“This is a Z-gun,” he said. “It’s a handy all-round piece, packs 0.8 megaton/seconds of firepower, weight four pounds three ounces.” He snapped a switch on the side back and forth a couple of times and handed the gun across to me.
“What’s a megaton/second?” I asked him.
“Enough power to vaporize the yacht if it were released at one burst. At full gain the Z-gun will punch a three-millimeter hole through an inch of flint steel at a range of five miles with a five millisecond burst.” He went on to tell me a lot more about Z-guns, crater-rifles, infinite repeaters, filament pistols.
At the end of it I didn’t know much more about the weapons Lord Desroy would be using on his hunt, but I was feeling sorry for whatever it was he was after.
3
Sir Orfeo took me back to the little room I’d waked up in, showed me how to work a gadget that delivered a little can of pink oatmeal, steaming hot. I sniffed it; it smelled like seaweed. I tasted it. It was flat and insipid, like papier-mâché.
“Sir Orfeo, I hate to complain about a free gift,” I said. “But are you sure this was meant for a man to eat?”
“Jongo wasn’t a man.”
I kind of goggled at him. “What was he?”
“A Lithian. Very good boy, Jongo. With me for a long time.” He glanced around the room. “Damned if it doesn’t give me a touch of something-or-other to see you in his kennel.”
“Kennel?”
“Nest, pitch, call it cabin if you like.” Sir Orfeo beetled a fine eyebrow at me. “Don’t be putting on airs, Billy Danger. I’ve no patience with it.”
He left me there to dine in solitude. Afterward, he gave me a tour of the ship. He was showing me a fancy leather-and-inlay lounge when Lord Desroy came in.
“Ah, there you are, Desroy,” Orfeo said in a breezy way. “Just occurred to me you might like to have Jongo—ah, Billy Danger, that is—do a bit of a dust-up here in the lounge—”
“How now? Hast lost thy wits, Orfeo? Hie the mooncalf hence i’ the instant!”
“Steady on, Desroy. Just thought I’d ask—”
“I’ve a whim to chide the varlet for his impertinence!” the big boss barked and took a step toward me. Orfeo pushed me behind him.
“Don’t blame the boy. My doing, you know,” he said in a nice cool tone.
“Thy role of advocate for this scurvy patch would want credit, an’ I stood not witness on’t!”
We went on down the stairs. Instead of looking mad, Sir Orfeo was smiling and humming between his teeth. He dropped the smile when he saw me looking at him.
“I advise you to stay out of Lord Desroy’s way, Jongo. For now, he’s willing to humor me along; I have a carefully nurtured reputation for temperament, you see. If I get upset, the game might turn out to be scarce. But if you ruffle his feathers by being underfoot, he might act hastily.”
“He has a strange way of talking,” I said. “What kind of accent is that?”
“Eh? Oh, it’s a somewhat archaic dialect of English. Been some three hundred years since his lordship last visited Earth. Now, that’s enough gossip, Jongo—”
“It’s Billy Dan—”
“I’ll call you Jongo. Shorter. Now let’s get along to Hold F and you can earn your keep by polishing a spot of brightwork in Environmental.”
The polishing turned out to be a job of scraping slimy deposits off the valves and piping. Sir Orfeo left me to it while he went back up and joined in whatever they were doing on the other side of the forbidden door.
4
One day Sir Orfeo showed me a star chart and pointed out the relative locations of Earth, Gar 28, the world we were headed for at the moment, and Zeridajh, far in toward the big gob of stars at the center of the Galaxy.
“We’ll never get there,” I said. “I read somewhere it takes light a hundred thousand years to cross the Galaxy; Gar 28 must be about ten light-years away; and Zeridajh is thousands!”
He laughed. “The limiting velocity of light is a myth, Jongo,” he said. “Like the edge of the world your early sailors were afraid they’d fall over—or the sound barrier you used to worry about. This vessel could reach Zeridajh in eighteen months, if she stretched her legs.”
I wanted to ask him why Lord Desroy picked such a distant part of the sky to go hunting in, but I’d learned not to be nosy. Whatever the reasons were, they were somebody’s secret.
After my first few weeks away from all time indicators, I began to develop my own internal time-sense, independent of the three-hour cycles that were the Galactic shipboard standard. I could sense when an hour had passed, and looking back, I knew, without knowing how I knew, just about how long I’d been away from Earth. I might have been wrong—there was no way to check—but the sense was very definite, and always consistent.
I had been aboard just under six weeks when Sir Orfeo took me to the personal equipment room one day and fitted me out with thermal boots, leggings, gloves, a fancy pair of binocular sunglasses, breathing apparatus, a backpack, and a temperature suit. He spent an hour fussing over me, getting everything fitted just right. Then he told me to go and tie down in my digs. I did, and for the next hour the yacht shook and shrilled and thumped. When the noise stopped, Sir Orfeo came along and yelled to me to get into my kit and come down to F Hold. When I got there, walking pretty heavy with all the gear I was carrying or had strapped to my back, he was there, checking items off a list.
“A little more juldee next time, Jongo,” he snapped at me. “Come along now; I’ll want your help in getting the ground-car out shipshape.”
It was a powerful-looking vehicle, wide, squatty, with tracks like a small tank, a plastic bubble dome over the top. There was a roomy compartment up front full of leather and inlaid wood and bright work, and a smaller space behind, with two hard seats. Lord Desroy showed up in his Frank Buck bush jacket and jodhpurs and a wide-brimmed hat; the Lady Raire wore her white coverall. Sir Orfeo was dressed in his usual tailored gray with a filament pistol strapped to his hip and a canteen and bush knife on the other side. We all wore temperature suits, which were like long-handled underwear, under the coveralls. “Keep your helmet closed, Jongo,” Sir Orfeo told me. “Toxic atmosphere, you know.”
He pushed a button and a door opened up in the side of the hold, and I was looking out at a plain of bluish grass. A wave of heat rolled in and the thermostat in my suit clicked, and right away it turned cool against my skin. Sir Orfeo started up and the car lifted a couple of inches from the floor, swung around, and slid out under the open sky of a new world.
For the next five hours I perched on my seat with my mouth open, taking in the sights: the high, blue-black sky, strange trees like overgrown parsley sprigs, the leathery grass that stretched to a horizon that was too far away—and the animals. The things we were after were big crab-armored monstrosities, pale purple and white, with mouths full of needle-pointed teeth and horns all over their faces. Lord Desroy shot two of them, stopping the car and going forward on foot. I guess it took courage, but I didn’t see the point in it. Each time, he and Sir Orfeo made a big thing of hacking off one of the horns and taking a lot of pictures and congratulating each other. The Lady Raire just watched from the car. She didn’t seem to smile much.
We loaded up and went on to another world then, and Milord shot a thing as big as a diesel locomotive. Sir Orfeo never talked about himself or the other members of the party, or the world they came from, but he explained the details of the hunt to me, gave me pointers on tracking and approaching, told me which gun to use for different kinds of quarry. Not much of it stuck. After the fourth or fifth hunt, it all got a little stale.
“This next world is called Gar 28,” Sir Orfeo woke me up to tell me after a long stretch in space. “Doesn’t look like much; dry, you know; but there’ll be keen hunting. I found this one myself, running through tapes made by a survey team a few hundred years ago. The fellows we’ll be going after they called dire-beast. You’ll understand why when you see the beggars.”
He was right about Gar 28. We started out across a rugged desert of dry-baked pink and tan and yellow clay, fissured and cracked by the sun, with points of purplish rock pushing up here and there, a line of jagged peaks for a horizon. It didn’t look like game country to me, but then I wasn’t the hunter.