Title: Captives of the Thieve-Star
Author: Schmitz, James H.
Language: English
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                      CAPTIVES of the THIEVE-STAR

                    _A Novelet by_ JAMES H. SCHMITZ

             _When Peer and Channok grappled the derelict
             Ra-Twelve, they hooked a death-prize--haunted
             by the Yomm, stalked by the Mysterious Nine!_

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                       Planet Stories May 1951.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


The celebration of the wedding of Peer and Channok had to be cut a
little short, because a flock of police-boats from Irrek showed up at
detector-range about midway. But it was carried off with a flourish
nevertheless.

The oxygen-bubble in the small moon crater was filled with colorful
solidographs, creating the impression of an outdoor banquet hall. The
best bands playing in the Empire that night unwittingly contributed
their efforts, and food and drink were beyond reproach.

Though somewhat dazed throughout, Channok was startled to discover
at one point that the thick carpets on which he stood were a genuine
priceless Gaifornaab weave--and no solidographs either! The eighty-four
small ships of the space-rat tribe--or voyageurs, as they distinctly
preferred to be called--lined up along the outer edges of the banquet
hall looked eerily out of place to him; but Peer didn't seem to mind.
Her people rarely did go far away from their ships, and the lawless,
precarious life they led made that an advisable practice.

It would be up to him now, Channok reflected, beaming down on Peer,
to educate her into customs and attitudes more fitting for the wife
of a regular citizen of the Empire and probable future member of the
Imperial Secret Service--

And then, suddenly, the whole ceremony seemed to be over! A bit
puzzled by the abruptness with which everybody had begun to pack up
and leave, Channok was standing beside the ramp of his own ship, the
_Asteroid_--an honest, licensed trader--when Santis strolled over to
talk to him. Santis was Peer's father and the pint-sized chieftain of
the tribe.

"Didn't tell you before, son," he remarked, "because you were already
nervous enough. But as soon as they finish collapsing the bubble,
you'll have about six minutes to get your _Asteroid_ aloft and off this
moon before the cops from Irrek arrive!"

"I heard you, Pop, and everything's packed!" Peer called down from the
open lock of the _Asteroid_. "Come up and kiss me good-by and we'll
seal her up!"

Frowning suspiciously, Channok followed Santis up the ramp. "Why should
I worry about cops?" he inquired, looking down at the two little people
while they briefly embraced. Peer came about up to his shoulder, though
perfectly formed, and Santis was an inch or two shorter. The tribe
didn't run to bulk. "Nobody's hunting for me!"

"Not yet, son," Santis conceded. He twirled his fierce brown
mustache-tips thoughtfully and glanced at Peer.

"If you're passing anywhere near Old Nameless, you might cache that
special cargo you're carrying for me there," he told her. "Around the
foot of the Mound. Too bulky for the ships I've got here! Put a dowser
plate in with it, and I'll come pick it up with a transport sometime in
the next four months."

"Yes, Pop," said Peer.

"The Fourth Voyageur Fleet will rendezvous at New Gyrnovaan next
Terra-spring. If you can talk this big lug into it, try to make it
there, daughter!"

"We'll be there," promised Peer.

Channok cleared his throat impatiently. Not if he could help it, they
wouldn't!

"Those cops are looking for the missing Crown Jewels of Irrek," Santis
resumed, looking at him. "After they've opened you up from stem to
stern to make sure you're not hiding them, they might apologize. And
again they might not."

"Holy Satellites!" Channok said, stunned. "Did you actually--"

"Not I, son. I just master-mind these things. Some of the boys did the
job. There goes the oxygen-bubble! Now will you get going?"

They got going, Channok speechless for once.

       *       *       *       *       *

Some two months later, he stood in the _Asteroid's_ control room,
watching a pale blur creep up along the starboard screen.

"That's not just one ship--that's at least a hundred!" he announced
presently, somewhat startled. "Looks like they've turned out the entire
Dardrean war-fleet! Wonder what's up?"

Peer laid the cargo list she was checking down on the desk and came
over to look at the screen.

"Hm!" she said.

"It couldn't possibly have anything to do with us, could it?" he
inquired, on a sudden alarming hunch. Being unfamiliar with the dialect
used on Dardrea, he had left most of the bargaining there to her.

