The Planet Dweller

by Jane Palmer

  ***

  ‘I can remember where everything goes,’ Tolt told him.

  ‘It’s a pity you couldn’t do the same for the net,’ retorted the Mott. ‘If this goes wrong you know what will happen, don’t you?’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Jannu quipped, ‘We won’t get the Mott award for practical engineering.’

  ‘We’ve got to do some damage to the console to install the firing device,’ explained Tolt, ‘and every second we spend doing this means we’re not able to monitor the beacons. We can’t reconnect the scanner until we’ve finished. Did you want to stay in Kulp’s ship and discover some booby trap in the middle of firing, would you?’

  At last the botching and bumbling about was completed. Tolt activated the monitor’s scanner sitting in a pile of materials that had once been the Mott’s console.

  ‘Great, great,’ sang out Jannu in uncharacteristic delight. ‘Ex 8 89 and Ea 8 88 have aligned themselves.’

  ‘That was lucky,’ said Tolt.

  They were both incompetent enough to take the unlikely occurrence as being more fortuitous than sinister.

  ‘We must have got it right after all,’ Jannu went on. ‘The sequence lights are checking out.’

  At that there was a gasp of relief from both ends of the Mott commander who had been thinking more of his court martial than a closer death.

  ‘Luck must finally have paid us a visit,’ Tolt said. ‘Shall we order Kulp’s ship out of range now?’

  ‘Not now we know things are going to work out,’ replied Jannu. ‘We may not have to make a run for it after all,’ he added in a low whisper.