Mattock read the computer figures flaring across the screen and calmly punched down on the power.
There came from Kimmel a squeal like that of a stricken rabbit; he clutched his hands over his bald head like an old woman awaiting doomsday.
Dilullo grinned. He had had a good many landings with Kimmel and Mattock and they had never changed much.
He looked out ahead. They were running down fast toward Allubane, and the topaz sun glared bright and wicked in his blue eyes.
The computer began to stutter now and then. The emissions from the cool hydrogen clouds one couldn't even see were interfering with radar information, and without information the computers were just metal and wire and crystals. Useless.
Dust whispered along the hull. They were getting into the edges of the drift and it was bad—not the worst, but bad enough. It- always made Dilullo wish that the suns and planets were as clean and tidy as they looked on the star-charts, with nothing between them but nice, clean open space. But it wasn't that way at all; their making had left many of them a bit messy around the edges. In time the debris would be all swept up by their gravitational fields, but human beings didn't have that kind of time.
The whispering became a crackling, outside the hull. Kimmel went and buried his face against the wall of the bridge-room. Dilullo watched him admiringly. This was the next-to-last phase for him, the "I can't look" phase.
The crackling outside the hull eased, then came back again, a little stronger. The computers went off for a whole minute, a silence that was dread-inspiring.
Kimmel came away from the wall. He came and sat down in the co-pilot chair. He sat quite still, his head stuck forward, his eyes stony, a little glazed, his shoulders hunched.
Dilullo nodded to himself. This was the final phase, the "All is lost, sunk in despair" phase.
Mattock calmly turned his head and spat regally into the bucket.
The computers came back on again and the crackle of drift faded; before them there came into view three planets, two on this side of the star and the third halfway around it.
Dilullo thought, it was like that which Berlioz had written about the second movement of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony: "... the great chords come up like newly-created worlds swimming up, fresh and beautiful from the hand of God."
He felt proud of himself for a moment; no other Merc captain would know things like that. And then he thought forlornly, But I only know them because I was alone and lonely for so long, and so much time to read.
He looked at the Closed Worlds as one looks at the eyes of an enemy. And they went on down toward the smoky yellow flare of Allubane.
V
Chane smelled danger in the silence.
He stood with a half-dozen other Mercs on the battered spaceport in front of their ship. The hot lemon-colored sunlight poured down and the warm wind whispered around them; there was no other sound.
The massive white marble city beyond the spaceport climbed a slope in tier after tier of ancient-looking buildings. It was too far away to be heard, and the silence did not bother Chane. But here on the spaceport it was too quiet. There was no movement at the warehouses and other buildings. The eight or nine small planetary cruisers near them, four of which had missile-launcher ports in their sides, had no activity around them.
"Just take it easy," said Dilullo. "Be casual. It's safer to wait and let them make the first move."
Milner, beside Chane, muttered, "It would be safer still by a.damn sight to be wearing our stunners."
Milner was a foul-mouthed, fighty little man whom none of the other Mercs liked much, and who got berths only because of his superlative skill in using and servicing weapons. Yet Chane had to agree with him.
But Dilullo had been dogmatic about it. They had to come in to Allubane One—its planet-name was Arkuu—and take its people by surprise, but they mustn't seem to be looking for a fight.
They had managed the surprise all right. They had homed in on the other side of Arkuu, and then had whipped half around the planet toward this capital city of Yarr without sending any notice of arrival or requesting landing-permission.
Chane had looked down on Arkuu as it rolled rapidly away beneath them, and thought it was not much of a world.
Crimson jungle covered a lot of it. Here and there, where the land rose into dark mountains, the jungle gave way to forests of deeper red. Once there was an ocher-colored sea, with tawny rivers snaking into it.
And cities. Cities of white marble that had been great and gracious once, but now were whelmed by the red tide of the jungle. Cities with no life stirring in their broken stones, the wrecks of the past, brooding under the topaz sun like old, dead kings whose glory is long forgotten.
