‘Where’s it bound for?’ Pete asked, pausing to light a cigarette.
‘Out on the other side of the Thousand Suns cluster, somewhere. This is some little peanut outfit that call themselves Explorations Limited.’
‘Oh?’ Peter looked mildly interested. ‘The other side of the Thousand Suns has some unmapped systems, I understand. What are they looking for - did they say?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’ The chief inspector shrugged. ‘I only talked to them a few minutes. There are five of them - an elderly sort of a fellow, who threw up his job as dean of some little technological college in New Chicago, gathered up his three brightest graduate students, and now they’re all off into space to see the galaxy and seek their fortunes.’
‘You said there were five,’ Pete reminded him.
‘There are. They bought this old heap - it was a service ship for the old Interplanetary Freightlines, once - and happened to run into a mining engineer just back from Charon. He had made a nice little pile in some iridium strike out there and he bought in with them. This had a rocket drive so the five of them managed to dig up enough money to have a hyperspace drive and that nuclear converter installed. I guess it took every last cent they had, too - those hyperspace drives and converters really come high.’
‘Well,’ Pete observed, glancing at the converter, ‘they sure wouldn’t ever get anywhere with a rocket drive in normal space with the speed of light their maximum speed - not far enough away to mean anything in only one lifetime. It’s pretty close to thirty thousand light-years to the Thousand Suns, isn’t it?’
‘Just about. Sixty thousand years for the round trip in normal space or a fraction over a year in hyperspace.’
‘But what a year! I took one trip in hyperspace when I was a lot younger and more foolish than I am now. Only a forty-day jump, but I never saw forty days go by so slow in my life. You have to accelerate to get anywhere, even in hyperspace, and between the constant acceleration and the blackness outside your ship you feel like you weigh a ton and that you’re stuck in a black tomb, not moving at all.’
The chief inspector grinned. ‘Maybe you’re subject to claustrophobia. And speaking of going somewhere - get Jim’s tool box and let’s get out of the Turkish bath.’
Pete picked up the tool box and followed his chief to the elevator, not noticing that flat, black clamps folded down against the flat, black sides of the fuel inlet box. It never occurred to him to give anything in the room a second glance; Jim Brannon was a methodical and thorough man and his inspection form showed that he had inspected everything in the room and found it to be in perfect condition.
The months passed for the Star Scout as she sped through the featureless blackness of hyperspace. At last the chronometers indicated that the time had come to commence deceleration and she made turn-over.
Down in her drive room the Bern nuclear converter squatted on the floor, microscopic sun in its heart emulating the suns they were approaching by its conversion of matter into energy. The unclamped cover of the fuel inlet jiggled uncertainly during the first weightlessness of turn-over, then lifted and floated to the ceiling as the drives made a corrective side-thrust. It remained there until the first thrust of deceleration came, then it was slammed to the floor with a loud clang.
The muffled thunder of the drives drowned the sound and none of the five men in the ship heard it.
The Star Scout’s normal-space speed was far below that of light when she dropped out of hyperspace beyond the rim of the Thousand Suns. Two last stars lay beneath her; a binary composed of a small yellow sun and a larger blue-white sun. Observations were taken and instruments noted the tiny, shining mote that swung four hundred million miles out from the blue-white sun. Other instruments determined the new destination and the Star Scout vanished again into hyperspace.
When she dropped once more into normal space the shining mote had become a planet that blazed like a great, radiant gem against the black void beyond. The planet grew as the hours went by, filling the viewscreen as Blake braked for the descent into its atmosphere. Land masses and small oceans were faintly discernible through the fiery, opalescent haze that blanketed the planet. The image swelled and enlarged, the surplus running off the four sides of the screen, until the western side of a continent and a small portion of ocean filled the screen.
The four men in the deceleration chairs behind Blake, and held as helplessly as he by the force, watched the image on the viewscreen and the multiple hands of the air analyzer. The hands began to move as the first thin sample of air was scooped into the analyzer, then settled into position a few minutes later.
“Breathable.” The gray-haired Taylor spoke with difficulty against the deceleration.
“Less carbon dioxide than New Earth,” Wilfred commented. Young, short and stocky, he was far less affected by the deceleration than the elderly ex-dean. “I can’t understand why the spectroscope showed such an incredibly high percentage of carbon. How could any planet’s crust contain such an excess of carbon?”
“The carbon must be in the crust, rather than in the atmosphere,” Taylor said. “Either that or the old spectroscope is erroneous. We know the air analyzer is a new and reliable instrument, but these old Warden spectroscopes, like men, develop eccentricities with age. If we had a new—”
“Hang on,” Blake interrupted, his eyes on the instruments before him. “I’m going to have to brake a little harder.”