Peer shrugged. She showed the bland, innocent look of a ten-year-old
child, but that was habitual with her. On one occasion she'd been
mistaken for his daughter, and at times he even had to remind himself
that she'd been eighteen and a student at the Imperial Institute of
Technology when he first met her there--and then unwittingly became
Santis' tool in the abstraction of a small but important section of the
IIT's top-secret experimental files! He'd been trying to counteract
that little brigand's influence on Peer ever since, but he wasn't too
sure of his degree of success so far.

"We took the Merchants Guild for plenty on our auction!" she admitted.

"Well," Channok frowned, "they'd hardly send a fleet after us for that."

"And, of course," added Peer, "we got the Duke of Dardrea's fabulous
Coronet. Forgot to mention that. Perfectly legal, though! Some local
crook swiped it and we took it in trade."

Channok winced. As a matter of fact, fencing _was_ a perfectly
legitimate business on Dardrea. But a man who planned to enter the
Imperial Secret Service, as soon as he could save up the money to pay
his way through the Academy, couldn't afford any stains on his past!
Throughout the Empire, the Service was renowned in song and story as
the one body of men who stood above the suspicion of reproach.

"The Duke won't know it's gone for another week," Peer consoled him.
"Anyway, it looks to me as if those ships are beginning to pull off our
course!"

There followed some seconds of tense observation.

"So they are," Channok acknowledged then. He mopped his forehead. "But
I wish you wouldn't be quite so technical in your interpretation of
local laws, Peer! Those babies are really traveling. Wonder who or what
they're chasing?"

Three days later, as the _Asteroid_ approached the area of the red
giant sun of Old Nameless, where they were going to cache Santis' cargo
for him--hot cargo, probably; and it would be a load off Channok's mind
to get rid of it--they picked up the trail of the foundering spaceship
_Ra-Twelve_ and found part of the answer on board.


                                  II

"It seemed to me," Channok remarked, watching the _Ra-Twelve_ in the
viewscreen before them, "as if her drives had cut off completely just
then! But they're on again now. What do you think, crew-member Peer?"

"Let's just follow her a bit," Peer suggested. "I've seen ships act
like that that were just running out of juice. But this one won't even
answer signals!"

"It could be," Channok said hopefully, "a case of fair salvage! You
might keep working the communicators, though...."

However, the _Ra-Twelve_ continued to ignore them while she plodded
on towards the distant red glare of the Nameless System like a blind,
thirsty beast following its nose to a water-hole. Presently, she
began a series of quavering zigzag motions, wandered aimlessly off
her course, returned to it again on a few final puffs of invisible
energy and at last went drifting off through space with her drives now
obviously dead.

The _Asteroid_ continued to follow at a discreet distance like a chunky
vulture, watching. If there was anyone on board the _Ra-Twelve_, it
almost had to be a ghost. Her rear lock was wide open, and the hull
showed deep scars and marks of some recent space-action.

"But she wasn't really badly hurt," Channok pointed out. "What do you
suppose could have happened to her crew?"

Peer gave him a nervous grin. "Maybe a space-ghost came on board!"

"You don't really believe those spooky voyageur stories, do you?" he
said tolerantly.

"Sure I do--and so will you some day!" Peer promised him. "I'll tell
you a few true ones just before your next sleep-period!"

"No, you won't," Channok said firmly. "Aside from space-ghosts, though,
that crate has a downright creepy look to her. But I suppose I'd better
go over and check, as soon as she slows down enough so we can latch on.
And you're going to stay on the _Asteroid_, Peer."

"In a pig's eye, I am!" Peer said indignantly. And though Channok
wished to know if she had forgotten that he was the _Asteroid's_
skipper, it turned out that this was one time he'd have to yield.

"Because, Channy dear," Peer said, her big dark eyes welling slow
tears, "I'd just die if something happened to you over there and I was
left all alone in space!"

"All you'd have to do," Channok said uncomfortably, "is to head the
_Asteroid_ for New Gyrnovaan, and you know it. Well--you've got to
promise to stay right behind me, anyway!"

