Just then, a voice spoke to Wilforce, and it took him an instant to realize that it was Rybalko, saying, “Sir, excuse me—that vanishing ship has been spotted again.”
Wilforce slid the microphone up, pressed back the door edge, and stepped out of the transceiver booth, feeling again a momentary disorientation as he glanced around the command center. Then he saw the big viewscreen on the far wall, the planet Bemus III in its lower left corner, and in the center a silvery object like a chopped-off length of giant rod. Wilforce crossed the room to take a closer look.
He studied the big flat-ended object for a moment, noted the pitted look of its surface, and saw what appeared to be a small hatch housing at its far end.
Rybalko said, “Sir, this thing is in orbit around the planet. We’ve only been watching it for several minutes now, but it vanished twice.”
Wilforce, trying to see if what he saw near the far end was a hatch housing, abruptly found himself looking through empty space at a distant constellation. The huge closed cylinder was gone.
Rybalko had a watch in his hand. When the cylinder reappeared, with the abruptness of a projected image thrown on a screen, Rybalko glanced at the watch. “Eight seconds. There doesn’t seem to be any pattern.”
Wilforce said, “All our instruments show this object?”
“Yes, sir. And its orbit seems perfectly sensible. But all it seems to do is to vanish and reappear. There’s been no actual sign of life from it so far.”
Wilforce nodded. For a moment, he tried to connect the disappearing ship with the disappearing animals on the planet. But there occurred to him such a host of unlikely theories that he decided to forget all about it. He glanced at Rybalko.
“Both ends of that cylinder are closed?”
“Yes, sir. There are signs of possible openings, but they’re shut now.”
Wilforce glanced at the cylinder again. Its blocky shape suggested to him that it was probably not intended for use in a planet’s atmosphere. It might be—perhaps—an interplanetary cargo carrier. The apparent invisibility of the ship might be due to extremely well-designed counter-detection apparatus. Assuming it had, for some unknown reason, been left in orbit around this planet, it could have remained there for thousands of years with little noticeable change. And the destroyer that crash-landed on Bemus III had collided with something. It seemed reasonable to think it had collided with this cylinder, had heavily jarred the counter-detection apparatus, and caused a malfunction that produced the alternating visibility and invisibility.
Wilforce turned to Rybalko, and said, “We’ll have to see if that thing can be boarded. It’s just possible that this might be the loose end of the knot.”
Rybalko turned to the communicator to repeat the boarding order to the task force commander.
As Wilforce again turned to glance at the unchanging battle screen, a call came in from Pick.
“Here’s something queer,” said Pick. “Some of my men have been finishing up a check of the settlements. They’ve found a few partly-chewed scraps of clothing, paper, and so on, plus droppings containing metal snap fasteners, identification tags, and other metal items, which pretty well bolster the theory that the carnivores attacked and actually ate the colonists, and the herbivores ate the food stocks and records. But some of the metal identification tags, chains, and other items were in unburied droppings, exactly typical of the Bemus herbivores we’ve seen so far.”
“The colonists could have taken off their tags and left them in the pockets of their clothing.”
“Would they have taken out their dental fillings and put them in their pockets?”
Wilforce stared, then said slowly, “Dogs don’t bury their droppings. They’re carnivores.”
“True, but everything we’ve found so far suggests catlike forms that lie in wait, not doglike animals that run down their prey. And it’s important to a catlike animal to keep the herbivores in the vicinity unaware that it’s there. This business strikes me as very peculiar, and it’s not the only peculiar thing.”
“What else?”
“All the settlements have big barbecue pits. Now we find from the remains of weeds buried under the dirt from these pits, from the size of weeds growing atop the dirt, from the ashes in the pits, and from the condition of the pit’s big stakes, that they were dug recently and only used once—around the time the attack was made on the settlements.”
Wilforce went to bed still turning this problem over in his mind. Early the next morning, he came wide awake, and, for an instant, everything fitted together in a complete picture.
Wilforce swung to a sitting position on the edge of his cot. Already, the thoughts were slipping away, and carefully he held his mind nearly blank, trying to grope back along the mental associations to the pattern of ideas that had been in his mind the instant before he came fully awake. Gradually, it all came back to him, and he saw the puzzle on Bemus III fit together like the steel hooks, jaws and springs of a powerful trap.
Wilforce went over his thoughts a bit at a time, carefully checking each connection, till he was sure it fitted together in a consistent whole. Now he wondered how he could ever have missed it. He washed, dressed quickly, and started down the corridor to the command center. He turned a corner and a junior communications officer came out a door and said, “Sir, excuse me, could you come in here a minute?”
“What is it?”
“It’s the screen the Pioneers set up so we could watch the destroyer, sir. We’ve got something funny here.”
Wilforce said, “All right. Let’s see it.”
The communications officer quickly led the way into a darkened room, where a technician sat hunched at a screen. Wilforce looked over his shoulder to see a dim corridor in the crash-landed destroyer. In the foreground was an air-circulation duct. As Wilforce leaned closer, he saw a faint movement, then a small shadowy thing that squeezed under a corner of the mesh over the duct opening and dropped to the floor. There was a swift scurry down the corridor, then another small thing moved in a long bound. There was a brief struggle, then silence, and finally a faint crunch. Another shadow slid out the duct.
Wilforce said, “How long has this been going on?”
“Ever since they carried that big tomcat around the corner into the food storeroom. These things have been popping out the ventilator right and left.”
“I see.” Wilforce turned to the communications officer. “Get Mr. Pick for me on another screen, and hurry.”
“Yes, sir.”
The officer went out, and Wilforce turned to glance at the screen. On it, nothing moved. The corridor appeared to be empty. He said to the technician, “We aren’t transmitting sound, are we?”
“No, sir.”
“Have you seen any other animals beside these small ones?”
“Sir, I could have sworn something the size of a rat went by the other night. But it was moving fast, and I haven’t seen anything like it since.”
“Did it come out of that ventilator?”
“No sir. It streaked down the corridor well over to the side.”
The door opened. “Sir, we’ll have Mr. Pick in just a moment.”
Wilforce said, “Switch the call to the command center. I’ll want General Rybalko to see it, if possible.”
“Yes, sir.”
Wilforce went to the command center, observed that the battle screen continued to show nothing of interest, and then saw the big wall screen, lit to show the huge cylinder, now surrounded by small spaceboats. There was a round opening in the far end of the cylinder where Wilforce thought he had seen a hatch. He looked at the cylinder with a frown, then glanced around as a communicator switched on. Pick was on the screen, tired and scowling.
Wilforce described what he’d just seen.
Pick said, “Just a minute. I’ll find out whether that cat’s caught anything.”
Wilforce snapped on another communicator, and called Davis, who appeared on the screen rumpled but alert. Wilforce said, “Has the Forty-second had any more trouble?”
“Nothing serious, sir. Every now and then, something charges out of the forest and gets cut to pieces before it can do anything. The only trouble is rats and hallucinations.”
“Rats?”
“Yes, sir. A kind of furtive vicious rat has turned up that feeds on the remains of the carnivores and any other flesh it can sink its teeth in. There have also been reports of things something like hyenas, but there are a lot more of these rats.”
“What was that about hallucinations?”
“The nervous strain down there must be pretty severe. The men are probably in no real danger now, but the thought of those monsters springing out of the forest any moment, and the constant watch that has to be kept—Well, some of the men think they’ve seen chunks of carnivores they’ve shot get up and walk away.”