He bent his bony head. “Far enough,” be said, “and always in the search of truth?’
“Truth,” I said, “at times is very hard to come by.” “And captain,” Sara said, quickly, “this is George Smith.” The second man by this time had fumbled to his feet and was holding out a flabby hand in my direction. He was a tubby little man with a grubby look about him and his eyes were a milky white.
“As you can see by now,” said Smith, “I am quite blind. You’ll excuse me for not rising when you first came in the room.”
It was embarrassing. There was no occasion for the man to so thrust his blindness on us.
I shook his hand and it was as flabby as it looked, as nearly limp as a living hand can be. Immediately he fumbled his way back into the chair again.
“Perhaps this chair,” Sara said to me. “There’ll be drinks immediately. I know what the others want, but...”
“If you have some Scotch,” I said.
I sat down in the chair she had indicated and she took another and there were the four of us, huddled in a group before that looming fireplace and surrounded by the heads of creatures from a dozen different planets.
She saw me looking at them. “I forgot,” she said. “You’ll excuse me, please. You had never heard of me-until you got my note, I mean.”
“I am sorry, madam.”
“I’m a ballistics hunter,” she said, with more pride, it seemed to me, than such a statement called for.
She could not have missed the fact that I did not understand. “I use only a ballistics rifle,” she explained. “One that uses a bullet propelled by an explosive charge. It is,” she said, “the only sporting way to hunt. It requires a considerable amount of skill in weapon handling and occasionally some nerve. It you miss a vital spot the thing that you are hunting has a chance at you.”
“I see,” I said. “A sporting proposition. Except that you have the first crack at it.”
“That is not always true,” she said.
A robot brought the drinks and we settled down as comfortably as we could, fortified behind our glasses.
“I have a feeling, captain,” Sara said, “that you do not approve.”
“I have no opinion at all,” I told her. “I have no information on which opinion could be based.”
“But you have killed wild creatures.”
“A few,” I said, “but there was no such thing involved as sporting instinct. For food, occasionally. At times to save my life.”
I took a good long drink. “I took no chance,” I told her. “I used a laser gun. I just kept burning them as long as it seemed necessary.”
“Then you’re no sportsman, captain.”
“No,” I said, “I am-let us say I was-a planet hunter. It seems I’m now retired.”
And I wondered, sitting there, what it was all about. She hadn’t invited me, I was sure, just for my company. I didn’t fit in this room, nor in this house, any better than the other two who sat there with me. Whatever was going on, they were a part of it and the idea of being lumped with them in any enterprise left me absolutely cold.
She must have read my mind. “I imagine you are wondering, captain, what is going on.”
“Ma’am,” I said, “the thought had crossed my mind.”
“Have you ever heard of Lawrence Arlen Knight?” “The Wanderer,” I said. “Yes, I’ve heard of him. Stories told about him. That was long ago. Well before my time.”
“Those stories?”
“The usual sort of stories. Space yarns. There were and are a lot of others like him. He just happened to snare the imagination of the story tellers. That name of his, perhaps. It has a ring to it. Like Johnny Appleseed or Sir Launcelot.”
“But you heard...”
“That he was hunting something? Sure. They all are hunting something.”
“But he disappeared.”
“Stay out there long enough,” I told her, “and keep on poking into strange areas and you’re bound to disappear. Sooner or later you’ll run into something that will finish you.”
“But you...”
“I quit soon enough,” I said. “But I was fairly safe, at that. All I was hunting were new planets. No Seven Cities of Cibola, no mystic El Dorado, no trance-bound Crusade of the Soul.”
“You mock at us,” said Friar Tuck. “I do not like a mocker.”
“I did not mean to mock,” I said to Sara Foster. “Space is full of tales. The one you mention is only one of many. They provide good entertainment when there’s nothing else to do. And I might add that I dislike correction at the hands of a phony religico with dirty fingernails.”
I put my glass down upon the table that stood beside the chair and got up on my feet.
“Thanks for the drink,” I said. “Perhaps some other time...”
“Just a moment, please,” she said. “If you will please sit down. I apologize for Tuck. But it’s I you’re dealing with, not him. I have a proposal that you may find attractive.”
“I’ve retired,” I said.
“Perhaps you saw the, ship standing on the field. Two berths from where you landed.
“Yes, I saw the ship. And admired it. Does it belong to you?”
She nodded. “Captain, I need someone to run that ship. How would you like the job?”
“But why me,” I asked. “Surely there are other men.”
She shook her head. “On Earth? How many qualified spacemen do you think there are on Earth?”
“I suppose not many.”
“There are none,” ‘she said. “Or almost none. None I’d trust that ship to.”
I sat down again. “Let’s get this straight,” I said. “How do you know you can trust the ship to me? What do you know about me? How did you know I had arrived on Earth?”
She looked straight at me, squinting just a little, perhaps the way she’d squint down a rifle barrel at a charging beast.
“I can trust you,” she said, “because there’s nowhere you can go. You’re fair game out in space. Your only safety would lie in sticking with the ship.”
“Fair enough,” I admitted. “And how about going out in space? The Patrol...”
“Captain, believe me, there’s nothing that can overtake that ship, And if someone should set out to ‘do it, we can wear them down. We have a long, hard way to go. It would not be worth their while. And, furthermore, I think it can be arranged so that no one ever knows you’ve gone into space.”
“That’s all very interesting,” I said. “Could you bring yourself to tell me where we might be going?”
She said, “We don’t know where we’re going.”
And that was damn foolishness, of course. You don’t set out on a flight until you know where you are going. If she didn’t want to tell, why couldn’t she just say so?
“Mr. Smith,” said Sara, “knows where we are going.”
I switched my head to look at him, that great lump huddled in his chair, the sightless, milk-white eyes in his flabby face.
“I have a voice in my head,” he said. “I have contact with someone. I have a friend out there.”
Oh, wonderful! I thought. It all comes down to this. He has a voice in his head.
“Let me guess,” I said to Sara Foster. “This religious gentleman brought Mr. Smith to you.”
She suddenly was angry. Her face turned white and her blue eyes seemed to narrow to gleaming jets of ice.
“You are right,” she said, biting off the words, “but that’s not all of it. You know, of course, that Knight was accompanied by a robot.”
I nodded. “A robot by the name of Roscoe.”
“And that Roscoe was a telepathic robot?”
“There’s no such thing,” I said.
“But there is. Or was. I’ve done my homework, captain. I have the specifications for this particular robot. And I had them long before Mr. Smith showed up. Also letters that Knight had written to certain friends of his. I have, perhaps, the only authentic documentation concerning Knight and what be was looking for. All of it acquired before these two gentlemen showed up and obtained from sources of which they could have had no knowledge.”