They went back to the _Nadine_ for weapons more adequate for
encountering the local fauna when it was over. Blast-rifles were not
effective against such creatures as these. Torches were contact weapons
but they killed. Blast-rifles did not. And Harper needed to pull himself
together again, too. Also, neither Moran nor any of the others wanted to
go back to the still un-entered wreck while the skinny, somehow
disgusting legs of the thing still kicked spasmodically--quite
separate--on the whitish ground-stuff. Moran had disliked such creatures
in miniature form on other worlds. Enlarged like this.
It seemed insane that such creatures, even in miniature, should
painstakingly be brought across light-years of space to the new worlds
men settled on. But it had been found to be necessary. The ecological
system in which human beings belonged had turned out to be infinitely
complicated. It had turned out, in fact, to be the ecological system of
Earth, and unless all parts of the complex were present, the total was
subtly or glaringly wrong. So mankind distastefully ferried pests as
well as useful creatures to its new worlds as they were made ready for
settlement. Mosquitos throve on the inhabited globes of the Rim Stars.
Roaches twitched nervous antennae on the settled planets of the
Coal-sack. Dogs on Antares had fleas, and scratched their bites, and
humanity spread through the galaxy with an attendant train of insects
and annoyances. If they left their pests behind, the total system of
checks and balances which make life practical would get lopsided. It
would not maintain itself. The vagaries that could result were admirably
illustrated in and on the landscape outside the _Nadine_. Something had
been left out of the seeding of this planet. The element--which might be
a bacterium or a virus or almost anything at all--the element that kept
creatures at the size called "normal" was either missing or inoperable
here. The results were not desirable.
* * * * *
Harper drank thirstily. Carol had watched from the control-room. She was
still pale. She looked strangely at Moran.
"You're sure it didn't get through your suit?" Burleigh asked
insistently of Harper.
Moran said sourly;
"The creatures have changed size. There's no proof they've changed
anything else. Beetles live in tunnels they make in fungus growths. The
beetles and the tunnels are larger, but that's all. Inchworms travel as
they always did. They move yards instead of inches, but that's all.
Centipedes--"
"It was--" said Carol unsteadily. "It was thirty feet long!"
"Centipedes," repeated Moran, "catch prey with their legs. They always
did. Some of them trail poison from their feet. We can play a blowtorch
over Harper's suit and any poison will be burned away. You can't burn a
space-suit!"
"We certainly can't leave Moran here!" said Burleigh uneasily.
"He kept Harper from being killed!" said Carol. "Your blast-rifles
weren't any good. The--creatures are hard to kill."
"Very hard to kill," agreed Moran. "But I'm not supposed to kill them.
I'm supposed to live with them! I wonder how we can make them understand
they're not supposed to kill me either?"
"I'll admit," said Burleigh, "that if you'd let Harper get killed, we'd
have been forced to let you take his identity and not be marooned, to
avoid questions at the space-port on Loris. Not many men would have done
what you did."
"Oh, I'm a hero," said Moran. "Noble Moran, that's me! What the hell
would you want me to do? I didn't think! I won't do it again. I
promise!"
The last statement was almost true. Moran felt a squeamish horror at the
memory of what he'd been through over by the wrecked ship. He'd come
running out of the excavation he'd made. He had for weapon a four-foot
blue-white flame, and there was a monstrous creature running directly
toward him, with Harper lifted off the ground and clutched in two
gigantic, spidery legs. It was no less than thirty feet long, but it was
a centipede. It travelled swiftly on grisly, skinny, pipe-thin legs. It
loomed over Moran as he reached the surface and he automatically thrust
the flame at it. The result was shocking. But the nervous systems of
insects are primitive. It is questionable that they feel pain. It is
certain that separated parts of them act as if they had independent
life. Legs--horrible things--sheared off in the flame of the torch, but
the grisly furry thing rushed on until Moran slashed across its body
with the blue-white fire. Then it collapsed. But Harper was still held
firmly and half the monster struggled mindlessly to run on while
another part was dead. Moran fought it almost hysterically, slicing off
legs and wanting to be sick when their stumps continued to move as if
purposefully, and the legs themselves kicked and writhed rhythmically.
