Then I fainted.
I woke up thinking, It wasn’t that strong!
And everyone else was waking, too.
Something had knocked us all out at once. Which might mean the ship had an unconscious captain! I left the lounge at full speed, which was a wobbly walk.
The control-room door was open, which is bad practice. I reached to close it and changed my mind because the lock and doorknob were gone, replaced by a smooth hole nine inches across.
Margo drooped in her chair. I patted her cheeks until she stirred.
“What happened?” she wanted to know.
“We all went to sleep together. My guess is gas. Stun guns don’t work across a vacuum.”
“Oh!” It was a gasp of outrage. She’d spotted the gaping hole in her control board, as smooth and rounded as the hole in the door. The gap where the hyperwave radio ought to be.
“Right,” I said. “We’ve been boarded, and we can’t tell anyone about it. Now what?”
“That hole…” She touched the rounded metal with her fingertips.
“Slaver disintegrator, I think. A digging tool. It projects a beam that suppresses the charge on the electron, so that matter tears itself apart. If that’s what it was, we’ll find the dust in the air filters.”
“There was a ship,” said Margo. “A big one. I noticed it just after I ended the show. By then it was inside the mass limit. I couldn’t go into hyperspace until it left.”
“I wonder how they found us.” I thought of some other good questions, but let them pass. One I let out. “What’s missing? We’d better check.”
“That’s what I don’t understand. We aren’t carrying anything salable! Valuable, yes. Instruments for the base. But hardly black-market stuff.” She stood up. “I’ll have to go through the cargo hold.”
“Waste of time. Where’s the cargo mass-meter on this hulk?”
“Oh, of course.” She found it somewhere among the dials. “No change. Nothing missing there, unless they replaced whatever they took with equivalent masses.”
“Why, so we wouldn’t know they were here? Nuts.”
“Then they didn’t take anything.”
“Or they took personal luggage. The lifesystem mass-meter won’t tell us. Passengers move around so. You’d think they’d have the courtesy to stay put just in case some pirates should—ung.”
“What?”
I tasted the idea and found it reasonable. More. “Ten to one Lloobee’s missing.”
“Who?”
“Our famous, valuable kdatlyno sculptor. The third kdatlyno in history to leave his home planet.”
“One of the ET passengers?”
Oh, brother. I left, running.
Because Lloobee was the perfect theft. As a well-known alien artist who had been under the protection of Earth, the ransom he could command was huge. As a hostage his value would be equal. No special equipment would be needed; Lloobee could breathe Earth-normal air. His body could even use certain human-food proteins and certain gaseous human anesthetics.
Lloobee wasn’t in the lounge. And his cabin was empty.
With Lloobee missing, and with the hyperwave smashed, the Argos proceeded to Gummidgy at normal speed. Normal speed was top speed; there are few good reasons to dawdle in space. It took us six hours in hyperdrive to reach the edge of CY Aquarii’s gravity well. From there we had to proceed on reaction drive and gravity drag.
Margo called Gummidgy with a com laser as soon as we were out of hyperspace. By the time we landed, the news would be ten hours old. We would land at three in the morning, ship’s time, and at roughly noon Gummidgy time.
Most of us, including me, went to our cabins to get some sleep. An hour before planetfall I was back in the lounge, watching us come in.
Emil didn’t want to watch. He wanted to talk.
“Have you heard? The kidnapers called the base a couple of hours ago.”
“What’d they have to say?”
“They want ten million stars and a contract before they turn the kdatlyno loose. They also”—Emil was outraged at their effrontery—“reminded the base that kdatlyno don’t eat what humans eat. And they don’t have any Kdat foodstuffs!”
“They must be crazy. Where would the base get ten million stars in time?”
“Oh, that’s not the problem. If the base doesn’t have funds, they can borrow money from the hunting parties, I’m sure. There’s a group down there with their own private yacht. It’s the contract that bothers me.”
