"I wouldn't know. Maybe." Barbara flipped the pages of a large book from her library, a book that had not been used much. "It says a compress."
Dusty made a pad of bandage and cotton and covered the hole. He taped it down. Scyth groaned again and Barbara cracked open an inhalant vial and put the stuff under Scyth's nose.
"Wh—wha—di' you hi' me wi'?"
Dusty never knew from where he found the moral strength to be hard-boiled. But all of a sudden the feeling that this was one hell of a mess left him; his next feeling was one of confidence and self-justification. "It's called a belly gun," he said. "But you'll be all right in a couple of months. Maybe three."
Scyth tried to struggle up but failed. He fell back and lay there glaring at them. He gasped, "Cou'le munce?"
"Sure. Stop crying. It's just a flesh wound."
"Bu' in cou'le munce—'11 be—bar'rine fiel'—gone—"
"Take it, Scyth. Sure. It's tough," said Dusty in a cold, matter-of-fact voice. "You've played and lost, but that's all right. Be a good loser. You've got a lot of company."
"Com'any?"
"Sure. There's millions of guys who've lost their future and their birthright over the flick of a hemline. We're a primitive sort of race, old man, but you'll find us both healthy and lusty. Forget Marandis and your ding-busted beacons. Maybe you can help us build a spacecraft—after we get through this barytrine business your friends cooked up for us."
"Bu' can—mus' not—Chat an' Bren—die—"
"Nonsense."
Barbara plucked at Dusty's sleeve. "He's talking about his friends. Chat and Bren. On Mercury, remember?"
"Oh, don't worry about them."
"But don't you see, Dusty? If we go into the barytrine field, and trap Scyth and his spacecraft with us, his friends will be marooned on Mercury."
Dusty nodded quickly. "Sure and that's what I'm counting on. They'll not start Sol into a variable until Scyth gets back. So—"
"Don't be blind. They won't start the variable star, but no one can stop the barytrine field. They'll still be marooned."
Dusty grinned. "You don't think a gang this advanced would be so dumb as to leave a couple of their kind marooned on a place like Mercury, do you? Well, I'll tell you how I've got it figured, Barb. Exactly eight seconds after Scyth does not land as per schedule, Chat and Bren will be calling for help on these phanoband things. That'll take care of them. But as for this guy, let's cheer up. We've got a sort of hostage. Scyth will be most happy to make a spacecraft for us as soon as he gets back on his feet. Chat and Bren will, of course, be taken care of some thousand years before we—"
Scyth groaned loudly.
"Huh?" demanded Dusty.
"S'no-so. Bren an' Chat—alone. No—no—famban—phan'ban'—phanoban' on Mer'cry. Die—"
Barbara started to say, "But your company—" but Dusty turned quickly and slapped a broad hand over her mouth.
"Shut up," he whispered in her ear swiftly. "He's got to think there is no help. He's forgotten that someone knows they're here. Play it by ear and follow my lead."
"What can you hope to do?"
"I don't know," said Dusty. "But I'm hoping that I find out." Loud enough for Scyth to hear, Dusty asked, helplessly, "But what can we do?"
"Car—ou'side. Spacer. Pocket—map."
– – –
Dusty made a dive for Scyth's jacket and found a folded road map in one of the pockets. Like any stranger in a strange land, Scyth had outlined the route in a heavy blue pencil. His travel was detailed, it took Dusty no more than a glance to place the location of Scyth's big spacecraft.
Scyth rested a moment and then went on: "Hurt—can be doc'or on Maran'is. Hurry—"
Dusty grunted. "And who's going to run this spacecraft of yours?"
"You—easy—"
Barbara looked at Dusty cynically. "It's your show, Spaceman Officer." She laughed hysterically again. "Dusty Britton Rides Again!"
Dusty slapped her across the face to shock her out of it. Then he bent down to look at Scyth. The compress was soaked with red blood, but it was not overflowing. Dusty touched it gently and looked up at Scyth's face. "Hurt?" he asked.
