He had questions of his own. He gave orders for a study of every bit of information about every planet within a light-century. The Galactic Directory wouldn't tell if there were one whose colonists had ceased to have normal space-communication with the rest of the Pleiads—the reason, pirates—or else one which could have had a pirate's base built on it. The second alternative was not too likely. Criminal enterprises are inherently destructive. A specially built base would be constructive. It would mean investment of capital, in fact, construction. The bare idea of building something would be alien to a piratical enterprise. It wouldn't be done.
The searching of records was a reasonable idea, but it was based on the assumption that pirates would maintain their ships in the manner of ship owners, keeping them in repair. But pirates wouldn't keep ships in repair. Instead, they'd abandon them for better-found ships as they captured them. So the urgent search of records was apparently futile.
But the news of such quests did bring one of the Yarrow's crewmen to Trent with an observation he'd made while the Cytheria was aground. He'd heard, naturally, of the search for a probably tiny colony whose landing-grid was at the service of pirates. He was one of the salvage-crew Trent had recruited for the Hecla. He'd been making a final weld on the Yarrow's bow-plates when the Cytheria touched ground. He'd seen lumps of frozen mud on the tips of her landing-fins. He came to Trent to report that wherever the Cytheria had been, it hadn't been to a Pleiad spaceport. He knew the Pleiad spaceports. They were solidly paved. The Cytheria had landed somewhere where there wasn't a landing-grid. She'd landed by rockets, ordinarily an emergency landing-system only. She'd taken off again. There was mud on her landing-fins. So there was no use looking for a known spaceport that pirates might have seized.
Trent barked orders. He had no authority to give orders, but nobody else had orders to give. He was obeyed. He sent a ground-car burning up the highway to the ghil plantation he'd visited only hours earlier. The scientist there, with specimens of vegetation from thirty other planets growing in plastic cubicles was to be picked up and brought to him right away!
And Trent went out on the spaceport tarmac to see if by any possible chance any fragments of that mentioned mud had been left behind by the Cytheria.
He was, as it happened, just in time to keep tidy-minded spaceport employees from cleaning up and disposing of the left-behind mud as refuse.
It was nearly an hour before the white-haired scientist arrived from the ghil plantation research laboratory. Trent was pacing up and down, his hands clenching and unclenching, alternating between rage that he hadn't been at the spaceport when the Cytheria came in—she'd never have lifted off again without a fight—and bitter despair because all his most appalling suspicions seemed to have been proven true.
Meanwhile the lumps of soil from the Cytheria's landing-fins melted. Exposed to a vacuum, water boils, and in boiling loses heat, so that when a certain portion of it has boiled away the remainder becomes ice. The first human-made artificial ice was made by the operation of a vacuum-pump on a flask of water. Wherever the Cytheria had landed before Loren, mud sticking to her fins had been carried away, frozen solid in space. It remained firmly fixed until the slight shock of landing on the Loren tarmac jolted it loose. The now-softened fragments amounted to a total of nearly a bushel of top-soil and plant-fragments.
The ground-car with the ghil plantation scientist arrived. Trent stood tensely by while he examined the material that so nearly had escaped being thrown away. The examination was exhaustive, done with pursed lips and an air of intense but academic interest. At long last he shook his head.
"I've plant samples from thirty worlds," he said regretfully, "but not from this one. Most interesting! This thready specimen is functionally a congener of grasses. It is a ground-cover plant. This one—I've never seen this leaf-shape or this triform stem before, and this—" He shook his head. "It looks like part of a symbiotic unit. Perhaps its companion-organism—"
'Where's it from?" demanded Trent.
"I haven't the least idea," said the scientist ruefully. "Not the least idea. But I hope I can take these specimens! They've been frozen, but possibly there may be spores or… or something that in a proper environment will revive and develop. They're most interesting!"
"We've got to know the planet they came from!" snapped Trent. "We've got to!"
The short man again shook his head.
"Nobody knows all the plants in the galaxy," he said in mild defensiveness. "Nobody! But of course—it's from a planet very nearly the size of this one. The stalks would be thinner on a lighter world, and thicker where the gravity was greater. The sun is type G, because of the exact variant of chlorophyll that has this special tint to use that kind of light. The cell-forms suggest a trace of sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere; not much, but a trace. And the soil says conclusively that there is much volcanic activity, because it contains volcanic ash in every stage of disintegration from fresh ash to, hmmm, sludge. But I bore you."
"Keep on!" said Trent.
"The temperature range," said the short man, "would be of the order of fifteen to forty-five degrees centigrade, which one knows by the evaporation-rates the leaf-surfaces imply. The planet's axis will be nearly at a right angle to the ecliptic, because there are practically no seasons, and I'd estimate the annual rainfall at about two meters per standard year." Then the ecologist said apologetically, "But that's all. I'm sorry I can't tell you anything really useful. But there simply isn't any information to tell what planet this material comes from."
"You're wrong," said Trent. "You have told me!"
Thirty minutes later the Yarrow lifted off to space from the Loren landing-grid. When it was well on its way, Trent painstakingly read in the Galactic Directory for this sector. He'd studied every planet within a light-century with no reason to guess at one rather than another, until the plant ecologist told him. He read:
… mass approximately 1/325000 sol. Acceleration due to gravity, 975 cm.-sec. Solar const. 1.94 small cal. min. Mean bar. pres. 794 mm. mercury. Rotation period 26.30 hr. Atm. 72.6% N, 27.5% O, .08% CO2, .04% SO2…
The description in the Directory was of a planet not individually named, but known as Kress Three because it lay in the third orbit out from the sun called Kress. It was the only planet within a hundred lightyears whose physical constants matched the description given by the mud dropped from the Cytheria's fins. The Yarrow drove for it with all the speed two overdrive coils in one ship's hull could make possible.
It was related of one of the earlier known explorers, back on ancient Earth, that when he bound across what was then believed a boundless sea, he encouraged his frightened crew by discovering floating tree-branches in the ocean. They must have come from land, and could only have come from land ahead.
Captain Trent of the Yarrow had better information and a totally unlike purpose. But he was as much relieved when on the second day out from Loren the Yarrow's drive-detector reported another ship in overdrive within detector-range. The other ship was ahead. Captain Trent cut down his speed, and overhauled the other space craft in a very leisurely fashion. He caught up to it, but at a discreet distance to one side. There was no question of blowing drives. The Yarrow went by, slowly, as if only very slightly faster than its unseen companion. The other ship neither sheered off nor closed in. Had it been a merchantman, it would probably have sheered off. A pirate might have closed in. Doing neither, and yet moving on the same course, each identified the other to its own satisfaction. Trent was confident that the other ship was the Cytheria, bound for the pirate's base of operations. Very probably the Cytheria identified the Yarrow as that pirate vessel presumably receiving the attentions of an armed ship from Loren, back by the double yellow sun.