But he bored in and cut at the body and ultimately dragged Harper clear.
Afterward, sickened, he completed cutting it to bits with the torch. But
each part continued nauseatingly to move. He went back with the others
to the _Nadine_. The blast-rifles had been almost completely without
effect upon the creature because of its insensitive nervous system.
* * * * *
"I think," said Burleigh, "that it is only fair for us to lift from here
and find a better part of this world to land Moran in."
"Why not another planet?" asked Carol.
"It could take weeks," said Burleigh harassedly. "We left Coryus three
days ago. We ought to land on Loris before too long. There'd be
questions asked if we turned up weeks late! We can't afford that! The
space-port police would suspect us of all sorts of things. They might
decide to check back on us where we came from. We can't take the time to
hunt another planet!"
"Then your best bet," said Moran caustically, "is to find out where we
are. You may be so far from Loris that you can't make port without
raising questions anyhow. But you might be almost on course. I don't
know! But let's see if that wreck can tell us. I'll go by myself if you
like."
He went into the airlock, where his suit and the others had been sprayed
with a corrosive solution while the outside air was pumped out and new
air from inside the yacht admitted. He got into the suit. Harper joined
him.
"I'm going with you," he said shortly. "Two will be safer than
one,--both with torches."
"Too, too true!" said Moran sardonically.
He bundled the other suits out of the airlock and into the ship. He
checked his torch. He closed the inner lock door and started the pump.
Harper said;
"I'm not going to try to thank you--."
"Because," Moran snapped, "you wouldn't have been on this planet to be
in danger if I hadn't tried to capture the yacht. I know it!"
"That wasn't what I meant to say!" protested Harper.
Moran snarled at him. The lock-pump stopped and the ready-for exit light
glowed. They pushed open the outer door and emerged. Again there was the
discordant, almost intolerable din. It made no sense. The cries and
calls and stridulations they now knew to be those of insects had no
significance. The unseen huge creatures made them without purpose.
Insects do not challenge each other like birds or make mating-calls like
animals. They make noises because it is their nature. The noises have no
meaning. The two men started toward the wreck to which Moran had partly
burned a passageway. There were clickings from underfoot all around
them. Moran said abruptly;
"Those clicks come from the beetles in their tunnels underfoot. They're
practically a foot long. How big do you suppose bugs grow here,--and
why?"
* * * * *
Harper did not answer. He carried a flame-torch like the one Moran had
used before. They went unsteadily over the elastic, yielding stuff
underfoot. Harper halted, to look behind. Carol's voice came in the
helmet-phones.
"_We're watching out for you. We'll try to warn you if--anything shows
up._"
"Better watch me!" snapped Moran. "If I should kill Harper after all,
you might have to pass me for him presently!"
He heard a small, inarticulate sound, as if Carol protested. Then he
heard an angry shrill whine. He'd turned aside from the direct line to
the wreck. Something black, the size of a fair-sized dog, faced him
belligerently. Multiple lensed eyes, five inches across, seemed to
regard him in a peculiarly daunting fashion. The creature had a narrow,
unearthly, triangular face, with mandibles that worked from side to side
instead of up and down like an animal's jaws. The head was utterly
unlike any animal such as breed and raise their young and will fight for
them. There was a small thorax, from which six spiny, glistening legs
sprang. There was a bulbous abdomen.
"This," said Moran coldly, "is an ant. I've stepped on them for no
reason, and killed them. I've probably killed many times as many without
knowing it. But this could kill me."
The almost yard-long enormity standing two and a half feet high, was in
the act of carrying away a section of one of the legs of the giant
centipede Moran had killed earlier. It still moved. The leg was many
times the size of the ant. Moran moved toward it. It made a louder
buzzing sound, threatening him.
