“There it is again!” Tang’s forehead creased, his hands pulled the phones from close contact with his ears. As he did so the rest heard the clamour which had jolted him. Not unlike the drone of the rider beam—it scaled up to a screech which was real pain.
It continued steadily for a space and as Dane listened to it he became conscious of something else—a muffled rhythm deep within that drone—a rhythm he had known before—when he laid his hands upon the wall of the sinister valley. This disturbance was akin to the vibration in the distant rock!
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the sound was gone. Tang put on his earphones once more and listened for a signal—either from the missing flitter or from Ali’s personal com-unit.
“What is that?” Mura asked.
Captain Jellico shrugged. “Your guess is as good as ours. It may be a signal of some sort—been cutting in at regular intervals all day.”
“So we must admit—” that was Van Rycke looming in the door of the control cabin, “that we are not alone on Limbo. In fact there is much more to Limbo than meets the casual eye.”
Dane voiced his own suspicion. “Those archaeologists—” he began, but the Captain favoured him with a sharp pointed stare that stopped him almost in mid-word.
“We have no idea what is at the root of this,” Jellico said coldly. “You men get some food and rest—”
Dane, smarting from his abrupt dismissal, trailed Mura and Kosti down to the mess cabin. As they passed the Captain’s private quarters they could hear the wild shrieks of the Hoobat.
That thing sounded, Dane thought, just the way he felt. And even warm food, bearing no resemblance to the iron rations he had eaten earlier, did little to raise the general curtain of gloom.
But the meal had an excellent effect on Kosti’s spirits. “That Rip,” he announced to the table at large, “he’s got a lot of sense. And Mr. Wilcox, he knows what he’s doing. They’re all snug somewhere and’ll stay holed up until this stuff clears. Nobody’ll come out in this—”
Was Kosti right there, Dane wondered. Suppose there were those on Limbo who knew the tricks of the climate, who were familiar enough with such fogs to be able to navigate through them—use them as a cover—? That signal they had heard blatting out of the com—could it be a beam to guide some expedition creeping through the mist? An expedition heading towards the unsuspecting Queen?
CHAPTER EIGHT:
FOG BOUND
Those of the Queen’s men who had no definite duties engaging them elsewhere, drifted to the hatch which gave upon the grey wool of the new Limbian landscape. They would have liked to hole up close to the control section and Tang’s com, but the presence of the Captain there was a dampener. It was better to hunker down at the top of the ramp, look out into the mist, and strain one’s ears for the motor purr of a flitter which did not arrive.
“They’re smart,” observed Kosti for the twentieth time. “They won’t risk their necks ploughing through this muck. But Ali—that’s different. He was snatched before this started.”
“You think it is poachers?” ventured Weeks.
His big partner considered the point. “Poachers? Yeah—but on this Limbo what have they got to poach—tell me that? We aren’t pulling a cargo of sveek furs, nor arlun crystals—leastways I haven’t seen any of those lying around waiting to be picked up. What about those dead things back in that valley? Thorson,” he turned to Dane, “did they look as if they had anything worth poaching?”
“They weren’t armed—or even clothed—as far as we could tell,” Dane replied a bit absently. “And their fields grew spicy stuff I never saw before—”
“Drugs—could it be drugs now?” inquired Weeks.
“A new kind then—Tau didn’t recognize the leaves.” Dane’s head was up as he faced out into the mist. He was almost sure— there—there it was again! “Listen,” he caught at Kosti, dragged the big man out on the ramp.
“Hear anything now?” he demanded a moment later.
There was sound in the fog, a fog which was now three parts night, through which the signal light on the nose of the Queen could not cut. The regular beat of a true running motor was magnified by some trick of the mist until it seemed that a whole fleet of small flyers was bearing down upon the space ship from all points of the compass.
Dane whirled and brought his hand down on the lever which controlled the lights along the ramp. Even swirled in the fog as they were, some faint gleam might break through to offer a landing mark for the flitter. Weeks had disappeared. Dane could hear the clatter of his space boots on the ladder within as he sped with the news. But before the wiper could have reached control a new marker blazed into view, the full powered searchlight from the nose, a beacon which could not be blanketed out, no matter how its rays were diffused.
And in that same instant a dark object swept by, so close that Dane leaped back, certain it was going to graze the ramp. The beat of the motor was loud, then it thinned, to grow into a roar once more as the shadow appeared for a second time, circling closer to the ground.
It landed with an audible, smacking grind which suggested that the fog spoiled distance judgment. And to the foot of the ramp came three figures which continued to be muffled shapes until they were nearly at the hatch.
“Man—oh, man!” Rip’s rich voice came to the ears of the watchers as he halted to pat the side of the ship. “It’s good to see the old girl again—Lordy, it’s good !”
“How did you make it back through this?” Dane asked.
“We had to,” the astrogator-apprentice told him simply. “There was no place back in the ranges to set down. Those mountains are straight up and down—or they look that way. We got on the beam—except when—say, what’s the cause of that interference? We were thrown off twice by it. Couldn’t cut it out—”
Steen Wilcox and Tau followed him at a slower pace. The Medic moved wearily, his emergency kit in his hand. And Wilcox had only a grunt for the reception party, pushing past them to climb to control. But Rip lingered to ask another question.
“Ali—?”
Dane retold the story of what they had discovered in the valley clearing.
“But how—?” was Rip’s second puzzled question.
“We don’t know. Unless they went straight up. And it wasn’t space enough to hold a flitter. But look how those crawler tracks ran straight into the cliff. Rip, there’s something queer about Limbo—”
“How far was that valley from the ruins?” the astrogator-apprentice’s voice lost much of its warmth, it was quieter, with a new crispness.
“We were nearer to those than to the Queen. But the fog hit us on the way back and we didn’t see them—if we did pass over the location.”
“And you couldn’t raise Ali on the com-unit after that one interrupted signal?”
“Tang’s been trying. And we kept open all the time we were out.”
“They might have stripped that off him at once,” Rip conceded. “It would be a wise move for them. He could give us a fix otherwise—”
“But could we get a fix on a com-unit? On one which no one was using—” Dane began to see a thin chance. “That is if its power was still working?”
“I don’t know. But the range would be pretty limited. We could ask Tang—” Rip was already on his way up the ladder to where the com-tech was on duty.
Dane glanced at his watch, making a swift calculation squaring ship time with hours measured on Limbo. It was night. Suppose Tang was able to pick up a call from Ali’s com-unit— they could not trace it now.
They did not find the com-tech alone. All the officers of the Queen were there and again Tang was holding the earphones well away from his head so that they could hear the discordance which beat out from some hidden point in the fog-bound world.