Horn put his hand casually into the pocket where the stun pistol waited. He'd have to be careful to seize the right instant....
All he could do was try to disable the Theban's entire crew and then take off in the ship itself. When that was done, he was finished. He was no astrogator. He knew the galactic poles, and he could recognize galactic longitude. But it was utterly unlikely that he could find his way back to, say, Formalhaut. There were too many stars. He couldn't pick out Formalhaut among myriads of other flaming suns. He didn't know the absolute magnitude of Formalhaut, its distance, or its spectral type, and he'd never used an identification spectroscope. He could aim a ship in the right general direction, but for him to find Formalhaut was as unlikely as finding a specific blade of grass in an acre of lawn. There were that many stars.
There was a clicking sound, loud, enormously magnified. A relay had operated somewhere within the beacon cone. There were scratching noises. Then a voice bellowed out of half a dozen loudspeakers built into the beacon's side walls. "Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Liner Danae calls for help! Liner Danae calls for help! Mayday! Maydayl Mayday!" The bellowing voice, endlessly repeating the distress call, could be heard for miles. Larsen roared orders through the din, and began to run towards the Theban.
CHAPTER FOUR
MEN came from beneath the curiously shaped growths that was the Hermas jungle. They raced for the entrance port of the Theban. The mate was among the last to arrive, dragging the weeping engineer. Larsen snarled for haste. Men scrambled aboard the ship.
The mate said contemptuously, "What'll I do with him?" He shook the engineer for emphasis. "Leave him, kill him, or what?"
The distress call boomed over the clearing and went echoing and reechoing among the tall vegetation of Hermas. "Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Liner Danae calling for help! Liner Danae calling for help! Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!" Larsen jerked his thumb and the mate heaved the sobbing little man inside. Horn was already aboard. Larsen and the mate crowded into the ship with what crewmen were not already within it, then Larsen closed and dogged the exit port.
"We'll be needing the engines to work right," he growled ominously to Horn. "They'd better!" Then he added to the crew, "Bring up the engineer."
He made for the companion ladder towards the nose of the ship, with Horn close behind. The crewmen scattered to their lift-off stations. In no more than seconds the ship was wholly silent save for the thumping and bumpings as the engineer was pulled up the companionway.
Horn came up and stood by the engines, with cold chills marching up and down his spine. The Danae was in trouble! She was broadcasting what was almost inevitably a futile cry for help. He could still hear the monotonous, staccato SOS, coming now from the communicator in the engineroom. Mayday was the traditional distress call.
Horn raged, but in part it was because he was surprised. He'd believed that Larsen planned to take some action against the Danae, and he'd considered disabling the Theban so it could not carry out any plan, however brilliant, for the commission of piracy. But whatever had happened had been done somewhere else by someone else. The Theban only had to take advantage of whatever had been arranged to happen.
The engines wanted signal lighted in the engineroom. Horn threw the switch. The engines made squawking, protesting noises as the Theban surged upwards. Then Larsen in the control room gave full power to the drive plates, and the Theban went plunging skyward. Outside air shrieked as the tramp ship forced it aside. Undotibtedly the ship's skin heated from the friction. But then the outer noises thinned and grew faint, there was clear space, and the engines made buzzing, moaning sounds, with burblings in between, as the Theban went hurtling away from the planet Hermas.
Horn grimly made an inconspicuous connection he'd contrived. It was a safety device, pure and simple. If anything broke down the engines would cut off before they destroyed themselves. It was a precaution so that he could leave the engineroom. He was of no mind to stay there with no idea of what was happening.
He again touched his stun pistol for assurance, went up to the control room, and looked in the door. The engineer sat weeping on the floor near the wall. Larsen and the red-haired mate stared, fidgeting, at the vision screens.
"She'll be coming from Carola," growled Larsen, "driving blind and howling."
The communicator repeated its call with an unvarying, unwearying urgency that would have been tedious had it told of anything but disaster. The Hermas beacon, of course, could be picked up even by a ship in overdrive. Then an automatic astrogation unit would swing the receiving ship - and the Danae would be receiving the beacon's Wrangel waves - into line straight for the beacon. It would break out of overdrive when within light minutes of the beacon's sun. All this was because a ship's course needed to be exact. Small errors would add up instead of cancelling, if courses were started from the edge of a beacon's signal area instead of as near as possible to the beacon world.
Larsen growled again, indistinguishably, but the sound was one of satisfaction.
"She's out of overdrive," he rumbled a moment later, "just short of Hermas. Just like she should be!"
He crossed to the ship's computer. It was an old one, and Horn would have had trouble using so antiquated a model, but Larsen punched buttons as if he'd looked up the mathematical constants for this particular problem beforehand. The problem was to take a reading of the Danae's position, course, and speed towards Hermas, and to compute a series of courses and speeds for the Theban that would end with the two ships running side by side at the same speed and as close to each other as possible.
The computer clicked off a paper-strip answer - courses, durations, and accelerations - and Larsen began absorbedly to set it up on the Theban's controls.
Horn swore softly and furiously to himself. The Theban had known in advance that the Danae would arrive here emitting distress calls. Larsen had risked his life and that of every man aboard to be here and pick up those distress calls. He'd shanghaied Horn to keep the Theban's engines going because he knew the Danae would be calling for help at just this place and about this time.
But what had happened? Worse, what was meant to happen next?
The Theban drove with the dwindling half-moon of a partly lighted planet behind her. Horn found his throat going dry as he began to imagine things that might have happened. If the Danae needed help, Ginny might be dead! Yet it was desperately necessary to make sure.
He thought he heard a slight eccentricity in the engine noises. Those sounds, if heard by a normal liner spaceman, would have paralysed him with horror. But Horn went down to find out what could be making the new noise. He found that a minor repair was coming unstuck because of the vibration that made the other noises.
He was still working on that when the Theban ceased to accelerate towards the Danae, and he continued to work while changes in power demands told him that the tramp was decelerating, and then driving back to match course and speed. Then he sealed the job and went up to the control room again. Larsen and the mate were excitedly trying to centre a small glitter in the vision screen. It was almost dead ahead, a sliver of reflected brightness that looked nearer than the stars.
The Theban drove on. The speckle of brightness grew in size. It became distinct, a long, sleek, shining shape which was the space liner Danae. It was a needle of polished metal on the screen.
"Try a call," rumbled Larsen. He punched the communicator. The incoming distress call cut off. "Theban calling Danae," he said. "What's your trouble? We see you clearly. We're close by you. What's your trouble?"