Gummidgy was blue-on-blue under a broken layer of white, with a diminutive moon showing behind an arc of horizon. Very Earth-like, but with none of the signs that mark Earth: no yellow glow of sprawling cities on the dark side, no tracery of broken freeways across the day. A nice-looking world, from up here. Unspoiled. No transfer booths, no good nightclubs, no tridee except old tapes and those only on one channel. Unspoiled.
With only half my mind working on conversation, I said, “Be glad we’ve got contracts. Otherwise we might get him back dead.”
“Obviously you don’t know much about kdatlyno.”
“Obviously.” I was nettled.
“They’ll do it, you know. They’ll pay the kidnapers ten million stars to give Lloobee back, and they’ll tape an immunity contract too. Total immunity for the kidnapers. No reprisals, no publicity. Do you know what the kdatlyno will think about that?”
“They’ll be glad to have their second-best sculptor back.”
“Best.”
“Hrodenu is the best.”
“It doesn’t matter. What they’ll think is, they’ll wonder why we haven’t taken revenge for the insult to Lloobee. They’ll wonder what we’re doing about getting revenge. And when they finally realize we aren’t doing anything at all…”
“Go on.”
“They’ll blame the whole human race. You know what the Kzinti will think?”
“Who cares what the Kzinti think?”
He snorted. Great. Now he had me pegged as a chauvinist.
“Why don’t you drop it?” I suggested. “We can’t do anything about it. It’s up to the base MPs.”
“It’s up to nobody. The base MPs don’t have ships.”
Right about then I should have accidentally bitten my tongue off. I didn’t have that much sense. I never do. Instead I said, “They don’t need ships. Whoever took Lloobee has to land somewhere.”
“The message came in on hyperwave. Whoever sent it is circling outside the system’s gravity well.”
“Whoever sent it may well be.” I was showing off. “But whoever took Lloobee landed. A kdatlyno needs lots of room, room he can feel. He sends out a supersonic whistle—one tone—all his life, and when the echoes hit the tympanum above his mouth, he knows what’s around him. On a liner he can feel corridors leading all around the ship. He can sense the access tubes behind walls, and the rooms and closets behind doors. Nothing smaller than a liner is big enough for him. You don’t seriously suggest that the kidnapers borrowed a liner for the job, do you?”
“I apologize. You do seem to know something about kdatlyno.”
“I accept your apology. Now, the kidnapers have definitely landed. Where?”
“Have to be some rock. Gummidgy’s the only planet-sized body in the system. Look down there.”
I looked out the window. One of Gummidgy’s oceans was passing beneath us. The biggest ocean Gummidgy had, it covered a third of the planet.
“Circle Sea. Round as a ten-star piece. A whale of a big asteroid must have hit there when Gummidgy was passing through the system. Stopped it cold, or almost. All the other rocks in the system are close enough to the star to be half molten.”
“Okay. Could they have built their own space station? Or borrowed one? Doubtful. So they must have landed on Gummidgy,” I concluded happily, and waited for the applause.
Emil was slowly nodding his head, up, down, up, down. Suddenly he stood up. “Let’s ask Captain Tellefsen.”
“Hold it! Ask
her what?”
“Ask her how big the ship was. She saw it, didn’t she? She’ll know whether it was a liner.”
“Sit down. Let’s wait till we’re aground, then tell the MPs. Let them ask Margo.”
“What for?”
Belatedly, I was getting cautious. “Just take my word for it, will you. Assume I’m a genius.”
He gave me a peculiar look, but he did sit down.
Later, after we landed, we favored the police with our suggestions. They’d already asked Margo about the ship. It was a hell of a lot smaller than the Argos…about the size of a big yacht.
“They aren’t trying,” Emil said as we emerged from city hall.
“You can’t blame them,” I told him. “Suppose we knew exactly where Lloobee was. Suppose that. Then what? Should we charge in with lasers blazing and risk Lloobee catching a stray beam?”
“Yes, we should. That’s the way kdatlyno think.”
“I know, but it’s not the way I think.”
I couldn’t see Emil’s face, which was bent in thought two feet below eye level. But his words came slowly, as if he had picked them with care. “We could find the ship that brought him down. You can’t hide a spaceship landing. The gravity drag makes waves on a spaceport indicator.”
