“In case one of those two is after the Sheewash Drive,” he told Goth, “we’d better do something about it.”
“Do what?” asked Goth. It would have been convenient just now if her talents had included reading minds; but they didn’t.
The captain had thought about it. “Set up a decoy drive.”
Goth liked the idea. He’d almost forgotten what had happened to the leftovers of the cargo with which he had started out from Nikkeldepain, sometimes that day seemed to lie years in the past now, but he located them finally in storage at the spaceport. One of the crates contained the complicated, expensive, and somewhat explosive educational toys which probably were the property of Councilor Rapport and which had turned out to be unsalable in the Empire.
“There’s a kind of gadget in there that could do the trick,” he said to Goth. “Called the Totisystem Toy, I think.”
He found a Totisystem Toy and demonstrated it for her. It had been designed to provide visual instruction in all forms of power systems known to Nikkeldepain, but something seemed to have gone wrong with the lot. When the toy was set in action, the systems all started to operate simultaneously. The result was a bewildering, constantly changing visual hash.
“Might not fool anybody who’s got much sense for long,” he admitted. “But all it has to do is let us know whether there’s someone on board we have to watch…. Could have the ship bugged, too, come to think of it!”
They had the Totisystem Toy installed in the engine room, concealed but not so well concealed that a good snooper shouldn’t be able to find it, and set up a camera designed for espionage work. The espionage supplies outfit, which sold them the camera, and sent an expert to bug the Venture unobtrusively in the areas the captain wanted covered, acknowledged the devices couldn’t be depended upon absolutely. Nothing in that class could. It was simply a matter of trying to keep a jump ahead of the competition.
“Spiders!” Goth remarked thoughtfully.
“Eh?” inquired the captain.
Spiders spun threads, she explained, and spiders got in everywhere. Even a very suspicious spy probably wouldn’t give much attention to a spider thread or two even if he noticed them.
They brought a couple of well-nourished spiders aboard the ship and attached a few threads to the camouflaged camera in the engine room. Anyone doing anything at all to the camera was going to break a thread.
Vezzarn, of course, couldn’t be completely counted out now as a potential spy. The old spacer’s experience might make him very useful on the run; but if it could, be made to seem that it was his own decision, they’d leave him on Uldune.
Vezzarn scratched his gray head. “Sounds like the Chaladoor’s acting up kind of bad right now, at that.” he agreed innocently. “But I’ll come along anyway, skipper, if it’s all right with you. “
So Vezzarn also came along. If they’d discharged him just before starting on the trip for which he’d been hired, people would have been wondering again.
On the night before take-off, Daalmen in an unmarked van brought two sizable crates out to the Evening Bird and loaded them on the ship’ at the captain’s direction. One crate went into a brand-new strongbox in the storage vault with a time lock on it. When it was inside, the captain set the lock to a date two weeks ahead. The other crate went into a stateroom recently sealed off from the rest of the passenger compartment. The first contained the crystalloid object that had been on Olimy’s ship; and the other contained Olimy himself.
They’d completed all preparations as well as they could.
After they’d been aloft twelve hours, Goth went down to the engine room with one of the spiders in a box in her pocket, and looked into the locked compartment. The camera hadn’t come into action, but the two almost imperceptible threads attached to it were broken. Someone had been there.
She had the spider attach fresh threads and came back up. None of their expensive bugs had been disturbed. The engine room prowler should be a spy of experience.
When they checked again next day, someone had been there again.
It didn’t seem too likely it had been the same someone. The bugs still had recorded no movement. They had two veteran spies on board then-perhaps three. The Totisystem Toy might have had a third visitor before the spider threads were reattached to the camera. But the camera hadn’t gone into action even once.
Short of putting all three suspects in chains, there wasn’t much they could do about it at the moment. The closer they got to the Chaladoor, the less advisable it would be for either of them to be anywhere but in the control section or in their cabins, which opened directly on the control section, for any considerable length of time. The spies, whether two or three, might simply give up. After all, the only mystery drive to be found on the ship was a bundle of wires in a drawer of the bedside table in Goth’s cabin. Plus Goth.
On the fourth ship-day something else occurred….
The captain was in the control chair, on watch, while Goth napped in her cabin. The Chaladoor had opened up awesomely before them, and the Venture was boring through it at the peak thrust of her souped-up new drives. Their super sophisticated detection system registered occasional blips, but so far they’d been the merest of flickers. The captain’s gaze shifted frequently to the forward screens. A small, colorful star cluster hung there, a bit to port, enveloped in a haze of reddish-brown dust against the black of space. It was the first of the guideposts through the uncertainties of the Chaladoor but one it was wise to give a wide berth to, the reputed lair, in fact, of his old acquaintances, the Megair Cannibals.
He tapped in a slight course modification. The cluster slid gradually farther to port. Then the small desk screen beside him, connected to the entrance to the control section, made a burring sound. He clicked it on and Vezzarn’s face appeared.
“Yes?” said the captain.
Vezzarn’s head shifted as he glanced back along the empty passage behind him. “Something going on you ought to know about, skipper!” he whispered hoarsely.
The captain simultaneously pressed the button that released the entrance door and the one that brought Goth awake in her cabin.
“Come in!” he said.
Vezzarn’s face vanished. The captain slipped his Blythe gun out of a desk drawer and into his pocket, stood up as the little spaceman hastily entered the control room. “Well?” he asked.
“That NO ADMITTANCE door back of the passenger section, skipper! Looks like one of ‘em’s snooping around in there.”
“Which one?” asked the captain as Goth appeared in the control room behind Vezzarn.
Vezzarn shrugged. “Don’t know! No one in the lounge right now. I was coming by, saw the door open just a bit. But it was open!”
“You didn’t investigate?”
“No, sir!” Vezzarn declared virtuously. “Not me. Not without your permission, I wouldn’t go in there! Thought I’d better tell you right away though.”
“Come along,” the captain told Goth. He snapped the control section door lock on behind the three of them, and they hurried along the passage to the lounge screens. The captain and Vezzarn hastened on, stopped at the door to the sealed passage, at the far end of which Olimy sat unmoving in his dark stateroom.
“Closed now!” Vezzarn said.
The captain glanced at him, drawing the key to the passage from his pocket. “Sure you saw it open?” he asked.
Vezzarn looked hurt. “Sure as I’m standing here, skipper! Just a bit. But it was open!”
“All right.” Whoever had been prowling about the ship before might have investigated the passage and the stateroom, discovered Olimy there, which should be a considerable shock to most people, and hurriedly left again. “You go wait with Dani in the lounge,” he said. “I’ll check.”
The key turned in the lock. The captain twisted the handle. The door flew open, banging into him; and he caught Hulik do Eldel by the arm as she darted out. She twisted a dead-white face up to him, eyes staring. Then, before he could say anything, her mouth opened wide and she screamed piercingly.
The scream brought Vezzarn back to the scene, Laes Yango lumbering behind him. Hulik was babbling her head off. The captain shoved the passage door shut, said curtly, “Let’s get her to the lounge….”
It was an awkward situation, but by the time they got to the lounge he had a story ready. The motionless figure Miss do Eldel had seen was simply another passenger and no cause for alarm. The man, whose name the captain was not at liberty to disclose, suffered from a form of paralysis for which a cure was to be sought on Emris. Some very important personages of Uldune were involved; and for reasons of planetary politics, the presence of the patient on board the Evening Bird was to have been a complete secret.