He turned on the outside telescope, and the image on its screen was more incredible than the voices and the existence of the fleet itself. The scope focused first on a bulging monster. It was an antiquated freighter that had not been built for a hundred years. The second view was of a passenger-liner with the elaborate ornamentation that in past generations was considered suitable for space. There was a bulk-cargo ship, with no emergency rockets at all and the crew's quarters in long blisters built outside the gigantic tank which was the ship itself. There was a needle-like spaceyacht. More freighters, with streaks of rust on their sides where they had lain aground for tens of years.
The fleet was an anomaly, and each of its component parts was a separate freak. It was a gathering together of all the outmoded and obsolete hulks and monstrosities of space. One would have to scavenge half the galaxy to bring together so many crazy, overage derelicts that should have been in junk yards.
Then Hoddan drew an explosive deep breath. It was suddenly clear what the fleet was and what its reason must be. Why it stopped here, he could not yet guess.
Hoddan watched absorbedly. There was some emergency. It could be in the line of what an electronic engineer could handle.
Chapter 7
The spaceboat floated on upon a collision course with the arriving fleet. That would not mean, of course, actual contact with any of the strange vessels themselves. Crowded as the sunlit specks might seem from Darth's night-side shadow, they were sufficiently separated. It was more than likely that even with ten-mile intervals the ships would be considered much too crowded. But they came pouring out of emptiness to go into a swirling, plainly pre-intended orbit about the planet from which Hoddan had risen less than an hour before.
It was a gigantic traffic tangle, and Hoddan's boat drifted toward and into it. He counted a hundred ships, then . . . Long before he gave up, he'd numbered two hundred forty-seven of the oddities swarming to make a whirling band—a ring—around the planet Darth.
He was fairly sure that he knew what they were, now. But he could not possibly guess where they came from. And most mysterious of all was the question of why they'd come out of faster-than-light drive to make of themselves a celestial feature about a planet which had practically nothing to offer to anybody.
Presently the spaceboat was in the very thick of the fleet. His communicator spouted voices whose tones ranged from basso profundo to high tenor, and whose ideas of proper astrogation seemed to vary more widely still.
"You there!" boomed a voice with deafening volume. "You're in our clear-space! Sheer off!"
The volume of a signal in space varies as the square of the distance. This voice was thunderous. It came apparently from a nearby, potbellied ship of ancient vintage.
Hoddan's spaceboat floated on. The relative position of the two ships changed slowly. Another voice said indignantly:
"That's the same thing that missed us by less than a mile! You, there! Stop acting like a squig! Get on your own course!"
A third voice:
"What boat's that? I don't recognize it! I thought I knew all the freaks in this fleet, too!"
A fourth voice said sharply:
"That's not one of us! Look at the design! That's not us!"
Other voices broke in. There was babbling. Then a harsh voice roared:
"Quiet! I order it!" There was silence. The harsh voice said heavily, "Relay the image to me." There was a pause. The same voice said grimly: "It is not of our fleet. You, stranger! Identify yourself! Who are you and why did you slip secretly among us?"
Hoddan pushed the transmit button.
"My name is Bron Hoddan," he said. "I came up to find out why three ships, and then nine ships, went into orbit around Darth. It was somewhat alarming. Our landing-grid's disabled, anyhow, and it seemed wisest to look you over before we communicated and possibly told you something you might not believe."
The harsh voice said as grimly as before:
"You come from the planet below us? Darth? Why is your ship so small? The smallest of ours is greater."
"This is a lifeboat," said Hoddan pleasantly. "It's supposed to be carried on larger ships in case of emergency."
"If you will come to our leading ship," said the voice, "we will answer all your questions. I will have a smoke flare set off to guide you."
Hoddan said to himself:
No threats and no offers. I can guess why there are no threats. But they should offer something!
He waited. There was a sudden, huge eruption of vapor in space some two hundred miles away. Perhaps an ounce of explosion had been introduced into a rocket tube and fired. The smoke particles, naturally ionized, added their self-repulsion to the expansiveness of the explosive's gases. A cauliflower-like shape of filmy whiteness appeared and grew larger and thinner.
Hoddan drove toward the spot. He swung the boat around and killed its relative velocity. The leading ship was a sort of gigantic, shapeless, utterly preposterous ark-like thing. Hoddan could neither imagine a purpose for which it could have been used, nor a time when men would have built anything like it. Its huge sides seemed to be made exclusively of great doorways now tightly closed.
One of those doorways gaped wide. It would have admitted a good-sized modern ship. A nervous voice essayed to give Hoddan directions for getting the spaceboat inside what was plainly an enormous hold now pumped empty of air. He grunted and made the attempt. It was tricky. He sweated when he cut off his power. But he felt fairly safe. Rocket flames would burn down such a door, if necessary. He could work havoc if hostilities began.
The great door swung shut. The outside-pressure needle swung sharply and stopped at thirty centimeters of mercury pressure. There was a clanging. A smaller door evidently opened somewhere. Lights came on. Then figures appeared through a door leading to some other part of this ship.
Hoddan nodded to himself. The costume was odd. It was awkward. It was even primitive, but not in the fashion of the soiled, gaudily-colored garments of Darth. These men wore unrelieved black, with gray shirts. There was no touch of color about them. Even the younger ones wore beards. And of all unnecessary things, they wore flat-brimmed hats—in a spaceship!
Hoddan opened the door and said politely:
"Good morning. I'm Bron Hoddan. You were talking to me."
The oldest and most fiercely bearded of the men said harshly:
"I am the leader here. We are the people of Colin." He frowned when Hoddan's expression remained unchanged. "The people of Colin!" he repeated more loudly. "The people whose forefathers settled that planet, and made it a world of peace and plenty, and then foolishly welcomed strangers to their midst!"
"Too bad," said Hoddan. He knew what these people were doing, he believed, but putting a name to where they'd come from told him nothing of what they wanted of Darth.
"We made it a fair world," said the bearded man fiercely. "But it was my great-grandfather who destroyed it. He believed that we should share it. It was he who persuaded the Synod to allow strangers to settle among us, believing that they would become like us."
Hoddan nodded expectantly. These people were in some sort of trouble or they wouldn't have come out of overdrive. But they'd talked about it until it had become an emotionalized obsession that couldn't be summarized. When they encountered a stranger, they had to picture their predicament passionately and at length.
This bearded man looked at Hoddan with burning eyes. When he went on, it was with gestures as if he were making a speech. But it was a special sort of speech. The first sentence told what kind.