Wooded stretches passed under him and Great Gruesome’s lowlands moved into view ahead. Holati cut the hopper’s speed to a crawl, dropped to twenty feet and opened the hatch. He edged out, breathing hard and hanging on to his wire with one hand, and as they passed over the first patch of marshy ground he gave the wire a firm tug and jumped. The hopper zoomed off, slanting upward again.
The ground was much wetter than Holati had estimated, but he floundered and waded out in three and a half minutes. A pair of hippopotamus-sized, apparently vegetarian, denizens of Great Gruesome followed him part of the way, bellowing annoyedly, but undertook no overt action.
As he sat down on the first piece of dry earth to pour the mud out of his boots, there was a moderately bright flash in the noonday sky over the approximate center of the swamp-arm behind him. Holati didn’t look around but he grunted approvingly. Clean work! Even if someone had been interested in going hunting for fragments of the hopper, they weren’t going to invade the center of Great Gruesome to do it. Not very long.
He worked his boots back on, stood up, sighed, and set out squishily on what was going to be a two-day hike back to the Headquarters Station.
* * *
2
When the long-awaited announcement of the first artifacts of the legendary Old Galactic civilization finally was flashed from Precol’s Manon System to the Federation, the Precol home office and Academy showed an uncharacteristic lack of enthusiasm. The fact that one of their most able and respected field operators had just been lost off Manon in line of duty might have had something to do with it. In the wave of renewed high interest in space exploration which swept the Federation, this detail remained generally unnoticed.
For the discovery was a truly king-sized strike. The riches of robotic information alone which it provided for a dozen interested branches of human science might take a century to be fully utilized. The Old Galactic base on an obscure planetoid circling far beyond the previously established limits of the Manon System was no dead relic; it was a functioning though currently purposeless installation. The best guess was that approximately thirty-two thousand standard years had passed since the constructors of the base had last visited it. Automatically and efficiently since then the installation had continued to reap and process the cyclic abundance of plankton life from Manon’s atmosphere.
When the ships which once had carried away its finished products no longer came and the limits of its storage facilities were reached, it piled up the accumulating excess on the little world’s lightless surface. But its processing sections remained active, and back and forth between the planetoid and Manon moved the stream of Harvesters, biological robots themselves, and performed their function until a human discoverer set foot on the little world and human hands reached for the controlling switches in the installation that turned the Harvesters off.
So scientists, technicians and reporters came out by the shipload to the Manon System, and for a few months Manon’s new Acting Commissioner was an extremely busy man. One day however he summoned his secretary, Trigger Argee, to his new office on what was now popularly though inaccurately known as Harvest Moon and said, “Trigger, we’re going for a little trip.”
“You’re scheduled for three more interviews in the next six hours,” Trigger informed him.
“Chelly or Inger can handle them,” the Acting Commissioner said.
“Not these,” said Trigger. “Reporters. They want more details on the Space Exploits of the Gallant Scout Commander Tate in His Younger Days.”
“Hell,” Acting Commissioner Tate said, reddening slightly, “I’m too old to enjoy being a hero now. They should have come around thirty years earlier. Let’s go.”
* * *
So they rose presently from the surface of the dark worldlet, with Trigger at the controls of a spacecraft not much bigger than a hopper but capable nevertheless of interstellar jumps, though Trigger hadn’t yet been checked out on such maneuvers. It was, as a matter of fact, basically the ferocious little boat of the Space Scouts rebuilt for comfort, which made it a toy for the fabulously wealthy only. The Acting Commissioner, having observed recently that, on the basis of his first-discovery claims to Harvest Moon and its gadgetry, he was now in the fabulously wealthy class, had indulged himself in an old man’s whim.
“Here’s your course-tape, pilot,” he said complacently and settled back into the very comfortable observer’s seat on Trigger’s right, equipped with its duplicate target screen.
Trigger fed in the tape and settled back also. “Runs itself,” she said. “Practically.” She was a girl who could appreciate a good ship. “What are you looking for, out in the middle of the Manon System?”
“You’ll see when we get there.” Trigger gave him a quick look. Then she glanced at the space-duty suit he had brought from the back of the ship and laid behind his seat. “I’m not so sure,” she said carefully, “that I’m going to like what I see when we get there.”
“Oho!” Holati Tate reached up and tugged down on his left ear lobe. He looked reflective. After a moment he inquired, “How much of this have you got figured out, Trigger girl?”
“Parts of it,” Trigger said. “There’re some missing pieces, too, though. I’ve been doing a little investigating on my own,” she explained.
Manon’s Acting Commissioner cleared his throat. He reached out and made an adjustment on his target screen, peered into the screen, muttered and made another adjustment. Then he said, “What got you going on an investigation?”
“The fact,” said Trigger, “that Precol Academy seems willing to let you get away with murder.”
“Murder?” He frowned.
“Yes. It didn’t take much digging to find out about the Ancient and Honorable Society of Retired Space Scouts. First I’d heard of that outfit.” She hesitated. “I suppose you don’t mind my saying it doesn’t sound like an organization anyone would take seriously?”
“Don’t mind at all,” said Holati Tate.
“I believe you. In fact, after I’d found there were around twelve thousand of those retired Scouts scattered through Precol—and that you happened to be their president—it occurred to me the Society might have selected that name so nobody would take it seriously.”
“Hm-m-m.” He nodded. “Yes. Bright girl!”
“There may be bright people at the Academy, too,” Trigger said. “Bright enough to work out that Commissioner Ramog’s departure from our midst was a well-planned execution.”
“I’d say I like `execution’ better than `murder’,” Holati remarked judiciously. “But it’s still not quite the right word, Trigger girl.”
“You prefer `object lesson’?”
“Well . . . that’ll do for the moment. So what did you mean about it’s being a well-planned object lesson?”
Trigger shrugged. “Wouldn’t it have been a remarkable coincidence if you’d made the Old Galactic strike at just the right instant to help close out Ramog’s account?”
“I see.” Holati nodded again. “Yes, you’re right about that. A few of us discovered Harvest Moon almost three years ago, on a private prospecting run—” He leaned forward suddenly. “Brake her down, pilot! There’s a flock of those Harvester things ahead right now. I want to look them over.”
* * *
She brought the ship to a stop in the middle of a widely scattered dozen of Harvesters, drifting idly through the system as they had been doing since Holati Tate had disconnected the switch that energized them, in an airless underground dome on Harvest Moon, three months before.
Peering out against the green glare of Manon’s sun, Trigger eyed the nearest of the inert hulks with some feeling of physical discomfort. It was very considerably bigger than their ship, and it looked more like some ominously hovering dark monster of space than like an alien work-robot. She became aware that her companion’s hands were moving unhurriedly about an instrument panel on the other side of his target screen. Suddenly, first one and then another of the Harvesters was glowing throughout its length as if a greenish light had been switched on inside it. The glow darkened again, as the invisible beam that had been scanning them from the ship went on to others of the group.
“Looks like this bunch was about four weeks out from Manon when the power went off,” Holati remarked conversationally. He cut the scanbeam off. “It would have taken them close to two months to make the run to Harvest Moon at the time.”
Trigger nodded. “I’ve seen the figures. Shall I get us back on course?”
“Please do. There’s nothing here.”
* * *
Trigger remained silent until she had gone through the required operations. Then, feeling unaccountably relieved at being in motion again, she said, “I suppose it was your Society that started the rumors about the Manon System being the most likely place for an Old Galactic strike to be made.”