"Of course," promised Peer, the tears vanishing miraculously. "Santis
says a wife should always stick with her husband in space, because he
might lead her into a jam, all right, but nothing like the !!****!;
!**!! jams she's likely to run into if she strays around by herself."

"Whereas Ship's Regulation 66-B says," said Channok with grim
satisfaction, "that crew-member Peer gets her mouth washed out with
soap just before the next sleep-period because of another uncontrolled
lapse into vituperous profanity--and what was that comment?"

"That one was under my breath," said Peer, crestfallen, "so it doesn't
count!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Without making any particular remarks about it, both of them had
fastened a brace of guns to their jet-harnesses. At close range--held
thirty feet away against the _Asteroid's_ ring-bumpers by a set of dock
grapnels--the _Ra-Twelve's_ yawning lock looked more than ever like the
black mouth of a cavern in which something was lurking for them.

Channok went over first, propelled by a single squirt of his jets,
and landed a little heavier than he had intended to. Peer, following
instructions to keep right behind him, came down an instant later in
the middle of his back. They got untangled hurriedly, stood up and
started swiveling their helmet beams about the _Ra-Twelve's_ storage
lock.

It was practically empty. So was the big rack that had held the ship's
single big lifeboat. There were some tools scattered around. They
kicked at them thoughtfully, looked at each other and started forward
through an open door up a dark passageway, switching their lights
ahead and from side to side.

There was a locked door which probably led into the _Ra-Twelve's_
engine section, and then four cabins, each of which had been used by
two men. The cabins were in considerable disorder, but from what one
could tell in a brief look-around, each of the occupants had found time
to pack up about what you would expect a man to take along when he was
planning on a lifeboat trip. So whatever had happened probably hadn't
been entirely unexpected.

The mess-room, all tidied up, was next; two locked doors were at
the back of it, and also an open entrance to the kitchen and food
storage. They glanced around at everything, briefly, and went on to the
control room.

It was considerably bigger than the one on the _Asteroid_ and
luxuriously equipped. The pilot's section was in a transparently walled
little office by itself. The instruments showed both Dardrean and
Empire markings and instructions. Channok switched the dead drives off
first and then reached out, quite automatically, for the spot above the
control desk where a light button ought to be--

Light instantly flooded the interior of the _Ra-Twelve_.

The intruders jumped a foot. It was as if the ship had suddenly come
alive around them! Then they looked at each other and grinned.

"Automatic," Channok sighed.

"Might as well do it the easy way!" Peer admitted. She slid the Ophto
Needle she'd half-drawn back into its holster.

       *       *       *       *       *

The _Ra-Twelve_ had eighteen fully charged drive batteries still
untouched. With some system of automatic power transfer working, she
could have gone cruising along on her course for months to come.
However, she hadn't been cruising, Channok discovered next; the speed
controls were set to "Full Emergency".... An empty ship, racing through
space till the battery she was operating on went dead--

He shook his head. And then Peer was tapping his arm.

"Look what I found! I think it's her log!"

It was a flat steel box with an illuminated tape at its front end,
on which a date was printed. A line of spidery Dardrean script was
engraved on a plate on the top of the box.

"_Ra-Twelve_," Peer translated. "That's her name."

"So it's a Dardrean ship! But they're using the Empire calendar,"
Channok pointed out, "which would make it an Empire crew.... How do you
work this thing? If it is her log, it might give us an idea of what's
happened."

"Afterwards, Channy! I just found another door leading off the other
end of the control room--"

The door opened into a second passage, parallel to the one by which
they had come forward, but only half as long and very dimly lit. Filled
with uneasy speculations, Channok forgot his own instructions and let
Peer take the lead.

"More cabins!" her voice said, just as he became aware of the wrecked
door-frame out of which the light was spilling ahead of her.

A woman had been using that cabin. A woman who had liked beautiful and
expensive things, judging by what was strewn about. It looked, Channok
thought, as if she hadn't had time to finish her packing.

"Her spacesuit's gone, though," Peer's voice announced from the
interior of a disordered closet.

Channok was inspecting the door. This was the first indication that
there had been any violence connected with whatever had happened on the
_Ra-Twelve_. The door had been locked from without and literally ripped
open from within by a stream of incandescence played on it by a gun
held probably not much more than a foot away. That woman had wanted out
in an awful hurry!

