Part 15 (2/2)

”That's my business, like runnin' this s.h.i.+p to where we're goin' is yours! You leave me be! I'm not riskin'

you knowin' what I know. I'm not takin' the chance of you figurin' you'll do better cheating me than playin' fair.”

This was shrewdness, after a fas.h.i.+on. There are plenty of men who quite simply and naturally believe that the way to profit in any enterprise is to double-cross their a.s.sociates. The whiskery man had evidently met them. He wasn't sure Link wasn't one of them. He kept his mouth shut.

”Eventually,” said Link, ”I'm going to have to come out of overdrive to check my course. Is that all right with you?”

”That's your business!” rasped Thistlethwaite. ”You tend to your business and I'll tend to mine!”

He disappeared, prowling around the s.h.i.+p, checking the air pressure, spending long periods in the engine room and not infrequently coming silently and secretly up the stairway to the control room to regard Link with inveterate suspicion.

It annoyed Link. So when he determined that he should break out of overdrive to verify his position-a dubious business considering the limits of his knowledge-he did not notify Thistlethwaite. He simply broke out of overdrive.

There should have been merely an instant of intolerable vertigo and of intense nausea, and then the sensation of a spiral fall toward infinity, but nothing more. Those sensations occurred. But as they began there was also a wild, rasping roar in the engine room. Lights dimmed. Thistlethwaite howled with fury and flung himself down into an inferno of blue arcs and stinking scorched insulation. In that incredible nightmare-like atmosphere he hit something with a stick. He pulled violently on a rope. He spun a wheel rapidly. And the arcs died. The s.h.i.+p's ancient air system began to struggle with the smoke and smells.

It took him two days to make repairs, during which he did not address one syllable to Link. But Link was busy anyhow. He was taking observations and checking the process with thePractical Astrogatoras he went along. Then he used the computer to make his observations mean something. He faithfully wrote all these exercises in the s.h.i.+p's log. It helped to pa.s.s the time. But when determination of the s.h.i.+p's position by three different methods gave the same result, he arrived at the astonis.h.i.+ng conclusion that the Glamorganwas actually on course.

He was composing a tribute to himself for the feat when Thistlethwaite came bristling into the control room.

”I fixed what you messed up,” he said bitterly. ”We can go on now. But next time you do something, don't do it till you ask me, and I'll fix it so you can. You could've wrecked us.”

Link opened his mouth to ask what could be a more complete wreck than theGlamorganright now, but he refrained. He arranged for Thistlethwaite to go down into the engine room. He shouted down the stairways. Thistlethwaite bellowed a reply. Link checked the s.h.i.+p's heading again, glanced at the s.h.i.+p's chronometer, and threw the overdrive on.

Nothing happened except vertigo and nausea and the feeling of falling in a spiral fas.h.i.+on toward nowhere at all. TheGlamorganwas again in overdrive. The little man came in, brus.h.i.+ng off his hands.

”That's the way,” he said truculently, ”to handle this s.h.i.+p!” Link scribbled a memo of the instant the Glamorganhad gone into overdrive.

”In two days, four hours, thirty-three minutes and twenty seconds,” he observed, ”we'll want to break out again. We ought to be somewhere near Sord, then.”

”If,” said Thistlethwaite suspiciously, ”if you're not tryin' to put something over on me!”

Link shrugged. He'd begun to wonder, lately, why he'd come on this highly mysterious journey. In one sense he'd had good reason. Jail. But now he began to be restless. He wore a stake-belt next to his skin, and in it he had certain small crystals. There were people who would murder him enthusiastically for those crystals. There were others who would pay him very large sums for them. The trouble was that he had no specific idea of what he wanted to do with a large sum. Small sums, yes. He could relax with them. But large ones- He felt a need for the pleasingly unexpected. Even the exciting.

One day pa.s.sed and he was definitely impatient. He was bored. He couldn't even think of anything to write in the log book. There'd been a girl about whom he'd felt romantic, not so long ago. He tried to think sentimentally about her. He failed. He hadn't seen her in months and she was probably married to somebody else now. The thought didn't bother him. It was annoying that it didn't. He craved excitement and interesting happenings, and he was merely heading for a planet that hadn't made authenticated contact with the rest of the galaxy in two hundred years, and then had promised to shoot anybody who landed. He was only in a leaky s.h.i.+p whose machinery broke down frequently and might at any time burn out.

He was, in a word, bored.

The second day pa.s.sed. Four hours, thirty-three minutes remained. He tried to hope for interesting events. He knew of no reason to antic.i.p.ate them. If Thistlethwaite were right, there would be only business dealings aground, and presently an attempt to get to somewhere else in theGlamorgan,and after that- The whiskery man went down into the engine room and bellowed that everything was set. Link sat by the control board, leaning on his elbows, in a mood of deep skepticism. He didn't believe anything in particular was likely to happen. Especially he didn't believe in Thistlethwaite's story of fabulous wealth.

There was nothing as valuable as Thistlethwaite described. Such things simply didn't exist. But since he'd come this far- Two minutes to go. One minute twenty seconds. Twenty seconds. Ten . . . five . . . four . . . three . . .

two . . . one!

