Horn went back on his bark animal-track soles and left more money on another trail. Then still another. He baited two small sections only a hundred yards each. He left patches of jungle trail displaying bright, rectangular, beautifully printed certificates saying that so many credits would be paid to the bearer at any bank in the galaxy. Then he went back to the Danae people's encampment. He wanted to see Ginny. If things had happened differently, he and Ginny would now be married and living happily ever after. As it was, they were in a very nasty situation, along with two officers, four crewmen, and six other passengers of the Danae. It was no time for romance, but Horn was working and planning exclusively for Ginny. He thought only in terms of what was best for Ginny. He didn't notice the anguish of the Theban's small engineer, two days without access to a bottle. The engineer was suffering intensely.
The Danae's captain had gravely decided that some sort of shelter should be built against rainstorms. They'd made a leanto of sorts, and it was partly thatched. Horn believed it would leak, but he praised it generously. He showed the castaways a small patch of what looked like mould or fungus on the game trail. With all watching, he touched it at its centre with a stick. It was barely six inches in diameter, but instantly it seemed to sprout tiny, horrible tentacles which seized the stick and squeezed and slavered lustfully over it. It was unspeakably disgusting. Horn flirted the stick and the small beast went hurtling through the air. It fell some distance off in the jungle, and Horn considered that his followers were properly warned against that and larger beasts of the kind.
He conferred at length with the Danae's captain, and gravely agreed upon measures to be taken if any of the beasts of Carola should attempt to investigate their camp after nightfall. Lights were to be the prime defence. Local creatures would become fascinated when lights were flashed into their eyes. They could be led past the camp, or even killed if necessary - but in silence if possible. Sharp-pointed poles might be used as spears while a beast was held hypnotized by light. But there should be no avoidable noise, because sound travelled a long way in the jungle.
So Horn and Ginny had not much opportunity to be together this night. The Danae's captain made a formal, even bitter protest against Horn's use of currency as a weapon in a psychological war, but he couldn't protest too much. He needed Horn to think of things he'd never been trained to think of, and therefore never had thought.
In the end, Horn left the encampment again very near the middle of the planet's dark hours. He headed back along the water route he'd used before. There'd be no constrictor beasts in the water, but after he came out he moved through blackness, with cold chills running up and down his spine. He carried his stun pistol out and in his hand. He'd use it if one of the monsters lay in wait.
Ultimately he came to the edge of the clearing. The particoloured moon went overhead and during the half minute of its passage the clearing was astonishingly bright. The Theban loomed high in the rapidly moving moonlight. It showed no lights. There was no movement except unseen, slithering stirrings where the beasts fed. There was no sound anywhere.
But the atmosphere inside the Theban must have changed very much. The crew of the Theban had money and nothing to do with it. They would probably be shooting dice soon. There'd be exultation when they won and anger when they lost. At least some of them would try to cheat the others. And they'd be beginning to want to get away from Carola. Not immediately, to be sure. Now that they had so much, they could imagine having much more. But when they had that much, they'd want to start spending it. It is a part of human nature that most men don't want to accumulate money; they want to spend it. Most men get nervous when they have more than they're used to, and will abandon any prospect for future wealth in favour of wild extravagance and celebration in the present.
Horn estimated how this human character trait would work on the Theban. Normally, no spaceman will work if he has two thousand credits. If he has ten, he won't try to get more. The money left on the jungle trail should mean to the men of the Theban's crew that they had vast excitement, great satisfaction, and wild parties waiting for them to get where they were going. Money was like a ticket to something thrilling. Nothing was more sure to undermine Larsen's authority than money burning holes in the pockets of his crew.
Actually, there was a dice game already going on in the tramp ship's crew's quarters. The money found on the trail was changing hands frequently and rapidly. Those who had the money bet it, and those who didn't watched. So there was nobody watching the clearing from inside the ship.
Horn made his way from the far side of the cone-shaped beacon to the beacon itself. He avoided the dead beasts and the revolting nightmares-made-flesh around them. The particoloured moon was long vanished. There was abysmal blackness everywhere. Horn guided himself by starlight alone as he found the entrance to the cone.
He went inside and found what Larsen had discovered before him. There was the broadcast unit, separately covered and sealed inside a plastic case. An infinitely tiny sound came from where the beacon's plastic recording went round and round under a magnetic pickup.
"Carola beacon. Carola beacon," said the infinitesimal voice. It gave galactic co-ordinates by which a ship could check its own position. "Unmanned commerce refuge only. Unmanned commerce refuge only. Carola beacon. Carola beacon." It had broadcast that message millions of times in the past, yet it went on monotonously: "Carola beacon. Carola beacon..."
Horn cut off the broadcast. There was a special device alongside the pickup. Using it, a patrol ship surveying the Rhymer passage could change its message and add warning of a newly discovered meteor stream, the future approach of a burned-out solar system, or a new patch of cosmic dust. Cosmic dust was particles ranging in size from much smaller than grains of sand to pebbles the size of pinheads. A ship striking such a dust cloud at full speed would vanish in a flare of vapourized metal and white-hot gas.
Horn used the equipment provided to give warning of newly found dangers. He recorded a terse and succinct notice that there were castaways aground on Carola. They were refugees from the wrecked liner Danae. They were being hunted by the crew of the space tramp Theban, which had caused the wreck of the Danae.
When the recording was complete, Horn utterly smashed the device for changing it. Nothing else could be substituted for it now. He turned on the beacon broadcast again and went quickly away. If by any chance Larsen should again pick up the tedious beacon signal and discover the change, he could only turn off the broadcast permanently, as Horn had done it temporarily. And even that would be reported by the first ship to pass this way. A patrol ship could come to make repairs, and it would find out what had happened.
As a result of Horn's just-ended visit to the beacon, it was absolutely necessary for the Theban to lift off from Carola. Whether or not her crew found the castaways, and whether or not they secured the money for which they had committed several capital crimes, they had to get away! Only, of course, they couldn't without Horn to run the engines.
There was no alarm. Horn was back in the jungle within minutes. He ensconced himself in a tree and tried to doze until daybreak.
There was reaction to what he'd done earlier, though, at a very early hour of the next morning. Crewmen of the Theban came bustling out of the ship and moved eagerly and briskly towards the west. The men who'd previously been left as ship guards were in this group. They went zestfully and hurriedly to look for money strewn on the game trails of the jungle.
They'd find it, of course. Some would have been trampled by passing beasts, but there was a mile-long stretch of trail on which credit notes had been strewn not too lavishly by Horn. There was another, quarter-mile-long section. And there were two short bits of trail where money was to be picked up by any passerby.