His orders had been carried out to the letter, except in the one detail of not allowing any vessel to take off. This take-off absolutely could not be helped—it was just one of those things. The ship was a Patrol speedster from Deneb V, registry number so-and-so. Said he was coming in for servicing. Came in on the north beam, identified himself properly—Lieutenant Quirkenfal, of Deneb V, he said it was, and it checked. .
It would check, of course. The zwilnik that Kinnison had been chasing so long certainly would not be guilty of any such raw, crude work as a faulty identification. In fact, right then he probably looked just as much like Quirkenfal as the lieutenant himself did.
“He wasn’t in any hurry at all,” the information went on. “He waited around for his landing clearance, then slanted in on his assigned slide to the service pits. In the last hundred yards, though, he shot off to one side and sat down, plop, broadside on, clear over there in the far corner of the field. But he wasn’t down but a second, sir. Long before anybody could get to him—before the cruisers could put a beam on him, even—he blasted off as though the devil was on his tail. Then you came along, sir, but we did put a CRX tracer on him. .”
“I did that much, myself,” Kinnison stated, morosely. “He stopped just long enough to pick up a passenger—my zwilnik, of course—then flitted . and you fellows let him get away with it.”
“But we couldn’t help it, sir,” the official protested. “And anyway, he couldn’t possibly have .”
“He sure could. You’d be surprised no end at what that bimbo can do.”
Then the Dauntless flashed in; not asking but demanding instant right of way.
“Look around, fellows, if you like, but you won’t find a damned thing,” Kinnison’s uncheering conclusion came back as he sprinted toward the dock into which his battleship had settled. “The lug hasn’t left a loose end dangling yet.”
By the time the great Patrol ship had cleared the stratosphere Kinnison’s CRX, powerful and tenacious as it was, was just barely registering a line. But that was enough. Henry Henderson, Master Pilot, stuck the Dauntless’ needle nose into that line and shoved into the driving projectors every watt of “oof” that those Brobdingnagian creations would take.
They had been following the zwilnik for three days now, Kinnison reflected, and his CRX’s were none too strong yet. They were overhauling him mighty slowly; and the Dauntless was supposed to be the fastest thing in space. That bucket up ahead had plenty of legs—must have been souped up to the limit. This was apt to be a long chase, but he’d get that bozo if he had to chase him on a geodesic line along the hyper-dimensional curvature of space clear back to Tellus where he started from!
They did not have to circumnavigate total space, of course, but they did almost leave the galaxy before they could get the fugitive upon their plates. The stars were thinning out fast; but still, hazily before them in a vastness of distance, there stretched a milky band of opalescence.
“What’s coming up, Hen—a rift?” Kinnison asked.
“Uh-huh, Rift Ninety Four,” the pilot replied. “And if I remember right, that arm up ahead is Dunstan’s region and it has never been explored. I’ll have the chart-room check up on it.”
“Never mind; I’ll go check it myself—I’m curious about this whole thing.”
Unlike any smaller vessel, the Dauntless was large enough so that she could—and hence as a matter of course did—carry every space-chart issued by all the various Boards and Offices and Bureaus concerned with space, astronomy, astrogation, and planetography. She had to, for there were usually minds aboard which were apt at any time to become intensely and unpredictably interested in anything, anywhere. Hence it did not take Kinnison long to obtain what little information there was.
The vacancy they were approaching was Rift Ninety Four, a vast space, practically empty of stars, lying between the main body of the galaxy and a minor branch of one of its prodigious spiral arms. The opalescence ahead was the branch—Dunstan’s Region. Henderson was right; it had never been explored.
The Galactic Survey, which has not even yet mapped at all completely the whole of the First Galaxy proper, had of course done no systematic work upon such outlying sections as the spiral arms. Some such regions were well known and well mapped, it is true; either because its own population, independently developing means of space-flight, had come into contact with our Civilization upon its own initiative or because private exploration and investigation had opened up profitable lines of commerce. But Dunstan’s Region was bare. No people resident in it had ever made themselves known; no private prospecting, if there had ever been any such, had revealed anything worthy of exploitation or development. And, with so many perfectly good uninhabited planets so much nearer to Galactic Center, it was of course much too far out for colonization.
Through the rift, then, and into Dunstan’s Region the Dauntless bored at the unimaginable pace of her terrific full-blast drive. The tracers’ beams grew harder and more taut with every passing hour; the fleeing speedster itself grew large and clear upon the plates. The opalescence of the spiral arm became a firmament of stars. A sun detached itself from that firmament: a dwarf of Type G. Planets appeared.
One of these in particular, the second out, looked so much like Earth that it made some of the observers homesick. There were the familiar polar ice-caps, the atmosphere and stratosphere, the high-piled, billowy masses of clouds. There were vast blue oceans, there were huge, unfamiliar continents glowing with chlorophyllic green.
At the spectroscopes, at the bolometers, at the many other instruments men went rapidly and skillfully to work.
“Hope the ape’s heading for Two, and I think he is,” Kinnison remarked, as he studied the results. “People living on that planet would be human to ten places, for all the tea in China. No wonder he was so much at home on Tellus . Yup, it’s Two—there, he’s gone inert.”
“Whoever is piloting that can went to school just one day in his life and that day it rained and the teacher didn’t come,” Henderson snorted. “And he’s trying to balance her down on her tail—look at her bounce and flop around! He’s just begging for a crack-up.”
“If he makes it it’ll be bad—plenty bad,” Kinnison mused. “He’ll gain a lot of time on us while we’re rounding the globe on our landing spiral.”
“Why spiral, Kim? Why not follow him down, huh? Our intrinsic is no worse than his—it’s the same one, in fact.”
“Get conscious, Hen. This is a superbattlewagon—just in case you didn’t know it before.”
“So what? I can certainly handle this super a damn sight better than that ground-gripper is handling that scrap-heap down there.” Henry Henderson, Master Pilot Number One of the Service, was not bragging. He was merely voicing what to him was the simple and obvious truth.
“Mass is what. Mass and volume and velocity and inertia and power. You never stunted this much mass before, did you?”
“No, but what of it? I took a course in piloting once, in my youth.” He was then a grand old man of twenty-eight or thereabouts. “I can line up the main rear center pipe onto any grain of sand you want to pick out on that field, and hold her there until she slags it down.”
“If you think you can spell ‘able’, hop to it!”
“QX, this is going to be fun.” Henderson gleefully accepted the challenge, then clicked on his general-alarm microphone. “Strap down, everybody, for inert maneuvering, Class Three, on the tail. Tail over to belly landing. Hipe!”
The Bergenholms were cut and as the tremendously massive super-dreadnought, inert, shot off at an angle under its Tellurian intrinsic velocity, Master Pilot Number One proved his rating. As much a virtuoso of the banks and tiers of blast keys and levers before him as a concert organist is of his instrument, his hands and feet flashed hither and yon. Not music?—the bellowing, crescendo thunders of those jets were music to the hard-boiled space-hounds who heard them.