He flipped the overdrive switch to off. There were the customary sensations of dizzy fall and vertigo and nausea. Then theGlamorganfloated in normal s.p.a.ce, and there was a sun not unreasonably far away, and all the sky was stars. Link was even pessimistic about the ident.i.ty of the sun, but a spectro-photo identified it. It was truly Sord. There were planets. One. Two. Three. Three had ice-caps; it looked as if two-thirds of its surface was sea, and in general it matched theDirectory'sdescription. It might . . . just possibly . . . be inhabited.

A tediously long time later theGlamorganfloated in orbit around the third planet out from its sun. Mottled land ma.s.ses whipped by below. There were seas, and more land ma.s.ses.

Thistlethwaite watched in silence. There could be no communication with the ground, even if the ground was prepared to communicate. TheGlamorgan'scommunication system didn't work. Link waited for the little man to identify his destination. When it was named there would probably be trouble.

”No maps,” said Thistlethwaite bitterly, on the second time around. ”I asked Old Man Addison for a map but he hardly knew what I meant. They never bothered to make 'em! But Old Man Addison's Household is near a sea. Near a bay, with mountains not too far off.”

Link was not relieved. It isn't easy to find a landmark of limited size on a large world from a s.h.i.+p in s.p.a.ce that has no maps or even a working communicator. But on the fourth orbital circuit, clouds that had formerly hidden a certain place had moved away. Thistlethwaite pointed.

”That's it!” he said, scowling as if to cover his own doubts. ”That's it! Get her down yonder!”

Link took a deep breath. Standard s.p.a.ceport procedure is for a s.h.i.+p to call down by communicator, have coordinates supplied from the ground, get into position, and wait. Then the landing grid reaches out its force fields and lets the s.h.i.+p down. It is neat, and comfortable, and safe. But there was no landing grid here. There was no information. And Link had no experience, either.

He made one extra orbit to fix the indicated landing point in his mind and to try to guess at the relative speed of s.h.i.+p and planetary surface. On the seventh circling of the planet, he swung the s.h.i.+p so it traveled stern-first and its emergency rockets could be used as retros. The drive engine would be useless here.

Thistlethwaite stayed in the control room to watch. He chewed agitatedly on wisps of whisker.

The s.h.i.+p hit atmosphere. There was a keening, howling sound, as if the ancient hull were protesting its own destruction. There were thumpings and b.u.mpings. Loose plates rattled at their rivets and remaining welds.

Something came free and battered thunderously at other hull plates before it went crazily off to nowhere.

Vibration began. It became a thoroughly ominous quivering of all the s.h.i.+p. Link threw over the rocket lever, and the vibration ceased to increase as the emergencies bellowed below. He gave them more power, and more, until the deceleration made it difficult to stand. Then, at very long last, the vibration seemed to lessen a very little.

The s.h.i.+p descended into a hurricane of wind from its own motion. Unbelievable noises sounded here and there. The hole where a plate had torn away developed an organ tone with the volume of a baby earthquake's roar.

The s.h.i.+p hurtled on. Far ahead there was blue sea. Nearer, there were mountains. There was a sandy look to the surface of the soil. Clouds enveloped the s.h.i.+p, and she came out below them, bellowing, and Link gave the rockets more braking power. But the ground still seemed to race past at an intolerable speed. He tilted the s.h.i.+p until her rockets did not support her at all, but only served as brakes.

Then she really went down, wallowing. He fought her, learning how to land by doing it, but without even a close idea of what it should feel like. Twice he attempted to check his descent at the cost of not checking motion toward the now-not-so-distant sh.o.r.eline. He began to hope. He concentrated on matching speed with the flowing landscape.

He made it. The s.h.i.+p moved almost imperceptibly with respect to such landmarks as he could see.

Something vaguely resembling a village appeared, far below, but he could not attend to it. The s.h.i.+p suddenly hovered, no more than five thousand feet high. Then Link, sweating, started to ease down.

Thistlethwaite protested agitatedly, ”I saw a village! Get her down! Get her down!'

Link cut the rockets entirely; the s.h.i.+p began to drop like a stone, and he cut them in again and out and in.

TheGlamorganlanded with a tremendous crash. It teetered back and forth, making loud grinding noises.

It steadied. It stopped.

Link mopped his forehead. Thistlethwaite said accusingly, ”But this ain't where we shoulda landed! We shoulda stopped by that village! And even that ain't the one I want!”

”This is where we did land,” said Link, ”and lucky we made it! You don't know how lucky!”

He went to a port to look out. The s.h.i.+p had landed in a sort of hollow, liberally sprinkled with boulders of various shapes and sizes. Sandy hillocks with spa.r.s.e vegetation on their slopes appeared on every hand. Despite the s.h.i.+p's upright position, Link could not see over the hills to a true horizon.

”I'll go over to that village we saw comin' down,” said Thistlethwaite importantly, ”an' arrange to send a message to my friends. Then we'll get down to business. And there's never been a business like this one before in all the time since us men stopped swappin' arrowheads! You stay here an' keep s.h.i.+p.”

<script>