Halderson integrated the signal and fed it to his computing tapes to get a directional fix. Perhaps the computer could give him an exact location; if not, it could at least pinpoint a general area which could be subjected to an exhaustive search.
He waited. He was in no hurry now. The computer took its own sweet time, checking probabilities and directional quadrations before beeping out a string of linked coordinates.
Halderson studied the sheet of paper that had issued from the computer. It gave a fairly precise orientation for the signal-source. Halderson nibbled on his writing stylus for a moment, then jabbed at the button that activated his chart-screen.
The screen lit up, glowing green with dark flecks in it. Quickly Halderson tapped out the directional coordinates the computer had given him, and the screen obligingly shifted to show him a view of the heavens in the area he called for.
One small dark fleck stood alone on the field of green. Halderson grinned in satisfaction. There was only one planet from which that signal could have emanated, then! It made his job that much simpler. The James P. Drew lifeship that had signaled him had come to rest in a relatively uncrowded sector of the galaxy’s Second Octant.
Nodding, Halderson jotted down the planetary data and shut off the chart-screen. He jacked in the contact for subradio communication with his home base on the planet Skaldek. Moments later came the crackling response from headquarters: “Disaster Patrol HQ. Come in, scoutship. Come in. Major Lang speaking.”
“Lieutenant Halderson calling, sir. Are you getting me? Halderson calling.”
“We read you,” came the reply from HQ. “Proceed, Halderson.”
“My detectors have picked up an S.O.S. message from survivors of the James P. Drew. I’ve made a directional estimate on the signal and I’ve come up with a possible planet of origin for it.”
“Let’s have the coordinates,” Lang said. “We’ll check them for you and advise.”
Halderson said. “It’s a Second Octant planet with Absolute Coordinates DY1164/AD2306. Repeat: Absolute Coordinates DY1164/AD2306.”
“DY1164/AD2306. Okay, Halderson. I’ll check them on the master planetary chart and let you know what to do next.”
Halderson waited patiently. It was impossible to install a complete galactic data-chart in every small scoutship; for any detailed information on a given planet, it was necessary for the scout to refer back to his home headquarters.
In a few moments Lang’s voice said, “I’ve checked that planet of yours, Halderson. So far as our records show, it’s a good potential harbor for castaways. It’s an Earthtype planet to three places, surveyed twenty years ago but never settled.”
Halderson nodded. Earthtype to three places meant that Earthmen could live there indefinitely without need of artificial protection. The air was breathable, the natural life edible, the water drinkable…
He said, “Very well, sir. In that case I’ll run a direct check on the planet immediately. If I find the Drew survivors there I’ll notify HQ.”
“Right.”
“Perhaps more than one lifeship landed there. I’ll keep you posted on my findings, Major.”
After he had broken contact with home base, Lieutenant Halderson pulled his small ship out of the idling orbit it had been in for the past hour, and punched out the coordinates of the new planet on his drive director. He estimated it would take no more than a day to reach the unnamed planet from his present position. He hoped the Drew survivors would be readily accessible, not stranded on a mountain peak or in the midst of some dreary alien desert, as so frequently happened.
Halderson had been in the Disaster Patrol for seven years. He liked the work, in an obscure way, even though it was lonely going and low paying. Disaster Patrol scouts were forbidden by law to accept rewards from people they rescued. Halderson didn’t mind that. Many times some rich tourist rescued by Halderson would offer to give the Disaster Patrol scout a fat reward, but Halderson was not even tempted.
He had no need for large amounts of money. He spent eight months of the 365-day Galactic Standard Year roaming the spaceways in search of stranded castaways, and the remaining four months of the year were his own, to be spent groundside on the more entertaining worlds of the universe.
That was all he asked. Eight months of rescue work, four months of relaxation. To be handed a couple of thousand credits for rescuing a wealthy traveler would only upset his quiet routine of life.
Most likely, he thought, somebody was going to offer him a reward this time. The James P. Drew had been, so he was told, the ultimate in pleasure liners. The fare from Earth to the gaming-world of Darrinoor was eighteen thousand credits for the two-week cruise, and from what he had heard the trip was worth the price in every way, if you cared for that sort of luxury.
Foods from the most remote parts of the galaxy, costly entertainers, party-girls supplied on the house if you wanted one, a constant flow of rare wines and liquors—yes, two weeks of that might be worth eighteen thousand credits for those who liked the high life.
Halderson didn’t. But he imagined that there would be at least one survivor who wanted to give him a reward.
“Contribute it to the Disaster Patrol pension fund,” Halderson would have to tell him. “I’m forbidden by law to accept it.”
As his tiny ship glided through the blank sleek grayness of nospace toward the planet from which the S.O.S. had emanated, Halderson thought back over his previous missions. Most of the time it was simply a matter of rescuing some cargo ship that had crashed on an alien world; and though that had its difficult points, it was usually simple work.
Twice before, superliners had been destroyed in space. At least a few survivors managed to get free in each case. But a lifeship is a small spaceship, and it can travel great distances if necessary. It was not always easy to locate the escapees. In this particular case, the planet from which the message had come was more than sixty parsecs from the last reported position of the liner James P. Drew.