Moran cut it apart with a slashing sweep of the flame that a
finger-touch sent leaping from his torch. The thing presumably died, but
it continued to writhe senselessly.
"I killed this one," said Moran savagely, "because I remembered
something from my childhood. When one ant finds something to eat and
can't carry it all away, it brings back its friends to get the rest.
The big thing I killed would be such an item. How'd you like to have a
horde of these things about us? Come on!"
Through his helmet-phone he heard Harper breathing harshly. He led the
way once more toward the wreck.
* * * * *
Black beetles swarmed about when he entered the cut in the mould-yeast
soil. They popped out of tunnels as if in astonishment that what had
been subterranean passages suddenly opened to the air. Harper stepped on
one, and it did not crush. It struggled frantically and he almost fell.
He gasped. Two of the creatures crawled swiftly up the legs of Moran's
suit, and he knocked them savagely away. He found himself grinding his
teeth in invincible revulsion.
They reached the end of the cut he'd made in the fungus-stuff. Metal
showed past burned-away soil. Moran growled;
"You keep watch. I'll finish the cut."
The flame leaped out. Dense clouds of smoke and steam poured out and up.
With the intolerably bright light of the torch overwhelming the
perpetual grayness under the clouds and playing upon curling vapors, the
two space-suited men looked like figures in some sort of inferno.
Carol's voice came anxiously into Moran's helmet-phone;
"_Are you all right?_"
"So far, both of us," said Moran sourly. "I've just uncovered the crack
of an airlock door."
He swept the flame around again. A mass of undercut fungus toppled
toward him. He burned it and went on. He swept the flame more widely.
There was carbonized matter from the previously burned stuff on the
metal, but he cleared all the metal. Carol's voice again;
"_There's something flying.... It's huge! It's a wasp!
It's--monstrous!_"
Moran growled;
"Harper, we're in a sort of trench. If it hovers, you'll burn it as it
comes down. Cut through its waist. It won't crawl toward us along the
trench. It'd have to back toward us to use its sting."
He burned and burned, white light glaring upon a mass of steam and smoke
which curled upward and looked as if lightning-flashes played within it.
Carol's voice;
"_It--went on past.... It was as big as a cow!_"
* * * * *
Moran wrenched at the port-door. It partly revolved. He pulled. It fell
outward. The wreck was not standing upright on its fins. It lay on its
side. The lock inside the toppled-out port was choked with a horrible
mass of thread-like fungi. Moran swept the flame in. The fungus
shriveled and was not. He opened the inner lock-door. There was pure
blackness within. He held the torch for light.
For an instant everything was confusion, because the wreck was lying on
its side instead of standing in a normal position. Then he saw a sheet
of metal, propped up to be seen instantly by anyone entering the wrecked
space-vessel.
Letters burned into the metal gave a date a century and a half old.
Straggly torch-writing said baldly;
"_This ship the Malabar crashed here on Tethys II a week ago. We
cannot repair. We are going on to Candida III in the boats. We are
carrying what bessendium we can with us. We resign salvage rights
in this ship to its finders, but we have more bessendium with us.
We will give that to our rescuers._
"_Jos. White, Captain._"
Moran made a peculiar, sardonic sound like a bark.
"Calling the _Nadine_!" he said in mirthless amusement. "This planet is
Tethys Two. Do you read me? Tethys II! Look it up!"
A pause. Then Carol's voice, relieved;
"_Tethys is in the Directory! That's good!_" There was the sound of
murmurings in the control-room behind her. "_Yes!... Oh,--wonderful!
It's not far off the course we should have followed! We won't be
suspiciously late at Loris! Wonderful!_"
"I share your joy," said Moran sarcastically. "More information! The
ship's name was the _Malabar_. She carried bessendium among her cargo.
