The man snarled. “We ought to roast ’em all! They hang around and try to crack our skulls every time we have to come through these hills. We’ll have to use the blasters again—if we can catch up with ’em. Trouble is they move too fast—”
“Yes, they provide a problem,” Mura returned soothingly. “Around here now—” He urged their captive around the point of the cliff into the other valley. But for the first time the man seemed to sense that something was wrong.
“Why go in here?” he asked, his pale eyes moving from one to the other of the Traders. “This isn’t a through valley.”
“We have our crawler here. It would be better for you to ride—in your shaken condition, would it not?” Mura continued persuasively.
“Huh? Yes, it might! I’ve a bad head, that’s sure.” His hand arose to his head and he winced as it touched a point above his right ear.
Dane let out his breath. Mura was running this perfectly. They were going to be able to get the fellow back where they wanted him without any trouble at all.
Mura had kept his clasp on their charge’s arm, and now he steered him around a screen of boulders to face the crawler, Kosti and Wilcox. It was the machine that gave the truth away.
The captive stiffened and halted so suddenly that Dane bumped into him. His eyes shifted from the machine to the men by it. His hands went to his belt, only to tell him that he was unarmed.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
“That works two ways, fella,” Kosti fronted him. “Suppose you tell us who you are—”
The man made as if to turn and looked over his shoulder down the valley as if hoping to see a rescue party there. Then Mura’s grip screwed him back to his former position.
“Yes,” the steward’s soft voice added, “we greatly wish to know who you are.”
The fact that he was fronted by only four must have triggered the prisoner’s courage. “You’re from the ship—” he announced triumphantly.
“We are from a ship,” corrected Mura, “there are many ships on this world, many, many ships.”
He might have slapped the fellow with his open hand, for the effect that speech had. And Dane was inspired to add:
“There is a Survey ship—”
The prisoner swayed, his bloodstained face pale under space tan, his lower lip pinched between his teeth as if by that painful gesture he could forego speech.
Wilcox had seated himself on the crawler. Now he calmly drew his blaster, balancing the ugly weapon on his knee pointing in the general direction of the prisoner’s middle.
“Yes, there are quite a few ships here,” he said. They might have been speaking of the weather, but for the set of the astrogator’s jaw. “Which one do you think we hail from?”
But their captive was not yet beaten. “You’re from the one out there—the Solar Queen.”
“Why? Because no one survived in the others?” Mura asked quietly. “You had better tell us what you know, my friend.”
“That’s right.” Kosti moved forward a pace until his many inches loomed over the battered driver. “Save us time and you trouble, if you speak up now, flyboy. And the more time it takes, the more impatient we’re going to get—understand?”
It was plain that the prisoner did. The threat which underlay Mura’s voice was underlined by Kosti’s reaching hands.
“Who are you and what are you doing here?” Wilcox began the interrogation for the second time.
The knockout delivered by the bogies had undoubtedly softened up the driver to begin with. But Dane was inclined to believe that it was Mura and Kosti who finished the process.
“I’m Lav Snall,” he said sullenly. “And if you’re from the Solar Queen, you know what I’m doing here. This isn’t going to get you anywhere. We’ve got your ship grounded for just as long as we want.”
“This is most interesting,” Wilcox drawled. “So that ship out on the plain is grounded for as long as you want, it it? Where’s your maul—invisible?”
The prisoner showed his teeth in a grin which was three-quarters sneer. “We don’t need a maul—not here on Limbo. This whole world’s a trap—when we want to use it.”
Wilcox spoke to Mura. “Was his head badly injured?”
The steward nodded. “It must have been—to addle his wits so. I can not judge truly, I am no medic.”
Snall rose to the bait. “I’m not space-whirly if that’s what you mean. You don’t know what we found here—a Forerunner machine and it still operates! It can pull ships right out of space—brings ’em here to crash. When that’s running your Queen can’t lift—not even if she were a Patrol Battlewagon she couldn’t. In fact we can pull in a battlewagon if and when we want to—!”
“Most enlightening,” was Wilcox’s comment. “So you’ve got some sort of an installation which can pull ships right out of space. That’s a new one for me. Did the Whisperers tell you all about it?”
Snall’s cheeks showed a tinge of dark red. “I’m not whirly, I tell you!”
Kosti laid his hands on the prisoner’s shoulders and forced him to sit down on a rock. “We know,” he repeated in a mock soothing tone. “Sure—there’s a great big machine here with a Forerunner running it. It reaches out and grabs—just like this!” He clutched with his own big fist at the empty air an inch or two beyond Snall’s nose.
But the prisoner had recovered a little of his poise. “You don’t have to believe me,” he returned. “Just watch and see what happens if that pigheaded captain of yours tries to upship here. It won’t be pretty. And it won’t be long before you’re gathered up, either—”
“I suppose you have ways of running us down?” Wilcox’s left eyebrow slanted up under his helmet. “Well, you haven’t contacted us yet and we’ve done quite a bit of travelling lately.”
Snall looked from one to the another. There was a faint puzzlement in his attitude.
“You’re wearing Trade dress,” he repeated aloud the evidence gathered by his eyes. “You have to be from the Queen.”
“But you’re not quite sure, are you?” prodded Mura. “We may be from some other spacer you trapped with this Forerunner device. Are you certain that there are no other survivors of crashes roaming through these valleys?”
“If there are—they won’t be walking about long!” was Snall’s quick retort.
“No. You have your own way of dealing with them, don’t you? With this?” Wilcox lifted the blaster so that it now centred upon the prisoner’s head rather than his middle. “Just as you handled some of those aboard the Rimbold.”
“I wasn’t in on that!” Snall gabbled. In spite of the morning chill there were drops of moisture ringing his hairline.
“It seems to me that you are all outlaws,” Wilcox continued, still in a polite, conversational tone. “Are you sure you haven’t been Patrol Posted?”
That did it. Snall jumped. He got about a foot away before Kosti dragged him back.
“All right—so I’ve been posted!” he snarled at Wilcox as the jetman smacked him down on the rock once more. “What are you going to do about it? Burn me when I’m unarmed? Go ahead—do it!”
Traders could be ruthless if the time and place demanded ice-cold tactics, but Dane knew now that the last thing Wilcox would do was to burn Snall down in cold blood. Even if the fact that he was Patrol Posted as a murderous criminal, with a price on his head, put him outside the law and absolved his killer from any future legal complications.
“Why should we kill you?” asked Mura calmly. “We are Free Traders. I think that you know very well what that means. A swift death by a blaster is a very easy way into the Greater Space, is it not? But out on the Rim, in the Wild Worlds, we have learned other tricks. So you do not believe that, Lav Snall?”
The steward had made no threatening grimaces, his pleasant face was as blandly cheerful as ever. But Snall’s eyes jerked away from that face. He swallowed in a quick gulp.