Chane felt a sharply heightened sense of the mystery of this far world. Once its people must have been great indeed, to build such cities and to have gone out and colonized the second planet. What was it that had made them throw it all away? What was it that made them set their faces against interstellar travel, so that they made their system into the Closed Worlds?
Then their ship had come over the ridge of a valley and below them was another white city but this one still living, with people and a few ground-cars moving in its streets and some light fixed-wing fliers buzzing in the sky. With no warning at all, they had landed at the little planetary spaceport.
And now they waited, with Bollard and Kimmel and four others inside the ship just in case, and the sun was hot and nothing was happening.
Dilullo spoke without turning. "I'll do the talking."
A ground-car had emerged from the city and was coming across the spaceport toward them. It stopped a little way from them and two men got out of it and approached.
Chane, looking at the men, felt a sharp surprise.
He had expected the people of this decayed civilization to be limp, effete, weak. But these two were as impressive as he had ever seen.
They were tall, wide-shouldered, powerful-looking men, with pale golden skins and deep yellow hair and eyes of an icy blue-green. They wore short belted jerkins that left arms and legs bare, exposing superb muscles. They were about the least effete-looking men Chane had ever encountered.
One of the two, the younger and taller one, spoke to Dilullo in galacto, the lingua-franca of the galaxy. He spoke it a bit rustily.
"You are not welcome here," he said flatly. "Did you not know that the Closed Worlds are ... closed?"
Dilullo gave him a straight answer. "We knew it."
"Then why did you come here?"
"I would like to give my reasons to those in your government with authority."
The younger man said, "We come from government and speak for it. I am Helmer and this is Bros. Now speak—why did you land here?"
Dilullo squared his shoulders as though he knew that he was heading into it now, but there was no way out of it.
"We came to look for a man," he said. "An Earthman, Randall Ashton by name, and his companions."
The two Arkuuns were silent for a moment. Chane saw them glance at each other, and then the one named Helmer answered.
"The man you look for is not here."
"Then where is he?"
Helmer shrugged. "Who knows? He was here, and then he went away."
"To one of the other two planets?"
Helmer merely shrugged his broad shoulders again. "Who knows?"
Chane thought, I'd hate try knocking the answer out of him. The muscles he's got he'd give even a Varnan a tussle.
As though he caught the thought, or detected it from Chane's expression, the tall young Arkuun suddenly looked directly at him. It was as though, towering and great-limbed as he was, he recognized a potential powerful antagonist in the compact figure and dark, faintly mocking face of Chane.
Then he turned back to Dilullo. "You are to go," he said. "We cannot service starships here, but we can give you food and water. Take them and go."
"Now wait a minute," said Dilullo. "You may be hermits here, but the
re are certain rules in the civilized starworlds about the right of repatriation of nationals. If you knew more about the galaxy as it is, you'd realize ..."
He was interrupted by Bros, the older man, who laughed suddenly. His laughter was loud and nervous, oddly mirthless.
"Did you hear that, Helmer?" he said. "If we Arkuuns only knew more about the universe. But he is right. Our people have never been anywhere, have they?"
He laughed again, and a sardonic smile came onto Helmer's strong face.
To Chane, there was something ominous, hidden, in this sudden mirth. But it stung Dilullo.
"Let me tell you something," he said in an edged voice. "This man Randall Ash ton is an important man, and comes from people with power. If I go back and report that you won't even tell what's happened to him, you'll sooner or later have a force come here that'll knock the Closed Worlds wide open."
Helmer's face became instantly stone cold. "Ah," he said. "Is it so?"
Chane groaned inwardly and thought, Your foot slipped
that time, John—a Starwolf child would have known better.
He felt like shaking Dilullo. He looked away, toward the city, and his eye was caught by a point of light that came and went in one of the taller buildings, where a window that seemed to be swinging in the wind caught and reflected the lemon sunlight.
