The Earth ship knew, of course, what the raiders could have done. Every man in the crew knew that, from the captain down, and no one could understand why they had been allowed to escape. Yet in their minds the haunting chant of the captive woman still echoed; they could still hear her song of longing and loneliness. Back on Earth they would remember those words, and talk about that song for years to come.
And that was what the mauki wanted.
1. The Rumor
IT WAS not really any great desire to display his skill as a pilot that led Ben Trefon to pancake his little four-seater down for a crazy pinwheel landing on the Martian desert that late afternoon in the spring. He certainly hadn’t planned it that way, and the fact that he nearly dumped the little space craft into the Great Rift before he finally got it landed on the red desert sand didn’t mean that he was particularly reckless most times. Of course, he didn’t know that half the Central Council was watching his landing from his father’s front terrace, and it was fairly common knowledge that a Spacer didn’t stay alive very long if he wasn’t a little reckless once in a while. As far as Ben Trefon was concerned, the near-disaster was mostly his father’s fault for recalling him home to Mars so suddenly, without warning or explanation, when he knew that other more exciting things were afoot.
As a matter of fact, at the age of eighteen Ben Trefon was a highly expert space pilot. From his fifth birthday on he had been familiar with the feel of space ship controls. He had handled the whole range of Spacer ships, from the tiniest one-man scooters to the great cargo ships orbiting home from the raids on Earth. He had learned the principles of inertia of motion and inertia of rest almost before he learned his ABC’s, and the laws of gravity and null-gravity seemed more natural than addition and subtraction.
When he had later come up against the theory of interplanetary navigation, astrophysics, landing maneuvers and raiding techniques at the Spacer Academy on Asteroid Central, he had brought with him a dozen years of experience in practical, seat-of-the-pants space flying.
But things seemed to conspire against Ben Trefon ever since his father’s message came through to him on Asteroid Central forty-eight hours before. The forthcoming raid was Ben’s first as a full-fledged participant, and the briefings and instructions had gone on all through the night. For days the excitement had been mounting until the whole raiding crew was running on raw nerve and tension… and then Dad’s message, like a dash of ice-cold water in his face: RETURN TO MARS AT ONCE. URGENT THAT I SEE YOU BEFORE THE RAID. REPEAT, URGENT.
That in itself was unnerving. Dad didn’t go in for heavy drama. He knew as well as any Spacer the tension that built up before a major raid on Earth. He would never have sent a summons like that unless something were drastically wrong. That knowledge alone worried Ben all the way home and affected his judgment when he decided to make a powered landing on the Martian desert without the aid of his ship’s null-gravity units.
He knew that he had trapped himself the moment he swung the little ship into its first graceful braking arc through the tenuous outer layers of the Martian atmosphere. He could have backed out and used the null-grav units in the next pass but with typical Trefon stubbornness, he decided to bull it through, and that was his real mistake. As he watched the surface of the red planet skimming by below him, he realized that he needed one more hand and one more foot than he had to keep his ship under control. He spotted his landing target, the great camouflaged patchwork of the House of Trefon resting on a low plateau near the equator on the edge of the Great Rift, and things looked all right until his third braking arc when the massive north-moving jet stream caught the little ship and carried it fifteen degrees off course. He was still farther off course as the ship swept around over the dark side of Mars; on the next pass the atmosphere was thicker and Ben’s attempt to compensate with more and more torque from the ship’s side jets made control all the harder.
By the time he came into his final arc for landing, he was riding the little craft like a bucking bronco, trying to prevent a side-slip, with his approach speed twice too fast and the long, deep canyon of the Rift yawning larger and larger ahead of him. The ship rolled crazily as Ben fought the controls; then, in desperation, he slammed on the forward braking jet and said a quick prayer. His body strained at the safety belt as force slammed against force and the tiny ship jerked as if it had struck a stone wall. Then its nose dropped suddenly and the ground rushed up at him. One landing skid struck the edge of the Rift; in graceful slow motion the ship did an end-over-end pirouette in the air and bounced on its belly three times before coming to a stop in a cloud of red desert sand.
Ben sat for a moment or two, gathering his wits and catching his breath as the dust settled. He could see the shiny plastic bubble of his father’s house on the dunes above him. Already a crash siren was wailing. An emergency sand-cat rolled down the hill toward him from the house, with a second following in its tracks. By the time Ben climbed out of the cockpit, feeling very foolish, the sand-cats reached him.
He waved to the ground crew and jumped down onto the sand. The plastic lid of the first sand-cat flew up, and Elmo Peterson, his father’s chief mechanic, glared down at Ben from the controls. “Crazy kid!” he bellowed. “What were you trying to do, land that thing on its back?”
“The jet stream caught me,” Ben said defensively, climbing into the sand-cat.
“Well, what did you expect?” Peterson was a big man, with a shock of snow-white hair like most Spacer men. “You never heard of null-gravity, I suppose? Your dad nearly swallowed his tongue.”
“Count on him to be watching,” Ben said sourly. “What does he want me for, anyway?” Peterson ignored the question for a moment as he mustered the ground crew to haul Ben’s ship—on its bent landing skids—up to the hangar. Then he turned the sand-cat around on its caterpillar tracks and headed toward the house again. “Right now he may just want to take a belt to you,” he answered Ben finally. “He wasn’t the only one watching that little performance.” A moment later Ben saw what the big man meant. The House of Trefon, like all Spacer homes built on Mars or the major asteroids, was artfully concealed from detection from above. But as the sand-cat ground up the hill toward the bubble-enclosed buildings, Ben could see that the hangar area was filled with private space craft. A dozen small ships were here, old and new, with the ground crew working frantically to service them. Some of them Ben recognized at once: there was old Mitsuki Mikuta’s tiny private ship up against the hangar wall; Dan O’Brien’s flambuoyant yellow craft was being polished down by three of the ground crew, and across the hangar he could see Roger Petro’s new black-and-white family cruiser.
Ben stared at Peterson. “Is the whole Council here?”
“Pretty near it,” Peterson said. “And the rest will be here before long.”
“But why? What’s going on?”
Peterson shrugged. “Ask your dad. They don’t ask my permission for a Council meeting.” Ben fought down his rising alarm, but it wouldn’t work. “You must have heard something,” he pleaded.
“This isn’t going to stall the raid, is it? I mean, they aren’t going to call it off for some reason?” Peterson hauled the sand-cat in through the airlock of the plastic bubble, and snapped the motor off.
“Look,” he said patiently. “Just ask your dad, huh? I’ve got a hunch he’s looking for you.”
“I suppose,” Ben said gloomily, climbing down to the hangar floor. “Well, thanks for the lift.”