Part 23 (1/2)

And then they'd take off. On the liner's rockets, which were carried for emergency landing only, but could be used for a single take-off. After one such use they'd be exhausted. And with the grid's controls smashed, n.o.body could even try to stop them.

It wasn't a bad idea. He had a good deal of confidence in it. It was the reason for his Darthian crew. n.o.body'd expect such a thing to be tried, so it almost certainly could be done. But it did have the drawback that the yacht would have to be left behind, a dead loss, when the liner was seized.

Hoddan thought it over soberly. Long before he reached Walden, of course, he could have his own crew so terrified that they'd fight like fiends for fear of what he might do to them if they didn't. But if he could keep the s.p.a.ce-yacht also--

He nodded gravely. He liked the new possibility. If it didn't work, there was the first plan in reserve. In any case he'd get a modern s.p.a.ce-liner and a suitable cargo to present to the emigrants of Colin.

And afterward--

There were certain electronic circuits which were akin. The Lawlor drive unit formed a force field, a stress in s.p.a.ce, into which a nearby s.h.i.+p necessarily moved. The faster-than-light angle came from the fact that it worked like a donkey trotting after a carrot held in front of him by a stick. The s.h.i.+p moving into the stressed area moved the stress.

The force fields of a landing grid were similar. A tuning principle was involved, but basically a landing grid clamped an area of stress around a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p, and the s.h.i.+p couldn't move out of it. When the landing grid moved the stressed area up or down--why--that was it.

All this was known to everybody. But a third trick had been evolved on Zan. It was based on the fact that ball lightning could be generated by a circuit fundamentally akin to the other two. Ball lightning was an area of s.p.a.ce so stressed that its energy-content could leak out only very slowly, unless it made contact with a conductor, when all bets were off. It blew. And the Zan pirates used ball lightning to force the surrender of their victims.

Hoddan began to draw diagrams. The Lawlor drive-unit had been installed long after the yacht was built. It would be modern, with no nonsense about it. With such-and-such of its electronic components cut out, and such-and-such other ones cut in, it would become a perfectly practical ball lightning generator, capable of placing bolts wherever one wanted them. This was standard Zan practice. Hoddan's grandfather had used it for years. It had the advantage that it could be used inside a gravity field, where a Lawlor drive could not. It had the other advantage that commercial s.p.a.cecraft could not mount such gadgets for defense, because the insurance companies objected to meddling with Lawlor drive installations.

Hoddan set to work with the remnants of a tool shop on the ancient yacht and some antique coils and condensers and such. He became filled with zest. He almost forgot that he was the skipper of an elderly craft which should have been sc.r.a.pped before he was born.

But even he grew hungry, and he realized that n.o.body offered him food.

He went indignantly into the yacht's central saloon and found his seven crew-members snoring stertorously, sprawled in stray places here and there.

He woke them with great sternness. He set them furiously to work on that housekeeping--including meals--which can be neglected in a feudal castle because strong outside winds blow smells away and dry up smelly objects, but which must be practiced in a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p.

He went back to work. Suddenly he stopped and meditated afresh, and ceased his actual labor to draw a diagram which he regarded with great affection. He returned to his adaptation of the Lawlor drive to the production of ball lightning.

It was possible to wind coils. A certain percentage of the old condensers held a charge. He tapped the drive-unit for brazing current, and the drill-press became a die-stamping device for small parts. He built up the elements of a vacuum tube such as is normally found only in a landing grid control room. He set up a vacuum-valve arrangement in the base of a large gla.s.s jar. He put that jar in the boat's air lock, bled the air to emptiness, and flashed the tube's quaint elements. He brought it back and went out of overdrive while he hooked the entire new a.s.sembly into the drive-circuit, with cut-outs and switches to be operated from the yacht's instrument board.

Finished, he examined the stars. The nearby suns were totally strange in their arrangement. But the Coalsack area was a s.p.a.ce-mark good for half a sector of the galaxy. There was a condensation in the Nearer Rim for a second bearing. And a certain calcium cloud with a star-cl.u.s.ter behind it was as good as a highway sign for locating one's self.

He lined up the yacht again and went into overdrive once more. Two days later he came out, again surveyed the cosmos, again went into overdrive, again came out, once more made a hop in faster-than-light travel--and he was in the solar system of which Walden was the ornament and pride.

He used the telescope and contemplated Walden on its screen. The s.p.a.ce yacht moved briskly toward it. His seven Darthian crewmen, aware of coming action, dolefully sharpened their two-foot knives. They did not know what else to do, but they were far from happy.

Hoddan shared their depression. Such gloomy antic.i.p.ations before stirring events are proof that a man is not a fool. Hoddan's grandfather had been known to observe that when a man can imagine all kinds of troubles and risks and disasters ahead of him, he is usually right.

Hoddan shared that view. But it would not do to back out now.

He examined Walden painstakingly while the yacht sped on. He saw an ocean come out of the twilight zone of dawn. By the charts, the capital city and the s.p.a.ceport should be on that ocean's western sh.o.r.e. After a suitable and very long interval, the site of the capital city came around the edge of the planet.

From a bare hundred thousand miles, Hoddan stepped up magnification to its limit and looked again. Then Walden more than filled the telescope's field. He could see only a very small fraction of the planet's surface.

He had to hunt before he found the capital city again. Then it was very clear. He saw the curving lines of its highways and the criss-cross pattern of its streets. Buildings as such, however, did not show. But he made out the s.p.a.ceport and the shadow of the landing grid, and in the very center of that grid there was something silvery which cast a shadow of its own. A s.h.i.+p. A liner.

There was a tap on the control-room door. Thal.

”Anything happening?” he asked uneasily.

”I just sighted the s.h.i.+p we're going to take,” said Hoddan.