Her crew went on to Candida III a hundred and fifty years ago, leaving a
promise to pay in more bessendium whoever should rescue them. More
bessendium! Which suggests that some bessendium was left behind."
Silence. The bald memorandum left behind the vanished crew was, of
course, pure tragedy. A ship's lifeboat could travel four light-years,
or possibly even six. But there were limits. A castaway crew had left
this world on a desperate journey to another in the hope that life there
would be tolerable. If they arrived, they waited for some other ship to
cross the illimitable emptiness and discover either the beacon here or
one they'd set up on the other world. The likelihood was small, at best.
It had worked out zero. If the lifeboats made Candida III, their crews
stayed there because they could go no farther. They'd died there,
because if they'd been found this ship would have been visited and its
cargo salvaged.
* * * * *
Moran went inside. He climbed through the compartments of the toppled
craft, using his torch for light. He found where the cargo-hold had been
opened from the living part of the ship. He saw the cargo. There were
small, obviously heavy boxes in one part of the hold. Some had been
broken open. He found scraps of purple bessendium ore dropped while
being carried to the lifeboats. A century and a half ago it had not
seemed worth while to pick them up, though bessendium was the most
precious material in the galaxy. It couldn't be synthesized. It had to
be made by some natural process not yet understood, but involving
long-continued pressures of megatons to the square inch with
temperatures in the millions of degrees. It was purple. It was
crystalline. Fractions of it in blocks of other metals made the
fuel-blocks that carried liners winging through the void. But here were
pounds of it dropped carelessly....
Moran gathered a double handful. He slipped it in a pocket of his
space-suit. He went clambering back to the lock.
He heard the roaring of a flame-torch. He found Harper playing it
squeamishly on the wriggling fragments of another yard-long ant. It had
explored the trench burned out of the fungus soil and down to the rock.
Harper'd killed it as it neared him.
"That's three of them I've killed," said Harper in a dogged voice.
"There seem to be more."
"Did you hear my news?" asked Moran sardonically.
"Yes," said Harper. "How'll we get back to the _Nadine_?"
"Oh, we'll fight our way through," said Moran, as sardonically as
before. "We'll practice splendid heroism, giving battle to ants who
think we're other ants trying to rob them of some fragments of an
over-sized dead centipede. A splendid cause to fight for, Harper!"
He felt an almost overpowering sense of irony. The quantity of
bessendium he'd seen was riches incalculable. The mere pocketfull of
crystals in his pocket would make any man wealthy if he could get to a
settled planet and sell them. And there was much, much more back in the
cargo-hold of the wreck. He'd seen it.
But his own situation was unchanged. Bessendium could be hidden
somehow,--perhaps between the inner and outer hulls of the _Nadine_. But
it was not possible to land the _Nadine_ at any space-port with an extra
man aboard her. In a sense, Moran might be one of the richest men in the
galaxy in his salvagers' right to the treasure in the wrecked
_Malabar's_ hold. But he could not use that treasure to buy his way to
a landing on a colonized world.
Carol's voice; she was frightened.
"_Something's coming! It's--terribly big! It's coming out of the mist!_"
* * * * *
Moran pushed past Harper in the trench that ended at the wreck's
lock-door. He moved on until he could see over the edge of that trench
as it shallowed. Now there were not less than forty of the giant ants
about the remnants of the monstrous centipede Moran had killed. They
moved about in great agitation. There was squabbling. Angry, whining
stridulations filled the air beneath the louder and more gruesome sounds
from fartheraway places. It appeared that scouts and foragers from two
different ant-cities had come upon the treasure of dead--if
twitching--meat of Moran's providing. They differed about where the
noisesome booty should be taken. Some ants pulled angrily against each
other, whining shrilly. He saw individual ants running frantically away
in two different directions. They would be couriers, carrying news of
what amounted to a frontier incident in the city-state civilization of
the ants.
