“In a way, though, it’s too bad it had to be that space-pixy Zamm who found him!” one of the Co-ordinator’s aides remarked.
And to that, after a moment’s reflection, the Chief of Galactic Zones agreed.
* * *
The moon where Bropha’s yacht lay concealed was one of three approximately Earth-sized, ice-encrusted satellites swinging about the sullen glow of a fiery giant-planet.
The robot-ship of Zone Agent Zamman Tarradang-Pok, working along its allotted section of the general search-pattern, flashed in at the moon on a tangent to its orbit, quartered its surface in two sweeping turns and vanished again toward the nearer of the two other satellites.
All in all, that operation was completed in a matter of seconds; but before the ship left, Zone Agent Zamm had disembarked from it in a thirty-foot space-duty skiff—crammed to its skin just now with the kind of equipment required to pull off a miniature invasion-in-force. Whatever sort of camouflaged power station was down there had been shut off the instant it detected her ship’s approach. While that didn’t necessarily reveal a bad conscience, the momentary pattern of radiations Zamm’s instruments had picked up suggested an exact duplicate of the type of engines which powered Bropha’s yacht.
So it probably was the yacht, Zamm decided—and it would be hidden just below the moon’s frozen surface. She had pin-pointed the spot; and on the opposite side of the big satellite the skiff came streaking down into a thin, icy atmosphere.
“You can start hoping that ship was one of those I’ve been waiting for,” Greemshard was remarking meanwhile. “Or else just somebody who isn’t interested in us.”
He stood in the center of the yacht’s control room, staring at Bropha with intense dislike and a touch of fear. A suspicion had begun to grow on Greemshard that with all his cleverness and planning he might have worked himself at last into an impossible situation. None of the dozens of coded messages he had sent out during the past few days had been answered or perhaps even received. It was a little uncanny.
“Whatever happens,” he concluded, “they’re not getting you back alive!”
Bropha, flattened by gravity shackles to one wall of the room, saw no reason to reply. For the greater part of the past week, he had been floating mentally in some far-off place, from where he detachedly controlled the ceaseless complaints of various abused nerve-endings of his body. His half brother’s voice hardly registered. He had begun to review instead, for perhaps the thousandth futile time, the possibilities of the trap into which he had let Greemshard maneuver him. The chances were he would have to pay the usual penalty of stupidity, but it was unlikely that either Greemshard or his confederates would get any benefit out of that.
Bropha was quite familiar—though Greemshard was not—with the peculiar efficiency of the organization headed by his friend, the Third Co-ordinator.
“Do not move, Captain Greemshard!”
That was all that tinkling, brittle voice really said. But it was a moment or so before Bropha grasped the meaning of the words.
He had, he realized, been literally shocked into full consciousness by something that might have been the thin cry of a mindless death as it rose before its victim—a sound that ripped the clogging pain-veils from his thoughts and triggered off an explosion of sheer animal fright. Bropha’s brain was a curiously sensitive tool in many ways; it chose to ignore the explicit substance of Zamm’s curt warning and, instead, to read in it things like an insatiable hunger, and that ultimate threat. And also, oddly enough, a wailing, bleak despair.
Later on, he would admit readily that in his wracked condition he might have put a good deal more into the voice than was actually there. He would point out, however, that Greemshard, who was not an imaginative man and recklessly brave, seemed to be similarly affected. His half brother, he saw, stood facing him some twenty feet away, with his back to the door that led from the control room into the main body of the yacht; and the expression on his face was one Bropha could never remember afterwards without a feeling of discomfort. There was an assortment of weapons about Greemshard’s person and on a desk to one side and within easy reach of him; but for that moment at least he did not move.
Then Bropha’s startled gaze shifted beyond Greemshard.
The passage door had disappeared, and a pale-green fire was trickling swiftly from about its frame. He saw Zone Agent Zamm next, standing just beyond the door with a gun in her hand, and several squat, glittering shapes looming up behind her. The shock of almost superstitious fear that had roused him left Bropha in that instant, because he knew at once who and what Zamm was.
