She finished her drink. Grimes finished his. Obviously there was not going to be another.
She said, “Don’t let me keep you from your dinner, Captain.”
Grimes left her boudoir and went up to his own spartan—but only relatively so—quarters.
Not very long afterward The Far Traveler hung in orbit about Lode Ranger’s world. It was inhabited without doubt; the lights of cities could be seen through the murky atmosphere of the night hemisphere and on the daylit face were features too regular to be natural, almost certainly roads and railways and canals. And those people had radio; the spaceship’s NST receivers picked up an unceasing stream of signals. There was music. There were talks.
But . . .
But the music bore no resemblance to anything composed by Terrans for Terran ears and the instruments were exclusively percussion. There were complex rhythms, frail, tinkling melodies, not displeasing but alien, alien . . .
And the voices . . .
Guttural croaks, strident squeals, speaking no language known to Grimes or the Baroness, no tongue included in Big Sister’s fantastically comprehensive data bank.
But that wasn’t all.
The active element of the planet’s atmosphere was chlorine.
“There will be no Lost Colony here, Your Excellency,” said Grimes. “Lode Ranger’s captain would never have landed once his spectroscopic analysis told him what to expect. He must have carried on.”
“Even so,” she said, “I have found a new world. I have ensured for myself a place in history.” She smiled in self mockery. “For what it is worth. Now that we are here our task will be to carry out a preliminary survey.”
“Do you intend to land, Your Excellency?” asked Big Sister.
“Of course.”
“Then I must advise against it. You assumed, as did my builders, that my golden hull would be immune to corrosion. But somehow nobody took into account the possibility of a landing on a planet with a chlorine atmosphere. I have already detected traces of nitrohydrochloric acid which, I need hardly remind you, is a solvent for both gold and platinum.”
“Only traces,” said Grimes.
“Only traces, Captain,” agreed Big Sister. “But would you care to run naked through a forest in which there might be pockets of dichlorethyl sulfide?”
Grimes looked blank.
“Mustard gas,” said Big Sister.
“Oh,” said Grimes.
The Baroness said, “I am rich, as you know. Nonetheless this ship is a considerable investment. I do not wish her shell plating to be corroded, thus detracting from her value.”
“Yes, it would spoil her good looks,” admitted Grimes. But the main function of a ship, any ship, is not to look pretty. He remembered that long-ago English admiral who had frowned upon gunnery practice because it discolored the gleaming paintwork of the warcraft under his command.
He asked, “Couldn’t you devise some sort of protective coating? A spray-on plastic . . .”
Big Sister replied, “I have already done so. And, anticipating that you and Her Excellency would wish to make a landing, the smaller pinnace has been treated, also your spacesuits and six of the general purpose robots. Meanwhile I have processed the photographs taken during our circumpolar orbits and, if you will watch the playmaster, I shall exhibit one that seems of especial interest.”
Grimes and the Baroness looked at the glowing screen. There—dull, battered, corroded but still, after all these many years, recognizable—was the pear-shaped hull of a typical gaussjammer. Not far from it was a dome, obviously not a natural feature of the terrain, possibly evidence that the survivors had endeavored to set up some sort of settlement in the hostile environment. A few kilometers to the north was a fair-sized town.
“Could they—or their descendants—still be living, Captain?” asked the Baroness.
“People have lived in similar domes, on Earth’s airless moon, for many generations,” said Grimes. “And the Selenites could always pack up and return to Earth if they didn’t like it. Lode Ranger’s personnel had no place else to go.”
“But . . . To live among aliens?”
“There are all sorts of odd enclaves throughout the Galaxy,” said Grimes.
“Very well, Captain. We shall go down at once, to find what we shall find.”
“Big Sister,” asked Grimes, “assuming that we leave the ship now, what time of day will it be at the wreck when we land?”
“Late afternoon,” was the reply.
“We should make a dawn landing,” said Grimes.