Peer came over to watch him. He couldn't quite read her expression, but
he had a notion she wanted to bawl.

"Let's take a quick look at the rest of it and get back to the
_Asteroid_," he suggested, somewhat disturbed himself. "We ought to
talk this over."

The one remaining cabin lay just beyond the point where the passage
angled back into the ship. There was light in that one, too, and the
door was half open. Channok got there first and pushed it open a little
farther. Then he stood frozen in the door-frame for a moment.

"What's stopping you?" Peer inquired impatiently, poking his ribs from
behind.

He stepped back into the passage, pulled the door shut all the way,
scooped her up and heaved her to his shoulder. His space-boots felt
like iron anchors as he clunk-clunked hastily back through the passages
to the derelict's lock. There was nothing definite to run from any
more; but he knew now what had happened on the _Ra-Twelve_, and he felt
nightmare pacing after him all the way.

He crossed to the _Asteroid's_ control room lock in a jump, without
bothering with his jets.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Close the outer lock!" he told Peer hoarsely, reaching up for the
switch marked "Decontaminant" above him.

A fourfold spray of yellowish Killall was misting the trapped air in
the lock about them an instant later.

"What was it?" Peer's voice came out of the fog.

"Antibiotic," Channok said, his scalp still crawling. "What you--what
voyageurs call a lich, I think. I don't know that kind. But it got the
guy in that last cabin."

The occupant of the last cabin had looked as if somebody had used a
particularly vicious sort of acid gun on him, which somehow had missed
damaging his clothing. To the grisly class of life-forms that produced
that effect, an ordinary spacesuit offered exactly no resistance.

"A lich can't last more than an hour or so in space, Channy," Peer's
voice came shakily after a pause. "It's a pretty awful way to get it,
but that stuff over there must have been dead for a long time now."

"I know," said Channok. He hesitated, and then cut off the Killall
spray and started the blowers to clear the lock. "I guess I just
panicked for a moment. But I'm going to go over that ship with
decontaminant before we do any more investigating! And meanwhile you'd
better get in a few hours of sleep!"

"Wouldn't hurt any," Peer agreed. "How do you suppose the lich got on
board?"

He could tell her that. He'd seen a heavy, steel-framed glassite
container in a corner of the cabin, opened. They must have been
transporting some virulent form of antibiotic; and there might have
been an accident--

Five hours later, they had come to the conclusion that it had been
no accident. Four hours of that time, Channok had been engaged in
disinfecting the _Ra-Twelve_, even her engine sections. He'd given the
one man left on board space-burial in one of the _Asteroid's_ steel
cargo crates. The crate hadn't been launched very far and presently
hung suspended some eighty yards above the two ships, visible as a
black oblong that obscured the stars behind it.

It and its contents were one of the reasons Channok was anxious to get
done with the job of salvaging the _Ra-Twelve_. She was a stream-lined,
beautiful ship; but after what had happened, he knew he would never be
able to work up any liking for her. She seemed to be waiting sullenly
and silently for a chance to deal with the two humans who had dared
come on board her again.

He sealed her up presently, filled her with a fresh airmix and, having
once more checked everything he could think of, let Peer come over
again for a final briefing on their run to Old Nameless.

Peer wandered promptly into the cabin where the dead man had been and
there discovered the wall-safe.


                                  III

She called him. He couldn't imagine how he had overlooked it. Perhaps
because it was so obviously _there_! It was an ordinary enough safe,
from what they could see of the front of it; and there was a tiny key
in its lock.

They looked at it thoughtfully.

"You didn't try to open it, did you?" Channok inquired.

"No," said Peer; "because--"

"That's what I was thinking," Channok admitted.

There had been, they had decided, at least two groups working against
each other in the ship. The dead man had been in charge of the
antibiotic. Perhaps the woman had been on his side, perhaps not. But
the eight other men had acted together and had controlled the ship.
What action or threat of theirs had caused the dead man to release his
terrible weapon would be hard to discover now. But he had done it, and
the eight men had abandoned the _Ra-Twelve_ promptly, leaving the woman
locked in her cabin....