“Granted.”
“He could be right here in the base. So many ships go in and out.”
“Most of the base ships don’t have hyperdrive.”
“Good. Then we can find them, wherever they landed.” He looked up. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go look at the spaceport records!”
It was a waste of time, but there was no talking him out of it. I tagged along.
The timing was a problem.
From where the kidnaping took place, any ship in known space would take six hours to reach the breakout point. If it tried to go farther in hyperspace, CY Aquarii’s gee well would drop it permanently into the Blind Spot.
From breakout it had taken us ten hours to reach Gummidgy. That was at five-gee acceleration, fusion drive and gravity drag, with four gees compensated by the internal gee-field. CY Aquarii was a hot star, and if Gummidgy hadn’t been near the edge of the system, it would have been boiling rock. Now, the fastest ship I’d ever heard of could make twenty gees…
“Which would take it here in five hours,” said Emil. “Total of eleven. A one-gee ship would—”
“Would take too long. Lloobee would go crazy. They must know something about kdatlyno. In fact, I’ll bet they’re lying about not having kdatlyno food.”
“Maybe. Okay, assume they’re at least as fast as the Argos. That gives us five hours to play in. Hmmm…?”
“Nineteen ships.” On the timetable they were listed according to class. I crossed out fifteen that didn’t have hyperdrive, crossed out the Argos itself to leave three. Crossed out the Pregnant Banana because it was a cargo job, flown by computer, ten gee with no internal compensating fields. Crossed out the Golden Voyage, a passenger ship smaller than the Argos, with a one-gee drive.
“That’s nice,” said Emil. “Drunkard’s Walk. Say! Remember the hunting party I told you about, with their own yacht?”
“Yah. I know that name.”
“Well, that’s the yacht. Drunkard’s Walk. What did you say?”
“The owner of the yacht. Larchmont Bellamy. I met him once, at Elephant’s house.”
“Go on.”
By then it was too late to bite my tongue, though I didn’t know it yet. “Not much to tell. Elephant’s a friend of mine, a flatlander. He’s got friends all over known space. I walked in at lush-hour one afternoon, and Bellamy was there, with a woman named…here she is, Tanya Wilson. She’s in the same hunting party. She’s Bellamy’s age.”
“What’s Bellamy like?”
“He’s three hundred years old, no kidding. He was wearing a checkerboard skin-dye job and a shocking-pink Belter crest. He talked well. Old jokes, but he told them well, and he had some new ones too.”
“Would he kidnap a kdatlyno?”
I had to think about that. “He might. He’s no xenophobe; aliens don’t make him nervous, but he doesn’t like them. I remember him telling us that we ought to wipe out the Kzinti for good and all. He doesn’t need money, though.”
“Would he do it for kicks?”
Bellamy. Pink bushy eyebrows over deep eyes. A mimic’s voice, a deadpan way of telling a story, deadpan delivery of a punch line. I’d wondered at the time if that was a put-on. In three hundred years you hear the same joke so many times, tell the same story so many ways, change your politics again and again to match a changing universe…Was he deadpan because he didn’t care anymore? How much boredom can you meet in three hundred years?
How many times can you change your morals without losing them all? Bellamy was born before a certain Jinxian biological laboratory produced boosterspice. He reached maturity when the organ banks were the only key to long life, when a criminal’s life wasn’t worth a paper star. He was at draft age when the Kzinti were the only known extrasolar civilization, and a fearful alien threat. Now civilization included human and nine known alien life-forms, and criminal rehabilitation accounted for half of all published work in biochemistry and psychotherapy.
What would Bellamy’s morals say about Lloobee? If he wouldn’t kidnap a kdatlyno, would he “steal” one?
“You make your own guess there. I don’t know Bellamy that well.”
“Well, it’s worth checking.” Jilson bent over the timetables. “Mist Demons, he landed a third of the way around the planet! Oh, well. Let’s go rent a car.”
“Hah?”
