First the prospector hulk and then this—which must have been far more rewarding. Survivors of earlier crashes could have been searching for supplies, for material to make life more endurable but—Rip had an answer to that line of thought and he gave it in a single outburst:
“The Survey men were blaster burned!”
Blaster burned! Just as the globe things had been killed in that valley. Ruthless cruelty of a sort unknown to the civilized space lanes was in power on Limbo. Then another announcement from Mura electrified them all.
“This I believe, is the missing Rimbold!”
The Survey ship whose disappearance had indirectly led to the auction on Naxos, and so their own arrival on Limbo! But how had it reached here and what had brought it crashing down on this world? Survey ships, because of the nature of their duty, were as nearly foolproof as any ships could be. In a hundred years perhaps two had been lost. Yet the Rimbold, for all of its safety devices and the drilled know-how of its experienced crew, had been as luckless as the earlier ships they had discovered.
Dane slid down on the rope, Kosti following him. The sun had gone under a cloud and there was a spatter of rain on the rocks about. It was thickening into a drizzle as the steward joined them. Whatever he had seen within the Rimbold, it had not upset him as completely as it had Rip and Kosti. Instead he had a thoughtful, almost puzzled look.
“Does not Van tell a story like this?” he asked suddenly. “It is one from the old days when ships rode the sea waves not the star lanes. Then there was said to be a place in a western ocean of our own Earth where no winds blew and a weed grew thick, trapping within it the ships of those days so that they were matted together into a kind of floating land of decay and death—”
Rip’s attention was caught, Dane saw him nod. “The Sago—no—the Sargasso Sea!”
“That is so. Here, too, we have something like—a Sargasso of space which in some way traps ships, bringing them in to smash against its rocks and be held forever captive. And whatever it is must have great power. This Survey ship is no experimental prospector of the early days when calculations were faulty and engines could easily fail.”
“But,” Wilcox protested, “the Queen made a routine landing without any trouble at all!”
“Did it occur to you,” Mura said, “that she might have been permitted to make such a landing—for a reason—”
That would explain a great many things, but the idea was chilling. It suggested that the Solar Queen was a pawn in some one’s game—Rich’s? And that she no longer had any control over her destiny.
“Let’s get along!” Wilcox shifted his weight and started limping back to where they had left the crawler.
And from then on they made no more side expeditions hunting wrecks. There were probably more of them to be found, Dane suspected. Mura’s idea had taken hold of his imagination—a Sargasso of space, drawing into its clutch wanderers of the lanes which came into the area of its baleful influence—whatever that influence could be. Why had the Queen been able to make a normal landing on a world where other ships crashed? Was it because they had had Rich and his men on board? Who and what was Rich?
They splashed through a stream which had been fed by the rain. It was there that Wilcox pulled up the crawler and spoke: “We must be getting close to a point opposite the Queen. If we don’t want to miss her we should get aloft—” He pointed to the cliffs.
In the end it was decided to make temporary camp with the crawler for their base, leaving Wilcox and two others there, while two more in turn climbed the heights and scouted ahead. It was now past noon and with the coming of night they would be able to move freely. So they must discover their vantage point before dark.
Rip and Mura made the first scout, but when Shannon came back to report—since they dared no longer trust to the com-calls which others might catch—it was to say that the Queen was in sight but farther ahead.
With caution Wilcox started up the crawler, taking it out of the valley they had just selected, through the rough edge of the plains, until he had gained a mile beyond their first proposed base. Concealed there behind a tall outcrop, he waited for a second report—and this time Mura made it.
“From there,” he indicated a pinnacle of rock, “one can see well. The Queen is sealed—and there are others around her. As yet we have not had a chance to count them or see their arms—”
Kosti, his fear of the heights still operating to keep him from climbing, had prowled along on the plain. Now he returned with news as much to the point as Mura’s.
“There is a place, right up there behind the lookout, where you can park the crawler and it can’t be seen from any angle—”
Wilcox headed the machine for that point and the jetman took the astrogator’s place to manoeuvre the crawler into the confined quarters. While Kosti and Wilcox stayed there, Dane climbed with Mura up to the spy post where Rip was already stationed, his back supported by a rock, far-distance glasses to his eyes as as he faced south, looking out over the burnt-off land.
There was the sky-pointing needle of the Queen. It was true she was sealed, the ramp was in, the hatch closed, she might have made ready for a blast-off. Dane unhooked his own glasses and adjusted the range until the rocky terrain about the ship’s fins leaped up at him.
CHAPTER TWELVE:
SHIP BESIEGED
Even after he had the glasses focused he could not be sure that he saw more than just one strangely shaped vehicle and the two men by it. To Dane’s angle of sight the party appeared to be fully exposed to those in the Queen. And he wondered why the Traders had not attacked—if this was the enemy.
“Right out in the open—” he said aloud. But Rip was not so sure.
“I don’t think so. There’s a ridge there. Visibility’s poor now, but it would show in sunlight. With a stun rifle—”
Yes, with a stun rifle, and this elevation to aid him, a man might pick off those foreshortened figures—even with the range as great as it was. Unfortunately their full armament now consisted of only short range weapons—the close-to-innocuous sleep ray rods, and the blasters—potent enough, but only for in-fighting.
“Might as well wish for a bopper while you’re about it,” Dane commented.
Both flitters had disappeared from the landing place near the ship. He supposed they had been warped in for safety. Now he swept the ground slowly, trying to pick out any shape which did not seem natural. And within five minutes he was sure he had pinpointed at least as many posts of two or three watchers staked out in an irregular circle about the ship. Four of the groups had transportation—machines which resembled their own crawlers to some degree but were narrower and longer, as if they had been designed to negotiate the valleys of this planet.
“Speaking of boppers,” Rip’s voice startled Dane because of its tenseness, “What’s that? Over there—”
Dane’s glasses obediently turned west. “Where?”
”See that rock that looks a little like a hoobat’s head—to the left of that.”
Dane searched for a rock suggesting Captain Jellico’s pet monstrosity. He finally found it. To the left—now—yes! A straight barrel. Was that—could that be the barrel of a portable bopper, wheeled into a position which commanded the ship, from which it could drop its deadly little eggs right under her fins?
A bopper couldn’t begin to make any impression on a sealed ship, that was true. But it could and would bring sudden death to those venturing out into the gas which burst from its easily shattered ammunition. One had to take a bopper seriously.
“Space!” he spit out. “We must have strayed into a darcon’s nest—”