It had taken a beating, Tom saw. The wingtips were crumpled, the fuselage punctured. (The covering was mostly some fluorosynthetic. What a metal shortage they must have here!) But it ought to fly anyhow, after a fashion. Given a gravity drive, however weak, airfoils were mainly for auxiliary lift and control.
“In we go,” Tom said. He squeezed his bulky form behind Aran’s seat so that it concealed him. The blaster remained in his fist, ready to fire through the back.
But there was no trouble. Aran followed instructions. He called his squadron: “—Yes, you’re right, I did ‘cide I’d try looking, at the ship. And no one! None aboard. ‘Least, none I saw. Maybe robos fought us, or maybe the rest of the crew got away, on foot, not seen. I found a switch, looked like a main powerline breaker, and opened it. Maybe now I can rise.”
And he started the engine. The airboat climbed, wobbling on its damaged surfaces. A cheer sounded from the receiver. Tom wished he could see the face in the screen, but he dared not risk being scanned himself.
“You land, if Engineer Weyer approves,” Aran directed. “Go aboard. Be careful. Me, best I take my craft back to base immediately.”
Tom had figured that would be a natural move for a pilot on Nike, even a squadron leader. A plane was obviously precious. It couldn’t get to the repair shop too fast.
He must now hope that Aran’s expression and tone didn’t give him away. The “fish” was no actor. But everyone was strung wire-taut. Nobody noticed how much more perturbed this fellow was. After a few further words had passed, Man signed off and started west.
“Keep low,” Tom said. “Like you can’t get much altitude. Soon’s you’re out o’ their sight here, swing north. Find us a good secret place to land. I think we got a bucketful to say to each other, no?”
One craft was bound eagerly down. The rest stayed at hover. They’d, soon learn that the spaceship was, indeed, deserted. Hence, they wouldn’t suspect what had happened to Aran until he failed, to report. However, that wasn’t a long, time. He, Roan Tom, had better get into a bolt-hole quick! .
The volcano’s northern side was altogether wild. On the lower flanks, erosion had created, a rich lava soil and vegetation was dense. For some reason it was principally native Nikean, dominated by primitive but tree-sized “ferns.” An antigrav flyer could push its way under their soft branches and come to rest beneath the overhang of a cliff, camouflaged against aerial search.
Tom climbed out of the cockpit and stretched to uncramp himself. The abri was rough stone at his back, the forest brooded shadowy before him. Flecks of copper sunlight on bluish-green fronds and the integuments of bumbling giant pseudo-insects made the scene look as if cast in metal. But water rilled nearby, and the smells of damp growth were organic enough.
“C’mon, son. Relax with me,” Tom invited. “I won’t eat you. ‘Specially not if you’ve packed along a few sandwiches.”
“Food? No.” Yanos Aran spoke as stiffly as he moved.
“Well, then we’ll have to make do with what iron rations I got in my pockets.” Tom sighed. He flopped down on a chair-sized boulder, took out pipe and tobacco pouch, and consoled himself with smoke.
He needed consolation. He was a fugitive on an un—known planet. His ship had been taken, his wives were out of touch; an attempt to raise Dagny on the plane’s transmitter, using a Krakener military band, had brought silence. She must already have discarded her telespace armor.
“And all ‘count of a stupid lingo mistake!” he groaned. Aran sat down on another rock and regarded him with eyes in which alertness was replacing fear. “You say you are not truly our friend?”
“Not in your sense. Look, where I come from, the Aran word ‘friend’ means… well, fellow you like, and who likes you. When I told your Engineer we were friends, I wanted him to understand we didn’t aim him any harm, in fact we could do good business with him.”
“Business!” Aran exploded.
“Whoops-la. Sorry. Said the wrong thing again, didn’t I?”
“I think,” Aran replied slowly “what you have in mind is what we would call “change.’ You wanted to ‘change goods and services with our people. And to you, a ‘friend’ is what we call a ‘camarado.’ ”
“Reckon so. What’re your definitions?”
“A friend is a space raider such as did business with our planet some five years agone. They destroyed the last great cities we had left from the Terran Empire days, and none knows how many million Nikeans they killed.”
“Ah, now we’re gettin’ somewhere. Let’s straighten out for me what did happen.”
Aran’s hostility had not departed, but it had diminished. He was intelligent and willing to cooperate within the limits of loyalty to his own folk. Information rushed out of him.
Nike did not appear to be unique, except in its planetology. Tom asked about that. Aran was surprised. Was his world so unusual per se?
He knew only vague traditions and a few fragmentary written accounts of other planetary systems. Nike was discovered and colonized five hundred-odd years ago—about a thousand standard years. It was always a backwater. Fundamentally agricultural because of its shortage of heavy metals, it had no dense population, no major libraries or schools. Thus, when the Empire fell apart, knowledge vanished more quickly and thoroughly here than most places. Nikean society disintegrated; what had been an Imperial sub-province became hundreds of evanescent kingdoms, fiefs and tribes.
The people were on their way back, Aran added defiantly. Order and a measure of, prosperity had been restored in the advanced countries. As yet, they paid mere lip service to an “Emperor,” but the concept of global government did now, exist, Technology was improving. Ancient apparatus was being repaired and put back into service, or being reproduced on the basis of what diagrams and manuals could be found. Schemes had been broached for making interplanetary ships. Some dreamers had hoped that in time the Nikeans might end their centuries-long isolation themselves, by re-inventing the lost theory and practice of hyperdrive.
For that, of course, as for much else, the tinkering of technicians was insufficient. Basic scientific research must be done. But this was also slowly being started. Had not Aran remarked that his father was head cornputerman in the Engineer’s court? He used a highly sophisticated machine which had survived to the present day and which two generations of modern workers had finally learned how to operate.
Its work at present was mainly in astronomy. While some elementary nucleonics had been preserved through the dark ages—being essential to the maintenance of what few atomic power plants rcmaincd—practically all information about the stars had vanished. Today’s astronomers had learned that their sun (as distinguished from their planet) was not typical of its neighborhood. It was unpredictably variable, and not even its ground state could be fitted onto the main sequence diagram. No one had yet developed a satisfactory theory as to what made this sun abnormal, but the consensus was that it must be quite a young star.
One geologist had proposed checking this idea by establishing the age of the planet. Radioactive minerals should provide a clock. The attempt had failed, partly because of the near-nonexistence of isotopes with suitable half-lives and partly, Tom suspected, because of lousy laboratory technique. But passing references in old books did seem to confirm the idea held by latter-day theorists, that stars and planets condensed out of interstellar gas and dust. If so, Nike’s sun could be very new, as, cosmic time went, and not yet fully stabilized.
“Aye, Ed guess that myself,” Tom nodded.