"The range is still extreme, sir. And as for this secondary psionic radiation, sir, sometimes it fades rapidly, sometimes it lingers for years. There must be laws governing it, but nobody has yet been able to work them out."
"So there could be something…"
"There could be, sir. And there could not."
"Just go on trying, Mr. Mayhew."
"Of course, sir. But with poor Lassie in her present state I can’t promise anything."
Grimes went along to the galley. He seated himself on the bench, accepted the cup of coffee that Sonya poured for him. He said, "It looks, my dear, as though we shall soon be needing an Intelligence Officer as well as a Catering Officer."
"Why?" she asked.
He told her of his conversation with Mayhew. He said, "I’d hoped that he’d be able to find us a few short cuts—but his crystal ball doesn’t seem to be functioning very well these days… If you could call that poodle’s brain in aspic a crystal ball."
"He’s told me all about it," she said. "He’s told everybody in the ship all about it. But once we get the derelict in tow, and opened up, we shall soon be able to find out what makes her tick. Or made her tick."
"I’m not so sure, Sonya. The way in which she suddenly appeared from nowhere, not even a trace on Station 3’s M.P.I. beforehand, makes me think that she could be very, very alien."
"The Survey Service is used to dealing with aliens," she told him. "The Intelligence Branch especially so."
"I know, I know."
"And now, as I’m still only the humble galley slave, can I presume to ask my lord and master the E.T.C.?"
"Unless something untoward fouls things up, E.T.C. should be in exactly five Lorn Standard Days from now."
"And then it will be Boarders Away!" she said, obviously relishing the prospect.
"Boarders Away!" he agreed. "And I, for one, shall be glad to get out of this spaceborne sardine can."
"Frankly," she said, "I shall be even gladder to get out of this bloody galley so that I can do the real work for which I was trained."
V
Slowly the range closed, until the derelict was visible as a tiny, bright star a few degrees to one side of the Lorn Sun. The range closed, and Rim Mamelute’s powerful telescope was brought into play. It showed very little; the stranger ship appeared to be an almost featureless spindle, the surface of its hull unbroken by vanes, sponsons or antennae. And still, now that the distance could be measured in scant tens of miles, the alien construction was silent, making no reply to the signals directed at it by both the salvage tug’s communications officers.
Grimes sat in the little control room, letting Williams handle the ship. The Mate crouched in his chair, intent upon his tell-tale instruments, nudging the tug closer and closer to the free-falling ship with carefully timed rocket blasts, matching velocities with the skill that comes only from long practice. He looked up briefly from his console to speak to Grimes. "She’s hot, Skipper. Bloody hot."
"We’ve radiation armor," said Grimes. The words were question rather than statement.
"O' course. The Mamelute’s ready for anything. Remember the Rim Eland disaster? Her pile went critical. We brought her in. I boarded her when we took her in tow, just in case there was anybody still living. There wasn’t. It was like bein' inside a radioactive electric fryin' pan…"
A charming simile… thought Grimes.
He used the big, mounted binoculars to study the derelict. They showed him little more than had the telescope at longer range. So she was hot, radioactive. It seemed that the atomic blast that had initiated the radiation had come from outside, not inside. There were, after all, protuberances upon that hull, but they had been melted and then re-hardened, like guttering candle wax. There were the remains of what must have been vaned landing gear. There was the stump of what could have been, once, a mast of some kind, similar to the retractable masts of the spaceships with which Grimes was familiar, the supports for Deep Space radio antennae and radar scanners.
"Mr. Williams," he ordered, "we’ll make our approach from the other side of the derelict."
"You’re the boss, Skipper."
Brief accelerations crushed Grimes down into the padding of his chair, centrifugal force, as Mamelute’s powerful gyroscopes turned her about her short axis, made him giddy. Almost he regretted having embarked upon this chase in person. He was not used to small ships, to the violence of their motions. He heard, from somewhere below, a crash of kitchenware. He hoped that Sonya had not been hurt.
She had not been—not physically, at any rate. Somehow, even though the tug was falling free once more, she contrived to stamp into the control room. She was pale with temper, and the smear of some rich, brown sauce on her right cheek accentuated her pallor. She glared at her husband and demanded, "What the hell’s going on? Can’t you give us some warning before indulging in a bout of astrobatics?"
Williams chuckled to himself and made some remark about the unwisdom of amateurs shipping out in space tugs. She turned on him, then, and said that she had served in tugs owned by the Federation Survey Service, and that they had been, like all Federation star ships, taut ships, and that any officer who failed to warn all departments of impending maneuvers would soon find himself busted down to Spaceman, Third Class.
Before the Mate could make an angry reply Grimes intervened. He said smoothly, "It was my fault, Sonya. But I was so interested in the derelict that I forgot to renew the alarm. After all, it was sounded as we began our approach…"
"I know that. But I was prepared for an approach, not this tumbling all over the sky like a drunken bat."
"Once again, I’m sorry. But now you’re here, grab yourself the spare chair and sit down. This is the situation. All the evidence indicates that there’s been some sort of atomic explosion. That ship is hot. But I think that the other side of the hull will be relatively undamaged."
"It is," grunted Williams.
The three of them stared out of the viewports. The shell plating, seen from this angle, was dull, not bright, pitted with the tiny pores that were evidence of frequent passages through swarms of micrometeorites. At the stern, one wide vane stood out sharp and clear in the glare of Mamelute’s searchlights. Forward, the armor screens over the control room ports were obviously capable of being retracted, were not fused to the hull. There were sponsons from which projected the muzzles of weapons—they could have been cannon or laser projectors, but what little was visible was utterly unfamiliar. There was a telescopic mast, a-top which was a huge, fragile-seeming radar scanner, motionless.
And just abaft the sharp stem there was the name.
No, thought Grimes, studying the derelict through the binoculars, two names.
It was the huge, sprawling letters, crude daubs of black paint, that he read first. Freedom, they spelled. Then there were the other symbols, gold-embossed, half obscured by the dark pigment. There was something wrong about them, a subtle disproportion, an oddness of spacing. But they made sense—after a while. They did not belong to the alphabet with which Grimes was familiar, but they must have been derived from it. There was the triangular "D", the "I" that was a fat, upright oblong, the serpentine "S"…
"Distriyir…" muttered Grimes. "Destroyer?" He passed the glasses, on their universal mount, to Sonya. "What do you make of this? What branch of the human race prints like that? What people have simplified their alphabet by getting rid of the letter E?"