An hour after he had started back to the farm, looking suddenly a little forlorn, the trailer swung off the valley road into a narrow forest path. Here the pony lengthened its stride, and less than five minutes later they entered a curving ravine, at the far end of which lay something that Grimp would have recognized instantly, from his one visit to the nearest port city, as a small spaceship.
A large round lock opened soundlessly in its side as they approached. The pony came to a stop. Grandma got down from the driver’s seat and unhitched it. The pony walked into the lock, and the trailer picked its wheels off the ground and floated in after it. Grandma Wannattel walked in last, and the lock closed quietly on her heels.
The ship lay still a moment longer. Then it was suddenly gone. Dead leaves went dancing for a while about the ravine, disturbed by the breeze of its departure.
In a place very faraway—so far that neither Grimp nor his parents nor anyone in the village except the schoolteacher had ever heard of it—a set of instruments began signalling for attention. Somebody answered them.
Grandma’s voice announced distinctly:
“This is Zone Agent Wannattel’s report on the successful conclusion of the Halpa operation on Noorhut—”
High above Noorhut’s skies, eight great ships swung instantly out of their watchful orbits about the planet and flashed off again into the blackness of the boundless space that was their sea and their home.
The Truth about Cushgar
There was, for a time, a good deal of puzzled and uneasy speculation about the methods that had been employed by the Confederacy of Vega in the taming of Cushgar. The disturbing part of it was that nothing really seemed to have happened!
First, the rumor was simply that the Confederacy was preparing to move into Cushgar—and then, suddenly, that it had moved in. This aroused surprised but pleased interest in a number of areas bordering the Confederacy. The Thousand Nations and a half-dozen similar organizations quietly flexed their military muscles, and prepared to land in the middle of the Confederacy’s back as soon as it became fairly engaged in its ambitious new project. For Cushgar and the Confederacy seemed about as evenly matched as any two powers could possibly be.
But there was no engagement, then. There was not even anything resembling an official surrender. Star system by system, mighty Cushgar was accepting the governors installed by the Confederacy. Meekly, it coughed up what was left of the captive peoples and the loot it had pirated for the past seven centuries. And, very simply and quietly then, under the eyes of a dumfounded galaxy, it settled down and began mending its manners.
Then the rumors began. The wildest of them appeared to have originated in Cushgar itself, among its grim but superstitious inhabitants.
The Thousand Nations and the other rival combines gradually relaxed their various preparations and settled back disappointedly. This certainly wasn’t the time to jump! The Confederacy had sneaked something over again; it was all done with by now.
But what had they done to Cushgar—and how?
* * *
In the Confederacy’s Council of Co-ordinators on Vega’s planet of Jeltad, the Third Co-ordinator, Chief of the Department of Galactic Zones, was being freely raked over the coals by his eminent colleagues.
They, too, wanted to know about Cushgar; and he wasn’t telling.
“Of course, we’re not actually accusing you of anything,” the Fifth Co-ordinator—Strategics—pointed out. “But you didn’t expect to advance the Council’s plans by sixty years or thereabouts without arousing a certain amount of curiosity, did you?”
“No, I didn’t expect to do that,” the Third Co-ordinator admitted.
“Come clean, Train!” said the First. Train was the name by which the Third Co-ordinator was known in this circle. “How did you do it?” Usually they were allies in these little arguments, but the First’s curiosity was also rampant.
“Can’t tell you!” the Third Co-ordinator said flatly. “I made a report to the College, and they’ll dish out to your various departments whatever they ought to get.”
He was within his rights in guarding his own department’s secrets, and they knew it. As for the College—that was the College of the Pleiades, a metaphysically inclined body which was linked into the affairs of Confederacy government in a manner the College itself presumably could have defined exactly. Nobody else could. However, they were the final arbiters in a case of this kind.
The Council meeting broke up a little later. The Third Co-ordinator left with Bropha, a handsome youngish man who had been listening in, in a liaison capacity for the College.
“Let’s go off and have a drink somewhere,” Bropha suggested. “I’m curious myself.”
The Co-ordinator growled softly. His gray hair was rumpled, and he looked exhausted.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you—”
Bropha’s title was President of the College of the Pleiades. That was a good deal less important than it sounded, since he was only the executive scientist in charge of the College’s mundane affairs. However, he was also the Third Co-ordinator’s close personal friend and had been cleared for secrets of state of any kind whatsoever.
They went off and had their drink.
“You can’t blame them too much,” Bropha said soothingly. “After all, the conquest of Cushgar has been regarded pretty generally as the Confederacy’s principal and most dangerous undertaking in the century immediately ahead. When the Department of Galactic Zones pulls it off suddenly—apparently without preparation or losses—”
“It wasn’t without losses,” the Co-ordinator said glumly.
“Wasn’t it?” said Bropha.
“It cost me,” said the Co-ordinator, “the best Zone Agent I ever had—or ever hope to have. Remember Zamm?”
Bropha’s handsome face darkened.
Yes, he remembered Zamm! There were even times when he wished he didn’t remember her quite so vividly.
But two years would have been much too short an interval in any case to forget the name of the person who had saved his life—
* * *
At the time, the discovery that His Excellency the Illustrious Bropha was lost in space had sent a well-concealed ripple of dismay throughout the government of the Confederacy. For Bropha was destined in the Confederacy’s plans to become a political figure of the highest possible importance.
Even the Third Co-ordinator’s habitual placidity vanished when the information first reached him. But he realized promptly that while a man lost in deep space was almost always lost for good, there were any number of mitigating factors involved in this particular case. The last report on Bropha had been received from his personal yacht, captained by his half brother Greemshard; and that ship was equipped with devices which would have tripped automatic alarms in monitor-stations thousands of light-years apart if it had been suddenly destroyed or incapacitated by any unforeseen accident or space attack.
Since no such alarm was received, the yacht was still functioning undisturbed somewhere, though somebody on board her was keeping her whereabouts a secret.
It all pointed, pretty definitely, at Greemshard!
For its own reasons, the Department of Galactic Zones had assembled a dossier on Bropha’s half brother which was hardly less detailed than the information it had available concerning the illustrious scientist himself. It was no secret to its researchers that Greemshard was an ambitious, hard-driving man, who for years had chafed under the fact that the goal of his ambitions was always being reached first and without apparent effort by Bropha. The study of his personality had been quietly extended then to a point where it could be predicted with reasonable accuracy what he would do in any given set of circumstances; and with the department’s psychologists busily dissecting the circumstances which surrounded the disappearance of Bropha, it soon became apparent what Greemshard had done and what he intended to do next.
A prompt check by local Zone Agents indicated that none of the powers who would be interested in getting Bropha into their hands had done so as yet, and insured, furthermore, that they could not do so now without leading the Confederacy’s searchers directly to him. Which left, as the most important remaining difficulty, the fact that the number of places where the vanished yacht could be kept unobtrusively concealed was enormously large.
The number was a limited one, nevertheless—unless the ship was simply drifting about space somewhere, which was a risk no navigator of Greemshard’s experience would be willing to take. And through the facilities of its home offices and laboratories and its roving army of Agents, the Third Department was equipped, as perhaps no other human organization ever had been, to produce an exact chart of all those possible points of concealment and then to check them off in the shortest possible time.
So the Co-ordinator was not in the least surprised when, on the eighth day of the search instigated by the department, a message from Zone Agent Zamman Tarradang-Pok was transferred to him, stating that Bropha had been found, alive and in reasonably good condition, and would be back in his home on Jeltad in another two weeks.