“You are not in the Survey Service now, Captain,” the Baroness told him. “You may as well forget Survey Service S.O.P.”
“Those survivors—if there are any survivors—have waited for generations,” said Grimes. “A few more hours won’t hurt them.”
“I am going down now,” she told him. “You may come if you wish.”
Grimes wished that he knew more about Space Law as applicable to civilian vessels. When is a captain not a captain? When he has his owner on board, presumably.
He said, “Shall we get into our spacesuits, Your Excellency? We shall need them if we leave the pinnace.”
She said, “I will meet you in the boat bay, Captain.”
Chapter 24
His robot stewardess helped him on with his spacesuit. The protective garment was no longer gold but, after the anti-corrosive spray, a dull, workmanlike grey. He preferred it in that color. He buckled on the belt with the two bolstered pistols—one laser, one projectile. He checked the weapons to make sure they were models with firing studs instead of triggers, designed to be held in a heavily gauntleted hand. All was in order.
He went down to the boat bay. The Baroness was already there, clad as he was. Six of the general purpose robots were there. Golden, their asexual bodies had been beautiful; gray, they looked menacing, sinister. So did the pinnace.
“Should we get into trouble,” said Grimes, speaking into his helmet microphone, “please come down for us.” He could not resist adding, “if you get tarnished it will be just too bad.”
“There was no need for that,” said the Baroness. Through the helmet phones her voice was even more coldly metallic than that of the computer-pilot.
“Understood,” said Big Sister shortly.
“Robots into the boat,” ordered Grimes.
The automata filed into and through the airlock.
“After you, Your Excellency.”
The Baroness, looking not unlike a robot herself, boarded.
Grimes followed her, took his seat in the pilot’s chair. The airlock doors closed before he could bring a finger to the appropriate button. If Big Sister insisted on doing the things that he was being paid to do, that was all right by him.
He said, “One kilometer from the wreck please revert to manual control. My control.”
“Understood, Captain,” said Big Sister.
“Must you dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’?” asked the Baroness crossly.
The boat’s inertial drive grumbled itself awake; the boat bay doors opened. Through the aperture glowed the sunlit hemisphere of Lode Ranger’s planet, a gigantic, clouded emerald. Then they were out and away from the ship, driving down rather than merely falling. Grimes kept his paws off the controls, although it required a considerable effort of will to refrain from touching them. Big Sister knew what she was doing, he told himself. He hoped.
Down they drove, down, down. The whispering of atmosphere along the hull became audible above the clatter of the inertial drive. There was no rise of cabin temperature although, thought Grimes, the cooling system must be working overtime. And, he told himself, the modified metal of which the pinnace was constructed had a far higher melting point than that of normal gold.
Down they drove, through high, green, wispy clouds.
Down they drove, and the land was spread out below them—mountain masses, seas, rivers, the long, straight line of a transcontinental railway, cities, forests . .
.
Ahead of them and below something was flying. A bird? Grimes studied it through his binoculars, wondering how he had come to make such a gross underestimation of its size. It was a huge, delta-winged aircraft. It pursued its course steadily, ignoring the intruder from space. Probably its pilot did not know that there were strangers in his sky.
The radar altimeter was unwinding more slowly now. They were low enough to make out features of the landscape with the naked eye. Ahead of them was the town, the small city, its architecture obviously alien. The proportions of the buildings were all wrong by human standards and not one of the many towers was perpendicular; the truncated spires leaned toward and away from each other at drunken angles.
They swept over the town. Beyond it was the wreck of the ancient Terran spaceship and beyond that the discolored white dome. Through his binoculars Grimes could see spacesuited figures standing by the airlock of the vessel. Men in spacesuits? They had to be human; the natives would not require protective clothing on their own planet.
But what were they doing?
Fighting!
Yes, they were fighting—the spacemen and the near-naked, humanoid but far from human natives. It was hand to hand almost, at close range with pistols from the muzzles of which came flashes of bright flame. Oddly enough there seemed to be no casualties on either side.
