7
The ship handled like a yachtsman’s dream; for the first few hours I ducked and bobbed in an evasion pattern that took us out through the planetary patrols. I kept the comm channels open and listened to a lot of excited talk that told me I’d picked the personal transportation of an Ahacian official whose title translated roughly as Assistant Dictator. After a while Assemblyman Ognath came on, looking very red around the ears, and showed me a big smile as phony as a UN peace proposal.
“Captain Danger, there’s been a misunderstanding,” he warbled. “The police officers you may have seen at the port were merely a guard of honor—”
“Somebody forgot to tell the gun-handlers about that,” I said in a breezy tone that I thought would have the maximum irritant value. “I had an idea maybe you fellows decided forty years’ pay was too much to spend, after all. But that’s OK; I’ll accept this bucket as payment in full.”
“Look here, Danger,” Ognath let the paper smile drop. “Bring the vessel back, and I’ll employ my influence to see that you’re dealt with leniently.”
“Thanks; I’ve had a sample of your influence. I don’t think I’d live through another.”
“You’re a fool! Every civilized world within ten parsecs will be alerted; you’ll be hunted down and blasted without mercy—unless you turn back now!”
“I guess the previous owner is after somebody’s scalp, eh, Ognath? Too bad.”
I gave him, and a couple of naval types who followed him, some more funny answers and in the process managed to get a fair idea of the interference I could expect to run into. I had to dodge three patrols in the first twenty hours; by the thirtieth hour I was running directly toward Galactic Zenith with nothing ahead but the Big Black.
“Give me the coordinates of the nearest of the worlds where you H’eeaq used to trade,” I ordered Srat.
“It is distant, Master. So far away, so lonely. The world called Drope.”
“We’ll try it anyway,” I said. “Maybe somewhere out there we’ll run into a little luck.”
The yacht was fueled and supplied in a way that suggested that someone had been prepared for any sudden changes in the political climate back home. It carried food, wines, a library that was all the most self-indulgent dictator could want to while away those long, dull days in space.
I showed Srat how to handle the controls so that he could relieve me whenever I felt like taking a long nap or sampling the library. I asked him why he had stuck with me, but he just looked at me with those goggle-eyes, and for the first time in many weeks it struck me what a strange-looking thing he was. You can get used to anything, even a H’eeaq.
8
Eureka was better company than the alien, in spite of not being able to talk. He settled in in a cabin full of frills that conjured up pictures of a dance-hall floozie with the brains of a Pekinese and a voice to match. Fortunately, the dictator’s taste in music and books was closer to mine than his choice of mistresses. There were tapes aboard on everything from ancient human history to the latest techniques in cell-surgery, thoroughly indexed. I sampled them all.
The Fringe worlds, I learned, were the Museum of the Galaxy. These lonely planets had once, long eons ago, been members of the tightly packed community of Center; their races had been the first in the young Galaxy to explore out through the Bar and Eastern Arm, where their remote descendants still thrived. Now the ancient Mother-worlds lingered on, living out the twilight of their long careers, circling dying suns, far out in the cool emptiness of the space between Galaxies. One of those old races, Srat assured me, was the ancestral form of Man—not that I’d recognize the relationship if I encountered a representative of the tribe.
One day I ran through a gazeteer of the Western Arm, found a listing of an obscure sun I was pretty sure was Sol and coded its reference into the index. The documentary that came onto the view-screen showed me a dull-steel ball bearing with a brilliant highlight that the voice track said was the system’s tenth planet. Number nine looked about the same, only bigger. Eight and seven were big fuzz-balls flattened at the poles. I had just about decided I had the wrong star when Saturn swam into view. The sight of that old familiar ring made me feel homesick, as if I’d spent the long happy hours of childhood there. I recognized Big Jupe, too. The camera came in close on this one, and then there were surface scenes on the moons. They looked just like Luna.
Mars was a little different than the pictures I remembered seeing; the ice caps were bigger, and in the close scan the camera moved in on what looked like the ruins of a camp; not a city, just a lash-up collection of metal huts and fallen antennas, such as a South Pole expedition might have left behind. And then I was looking at Earth, swimming there on the screen, cool and misty green and upside down, with Europe at the bottom and Africa at the top. I stared at it for half a minute before I noticed that the ice caps were wrong. The northern one covered most of Germany and the British Isles, and as the camera swung past, I could see that it spread down across North America as far as Kansas. And there wasn’t any south polar cap. Antarctica was a crescent-shaped island, all by itself in the ocean, ice-free; and Australia was connected to Indochina. I knew then the pictures had been made a long time ago.
The camera moved in close, and I saw oceans and jungles, deserts and ice-fields, but nowhere any sign of Man. The apparent altitude at the closest approach was at least ten thousand feet, but even from that height I could make out herds of game. But whether they were mammoths and megatheria or something even older, I couldn’t tell.
Then the scene shifted to Venus, which looked like Neptune, only smaller and brighter, and I switched the viewer off and made myself a long, strong drink and settled down for the long run ahead.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Drope was a lone world, circling a tired old star the color of sunset in Nevada. No hostile interceptors rose to meet me, but there was no welcoming committee either. We grounded at what Srat said was a port, but all I saw was a windblown wasteland with a few hillocks around it, under a purplish-black sky without a star in sight, Center being below the horizon. The air was cold, and the wind seemed to be whispering sad stories in the dusk. I went back aboard; I dined well and drank a bottle of old Ahacian wine and listened to music, but it seemed to be telling sad stories, too. Just before dawn Srat came back with a report that a H’eeaq ship had called—about a century ago, Earth time.
“That doesn’t help us much,” I pointed out.
“At least,” Poor Srat got down and wriggled in the dust, but I sensed a certain insolence in his voice— “at least Master knows now I speak truly of the voyages of the H’eeaq.”
“Either that or you’re a consistent liar,” I said, and stopped. My tone of voice when I talked to the midget reminded me of something, but I couldn’t say what it was.
Srat’s informant had mentioned the name of the H’eeaq vessel’s next port of call: a world known as E’el, ten lights farther out into intergalactic space, which meant a two weeks’ run. I set ship time up on a cycle as close to Earth time as I could estimate, and for a while I tried to sleep eight hours at a stretch, eat three meals a day, and maintain some pretense of night and day; but the habit of nearly six years in space was too strong. I soon reverted to three on, three off, with meals every other off-period.
We picked up E’el on our screens at last, a small, dim star not even shown on the standard charts. I set the yacht down on a grassy plain near a town made of little mud-colored domes and went into the village with Srat. There was nothing there but dust and heat and a few shy natives who scuttled inside their huts as we passed. An hour of that was enough.
After that we called at a world that Srat called Zlinn, where a swarm of little atmosphere fliers about as sturdy as Spads came up and buzzed us like irate hornets. They refused us permission to disembark. If any H’eeaq vessel had been there in the last few decades, it was their secret.
We visited Lii, a swamp-world where vast batteries of floodlights burned all day under a dying sun, and Shoramnath, where everyone had died since Srat’s last visit, and we walked around among the bones and the rusted machines and the fallen-in buildings, and wondered what had hit them; and we saw Far, and Z’reeth, and on Kish they let us land and then attacked us, just a few seconds prematurely, so that we made it back to the lock and lifted off in the middle of a barrage of HE fire that burned some of the shine off the hull. Suicide fliers threw themselves at us as we streaked for space; they must have been tough organisms, because some of them survived the collisions and clung to the hull and I heard them yammering and rat-tat-tatting there for minutes after we had left the last of the atmosphere behind.