"Since you make threats," Helmer was saying icily, "I too will threaten. Go now, or you do not go at all."
He turned his back on Dilullo, and he and Bros went to their car and sped away.
Dilullo turned around and looked sourly at the Mercs. "Right up against a blank wall," he said. "Well, your peerless leader isn't doing so good. Anybody got any ideas?"
"I've got one," Chane said. "I'd get back in the ship and go out of here as though the devil was riding our tail."
Dilullo stared at him, as though a Chane counseling flight was a new and upsetting phenomenon.
Chane explained, with insulting carefulness. "You told him that if you got back and made your report, it would bring big trouble on them, Ifyou got back."
It sank in. The Mercs looked from Chane to Dilullo, and Dilullo's face became longer.
"You're right," he said. "I tried a bluff and it didn't work, and we've bought it if we stay here. Emergency take-off."
They ran into the ship. The locks slammed shut, and within a minute the hooter blared its warning. Mattock took them skyward with a slamming rush. The friction-alarms started screeching like hysterical women, but Mattock ignored them. Presently they were out of atmosphere.
Chane had gone to his post at radar; he scanned the planet falling away behind them. Presently he saw what he expected to see.
"Two Arkuun ships coming out fast after us," he said, and added, "I think we can expect some missiles."
"Up shields," Dilullo ordered, and then swore. "We may have made it easier for them. They wouldn't have dared use those missiles on the spaceport, so close to the city."
"Shields up" came Bollard's voice.
The ship rocked to a blam-blam impact, and Bollard added, "And about time."
It did not look too good to Chane. The Merc ship had no launchers; its shields were light ones and would not take a prolonged hammering.
Kimmel was hanging over Mattock's chair and now he began talking to him. Chane expected more worried wailing, but he did not know Kimmel the way Dilullo did, and was surprised.
"Now, David," Kimmel was saying, "we have to shake those cruisers off fast. If a screen fails, we can take damage. Costly damage." He quivered a little like a nervous terrier as he said that. "So you head for that stream of drift zenith ward from Allubane Two."
Mattock looked up at him. "Hit the drift?"
"Yes, David, it's our best chance. I saw those ships at the spaceport; they're old types and can't have radar as good as ours. We can throw them off in the drift; they won't chance it for long. But with our good radar you can take us on through,
David." Mattock spat mightily and said, "Hit the drift. Okay." The ship veered sharply. Chane watched the radar screen.
They were hauling away from the Arkuun cruisers, but not fast enough to get clear out of missile range. He told that to Dilullo. "Ah, I played the devil with my smart bluff," Dilullo muttered.
"And we didn't even find out if Ashton's party are alive or dead." "Some of them are alive," Chane said. "How do you know?" Chane did not turn from the screen as he said, "A window up in one of those bigger buildings in the city kept swinging and reflecting sunlight. It was blinking 'ASHTON' in ship code."
"You didn't tell me that," Dilullo accused.
Chane smiled. "I didn't want to tell you anything that might distract you from pulling tail fast."
A salvo hit the screens and the ship rocked wildly. The thunderous noise drowned Dilullo's answer to that. Chane was just as glad.
VI
They were in the drift now, and it was bad. It was so bad that Kimmel kept his mouth completely shut, which was always a sign of danger. The computers clacked and worried as they ran on down toward Al-lubane Two.
They passed zenithward of that spinning planet. It looked to Chane not unlike Arkuu, except that the jungles were forest on this second planet, and rather thin forest at that. There were none of the ancient white marble cities, but more modest towns of stone. Lights shone here and there from the dark side of the planet.
Chane scanned the screen. "They've broken off pursuit."
Kimmel looked at Dilullo. "Now what? Do we head back to Sol? Remember, John, we get two-thirds of the money just for trying. We certainly tried."
