Yet here there were no leads at all.
No real leads, at least. A few unguarded remarks at mess. Some slipshod accounting of spare parts for the laser banks. These were anti-Plan irregularities, to be sure, and men had gone to the Body Bank for far less. Men would go to the Body Bank for them now, from Polaris Station, for Gann had promptly filed the names and data. But he was certain that what he should be looking for was something bigger and worse than an occasional disgruntled or sloppy officer.
Within one week Gann had proved to his own satisfaction that if there was any major anti-Plan activity going on, it was not on Polaris Station.
He had to look elsewhere.
But where else was there?
It wasn't until he had been there twice that he realized where the "elsewhere" had to be.
Like all the noncommissioned personnel, Gann took his share of KP, garbage detail, cleanup orderly, and so on. It was not usually a burdensome chore. The radar ovens and cybernated housekeepers did all the work; the only thing left for the men in charge was to make sure they were working properly. Even the short hop from station to the snowball for garbage disposal was a welcome break in the routine.
He shared his garbage tour with M'Buna, and they spent their time chatting desultorily at the controls of the "scow"—actually a reactionless space tractor—while the garbage pods steered, unloaded, and returned themselves. M'Buna had never referred to Gann's leading remark about collars. Nor had Gann ever been able to draw him into any unplanned talk; he had given up trying. They talked about home. They talked about promotion. And they talked about girls.
For Gann there was one girl, and her name was Julie Martinet. "No bigger than a minute, M'Buna," he said earnestly, "and with those beautiful dark eyes. She's waiting for me. When I come back—"
"Sure," said M'Buna. "Now, this girl I knew in Lagos—"
"You're talking about a girl," said Gann. "Julie is the girl. The only one who matters."
"How come you never get any mail from her?" asked M'Buna.
And Gann froze.
"She doesn't like to write letters," he said after a moment, but inside he was cursing himself. So foolish a slip! There was a reason, and a perfectly good one, why he got no letters from Julie Martinet. They were piling up for him on Pluto; he was sure of that; but they could not be forwarded here. There was too much risk of someone reading one, and learning from some chance comment that Gann was not the simple laser tech he appeared.
As soon as he could, Gann changed the subject. "Say," he said, "what's that on the scope?" It was a tiny blip, settling down feather-light toward the surface of the snowball protoplanet. A clutter of trash, of course. Nothing more. It was by no means unusual for some part of the garbage cargo to rebound from the tenuous clutch of the snowball's gravity and wheel around in space for minutes or hours before finally settling into place.
But M'Buna glanced at the radar display and said casually, "The commandant, I suppose. He comes out here every once in a while to check things over."
Carefully, trying to hide his excitement, Gann said, "Wonder what he does there." M'Buna shrugged, reached forward, and turned a switch. The pod had emptied itself and returned to the ship. "Tell you what," Gann went on. "Let's look."
He didn't wait for an answer. The pod back, the scow ready, there was nothing to stop him. He fed the ion stream to the reactionless drive and cut in the course-correcting side rockets. The scow began to move.
M'Buna said tautly, "No! Cut it out, Gann. The Old Man isn't going to want us skylarking around without permission."
But Gann wasn't listening. He was watching the screens intently.
If Machine Colonel Zafar was paying surreptitious visits to the ice-planetoid, there had to be a reason. He was going to find out what that reason was. He cut in maximum magnification on the screens, and the surface of the little protoplanet of frozen gases leaped up toward him.
The thing was eight or ten miles thick, shaped more like a broken cinder block than a sphere. It was unusually dense, as the distant, orbiting blobs of frozen methane and hydrogen went; if it ever drifted in near the sun, it would make a major comet. In the screen its greenish crust of solid gases looked like a blizzard in slow motion. Disturbed by the impact of the waste they had dumped, the whole snowball was quivering and shaking, its light gas-snow rising in sheets and falling again.
There was absolutely nothing to be seen . . .
But even a tiny planetoid has a great deal of surface, by human standards. Somewhere on that surface Colonel Zafar had gone in his flying suit. Gann reached again for the controls to circle around.
Some noise warned him.
He turned, and saw M'Buna leaning toward him, a strange expression of mingled pity and hate on his face; and in M'Buna's hand was a glittering metal pencil, pointed at him.
In that split second of time that was leftto him Gann thought wildly: If only I could get the report in, I've sure found something anti-Plan going on now . . .
And that was the last thought he had for a long time. He heard a hiss and just had time to realize that the sting on his cheek was a nerve pellet fired from M'Buna's contraband gun. That was all. Blackness closed over him, and cold.
3
A nerve pellet is an instant anesthetic. It is also something more.
It does not wear off. Not ever. The victim of a nerve pellet does not recover consciousness until he is given an antidote.
When Gann woke up, he had no idea of how long he had been under the influence of the nerve pellet. But what he knew for sure was that he was no longer in the control room of the garbage scow.
Nor was he anywhere else in the universe where he had ever been before.
He lay on an uneven, rocky ledge. Under him was a soft, moist—and warm—blanket of something that seemed to be a lichen, a kind of clinging moss that grew in thick, flaky scales. It was glowing with a soft steady light. On the rocks around him the light was greenish in hue. Farther away, on higher ridges, it shone purple and red.
And above the rocks the sky was velvet black, with a single dazzling star blazing down on him.
Boysie Gann struggled to his feet—and soared into the air.
As he came down he stared about him. When he looked away from the rocks and that bright star his eyes adjusted and he could see other stars. All the familiar constellations . . . And then it hit him.
That bright star was the sun.
He was on one of the Reefs of Space.
Gann never knew how he came there. The man who would surely know was M'Buna, and Gann never saw M'Buna again. But it was clear that while under the influence of the nerve pellet he had been transported and marooned. Alone, without a radio, without instruments, without a ship or spacesuit, he might live out his life on that Reef—but he would die there in the end. For he could never leave.
It was surely a good way to dispose of an unwanted man—simpler even than murder, since there was no body to get rid of.
He was stiff and cold. His wrists were swollen and his ankles numb. Evidently his captors had not trusted to the nerve pellet to keep him quiet, but had shackled him as well. But the shackles were gone now, with every other evidence of who it was who had brought him here. His head hurt. He was parched and hungry.
He began to look around him more methodically.
His first needs were food and water; but he could not resist a look around at the wonder of the place. Bright metallic fern fronds tinkled like wind gongs from an overgrown vale to one side. A distant whirring sounded like a flock of grouse. Impossible that there should be grouse here, Gann knew; yet there might be some sort of life. The Reefs of Space were created by life, like the coral atolls on Earth's warm seas. Life inhabited them all. . .