He read until he was sleepy. Then he went to look at the instrument board before he turned in. The farthest screen of all was being nibbled at. The needle of its dial trembled almost imperceptibly. The alarm bell rang sharply.
He settled down in the pilot’s chair and followed the detector-screen line on out. There was that odd, dizzying sensation at the beginning which always comes of a total-acceleration field taking hold. The little ship went hurtling through emptiness. As technical lieutenant, he knew atomic drive rather thoroughly. The Navy drive is in several essentials much above the commercial drive, though it requires more competent attention. Ben could give it, and he’d altered the drive of his small craft to Navy quality.
In ten minutes he’d sighted the craft of which his detectors had told him. It drove on for the very minor planet he had just left. He signaled by space-phone, but got no answer. The sharp, authoritative “Identify yourself immediately” dot-dash signal is known to all space craft. To fail to answer it is to confess illegality.
Ben pushed the Headquarters’ button again. There was a long delay before the screen lighted. He had time to reverse his acceleration and match course with the unresponsive ship, at a distance of no more than ten miles. The fat officer looked annoyed.
“Ben Sholto reporting,” said Ben. “I have located a vessel, on course apparently from Pharona. It refuses to reply to signals.”
The fat officer said “Stand-by” and became efficiously busy. A vast, bureaucratic dither went on behind the phone-screen focus. From time to time the fat officer answered some question put to him. At long last he turned to the screen again, pompously.
“No authorized vessel is in your locality. Destroy it.”
“With what?” asked Ben mildly. “I’ve a positron-beam pistol, but that’s all. This is a Reserve Auxiliary ship.”
“Then . . . er . . . accompany the suspicious vessel,” said the fat man, frowning portentously. “A destroyer will be sent to blast it.”
Ben punched the cut-off button. He felt rather wry. There was no need to report his own position, of course. The same force that could make his Reserve bracelet give him senselessly severe electric shocks could cause it to radiate direction-waves by which he could be triangulated upon— even without his knowledge—from an incredible distance.
He regarded the hurtling ship some ten miles to one side. It was trimly streamlined, as if intended for at least occasional use as a yacht in atmosphere. It headed straight in for the planet now only a few thousand miles distant. It decelerated swiftly, and went into an orbit about the planet. Ben matched speed and course with the precision of long practice. Then he happened to glance at the phone board. There was a tiny bluish haze over to the left of the telltale tube, which reports the wave lengths of all broadcasters in operation, so that one may select. Curious, Ben tuned in that wave. It was a reflection-wave coming back from the planet’s heaviside layer while most of the signal went through.
“Ben!” said a girl’s voice desperately. “Ben! If you’re down there, signaL me quickly! Please, Ben! Please!”
Ben’s heart leaped crazily and then seemed to cramp itself into knots. Because this was the girl who was the romance he’d been cheated of by a brass hat, and she was in the spaceship he’d been ordered to destroy, and there was a Navy ship coming now to blast it out of space— “Sally!” he cried fiercely into the transmitter. “I’m here! I’m in the ship alongside!”
The visiphone screen lighted. And Sally Hale stared at him out of it, pale and hunted to look at. She tried to smile. Then she toppled from view. She had fainted.
Within this same hour, Galactic time, a sub-commissioner on Thallis II forbade the colonization of the planet’s largest moon by arbitrary edict, which could not be gainsaid. The only reason ever discovered for the order was that the sub-commissioner enjoyed the hunting on that tiny planet, and it would be spoiled if the crowded population on Thallis II were admitted to colonists’ rights. Simultaneously, four spacelines in the Denib sector applied for permission to discontinue operations. They asserted, and offered to prove, that the cost of supplying required reports to the Administrative Service had grown to be the greatest single item of their operating costs, and made operation impossible save at a loss. (They were forbidden to discontinue operations.) And on the same Galactic day on Foorph—the solitary planet of Etamin—a crack express-liner from the Algol sector was refused landing and ordered to return to its port of departure. Of the more than eighteen hundred documents covering its voyage and cargo, exactly one lacked a sub-sub-clerk’s indorsement. The Administrative Service was behaving exactly as usual.
But Ben Sholto was not behaving as a properly subordinate officer in the Naval Reserve. Half an hour after seeing Sally on the vision-screen, he cut loose the grapples and the tiny air lock hissed shut. The yacht seemed to swerve aside, but it was actually the little sports cruiser which abruptly altered course. Dead ahead, the blue-white sun of this minor solar system burned terribly in emptiness. The long, slim space yacht which had come so far sped on and on. The smaller ship curved away and drove hard to get orbital speed. Ben went to the GC phone. He stabbed at the Headquarters’ button again. The fat officer thrust out an under lip.
“Well?” he demanded challengingly.
“Reporting,” said Ben woodenly. “The ship from Pharona did not respond to repeated calls. It seemed to be heading straight for the sun, here. I have pulled away from it now, because on its present course it will either hit the sun or pass so close that nothing could possibly live on it. I suggest that the entire crew must be dead.”
“Watch it,” said the fat officer.
Ben clicked off the phone. He went back to the single stateroom in his sports cruiser. Sally Hale said faintly, “Really, Ben, I’m all right. Just ... just you were the only person in the world I could appeal to. I’m hunted.”
“Not any more,” said Ben. “You’re safe now!”
“I . . . broke the quarantine on Pharona,” said Sally. “It . . . it was terrible, Ben! They’re. .. dying there by. . - by millions. Women. Only women. And girls. And nobody knows why. Their bodies give off cosmic rays, and they die. That’s all. There’s no real night on Pharona, you know, only twilight, so it was only the day before I left that they . . . discovered that women who have the plague glow, too. They get. . . phosphorescent. They don’t feel badly, only oppressed. They get fever, and cosmic rays come from them, and in the dark they shine faintly, and they get weaker and weaker, and then they die. And men are immune, and they are going crazy! Their wives and sweethearts and daughters and mothers dying before their eyes. And they’re not even in danger—”
“Don’t tell me now if you don’t want to,” said Ben.
“I. . . think I’m all right. I must be!” said Salty. “I was twelve days on the way. If. . - if I’d had the plague I’d have died, wouldn’t I? At least I’d be sick by now! But I’m not. Only. . . I couldn’t sleep much, Ben. I was all alone on the yacht, and four days out I heard the alarm g-go out for me, and I’ve been hearing the GC phone organizing a hunt for me—”
“Maybe you’d better eat something, and take a nap,” said Ben. “But how’d you come to pick this place to run to?”
Sally flushed a little.
“You were here.” She looked at him pleadingly. “I . . . couldn’t help it that my father. . . acted as he did. You know that after . . . well after my father got so angry with you, I felt badly. I went to Pharona to visit my uncle. And the Bazin Expedition came, and left for Lore, and the subcommissioner ordered it back, and it came, protesting all the way, and