Dilullo looked at him bleakly. "We didn't do anything. I tried a stupid bluff and we had to hightail it out of there. You think I want to take a story like that back to Merc Hall?"
"But what, then....?"
"We're going back to Arkuu," Dilullo said decisively. "But in a different way. Head out of this system, get Allubane Three between us and the primary, and then swing back and land on that planet."
"Allubane Three? But it's supposed to be uninhabited, nothing much there at all."
"Exactly the kind of place we need, so set down there," said Dilullo.
The ship went on, edging out of the drift. It went beyond the third planet, which was a tawny, barren-looking ball, and then swung back again, running up the planet-shadow.
They came down upon a world that was almost desert, a world with bitter-looking seas and sad, barren lands with scant vegetation and no sign of people at all. Mattock brought them down near a seashore and cut the power.
"Very well done, David," said Kimmel.
"Get the launchers out and set them up," said Dilullo on the intercom, and rattled off names.
Chane's was one of them and he went down into the hold. They squeezed and tugged, hauling the portable missile-launchers past the stored skitter-flier and ground-car, manhandling them out of the cargo port.
The air was cold. This was the outermost of the Closed Worlds, and the sun had little warmth in it. They set up the launchers, and then stood by them, keeping an eye on the sky.
Chane and the Merc named Van Fossan manned one of the launchers. Van Fossan was a lean, blond, thir-tyish young Hollander, with an eager eye and a face like a young hound's.
"What do you think John will do now?" he asked Chane.
Chane shrugged. What he wanted to say was that Dilullo should get his brains back into his head from where he had been carrying them, but an odd feeling of loyalty forbade him voicing the thought.
"No people, but some life here," said Van Fossan a little later. "Look at that."
The smoky yellow flare of Allubane was setting out over the ocean. Van Fossan pointed to two black, big, snaky-looking winged things flying out there. He added,
"... when sunset, like a crimson throat to Hell, Is cavernous, she marks the seaward flight Of homing dragons dark upon the west."
Chane looked at him. "What do you mean? That sky isn't crimson; it's dark yellow."
"It's a poem,"
Van Fossan said, and added disgustedly, "English is your mother tongue. Don't you know your own poetry?"
"I don't know many poems," said Chane. "I know some songs ..." He broke off, and his lips twitched.
No, he thought. I will not sing those songs for Nico. They were the songs we sang on Varna when the raiding squadrons were in, and they would not be good for Earthman ears.
He dreamed again of Varna. Would he ever go there again? He felt somehow that he would, though it might be going to his death. The brothers of Ssander, whom he had killed in the fair fight that had got him chased out of the Starwolves, would never forgive him.
The yellow sky darkened to a dusky saffron, but no ships appeared in it. "Chane," said Van Fossan in a low voice. "Look."
Chane turned his attention from the sky to the barren landscape around them.
Then he saw. A furry, dark animal about the size and look of a bear but with six limbs, was industriously digging out a bush only a few hundred feet from them. There were three more of the animals, but they were much farther away.
The creature dug out the bush and started chewing on its root. It looked with mild, stupid eyes as it did so, and then it seemed for the first time to become aware of the ship and the men. It stopped chewing and looked at them. Then it made a low growling sound.
It seemed to be saying, "Errrrr!"
Chane looked it back in the eye.
Again it said, "Errrrr.'"
Chane suddenly uttered a tremendous roar and ran forward toward the creature, flailing his arms wildly.
The animal dropped the root and scuttled frantically away, and Chane stopped running, and laughed and laughed.
"Chane, you damn crazy fool! It could have been dangerous!" stormed Van Fossan.
"What the devil is going on out here?" demanded Dilullo's voice in the dusk. He had come out of the ship.
Van Fossan explained. Dilullo grunted. "If standing watch is that much fun we'll cut short your turn, Chane. Come on in and sweat with us."
Chane followed him in. In the main bunkroom, under the lights, Bollard and Kimmel and Milner sat around the table.
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