Yet.
“We have come in the nick of time,” said the Baroness. “If we had waited until local daybreak, as you suggested . . .”
There was a screwy lack of logic about what she was saying, about the entire situation. If Lode Ranger had just landed the situation would have made sense, but . . . The gaussjammer had not come down today, or yesterday, or the day before that.
“I relinquish control, Captain,” came the voice of Big Sister. “You are now one kilometer from the wreck.”
Grimes brought his gloved hands up to the console.
“Do something,” ordered the Baroness. “There are people, humans, there, being murdered.”
The pinnace was not armed. (If Grimes, man of peace as he claimed to be, had had any say in the building of The Far Traveler and her ancillary craft she would have been.) Even had she been fitted with weaponry Grimes would have been unable to fire into that melee with any degree of discrimination. All that he could do was to bring her in fast, fast and noisily. The combatants heard the rapidly approaching clangor; they would have had to have been stone deaf not to do so. They stopped fighting, looked up and around. Then they ran, all of them, human and autochthon. Together they fled, arms and legs pumping ludicrously, jostling each other at the open airlock door of the gaussjammer, scrambling for the safety of the interior of the old ship.
They were gone from sight, all of them, their dropped weapons, gleaming greenly in the light of the afternoon sun, littering the bare, sandy ground.
Grimes slammed the pinnace down hard at the foot of the ramp that protruded from the airlock door. With one hand he sealed his helmet, with the other he unsnapped his seat belt. Big Sister had already opened the inner airlock door. Two steps took him to the little chamber. The Baroness was with him. The inner door closed, the outer door opened. He jumped to the ground, pulling his pistols as he did so. She landed just behind him and then ran ahead.
“Hold it!” he called. “I’ll send the robots in first to draw the fire. They’re expendable.”
“And you’re not?” she asked coldly.
“Not if I can help it. And I’m not invulnerable either. Your tin soldiers-are.”
She admitted grudgingly that there was sense in what he said. They stood together, looking up at the huge, weathered hulk, the great, metallic peg top supported in an upright position by its landing struts. And what was happening inside the battered hull? he wondered. Were the survivors of the wreck—the descendants of the survivors, rather—and the natives still fighting hand to hand along the alleyways, through the public rooms? His helmet muffled external sounds but did not deafen him completely. He listened but could hear no cries, no gunfire.
The first two robots emerged from the pinnace’s airlock. He told them to board the ship, not to fire unless fired upon, to use stunguns rather than laser pistols, their net-throwing blunderbusses in preference to either.
When the automata were aboard he followed, climbing the rickety, warped ramp with caution. It had been damaged, he noticed, and clumsily patched with some dissimilar metal. The repairing plates had been riveted, not welded.
“Are you brave enough to go in?” asked the Baroness when they reached the head of the gangway.
Grimes did not answer her. He joined the two robots who were standing in the airlock chamber. They were using their laser pistols, set to low intensity, as torches, shining the beams in through the open inner door.
Grimes used his chin to nudge the controls of his suit’s external speaker to maximum amplification. “Ahoy!” he shouted. “Lode Ranger! Ahoy! This is the Survey Service! We’re here to rescue you!”
“We are not the Survey Service,” snapped the Baroness.
Grimes ignored her. “Ahoy!” he called again. “Lode Ranger, ahoy!”
He could imagine the sound of his amplified voice rolling up and along the spiral alleyway, the ramp that in these ships encircled the hull from tapered stern to blunt, dome-shaped bows inboard of the inner skin.
There was no reply.
He said, “All right, we’re going in. We’ll follow the ramp all the way to the control room. Two robots ahead, then ourselves, then two robots to cover our rear. The remaining two will guard the airlock.”
They began to climb.
It was a far from silent progress. At one time the deck had been coated with a rubbery plastic but, over the long years, it had perished, its decomposition no doubt hastened by the chlorine-rich atmosphere. The feet of the marching robots set up a rhythmic clangor, the heavy boots of the man and the woman made their own contributions to the rolling reverberation. It would have been impossible not to have stepped in time to the metallic drumbeat.