"Can' tell. Hur' all over."
"Gonna hurt more, Scyth. C'mon. make a break."
Dusty put his arm under the Marandanian's shoulder and slowly lifted him to a sitting position. The man groaned and the compress broke out in a new flood that ran wet for a moment and then subsided in the stickiness of clot.
Dusty lifted Scyth as gently as he could, and with Barbara opening doors, he carried Scyth to his big car.
"Why not take his?" she asked.
"Like mine better," he said with a shake of his head at the rental-agency model Scyth had come in.
Barbara found blankets from the trunk and made a soft cushion for Scyth.
"You take care of him and I'll drive," said Dusty.
Barbara shook her head. "I—you take care of him and I'll drive."
"But I know the route."
"I can read a map as well as you can."
Scyth opened his eyes wearily, but with a trace of bitter humor he managed to say, "You take care—of one another—and I'll drive!"
Then Scyth passed but cold.
– – –
Four hours' drive into the foothills, far from the lights of civilization, Dusty found the big spacecraft. It was parked in a small valley and it was colored so that only a man who knew what he was seeking and where it was would have found it.
On the way Scyth babbled about the drive and how to run the big ship. Happily, Scyth's periods of delirium were easy to separate from his periods of lucidity, for when Scyth began to babble he talked cynically about the stupidity of taking four "hours to travel less than a couple of hundred miles when they could cover light years in the matter of minutes. Then he would become quite rational and tell Dusty how to recognize the beacons as they came into sight, and where the 'charts were. He had to get back to Marandis, and he told Dusty the way.
Then his mind would wander a bit and Scyth would chuckle quietly over something entirely removed from spaceman-ship. Then would come a discussion of the levers that must be turned and the meters that must be watched; how to turn the correct knob or to push the proper pedal. He spoke of cautions, too. They must not turn on the space drive until the ship had warmed for a certain length of time (which the menslator interpreted to Dusty as a vague quantity of minutes. To be safe, Dusty would wait twice that long) and then Scyth would lapse again.
But as the drive went on, Scyth's periods of lucidity waned. His moments of babbling dropped too; and between them both came longer and longer periods of dead silence and heavy breathing.
Yet by the time Dusty drove his car underneath one tailfin, he had a fair idea of how to run the spacecraft.
Chapter VIII
Dusty carried Scyth to the salon and dropped him on a divan. He left Barbara to take care of the Marandanian while he went aloft into the control room to take over.
Once inside the room Dusty stopped short.
He was a Hottentot in a powerhouse, a savage in a Plutonium refining plant, a tone-deaf idiot standing before a four-console organ. There were meters and switches and levers and toggles, neatly mounted on gleaming black panels and clearly lettered in shining white. He stared at a pilot lamp labeled: æ :*œæ; œ*œ and wondered foolishly whether the gleam of red meant that the spaceport was still open or whether it signaled that smoking was forbidden for the time being.
And Dusty was supposed to drive this.
Stunned, Dusty dropped into the pilot's chair and looked around him in a completely dazed manner. Below his feet were pedals and just below the surface of the slanting panel were a pair of knee-flappers that could be pressed without losing the thrust on a foot pedal. The desk-thing was studded with large levers mounted in curve-segments all carefully marked in the calibrations of the Marandanian language. To his left was a panel filled with push-buttons from the floor to the level above h
is head where his long arm could reach without standing up. To his right was a similar panel. Dead ahead was a flat plate that looked like frosted. glass and seemed to Dusty about as useful. It neither glowed, nor showed a spot of color other than the very logical reticule-lines which were to be used for aiming the ship. Above the plate of glass was a line of meters and another line of them below.
Dusty shivered. No matter in which way he reached he could touch buttons, or thumb levers or turn dials.
Doubtless the competent Marandanian pilot played this console like a pianist—strictly from practise. A mere matter of training; when the concert master calls for 'A' the musician automatically reaches for the right position and drops his fore-finger.
This was no instrument to play by ear.