He wondered whether there would be any trouble with this rescue. He hoped not. In four weeks more he was due for his annual leave.
The planet came into view twenty-two hours after Halderson had notified Headquarters about the S.O.S. He locked his ship into the standard reconnaissance orbit, five hundred miles above the surface of the planet, and began setting up his detecting equipment.
There were four continents, plus ice-masses at each pole. The planet was within the temperate zone of climate, which meant that the temperature varied between a hundred below zero and a hundred above, but that most of the planet was in the forty-to-eighty above zone. No sign of civilization was visible.
The planet had the usual distribution of climatic areas; in his first sweep around, Halderson saw bleak deserts, thick jungles, frozen tundra, grassy plains. Like most planets, this one had a pretty fair mixture of geography.
It was the fourth planet of a brightish yellow sun. Halderson saw three moons circling the planet: two reasonably big ones in wide orbits, and one close-in hunk of cosmic debris that was moving in a perversely retrograde direction.
The first quick sweep gave no indication of the whereabouts of the stranded lifeship. Halderson taped a message of greeting, looping the ends of the tape together so the message would be repeated infinitely, and sent it out over the known wavelength of the lifeship’s communicator. He doubted that they would be able to reply, but at least they would know he had arrived.
Then he got to work with the lifeship detector. It was geared to react to any large metallic mass on the surface of the planet, and it was particularly useful in finding ships that had crashed on uninhabited worlds. On an inhabited planet, of course, the detector was completely useless, since it would react to all sorts of stimuli. But here, if the lifeship really were here, the detector could locate it quickly.
It took fifteen orbital sweeps of the planet before Halderson heard the first cluttering sounds out of the mass detector. It took ten sweeps more before he had established
the approximate location of the wrecked ship. Five sweeps later, he was leaving his fixed orbit and heading down for a landing.
It was just twenty-nine hours since the S.O.S. had been received.
Pretty fast work, Halderson thought with some satisfaction.
The lifeship had come to rest in a valley situated in the middle of the planet’s biggest continent, Halderson discovered. Whoever had landed the lifeship had done a pretty fair job, all things considered, but he had cut the jets a moment too soon. The ship had fallen from a goodly height without power—perhaps as much as two hundred feet—and the landing had not only smashed up the tail jet assembly but probably banged the occupants around severely.
Halderson landed his own ship, which was half the size of the lifeship, with professional ease, about a hundred yards from the wrecked ship. There was no sign of life either in or around the other vessel.
The Disaster Patrol scout ran the standard atmospheric checks before opening his locks. True, Lang had told him the planet was Earthlike to three decimals, but there was always the possibility of error. Halderson was determined to live to a ripe old age, and the best way to do that was to avoid taking unnecessary risks. Necessary risks were something else entirely.
However, his instruments checked the planet out as Earthlike and therefore safe for him, and he threw his airlocks open, strapped on his weapons, and stepped out of his ship.
The air was pleasantly mild and had a touch of springlike fragrance in it. According to the gauges embedded in his uniform’s wristband, the temperature was a cheerful 72.
The valley was very quiet.
Halderson strolled over to the lifeship and surveyed it from the outside. It stood reasonably upright, considering the crumpled nature of the tail assembly, and the main airlocks were open. He walked around the ship, checking on the extent of the damage. The lifeship was definitely beyond repair. It would never blast off again.
He had room for two or three passengers in his own ship, if necessary, but if there were more survivors than that he would have to radio for a Patrol pickup ship.
The silence of the valley oppressed him. He saw brightly-colored birds nestling in the trees, and in the distance a huge mountain peak vaulted toward the clouds.
The survivors, if there were any, were lucky to have crash-landed here. There were plenty of other worlds they might have picked that were a lot less congenial.
Indeed, there were plenty of other places on this very planet that would have been nasty for an extended stay, as Halderson had learned while making his preliminary inspection of the world.
Standing outside the crashed ship, Halderson cupped his hands and shouted three times, each time in a different direction.
“Halloo! Halloo! Halloo!”
He waited. He heard the dying echo of his own voice resounding from the distance, but there was no other sound to break the alien silence. He shrugged; maybe the survivors had picked up and moved on elsewhere. But that was a funny thing to do after you had sent out a rescue call. Perhaps they were all lying within the ship, dying or dead. But in that case, why were the airlocks open? For ventilation?
He shrugged and climbed up the catwalk and into the open airlock, to have a look around the lifeship and see what was inside. The silence of this planet was beginning to irritate him. This particular rescue mission was turning out quite unlike any other he had been involved in.
A lifeship is built for efficiency, not for comfort. It consists of a control panel in front, a drive unit in the rear, and passenger cradles in between. There were twelve cradles in this ship, each of them capable of holding two normal-sized people or three small-sized ones. But a quick look around told Halderson that only nine of the twelve cradles in this ship had been occupied at all—which meant that the lifeship had departed with even less than the intended minimum of passengers, let alone taking an extra load.
That was extremely odd too. The scene aboard the James P. Drew in its final moments of life must have been a terrifying one. But if all the lifeships had taken off with only nine or ten people aboard, then hundreds must have been stranded aboard the doomed liner with no means of escape.