It looked pretty much as if she had been the one who had switched the
drives to full speed--before jumping out into space. A pretty tough,
desperate lot all around, in Channok's opinion. The _Ra-Twelve's_ log
offered the information that they had left Dardrea three calendric
days earlier, but had been of no further help in identifying crew or
passengers. That most of them were professional criminals, however,
seemed a pretty safe bet--as Peer had pointed out, in voyageur terms,
amateurs didn't play around with taboo-weapons like a bottled lich!

Also, amateurs--Peer and Channok, for example--could have sense enough
not to blunder into a booby-trap....

"He'd know, of course," Channok said reflectively, "that everybody
would be wondering what's hidden in that safe! And it could be anything
up to and including full instructions on how to set up an artificial
culture of antibiotics. Plenty of governments would pay twenty times
what the _Ra-Twelve_ is worth as salvage for that kind of information.
But it's nothing _we_ need to know."

"Not that bad," Peer agreed.

"And the guy who opens that wall-safe had better be an armaments
expert! Which we're not. But now, crew-member Peer, if we want to get
Santis' cargo cached on Old Nameless before I fall asleep, we ought
to get started. Idle curiosity is something we can satisfy some other
time."

"Two hours past your sleep-period right now!" said Peer, glancing at
her wrist-watch. "Tsk, tsk! That always makes you so grouchy."

Half an hour later, they were on their way--Channok in the _Ra-Twelve_,
Peer in the _Asteroid_, keeping as close to each other as two ships
in flight could safely get. With the red glare of the Old Nameless
sun a trifle off-center before him, Channok settled down in the most
comfortable pilot-seat he'd ever found on any ship and decided he could
relax a trifle. Peer was obviously having a wonderful time doing her
first solo-piloting job on a ship of the _Asteroid's_ size; and since
she'd run and landed the _Asteroid_ any number of times under his
supervision, he wasn't worried about her ability to handle it. However,
he continued to check in on her over the communicators every five
minutes or so, and grinned at the brisk, spacemanlike replies he got in
return. Crew-member Peer was on her best behavior right now!

By and by, then--he couldn't have said just when it started--Channok
began to realize that some very odd things were happening around him--

       *       *       *       *       *

It appeared that the Thing he had put out for burial in a space-crate
hadn't liked the idea of being left alone. So it was following him.

Channok decided uneasily that it might be best to ignore it. But it
kept coming closer and closer until, finally, the crate was floating
just outside the _Ra-Twelve's_ control room port, spinning slowly like
a running-down top.

The crate stayed shut, but he knew the Thing inside it was watching him.

"That's my ship," the Thing remarked presently.

Channok ignored it.

"And you're all alone," said the Thing.

"No, I'm not!" said Channok. "Peer's with me."

"Peer's gone back to Santis," said the Thing. "You're all alone!
Except," it added, "for me."

"Well, good-by!" Channok said firmly. There was no point in getting too
chummy with it. He punched the _Ra-Twelve's_ drives down as far as they
would go, and the crate vanished.

How that ship could travel! Nothing could hope to keep up with him
now--except, perhaps, that round, red glare of light just behind the
_Ra-Twelve_.

That was actually overtaking him, and fast. It was coming up like
a cosmic police-ship, with a huge, hollow noise rushing before it.
Channok listened apprehensively. Suddenly, there were words:

"WHOO-WHOOO!" it howled. "_This is the Space Ghost!_"

He shot up out of his chair like a jabbed cat, knocking it over, and
glared around.

The _Ra-Twelve's_ control room lay brightly lit and silent behind him.

"Ha-ha!" Peer's chuckle came from the communicator. "That woke you up,
I bet! Was that you that fell over?"

"Aw-awk!" breathed Channok. Articulation came back to him. "All right,
crew-member Peer! Just wait till we get to Old Nameless! I'll fix you
good!"

"Shall I tell you the story now about the Horror Ship from Mizar?" Peer
inquired intrepidly.

"Go right ahead," Channok challenged, righting his chair and settling
back into it. "You can't scare me with that sort of stuff!" He began
checking their position.

He must have been asleep for quite a while! The Nameless System was
less than two hours ahead now. He switched on the front screen; and the
sun swam up like a big, glowing coal before him. He began checking for
the seventh planet.