The increased deceleration settled them all deeper in their chairs and no one spoke while the section of continent on the viewscreen became a hazy desert or plain through which ran dim wrinkles. The surplus slid away and the wrinkle in the center of the screen became a range of mountains. Blake watched the translucent white dot in the center of the screen that represented their point of landing and saw it would be along the eastern side of the mountain range. It would do as well as any other unknown section of the unknown world and he let the ship hold its course.
The green line of a tree-bordered creek appeared, hugging the mountain’s foothills, with the white dot between the creek and the mountain. The area covered by the dot became a small delta of alluvium from one of the canyons with a few trees scattered across it. The delta swept up to meet them, slowing as it came, with the white dot in a flat clearing that seemed to be of some curiously glittering sand.
The Star Scout halted ten feet above the ground with a staccato of blasts from the drive tubes that sent the bright sand swirling in heavy clouds, then it dropped, cushioned by the drive, to touch the ground with a slight lurch. The wide tail fins settled in the sand and Blake cut off the drive.
“And here we are,” he remarked.
* * *
The others were already hurrying to read the data recorded on the instruments; Taylor and Wilfred, Lenson and Cooke. Blake watched them, interested by their reactions. None of them had ever been off New Earth before, let alone on a world hitherto unknown to exist, and they were as excited as children with a new toy. Taylor, steeped in the academic environment all his life, was the most enthusiastic of them all. He had once told Blake: “With all due respect to ivied walls of stone, they can become a prison. I want to see a few things before I grow any older; deep space and distant suns and strange worlds—” Lenson, a tall, lean man with the easy grace of a cat, stood a full head taller than the pink young Wilfred; a pleasant sort of a man with a slow smile and a tolerant understanding of the foibles of others.
There was the indefinable mark of the intellectual upon all three of them and among them the paradox, Cooke, stood out like a black sheep among white. He was, Blake knew, fully as intelligent as any of the others; he, like the others, had been selected by Taylor because his intelligence and knowledge were considerably greater than the intelligence and knowledge of the average graduate. But he did not look the part. His dark, hard-jawed face was not that of an intellectual. Neither were his broken nose and glittering black eyes. Blake watched him, thinking: He doesn’t belong with the others; he belongs o
n Old Earth three hundred years ago, on the deck of a pirate ship with a bloody cutlass in his hand.
But, for all his appearance of being a man of sanguine physical violence, Cooke seemed to be content to do no more than laugh at what his black eyes found in others and in life, itself.
“Earth-type in every important respect,” Taylor was saying. “Gravity, temperature, air. No indications of any harmful bacteria—we’ve been incredibly fortunate.”
“We had about one chance out of several thousand of this being an Earth-type planet, didn’t we, Red?” Lenson asked, looking over at Blake.
Blake nodded his red head. “Quite a few thousand, since this isn’t a class-G sun. As Taylor said, we were incredibly lucky to hit the jackpot the very first try.”
“Then let’s get out and look our find over,” Cooke said, shifting restlessly. “Let’s get out and romp across the sand and breathe some air we haven’t breathed a million times already.”
Taylor looked questioningly at Blake and Blake nodded. “I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t,” he said. He checked the readings on the control board instruments from long habit and saw the red line that indicated the drive room’s temperature. It was climbing rapidly, and he turned a knob marked: DRIVE ROOM—OUTSIDE VENTILATION. This would open the ports in the drive room and start the blower to rushing its great volumes of cool outside air through the overheated room. “Drive room’s mighty hot from the decelerating,” he said as he followed the others to the elevator. “If we had had a little more money left over, we could have had full-size coolers installed.”
“We were lucky to scrape up enough money to buy what we have,” Wilfred said, dropping the elevator to the cabin level.
“Our worries are over, now,” Cooke declared. “Anyone who owns an Earth-type world isn’t just rich—he’s lord of all he surveys.”
* * *
They stopped at the cabin level only long enough to procure a sidearm each. “You can’t tell what you may run into on an alien planet,” Blake said as he stepped back into the elevator. “No signs of any intelligent, civilized life, but there might be animals. Sometimes animals don’t wait for you to run into them—they take a deep breath and do their level best to run into you and tramp you into the ground.”
They dropped to the lower air lock and went through it. The boarding ramp was dropped to the ground and they descended into the cloud of dust that still swirled about the ship.
“The blower is filling the drive room with this dusty air,” Blake said, sneezing. “I didn’t realize it was so thick. But the drive room door is shut and none of this dust can get into the rest of the ship.”
They walked out away from the ship and the dust and stood in the glittering sand, looking about them curiously. The mouth of the canyon was visible above them, with the iridescent haze hiding the higher peaks. The trees were almost like those of the desert regions of New Earth, scattered very thinly across the mountain’s foot, and viciously thorned bushes grew among them. Some of them, Blake noticed, were in bloom with exotically beautiful blossoms, ranging from delicate pink to vivid scarlet.
“Pretty,” Cooke commented. “A little dangerous to try to pick one, I’d say; those thorns are Nature’s ice picks.”
“We ought to name it . . . this world,” Taylor said. “What shall we call it?”
