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Such feverish attempts to find reason for even the most unlikely hopes kept Howell busy. There was no more profitable thing for him to do. The Marintha floated effortlessly upon the long curved course which should bring her to rendezvous with the green planet. Howell listened for communications between the two slug-ships. Their drives were silent now. He stayed beside the control-board, listening and watching and listening again, until from sheer exhaustion he fell into nerve-racked sleep.

Karen waked him, her eyes anxious.

“I know you need sleep,” she said unhappily, “but there’s something coming in and we don’t know what to make of it.”

He was instantly wide awake. He stared at the screens. The now-familiar pattern of the stars was unchanged. The all-wave receiver gave out only the tiny cracklings of the sun and small other sounds perfectly natural in a planetary system.

“What is it?” he demanded.

“It just stopped. It’ll come back. It—it sounds like words.”

He shook himself. He stood up and moved himself. He ached from the hours of uneasy partial slumber he’d had.

Then there were new sounds. They weren’t whinings. They weren’t the beast-howl, beast-mooing noises with which the Marintha had once been challenged. These new sounds began faintly, and strengthened faintly, and died away again. Karen parted her lips to speak, but he waved her to silence. The sounds came again.

Howell risked raising the sensitivity of the all-wave receiver by a trifle. The sounds came once more, and louder.

“They’re words,” said Howell.

He wanted to rejoice. He wanted to feel that something was breaking for the four of them in the Marintha. He wanted desperately to credit fate or chance or destiny with some sense of fairness—which would result in Karen’s safety. But there’d been too many bad breaks.

“If,” he said deliberately, after a long time, “if that isn’t another decoy-call like the one you answered, Karen, this may be what we haven’t really hoped for. But I’m not going to answer it. Not yet!”

He settled down to listen to it. Hours after the first hearing, he believed he recognized certain sequences in the sounds. They came again and again. The sounds came at intervals of about a quarter of an hour. They continued for a minute or more. Then they faded out. Presently they came back, and he recognized the same sequences of syllables.

It was a taped message, transmitted without a pause by an automatic transmitter. But the way it faded in and out again was proof that it was a beamed message, sweeping back and forth so that a large volume of space would receive a reasonably strong signal at the cost of its being audible only at intervals. It was like a position-indicator on a seacoast. It was like a traffic-lane marker for atmospheric fliers. It was like the lighthouses—of ancient days, at least identifying themselves and possibly telling more than their own identity. It could even be a distress signal.

Or it could be a trick of the slug-ship’s crew.

Howell doubted everything except the most undesirable of interpretations. But even he had to admit that if it were a human broadcast, it could mean that this was an area and a solar system where slug-ships did not come. Otherwise the human-voiced people would not have dared—No! It might mean that here humans were not afraid of the slug-ships! It could be a matter-of-fact announcement of the location of a city the slug-ships dared not attack. It could be a combat-base ,I of enemies of the slug-ship creatures. It could have a fighting force strong enough to give battle to any force brought against it.

It could be almost anything. Those were the encouraging ideas which Howell regarded with pessimistic suspicion. There was the possibility that the Marintha actually neared safety, but that one slug-ship dared make a foray here, and that it would rush upon and destroy the Marintha before help could come from the green world.

In any case, if there were humans aground on the green planet, it should be possible to communicate with them and make friends with them and have Karen at least in no such danger as she was in now.

But there was the slug-ship! Howell wouldn’t risk a call to the planet ahead. Not until the Marintha was much nearer. Not until he began to pick up the radiation-signals that fill all space near a centre of civilization. The most he would risk—so great was his distrust of all things that might harm Karen—the utmost he’d risk was the energizing of the beam-locator. And it indicated that the beamed broadcast came from the green planet toward which the Marintha floated. More, it pointed to one spot where now-visible continents almost divided a muddy-coloured sea.

The electron telescope told more and more about the planet as the Marintha floated nearer. It was a good world. There were seas and islands and continents between two ice-caps of which one was larger than the other. There was an area which was probably desert, and there were mountain-ranges which said that there should be rain-forests. But he saw no sign of agriculture. At that, though, foodstuff on this world might grow mainly on trees, and there would be no need for vast clearings and seasonally planted crops.

But there were no signs of cities. Not one. The beam-direction locator, tuned to pin-point the source of the monotonous, fading-in-and-fading-out broadcast, said that it came from a peninsula jutting out into a world-girdling sea, just where two continents almost came together. There was a small circular area here which looked different from its surroundings. But the most painstaking search showed no sign of civilized development.

Howell, having yielded to faint and desperate hopes, now felt himself sinking back into complete discouragement.

“The worst I can imagine,” he told Karen gloomily, “is that either it’s a trick of the slug-ship creatures, or else instead of being help for us, it’s a call for help for someone else. It could be a distress-call from a human ship, in a part of space the slug-ships usually stay away from. Even that could be a break—maybe! It wouldn’t be too good, but we need anything good we can get. But I’m not sure! I’m suspicious of I-don’t-know-what. Yet I can’t bring myself to believe that we shouldn’t give it a good close look.”

“I think you’re exactly right,” said Karen. She looked at him with a certain anxiety. “My father thinks so too.”

Breen said comfortably, “Ketch thinks the same. He was telling Karen so.”

At just this moment Ketch appeared and said amiably, “What was I telling Karen? It was probably a lie.”

Howell said doggedly, doubting his own wisdom but with thoughts of the slug-ship haunting him, “I’m going to make one orbit low down, swinging over the peninsula the beam-cast comes from. We’ll all use our eyes, and there’ll be the cameras. We’ll be moving too fast to use the electron telescope. If we’re not shot down—we’ll be going fast, and even artillery-sized blasters have a limited velocity in air—if we’re not shot down and there’s no attempt at it, we’ll land on the second orbiting. Right?”

Ketch said, “There’s nothing else to do, is there?”

Breen agreed complacently. “You’re the skipper,” he said.

He beamed, and Howell felt a certain astonished annoyance that any man could be so blithely and blindly confident that everything would come out all right in the end. Howell was acutely aware that he might be making a decision that would doom all of them. But in his best judgment they were already doomed. And neither of the others offered to take charge. They didn’t even object to what he proposed. It threw all the responsibility on his shoulders.