Cerberus_ came in. Where was it? It
prob'ly knew the _Cerberus_ was landing to wait for help. How? If
somebody was coming to help the _Cerberus_ it would be bound to spot the
other ship, and it didn't want to be spotted. Why? Anyhow, it must've
taken the _Cerberus_ and sent it off, and then taken off itself, leaving
nothing sensible for us to think. 'Sounds like delinks." Then he
growled. "Only it's not. There'd have to be too many men. Delinks don't
work together more'n two or three. Too jealous of showin' off. But where
was that other ship, and what was it doin' here?"
Patrolman Willis hesitated, and then said:
"There used to be pirates, sergeant."
"Uh-huh," said the sergeant. "You had it right the first time, most
likely. Not delinks. Not pirates. You said Huks." He looked around,
estimatingly. "The rockets had to be brought here from somewhere else
where they'd been landed. I'm betting the tracks were covered pretty
careful. But rockets are heavy. Manhandlin' them, whoever was doin' it
would take the easiest way. Hm-m-m. There's water close by over yonder.
Sort of a sound in there--too narrow to be a bay. Let's have a look. And
the slopes are easiest that way, too."
He led off to the eastward. He thought of Timmy's girl. He'd never seen
her, but Timmy was going to marry her. She was on the _Cerberus_. It was
the job of the cops to take care of whatever dilemma that ship might be
in. As of here and now, it was Sergeant Madden's job. But besides that,
he thought of the way Timmy would feel if anything happened to the girl
he meant to marry. As Timmy's father, the sergeant had to do something.
He wanted to do it fast. But it had to be done the right way.
* * * * *
The route he chose was rocky, but it was nearly the only practicable
route away from the burned-dead landing place. He climbed toward what on
this planet was the east. There were pinnacles and small precipices.
There were small, fleshy-leaved bushes growing out of such tiny
collections of soil as had formed in cracks and crevices in the rock.
Sergeant Madden noted that one such bush was wilted. He stopped. He bent
over and carefully felt of the stones about it. A small rock came out.
The bush had been out of the ground before. It had carefully been
replaced. By someone.
"The rockets came this way," said the sergeant, with finality. "Hauled
over this pass to the _Cerberus_. Somebody must've knocked this bush
loose while workin' at getting 'em along. So he replanted it. Only not
good enough. It wilted."
"Who did it?" demanded Patrolman Willis.
"Who we want to know about," growled Sergeant Madden. "Maybe Huks. Come
on!"
He scrambled ahead. He wheezed as he climbed and descended. After half a
mile, Patrolman Willis said abruptly:
"You figure they all left, before anybody tried to find 'em?"
The sergeant grunted affirmatively. A quarter mile still farther, the
rocky ground fell away. There was the gleam of water below them. Rocky
cliffs enclosed an arm of the sea that came deep into the land, here. In
the cliffs rock-strata tilted insanely. There were red and yellow and
black layers--mostly yellow and black. They showed in startlingly clear
contrast.
"Right!" said Sergeant Madden in morose satisfaction. "I thought there
might've been a boat. But this's it!"
He went down a steep descent to the very edge of the sound--it was even
more like a fjord--where the waters of the ocean came in among the
island's hills. On the far side, a little cascade leaped and bubbled
down to join the sea.
"You go that way," commanded Sergeant Madden, "and I'll go this. We've
got two things to look for--a shallow place in the water coming right up
to shore. And look for signs of traffic from the cliffs to the water. By
the color of those rocks, we'd ought to find both."
He lumbered away along the water's edge. There were no creatures which
sang or chirped. The only sounds were wind and the lapping of waves
against the shore. It was very, very lonely.
Half a mile from the point of his first descent, the sergeant found a
shoal. It was a flat space of shallow water--discoverable by the color
of the bottom. The water was not over four feet deep. It was a
remarkably level shoal place.
He whistled on his fingers. When Patrolman Willis reached him, he
pointed to the cliffs directly across the beach from the shallow water.
Lurid yellow tints stained the cliff walls. Odd masses of fallen stone
dotted the cliff foot. At one place they were piled high. That pile
looked quite natural--except that it was at the very center of the shore
line next the shoal.
"This rock's yellow," said Sergeant Madden, rumbling a little. "It's
mineral. If we had a Geiger, it'd be raising hell, here. There's a mine
in there. Uranium. If a ship came down on rockets, an' landed in that
shoal place yonder ... why ... it wouldn't leave a burned spot comin'
down or takin' off, either. Y'see?"