The Danae's castaways were captured. Guided by the whining static of a pocket battery razor, a hunting party from the ship had moved through twilight which made them almost as fearful as their quarry. They'd come silently - what few sounds they made masked by continued drippings from the trees - and they'd rushed the giant fallen tree after cries from inside it told them exactly where the fugitives were.
Again an element of timing was decisive. The interior of the hollow tree had had an occupant before the castaways took it over. Far back, where the rotted part of the toppled tree was smallest, a creature of Carola's night had slept through the day. It slept through the rain. Later, though, it awoke. It became uneasy because of movements nearby.
Then, when twilight fell, the castaways prepared to move their tiny fire to where it couldn't possibly attract any night-creature. Carrying the smouldering punk, they approached the night thing in its hiding place. It was terrified. When they were within feet of it, it bellowed and rushed for the open air. It toppled people. It toppled the glowing coals. It made a horrific bleating noise which called forth screams from the women and squeals of excitement from the two children. Then it found the exit and bolted into the night.
And within seconds the Theban's hunting party rushed the doorway through which the beast had fled. Blaster bolts set parts of the rotted ceiling aglow. A blaster shot knocked out the castaways' one weapon. It glowed red, then yellow, then incandescent white. But where it had fallen was dry and there was no explosion of steam.
And the castaways were captured. The crewmen of the Danae looked very unhappy. Two of the women desperately prepared to defend their children to the death. The red-haired mate rasped commands. He found the piled-up parcels of currency. He needed orders from Larsen about the disposition of the captives, but the currency was too much for four men to carry.
He loaded it on the prisoners. He was in a great hurry, because darkness was on the way. He and the three crewmen from the tramp ship herded their captives ahead, leaving the hollow tree to burn behind them. Presently there would be flames, leaping out into the night. Some nearby stuff might catch. But there was no danger of a widespread forest fire; the jungle was too wet. Tomorrow, or perhaps tonight, there'd come torrents from the sky that could douse any conflagration, no matter how fierce.
But the men of the Theban were literally afraid of the dark. Some of them had had experiences the night before that made them desperately anxious not to meet any night creature on the trail back to the ship. They drove their loaded captives ahead. If any monster did lurk in ambush, it would seize upon a prisoner at the front of the column, rather than an armed crewman at the rear.
Horn, waiting on the western side of the beacon clearing, saw the dispirited, despairing captives march slowly towards the ship. He'd had a perfectly workable plan in mind to increase the tension inside the ship to where it might become intolerable. He'd meant simply to snipe. He'd confine the crew in a ship they couldn't lift and that he'd prevent them from leaving. And he'd let them know about the beacon, so the necessity for leaving would be past avoiding. Horn estimated that, considering everything, they should give up in two days.
But the Danae's crew and passengers, including Ginny, now straggled hopelessly towards the Theban on the beacon clearing of Carola.
Horn never remembered beginning to run. He simply found himself racing crazily across the clearing in the new-fallen night. He was unable to see the marching band clearly enough to aim at Theban crewmen alone. He couldn't fire into the clump of people. If he beat them to the air lock, he'd still be one man against four crew members, and he must take great care lest a shot kill a castaway, while his enemies could cut him down with blast rifles shooting three hundred bolts a minute.
But he didn't beat the party to the ship's port. He was three hundred yards away when the milling group about the landing fin began to dwindle. It was now black dark. Wholly inadequate starlight did show the stubby bulk of the Theban against the sky, but there was only a confusion of blackness where loaded figures were forced to enter the ship. By the time Horn was two hundred yards away, there was only blurred movement.
He was a hundred yards away, unable to gasp even a cry of desperation, when the exit port of the air lock clanged shut.
He arrived at it seconds later. He beat on it. But this was a time of tumult and confusion inside, and his pounding went unheard. It would take minutes for the clamourous boasting of the returned hunters to be subdued by roared orders from Larsen. It would take more minutes for Larsen to become satisfied that the parcels of currency were found, and to have them piled up by the captives.
The captives themselves would cause more disorder. They would have to be killed eventually, but murder in cold blood was not especially attractive to men who had forty million credits in currency to gloat over, and who wanted to revel in their stupendous good fortune. Murder was simply not yet an appealing idea. Besides, three of the prisoners were women.
A Theban spaceman ripped open a package of currency. Hundred and five-hundred and thousand-credit notes fluttered to the floor. He picked up notes and threw them crazily into the air to fall where they would. Other men tore at other parcels of cash. They made a snowstorm of money. They pelted each other with handfuls of it, laughing hysterically. They were intoxicated, drunk, drugged by the possession of inconceivable riches.
The captain of the Danae looked shocked. He must have known that his life was forfeit to the necessity of the Theban's crew, but he was shocked at this treatment of money. Larsen gazed at it with burning eyes.
Outside the airlock, Horn was filled with despair and with accumulating horror at this disaster. The particoloured moon of Carola rose swiftly in the west, as a crescent. It raced across the sky, waxing with unseemly haste until it was half full, scattering radiance upon the clearing. There was the fifty-foot wall of foliage ringing the artificially barren clearing like an irregular precipice. Single trees reached above it. Some of them were angular zigzags of wood with pompoms of foliage at every joint. Some were straight leafy spires which had no branches at all.
The bright and rapidly moving light shone on horror, too. There were the carcasses of the beasts Larsen had slain when they came to stare at the ship's cargo lights. Some of the carcasses were swollen now, but there was movement among them. Writhing, undulating discs of greyish-green horror fed upon them. They glistened as the particoloured moon moved overhead. The dead animals were not pleasant to look at, but the horrors that squirmed upon and around them, feeding through many mouths, embracing the things they ate and making sucking noises.... They penetrated, suddenly, even into Horn's frantic state of mind.
As of the moment, Larsen was wholly victorious. He had the castaways as captives in his ship, and he had the currency shipment. He also had Horn essentially at his mercy. And he knew it. From the information gived by the now-dead engineer, Larsen had undoubtedly learned of Ginny's special status in Horn's mind. Larsen would know that so long as Ginny was unharmed, Horn would do whatever was demanded.
With Ginny in his hands, Larsen could make Horn surrender. He could make Horn tune the Theban's engines to as complete dependability as such ancient mechanisms could attain. True, Larsen couldn't know when that perfection was real and when it was illusory. But while he held Ginny captive he had Horn at his mercy too.