But she was feminine enough to devote several seconds making sure the coverall fitted as well as she could manage and that she made the best appearance possible under the circumstances. Then, a little warily, she tried the door, found it open, and stepped out onto the level landing.
The captain was already on the ladder; only his head and shoulders were in sight. He beckoned impatiently to her. She followed him down for three levels until they came to the open hatch from which sprang the door ramp.
Outside was a glare of sunlight which made Charis blink and raise her hands to shield her eyes. The captain caught her elbow and steered her ahead into a harsh warmth, desert-like in its baking heat. And as her eyes adjusted she saw that they had indeed set down in a wasteland.
Sand, which was a uniform red outside the glassy slag left by the thruster blast, lapped out to the foot of a range of small hills, the outline of which shimmered in heat waves. There was no sign of any building, no look of a port, save for the countless slag scars which pecked and pitted the surface of the desert sand, evidence of many landings and take-offs.
There were ships—two, three, a fourth farther away. And all of them, Charis saw, were of the same type as the one she had just left, second- and third-class traders. This seemed to be a rendezvous for fringe merchants.
The captain's hold on her arm left Charis no time to examine her surroundings more closely; he was pulling rather than guiding her to the next ship, a twin to his own. And a man, with an officer's winged cap but no uniform except nondescript coveralls, stood waiting for them at the foot of the ramp.
He stared at Charis intently as she and the captain approached. But the stare was impersonal, as if she were not a woman or even a human being at all, but a new tool of which the stranger was not quite sure.
"Here she is." The captain brought Charis to a stop before the strange officer.
His stare held for a moment and then he nodded and turned to go up the ramp. The other two followed. Once inside the ship, Charis, sandwiched between the two men, climbed the core ladder up to the level of the commander's cabin. There he signaled for her to sit at a swing-down desk, pushed a reader before her.
What followed was, Charis discovered, an examination into her ability to keep accounts, her knowledge of X-tee contact procedures, and the like. In some fields she was very ignorant, but in others she appeared to satisfy her questioner.
"She'll do." The stranger was very sparing of words.
Do for what? The question was on the tip of Charis's tongue when the stranger saw fit to enlighten her.
"I'm Jagan, Free Trader, and I've a temporary permit for a world named Warlock. Heard of it?"
Charis shook her head. There were too many worlds; one could never keep up with their listing.
"Probably not—back of beyond," Jagan had already added. "Well, the natives have an unusual system. Their females rule, make all off-world contacts; and they don't like to deal with males, even strangers like us. So we have to have a woman to palaver with them. You know some X-tee stuff and you've enough education to keep the books. We'll put you at the post, and then they'll trade. I'm buying your contract, and that's that. Got it, girl?"
He did not wait for her to answer, but waved her away from the desk. She backed against the cabin wall and watched him thumbprint the document which transferred her future into his keeping.
Warlock—another world—unsettled by human beings except at a trading post. Charis considered the situation. Such trading posts were visited at intervals by officials. She might have a chance to plead her case before such an inspector.
Warlock— She began to wonder about that planet and what might await her there.
III
"It's simple. You discover what they want and give it to them for as near your price as you can get." Jagan sat at the wall desk, Charis on a second pull-seat by the wall. But the captain was not looking at her; he was staring at the cabin wall as if the answer to some dilemma was scratched there as deeply as a blaster ray could burn it. "They have what we want. Look here—" He pulled out a strip of material as long as Charis's forearm and as wide as her palm.
It was fabric of some type, a pleasant green color with an odd shimmer to its surface. And it slipped through her fingers with a caressing softness. Also, she discovered, it could be creased and folded into an amazingly small compass, yet would shake out completely unwrinkled.
"That's waterproof," Jagan said. "They make it. Of what we don't know."
"For their clothing?" Charis was entranced. This had the soft beauty of the fabulously expensive Askra spider silk.
"No, this fabric is used commonly to package things—bags and such. The Warlockians don't wear clothing. They live in the sea as far as we know. And that's the only thing we've been able to trade out of them so far. We can't get to them—" He scowled, flipping record tapes about the top of the desk. "This is our chance, the big one, the one every trader dreams of having someday—a permit on a newly opened world. Make this spin right and it means—" His voice trailed off, but Charis understood him.
Trading empires, fortunes, were made from just such chances. To get at the first trade of a new world was a dream of good luck. But she was still puzzled as to how Jagan had achieved the permit for Warlock. Surely one of the big Companies would have made contact with Survey and bid in the rights to establish the first post. Such plums were not for the fringe men. But it was hardly tactful under the circumstances to ask Jagan how he had accomplished the nigh to impossible.
She had been spending a certain period of each ship's day with Jagan, going over the tapes he considered necessary for her briefing. And Charis had, after her first instruction hour, realized that to Jagan she was not a person at all, but a key with which he might unlock the mysteriously shut door of Warlockian trade. Oddly enough, while the captain supplied her with a wealth of information about his goods, the need for certain prices and profits, the mechanics of trading with aliens, he seemed to have very little to say about the natives themselves, save that they were strongly matriarchal in their beliefs, holding males in contempt. And they had been wary of the post after a first curious interest in it.