"Well," he reminded the communicator grimly, "you were going to tell me
a story."

The communicator remained silent a moment.

"I don't think I will, anyway," Peer said then, rather quietly.

"Why not?" Channok inquired, getting his screen-viewer disentangled
from a meteor-belt in the Nameless System.

"I made that Space Ghost too good!" whispered Peer. "I'm getting scared
myself now."

"Aha!" said Channok. "See what behaving like that will get you?" He got
Old Nameless VII into the viewer.

The communicator remained still. He looked over at it.

"Of course, there's really nothing to be scared of!" he added
reassuringly.

"How do you know?" quavered Peer. "I'm all alone."

"Nonsense!" Channok said heartily. "I can see the _Asteroid_ right over
there on the screen! You can see me, can't you?"

"Sure," said Peer. "That's a long way off, though. You couldn't do
anything!"

"It's not safe for two ships to travel much closer together," Channok
reminded her. "We're only two hours from Old Nameless right now--I'm
already focussed on it."

"I've been focussed on it for an hour," said Peer. "While you were
snoring," she added. "Two hours is an awful long time!"

"Tell you what," suggested Channok. "I'll race you to it. The
_Ra-Twelve's_ a mighty fast boat--" He checked himself. He'd only
dreamed that, after all.

"Let's go!" Peer said briefly.

       *       *       *       *       *

He let Peer stay just ahead of him all the way in, though the
stream-lined derelict probably could have flown rings around the
_Asteroid_, at that. Just an hour later, they went around Old Nameless
VII twice, braking down, and then coasted into its atmosphere on their
secondary drives.

"That's the place," Peer's voice said suddenly. "I can see the old
Mound in the plain! In the evening strip, Channy--that straight-up
cliff!"

He set the _Ra-Twelve_ down first, at the base of a mountain that
reared up almost vertically for eighteen thousand feet or so out of a
flat, dimly-lit stretch of rocky desert land.

The _Asteroid_ came down in a very neat landing, two hundred yards
away. He got there on the run, just as the front lock opened. Peer
came tumbling out of it into his arms and hung on fiercely, while her
skipper hugged her.

"Let that scare be a lesson to you!" he remarked when he set her down.

"It certainly will," said Peer, still clutching his arm as they started
over to the _Ra-Twelve_. "That old Space Ghost had me going!"

"Me, too," he confessed; "just for a moment, anyway! Well, let's get
busy."

They went over the _Ra-Twelve_ again from bow to stern, to make sure
there was nothing they would want to take along immediately, and found
there wasn't. They gave the unopened wall-safe a last calculating
regard, and decided once more that they'd better not. Then they shut
off everything, closed the front lock behind them and safetied it with
the dock bolts.

The plain was darkening when they came out, but the top of the mountain
still glowed with red light. They climbed into the _Asteroid_, and
Channok closed the lock. He started for the control desk then; but
Peer beat him to it and anchored herself into the seat of command
with hands, knees and feet. It became apparent almost at once that he
couldn't get her out of it without running the risk of pulling off her
head.

"Now look here, crew-member Peer," he said persuasively, "you know good
and well that if these top-heavy cargo crates have one weakness, it's
the take-off!"

"It could be the pilot, too," Peer said meaningly. "I've been studying
the manual, and I've watched you do it. It's my turn now."

He considered her thoughtfully.

"Suppose you die of old age, all of a sudden?" argued Peer. "Wouldn't
want me to sit here alone without knowing even how to take her off,
would you?"

That did it.

"Go ahead," said Channok with dignity, taking a position back of the
chair. "Go right ahead! This decrepit old man of twenty-eight is going
to stand right here and laugh himself sick!"

"You'll be sick, all right," promised Peer. "But it won't be from
laughing! I'll read that chapter out of the manual to you sometime."

She _had_ studied it, too, he decided. She sat perched forward on the
edge of the chair, alert and cocky, and went through the starting
operations without hitch or hesitation. The _Asteroid_ rumbled beneath
them, briefly building up power....

Channok braced himself--


                                  IV

For the next few seconds, the question seemed to be whether they'd
pile into the plain or the mountain first; and, for another improbable
moment, they were distinctly skidding along upside down. Then Peer got
them straightened out, and they soared up rapidly into the night sky
above Old Nameless.

