Trent clenched and unclenched his hands. A message from the pirates might mean anything. It could even tell something about Marian. He found his throat gone dry. He waited. The news had come from a ship already broken out of overdrive. It was now driving at full Lawlor-drive speed toward Manaos, but it could not use overdrive in the areas where a planet had broken up into asteroids or where the elongated orbits of comets might interfere. But it would arrive before dawn.
And it did. It was a small and battered trading ship, and the landing-grid brought it down through lowering dark clouds that hid all the stars. It came slowly into the light cast upward from the spaceport, and it came down smoothly and touched the ground, and the large sleek ground-cars of officialdom went over to where it rested. Police blocked the approach of anybody else, including Trent. He found himself surrounded by newsmen and wondered bitterly how they knew what was going on.
The newsmen saw nothing. Trent saw no more. It seemed that aeons passed while the shiny cars stayed motionless about the landed small ship. It was far away over the spaceport tarmac, nearly as far as the lacy landing-grid reached.
At long last the sleek cars went away, escorted by police vehicles. Only one of them came toward the spaceport office, and newsmen broke the police cordon to get there first. Trent went along with the rest. This would be a news briefing.
It happened inside the spaceport office building, where there was room for many passengers and their luggage to gather before they took ship and went away among the stars. Now a man with a disillusioned expression stood up on a table to make the official announcement of what was toward. His voice boomed.
"Some hours ago," he announced, "a message by microwave from the other side of the social system said that the ship Castor was coming in with a message from the Pleiad pirates, who had captured her, held her two days, and then released her minus half her crew. The message deals with the pirates taken prisoner and now held on Manaos awaiting trial."
Lights flashed at irregular intervals as the men with cameras took pictures to go on the morning news tapes. From time to time the harsh glow of longer-continuing lights for movie-tapes made the speaker look strange and unhuman. His face and figure were seemingly flattened by the excessive white glare. When more than one such light shone on him he shielded his eyes with his hands and gave them no usable picture. He went on loudly,
"The message was to this government and delivered in a sealed envelope. It announced that the pirates are now taking prisoners from ships they stop. They are, in fact, capturing ships to take prisoners. They swear that if their companions in our jail are hanged, they will hang—or worse—ten of their prisoners for each one of ours in prison here. The rest of the message tells of the arrangement by which we can communicate with them. The text of the main letter will be released later. The proposed arrangement for communication and for exchange of prisoners, of course, cannot be made public."
He got down from the table on which he'd stood to give the news release. Newsmen swarmed about him, barking questions they couldn't hope for him to answer unless he lost his temper at their insistence. But that wasn't likely. Police helped him to get his car through the senselessly jostling throng, with equally aimless flash-units continuing to make explosive white flames all about.
Trent went back to the Yarrow. Some time during the morning, he believed, he might be able to reach an official high-enough-up to get him an exception allowing the Yarrow to be lifted to space. After all, he had fought a pirate ship and won the fight in a limited degree. If any ship should be allowed to take to space, it should be the Yarrow. He could even—and here he knew a mirthless amusement—insist that he had to go out to space to try out McHinny's invention. It might work.
Actually, McHinny's gadget didn't have to be referred to. The Yarrow had applied for lift-off for the purpose of a voyage to Loren. Permission was granted, subject to carrying mail to that destination. There was no mention made of the huge crate containing an overdrive coil-unit to be delivered to a consignee there.
The permit and an extremely thin mail sack came to the ship by the same messenger. It may be that Trent should have put two and two together. He didn't, because he'd been trying to learn if the half-crew left in the small message-carrying ship had learned anything about a ship called the Cytheria. They hadn't. Therefore, Trent was savagely anxious to get to space. He didn't check on a number of things. The big crate. He didn't look in the forecastle.
It was just barely sunrise when the landing-grid's force field fumbled at the Yarrow, and tightened, and then began to lift the ship swiftly upward. It happened to be a very fine sunrise, with more different and more beautiful colorings than are often seen by early risers.
But the Yarrow went up and up, through the sunrise, to emptiness.
VI
When the spaceport landing-grid let go of the Yarrow, she was a full five planetary diameters out from Manaos.
She'd lifted off at sunrise, spaceport time, and Manaos was a magnificent half-disk as seen from space. It was brilliantly green and blue where the sun shone on it and abysmally black where it was lighted only by the stars. But if one watched for a few minutes through a spaceport he could see the dark half of the disk displayed very faintly by starlight. With sharp eyes one could even see the ghostly specks and spirals of cloud-systems on Manaos' night side. Corresponding cloud-formations on the daylight side were blindingly white.
But Trent was in no mood to regard the wonders of the heavens. He aligned the Yarrow's drive-axis for a certain fourth-magnitude star, the aiming-point for a ship intending a passage from Manaos to Loren. He snapped into the ship's speaker system, "Overdrive coming. Ten seconds. Count down."
He counted down himself, from ten to nine and eight and so on to zero. He pressed the over drive-button and instantly fought dizziness and acute nausea and immediately afterwards that ghastly, spiralling, plummeting sensation as if falling through illimitable emptiness which goes with going into overdrive.
But then, abruptly, he was back in the pilot's chair, and the viewports were black as if sunk in tar, and somehow the normal minor operating sounds within the ship were consoling and welcome and deeply satisfying. Because they meant that the ship was alive and operating, and, therefore, it was going somewhere and, therefore, it would ultimately arrive.
Trent began to calculate in his head. While he'd been on Manaos, waiting for the Yarrow, no less than eleven ships had taken off for space in the bland conviction that because Trent had come out on top in a fight with a pirate, they also could now travel confidently to high profits before the rest of the Pleiads dared try it.
And the same thing had happened elsewhere. Ship owners on a dozen worlds, feverishly anxious for the profits they'd been missing, would convince themselves that the danger from piracy had diminished past the point where it needed to be considered. And most of those ships would make their voyages in safety because there were so many of them and a limited number of pirates could make only so many captures. But that didn't mean less danger. It only meant that the same danger was distributed among more ships.