I pushed the door aside. There was a bunk and I threw myself on it, suddenly as tired as I had been hungry. I felt Eet leap to my side and curl up with his head on my shoulder. But his mind was sealed and his eyes closed. There was nothing to do but yield to the demands of my overtired body and follow him into slumber.
I was jerked out of that blissful state by a strident buzzing far too close to my ear. When I looked blearily around I saw Eet sitting up, combing his whiskers between his fingers.
“Re-entry alarm,” he informed me.
“Are you sure?” I sat up on the bunk and ran my hands through my hair, but not with the neat results of Eet’s personal grooming. It had been far too long since I had had a change of clothing, a bath, a chance to feel really clean. On my hands and body, the pink patches of new skin were fading. It should not be long before my piebald state was past and I would bear none of the stigma of the disease which had taken me from the Vestris.
“Back where we started from, yes.” Eet did sound sure, though I could not share his complete confidence, and would not until I was able to look outside.
“Might as well strap down right here,” he continued.
“But the ship-“
“Is on full automatic. And what could you do if it were not?”
Eet was right, but I would have felt less shaky had Hory been riding in the pilot’s seat. It is very true that the autopilots have been refined and refined until they probably are more reliable than humans. But there is always the unusual emergency when a human reflex may save what a machine cannot. And, though the engines of a space ship practically run themselves, no ship ever lifts without pilot, engineer, and those other crewmen whose duties in the past once kept their hands ever hovering over controls.
“You fear your machines, do you not?” As I buckled down on the bunk Eet stretched out beside me. He seemed prepared to carry on a conversation at a time when I was in no mood for light talk.
“Why, I suppose some of us do. I am no techneer. Machines are mysteries as far as I am concerned.” Too much of a mystery. I wished I had had some instruction in spacing.
But my thoughts and Eet’s answer, if he made one, were blanked out in the discomfort of orbiting before planet-fall. And I found that to be twice as great as what I had experienced before. My estimation of Hory arose. If he had constantly to take this sort of thing he was indeed tough. My last stab of fear concerned our actual touch-down. What if the automatic controls did not pick a suitable spot on which to fin in and we were swallowed up in some lake, or tipped over at set-down. Not that there was one thing I could do to prevent either that or any other catastrophe which might arise.
Then I opened my eyes, with the thumping pain of a sun-sized headache behind them, felt the grip of planetside gravity, and knew that we had made it. Since the floor of the cabin appeared to be level, we had had a suitable landing, too.
Eet crawled out from beneath the strap which had gone across my chest and his body. His quick recovery from the strains which always held me in thrall was irritating. I had thought him dead after that violent blow he had taken from the rod. But from the time he had turned to bite the hand which held him, he had shown no sign of nursing even a bruise.
“-see where we are-“ He was already going out the cabin door. And in the silent ship I could hear the scraping of his claws as he climbed the ladder. I followed at a far more moderate pace, stopping on the way to pick up a tube of restorative from the rack in the gallery. Hory would need that and we would need him – at least until we learned more about where we were and what might be ahead of us.
The Patrolman’s eyes were open, fixed on Eet in a stare which suggested he did not in the least want to see the mutant. And Eet was in Hory’s lawful place, the pilot’s seat. For the first time since I had known him, my companion appeared truly baffled.
As always the control board was rigged with an outside visa-screen. But the button which activated that was now well above Eet’s reach, meant to be close to the hand of a human pilot reclining in that swing chair.
Eet had scrambled up as high as he could climb, his neck stretched to an amazing length. But his nose was still not within touching distance of that button. I crossed over to push it.
The screen produced a picture. We seemed to be facing a cliff – and it was too close to have reassured me had I seen it before we landed. Insofar as I could compare it in memory, it was of the same yellow-gray shade as that which had been tunneled by the long-ago miners. But this had no breaks in its surface.
For the first time Hory spoke. “Put on the sweep – that lever there.” Bound as he was, he had to indicate with his chin, using it as a pointer. I dutifully pressed that second button.
The cliff face now appeared to travel past us at a slow rate. Then we saw what must lie to the left, open sky with only the tops of greenery showing.
“Depress,” ordered Hory almost savagely. “Depress the lever. We want ground level.”
There was almost a sensation of falling as our field of vision descended rapidly. The tops of the growth became visible as the crowns of large bushes. There was the usual smoke and fumes left by the deter rockets, a strip of seared ground between the ship and that shriveled wall of green. Nowhere did I see the giant trees which had caught the LB in for the forest.
Neither were there any ruins, nor the wreckage of the ancient ship, nor, what I had dreaded the most, the spire of the Guild vessel. As the visa-screen continued to reveal the land about us, it looked very much as if we were in a wilderness. And how far we were from the mining camp was anyone’s guess.
“Not too far.” Eet climbed up on the webbing to watch the sweep across the countryside. “There are ways of locating a ship, especially on a planet where there is no interference in the way of ordinary electronic broadcasting. He has already thought of that-“ The mutant indicated Hory.
I turned to the Patrolman. “What about it? We are back on that planet, I know this vegetation. Can you discover the Guild ship or camp for us?”
“Why should I?” He was not struggling against his bonds, but lying at his ease, as if action was no concern of his. “Why should I put myself into your friends’ hands? You have a problem now, have you not, Jern? Take off on the tape set in the autopilot and you will reach my base. Stay here – and sooner or later your friends will come. Then you had better try to make a deal. Perhaps you can use me as a bargaining point.”
“You have given me little reason to want to do anything else,” I retorted. “But those are not my friends, and I am not about to make any bargain with them.” Almost I was tempted to let him believe that his supposition was the truth. But why play murky games when I might well need his cooperation in the future? The ship would take off on a tape, without the need for a human pilot. But whether he had a supply of such tapes on board, whether I could affix and use another, whether I could be sure my choice would not merely take me to another Patrol post, that I must find out. And time to learn might be running out – they might already be tracing us.
I – we – needed Hory, yet we must not make too much of that need lest he play upon it. So I had to convince him that we must cooperate, if only for a short period of truce.
“Do you know what they hunt back there?” I tried a different track.
“It is easy enough to guess. They try to find where those stones were mined.”
“Which-“ I said slowly, “Eet has discovered, though they have not.”
I feared some denial from Eet, but he made no attempt at communication. The mutant was still watching the screen as if the picture on it was the most important thing in the world. I was feeling my way, but it heartened me a little that he had not promptly protested my assertion concerning his knowledge.