machinery to do the work, that’s no problem. But we don’t.” He buried his face in the periscope hood. Cloudiness swirled beneath. “Also,” he said, “we got no screens and nobody at the guns. So we’d better be choosy about where we sit down. And… we don’t have any way to scan an area in detail. Now do be quiet and let me steer.”
Already in the upper air, he encountered severe turbulence. That was unexpected, on a planet which received less than 0.9 Terran insolation, with a lower proportion of UV to bait. It wasn’t that the atmosphere was peculiar. The spectroscope readout had said the mixture was ordinary oxy-nitro-CO2, on the thin and dry side—sea-level pressure around 600 mm.—but quite breathable. Nor was the phenomenon due to excessive rotation; the period was twenty-five and a half hours. Of course, the inner moon, while small, was close in and must have considerable tidal effect—Hoy!
The outercom buzzed. Someone was calling. “Take that, Yasmin,” Tom snapped. The ship wallowed. He felt it even through the cushioning internal gee-field, and the altitude meters were wavering crazily. Wind screamed louder. The clouds roiled near, coppery-headed blue-shadowed billows on the starboard horizon, deep purple below him. He had hoped that night and overcast would veil his arrival, but evidently a radar had fingered him. Or—“The knob marked A, you idiot! Turn it widdershins. I can’t let go now!”
Yasmin caught her lower lip between her teeth and obeyed. The screen flickered to life. “Up the volume,” Tom commanded. “Maybe Dagny can’t watch, but she’d better hear. You on, Dagny?” .
“Aye.” Her tone was crisp from the intercom speaker. “I doubt if I’ll understand many words, though. Hadn’t you better start aloft and I leave the radar and take over fire control?”
“No, stand where you are. See what you can detect. We’re not after a tussle, are we?” Tom glanced at the screen for the instant he dared. It was sidewise to him, putting him outside the pickup arc, but he could get a profile of the three-dimensional image.
The man who gazed out was so young that his beard was brownish fuzz. Braids hung from beneath a goggled fiber crash helmet. But his features were hard; his background appeared to be an aircraft cockpit; and his green tunic had the look of a uniform.
“Who are you?” he challenged. Seeing himself confronted by a girl, he let his jaw drop. “Who are you?”
“Might ask the same o’ you,” Tom answered for her. “We’re from offplanet.”
“Why did you not declare yourselves?” The Anglic was thickly accented but comprehensible, roughened with tension.
“We didn’t know anybody was near. I reckon you had to try several bands before hittin’ the one we were tuned to. Isn’t a standard signal frequency any more.” Tom spoke with careful casualness, while the ship bucked and groaned around him and lightning zigzagged in the clouds he approached. “Don’t worry about us. We mean no harm.”
“You trespass in the sky of Karol Weyer.”
“Son, we never heard o’ him. We don’t even know what you call this planet.”
The, pilot gulped. “N-Nike,” he said automatically.
“The planet Nike. Karol Weyer is our Engineer, here in Hanno. Who are you?”
Dagny’s voice said in Eylan, “I’ve spotted him on the scope, Tom. Coming in fast at eleven o’clock low.”
“Let me see your face,” the pilot demanded harshly. “Hide not by this woman.”
“Can’t stop to be polite,” Tom said. “S’pose you let us land, and we’ll talk to your Engineer. Or shall we take our business elsewhere?”
Yasmin’s gauntlet closed convulsively on Tom’s sleeve. “The look on him grows terrible,” she whispered. “Gods damn,” Tom said, “we’re friends!”
“What?” the pilot shouted.
“Friends, I tell you! We need help. Maybe you—”
“The screen went blank,” Yasmin cried.
Tom risked yawing Firedrake till he could see in the direction Dagny had bespoken. The craft was in view. It was a one—or two-man job, a delta wing whose contrail betrayed the energy source as chemical rather than atomic or electric. However, instruments reported it as applying that power to a gravity drive. At this distance he couldn’t make out if the boat had guns, but hardly doubted that. Fora moment it glinted silvery against the darkling clouds, banked and vanished.
“Prob’ly hollerin’ for orders,” Tom said. “And maybe reinforcements. Chil’ren, I think we’d better hustle back spaceward and try our luck in some place more sociable than Hanno.”
“Is there any?” Dagny wondered.
“Remains to be seen. Let’s hope its not our remains that’ll be seen.” Tom concentrated on the controls. Lame and weakened, the ship could not simply reverse. She had too much downward momentum and was too deep in Nike’s gravity well. He must shift vectors slowly and nurse her up again.
After minutes, Dagny called through the racket and shudderings: “Several of them—at least five—climbing faster than us, from all sides.”
“I was afraid o’ that,” Tom said. “Yasmin, see if you can eavesdrop on the chit-chat between ’em.”
“Should we not stay tuned for their call?” the Sassanian asked timidly.
“I doubt they aim to call. If ever anybody acted so scared and angry as to be past reason—No, hold ’er.”
The screen had suddenly reawakened. This time the man who stared forth was middle-aged, leonine, bearded to the waist. His coat was trimmed with fur and, beneath the storm in his voice, pride rang. “I am the Engineer,” he said. “You will land and be slaves.”
“Huh?” Tom said. “Look, we was goin’ away—”
“You declared yourselves friends!”
“Yes. We’d like to do business with you. But—”
“Land at once. Slave yourselves to me. Or my craft open fire. They have tommics.”
“Nukes, you mean?” Tom growled. Yasmin stifled a shriek. Karol Weyer observed and looked grimly pleased. Tom cursed, without words.
The Nikean shook his head. Tom got a glimpse of that, and wasn’t sure whether the gesture meant yes, no or maybe in this land. But the answer was plain: “Weapons that unleash the might which lurks in matter.”
And our force-screen generator is on sick leave, Tom thought. He may be lyin’. But I doubt it, because they do still use grays here. We can’t outrun a rocket, let alone an energy beam. Nor could Dagny, by herself, shoot down the lot in time to forestall ’em.
“You win,” he said. “Here we come.”
“Leave your transceiver on,”, Weyer instructed. “When you are below the clouds, the fish will tell you where to go.”
“Fish?” Tom choked. But the screen had emptied, save for the crackling and formlessnesses of static. “D-d- dialect?” Yasmin suggested.
“Uh, yeh. Must mean somethin’ like squadron leader. Good girl.” Tom spared her a grin. The tears were starting forth.
“Slaves?” she wailed. “Oh, no, no.”
“Course not, if I can help it,” he said, sotto voce lest the hostiles be listening. “Rather die.”
He did not speak exact truth. Having been a slave once, he didn’t prefer death—assuming his owner was not unreasonable, and that some hope existed of getting his freedom back. But becoming property was apt to be worse for a woman than a man: much worse, when she was a daughter of Sassania’s barons or Kraken’s sea kings. As their husband, he was honor bound to save theni if he could.
“We’ll make a break,” he said. “Lot o’ wild country underneath. One reason I picked this area. But first we have to get down.”
“What’s gone by me?” Dagny called.
Tom explained in Eylan while he fought the ship. “But that doesn’t make sense!” she said. “When they know nothing about us—”
“Well, they took a bad clobberin’, ten years back. Can’t expect ’em to act terribly sensible about strangers. And s’posin’ this is a misunderstandin’… we have to stay alive while we straighten it out. Stand by for a rough jaunt.”
