Twelve struts, some clamps and chain, four snatch blocks, and a hundred feet of heavy space-line....
"Good," he went on, when the order had been obeyed. "Rig the line from the winch through snatch blocks here, and here, and here, so I can haul you back against the wind. While you are doing that I'll rig a remote control on the winch."
Shortly before Trenco's fierce, blue-white sun reached meridian, the six men donned space-suits and Samms cautiously opened the air-lock ports. They worked. The wind was now scarcely more than an Earthly hurricane; the wildly whipping broadleaf plants, struggling upward, were almost half-way to the vertical. The leaves were apparently almost fully grown.
Four men clamped their suits to the line. The line was paid out. Each man selected two leaves; the largest, fattest, purplest ones he could reach. Samms hauled them back and received the loot; Tworn stowed the leaves away. Again—again—again.
With noon there came a few minutes of "calm". A strong man could stand against the now highly variable wind; could move around without being blown beyond the horizon; and during those few minutes all six men gathered leaves. That time, however, was very short. The wind steadied into the reverse direction with ever-increasing fury; winch and space-line again came into play. And in a scant half hour, when the line began to hum an almost musical note under its load, Samms decided to call it quits.
"That'll be all for today, boys," he announced. "About twice more and this line will part. You've done too good a job to lose you. Secure ship."
"Shall I blow the air, sir?" Tworn asked.
"I don't think so." Samms thought for a moment. "No. I'm afraid to take the chance. This stuff, whatever it is, is probably as poisonous as cyanide. We'll keep our suits on and exhaust into space."
Time passed. "Night" came; the rain and the flood. The bottom softened. Samms blasted the lifeboat out of the mud and away from the planet. He opened the bleeder valves, then both air-lock ports; the contaminated air was replaced by the ultra-hard vacuum of the inter-planetary void. He signaled the Virgin Queen; the lifeboat was taken aboard.
"Quick trip, Olmstead," Willoughby congratulated him. "I'm surprised that you got back at all, to say nothing of with so much stuff and not losing a man. Give me the weight, mister, fast!"
"Three hundred and forty eight pounds, sir," the super-cargo reported.
"My God! And all pure broadleaf! Nobody ever did that before! How did you do it, Olmstead?"
"I don't know whether that would be any of your business or not." Samms' mien was not insulting; merely thoughtful. "Not that I give a damn, but my way might not help anybody else much, and I think I had better report to the main office first, and let them do the telling. Fair enough?"
"Fair enough," the skipper conceded, ungrudgingly. "What a load! And no losses!"
"One boatload of air, is all; but air is expensive out here." Samms made a point, deliberately.
"Air!" Willoughby snorted. "I'll swap you a hundred flasks of air, any time, for any one of those leaves!" Which was what Samms wanted to know.
Captain Willoughby was smart. He knew that the way to succeed was to use and then to trample upon his inferiors; to toady to such superiors as were too strong to be pulled down and thus supplanted. He knew this Olmstead had what it took to be a big shot. Therefore:
"They told me to keep you in the dark until we got to Trenco," he more than half apologized to his Fourth Officer shortly after the Virgin Queen blasted away from the Trenconian system. "But they didn't say anything about afterwards—maybe they figured you wouldn't be aboard any more, as usual—but anyway, you can stay right here in the control room if you want to."
"Thanks, Skipper, but mightn't it be just as well," he jerked his head inconspicuously toward the other officers, "to play the string out, this trip? I don't care where we're going, and we don't want anybody to get any funny ideas."
"That'd be a lot better, of course—as long as you know that your cards are all aces, as far as I'm concerned."
"Thanks, Willoughby. I'll remember that."
Samms had not been entirely frank with the private captain. From the time required to make the trip, he knew to within a few parsecs Trenco's distance from Sol. He did not know the direction, since the distance was so great that he had not been able to recognize any star or constellation. He did know, however, the course upon which the vessel then was, and he would know courses and distances from then on. He was well content.
A couple of uneventful days passed. Samms was again called into the control room, to see that the ship was approaching a three-sun solar system.
"This where we're going to land?" he asked, indifferently.
"We ain't going to land," Willoughby told him. "You are going to take the broadleaf down in your boat, close enough so that you can parachute it down to where it has to go. Way 'nuff, pilot, go inert and match intrinsics. Now, Olmstead, watch. You've seen systems like this before?"
"No, but I know about them. Those two suns over there are a hell of a lot bigger and further away than they look, and this one here, much smaller, is in the Trojan position. Have those big suns got any planets?"
"Five or six apiece, they say; all hotter and dryer than the brazen hinges of hell. This sun here has seven, but Number Two—'Cavenda', they call it—is the only Tellurian planet in the system. The first thing we look for is a big, diamond-shaped continent ... there's only one of that shape ... there it is, over there. Notice that one end is bigger than the other—that end is north. Strike a line to split the continent in two and measure from the north end one-third of the length of the line. That's the point we're diving at now ... see that crater?"
"Yes." The Virgin Queen, although still hundreds of miles up, was slowing rapidly. "It must be a big one."
"It's a good fifty miles across. Go down until you're dead sure that the box will land somewhere inside the rim of that crater. Then dump it. The parachute and the sender are automatic. Understand?"
"Yes, sir; I understand," and Samms took off.
He was vastly more interested in the stars, however, than in delivering the broadleaf. The constellation directly beyond Sol from wherever he was might be recognizable. Its shape would be smaller and more or less distorted; its smaller stars, brilliant to Earthly eyes only because of their nearness, would be dimmer, perhaps invisible; the picture would be further confused by intervening, nearby, brilliant strangers; but such giants as Canopus and Rigel and Betelgeuse and Deneb would certainly be highly visible if he could only recognize them. From Trenco his search had failed; but he was still trying.
There was something vaguely familiar! Sweating with the mental effort, he blocked out the too-near, too-bright stars and studied intensively those that were left. A blue-white and a red were most prominent. Rigel and Betelgeuse? Could that constellation be Orion? The Belt was very faint, but it was there. Then Sirius ought to be about there, and Pollux about there; and, at this distance, about equally bright. They were. Aldebaran would be orange, and about one magnitude brighter than Pollux; and Capella would be yellow, and half a magnitude brighter still. There they were! Not too close to where they should be, but close enough—it was Orion! And this thionite way-station, then, was somewhere near right ascension seventeen hours and declination plus ten degrees!
He returned to the Virgin Queen. She blasted off. Samms asked very few questions and Willoughby volunteered very little information; nevertheless the First Lensman learned more than anyone of his fellow pirates would have believed possible. Aloof, taciturn, disinterested to a degree, he seemed to spend practically all of his time in his cabin when he was not actually at work; but he kept his eyes and his ears wide open. And Virgil Samms, as has been intimated, had a brain.
The Virgin Queen made a quick flit from Cavenda to Vegia, arriving exactly on time; a proud, clean space-ship as high above suspicion as Calpurnia herself. Samms unloaded her cargo; replaced it with one for Earth. She was serviced. She made a fast, eventless run to Tellus. She docked at New York Spaceport. Virgil