“Aurora,” Lenson said instantly. “She was the goddess of the dawn in ancient mythology. She was beautiful and she wore a veil. This world is beautiful and it wears a veil—that shining haze.”
“A good name,” Taylor agreed. He looked toward the creek a few hundred feet away, the creek itself hidden by the green trees that grew thickly along its banks. “Let’s get a sample of the water for analysis.”
They walked toward the creek, each of them unconsciously glancing back at the towering bulk of the ship as they went their way. Men always did that, Blake had noticed, when they set down on an alien planet. They would go out from their ship with their eyes alertly watching for danger ahead, and they never failed to look back at the ship as though to reassure themselves that its ponderous mass was still there. It was a normal thing to do; when a man set down on an alien world he was on his own and his only link with other humans and other worlds was his ship. It had brought him there; it, alone, could take him back. A man walked out from his ship knowing that it would be waiting for him to return, like a great, patient dog; waiting and ready to hurl itself into space at his command. Sometimes an alien planet held death for the bipeds who ventured to explore it, such as the spider-monsters of Nelson 14, and the ship would be the sword of vengeance for those who lived to fight their way back to it. The ship would avenge the fallen with fury in the thunder of its voice and annihilation in its flaming breath, leaving only drifting ashes where once had been alien things that had made the mistake of killing a human.
Without their ship, men on a hostile, alien world would be near-helpless; with their ship, they were invincible conquerors.
“Flowers, even,” Cooke exclaimed as they neared the trees by the creek. “Red, blue, yellow, purple; green trees and good air—what more could we offer colonists?”
* * *
Blake had been examining the shining sand with increasing curiosity and he stopped to inspect a bright crystal half the size of his hand. It was not quartz. He scratched at it with his knife point but could not make any impression. The same would have been true of quartz, but the crystal did not have the appearance of quartz. It was alive with internal fires and the crystal system, such as he could tell from its rounded, worn form, was distinctly not that of quartz. A little way farther on he found one that glowed a deep ruby red. He paused to pick it up, then hurried on at an excited exclamation from Lenson, who had gone with the others to the edge of the creek. “Look at this!”
“This” was a crystal at the very edge of the creek’s roiling, opalescent waters, the same deep ruby red as the one he had in his hand but a foot in diameter. Near it were other, smaller, crystals of blue-white, yellow, red, blue, green, with the blue-white ones predominating. The sand, gravel and rocks of the creek bed seemed to be composed exclusively of the bright mineral.
“Did you ever see so many quartz crystals in your life?” Lenson was asking the others. “Or so many different colors? Look at this one—it looks like a ruby.”
Blake failed to hear the reply of the others, a thought he had had upon first examining the bright sand suddenly losing the fantastic quality which had caused him to dismiss it. It all checked, the lack of any mineral other than the one in the creek bed, the “erroneous” spectroscope that had shown the world to possess an impossible percentage of carbon, the high index of refraction possessed by the mineral.
He could find out very quickly.
“Let me have your diamond ring,” he said to Wilfred.
Wilfred pulled it off his finger and handed it to him with a look of questioning surprise. Blake scratched the diamond in the ring across the red crystal he still held in his hand. It left no impression and he repeated the performance on several other crystals scattered on the ground near him. On none of them could he produce the faintest scratch with the diamond in Wilfred’s ring, no matter how heavily he bore down.
“The spectroscope was right,” he said, wondering if the others would find it as hard to believe as he did. “I don’t see how it could be, but it is.”
“Is what?” Wilfred asked.
“Carbon—all these crystals are diamonds!”
They stared at him, incredulous. “They couldn’t be!” Wilfred objected. Lenson asked, “How can you tell for certain? Are you sure?”
“The diamond in this ring won’t scratch them,” he replied. “The only mineral a diamond can’t scratch is another diamond.”
“Then they really are diamonds?” Taylor said, dropping to his knees to pick up a deep, bright-blue one that lay beside the ruby-red stone that Lenson had found. “But the variations in color—are they all diamonds?”
“All those th
at are any size,” Blake told him. “The softer silica would soon be reduced to a powder by the grinding action of the diamonds in the creek bed. Anything of any appreciable size that shines is pretty certain to be a diamond.”
“Hmm-m-m!” Cooke grunted, and shook his head in amazement. “I’m delighted to hear it, but it’s still hard to believe. Talk about luck—here we sink our last cent to make this one trip, with the odds all in favor of our finding nothing, and the first thing we do is hit a double jackpot; not only an Earth-type—almost—planet but also an unlimited fortune in diamonds. Such luck is incredible.”
“It is incredible,” Blake agreed. “It just isn’t the sort of thing that—”
* * *
His voice was drowned by a thunderous bellow from the ship. He whirled toward it, as did the others, wild disbelief on the faces of all of them. The same thought flashed in their minds at the same instant; they were all five there—there was no one in the ship!