sudden limp on us.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “If it hadn’t been for him...”
“All right, then.” I said. “Let’s just leave him here. If that is what he wants. If he’s gotten to the place he was aiming for...”
“Captain!” ‘she gasped. “You wouldn’t do a thing like that!”
“What makes you think I wouldn’t?”
“There must be some humanity in you. You wouldn’t turn your back...”
“He’s the one who is turning his back on us. He has what he wants. . .”
“How do you know he has?”
That’s the trouble with women. No logic. She had told me that this silly Smith had gotten where he was going. But when I said the same thing, she was set to argue.
“I don’t know anything,” I said. “Not for certain.”
“But you’ll go ahead and make decisions.”
“Sure,” I said. “Because if I don’t we could sit here forever. And we’re in no situation to be sitting still. We may have a long way to go and we’ve got to keep on moving.”
I got up and walked over to the door and stood there, looking out. There was no moon and the night was dark and there were no stars. A whiteness of the city was distinguishable in the darkness. A hazy and uncertain horizon led off beyond the city. There was nothing else that could be seen.
The tree had stopped its bombing and with all the seeds duly gathered in, the ratlike creatures had gone back to wherever they had come from.
Maybe, I thought, if we sneaked out right now we might be able to make it past the tree. But I somehow doubted it. I didn’t think darkness made that much difference to the tree. It certainly didn’t see us, for since when did trees have eyes. It must sense us in some other way. It had stopped the bombing, perhaps, because it figured it had us pinned down, knowing that it could start up again if we so much as tried to move, maybe even knowing somehow we’d not be apt to move at night.
But even so the thought of trying for it in the dark had some attraction for me. But we’d be plunging headlong into terrain we knew nothing of, trying to follow a path that we could not see and had never traveled. And, besides, we were too beat out to try it. We needed a good night’s rest.
“Why are you here with us, captain?” asked Sara from the fire. “Even from the first you had no belief in the venture.”
I went back to the fire and sat down beside her.
“You forgot,” I said. “All that money that you shoved at me. That’s why I’m doing it.”
“That’s not all of it,” she said. “The money would not have been enough. You were afraid you’d never get back into space again. You saw yourself cooped up on Earth forever and even that first day you landed, it was gnawing on you.”
“What you really want to know,” I said, “is why I had to make the run for Earth, why I sought sanctuary. You’re aching to know what sort of criminal you’ve been traveling with. How come you didn’t get all the sordid details? You knew everything else, even to the minute I would land? I’d shake up that intelligence system of yours, if I were you. Your operatives failed.”
“There were a lot of stories,” she said. “They couldn’t all be true. There was no way of telling which one of them was true. But I’ll say this much for you-you have space shook up. Tell me, Captain Ross, was it the swindle of all time?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I wasn’t out to break a record, if that is what you mean.”
“But a planet was involved. That is what I heard and it made sense because you were a planet hunter. Was it as good as they said it was?”
“Miss Foster,” I said, “it was a beauty. It was the kind of planet Earth was before the Ice Age hit.”
“Then what went wrong? There were all sorts of stories. One said there was a virus of some sort. Another said the climate was erratic. One said there wasn’t any planet.”
I grinned at her. I don’t know why I grinned. It was no grinning matter. “There was only one thing wrong,” I said. “Such a little thing. It already was inhabited by intelligences.”
“But you would have known...”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “There weren’t many of them. And they were hard to spot. What do you look for when you search a planet for intelligence?”
“Why, I don’t know,” she said.
“Nor do I” I said.
“But you. . .”
“I hunted planets. I did not survey them. No planet hunter is equipped to survey a planet. He can get an idea of what it’s like, of course. But he hasn’t got the gadgets or the manpower or the savvy to dig deeply into it. A survey made by the man who finds it would have no legal standing. Understandably, there might be certain bias. A planet must be certified. . .”
“But certainly you had it certified. You could not have sold it until it was certified.”
I nodded. “A certified survey,” I said. “By a reputable surveying firm. It came out completely clean and I was in business. I made just one mistake. I paid a bonus for them to pile in their equipment and their crews and get the job done fast. A dozen realty firms were bidding for the property and I was afraid that someone else might turn up another planet that would be competitive.”
