They reached that place. The Yarrow had moved. They went on, forever.
"She blew," said Trent briefly, for all the ship to hear. "Now we might ram her, because she can't go into overdrive any longer. But we're all shot up. Better not."
A faint noise came from the loudspeaker overhead. It was a voice. It babbled. It screamed. It begged pathetically. It babbled again. It was a spacesuit in emptiness, and unintelligible cries came from it.
The mate said, "Somehow, Captain, I don't think those pirates would pick up one of us if we was floating out of a smashed spaceboat like this fella."
"No," agreed Trent dourly. "They wouldn't. But they wouldn't need to ask us any questions about where our home port was, or how many ships like us were working out of it. And they wouldn't want to ask us if we knew anything about a ship named the Cytheria."
So he tracked down the voice from a spacesuit that had been in a now-shattered spaceboat. The man in that space-suit had found himself floating in absolute emptiness. In the confused, furious dashes of the Yarrow upon the pirate, both ships had moved many miles away from the spot where the spaceboat had been. Actually, the pirate ship was more than a hundred miles from the senselessly screaming voice. He couldn't pick it out with the naked eye against the background of all the stars there were. He was alone as no man can remain alone and stay sane. And his screamings had a specific cause. The man in the spacesuit could see the giant, double, yellow sun and feel its deadly heat. He screamed because he believed he looked at the two round doors which were the entrance gates to hell. And he felt that he was falling toward them.
The Yarrow picked him up, after an hour of searching, but nothing intelligible could be gotten out of him. He'd gone mad from terror.
The Yarrow arrived at Loren two shipdays later. She was landed by the spaceport landing-grid which rose half a mile from the wide flat plains of the colony world. Trent went aground and formidably to the spaceport office. His first question was about the Cytheria—if she'd arrived yet. She hadn't.
He said coldly, "Better tell your planetary president that his daughter's aboard her. You might tell him too, that his privateer has turned pirate, and he has reason to be worried. He and this whole planet may be in trouble because of it. And there's a pirate ship disabled but working hard to make repairs a couple of days' drive back toward Manaos. She's probably in unstable orbit around a double yellow star, but she may be able to patch herself up before the orbit breaks."
Then he said, "And I need repairs, too. But I'll do all right with some steel plates and some good welders. How do I arrange for that?"
There was agitation at the Loren spaceport, especially after the Yarrow's crewmen went aground and relaxed in the unprosperous dives outside the spaceport gates. The planet itself was not one of the outstanding human colonies in the Pleiads. It had originally been settled because of a genus of local fiber-producing plants which had a high luxury-value. For a time it prospered, producing fabulously soft and fabulously beautiful textile raw materials. The population went up into the millions, and there'd been a time when its spaceport was busy with ships from half the galaxy come to trade for ghil fiber. At that time a certain ecological difficulty seemed trivial. Earth-type vegetation did not thrive on Loren. The planet's native soil-bacteria were excellent for ghil-fiber plants, but not for potatoes or corn or commonplace crops like beans. To grow crops for human consumption, hormones and vitamin-base compounds and antibiotics had to be imported from off-planet.
Naturally humans, everywhere, have to carry the vegetation of Earth with them when they plant a colony, to supply the excessively complex food compounds the human race has adapted itself to require. Loren was highly prosperous for a long time. But it was a one-product world, subject to the disasters of a one-crop economy. And now it was a backwater world, its commerce stagnant and going steadily downhill.
Some of the people on Loren were excited about the Yarrow's arrival because trade goods were scarce. Even a privateer which requisitioned cargoes and gave receipts for them—to be redeemed in ghil fiber on Loren—could not supply the imported items a population of five millions needed. So even a single shipload of assorted imports could make a wild flurry in the business world on Loren.
Some of Loren's inhabitants were disturbed because they'd felt that the planet was being boycotted on account of its privateer, and now learned that interstellar trade was practically destroyed by pirates and even a privateer must work only empty shiplanes to no avail. The Yarrow was actually the first off-planet ship to touch ground on Loren in four months.
A few of Loren's people felt a special uneasiness because of the disabled pirate ship of which Trent had made report. In modern times there were no such things as armies or navies, of course. Police officials had to take over many functions formerly handled by the military. Some of them came to Trent and asked searching questions about the conflict near the double sun.
"We made out," Trent told them, "because we'd packed bulk cargo in our bow sections and their shells couldn't do but so much damage. If you mean to go after her, you should be able to find her with radar, and you shouldn't have much trouble. She's short-handed. We arranged that. We smashed three lifeboats full of men coming to board us. Have your doctors been able to get anything out of that pirate we brought in?"
They hadn't. They were recording all his babblings and studying them painstakingly. There was no doubt about his having been a pirate. But since his present mental state had been produced by an intolerable emotional stress of horror and despair, his babblings were naturally of emotional matters only. From his incoherencies they'd deduced at least three pirate ships in operation and half a dozen ships captured, but they couldn't be identified. Nor could they get any clue to where his own ship was based, nor a description of that home world, nor anything else that amounted to useful information. He babbled and wept and pleaded not to be returned to space where great yellow suns were the gates of hell and drew him irresistibly toward them.
Trent produced data from Manaos. It consisted of photos and fingerprints and retinal patterns of twelve pirates captured by Trent in the Hecla. They were the men for whose execution—if it happened—other pirates had sworn to take revenge. Their capture had sent innumerable deluded ships to space again, and there could be no doubt of the capture of enough spacemen and space travelers to let the pirates carry out their most bloodthirsty menaces. Trent mentioned sourly that both Marian and the Hecla's skipper said that pirate ship looked like the Bear, whose identity the pirate claimed while demanding surrender. Trent suggested that the police look up the spaceport records of the Bear's crew.
They came back presently, intolerably distressed. The pirates waiting trial, or release, on Manaos had been members of the privateer commissioned by Loren. What should they do?
"If it comes here," said Trent savagely, "blow hell out of it! But I rammed it. There are some repairs they'd have trouble explaining. It probably won't come. It'll go to its real base. It made use of you for information about space lanes and ship movements to make its piratical efforts easier. Now and then it brought in something. But you helped it to the best of your ability!"