Scott said nothing. Chenery said, somehow shrilly, “Dammit, you tell Bugsy—”
Scott reached out to Chenery. He whirled him about and thrust him through the door behind him. He swept the girl through that same doorway. His motions were smooth and precise, as if rehearsed. He faced back to the second would-be guard of the two injured men. He looked at him, and the man instinctively gave ground again. Scott picked up the blaster the first man had lost from its holster. “You’d better tell Bugsy,” he said evenly, “that I want to talk to him. I’ll be in the control room. He can come there. And tell him I’m liable to get impatient if he doesn’t come soon!”
The hospital corridor door closed behind him. He turned to find Chenery in the act of actually wringing his hands. Janet was paler than he’d seen her before, which was very pale indeed.
“Back to the control room,” he said shortly. “I’ve got to speak to the liner. By the way, who’s Bugsy?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He led the way briskly. Janet came close behind him. Chenery brought up the rear. He made agitated, whimpering sounds. They went through the engine room. The engineer wasn’t visible. But on the level above the warehouse space Scott turned aside from the way by which they’d descended. Chenery said miserably, “Hey! Not that way—”
“Yes,” said Scott. “This way.”
He had studied the plans of the space buoy when he had been appointed to command it. He made the rest of the way upward by stairs provided for the delivery of baggage and services to the hotel-level rooms. There was nothing secret about the stairway. Scott chose it to check his own familiarity with the space installation he’d never seen before.
They reached the control room. It was empty. Chenery practically blubbered when Scott closed the door behind them. Janet was pale.
“Discipline’s gone,” said Scott ironically. “I told those two privates to stay on duty here.”
Janet said hopelessly, “You didn’t really think they—”
“I was making a joke,” said Scott, ironically. “Chenery, this place should be bugged. Where is it?”
Chenery gulped. Then he reached under the control desk. He wrenched at something. He showed Scott a tiny microphone with thread-like wires attached.
“Good!” said Scott. “Now listen! I know the men I met were primed with answers for me. Quick work! I want to know if there’s anybody who’ll want to leave here. Can anybody leave?”
Janet said quietly, “No. There’s nobody—left to go.”
“Except you,” Scott corrected. “Chenery, she doesn’t belong in this mess. You’re in trouble too, and you know it. But if you’ll help her get on that liner, I’ll let you go with her! I can’t make a better deal than that. You’ll have a chance to disappear before this business is known anywhere but here.”
Chenery swallowed. Then he shook his head, “I got—I started this. It’s too good. It ain’t working out the way I wanted it but—” He swallowed again. “She couldn’t be got away anyhow.”
Scott said, “No?” He pressed a button, grimly. He called, using the inter-ship communicator microphone. There was no answer. He called again. He looked for the light that would indicate a carrier-wave going out. It hadn’t come on. The communicator wasn’t working.
Lips tensed, Scott pressed the trouble-finder stud that all important equipment carried. A separate, battery-operated device went into action. It checked the circuitry and the elements of the space-phone by which Scott had tried to reach the liner. There was a humming sound. Something clicked. A slip of paper rolled out briskly for his inspection.
“Power off,” said the slip. “This unit only.”
“It seems,” said Scott very coldly indeed, “that somebody doesn’t want any messages going out. Which is understandable!”
He turned in his chair. The screens were operating. Only the communicator was turned off from somewhere outside the control room. Scott could see the liner, probably as much as ten miles away. It had drifted out pretty far since Scott came aboard Lambda. It seemed to be waiting to hear from the checkpoint. But before Scott could even try to think how to get power back to the communicator, he realized that the liner was unnaturally still. He’d instructed it to wait half an hour. Much more time than that had passed. So far as the liner-skipper knew, he’d come aboard Lambda and the rest was silence. Calls hadn’t been answered. And there were those huge and increasing misty shapes which were the Five Comets. Comets were not solid. They were swarms of deadly objects, hurtling through emptiness. Even being near them was dangerous though, and the liner-skipper had his passengers to think of.
So the liner was aiming for its next port. Aiming took a long time. Minutes. The liner-skipper was doing the only thing possible. He had no alternative.
The liner seemed to hang absolutely motionless for minutes while its aim was refined to fractions of fractions of seconds of an arc. Scott had a feeling that it called, for one last time. But he couldn’t answer.
The liner flicked out of existence like a bubble bursting. Actually it was wrapped in a cocoon of stressed space which carried it away at many times the speed of light.
Six days from now it would return to normal space and try to tell what its skipper knew about events on Checkpoint Lambda. He didn’t know much. For one thing, he didn’t think of the Golconda Ship in connection with the behavior of the buoy. He’d send Scott’s report and his own information to the Patrol as soon as possible. But it would be a matter of weeks before a Patrol ship reached Canis Lambda to find out what had happened.
Scott looked after the vanished liner for a matter of seconds. Then he said evenly, “So that’s ruled out. Things look pretty sticky. We’ll take a look at the Five Comets again. That situation looks pretty nasty, too.”
It was.
CHAPTER 3
The Five Comets moved in toward the sun Canis Lambda. They moved with a seeming deliberation, each in its own individual fashion and from its individual direction. There was one which was very large. Its nucleus—its coma—its head—was the center of a misty brightness scores of thousands of miles across. The actual heart of it, of course, was something else. The substance of the comet was an enormous aggregation of rocks and metal masses floating about each other as they plunged toward the sun. By the effect of sunlight upon them, minute quantities of occluded gases were boiled off into emptiness. Sunlight striking them ionized them and made them into a mist; by another process it drove them away from itself toward remoteness in the form of a long and shining tail.
Another comet was very small. It came from very, very far out in space. It was speeding furiously to overtake the companions it knew only rarely and then for a relatively short time—a few weeks every so many years. It would rush with them around the yellow sun and then speed grandly away into the lonely and dimly lighted void. At the perihelion of this comet, Canis Lambda would be only a star, and not the brightest in the heavens at that. But now it rushed sunward.
Then there were two comets like twins, identical in size and pushing sturdily together toward the rendezvous of their tribe. Astronomers had likened them to Bella’s Comet in the First System, which was observed to have twinned itself somewhere out in the far darkness where comets spend most of their lives. Bella’s Comet appeared several times as twins. Then it appeared no more as if one of the twins had died far from the sight of men and the other would not survive its brother. Neither one was ever heard of again.