Channok's hair settled slowly back into place.

Peer looked around at him, puzzled and rather pale.

"That's not the way it said in the manual!" she stated.

Channok whooped. Then he sat down on the floor, bent over and yelled.

When he got around to wiping the tears from his eyes, Peer was looking
down at him disgustedly from the control chair.

"It wasn't the way it said in the manual!" she repeated firmly. "We're
going to have to have this old crate overhauled before she'll be safe
to fly--and if you weren't my husband, I'd really let you have it now!"

He stood up, muttering some sort of apology.

"I've done some just as bad!" he assured her.

"Hum!" said Peer coldly, studying Old Nameless in the screen below
them. It seemed safe to pat her on the head then, but he kept his hand
well out of biting range.

"We'd better get back to that mountain and bury the _Ra-Twelve_ before
it gets too dark to find the spot," he suggested.

"It's still just in sight," said Peer. "You get the guns ready, and
I'll run us past it slowly."

Spaceships being what they were, there wasn't much ceremony about
caching the _Ra-Twelve_. Channok got the bow-turret out; and as Peer
ran the _Asteroid_ slowly along the mountainside a few hundred feet
above the _Ra-Twelve_, he cut a jagged line into the rock with the
gun's twin beams. A few dozen tons of rock came thundering down on the
_Ra-Twelve_.

They came back from the other side, a little higher up, and he loosened
it some more. This time, it looked as if a sizable section of the
mountain were descending; and when the dust had settled the _Ra-Twelve_
was fifty feet under a sloping pile of very natural-looking debris.
To get her out again, they'd only have to cut a path down to her lock
and start her drives. She'd come out of the stuff then, like a trout
breaking water....

Satisfied, they went off and got the _Asteroid_ on an orbit around
Old Nameless, not too far out. Peer had assured Channok that Santis'
investigations had proved the planet safe for human beings, so it
probably was. But he knew he'd feel more comfortable if they put in
their sleep-periods outside its atmosphere. Bathed in the dismal light
of its giant sun, Old Nameless looked like a desolate backyard of Hell.
It was rocky, sandy, apparently waterless and lifeless and splotched
with pale stretches of dry salt seas. Incongruously delicate auroras
went crawling about its poles, like lopsided haloes circling a squat,
brooding demon. It wasn't, Channok decided, the kind of planet he would
have stopped at of his own accord, for any purpose.

       *       *       *       *       *

The cliff against which they had buried the _Ra-Twelve_ was the
loftiest section of an almost unbroken chain of mountains, surrounding
the roughly circular hundred-mile plain, which was littered with
beds of boulders and sand-hills, like a moon crater. What Peer had
referred to as the "Mound" lay approximately at the center of the
plain. It turned out, next morning, to be a heavily weathered,
dome-shaped structure half a mile high and five miles across, which
gave the impression that all but the top tenth of a giant's skull
had been buried in the sand, dented here and there with massive
hammers, and sprinkled thickly with rock dust. It was obviously an
artifact--constructed with hundred-foot bricks! As the _Asteroid_
drifted down closer to it, Channok became interested.

"Who built it?" he asked.

Peer shrugged. She didn't know. "Santis spent a few hours jetting
around the edges of it once," she said. "But he wouldn't tell us much;
and, afterwards, he wouldn't let us get nearer than a mile to it. He
didn't go back himself, either--said it was dangerous to get too close!"

It didn't look dangerous. But fifty thousand years ago, it might have
been a fortress of some sort.

"You oughtn't to be flying so low over it, even!" Peer said warningly.
"Right in the middle on top is where it's the most dangerous, Santis
said!"

Channok didn't argue the matter--they had to get Santis' special cargo
cached and off their hands first, anyway. He lifted the _Asteroid_
a mile or so and then brought her down a couple of miles beyond the
Mound, at the point Peer had designated.

They got out of the ship and gazed about the broken, rocky plain. The
red light of the Nameless Sun was spilling across it in what passed for
morning on this world. In it, the black mountain chains rearing about
the horizon and the craggy waves of flat land had the general effect
of a bomb-shattered and slowly burning city. Far off to their left, he
could see the upper half of the towering precipice which marked the
_Ra-Twelve's_ resting-place.