Jagan was singularly evasive over why the first contact had failed so thoroughly. And Charis, treading warily, dared not ask too many questions. This was like forsaking a well-worn road for a wilderness. She still had a little knowledge to guide her, but she had to pick a new path, using all her intuition.
"They have something else." Jagan came out of the thoughtful silence into which he had retreated. "It's a tool, a power. They travel by it." He rubbed one hand across his square chin and looked at Charis oddly as if daring her to take his words lightly. "They can vanish!"
"Vanish?" She tried to be encouraging. Every bit of information she could gain she must have.
"I saw it." His voice sank to a mumble. "She was right there—" one finger stabbed at the corner of the cabin, "and then—" He shook his head. "Just—just gone! They work it some way. Get us the secret of how they do that and we won't need anything else."
Charis knew that Jagan believed in the truth of what he had seen. And aliens had secrets. She was beginning to look forward to Warlock more than for just a chance of being free of this spacer.
But when they did planet, she was not so certain once again. The sky of mid-afternoon was amber, pure gold in places. The ship had set down among rough cliffs of red and black which shelved or broke abruptly to the green sea. Except for that sea and the sky, Warlock appeared a somber world of dark earth, a world which, to Charis, repelled rather than invited the coming of her species.
On Demeter the foliage had been a light, bright green, with hints of yellow along stem or leaf edge. Here it held a purple overcast, as if it were eternally night-shadowed even in the full sun of day.
Charis had welcomed and fiercely longed for the fresh air of the open, untainted by spacer use. But after her first tasting of that pleasure, she was more aware of a chill, a certain repulsion. Ye
t the breeze from the sea was no more than fresh; the few odors it bore, while perhaps strange, were not offensive in any way.
There was no settlement, no indication except for slag scars, that any spacer had set down here before. She followed Jagan down the ramp, away from the thruster steam, to the edge of a cliff drop, for they had landed on a plateau well above sea level. Below was an inlet running like a sharp sword thrust of sea into the land. And at its innermost tip bubbled the dome of the post, a gray dome of quickly hardened plasta-skin—the usual temporary structure on a frontier planet.
"There she is." Jagan nodded. But it seemed to Charis that he was in no hurry to approach his gate to fortune. She stood there, the breeze tugging at her hair and the coveralls they had given her. Demeter had been a frontier world, alien, but until after the white death had struck it had seemed open, willing to welcome her kind. Was that because it had had no native race? Or because its very combination of natural features, of sights, sounds, smells, had been more attuned to Terran stock? Charis had only begun to assess what made that difference, trying to explore the emotions this first meeting with Warlock aroused in her, when Jagan moved.
He lifted a hand to summon her on and led the way down a switchback trail cut into the native rock by blaster fire. Behind she could hear the voices of his crew as they formed a line of men to descend.
The foliage had been thinned about the post, leaving a wide space of bare, blue soil and gray sand ringing the bubble, an elementary defense precaution. Charis caught the scent of perfume, looked into a bush where small lavender-pink balls bobbed and swung with the wind's touch. That was the first light and delicate thing she had seen in this rugged landscape.
Now that she was on a level with the post, she saw that the dome was larger than it looked from above. Its surface was unbroken by any windows; visa-screens within would be set to pick up what registered on sensitive patches of the walls. But at the seaward end there was the outline of a door. Jagan fronted that and Charis, alert to any change in the trader's attitude, was sure he was puzzled. But his pause was only momentary. He strode forward and slapped his palm against the door as if in irritation.
The portal split open and they were inside the large foreroom. Charis looked about her. There was a long table, really only a flat surface mounted on easily assembled pipelegs. A set of shelves, put together in a like manner and now occupied by a mass of trade goods, followed the curve of the dome wall along, flanking the door, and added to the portion cutting this first chamber off from the rest.
There was a second door midway of that inner wall; the man who stood there must be Gellir, Jagan's cargomaster and now post keeper. He had the deep tan of a space man, but his narrow face, with its sharp jet of chin and nose, bore signs of fatigue. There were lines bracketing his lips, dark smudges under his eyes. He was a man who was under a strain, Charis thought. And he carried a stunner, not holstered at his belt as all the crew wore them when planetside, but free in his hand, as if he expected not his captain but some danger he was not sure he could meet.
"You made it." His greeting was a flat statement of fact. Then he sighted Charis and his expression tightened into one that she thought, with surprise, was a mingling of fear and repulsion. "Why—" He stopped, perhaps at some signal from Jagan the girl had not seen.
"Through here," the captain spoke to her quickly. She was almost pushed past Gellir into a passage so narrow that the shoulders of her escort brushed the plasta walls. He took her to the end of that way where the dome began to curve down overhead and then opened another door. "In here," he ordered curtly.
Charis went in, but as she turned, the door was already shut. Somehow she knew that if she tried to separate it by palm pressure, it would be locked.
