Bernie said over his shoulder, "Home, huh? That place you call Halsey's Planet?"
Ross shook his head. "Not this tune. I got this far and I'm still alive; maybe I can finish the job. Anyway, I'll try. The first solid suggestion I've had ever since I took off was what that half-witted old moron——" He ignored a little gasp from Helena.
"———said back on 'Minerva.' If Flarney had lived, he would have gone there; we'll go there now."
He finished manipulating the calculator and began to set it up on the board. He said, "The name of the place is—Earth."
10
IT took Ross a while to learn a lesson, but when he learned it, it stuck. This time, he promised himself, no spaceport.
They sneaked into the solar system that held fabulous old Earth from far outside the ecliptic, where the chance of radar detection was least; they came to a relative dead halt millions of miles from the planet and cautiously scanned the surrounding volume of space with their own radar.
No ships seemed to be in space. Earth's solar system turned out to be a trivial affair, only five planets, scarcely a half-dozen moons among them. None of the planets except Earth itself was anything like inhabitable.
"Hold tight," said Ross grimly, "I'm not so good at this fine navigation." He cautiously applied power along a single vector; the starship leaped and bucked. He corrected with another; and the distant sun swelled in their view plates with frightening rapidity. The alarm beeps bleated furiously, and the automatic cutoff restored all controls to neutral.
Ross, sweating, picked himself up from the floor and staggered back to the panel. Helena said carefully, "You're doing fine, Ross, but if you'd like me to take over for a minute——"
Ross swallowed his pride and stood back. After one wide-eyed stare of shock—she wasn't even calculating!— he gripped the loops and closed his eyes and waited for death.
There was a punishing bump and his eyes flew open. Helena was looking at him apologetically. "You would have done it better," she lied, "but anyway we're down."
Ross lied, "Of course, but I'm glad you had the practice. Where—uh, where are we?"
Helena silently showed him the radar plot. Earth, it seemed, had a confusing multiplicity of continents; they were on one in the northern hemisphere, a large one as Earth's continents went, and smack in the middle of it. It was night on their side of Earth just then; and, by the plot, a largish city was only a dozen or so miles away.
"Okay," said Ross wearily, "landing party away. Helena, you stay here while Bernie and I——"
Helena said simply, "No."
Ross stared at her a minute, then shrugged. "All right. Then Bernie will stay while———"
"I will not!" said Bernie.
Clearly it was time for a showdown. Ross roared: "Who's the captain here, anyway?"
"You are," Helena said promptly. "As long as I don't have to stay here alone."
"Yeah," said Bernie.
Ross said, "Oh." He thought for a while and then said, "Well, let's all go." They thought it was a wonderful idea.
Earth wasn't a very unusual planet—lots of green sand and purple vegetation. Either the master star chart was wrong or the gravity meter was off; the former, strangely enough, gave Earth's gravity as 1.000000 and the latter as O.8952, a whopping ten per cent discrepancy. Further, the principal inert gas hi Earth's atmosphere was, according to the master chart's planetary supplement, nitrogen; and according to the ship's instruments was indubitably neon. A terrific aurora polaris display constantly flickering hi the northern sky bore that out.
But the gap between the chart and the facts didn't particularly worry Ross as they swung along overland. So the chart was off, or perhaps things had changed. This was— according to Flarney via Whitker—the place where people knew about the formula, where his questions would be answered. After this, he thought happily, it's off to Halsey's Planet and an unspecified glorious future, revered as the savior of humanity instead of a lousy Yards clerk pushing invoices around. And Helena, he thought sentimentally....
He turned to smile at her and found she and Bernie were giggling.
"Listen, you two!" Captain Ross roared. "Haven't you learned anything yet? What's the good of us exploring if we stroll along with our silly heads in the clouds, not paying attention? Do you realize that this place may be as dangerous as Azor or worse?"
"Ross——" Helena said.
"Don't interrupt! What this outfit needs is some discipline—tightening up. You two have got to accept your responsibilities. Keep alert! Be on the lookout! Any single thing out of the ordinary may be a deathtrap. Watch for——"
Helena was looking not at Ross but over his shoulder. Bernie was making strangled noises and pointing.
Ross turned. Behind him stood a mechanical monstrosity vaguely recognizable as a heavily-armed truck, its motor faintly humming. A man leaned darkly from the cab and transfixed them to the ground with a powerful spotlight. From the dazzling circle of light his voice came, hasty and furtive. "Thought it was two women and a man, but I guess you're the ones. Ugh, those faces on you! Yes, you're the ones. Get in. Fast."
The light blinked out. When their eyes adjusted to the dimmer illumination of the stars and the aurora display they saw a side door in the body of the truck standing open. Too, one of the long, slim gun barrels with which the truck seemed copiously supplied swiveled to cover them.
Ross stupidly read aloud a sign on the truck: "Jones Floor-Cover Company. Finest Tile on Jones. Wall-to-Wall a Specialty. 'Rugs Fit For a Jones'."
"Yeah," the man said. "Yeah, yeah. Just don't try to buy any. Get in, for Jones' sake! If I'd of known you were half-wits I wouldn't of taken this job for a million Joneses, cash. Get in!" His voice was hysterical and the gun covering them moved ominously. "If this is a frame——" he began to shrill.
"Get in," Ross said shakily to the others. They climbed in and the door slammed violently and automatically. Helena began to cry in a preoccupied sort of way and Bernie began a long, mumbling inventory of his own mental weaknesses for ever getting involved in this crackbrained, imbecilic, feeble-minded. . . .
There were windows in the truck body and Ross turned from one to another. He saw the guns on the cab telescope into stubs, the stubs fold into the mounts, the mounts smoothly descend flush with the sheet metal. He saw the cursing driver manipulate a dozen levers as the car began to glide across the green sand, purple-dotted with vegetation. Finally, through the rear window, he saw three figures racing across the sand waving their arms, rapidly being left behind. All he could make out was that they seemed to be two women and a man.
Helena was wailing softly, "———and I am not ugly and just because we're young and we're strangers isn't any reason to go around insulting people——"
From Bernie: "——fatheaded, goggly-eyed, no-browed, slobber-lipped, dim-witted——"
"Shut up," Ross said softly. "Before I bang both your heads together."
They stared.
"Thank you. We've got to think. What's this spot we're in? What can we do about it? I don't have any F-T-L contact name for Earth and obviously this fellow picked us up by mistake. I saw two women and a man—remember what he said?—just now trying to catch up with us. He seems to be some kind of criminal. Otherwise why a disguised gun-carrier? Why floor coverings 'but don't try to buy any'? And Jones seems to be the name of the local political subdivision, the name of the local deity and the currency. That's important. It points to a rigid one-man dictatorship—Jones, of course, or possibly his dynasty. What course of action should we take? Kick it around. Helena, what do you think?"