Then Moran saw the giant thing of which Carol spoke. It was truly huge,
and it had a gross, rounded body, and a ridiculously small thorax, and
its head was tiny and utterly mild in expression. It walked with an
enormous, dainty deliberation, placing small spiked feet at the end of
fifteen-foot legs very delicately in place as it moved. Its eyes were
multiple and huge, and its forelegs though used so deftly for walking
had a horrifying set of murderous, needle-sharp saw-teeth along their
edges.
It looked at the squabbling ants with its gigantic eyes that somehow
appeared like dark glasses worn by a monstrosity. It moved primly,
precisely toward them. Two small black creatures tugged at a hairy
section of a giant centipede's leg. The great pale-green creature--a
mantis; a praying mantis twenty feet tall in its giraffe-like walking
position--the great creature loomed over them, looking down as through
sunglasses. A foreleg moved like lightning. An ant weighing nearly as
much as a man stridulated shrilly, terribly, as it was borne aloft. The
mantis closed its arm-like forelegs upon it, holding it as if piously
and benignly contemplating it. Then it ate it, very much as a man might
eat an apple, without regard to the convulsive writhings of its victim.
* * * * *
It moved on toward the denser fracas among the ants. Suddenly it raised
its ghastly saw-toothed forelegs in an extraordinary gesture. It was the
mantis's spectral attitude, which seemed a pose of holding out its arms
in benediction. But its eyes remained blind-seeming and
enigmatic,--again like dark glasses.
Then it struck. Daintily, it dined upon an ant. Upon another. Upon
another and another and another.
From one direction parties of agitated and hurrying black objects
appeared at the edge of the mist. They were ants of a special
caste,--warrior-ants with huge mandibles designed for fighting in
defense of their city and its social system and its claim to fragments
of dead centipedes. From another direction other parties of no less
truculent warriors moved with the swiftness and celerity of a striking
task-force. All the air was filled with the deep-bass notes of something
huge, booming beyond visibility, and the noises as of sticks trailed
against picket fences, and hootings which were produced by the rubbing
of serrated leg-joints against chitinous diaphragms. But now a new
tumult arose.
From forty disputatious _formicidae_, whining angrily at each other over
the stinking remains of the monster Moran had killed, the number of ants
involved in the quarrel became hundreds. But more and more arrived. The
special caste of warriors bred for warfare was not numerous enough to
take care of the provocative behavior of foreign foragers. There was a
general mobilization in both unseen ant-city states. They became nations
in arms. Their populations rushed to the scene of conflict. The burrows
and dormitories and eating-chambers of the underground nations were
swept clean of occupants. Only the nurseries retained a skeleton staff
of nurses--the nurseries and the excavated palace occupied by the
ant-queen and her staff of servants and administrators. All the
resources of two populous ant-nations were flung into the fray.
* * * * *
From a space of a hundred yards or less, containing mere dozens of
belligerent squabblers, the dirty-white ground of the fungus-plain
became occupied by hundreds of snapping, biting combatants. They
covered--they fought over--the half of an acre. There were contending
battalions fighting as masses in the center, while wings of fighting
creatures to right and left were less solidly arranged. But
reinforcements poured out of the mist from two directions, and momently
the situation changed. Presently the battle covered an acre. Groups of
fresh fighters arriving from the city to the right uttered shrill
stridulations and charged upon the flank of their enemies.
Simultaneously, reinforcements from the city to the left flung
themselves into the fighting-line near the center.
Formations broke up. The battle disintegrated into an indefinite number
of lesser combats; troops or regiments fighting together often moved
ahead with an appearance of invincibility, but suddenly they broke and
broke again until there was only a complete confusion of unorganized
single combats in which the fighters rolled over and over, struggling
ferociously with mandible and claw to destroy each other. Presently the
battle raged over five acres. Ten. Thousands upon thousands of black,
glistening, stinking creatures tore at each other in murderous ferocity.
