Part 18 (2/2)

If the stars behind sank down faster than those ahead rose up--he would be descending. If all the stars rose equally he'd be climbing straight up, and if they all dropped equally he'd be moving straight down. It was not a complex method, and it worked.

Presently he relaxed. He sped swiftly back past midday and toward the sunrise line on Darth. This was the reverse of a normal orbit, but it was the direction followed by the s.h.i.+ps up here. He hoped his...o...b..t was lower than theirs. If it was, he'd overtake them from behind. If he were higher, they'd overtake him.

He turned on the s.p.a.ce phone. Its reception-indicator was piously placed at ”Ground.” He s.h.i.+fted it to ”s.p.a.ce,” so that it would pick up calls going planetward, instead of listening vainly for replies from the nonoperative landing grid.

Instantly voices boomed in his ears. Many voices. An impossibly large number of voices. Many, many, many more than nine transmitters were in operation now!

”_Idiot!_” said a voice in quiet pa.s.sion, ”_sheer off or you'll get in our drive-field!_” A high-pitched voice said; ”_... And group two take second-orbit position--_” Somebody bellowed: ”_But why don't they answer?_” And another voice still said formally: ”_Reporting group five, but four s.h.i.+ps are staying behind with tanker_ Toya, _which is having stabilizer trouble...._”

Hoddan's eyes opened very wide. He turned down the sound while he tried to think. But there wasn't anything to think. He'd come aloft to scout three s.h.i.+ps that had turned to nine, because he was in such a fix on Darth that anything strange might be changed into something useful. But this was more than nine s.h.i.+ps--itself an impossibly large s.p.a.ce fleet.

There was no reason why s.h.i.+ps of s.p.a.ce should ever travel together.

There were innumerable reasons why they shouldn't. There was a limit to the number of s.h.i.+ps that could be accommodated at any s.p.a.ceport in the galaxy. There was no point, no profit, no purpose in a number of s.h.i.+ps traveling together--

Darth's sunrise-line appeared far ahead. The lifeboat would soon cease to be a bright light in the sky, now. The sun's image vanished from the rear screens. The boat went hurtling onward through the blackness of the planet's shadow while voices squabbled, and wrangled, and formally reported, and now and again one admonished disputants to a proper discipline of language.

During the period of darkness, Hoddan racked his brains for the vaguest of ideas on why so many s.h.i.+ps should appear about an obscure and unimportant world like Darth. Presently the sunset line appeared ahead, and far away he saw moving lights which were the hulls of the volubly communicating vessels. He stared, blankly. There were tens-- Scores-- He was forced to guess at the stark impossibility of more than a hundred s.p.a.cecraft in view. As the boat rushed onward he had to raise the guess.

It couldn't be, but--

He turned on the outside telescope, and the image on its screen was more incredible than the voices and the existence of the fleet itself. The scope focused first on a bulging, monster, antiquated freighter of a design that had not been built for a hundred years. The second view was of a pa.s.senger liner with the elaborate ornamentation that in past generations was considered suitable for s.p.a.ce. There was a bulk-cargo s.h.i.+p, with no emergency rockets at all and crews' quarters in long blisters built outside the gigantic tank which was the s.h.i.+p itself.

There was a needle-sharp s.p.a.ce yacht. More freighters, with streaks of rust on their sides where they had lain aground for tens of years....

The fleet was an anomaly, and each of its component parts was separately a freak. It was a gathering-together of all the outmoded and obsolete hulks and monstrosities of s.p.a.ce. One would have to scavenge half the galaxy to bring together so many crazy, over-age derelicts that should have been in junk yards.

Then Hoddan drew an explosive deep breath. It was suddenly clear what the fleet was and what its reason must be. Why it stopped here could not yet be guessed, but--

Hoddan watched absorbedly. He couldn't know what was toward, but there was some emergency. It could be in the line of what an electronic engineer could handle. If so--why--it could mean an opportunity to accomplish great things, and grow rich, and probably marry some delightful girl and be a great man somewhere--an a.s.sortment of ambitions one could not easily gratify on Zan, or Walden, or Darth.

VII

The s.p.a.ceboat floated on upon a collision-course with the arriving fleet. That would not mean, of course, actual contact with any of the improbable vessels themselves. Crowded as the sunlit specks might seem from Darth's night-side shadow, they were sufficiently separated. It was more than likely that even with ten-mile intervals the s.h.i.+ps would be considered much too crowded. But they came pouring out of emptiness to go into a swirling, plainly pre-intended orbit about the planet from which Hoddan had risen less than an hour before.

There was inevitable confusion, though, and the s.p.a.cephone proved it.

There were disputes between freakish s.h.i.+ps when craft with the astrogational qualities of washtubs tried to keep a.s.signed positions, and failed, and there were squabbles when s.h.i.+ps had to pa.s.s close together. One had to shut off its drive-field to keep from blowing the fuses of both.

But there were some s.h.i.+ps which proceeded quietly to their positions and others which did the same after tumult amounting to rebellion. And naturally there were a few others which seemed incapable of co-operation with anybody. They went careening through the other s.h.i.+ps' paths in what must have seemed to the planet's sunset area like a most unlikely dancing of brand-new stars.

It was a gigantic traffic tangle, and Hoddan's boat drifted toward and into it. He'd counted a hundred s.h.i.+ps long before. His count now pa.s.sed two hundred and continued. Before he gave up he'd numbered two hundred forty-seven s.p.a.ce-oddities swarming to make a whirling band--a ring--around the planet Darth.

He was fairly sure that he knew what they were, now. But he could not possibly guess where they came from. And most mysterious of all was the question of why they'd come out of faster-than-light drive to make of themselves a celestial feature about a planet which had practically nothing to offer to anybody.

Presently the s.p.a.ceboat was in the very thick of the fleet. His communicator spouted voices whose tones ranged from ba.s.so profundo to high tenor, and whose ideas of proper astrogation seemed to vary more widely still.

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