At about the same moment, Greemshard made his bid—desperately and with the flashing speed of a big, strong animal in perfect condition.
He flung himself sideways to reach the floor behind the desk, one hand plucking at a gun in his belt; but he was still in mid-leap when some soundless force spun him about and hurled him across the room, almost to Bropha’s feet. What was left of Greemshard lay twitching there violently for a few seconds more, and was still. A faint smell of ozone began to spread through the room.
Bropha looked down at the headless body and winced. As children and half-grown boys, he and Greemshard had been the best of friends; and later, he had understood his half brother better than Greemshard ever knew. For a moment at least, the events of the last few days seemed much less important than those years that were past.
Then he looked back at the figure behind the coldly flaming door frame across the room and stammered: “Thank you, Zone Agent!”
His first glance at Zamm had showed him that she was a Daya-Bal; and up to that moment he would have thought that no branch of humanity was emotionally less suited than they to perform the duties of an Agent of Galactic Zones. But under the circumstances, the person who had effected an entry into that room, in the spectacularly quiet and apparently instantaneous fashion which alone could have saved his life, was not likely to be anything else.
* * *
Like a trio of goblin hounds, three different pieces of robotic equipment came variously gliding and floating through the glowing door frame on Zamm’s heels, and began to busy themselves gently about a now rather shock-dazed Bropha. His rescuer, he found himself thinking presently, seemed really more bizarre in these surroundings than her mechanical assistants!
Zamm was not in armor but in a fitted spacesuit, so her racial characteristics were unmistakable. By ordinary human standards, the rather small Daya-Bal body was excessively thin and narrow; but Zamm’s white face with its pale eyes and thin, straight nose matched it perfectly, and every motion showed the swift, unconscious grace which accounted for some of the fascination her people exerted on their more normally constructed cousins. Bropha, who had spent over a year among the Daya-Bal planets in the Betelgeuse region, and during that time had also come under the spell of what was perhaps the youngest true branch of Genus Homo, addressed Zamm, by and by, in her own language.
He noted her smile of quick pleasure and the flash of interest in her eyes, and listened carefully to her reply, which began as an apology for causing irreparable damage to his ship in the process of boarding it. Such responses all seemed disarmingly normal; and he felt unable to recapture the sensations which had awakened him so suddenly when he heard her challenge to Greemshard.
Greemshard’s death, too—however he might feel about it personally—was, after all, simply the fate of a criminal who had been misguided enough to resist certain arrest. As it happened, Bropha never did learn the exact circumstances under which the four members of Greemshard’s little gang, who were acting as the yacht’s crew, had departed this life just before Zamm appeared at the control room; but it could be assumed that the situation there had been a somewhat similar one.
His explanations, however, completely failed to satisfy him—because he knew the Daya-Bals.
* * *
He spent most of the two weeks required for the return trip to Jeltad in a bed under robotic treatment.
The physical damage his misadventure had cost him wasn’t too serious, but it had to be repaired promptly; and such first-aid patchwork usually involved keeping a human brain anaesthetized to the point of complete unconsciousness. But Bropha’s level of mind-training permitted him to by-pass that particular effect, and to remain as aware of his surroundings as he chose to be; and he remained much more aware of them than Zamman Tarradang-Pok or her robots appeared to realize.
To the average bedridden traveler, that endless drive on a silent ship through the unreal-seeming voids of the overspeed might have seemed monotonous to the point of dreary boredom. Bropha—alert, wondering and reflecting—soon gained a different impression of it. Little enough was actually happening; but even the slightest events here seemed weighted to him with some abnormal dark significance of their own. It was almost, he thought, as if he were catching an occasional whispered line or two of some grim drama—the actors of which moved constantly all about him but were very careful to stay out of his sight!