Whining, squealing battle-cries arose and almost drowned out the deeper
notes of larger but invisible creatures off in the mist.
Moran and Harper got back to the _Nadine_ by a wide detour past warriors
preoccupied with each other just before the battle reached its most
savage stage. In that stage, the space-yacht was included in the
battleground. Fights went on about its landing-fins. Horrifying duels
could be followed by scrapings and bumpings against its hull. From the
yacht's ports the fighting ants looked like infuriated machines, engaged
in each other's destruction. One might see a warrior of unidentified
allegiance with its own abdomen ripped open, furiously rending an enemy
without regard to its own mortal wound. There were those who had
literally been torn in half, so that only head and thorax remained, but
they fought on no less valiantly than the rest.
* * * * *
At the edges of the fighting such cripples were more numerous. Ants with
antenna shorn off or broken, with legs missing, utterly doomed,--they
sometimes wandered forlornly beyond the fighting, the battle seemingly
forgotten. But even such dazed and incapacitated casualties came upon
each other. If they smelled alike, they ignored each other. Every
ant-city has its particular smell which its inhabitants share.
Possession of the national odor is at once a certificate of citizenship
in peacetime and a uniform in war. When such victims of the battle came
upon enemy walking wounded, they fought.
And the giant praying mantis remained placidly and invulnerably still.
It plucked single fighters from the battle and dined upon them while
they struggled, and plucked other fighters, and consumed them. It
ignored the battle and the high purpose and self-sacrificing patriotism
of the ants. Immune to them and disregarded by them, it fed on them
while the battle raged.
Presently the gray light overhead turned faintly pink, and became a
deeper tint and then crimson. In time there was darkness. The noise of
battle ended. The sounds of the day diminished and ceased, and other
monstrous outcries took their place.
There were bellowings in the blackness without the _Nadine_. There were
chirpings become baritone, and senseless uproars which might be
unbelievable modifications of once-shrill and once-tranquil night-sounds
of other worlds. And there came a peculiar, steady, unrhythmic pattering
sound. It seemed like something falling upon the blanket-like upper
surface of the soil.
Moran opened the airlock door and thrust out a torch to see. Its
intolerably bright glare showed the battlefield abandoned. Most of the
dead and wounded had been carried away. Which, of course, was not
solicitude for the wounded or reverence for the dead heroes. Dead ants,
like dead centipedes, were booty of the only kind the creatures of this
world could know. The dead were meat. The wounded were dead before they
were carried away.
Moran peered out, with Carol looking affrightedly over his shoulder. The
air seemed to shine slightly in the glare of the torch. The pattering
sound was abruptly explained. Large, slow, widely-separated raindrops
fell heavily and steadily from the cloud-banks overhead. Moran could see
them strike. Each spot of wetness glistened briefly. Then the rain-drop
was absorbed by the ground.
But there were other noises than the ceaseless tumult on the ground.
There were sounds in the air; the beating of enormous wings. Moran
looked up, squinting against the light. There were things moving about
the black sky. Gigantic things.
Something moved, too, across the diminishingly lighted surface about the
yacht. There were glitterings. Shining armor. Multi-faceted eyes. A
gigantic, horny, spiked object crawled toward the torch-glare,
fascinated by it. Something else dived insanely. It splashed upon the
flexible white surface twenty yards away, and struggled upward and took
crazily off again. It careened blindly.
* * * * *
It hit the yacht, a quarter-ton of night-flying beetle. The air seemed
filled with flying things. There were moths with twenty-foot wings and
eyes which glowed like rubies in the torch's light. There were beetles
of all sizes from tiny six-inch things to monsters in whom Moran did not
believe even when he saw them. All were drawn by the light which should
not exist under the cloud-bank. They droned and fluttered and performed
lunatic evolutions, coming always closer to the flame.
Moran cut off the torch and closed the lock-door from the inside.
