Which might mean a number of things of no interest at all to the IPA. But . . .
Dowland took his police gun from the pocket of his hunting jacket, and began checking it by touch, as he swung the car’s nose about toward the ranch and went slanting down toward the air. Either of the brothers might decide to make trouble, particularly if they had something to conceal—but, at any rate, they couldn’t claim he hadn’t been invited down.
Picking up the girl in the scope again, he saw that she realized he was coming in. She had dropped the cloth but was still gazing up toward the car, her free hand shielding her eyes from the setting sun.
In the next instant, without the slightest preliminary warning, every instrument in the panel before Dowland went dead. Then the grid-car began to drop like a stone.
* * *
The world-wide gravity grid was Terra’s general power source. It had been an idiotically expensive installation; actually, no other planet could have afforded it at present. Once installed, it was drawn on for idiotically minor services. There weren’t enough human beings on Terra to begin to make a significant use of the grid.
But there were compensating features. The grid was esthetically unobtrusive, and available everywhere. It supplied power for anything from personal wrist watches on up through the giant docking machines at the spaceports. And it was reliable. There had been no power failures and no accidents connected with the grid recorded in its eighty years of operation.
That shining safety record, Dowland thought, manipulating the flight controls with desperate haste, might become seriously marred in something like three-quarters of a minute now. He’d be lucky to get down alive. And another thought was clamoring for a different kind of action with almost equal urgency—unusual and unexplained physical phenomena of any kind were one of the things the YM searchers were alerted to look out for; and he’d certainly run into one of them here. He shot a glance down to his camouflaged wrist communicator. Just a few seconds to spare, and he could get a private-beam alarm in to the Solar Police Authority representative at the Columbia spaceport.
He didn’t have a few seconds to spare. The gird-car was a lousy glider—ponderous, sickeningly slow to respond. The rim of the mesa swayed up. If he missed that stretch of cleared ground around the Trelawney ranch, the car would either tear itself to pieces in the forest beyond or do a ditch into the piled rubble at the mesa’s foot. He hauled back on the controls again, felt the car actually begin to rise for an instant—
* * *
“I’m sorry,” Jill Trelawney was crying, running up the slope toward him. “I’m so terribly sorry. I tried to warn you. I simply didn’t realize—are you hurt?”
Her face, Dowland thought, was probably no whiter than his own. The canopy had caved in around him, and a jagged chunk of engine was nestling in the passenger seat to his right. As he tried to stand up, a section of the plastic floorboard collapsed; his foot followed it through and struck solid ground. He worked himself out of the seat. The grid-car creaked tiredly and settled another six inches. Dowland shoved a piece of canopy aside and found he could straighten out.
He cleared his throat. “I don’t think I’m hurt. Anyway, not much.”
“Your face—it’s bleeding!”
Dowland probed at a cut lip with his tongue and winced. “Didn’t notice it happen . . . a lot of stuff flying around there for a moment. Now, just what’s going on?”
The girl swallowed nervously, staring at him. “The power’s off.”
“That I noticed.” Something occurred to Dowland. “That’s why you couldn’t call me on the communicator.”
“Yes. I . . .”
“How long has it been off here?”
“Since this morning.”
He looked at her thoughtfully, and a quick flush spread up into her face. “I know,” she said. “It was terribly stupid of me to—to get you to come down. It just didn’t occur to me that . . .”
“It’s all right,” Dowland said. “I’m here now.” She was very good-looking, though her face was strained at the moment. Strained and scared. “You could not know how far the failure area extended.” He glanced over at the buildings. The crash of his landing hadn’t brought anyone into sight. “You’re not alone here, are you?”
“No.” She hesitated, went on half apologetically, “I’m sure I should remember you, but I don’t.”
“Well, you wouldn’t,” Dowland said. “I’m not a Freeholder.”
* * *
The flicker of reaction in her eyes brought a prickling to the hairs at the back of his neck. The thing looked hot, all right. He continued, “You just may have heard of me by name, though. Frank Dowland, of Dowland Animal Exports.”
“Oh, yes.” Apparently she did recognize the name. “I’m Jill Trelawney, Dowland. I . . . there’s been an accident. A bad one, I’m afraid.”
“Another accident? What kind?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Do you have a medical kit with you?”
“Of course. Who’s hurt?”
“My uncle. Miguel Trelawney. He’s up in the house.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“That’s what I don’t know. Looks—I think he’s terribly sick. In some way.”
“How long has he been sick?”
She hesitated. “This morning.”
“Since the time the grid-power went off?”
Jill looked startled. “Why, yes.”
And that about cinched it, Dowland thought. He said, “You two were alone here?”
“No. I’m sure this all sounds very crazy, but—” She nodded at one of the buildings down the slope from them, a long wooden structure identified as a feed barn in Dowland’s pictures of the ranch. “My other uncle, Paul Trelawney—he’s locked up in there.”
“Locked up?” Dowland repeated.
“Yes. There’s a key to the door somewhere, but I can’t find it.”
“Would Miguel know where it is?”
“I think so.”
“Then we’ll try to get him conscious again at least long enough to tell us. You’d better get back to the house, Miss Trelawney. I’ll dig out the kit. Be up there in a minute.”
He watched the tall supple figure start back across the slope, shook his head a little, and turned to the wrecked car. She was either somewhat stupid, or being cagey with a non-Terran. The last seemed a little more likely. Too bad if she turned out to be involved with something like the YM business, but that was out of his hands. He’d have to report immediately, and the Overgovernment specialists would be here in an hour. It wasn’t his job.
He climbed cautiously back into the car. Out of sight of the house, he pressed a key on the wrist communicator, said, “Chris? This is Dowland. Emergency,” and waited for the hum of response from the instrument.
There was no hum.
Half a minute later, he had the communicator off his wrist and opened. He couldn’t remember having struck his wrist hard enough against anything to have damaged it, but the delicate mechanisms inside were a crystal shambles. There was a portable communicator packed in with his camping equipment. But it operated on grid power.
It looked like it was going to remain his job for a while, after all.
* * *
Miguel Trelawney, in Dowland’s unvoiced opinion, was a man who was dying. He was big-boned and heavily muscled, but on the low couch in the living room he looked shrunken. Lead-colored skin and thready pulse. Internal bleeding at a guess—an informed layman’s guess. Radiation burns.
Dowland looked over at the girl. She was disturbed and tense, but nowhere near hysteria. “We might bring him around,” he said bluntly. “But it will take some hours at least. He’s in bad shape.”
Her hands, clasped together in her lap, went white around the knuckles. “Will he . . . can you save . . .”
Dowland shook his head. “I don’t know if we can save him here. If we got him to one of your hospitals tonight, he should have a very good chance. But we can’t do that—unless the grid-power cuts in again.”
She said faintly, “What’s happened to him?”
“Lady, that’s fairly obvious. He’s been ray-burned.”
“Ray-burned? But how?”
“I wouldn’t know.” Dowland opened the medical kit, slid out several of the tiny containers, turned one of them over in his hand. He asked, “Where was he when you found him?”
“Lying outside the door of the lab.”
“Lab?”
Jill Trelawney bit her lip. “The building I showed you.”
“Where Paul Trelawney’s locked up?”
“Yes. They call it a lab.”
“Who are they?”
“Miguel and Paul.”
“What kind of lab is it?” Dowland asked absently.
“I don’t know. They’re building something there. Some sort of a machine.”
“Are your uncles scientists?”
“Yes.” Her tone had begun to harden—a Freeholder lady rebuffing a non-Terran’s prying.
Dowland said, “If we knew whether they had radiation suits in that lab . . .”