He could feel the ardor of Deneb's rays the instant they struck him; and before he had covered a third of the distance the back of his suit was painfully hot. Things were hot for his ex-crew as well; fully ten of the black monsters had reacted to the burst of — to them — overpoweringly attractive odor — or gorgeous color? — that had resulted when Malmeson had turned his welder on the metal where Cunningham had applied the frozen blood of their natural prey; and more of the same substance was now vaporizing under Deneb's influence as Malmeson, who had been lying in fragments of it, stood fighting off the attackers. He had a flame pistol, but it was slow to take effect on creatures whose very blood was molten metal; and his companion, wielding the diode unit on those who got too close, was no better off. They were practically swamped under wriggling bodies as they worked their way toward the air lock; and neither man saw Cunningham as, staggering even under the feeble gravity that was present, and fumbling with eye shield misted with sweat, he reached the same goal and disappeared within.
Being a humane person, he left the outer door open; but he closed and dogged the inner one before proceeding with a more even step to the control room. Here he unhurriedly removed his spacesuit, stopping only to open the switch of the power socket that was feeding the diode unit as he heard the outer lock door close. The flame pistol would make no impression on the alloy of the hull, and he felt no qualms about the security of the inner door. The men were safe, from every point of view.
With the welder removed from the list of active menaces, he finished removing his suit, turned to the medium transmitter, and coolly broadcast a call for help and his position in space. Then he turned on a radio transmitter, so that the rescuers could find him on the planet; and only then did he contact the prisoners on the small set that was tuned to the suit radios, and tell them what he had done.
“I didn't mean to do you any harm,” Malmeson's voice came back. “I just wanted the ship. I know you paid us pretty good, but when I thought of the money that could be made on some of those worlds if we looked for something besides crazy animals and plants, I couldn't help myself. You can let us out now; I swear we won't try anything more — the ship won't fly, and you say a Guard flyer is on the way. How about that?”
“I'm sorry you don't like my hobby,” said Cunningham. “I find it entertaining; and there have been times when it was even useful, though I won't hurt your feelings by telling you about the last one. I think I shall feel happier if the two of you stay right there in the air lock; the rescue ship should be here before many hours, and you're fools if you haven't food and water in your suits.”
“I guess you win, in that case,” said Malmeson.
“I think so, too,” replied Cunningham, and switched off.
“Trojan Fall”
A galaxy should be a perfect hiding place. A hundred billion suns and a hundred thousand light-years form an appallingly large haystack in which to seek any such submicroscopic needle as a man, or even a planet. A photograph of the Milky Way, or, better, a projection of such a photograph, can give some idea of the sense of confusion which is experienced by anyone faced with the task of combing such a maze.
That was La Roque's first impression, and his views of the galaxy had not been confined to photographs. Admittedly, he was used to interplanetary, rather than interstellar flight; but it is almost as easy to get lost inside solar systems as between them. So, when it became a matter of expedience for him to disappear from sight for a time, he decided quite abruptly that Sol's little family was too crowded.
Getting a ship, even legally, was not too difficult; flight between Sol and the nearer stars was fairly common, and only the usual customs restrictions applied to private journeys. La Roque intended that his journey should be more private than usual.
He purchased a craft; the event which made departure so urgent had left him with plenty of funds. She was about as small as a second-order flyer could be: a metal egg about seventy feet long and thirty in diameter at the widest point. She had the required two second-order converters, either capable of holding the ship and six hundred tons of additional mass in the necessary condition for interstellar flight above light-speed. Her actual capacity for freight was nowhere near that figure, of course. The converters consumed mercury, but could be modified to take any reasonably dense metal of low melting point.
La Roque preferred the concealment of crowds, and for that reason chose to make his departure from the ever-busy Allahabad port. It was a little before midnight, on a July evening, that a pilot beam guided his ship beyond 66 the Earth's atmosphere; by 1 A.M. he had switched free, pointed the blunt nose of his ship at the center of the Milk Dipper's bowl, checked his personal equalizer, and shunted into second-order flight. The universe around him remained visible after a fashion, but aberration altered its appearance vastly. Every star swung forward; and at four hundred times the speed of light, they were all contained in a circular area, centered on his line of flight and a little over eight minutes of arc in radius. Sol was dead ahead, apparently, and prevented any possible view of his goal which might have been furnished by a telescope.
La Roque was not a navigator, and knew no more astronomy than the average educated person of his time. Although the beacon stars Rigel, Deneb, and Canopus would all be visible in any part of the galaxy his ship was likely to reach, they were useless to him. His only hope of eventual return to the Earth lay in the device which, every hour, automatically cut the second-order fields for a split second and simultaneously photographed the heavens dead astern. Even that was likely to be useless if he crossed a region of low star density, where there would be no nearby, recognizable objects on the films to guide his return. He had had sense enough to realize this, and consequently had headed in the general direction of the galactic center. He was reasonably certain of finding a habitable planet; the star that lacked worlds was the exception rather than the rule. Earth-type worlds were rarer, but frequent enough to have forced the enactment of several regulations against unrestricted colonization.
Having made the first step in his getaway, he settled down to figuring out the probable line of action of the law. It would, with luck, be a full month before his means of escape would be deduced, for it was known that he was not trained in cosmic navigation, and his ship would not be missed until sufficient time had elapsed for it to make a round trip to Tau Ceti, which he had indicated at Allahabad as his destination. It would take another day or two to compute his actual direction of departure, from the recording at the observatories which had presumably picked up his “wake.” From then on, time would be short; any League cruiser of reasonable size could cover in two or three days any distance he could hope to put behind him in that month. It is an unescapable fact that the speed obtainable from a second-order unit is directly dependent on its size.
Therefore, it was essential that a hiding place be found. A planet, where the ship could be buried or otherwise concealed, would present an impossible search problem to a hundred League ships — if there were no inhabitants to hold inconvenient memories of his landing. He might find such a world by random search, but the distance he could travel in his month of grace was limited; and, he realized, very few suns lay within that distance. He got out a set of heliocentric charts and began his search on paper.
There is no excuse for him. His destination should have been planned before he left the ground — planned not only as to planet, but to location on the planet. He had always planned his “deals” with meticulous care; and had sneered at less careful colleagues whose failure to do so had resulted in more or less lengthy retirement to League reform institutions. It is impossible to say why he didn't see that the same principle might apply to interstellar flight. But he didn't.