He had tiny hot-houses in which he grew assorted samples of vegetation from more than thirty different worlds other than Loren. He maintained appropriate climatic conditions and growing-soil for each separate planet's vegetation in the separate plastic shelters. He almost—almost—aroused Trent's interest when he explained how he could describe the planet a plant came from by examination of a single plant or sometimes even a leaf. He could tell the composition of its atmosphere, its gravitational field-strength, the climate, its temperature range, and even its seasonal changes all from a leaf of an unidentified botanical Specimen. Trent listened with what was almost interest.
But suddenly something made him turn away from this lecture to stare at the horizon behind him. The planet's landing-grid could be seen even from here, but there was a thread of white smoke uncoiling swiftly from within it. Something went blasting toward the sky. It reached the blue, went beyond. It thinned and thinned and thinned. Then it was gone.
And half an hour later a ground-car screeched to a stop at the ghil plantation. It had come for Trent. The Yarrow's mate had sent one of the crewmen to give Trent exact information. He was clearing away all scaffolding and getting ready to take to space immediately Trent arrived.
Because the Cytheria had come into port. An hour since she'd called down to ask coordinates for landing. The landing-grid operator had given them, and fumbled far, far out in emptiness until the grid's force-fields found and locked onto the ship. They brought her swiftly and precisely to ground. In the very center of the spaceport, the Cytheria stood upright. A man—one man only—came out of a passenger-port and trudged across the tarmac to the landing-grid's office. He went in and asked if there was mail for the Cytheria. There was. One letter. It looked official. It had come in the single bag of mail put on the Yarrow just before she was allowed to lift off of Manaos.
The single figure from the Cytheria trudged back to that ship, carrying the one letter in its official-seeming envelope. He went in the passenger-port. It closed behind him. The Cytheria asked by space-phone for immediate lift-off.
The grid office was astonished. This was so completely out of the ordinary run of events that the operator blankly asked why. What was the matter? Wasn't there any cargo? Weren't there any passengers to come ashore? Wasn't there one passenger in particular?
The operator should have focussed the grid's force-fields on the ship aground, as if perhaps to lift her. Then he should have held her aground in despite of protests or threats. He didn't happen to think of it. Such a thing had never been necessary or desirable. It was… unthinkable.
And the Cytheria suddenly emitted flames. They rolled over the empty spaceport tarmac. She lifted on her emergency-rockets and plunged skyward.
When Trent got to the spaceport, already three parts maddened by shock and frustration and grief, the Cytheria—which should have had Marian aboard to be landed here—was long gone away to space again. She'd long since gone into overdrive. She was already millions upon millions of miles away and traveling many times faster than the speed of light. And there was no faintest clue to her destination.
VIII
Things added up perfectly to a total of pure frustration. The Cytheria had been taken by pirates at some time which could have been anything up to twenty-two days before. At the time of her capture, the pirates knew that some of their companions were prisoners and were to be tried and doubtless executed on Manaos. Therefore she hadn't been looted and abandoned in emptiness. She'd been reserved for the task she'd just performed, of securing the official answer to their ultimatum. Her passengers and crew might or might not have been murdered at the time of her capture or any instant later. It was not possible to know.
These items fitted together. In making a demand for the exchange of captured pirates for captured spacemen and space travelers, the pirates must have named some way by which their demand could be answered. That hadn't been revealed on Manaos, but the Yarrow had been permitted to lift off for Loren with a flat mail sack before any other space craft was permitted to leave the planet. One thin, flat, official letter was probably the only postal matter in it. It was most likely the Manaos' government's answer to the threat.
Other things fitted in. If the Bear was both privateer and pirate, it would know the Loren spaceport and its personnel. It would know that the already-captured Cytheria could be sent there to pick up mail with no real danger of not being able to leave again. The fact that all interstellar communications traveled by ship made such an arrangement the only practical one. The other extraneous attempt to stop the Yarrow near the double yellow sun was simply proof that the pirates couldn't communicate with each other over vast distances. They got their supplies and information and delivered their loot—and now prisoners—at some base somewhere. Not all of them would be fully informed at any one time. The ship by the double star wasn't.
But the lack of any information about where that base might be—and a base was necessary—was frenziedly frustrating. Trent fiercely demanded information about the contacts of the Bear's crew on Loren when as a privateer she happened to be in port. If the crewmen were recruited from the local population—
They weren't. The Bear had appeared off Loren two years before. Its skipper proposed a deal to the local authorities. The Bear offered to act as a privateer for Loren, artifically supplying the planet with off-planet goods. Loren would pay for them in ghil fiber on presentation of the receipts the Bear would give its victims. It would be a process for forcing the trade that Loren's economic crisis had driven away. To have even the color of lawfulness, of course, a privateer had to be owned on the planet it seized goods for. So Marian's father had formally purchased the Bear, but it was strictly a legal fiction. The Bear's skipper was her true owner. The Bear had brought in some cargoes. It got information and some supplies from Loren. But no man of its crew belonged there. There was nothing to be learned about their actual base from casual hints they'd dropped. They hadn't dropped any.
It was a dead-end query. It led nowhere. But nobody else on Loren had thought to ask even that. Trent surrendered Marian's letter to the authorities. It proved that she should have been aboard the Cytheria. The behavior of that ship proved that it had been captured, unquestionably while she was aboard. Her father became as horror-struck as Trent assured himself he wasn't. All the resources of Loren were immediately available for anything that could conceivably be done. And Trent became automatically the man to whom proposals were offered and suggestions made and questions presented.