The two pseudo-patrol men came back to the control room. With them there was a short, plump civilian. He seemed wryly amused.
“Ho-ya, Lieutenant,” he said blandly. “I was afraid it was you.”
“They tell me,” said Scott formidably, “that you boss operations here.”
“Partly, partly,” said the plump man as blandly as before. “My name’s Chenery. Don’t you know me?”
“No,” said Scott.
“My name’s Chenery,” insisted the plump man. “You saved my life once. You’d ought to remember that!”
“I don’t,” said Scott.
“I was in trouble,” said Chenery, speaking cheerily. “Bad trouble! I was headed for the gas-chamber for something I didn’t do. Honest! And you found out I hadn’t done it, so they gassed somebody else and didn’t gas me. And now I’m an honest man and I run the hotel here. Because of you! I appreciate that!”
Scott dismissed the statement. He said, “You heard the announcement I just made. I’ve a job to do. I want to meet the men who won’t go aboard the liner. Trying to keep the Five Comets from smashing us is going to be tricky. I need to know the men who’ll help me do it. I need to know the buoy. I want you to guide me and introduce me.”
“Right!” said the plump man, cordially. “You did me a favor once. I’ll do you one now! I’ll show you over the ship and I’ll bring you back here safe and sound!”
“Very good,” said Scott curtly. He stood up and addressed the two men in uniform. “You stay on duty here. If the liner calls, tell her skipper I’ll call him back shortly.”
“Yes, sir!” said the taller of the two. He saluted with something of a flourish. It was irritating. Scott felt a certain impatient urge to tell him that the Patrol did not salute except on formal occasions. But he didn’t. Instead, he followed the plump man out of the control room.
There was a peculiar silence in the halls and corridors of the buoy. The only sound anywhere was the faint and muted Thallian mood-music coming from the miniature theater. The plump man padded on ahead, making curious sucking noises with his lips. He seemed to think deeply. Presently he shook his head.
“Funny!” he said reflectively. “Plenty funny! Here’s a man who saved my life. You still don’t remember? Chenery?”
“No,” said Scott. Nobody in the Patrol remembered all the names of all the people he encountered in the way of business.
“It was on Glamis,” said Chenery. “They had me cold! I was headed straight for the gas-chamber—and you turned up the proof of who it really was. And you don’t remember!”
“No,” admitted Scott. “I don’t.”
“That kind of hurts my feelings,” said Chenery. “But I’ll think it over. Whether you remember me or not, you did me a favor. And we meet each other here. It’s a small galaxy!”
They were now on the deck level below the control room, where the desk arrangement of an old fashioned hotel stood unused and gathering dust. The need for dust particles to maintain a proper ion-content in a space craft’s air was an old story, but one could tell how long it had been since conscientious housekeeping was done there. Scott estimated seven days, which was in good agreement with the results of poor housewifery in the control room.
Chenery turned into the small theater. The girl still sat there, her head turned toward the screen. But she did not seem to be watching it. It was as if she gazed blindly at it while her thoughts—desperate thoughts—were altogether elsewhere.
“Janet,” said Chenery amiably, “here’s somebody for you to know. He’s Lieutenant Scott, Space Patrol. He just came aboard to take command of the buoy.”
The girl turned her head as if reluctantly. Her eyes fell upon Scott. She saw his uniform. She looked at his face. Then a swift succession of emotions showed themselves. She was astonished, almost incredulous. Then a somehow terrible hope began to show. But Chenery said blandly, “He came aboard all by himself to take charge of things.”
The girl’s face lost its look of hope, and bitter disappointment took its place. Then she glanced at Chenery and back at Scott and a sorrowful compassion showed in her eyes.
“I’m showing him over the place,” said Chenery brightly. “Did you hear him telling everybody to get ready to leave here and get on a liner he’s got waiting?”
“I—didn’t really listen,” said the girl.
“He’ll explain—probably,” said Chenery with some zest. “He’s an old friend of mine. He don’t remember it, but he did me a big favor once. He wants to go over the buoy. Want to come along?”
The girl looked at him unhappily.
“It’ll be okay,” Chenery assured her. “I gave Bugsy a good talkin’ to. And I’ll be right there. Me and the Lieutenant. It’ll be okay, and you can look in the hospital with us right along.”
The girl stood up. The look of total hopelessness on her face was somehow harrowing. Scott revised an automatic first guess that against all probability, a woman or women were involved in this affair. This girl wasn’t normally an associate of criminals. She was involved, but against her will. And she looked forward without the least hope of escape to disaster more complete than she’d known up to now.
“Janet,” explained Chenery cheerily, “she’s a nurse. She’s been takin’ care of a couple of characters down in the hospital. They were on a ship goin’ from where they’d been caught to where they’d be gassed. They tried to pull off a trick. They thought they’d burn down their guards and take their ship all by themselves. But they didn’t. They got burned down themselves. So they were shifted from the ship they were burned on because they needed a hospital and we got one. Janet’s the nurse.”
Scott said nothing. He realized that his pose of ignoring everything that was wrong here was paying off admirably. Lambda had been taken over by criminals because the Golconda Ship was coming to port here. It might be necessary to convince somebody that everything was normal on the space buoy before they’d make fast alongside. So Scott was being used to test the look of things. So long as he pretended to accept conditions here as commonplace, the members of the criminal enterprise would be heartened. If he showed suspicion, they wouldn’t. But he’d be killed after the liner waiting outside had gone on its way. That was self-evident. Still, for the better part of half an hour there’d probably be no attempt to murder him. He had walked into the parlor of men waiting to capture the Golconda Ship. They were watching to see his reactions.
He followed Chenery down another level of stairs. Here were cabins for passengers shifted from their liners to the buoy in order to shift back to other liners going where they wanted to be. Scott did not pretend to be interested in the cabins. It was all too likely that in some of them he’d find evidence of murders done. It was not wise to uncover anything of that sort just now. But Scott was aware that Janet was very pale as he glanced down a corridor.
He saw a scorched place on the wall. It wasn’t especially conspicuous, but a blaster-bolt had made it, and blasters weren’t normally fired in the passenger-quarters on ships of space. Scott ignored it.
They descended again. There were three levels of passenger cabins, and plainly they were all unoccupied just now. On the last of the cabin decks, though, there was the sound of snoring and a faint, faint odor of drink.
“Somebody,” said Chenery brightly, “didn’t hear your little speech, Lieutenant. Maybe we’ll wake him up to leave us. But not now. Not just yet!”
Further downward—sternward—there was a deck for freight, passenger-freight. There was baggage here. On an average, a space passenger carried twice as much baggage as he needed across the space between worlds. Nobody quite realized that shops on a planet a light-century from home would stock just about the same articles one could buy around the corner. So space travelers carried mountains of baggage. But it was possible to guess the number of passengers by a glance around the luggage-hold. Scott made a guess. Then he realized that men traveling to commit crime would travel light because they’d expect to abandon other possessions when they took the Golconda Ship. There was baggage of the sort normal passengers carry. Scott had a feeling now that they’d never claim it. The girl’s utter hopelessness told him much. But he guessed at seven legitimate passengers and perhaps as many as twenty others. He wondered if the baggage master thought it strange when so many travelers with so little baggage had begun to accumulate in Lambda. It wasn’t likely he’d been alarmed, though.