Up and around they marched, up and around. The low intensity laser beams probed dark openings—cross alleyways, the entrances to cabins and machinery spaces and public rooms. There were streakings in the all-pervasive dust suggestive of footprints, of scufflings, but nothing was definite. On one bulkhead was a great stain, old and evil. It could have been no more than a careless spillage of paint in the distant past but Grimes sensed that somebody—or something—had died there, messily.
He called a halt.
“Now we can hear ourselves think,” commented the Baroness.
“Now we can hear,” he agreed.
And there were sounds, faint and furtive, that would have been faint even without the muffling effect of their helmets. They seemed to come from ahead, they seemed to come from inside the ancient hull. And within the archaic ship, Grimes knew, there would be a veritable maze of alleyways and companionways, shafts vertical and horizontal. The only hope of capturing either a native or a descendant of the Lode Ranger survivors would be if any of them tried to escape through the airlock door, where the two robots he had detailed for that duty were on guard.
One of those robots spoke now—or it may have been Big Sister who spoke.
“Ground cars are approaching from the city. I suggest that you retreat to the pinnace.”
Grimes hated to leave a job half finished, less than half finished, hardly begun in fact. But to remain in the ship could well prove suicidal. Still he waited so he could call, one last time, “Lode Ranger, ahoy! We have come to rescue you! Follow us to our boat!”
And then, wasting no time, the boarding party ran rather than walked down to the airlock.
Chapter 25
Somebody had gotten there before them. Somebody had tried to break past the robot sentries and was now entangled in the metallic mesh cast by a net-throwing blunderbuss, was still struggling ineffectually. It was a man in an archaic spacesuit, an ugly looking pistol in his right hand. Fortunately he coul
d not bring this weapon to bear.
“Easy, friend, easy,” said Grimes. “It’s all right. Tell us about it in the pinnace.”
But the man could not hear him, of course. His helmet looked as though it would deaden exterior sounds even more effectively than the one that Grimes was wearing. If his suit were equipped with radio, and if that radio were still functioning, it would not be likely that the frequency to which it was tuned would be the one being used by the party from The Far Traveler.
“Don’t hurt him,” ordered Grimes. “Take him to the boat.”
He looked toward the city, to the column of dust midway between town and ship, the fast-traveling cloud that did not quite conceal betraying glints of metal. The ground cars, obviously, that Big Sister had reported. And they were wasting no time, whoever and whatever they were. The sooner he was in the pinnace and up and away the better. He would return, better armed and better prepared—but that was in the future. This was now. This was strategic retreat from heavier forces, from an enemy who had already opened fire from his armored vehicles with large caliber projectile weapons. A shell burst just short of the pinnace, another to one side of it
“Run!” ordered Grimes.
The two robots with the prisoner between them broke into a gallop. Grimes and the Baroness followed, but less speedily. Spacesuits are not meant for running in. The other four robots brought up the rear.
The outer airlock door of the pinnace was already open. The leading robots and the struggling man passed through just before a shell landed on the boat itself.
“Hell!” exclaimed Grimes.
“Don’t . . . worry . . .” panted the Baroness. “She . . can . . . take . . . it . . .”
The green smoke cleared and Grimes saw that the pinnace seemed to be undamaged, although bright gold gleamed where the protective plastic had been ripped away.
The next two rounds were wide and Grimes and the Baroness scrambled into the airlock during the brief lull. Another shell hit, however, as the last pair of robots were boarding. It was like, Grimes said later, being a bug inside a bass drum. But at the time he was not thinking up picturesque similes. He was getting upstairs, fast, before a chance projectile scored a hit on some vulnerable part of the pinnace. A similar craft in the Survey Service would have been fitted with armor shields for the viewpoints. This one was not. No doubt Big Sister would make good this omission but Grimes was more concerned with now than a possible future.
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