With growing apprehension Charis looked about the room. There was a folding cot against the slope of the wall—she would have to move carefully to fit in under that curve. A stall fresher occupied a considerable space in the room where the roof was higher. For the rest, there was a snap-down table and a pull-out seat to fit beneath it and, at the foot of the cot, a box she guessed was to hold personal possessions.
More like a cell than living quarters in its design to conserve space. But, she thought, probably equal to any within the post. She wondered how big a staff Jagan thought necessary to keep here. Gellir had been in charge while the captain was off-world, and he could have been alone, a situation which would cause him to be jumpy under the circumstances. Normally a spacer of the Free Trader class would carry—Charis reckoned what she did know about such ships—normally a captain, cargomaster, assistant pilot-navigator, engineer and his assistant, a jet man, a medico, a cook—perhaps an assistant cargomaster. But that was a fully staffed ship, not a fringe tramp. She thought there had been four men on board beside Jagan.
Think things out, assemble your information before you act. Ander Nordholm had been a systematic thinker and his training still held in the odd turn her life had taken. Charis pulled out the seat and folded her hands on the table surface as she sat down to follow her father's way of facing a problem.
If she only knew more about Jagan! That he was desperately intent upon this project she could understand. Success meant a great deal for a fringe tramp; the establishment of a post on a newly opened planet was a huge step up. But—how had one on the ragged edge of respectability gotten the franchise for such a post in the beginning? Or—Charis considered a new thought—or had Jagan broken in here without a license? Suppose, just suppose, he had seen the chance to land well away from any government base, start trading. Then, when he was located by a Patrol from whatever headquarters did exist on Warlock, he could present an established fact. With the trade going, he could pay his fine and be left alone, because the situation could be so delicate locally that the legal representatives would not want the natives to have any hint of dissension between two off-world groups.
Then a time lapse in establishing proper contact with the aliens would goad Jagan into action. He would have to take any short cut, make any move he could devise, to get started. So, he needed her—
But that meeting on the desert of the unknown world where she had been traded from the labor ship to Jagan—what was that place and why had Jagan been there? Just to pick her up—or some other woman? An illegal meeting place where traders in contraband exchanged cargoes—of that she was sure. Smugglers operated all over space. A regular stop for the labor ship and Jagan was there, waiting on the chance of their carrying a woman for sale?
Which meant she had been taken by an illegal trader. Charis smiled slowly; she could be lucky because this trade had gone through. Somewhere on Warlock there was a government base where all contacts between off-worlders and natives were supervised. If she could reach that base and protest an illegal contract, she might be free even with Jagan holding her signature and thumbprint against her!
For the time being she would go along with Jagan's trading plans. Only—if the captain were working against time—Suddenly Charis felt as cold as she had when crouched on the Demeter mountainside. She was only a tool for Jagan; let that tool fail and . . .
She took an iron grip on herself, fought the cold inside her which was a gathering storm to send her beating at the door of what might be a trap. Her hands were palm-down on the table, their flesh wet. Charis strove to master the sickness in her middle and then she heard movements. Not in this cell—no—but beyond its wall.
A pounding—now heavy, now hardly more than a tapping—at irregular intervals. She was straining to hear more when the sound of metallic space-boot plates clicking against the flooring made her tense. Coming here?
She slipped sidewise on the seat to face the door. But that did not open. Instead, she heard another sound from beyond the wall—a thin mewling, animal-like, yet more frightening than any beast's cry. A human voice—low; Charis could not make out any words, just a man's tone close to the level of a whisper.
Now the sound of footsteps just without her own door. Charis sat ver
y still, willing herself into what she hoped was the outer semblance of calm. Not Jagan entered as the door split open, but one of the crew she did not recognize. In one hand he carried a sack-bag such as the crew used for personal belongings, which he tossed in the general direction of her cot. In the other, he balanced a sealed, hot ration tray which he slid on to the table before her. The room was so small he need hardly step inside the door to rid himself of both burdens.
Charis was ready to speak, but the expression on his face was forbidding and his movements were those of a man in a hurry. He was back and gone, the door sealed behind him before she could ask a question.
A finger-tip pressure released the lid of the tray and Charis savored the fragrance of stew, hot quaffa. She made a quick business of eating, and her plate was cleared before she heard more sounds. Not the thumping this time but a low cry which was not quite a moan.
As suddenly as that plaint began, it stopped and there was silence. A prisoner? A member of the crew ill? Charis's imagination could supply several answers, but imagination was not to be relied upon.
As the silence continued, Charis rose to investigate the bag on the cot. Jagan or someone had made a selection of trade goods, for the articles which spilled out were items intended to catch the eye of an alien or primitive. Charis found a comb with the back set in a fanciful pattern of bits of crystal; a mirror adorned to match; a box containing highly scented soap powder, the too strong perfume of which made her sniff in fastidious disgust. There were several lengths of cloth in bright colors; a small hand-sew kit; three pairs of ornamented sandals in different sizes for a fitting choice; a robe, which was too short and too wide, of a violent blue with a flashy pattern of oblak birds painted on it.