And Dane needed that support by the time they reached the level of the treasure room. He held fast to Tau for a long instant, his heart pounding, gasping. Now Tau’s words that he had been very close to death struck starkly, but he stumbled on, reaching for the release.
Trewsworld was a frontier planet, lightly settled. The bulk of the mail they carried for her single port city was light—micro tapes of agricultural information, personal communications between settlers and off- world, a bag of official tapes for the Patrol post. There was little enough security material, and the major portion was the embryo boxes.
Since the importation of domestic animals was experimental on most worlds and very carefully supervised, any such shipment was top security. And Ecology had firm rules on what might or might not be transferred. Too many times in the past, the balance of nature on some planet had been thoughtlessly overturned by such importation of a life form that had no local enemy, which perhaps developed a mutated strain beyond control, to speedily become a menace rather than the source of profit the importers had intended.
After exhaustive tests the pioneers were allowed imports of embryos for stock raising, and the Queen now carried fifty such—lathsmer chicks in sealed containers. These were lab-developed and worth far more than their weight in credits—since Trewsworld had proved an acceptable climate and lathsmer fowl were luxury items across a wide sector of space. Not only could the adults be plucked once a year for their fine
down, but young chicks were epicures’ delight for the table. If the lathsmer were raised in quantity, the pioneer settlers of the planet had an export item to establish them firmly in galactic trade.
To Dane these were the major “treasures” the Queen carried. But the boxes were secured by double bolting and shock packing, just as he had supervised. They were intact and protected. The few other bags and boxes were as undisturbed, and he finally had to admit that as far as he could tell, there had been no tampering. But when Tau helped him out, he double-sealed the portal as it should have been before the Queen lifted.
The original problem remained unsolved. A dead man in a mask, aboard for what reason? Until they came out of hyper, which meant into the Trewsworld system, there was no chance to communicate with the Patrol or other authorities.
Tau had made a detailed study of the body before it had been sealed off in a hull pocket for deep freeze. Save that the stranger had plainly died from a heart condition aggravated by the strain of take-off, that examination told them nothing. The man was of Terran descent with no mutating modifications. In these years of space travel he could have been any age past youth and from a number of worlds where the inhabitants were so akin to Terrans as to make them indistinguishable. None of the Queen’s crew had seen him before, nor was the poison used on Dane isolated and named by the medic, in spite of his research.
The forgery of the ident disk was perfect. Jellico stood now flipping that back and forth as if it alone could somehow prove a key to unlock the puzzle.
“Such a careful plan means a big deal. You say that call to pick up the security package came through the field tower?” he asked Dane.
“Regular channels. I had no reason to doubt it.”
“Probably was straight, as far as they knew. Anyone could have put it in to them,” Steen Wilcox, the astrogator, commented. “You’re sure there’s nothing on the manifests that is suspicious?”
“Nothing.” Dane suppressed a sigh. Of course he was only a stand-in for Van Ryke (and how he wished now that the usually omniscient cargo master was here and that he himself could return to the less responsible role of assistant), but at least he knew what he had seen stored away. He had personally clamped most of it into the special racks. The biggest things they had handled were the embryo boxes and the brach cage. The brach cage! That was the only thing he had not remembered, mainly because its inhabitants, being alive and needing attention, had been placed in Mura’s territory of the hydro compartment.
“What about the brachs?” he asked now.
Tau had a ready answer. “Nothing there. I give them daily inspections. The female’s about to have kits— not until after we planet—but she should be checked. That traveling cage can’t conceal anything.”
Dane thought about the brachs. They were common on Xecho—the largest native animal, that is, land animal.
But that did not make them very big. An adult male was about as tall as Dane’s knee, the female slightly larger. They were amusing, appealing creatures, covered with a soft growth that was really neither fur nor under-feathers but had some of the texture of both. This was cream-colored with a faint rosy underlight in the female, darker in the male, who was in addition equipped with folds of skin under his throat that could be inflated and, when so, flushed crimson. Their heads were long with pointed, narrow muzzles and a small, sharp horn on the very tip, which they put to excellent use when dealing with their favorite food, a shellfish that had to be pried open. The ears had feathery fringe. They were easily tamed but now rigidly protected by law on Xecho after early settlers there had carried on an illegal trade in their skins. Selected
pairs were sometimes exported only under bond to specialists in xenobiology, as these were due to be delivered to a lab on Trewsworld. For some reason they seemed to present a puzzle to most biologists, and several different planets had scientists devoting time to a detailed study of them.
“That’s it,” Dane said a short time later. He had run through the tape of inventory—nothing anywhere, except a dead man who must have been part of a very elaborate plan.
“So—” Wilcox looked as if he were now faced with one of his beloved mathematical formulas, one that was new and he was now admiring, before solving, for its very intricacy. “If this was not for the cargo, it is the man himself. He needed to get to Trewsworld under cover. Either the disguise was meant to operate to pass him at both ports or one alone. He risked our uncovering him and putting him under arrest. And murder, since they must have meant to eliminate you permanently”—he nodded to Dane—“is a very high price to pay. What’s going on on Trewsworld according to rumor?”
Planet politics could be a perilous business on some worlds, as they all knew. Free Traders carefully did not take sides. It was hammered into every crewman that the ship itself was his planet and to it he owed allegiance, first, last, and always. No involvement in local matters. That could be a hard fact to face when one’s sympathies or emotions were aroused by sights and sounds, but every one of them knew that it was the backbone of their own lives and it must be adhered to. So far, Dane had never come face to face with a choice between the ship’s safety and his own emotional urge to join or refrain. He knew that he had been lucky, and he only hoped that luck would continue to hold for him. He did not know whether any of the others had faced that dilemma, but the past, before he had joined the Queen, was theirs and not his to remember.
“Nothing off course that I know of.” Jellico still slapped the ident disk against the palm of his hand. “We’d have been warned in the general orders if there was. Combine had this run. They turned over all their general tapes with the contract.”
“There is always,” Ali said, “the I-S.”
I-S—Inter-Solar. Twice in the past the Solar Queen had had a brush with that company. And both times the Free Trader had won the round, a pygmy successfully facing down one of the giants of the star lanes. The companies with their huge trading empires, their fleets of ships, thousands, even millions of employees strung out along the galactic trade routes, were monopolists, sparring with each other for the control of new planet trade. The Free Traders were the beggars at the feast, snatching at such crumbs of profit as the big ones overlooked contemptuously, or thought it not worth the effort to exploit.