But nothing like that happened. Nothing much was happening at all, except that the sailors in the raft were gingerly touching the Scarecrow object with probes, frowning over their instrument readings, talking on their headsets to the command personnel on the tug about what they found . . . who in turn were, no doubt, talking to higher authority somewhere ashore at every step while someone decided what to do next.
Pat grinned to herself. It was actually getting pretty boring, but neither she nor anyone else in the Observatory could tear herself away from the dozen identical displays on the screens. . . .
Until the display on some of them changed. A human face appeared, looking agitated. “A transmission has been received,” it began to say, and then it froze; whatever it was saying was no longer heard as the audio portion of that transmission was replaced by the very transmission it had announced.
How the Object Was Found
The “Scarecrow” missile happened to be in Earth’s daylight skies when it emitted the burn that changed its course. It was almost directly overhead, as seen from the islands of Hawaii, where a BBC crew was interviewing a group of astronomers at the Canada-France-Hawaii dome. A script girl, glancing up at the sky, saw the flare. When she yelped in surprise the BBC cameraman caught the object in his finder, and that was how the world first saw it.
Within ten minutes every telescope in the world that could bear on the object was searching for it. Cerro Toledo was the first to locate it, once the burn was over. It was moving very rapidly, but the Chileans were able to hold it long enough to project a track, moving east by northeast. Using the Chilean data, telescopes in the little observatory in the hills over Rio de Janeiro picked it up and refined the orbit before it vanished over the Atlantic.
Twenty minutes later telescopes in the Azores, and moments later on the European continent, had it, and since then it has been under constant watch.
Sky & Telescope
“Do not be afraid,” a mellow, reassuring voice said. “Our intentions are friendly. The lander you are approaching is not dangerous. It simply carried a cargo of food to supply the needs of our loyal associates presently on your planet. As you see, the Beloved Leaders care for those who cooperate with them. We will care for you, too, if you wish it. And most of all, we will help you defend yourselves against the forces of the evil Horch. We suggest that you examine our lander and its contents to reassure yourself we mean no harm, and when you have had an opportunity to do so we will speak to you again. . . .”
“Just food?” Pat said incredulously. “They scare the pee out of us just to give Dopey some, food?”
“Hold it,” Dannerman said, listening, because the voice was going on-not quite as mellow, now; almost sounding agitated:
“But we must warn you against your foolish attempt to visit your Starlab! The mechanisms it contains are highly dangerous! Recall your spacecraft at once! Do not enter the Starlab! The consequences will be very grave!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Long before Starlab was in sight the word had come over the Luft-Buran’s radio that the “missile” was a dud. That did not appear to make Colonel duValier feel any safer. When they came within docking range of Starlab he brought the old rocket to relative rest for half an hour while he studied the exterior of the orbiter centimeter by centimeter. The French female astronaut had unbuckled herself and swum up to confer with him-endlessly; in French, and pitched too low for anyone else to hear.
She was the only one allowed freedom of movement. Everybody else was ordered to remain strapped in their seats in case the colonel decided to get out of there in a hurry. Hilda did her best to be patient, though little twinges in her belly reminded her that a lot of people got spacesick in this kind of microgravity . . . even without the odor of the Doc that filled the vessel.
Then the colonel reached a decision. “Check your weapons, everybody,” he ordered. “I am going to dock.”
That was a little better, though the odd, slippery-slidey motion of the LuftBuran as duValier twitched it to mate with the Starlab port caused Hilda to swallow nervously. But then he announced the docking secured. Everyone unstrapped and took their places by the door- well, almost everyone. The great pale alien remained lashed to the cradle that had been built for him, of course, and one of the Germans remained by him to release him when Colonel duValier gave the order.
Which the colonel was taking his time about doing. He was obviously mulling something over in his mind-perhaps trying to find the proper historic words to speak before ordering his crew to enter, Hilda thought sourly. But what he said at last was, “You all know your orders. I will be the first person to board Starlab. You will then follow in the order assigned, except for Capitaine des Esseintes. She will remain in the LuftBuran, in constant radio contact with those of us in the boarding party. This will be done as a precaution. If anything goes wrong, she will undock at once, until the problem is cleared up.”
And if the problem weren’t cleared up? Hilda tried to imagine what it would be like if the Frenchwoman took it into her head to decide they had all been taken over by the Scarecrows, and then pulled the LuftBuran away for a return to Earth. It was not an attractive prospect. If it were a false alarm, they would all be marooned there for an indefinite period. And if it weren’t a false alarm.. .. No, Hilda didn’t want to think about that at all.
The colonel was speaking to his controllers on Earth, presumably to announce that he was ready for his historic task. But he suddenly frowned and lost his composure. He spat rapid-fire French into the microphone, too fast for Hilda to follow, listened again, then looked up. “There has been a development. There is a message from these Scarecrows, and they warn that we must not enter Starlab. This is- This causes-“ Then he shook his head and was silent.
He was the only one silent. Everybody else was shouting at once- “Warning of what? What do they mean?”-everyone but Hilda. She had a different concern. It wasn’t so much what the Scarecrows had said as the fact that they had said anything about entering Starlab at all. For that meant that they weren’t thousands of light-years away. They were close enough to see what was going on. And that meant-
That was another thing Hilda didn’t want to think about.
Another hour went by while everyone jabbered to everyone else, with many more exchanges between Colonel duValier and the ground controllers. Then the colonel shrugged and pulled the lock door open with a crash. “Allons!” he said hollowly; and the troops stormed the citadel.
In Hilda Morrisey’s eighteen years with the Bureau she had stormed into enemy territory often enough, guns blazing, people getting killed. This wasn’t like that. For one thing, rushing a target when your feet were firmly on the ground and things dropped to the floor when you let go of them was one thing. This microgravity business was something else entirely. They didn’t storm the Starlab. They damn well floated in through the lock, one after another, as easy a collection of big, slow targets as ever graced any church-carnival shooting gallery. If there had been actual enemies inside, they would have had no problem picking the invaders off, one at a time, as they floundered and soared.
Well, there weren’t any waiting sharpshooters. There was nobody in sight at all. Hilda caught a confused glimpse of rows and clusters of odd colors and bizarre objects, looking like some mad interior decorator’s going-out-of-business sale; but then Martin Delasquez thumped into her from behind, propelling her into one of Colonel duValier s flying feet; and all her attention was taken up with the job of trying to grab on to something solid. Her interior ear canals were complaining about it, too; her queasiness got worse, to the point where she seriously thought she was going to toss her cookies right into the lap of the Chinese guy, Lin. And it was not helped by the smell of the place: something like spice, something like decay, a lot like a nastily rasping kind of chemical smoke.
The chemical part at least had an explanation. “It’s the transporter,” Jimmy Lin gasped, hauling himself up Martin Delasquez’s leg to clutch a wall bracket. “Dannerman shot it up to keep the Scarecrows from following us. Outside of that, the place is just the way we left it.”