“We’ll need a car.” He saw he’d left me behind. “To get to their camp. To find out if they rescued Lloobee. You know, the kdatlyno touch-sculptor who—”
“I get the picture. Good-bye and good luck. If they ask who sent you, for Finagle’s sake don’t mention me.”
“That won’t work,” Emil said firmly. “Bellamy won’t talk to me. He doesn’t know me.”
“Apparently I didn’t make it clear. I’ll try again. If we knew who the kidnapers were, which we don’t, we still couldn’t charge in with lasers blazing—”
But he was shaking his head, left, right, left, right. “It’s different now. These men have reputations to protect, don’t they? What would happen to those reputations if all human space knew they’d kidnaped a kdatlyno?”
“You’re not thinking. Even if everyone on Gummidgy knew the truth, the pirates would simply change the contract. A secrecy clause, enforced by monetary penalty.”
Emil slapped the table, and the walls echoed. “Are we just going to sit here while they rob us? You’re a hell of a man to wear a hero’s name!”
“Look, you’re taking this too personally—huh?”
“A hero’s name! Beowulf! He must be turning over in his barrow about now.”
“Who’s Beowulf?”
Emil stood up, putting us eye to eye, so that I could see his utter disgust. “Beowulf was the first epic hero in English literature. He killed monsters barehanded, and he did it to help people who didn’t even belong to his own country. And you—” He turned away. “I’m going after Bellamy.”
I sat there for what seemed a long time. Any time seems long when you need to make a decision but can’t. It probably wasn’t more than a minute.
But Emil wasn’t in sight when I ran outside.
I shouted at the man who’d loaned us the timetables. “Hey! Where do you go to rent a car?”
“Public rentals. Dial fourteen in the transfer booth, then walk a block east.”
So the base did have transfer booths. I found one, paid my coin, and dialed.
Getting to Public Rentals gave me my first chance to look at the base. There wasn’t much to see. Buildings, half of them semipermanent; the base was only four years old. Apartment buildings, laboratories, a nursery school. Overhead, the actinic pinpoint of CY Aquarii hit the weather dome and was diffused into a wide, soft white glow. There were f
ew people about, and all of them were tanned the same shade of black for protection against the savage, invisible ultraviolet outside. Most of them had goggles hung around their necks.
That much I saw while running a block at top speed.
He was getting into a car when I came panting up. He said, “Change your mind?”
“No, but…hoo!…you’re going to change yours. Whew! The mood you’re in, you’ll fly straight into…Bellamy’s camp and…tell him he’s a lousy pirate. Hyooph! Then if you’re wrong, he’ll…punch you in the nose…and if you’re right, he’ll either…laugh at you or have you…killed.”
Emil climbed into the car. “If you’re going to argue, get in and argue there.”
I got in. I had some of my breath back. “Will you get it through your thick head? You’ve got your life to lose and nothing to gain. I told you why.”
“I’ve got to try, don’t I? Fasten your crash web.”
I fastened my crash web. Its strands were thin as coarse thread, and not much stronger, but they had saved lives. Any sharp pull on the crash web would activate the crash field, which would enfold the pilot and protect him from impact.
“If you’ve still got to look for the kidnapers,” I said, “why not do it here? There’s a good chance Lloobee’s somewhere on the base.”
“Nuts,” said Emil. He turned on the lift units, and we took off. “Bellamy’s yacht is the only ship that fits.”
“There’s another ship that fits. The Argos.”
“Put your goggles on. We’re about to go through the weather dome. What about the Argos?”
“Think it through. There had to be someone aboard in the first place to plant the gas bomb that knocked us out. Why shouldn’t that same person have hidden Lloobee somewhere, gagged or unconscious, until the Argos could land?”
“Finagle’s gonads! He could still be on the Argos! No he couldn’t; they searched the Argos.” Emil glared at nothing. At that moment we went through the weather dome. CY Aquarii, which had been a soft white patch, became for an instant a tiny bright point of agony. Then a spot on each lens of my goggles turned black and covered the sun.
“We’ll have to check it out later,” said Emil. “But we can call City Hall now and tell them one of the kidnapers was on the Argos.”