“The spaceport,” said Alen. With a slate-pencil screech the driver engaged his planetary gear and they were off.
Through it all, blackbeard had ignored frantic muttered questions from Chief Elwon, who had wanted nothing to do with murder, especially of a judge. “You sit up there,” growled the trader, “and every so often you look around and see if
we’re being followed. Don’t alarm the driver. And if we get to the spaceport and blast off without any trouble, keep your story to yourself.” He settled down in the back seat with Alen and maintained a gloomy silence. The young Herald was too much in awe of this stranger, so suddenly competent in assorted forms of violence, to question him.
They did get to the spaceport without trouble, and found the crew hi the Customs shed, emptied of the gems by dealers with releases. They had built a fire for warmth.
“We wish to leave immediately,” said the trader, to the port officer. “Can you change my Lyran currency?”
The officers began to sputter apologetically that it was late and the vault was sealed for the night—
“That’s all right We’ll change it on Vega. It’ll get back to you. Call off your guards and unseal our ship.”
They followed the port officer to Starsong’s dim bulk out on the field. The officer cracked the seal on her with his club in the light of a flaring pressure lamp held by one of the guards.
Alen was sweating hard through it all. As they started across the field he had seen what looked like two closely spaced green stars low on the horizon towards town suddenly each jerk up and towards each other in minute arcs. The sema-. phore!
The signal officer in the port administration building would be watching too—but nobody on the field, preoccupied with the routine of departure, seemed to have noticed.
The lights nipped this way and that. Alen didn’t know the code and bitterly regretted the lack. After some twenty signals the lights flipped to the “rest” postion again as the port officer was droning out a set of take-off regulations: bearing, height above settled areas, permissible atomic fuels while in atmosphere—Alen saw somebody start across the field toward them from the administration building. The guards were leaning on then- long, competent looking weapons.
Alen inconspicuously detached himself from the group around Starsong and headed across the dark field to meet the approaching figure. Nearing it, he called out a low greeting in Lyran, using the noncom-to-officer military form.
“Sergeant,” said the signal officer quietly, “go and draw off the men a few meters from the star-travelers. Tell them the
ship mustn’t leave, that they’re to cover the foreigners and shoot if—”
Alen stood dazedly over the limp body of the signal officer. And then he quickly hid the bludgeon again and strolled back to the ship, wondering whether he’d cracked the Lyran’s skull.
The port was open by then and the crew filing in. He was last. “Close it fast,” he told the trader. “I had to—”
“I saw you,” grunted blackbeard. “A semaphore message?” He was working as he spoke, and the metal port closed.
“Astrogator and engineer, take over,” he told them.
“All hands to their bunks,” ordered Astrogator Hufner. “Blast-off immediate.”
Alen took to his cubicle and strapped himself hi. Blast-ofi deafened him, rattled his bones and made him thoroughly sick as usual. After what seemed like several wretched hours, they were definitely space-borne under smooth acceleration, and his nausea subsided.
Blackbeard knocked, came hi, and unbuckled him.
“Ready to audit the books of the voyage?” asked the trader.
“No,” said Alen feebly.
“It can wait,” said the trader. “The books are the least important part, anyway. We have headed off a frightful war.”
“War? We have?”
“War between Eyolf’s Realm and Vega. It is the common gossip of chancellories and trade missions that both governments have cast longing eyes on Lyrane, that they have plans to penetrate its economy by supplying metals to the planet without metals—by force, if need be. Alen, we have removed the pretext by which Eyolf’s Realm and Vega would have attempted to snap up Lyrane and inevitably have come into conflict. Lyra is getting its metal now, and without imperialist entanglements.”