So helpless were they that they could not make their own fire. And when one was kindled for them, they huddled about it and listened to the whining reproaches of the leader Wembling until the distant drums of the Langri’s death procession frightened him into silence.
The following day dwellings were raised for the prisoners, and boundaries marked out that they were not to pass, for that was the Plan.
And Fornri and Dalla, that morning after the Langri’s death rites, led the fifty youths of the Langri’s class back to the Forest Village, there to grapple doubtfully with the heritage the Langri had left to them.
4
The battle cruiser Rirga was outward bound on a routine patrol mission, and Captain Ernst Dallman was relaxing quietly in his quarters with his robot chess player. He was about to trap the robot’s queen, a suspenseful move because this robot was programmed for eccentricity, and at a given moment it could be functioning on any level from idiot to genius. He never knew whether an apparent lapse was due to stupidity or the setting of a cunningly contrived trap.
At that crucial moment the Rirga’s communications officer interrupted to hand Dallman a message. From his apologetic manner and the speed with which he departed, Dallman knew that the news was not good. The officer was dropping the door shut when a bellow of anger brought him scurrying back.
Dallman tapped the strip menacingly. “This is an order from the sector governor.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ships of the fleet do not take orders from bureaucrats, politicians, or port authority waste disposal engineers. You will kindly inform His Highness that there is an entity known as Fleet Headquarters, and that it esteems the illusion that it has full control over its own ships. I am currently on a third-priority assignment, and the fact that I am passing through one corner of his alleged territory does not give a sector governor control over my movements.”
The communications officer fumbled with a pocket flap and produced his memorator. “If you will dictate the message, sir—”
“I just gave you the message. You’re a communications officer. Communicate. Surely you have sufficient command of language to tell the man in a flattering way that Space Navy orders must come through Space Navy channels. Do so. And tell Commander Protz I want to see him.”
“Yes, sir.”
The communications officer exited nervously. Commander Protz sauntered in a moment later, met Dallman’s foreboding scowl with a grin, and calmly seated himself.
“How long are we going to be in this sector?” Dallman asked him.
Protz thought for a moment. “Roughly forty-eight hours.”
Dallman slammed down the message. “That’s twenty-four hours too long.”
“Some colony in trouble?”
“It’s worse than that. The sector governor has lost four scratchers.”
Protz straightened up and swallowed his grin. “By all that’s spaceworthy! Four of them? Look here—I have a leave due in two or three years. I’m sorry I won’t be able to see you through this, but I wouldn’t give up that leave if the Chancellor himself had lost four scratchers.”
“Not only does this oaf of a governor lose four survey ships at one crack,” Dallman went on, “but he has the insufferable nerve to order me to start looking for them. Order, mind you. I’m letting him know that we have a chain-of-command procedure in the Space Navy, but he’ll have time to get through to headquarters and have the order issued there. And since the Rirga is on routine patrol, headquarters will be happy to oblige.”
Protz reached over and took the strip. By the time he finished reading, he had recaptured his grin. “It could be worse. We just might find all of them in the same place. The W-439 turned up missing. What’s the ‘W’ for?”
“Maybe it’s privately owned. The others belong to the Sector Survey.”
“To be sure. The W-439 turned up missing, so they sent the 1123 to look for it. Then they sent the 519 after the W-439 and the 1123, and the 1468 after the W-439 and the 1123 and the 519. Too bad we happened to be here. Now we’ll never know how many ships the governor would have lost one at a time before he realized that isn’t the way to do it.”
Dallman nodded. “Seems curious, doesn’t it?”
“We can rule out mechanical failure. Those scratchers are reliable, and four of them wouldn’t bubble out at the same time.”
“Right. And no more than a fifth of the worlds in this sector have even had space ranging. Probably fewer than a tenth have been surveyed. An unsurveyed world can offer some queer kinds of trouble. The odds are that we’ll find all four on the same planet and that the same trouble that caught the first one caught the others. Go down to the chart room and see if you can lay out a search area. We might even be lucky.”
Twenty-four hours later Fleet Headquarters made it official, and the Rirga altered course. Protz paced the control room, whistling cheerfully and making deft calculations on a three-dimensional slide rule. Technicians were verifying them on a battery of computers and having trouble keeping up.
Finally he produced a set of coordinates, and Dallman accepted it skeptically. “I asked for an area, not a star system.”
“I’m betting we’ll find them there,” Protz said. He stepped to the chart. “The W-439 last reported in from here, on course—so. Obviously this is where it was heading, and there shouldn’t be more than one habitable planet. We can wind this up in a couple of days.”
Dallman nodded grimly. “And when we do—if we do—I’m going to see that this sector’s surveying section overhauls its procedures. If you’re right, four ships in a row landed on an unsurveyed planet, and not one of them bothered to let its headquarters know where it was and what it thought it was doing there. If the navy operated like that—” He turned on Protz. “Are you out of your mind? A couple of days to find four scratchers? You’ve been in space so long you’ve forgotten how large a world is!”
Protz shrugged cheerfully. “Like you said, we might even be lucky.”
They were lucky. There was one habitable planet, with a single long, narrow subtropical continent. On their first orbit they sighted the four gleaming survey ships parked neatly in a row in a meadow overlooking the sea.
Dallman studied the observational data, squinted at the film strips, and exploded. “By the time we get back on course we’ll be a month off schedule, and those fools have just taken time off to go fishing.”
“We’ll have to land,” Protz said. “We can’t be certain.”
“Of course we’ll land—but only after we’ve observed the entire prescribed procedure for landings on unsurveyed worlds. And as we complete each step we’ll notify headquarters that we have done so, just in case we have to be rescued. If whatever caught those scratchers also catches us, we’d better have a damned good excuse.”
“Right,” Protz agreed. “We land, but we land by the book.”
Dallman was still looking at the film strips. “Take a good look at these,” he said with a smile. “After this is over with, and after I’ve kicked those scratcher crews in the pants, I’m going fishing.”
Protz instituted USW landing procedure, and before he completed half the prescribed visual and instrument surveys, headquarters intervened and ordered them to land at once.
Protz read the order incredulously. “Who was on that privately owned ship? A Federation congressman’s brother-in-law?”
“At least,” Dallman said.