Halderson moved up through the passenger compartment to the control section in the nose of the ship. What he found there was even more curious.
There was a man lying sprawled out face down in the cramped control section. He was wearing the blue and red uniform that Halderson instantly recognized as the garb of a crewman aboard an Earth Line ship. Someone had clubbed him in the back of the head with one of the portable fire extinguishers. He was dead.
But his assailant had not let the job end there. Still wielding the fire extinguisher, he had proceeded to smash the radio equipment and the entire control dashboard of the lifeship. That explained why the S.O.S. had died out so abruptly. The man who was sending it had been interrupted by death.
Halderson scratched the side of his jaw in complete perplexity. This James P. Drew lifeship seemed full of unanswered and knotty questions.
In the first place, why was a crewman aboard at all, even a dead one? Earth Line crewmen knew the regulations. They were not supposed to enter the lifeships until every passenger aboard ship was safely taken care of. Had this man become panicky and tried to save his own life despite the stern regulation?
And who had killed him? Why?
Why was the radio shattered and the dashboard controls ruined?
Where were the other survivors who had occupied the lifeship?
Halderson revolved the questions in his mind without coming to any conclusion. He decided finally that he would have to explore the vicinity of the wreck before any of this made sense.
He turned to make his way down to the airlock and out of the lifeship.
His way was blocked. A girl stood downship, with her arms folded. She was holding a Kesterton blaster, nestling in the crook of her folded left arm. It was pointed straight at his head.
“Who are you?” she asked. “And where did you come from?”
Halderson didn’t know which was more surprising, the fact that the girl was there at all or the way she was dressed. She looked about twenty or twenty-one, a tall, willowy blonde. All she was wearing was a mostly-transparent tunic-like affair that clung tightly from breasts to thighs. She was wearing it strictly for ornamental purposes, it seemed, because it concealed about as much as a pane of glass.
Halderson moistened his lips and said, “Are you one of the James P. Drew survivors?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Lieutenant Halderson of the Disaster Patrol. I’m here to rescue the Drew survivors. And I’d appreciate it if you’d put that gun down, or at least point it somewhere else. It makes me nervous.”
The gun stayed where it was. The girl said, “You come on out of the ship. We didn’t send for any rescuers, and we don’t want to be rescued.”
“I picked up an S.O.S.,” Halderson argued.
The girl shrugged lightly and pointed with the gunbarrel to the corpse of the crewman lying crumpled near the battered control panel. “Maybe he sent that S.O.S. out. That’s why he’s dead now. We don’t want none of it, none at all.”
“I don’t know what you mean. You want to stay here, marooned on this planet?”
“Maybe we do,” the girl said. “Come on. Outside with you.”
Halderson didn’t intend to start a quarrel with that Kesterton blaster. He knew the gun could eat a good-sized hole in him before he could move two steps, and so he simply followed her meekly out of the airlock, down the catwalk, and to the ground.
The other survivors were outside. Seven others. Five women, two men.
A couple of the women were prowling suspiciously around Halderson’s nearby ship. The rest were grouped together between the two ships, watching Halderson with care. He eyed them. One of the men was young and slick-looking; the other, older, looked like a successful businessman. Two of the women seemed elderly, one middle-aged. The other two, like the girl with the blaster, seeme
d to be in their twenties.
“What do you want with us?” snapped the oldest of the women—a formidable bristling dowager with three strings of black Hethlian pearls still round her withered throat. Her voice was a harsh croak. “What do you want with us, young man?” she demanded.
Halderson frowned. “I’m here in response to an S.O.S., to rescue you. And this is one hell of a reception for a rescuer, let me tell you!”
“To rescue us?” the old woman thundered. “Why, whatever would we need rescuing for?” She laughed boomingly. “We’re perfectly happy here!”
She shut her eyes and lapsed into what looked like a sort of trance. The Disaster Patrol man looked around bewilderedly at the others. The younger of the two men said. “Don’t pay any attention to her. She’s off the deep end.”
“I suppose she is,” Halderson agreed. “The shock of the accident, I guess.”
“No, it isn’t that at all,” said the girl with the blaster. “But we don’t want to be rescued, hear? Get back into your ship and get going off this planet, and don’t come back!”
“We can’t do that,” said the other old woman. “If we let him go we’ll be endangering ourselves. He’ll come back with others and take us away. And we don’t want to leave, do we?”
“Of course not,” came an answering chorus.
“You’re right,” the girl with the blaster agreed. In the sunlight her tunic was utterly transparent, revealing firm, high breasts and a flat tawny belly. Halderson suddenly realized what she must be: one of the party-girls from the staff of the James P. Drew. “We can’t let him go back. We’d better smash the controls of his ship before he makes trouble for us.”
Halderson began to sweat. Were they all insane? It looked that way.
He glanced across the valley to his own ship, which stood undefended, its airlock open. Then he glanced at the half-naked party-girl with the Kesterton blaster. She gestured to the younger of the two men and said, “Merrick—go over to his ship and fix it so it can’t take off again and so he can’t call for help.”