There was one thing about the Venusian atmosphere. You couldn't see
through it, even with infra-beams, at very long range. The intensity
needle showed the Patrol ship still far off, probably not suspicious
yet, although stray craft were rare over the swamps.
In a minute the copper would be calling for information, with his
mass-detectors giving the Fitts-Sothern a massage. Campbell didn't
think he'd wait. He slammed in the drive rockets, holding them down
till the tubes warmed. Even held down, they had plenty.
The Fitts-Sothern climbed in a whipping spiral. The red light wavered,
died, glowed again. The copper was pretty good with his beam. Campbell
fed in more juice.
The red light died again. But the Patrol boat had all its beams out
now, spread like a fish net. The Fitts-Sothern struck another, lost it,
struck again, and this time she didn't break out.
Campbell felt the sudden racking jar all through him. "Tractor beams,"
he said. "You think so, buddy?"
The drive jets were really warming now. He shot it to them. The
Fitts-Sothern hung for a fractional instant, her triple-braced hull
shuddering so that Campbell's teeth rang together.
Then she broke, blasting up right through the netted beams. Campbell
jockeyed his port and starboard steering jets. The ship leaped and
skittered wildly. The copper didn't have time to focus full power on
her anywhere, and low power to the Fitts-Sothern was a nuisance and
nothing more.
Campbell went up over the Patrol ship, veered off in the opposite
direction from the one he intended to follow, hung in a tight spiral
until he was sure he was clean, and then dived again.
The Patrol boat wasn't expecting him to come back. The pilot was
concentrating on where Campbell had gone, not where he had been.
Campbell grinned, opened full throttle, and went skittering over the
curve of the planet to meet the night shadow rushing toward him.
He didn't meet any more ships. He was way off the trade lanes, and
moving so fast that only blind luck could tag him. He hoped the Patrol
was hunting for him in force, back where they'd lost him. He hoped
they'd hunt a long time.
Presently he climbed, on slowed and muffled jets, out of the
atmosphere. His black ship melted indistinguishably into the black
shadow of the planet. He slowed still more, just balancing the
Venus-drag, and crawled out toward a spot marked on his astrogation
chart.
An Outer Patrol boat went by, too far off to bother about. Campbell lit
a cigarette with nervous hands. It was only a quarter smoked when the
object he'd been waiting for loomed up in space.
His infra-beam showed it clearly. A round, plate-shaped mass about a
mile in diameter, built of three tiers of spaceships. Hulks, ancient,
rusty, pitted things that had died and not been decently buried, welded
together in a solid mass by lengths of pipe let into their carcasses.
Before, when he had seen it, Campbell had been in too much of a hurry
to do more than curse it for getting in his way. Now he thought it was
the most desolate, Godforsaken mass of junk that had ever made him
wonder why people bothered to live at all.
He touched the throttle, tempted to go back to the swamps. Then he
thought of what was going to happen back there, and took his hand away.
"Hell!" he said. "I might as well look inside."
He didn't know anything about the internal set-up of Romany--what made
it tick, and how. He knew Romany didn't love the Coalition, but whether
they would run to harboring criminals was another thing.
It wouldn't be strange if they had been given pictures of Roy Campbell
and told to watch for him. Thinking of the size of the reward for him,
Campbell wished he were not quite so famous.
Romany reminded him of an old-fashioned circular mouse-trap. Once
inside, it wouldn't be easy to get out.
"Of all the platinum-plated saps!" he snarled suddenly. "Why am I
sticking my neck out for a bunch of semi-human swamp-crawlers, anyhow?"
He didn't answer that. The leading edge of Romany knifed toward him.
There were lights in some of the hulks, mostly in the top layer.
Campbell reached for the radio.
He had to contact the big shots. No one else could give him what he
needed. To do that, he had to walk right up to the front door and
announce himself. After that....
The manual listed the wave-length he wanted. He juggled the dials and
verniers, wishing his hands wouldn't sweat.
"Spaceship _Black Star_ calling Romany. Calling Romany...."
His screen flashed, flickered, and cleared. "Romany acknowledging. Who
are you and what do you want?"
* * * * *
Campbell's screen showed him a youngish man--a Taxil, he thought, from
some Mercurian backwater. He was ebony-black and handsome, and he
looked as though the sight of Campbell affected him like stale beer.
Campbell said, "Cordial guy, aren't you? I'm Thomas Black, trader out
of Terra, and I want to come aboard."
"That requires permission."
"Yeah? Okay. Connect me with the boss."
The Taxil now looked as though he smelled something that had been dead
a long time. "Possibly you mean Eran Mak, the Chief Councillor?"
