It was a situation which seemed to have no possible solution. Horn, still laughing, moved towards the mate with the wrench swinging, and the mate held a blaster pointed at his middle. When Horn raised the wrench as if for a murderous blow, the mate fled. He scrambled up the companion ladder, swearing in panic, and Horn flung the wrench after him.
It didn't hit him. It clanged and fell back to the floor of the engineroom. Horn picked it up and went back to his work.
It became continually more difficult to keep his mind on the work, though. He thought of Ginny. The Theban would presently break out of overdrive, and there would be the usual tedious business of manoeuvring to the planet where Ginny might be aground or not, alive or not, in danger or not. If Ginny had died because Larsen wanted to loot a bank's shipment of currency - At that thought Horn went into a cold and terrible fury.
But he couldn't stop thinking of her, though all his imaginings were horrible or grisly or intolerable. She might be aground now, but the victim of unknown beasts or death from disease....
Then the Theban came out of overdrive at the solar system of which Carola was a member.
There followed a period of unalloyed torment for Horn. The landing of the Theban on Carola required that the engines function perfectly. Every ten seconds of engine failure during descent could mean a wreck instead of a landing. So Horn stood by the engines. He could picture the handling of the ship by the demands on the engines and the swinging of the hull. The Theban went ahead on interplanetary drive for a while, then decelerated for nearly as long. Then there were indecisive drives, freefall hoverings, and touches of power just sufficient to keep the ship aloft while searching for the beacon.
Horn could imagine with extreme vividness the look of a planet from space, with a sunset line curving across its surface. There would be colourings which would be vegetation, and there would be muddy-seeming areas which would be seas; perhaps ice-caps would be visible, and perhaps not. But somewhere down below a beacon ceaselessly broadcast, "Carola beacon! Carola beacon! Co-ordinates -" By straining his ears he could hear the mutter of the turned- down astrogation communicator, tuned to the Wrangel waves of the beacon's broadcast. "Unmanned refuge. Beacon only. Carola beacon! Carola beacon!"
Then the movements of the ship became purposeful. It drove and swung about. It hovered. And gradually, gradually, the use of power increased. The Theban would be descending, but increasing its lift as the surface of the world below it grew nearer. Horn bit his nails.
The engines wobbled, and their noise grew shrill. With iron-steady hands, Horn remedied the trouble. The Theban was descending. The beacon, then, would be on the now sunlit side of the planet. Even Larsen would not be so impatient as to land on unseen terrain at night. Being let down by a grid was another matter.
The quality of the ship noises changed subtly. There was air outside the hull. By the sound, it grew thicker. Presently the Theban seemed to wallow slightly, as if it had lowered itself into a jet stream in the air. Then there was a breathless time of waiting, and the power-demand needles wavered up and down and up and down. This was very delicate jockeying of the ship to a chosen landing place. Then the ship steadied suddenly. It was aground. Horn heard agitated stirrings in the control room.
He very deliberately twisted a wire here and broke a circuit and completed it in a new fashion there, and painstakingly threw an adjustment out of optimum position. Larsen and the red-haired mate came down the companion ladder, armed with blast rifles.
Larsen snarled, "Come along, in case you get ideas!"
Horn had intended to follow anyhow. Now he trailed along down to the air bank, air- freshener level, to the galley stores and messroom level, the crew's quarters. Then the holds. On the way down, faces peered out at them. The crew knew that Larsen was landing to seize forty millions of credits in interstellar credit notes. There was no man aboard who did not know that treachery and murder would begin the instant the treasure was found. But every man was involved in at least two conspiracies to seize the whole, and every man knew it was highly unlikely that more than one of their number would survive the murderous competition for the loot.
Larsen and the mate, with Horn close behind, clattered down towards the ship's bottom exit port. When Larsen saw a crewman starting, from his post for landing, he rasped, "Stay at quarters! If I want you outside I'll call you. Stay at quarters."
They continued to clatter downwards, past the holds. They reached the exit port - naturally, an air lock. Here Larsen stopped and threw off the safety catch of his blast rifle.
"They were here!" he rumbled thickly. "I saw 'em!" Fury seemed to exude from him. It was somehow like the ferocity of a carnivore who bristles over his meat. Because he expected to gather the fruits of a crime, Larsen was ready to add to it with atrocity. "But they saw us comin' down and they run off." To the mate he roared, "Open it!"
The mate unbolted the inner door, set the lock to "Aground" and undogged the outer door. Larsen raised the blast rifle. As the post swung open he opened fire, traversing his field of vision as the opening widened. Then he leaped out, rifle ready, peering ferociously for targets. He cursed luridly as none appeared.
The Theban stood slightly askew on an eminence which fell away on three sides to lower ground, and on the fourth direction went on, rising slightly, to a pattern of rounded, still-higher hills. About the landed ship there was a clearing of ground, sprayed to prevent the growth of any vegetation at all. There was the large, crimson-fluorescent cone of the beacon of this world. There were fragments of the same improbably lurid plastic on the ground a little distance away. There was jungle on every hand. But between the beacon and the jungle's edge there were the four lifeboats of the Danae.
They lay at random on the ground. The party had made it to Carola and had landed safely. Close by one of the boats there was a smouldering fire, as if someone had been cooking by it before the Theban appeared in the sky. It meant that someone had been here only moments ago.
Horn felt a surge of incredulous hope. It was so strong an emotion that for seconds he could neither have spoken nor moved. There was now a real chance that Ginny was still alive! And - blessedly! - the fugitives from the Danae had been aware that a ship of space coming to ground on Carola might not be a rescue ship. They'd fled at the Theban's descent. Perhaps some of them watched from the edge of the jungle now.
Larsen went striding to a lifeboat, blast rifle in hand. He wrenched open its port and entered. There were noises from inside. Crashings. Larsen seemed to be wrecking the boat's interior.
The mate looked truculent but uneasy. He stood by the exit port, staring about him. It was still day, here where the cone-shaped beacon sent its monotonous message to emptiness. But sunset was near. There were reddish clouds and a section of the deep-crimson disc of a sun already partly below the horizon. There, by convention, the west must lie. Against the sunset, improbable trees rose above the jungle. Peculiarly angular branches held tufts of foliage, and other angular branches departed from those tufts to meet yet other clumps of eccentrically shaped leaves. There were spikelike growths which also showed in silhouette above the forests. They appeared to have no branches at all. Then there was a dense mass of growing stuff which rose like a wall about the edges of the clearing.