"We don't load bessendium tonight," he said with some grimness. "To have
no light, with what crawls about in the darkness, would be suicide. But
to use lights would be worse. If you people are going to salvage the
stuff in that wreck, you'll have to wait for daylight. At least then you
can see what's coming after you."
They went into the yacht proper. There was no longer any question about
the planet's air. If insects which were descendents of terrestrial forms
could breathe it, so could men. When the first insect-eggs were brought
here, the air had to be fit for them if they were to survive. It would
not have changed.
Burleigh sat in the control-room with a double handful of purple
crystals before him.
"This," he said when Moran and Carol re├źntered, "this is bessendium past
question. I've been thinking what it means."
"Money," said Moran drily. "You'll all be rich. You'll probably retire
from politics."
"That wasn't exactly what I had in mind," said Burleigh distastefully.
"You've gotten us into the devil of a mess, Moran!"
"For which," said Moran with ironic politeness, "there is a perfect
solution. You kill me, either directly or by leaving me marooned here."
Burleigh scowled.
"We have to land at space-ports for supplies. We can't hope to hide you,
it's required that landed ships be sterilized against infections from
off-planet. We can't pass you as a normal passenger. You're not on the
ship's papers and they're alteration-proof. Nobody's ever been able to
change a ship's papers and not be caught! We could land and tell the
truth, that you hijacked the ship and we finally overpowered you. But
there are reasons against that."
"Naturally!" agreed Moran. "I'd be killed anyhow and you'd be subject to
intensive investigation. And you're fugitives as much as I am."
"Just so," admitted Burleigh.
Moran shrugged.
"Which leaves just one answer. You maroon me and go on your way."
* * * * *
Burleigh said painfully;
"There's this bessendium. If there's more--especially if there's
more--we can leave you here with part of it. When we get far enough
away, we charter a ship to come and get you. It'll be arranged.
Somebody will be listed as of that ship's company, but he'll slip away
from the space-port and not be on board at all. Then you're picked up
and landed using his name."
"If," said Moran ironically, "I am alive when the ship gets here. If I'm
not, the crew of the chartered ship will be in trouble, short one man on
return to port. You'll have trouble getting anybody to run that risk!"
"We're trying to work out a way to save you!" insisted Burleigh angrily.
"Harper would have been killed but for you. And--this bessendium will
finance the underground work that will presently make a success of our
revolution. We're grateful! We're trying to help you!"
"So you maroon me," said Moran. Then he said; "But you've skipped the
real problem! If anything goes wrong, Carol's in it! There's no way to
do anything without risk for her! That's the problem! I could kill all
you characters, land somewhere on a colonized planet exactly as you
landed here, and be gone from the yacht on foot before anybody could
find me! But I have a slight aversion to getting a girl killed or
killing her just for my own convenience. It's settled. I stay here. You
can try to arrange the other business if you like. But it's a bad
gamble."
Carol was very pale. Burleigh stood up.
"You said that, I didn't. But I don't think we should leave you here. Up
near the ice-cap should be infinitely better for you. We'll load the
rest of the bessendium tomorrow, find you a place, leave you a beacon,
and go."
He went out. Carol turned a white face to Moran.
"Is that--is that the real trouble? Do you really--"
Moran looked at her stonily.
"I like to make heroic gestures," he told her. "Actually, Burleigh's a
very noble sort of character himself. He proposes to leave me with
treasure that he could take. Even more remarkably, he proposes to divide
up what you take, instead of applying it all to further his political
ideals. Most men like him would take it all for the revolution!"
"But--but--."
Carol's expression was pure misery. Moran walked deliberately across the
control-room. He glanced out of a port. A face looked in. It filled the
transparent opening. It was unthinkable. It was furry. There were
glistening chitinous areas. There was a proboscis like an elephant's
trunk, curled horribly. The eyes were multiple and mad.
It looked in, drawn and hypnotized by the light shining out on this
nightmare world from the control-room ports.
Moran touched the button that closed the shutters.