"Possibly," admitted Campbell, "I do." If the rest of the gypsies were
anything like this one, they sure had a hate on for outsiders.
Well, he didn't blame them. The screen blurred. It stayed that way
while Campbell smoked three cigarettes and exhausted his excellent
vocabulary. Then it cleared abruptly.
Eran Mak sounded Martian, but the man pictured on the screen was no
Martian. He was an Earthman, with a face like a wedge of granite and a
frame that was all gaunt bones and thrusting angles.
His hair was thin, pale-red and fuzzy. His mouth was thin. Even his
eyes were thin, close slits of pale blue with no lashes. Campbell
disliked him instantly.
"I'm Tredrick," said the Earthman. His voice was thin, with a sound in
it like someone walking on cold gravel. "Terran Overchief. Why do you
wish to land, Mister Black?"
"I bring a message from the Kraylen people of Venus. They need help."
Tredrick's eyes became, if possible, thinner and more pale.
"_Help?_"
"Yes. Help." Campbell was struck by a sudden suspicion, something he
caught flickering across Tredrick's granite features when he said
"Kraylen." He went on, slowly, "The Coalition is moving in on them. I
understand you people of Romany help in cases like that."
There was a small, tight silence.
"I'm sorry," said Tredrick. "There is nothing we can do."
Campbell's dark face tightened. "Why not? You helped the Shenyat people
on Ganymede and the Drylanders on Mars. That's what Romany is, isn't
it--a refuge for people like that?"
"As a _latnik_, there's a lot you don't know. At this time, we cannot
help anyone. Sorry, Black. Please clear ship."
The screen went dead. Campbell stared at it with sultry eyes. Sorry.
The hell you're sorry. What gives here, anyway?
He thrust out an angry hand to the transmitter. And then, quite
suddenly, the Taxil was looking at him out of the screen.
The hostile look was gone. Anger replaced it, but not anger at
Campbell. The Taxil said, in a low, rapid voice:
"You're not lying about coming from the Kraylens?"
"No. No, I'm not lying." He opened his shirt to show the tattoo.
"The dirty scut! Mister Black, clear ship, and then make contact with
one of the outer hulks on the lowest tier. You'll find emergency
hatchways in some of the pipes. Come inside, and wait."
His dark eyes had a savage glitter. "There are some of us, Mister
Black, who still consider Romany a refuge!"
* * * * *
Campbell cleared ship. His nerves were singing in little tight jerks.
He'd stepped into something here. Something big and ugly. There had
been a certain ring in the Taxil's voice.
The thin, gravelly Mr. Tredrick had something on his mind, too.
Something important, about Kraylens. Why Kraylens, of all the
unimportant people on Venus?
Trouble on Romany. Romany the gypsy world, the Solar System's
stepchild. Strictly a family affair. What business did a Public Enemy
with a low number and a high valuation have mixing into that?
Then he thought of the drum beating in the indigo night, and an old man
watching _liha_-trees stir in a slow, hot wind.
Roy Campbell called himself a short, bitter name, and sighed,
and reached lean brown hands for the controls. Presently, in the
infra-field, he made out an ancient Krub freighter on the edge of the
lowest level, connected to companion wrecks by sections of twelve-foot
pipe. There was a hatch in one of the pipes, with a hand-wheel.
The Fitts-Sothern glided with exquisite daintiness to the pipe, touched
it gently, threw out her magnetic grapples and suction flanges, and
hung there. The airlock exactly covered the hatchway.
Campbell got up. He was sweating and as edgy as a tomcat on the prowl.
With great care he buckled his heavy gun around his narrow hips. Then
he went into the airlock.
He checked grapples and flanges with inordinate thoroughness. The
hatch-wheel jutted inside. He picked up a spanner and turned it, not
touching the frigid metal.
There was a crude barrel-lock beyond. Campbell ran his tongue once over
dry lips, shrugged, and climbed in.
He got through into a space that was black as the Coalsack. The air
was thin and bitingly cold. Campbell shivered in his silk shirt. He
laid his hand on his gun butt and took two cautious steps away from the
bulge of the lock, wishing to hell he were some place else.
Cold green light exploded out of nowhere behind him. He half turned,
his gun blurring into his palm. But he had no chance to fire it.
Something whipped down across the nerve-center in the side of his neck.
His body simply faded out of existence. He fell on his face and lay
there, struggling with all his might to move and achieving only a faint
twitching of the muscles.
He knew vaguely that someone rolled him over. He blinked up into the
green light, and heard a man's deep, soft voice say from the darkness
behind it:
"What made you think you could get away with it?"