Or—was it?
"Barb!"
"Yes, Dusty?"
"Barb, find that damned menslator and bring it up here. It might—"
A moment later she came up the stairs with the small instrument in her hands. She gasped as she saw the array of controls and asked, "I thought he said it was easy?"
"To him," growled Dusty. He fitted the menslator on his shoulder by its strap and fiddled with the controls. He hit one setting that made Barbara cry out inexplicably (which irritated him) and then he found another setting that made him feel like a hundred and seventy pounds of toothache (then he forgave Barbara) and after some more fiddling with the tuning and the gain Dusty hit the right setting.
Everything became clear to him.
Directly in front of him was a meter that read "Rhenic Doubler Current" and to one side was a lever labelled "Phanoband Isolator" and some pushbuttons marked "Polylateral Overload Reset" and "Primary Exchange Test." The rest, too, were very logical but equally meaningless. "Drive Pulse Synchronizer" must have some definite function because it was a large lever almost in the middle of the desk-panel and what one did with it was undoubtedly taught in the first grade of spaceman's school.
There was a large and interesting handwheel labelled "Drive Angle Trim" which Dusty gathered to be the gizmo used to equalize the drivers so the ship wouldn't yawn in flight, but he was not quite sure. There was another called the "Preflight Check Sequence" which probably checked the multitudinous functions of the instruments as it was turned from position to position, but what it did or what it told the pilot made no nevermind to Dusty Britton of The Space Patrol.
– – –
There was one that he recognized instantly. It said, reading from left to right "Off, Warm-up, Stand-by, Operate." It was a big four-position hand-lever and it was a good idea, excepting what did Dusty do next?
"Can Scyth help?" pleaded Dusty. "He's out cold like a Northern Light. Lost blood and—"
"But how'm I to run this godawful thing?"
"I don't know," said Barbara doubtfully. "Try something."
"What?" he asked.
She pointed to a small button high on the front panel beside the glazed plate. It said, "SC/WBN-3 Phanoband 22".
Dusty looked at the nameplate and the menslator helped him translate the name-plate into "Space, Commercial/Non-adjustable, High-power, Emergency—Model Three. Phanoband Twenty-Two."
Dusty looked at Barbara and shrugged. This was an emergency, so Dusty put cut a forefinger and pressed the button.
A pilot lamp winked from blue to red and a meter on the forepanel rose. There was a momentary whirring from far below in the big star ship and then along the bottom of the ground-glass looking window in front of him, a small circle began to grow luminous. A man's face appeared.
He was obviously in some sort of uniform; it had that air. The collar was high and the effect was uncomfortable. A pair of gold diagrams glistened on one shoulder. The man looked human enough to be the local desk-sergeant in costume dress. As soon as the little circle was completely clear he said tersely:
"Distress Call received. Identify yourself, state your position, define your danger, and estimate the time remaining in which you have a factor of safety."
Dusty blinked and then looked at Barbara. She shrugged. Dusty shrugged back and said, "Are you Marandis?"
"This is Marandis Emergency. Identify yourself, state your pos—"
"Stop talking like a robot—or are you a robot?"
"I am not! What is the meaning of this? Using a distress-call band for—"
"This is a distress call," snapped Dusty. "And part of the distress is that I can't identify myself because I don't know the language."
"You'll have—"
"The other part of the distress is that the man who knows all about this is likely to die of a bad accident if he is not given medical attention. So now you know, tell me what to do next."
"Who are you?"
"I am Dusty Britton, if that means anything."
"I don't know you."
"Of course not. I've never been to Marandis. I'm not a Marandanian, just a character of the race your playmates term 'Backward,' and/or 'Primitive.' But you better do something fast."
"What is the name of the injured party?"
"Scyth Radnor."
"Then your identity is Exploration License K-221-Y. I know Radnor. I must get you off the distress band. Please switch to Space Communications, Band Forty-Five. I—"
"Wait," said Dusty quickly. "As a member of another solar culture you must be aware of the fact that I am not familiar with your equipment. Which knob do I twist and how far?"
