But even so the thought of trying for it in the dark had some attraction for me. But we’d be plunging headlong into terrain we knew nothing of, trying to follow a path that we could not see and had never traveled. And, besides, we were too beat out to try it. We needed a good night’s rest.
“Why are you here with us, captain?” asked Sara from the fire. “Even from the first you had no belief in the venture.”
I went back to the fire and sat down beside her.
“You forgot,” I said. “All that money that you shoved at me. That’s why I’m doing it.”
“That’s not all of it,” she said. “The money would not have been enough. You were afraid you’d never get back into space again. You saw yourself cooped up on Earth forever and even that first day you landed, it was gnawing on you.”
“What you really want to know,” I said, “is why I had to make the run for Earth, why I sought sanctuary. You’re aching to know what sort of criminal you’ve been traveling with. How come you didn’t get all the sordid details? You knew everything else, even to the minute I would land? I’d shake up that intelligence system of yours, if I were you. Your operatives failed.”
“There were a lot of stories,” she said. “They couldn’t all be true. There was no way of telling which one of them was true. But I’ll say this much for you-you have space shook up. Tell me, Captain Ross, was it the swindle of all time?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I wasn’t out to break a record, if that is what you mean.”
“But a planet was involved. That is what I heard and it made sense because you were a planet hunter. Was it as good as they said it was?”
“Miss Foster,” I said, “it was a beauty. It was the kind of planet Earth was before the Ice Age hit.”
“Then what went wrong? There were all sorts of stories. One said there was a virus of some sort. Another said the climate was erratic. One said there wasn’t any planet.”
I grinned at her. I don’t know why I grinned. It was no grinning matter. “There was only one thing wrong,” I said. “Such a little thing. It already was inhabited by intelligences.”
“But you would have known...”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “There weren’t many of them. And they were hard to spot. What do you look for when you search a planet for intelligence?”
“Why, I don’t know,” she said.
“Nor do I” I said.
“But you. . .”
“I hunted planets. I did not survey them. No planet hunter is equipped to survey a planet. He can get an idea of what it’s like, of course. But he hasn’t got the gadgets or the manpower or the savvy to dig deeply into it. A survey made by the man who finds it would have no legal standing. Understandably, there might be certain bias. A planet must be certified. . .”
“But certainly you had it certified. You could not have sold it until it was certified.”
I nodded. “A certified survey,” I said. “By a reputable surveying firm. It came out completely clean and I was in business. I made just one mistake. I paid a bonus for them to pile in their equipment and their crews and get the job done fast. A dozen realty firms were bidding for the property and I was afraid that someone else might turn up another planet that would be competitive.”
“That would have been most unlikely, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, I suppose so. But you must understand that a man could hunt ten lifetimes and never come in smelling distance of a planet half as good. When something like that happens you fall victim to all sorts of fantasies. You wake up sweating at night at the imaginings that build up in your mind. You know you’ll never hit again. You know this is your one and only chance to make it really big. You can’t bear the thought that something might come along and snatch it all away.”
“I think I understand. You were in a hurry.”
“You’re damned right I was,” I said. “And the surveyors were in a hurry, too, so they could earn the bonus. I don’t say they were sloppy, but they might have been. But let’s be fair with them. The intelligent life forms lived in a rather restricted stretch of jungle and they weren’t very bright. A million years ago Earth might have been surveyed and not a single human have turned up. These life forms were on about the same level, let us say, as Pithecanthropus. And Pithecanthropus would not have made a splash in any survey of the Earth at the time he lived. There weren’t many of him and, for good reason, he would have stayed out of sight, and he wasn’t building anything that you could notice.”
“Then it was just a big mistake.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Just a big mistake.”
“Well, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, sure. But try to tell that to a million settlers who had moved in almost overnight and had laid out their farms and surveyed their little towns and been given time enough to really appreciate this new world of theirs. Try to tell it to a realty firm with those million settlers howling for their money back and filing damage claims. And there was, of course, the matter of the bonus.”
“You mean it was taken for a bribe.”
“Miss Foster,” I said, “you have hit it exactly on the head.”
“But was it? Was it a bribe, I mean?”
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I don’t think so. I’m fairly sure that when I offered it and, later, paid it, I didn’t think of it as a bribe. It was simply a bonus to do a good job fast. Although I suppose, unconsciously, that the company might have been disposed to do a little better for me than they would have done for someone else who didn’t pay a bonus, that they might even be inclined to shut their eyes to a thing or two.”
“But you banked your money on Earth. In a numbered account. You’d been doing that for years. That doesn’t sound too honest.”
“That’s nothing,” I said, “that a man can be hanged for. With a lot of operators out in space it’s just standard operating procedure. It’s the only planet that allows numbered accounts and Earth’s banking setup is the safest one there is. A draft on Earth is honored anywhere, which is more than you can say for many of the other planets.”
She smiled at me across the fire. “I don’t know,” she said. “There are so many things I like about you, so many things I hate. What are you going to do with George when we’re able to leave?”
“If he continues the way he is,” I said, “we may bury him. He can’t go on living too long without food or water. And I’m not an expert on force feeding. Perhaps you are.”
She shook her head a little angrily. “What about the ship?” she asked, changing the subject.
“Well, what about it?”
“Maybe, instead of leaving the city, we should have gone back to the field.”
“To do what? To bang a little on the hull? Try to bust it open with a sledge? And who has got a sledge?”
“We’ll need it later on.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. We may know more then. Pick up an angle, maybe. Don’t you think that if a ship, once covered by that goo, could be cracked open by main force and awkwardness someone else would have done it long ago?”
“Maybe they have. Maybe someone cracked their ship and took off. How can you know they haven’t?”
“I can’t, of course. But if this vibration business is true, the city is no place to hang around.”
“So we’re going off without even trying to get into the ship?”
“Miss Foster,” I said, “we’re finally on the trail of Lawrence Arlen Knight. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, of course. But the ship. . .
“Make up your mind,” I said. “Just what in hell do you want to do?”
She looked at me levelly. “Find Knight,” she said.