The police officials went away again. They were embarrassed.
Trent supervised the beginning of repairs to the Yarrow's shot-punctured bow. They were not difficult. A few hull-plates had to be replaced entirely, but damaged frames could be straightened by equipment aground, and the shot-holes could be plugged or patch-welded and be practically as good as new. The inner-skin shot-holes required no more elaborate attention. The cargo bales damaged by shot came out. They were replaced by others. Loren's merchants offered to buy the damaged bales. They took them at a price to pay for the repair work twice over. Hopefully, they offered ghil fiber in payment, and Trent accepted it.
A ship went out to space from Loren. It also belonged to Marian's father. It carried a gun. Its bow was armored with sandbags inside. It carried guided missiles. It carried volunteers from the planetary police anxious to capture or destroy a pirate ship to make up for their embarrassment on discovering that they'd been an active partner of one.
The Cytheria did not come to port. According to the note from Marian, it had intended to leave the planet Sira the day the note was written. The letter had been brought to Trent, on Manaos, by the Yarrow. Immediately afterward, the threat from the pirates had arrived. Trent lifted the Yarrow from Manaos less than twelve hours later, when the Cytheria should just about have reached Midway. It should have left that planet almost immediately for Loren. It was certainly possible for it to have reached Loren even before the Yarrow.
It hadn't. It was now many days overdue.
The delay was entirely reasonable. The Cytheria could have gone to Midway by a roundabout route. It needn't have followed the regular ship lane from Sira to Midway. If there was a possibility of encountering pirates, it would be intelligent to follow a circuitous pathway. Pirates would tend to wait along the ship lanes with drive-detectors out and reporting the presence of any ship in overdrive for a completely unbelievable distance. If the Cytheria's skipper had made the journey roundabout, it would mean a longer journey. The Cytheria might not be overdue, if one knew the courses she'd followed.
Again, there might be alarm on Midway—there had been when the Yarrow stopped there—and the Cytheria could have stayed in port to wait until the pirate danger genuinely abated. She might be peacefully aground. There might be no ground for worry. But yet again, there might.
Perfectly reasonable causes might have operated to delay the Cytheria. But on the other hand she might have been taken by a pirate. In which case, Trent couldn't know where it had happened or where Marian, as a captive, might have been taken.
Days went by, and more days, and still more. Trent reminded himself of all the separate reasons for the Cytheria to be delayed… roundabout traveling, very sensible. Alarms of piracy to make her stay in port—entirely reasonable, perfectly possible, almost convincing. But not quite.
Trent suddenly realized that he didn't believe any of them. He simply had no more hope that Marian would ever arrive at Loren in the Cytheria. He had no hope she'd ever arrive anywhere. He was simply, desolately, and arbitrarily convinced that the Cytheria had been taken by pirates. Possibly by the Bear, which certainly wasn't the freebooter he'd encountered near the double yellow sun.
He gave no outward sign of his conclusion. There was nothing to be done about it. True, the Yarrow was fit to take to space again. True, the planetary president had sent word, several times, that he'd like to speak to Trent. But patch-weldings hardly mattered, and Trent didn't want to talk to Marian's father. He simply didn't want to. With piracy rife in the Pleiads, her father had let her travel. He was the owner of a privateer, and those who should know—Marian and the Hecla's skipper—declared that the pirate of the Hecla affair not only claimed to be the Bear but looked exactly like it.
Word came that the planetary president was coming to visit the Yarrow, which had defeated a pirate ship near the double yellow star. He was concerned because the ship gone to dispose of that disabled marauder hadn't yet returned.
Trent said sourly to the Yarrow's mate, "You can tell him that the police ship will have to rewind the pirate's drive even if it surrenders, if it's to bring that ship into port. Doing that will take time. You can say that maybe they had to use a guided missile on it and are trying to patch it up to come back. That'd take more time. Tell him anything you please. I don't want to talk to him!"
The mate asked, "What'll I tell him about the lady? His daughter?"
"Anything you like," growled Trent. "She should have written him what happened to the Hecla. But they say there's been no ship but us to land here in months. So they haven't had any off-planet mail unless in the one sack we brought here. Maybe he doesn't know about the Hecla. If he doesn't, you can tell him if you choose. I'm claiming salvage out of his pocket for getting her to port after she was abandoned. He'll probably dislike me for that. Anyway, I don't want to talk to him!"
"Where're you going?" asked the mate.
"Off somewhere until he leaves," said Trent. He shrugged. "I've agreed to take ghil-fiber for the money due us for what I've sold here. It's been suggested that I see what a ghil plantation is like. It was intended as a courtesy; I'll use it as an alibi."
The mate said nothing. Trent got a ground-car and left the spaceport before the planetary president could arrive. It was not polite, but Trent was past politeness now. The Cytheria was at least eight days overdue by any calculation at all, if her skipper hadn't stayed aground on Midway. If she'd been captured by a pirate ship near the beginning of her voyage, she could have been taken twenty-two days ago, which was well before a battered small ship brought the threat of the pirate to Manaos. Marian could have been dead for three weeks. Or she might not be dead.
Trent drove furiously to the ghil-fiber plantation. He wasn't interested in plantations. It was unbearable to think of Marian dead or a prisoner of pirates who'd promised to murder ten spacemen or passengers for every one of their number hanged. It was time for him to take action. It happened to be impossible to take appropriate action, but he had to do something! So he resolved savagely to take to space himself as soon as the planetary president would have left the Yarrow.
He had no information, but he'd had a program in mind when he took command of his ship. The owners had offered him salvage rights. He'd used them, as the Hecla proved. He had the choice of ports-of-call and other privileges the owners had granted. He'd use them, though not as might be expected. He'd had some definite ideas about pirate-hunting, which should be an extremely profitable business if one didn't happen to be killed at it. He'd thought of it as an approach to salvage on a considerable scale. He'd preferred to have had definite information to start with, but since he was now suddenly and irrevocably convinced that Marian was dead, he'd set about hunting pirates anyhow, and somehow try to pay back whoever had harmed her.
Meanwhile, he drove to the ghil plantation to stay where Marian's father wouldn't be. As a visitor from off-planet who was actually buying ghil fiber, he was given red-carpet treatment at the plantation. He saw fields upon fields of ghil plants, and planting machinery and cultivating machinery and harvesting machinery. He saw processing equipment and a small research laboratory for improving the quality of ghil seeds. The laboratory was run by a squarish elderly scientist who took it for granted that anybody who saw a ghil-plant field would immediately be fascinated by experiments in line-bred mutant field crops. To the original purpose of his research he'd added a search for another plant than ghil to make a new one-crop economy for Loren.