But Horn did not think too much about his own prospects. He was savagely prepared to do any conceivable thing to ensure Ginny's safety. If he could keep the Theban aground until the Danae was safely past this beacon, he could then devote all his thought and energy to arranging his own situation in such a way that he could rejoin Ginny on Formalhaut. But first he must keep the Theban from carrying out her as yet unknown but certainly undesirable intentions, which most likely concerned the Danae.
He heard crashings, and saw the working party from the Theban busy at something. Axes were swinging. Horn stared and then was incredulous. The fluorescent-covered storage pit of supplies for shipwrecked space mariners was being broken open. It didn't have to be smashed; any man could open it. But it was being hacked to bits.
Men jumped down into the underground cache. Axes rose and fell again. They were chopping at the contents of the emergency-stores shelter, ruining the preserved foodstuffs. They were exposing them to the air, to moulds, to putrefactive bacteria, to decay, to spoliation, to destruction. There was no imaginable value in the action. It was pure wanton crime committed against any starving spaceboat fugitives who might come to ground on Hermas to restock their boat for a hazardous attempt to reach Formalhaut in one direction, or the beacon Carola in the other.
There was a whimper behind him. The engineer said, "Are they - looking this way?" The voice was nerve-racked. It showed trembling terror. "Are they - can I - get away?"
Without turning his head, Horn said evenly, "They're destroying the emergency food stores. They seem to be enjoying themselves. I don't see anybody looking this way."
There was a rustling sound. Horn did not turn to look. The rustling went in panicky haste around to the other side of the grounded ship. It went away, racing for the tall vegetation on beyond. Horn heard a faint clanking noise. The engineer was in such terror of Larsen that he'd fled the ship and marooned himself on an uninhabited planet which nobody would have reason to visit except once in a decade or so to refuel its beacon. But the clanking said that he'd carried with him bottles of the stuff he counted on to make life endurable. He hadn't carried food; it was unlikely he'd carried weapons. But he couldn't have carried many bottles, either, knowing the need to run and run until he was past the fear of being overtaken.
Horn stood up and moved away from the ship. It had been accepted by the crew that Larsen would commit enormities upon the engineer, when he came out of his cabin after days of black brooding and in a mood to commit murder. If the engineer preferred flight, it was not Horn's affair. He was coldly determined upon one point only - to defeat whatever might be the enterprise Larsen had in mind against the Danae.
He strolled over to the beacon cone, not wanting to watch the destruction of food put ashore for castaways. There were two men digging, close to the cone. They nodded to him.
"What goes on?" he asked in a carefully unemotional tone.
"The skipper's orders. Here we are!"
A tool had found a tank, buried three feet down. They cleared a space on it, then got out of the hole. The man who had spoken swung an axe and flinched as he struck. There was a loud hissing sound and the intolerable reek of ship fuel. A fluid bubbled up out of the hole the axe had made. Boiling furiously, it filled the air with a whitish vapour. Ship fuel was normally a gas, made liquid by pressure of an atmosphere or two. It dissolved in the fuel cells of a ship or lifeboat and produced electricity by a complicated displacement degradation reaction which yielded energy and ultimately a waxy substance that floated on fuel cell surfaces. The gas enabled a ship to carry more energy than any other non-nuclear system of energy supply, and it could be reconstituted - by surplus electric power drawn down by a landing grid from the sky. It was one of the reasons modern ships did not need to carry engineers to oversee power production as well as space engines.
Horn said nothing. It was too late. The destruction of food left for possible survivors of a shipwreck was an accomplished fact. It was senseless, purposeless crime against total strangers. Now the fuel stored for such survivors was destroyed, too. That made even less sense.
Larsen called. The two crewmen moved towards him, and Horn followed more slowly. He tried to fit this senselessness into some sort of pattern which justified Larsen's risking his own life and that of all his crew in the crazy, battered Theban; which justified the kidnapping of Horn himself; and which involved a rendezvous with the liner Danae.
"Now," said Larsen zestfully, "now we'll have some fun! Go get him!"
Three men made for the ship. They didn't seem eager, but they went. And Horn knew what they went for. Larsen had slipped his belt from about his waist. It had a heavy buckle which he whipped back and forth. Grinning, he turned to Horn, but there was no amusement in his eyes. They were blank and black and expressionless.
"You'll enjoy this!" said Larsen in a tone that was somehow horribly anticipative. "He's supposed to be an engineer, but he let the engines go. He was drunk when they started to blow. We'd all be dead if we had to depend on him!" He grinned again, but it was a grimace. He was deliberately allowing himself to become filled with murderous rage, and the jerking of the heavy belt buckle at the end of its strap grew savage and abrupt. "I don't let men in my crew get slack. When they let their work go, I let them know it! I - let - them - know - it! He'll know, when I'm through with him!"
One of the three men who'd gone to the ship appeared in the entrance port. He called. Horn caught words;
"... not here ... run off..."
Larsen swore. Then he ordered, "Go get him! Track him down! Get him!"
He did not raise his voice, but his tone was deadly. Horn carefully and unobtrusively made sure he had the stun pistol where he could draw it easily. He watched the other crew members move to obey, and considered what might happen next. It was obviously Largen's intention to flog the engineer as ship captains back in the age of sail, half a thousand years ago, used to do. But Larsen didn't look like a man preparing even zestfully to enforce discipline. He looked like a man lustfully anticipating murder.
Horn shook with sudden fury. His overwhelming obligation was to Ginny on the Danae, and he must not do anything that would place her in danger. But there are some things no man can stand by and watch.
He heard shouting behind the screen of tall growths, and wondered sardonically if men who pretended to search were actually warning the fugitive to hide. But the engineer could not have fled very far, especially if he'd burdened himself with too many of the bottles that helped him to forget, temporarily, what he'd become.
Then there were louder shouts. Men appeared at the edge of the semi-jungle. The Theban's red-haired mate called triumphantly. He'd found the engineer, squatted in thick foliage, trying desperately to become unconscious before he was found. His only operating instinct seemed to be flight from the terrors of his situation, rather than from the situation itself.
The mate dragged the small figure towards Larsen. Horn suddenly knew that he couldn't stand by while the little man was killed by Larsen with a buckle-loaded belt. The odds were enormous that he'd be killed if he tried to interfere. But if he were killed, the Theban couldn't lift off Hermas to practice whatever Larsen had in mind against the Danae. At the least, Ginny would reach Formalhaut safely! She'd grieve when she learned that Horn was missing, and she'd hope for a long time that he might somehow return. But at least she'd be safe.