The Marandanian gave Dusty instructions and waited for a second small circle to appear beside the first, with a different face in it. This face was older and not in uniform. The man said, "Please explain the nature of your difficulty. I am Gant Nerley."
As well as he could, under the circumstances, Dusty explained his predicament.
"I see," said Gant Nerley thoughtfully. "This is a rather complex problem to solve. Can you state your location?"
"Hardly."
"I suppose not. If we don't know where you are from here, the chance that a non-galactic culture would know where we are from there is indeed remote."
"Haven't you a filed plan of operations?" demanded Dusty, using a tone of voice that indicated that he thought that any culture above the level of the ape wouldn't let people go galloping all over the galaxy, tearing up stars and ruining scenery without first having filed a program and had such program approved by twenty-seven signatures.
"There is a filed plan," said Nerley defensively. "But naturally it is sealed as a matter of protection for the company."
"And no provision for emergency?"
"Only by the consent of the licensed company."
"Then you'd better call a conference at once. Scyth isn't going to last long enough for you to comb the galaxy for us."
"That's why it might be better to let the barytrine field run to completion."
– – –
Dusty's voice grew hard. "I wish you birds would stop tossing off a thousand years of our life with the flick of a finger," he said.
"What difference does it make? You'd not notice it, and—"
"Who says so?" snapped Dusty, his irritation mounting.
"Time is of importance only when its passage can be measured in reference to outside events. You have no contact with outside events. Therefore it makes no difference whether you come in contact with us now or a thousand years from now, so long as the same people of your culture are involved."
"Now see here—"
"Permit me to present an example. If the barytrine field went on at this instant, one thousand years from now my successor would pick up the thread of the conversation from the recording we are making, and take on from here. As far as you are concerned the only difference would be a sudden flick of the view-screen and a rather abrupt change in the facial characteristics of your conferee." Gant Nerley waited a moment to let the point sink in. "Now, since you and I have very little in common, it should make little difference to you whether you spoke to me or to someone else. And as far as I am concerned, I feel the same. I have long si
nce ceased feeling regretful that I cannot retain friendship with the hundreds of thousands of people with whom I must converse. I have almost stopped being regretful of the fact that there are so many worlds that no single lifetime would permit a visit to more than a fraction. I suggest that you try to take a more lasting attitude. You sound as though the troubles of a world you never saw were of prime importance to you."
"Look," said Dusty testily, "A lot of what you claim may be true. But we have a couple of thousand years of observational data on the planets and the nearby stars. You may take a thousand years out of our lives in the twinkle of a second, but then we spend another five hundred on top of that finding out where we are."
"You have time."
"We have not!" roared Dusty. "Move us to a new system and I'll tell you what'll happen. Before we can make a move into space we have to chart the new system completely, because we admit that our reaction motors are not efficient enough to take off without a well pre-charted course. We must know the orbits of the planets to a fine degree before we dare. Then, before we can make a try for the stars, we've got to spend years and years in observation before we can chart the nearest stars and observe whether or not they might have planets, our astronomy will be put back. Now—"
"Pardon me, but the information I have regarding your system is before me. Your space travel is primitive and any form of real commerce is as yet impossible. This I get from the license application for barytrine operations. Now, how can you justify your statements about interstellar travel?"
Dusty Britton, no matter what else, was a good actor any time he could sit in with a large Virginia Ham to carve. Dusty would never play Hamlet or Julius Caesar; a custard pie in the face was closer to Dusty's art than John Barry-more. This fact provided for Dusty a rather interesting background for the present argument. A student of science could not have faced Gant Nerley without paying deference to the Marandanian's obviously superior knowledge, position and experience. The learned man makes no flat-footed statements; this leads to the odd belief that most learned men are not entirely sure of themselves. It is the bird who is ignorant of all the myriad things that he does not know that can afford to stand up on his hind feet and reel off chapter and verse as though there could be no rebuttal.
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