"How long a time did you say you spent here?" he asked.

Peer reflected. "About two Terra-months, I guess. I'm not sure, though.
That was a long time ago. My youngest brother Dobby wasn't born yet."

He shook his head. "What a spot for a nice family picnic!"

"It wasn't a picnic," Peer said. "But my kid brother Wilf and I had a
lot of fun anyway, just running around and teasing the ghouls. I guess
you don't notice so much what a place looks like when you're little."

"Teasing the what?"

"Ghouls," said Peer carelessly.

He looked at her suspiciously; but she seemed to be studying the nearby
terrain for a good spot to start digging.

"And what were Santis and your mother doing?" he inquired.

"They were looking for some sort of mineral deposit on Old Nameless; I
forget just what. How about that spot--just under that little overhang?
It looks like good, solid top-rock."

       *       *       *       *       *

Channok agreed it was just the place. He'd got a drilling attachment
mounted to the _Asteroid's_ small all-purpose tractor; and now he
went back and ran the machine down the ramp from the storage lock.
He ordered Peer, who wanted to help, up a rock about twenty feet
overhead, where she perched looking like an indignant elf, out of
reach of any stray puffs of the drill-blast. Then he started running a
slanting, narrow tunnel down under the overhang.

Half an hour later, when he backed the tractor out of the tunnel,
pushing a pile of cooking slag behind him, he saw her standing up on
the rock with a small stun-gun in her hand. She beckoned to him.

Channok pulled off his breather-mask, shut off the tractor, and jumped
from the saddle.

"What is it?" he called anxiously, trotting towards her, while the
machine's clacking and roaring subsided.

"Some of those ghouls!" Peer called back. "Climb up here and I'll show
you." She didn't seem worried.

"They've ducked behind those rocks now," she said as he clambered up
beside her; "but they won't stay there long. They're curious, and I
think some of them remember the time we were here before."

"Are they dangerous?" he inquired, patting his holstered set of
heavy-duty Reaper guns.

"No," said Peer. "They look sort of awful, but you mustn't shoot them!
If they get inside of thirty feet I'll hit them in the stomach with a
stunner. They grunt then and run. Santis said that was the right way to
teach them not to get too nosey."

They waited a moment in silence, scanning the rocks.

Then Channok started violently.

"Holy !!**?** Satellites!" he swore, his hair bristling.

A big, dead-white shape had popped up springily on a rock about
fifty feet away, stared at him for an instant out of eyes like grey
glass-platters, and popped down out of sight again. Awful was right!

"Aha!" crew-member Peer gloated, grinning. "You shouldn't have said
that! Tonight you've got to let me soap out your mouth!"

A light dawned gradually.

"You did it on purpose!" he accused her. "You knew I'd say something
like that the first time I saw one!"

Peer didn't deny it.

"It's the soap for you, just the same!" she shrugged. "People ought to
have some self-control--that's what you said! Look, there's another one
now--no, two!"


                                   V

When he came up for lunch, he found about fifty ghouls collected
around the area. By that time he had dug the cache, steel-lined it,
disinfected it and installed preservatives, a humidifier and a dowser
plate. Loading it up would take most of the rest of the day.

He avoided looking at the local population as much as he could while
he ate. However, the occasional glimpses he got suggested that the
Nameless System had made a half-hearted and badly botched attempt at
developing its own type of humanoid inhabitant. They had extremely
capable looking jaws, at any rate, and their wide, lipless mouths were
wreathed in perpetual idiot grins. The most completely disagreeable
parts of them, Channok decided, were the enormous, red-nailed hands and
feet. Like fat, white gargoyles, they sat perched around the tops of
the rocks in a wide circle and just stared.

"Sloppy-looking things," he remarked, noticing Peer's observant eyes on
him. "But at least they're not trying to strike up a conversation!"

"They never say anything until you hit them in the stomach with a
stunner," she informed him. "Then they just grunt and run."

"Sure they mightn't get mean about that? The smallest of this lot looks
plenty big enough to take us both apart."

Peer laughed. "All of them together wouldn't try it! They're real
yellow. Wilf got mad at a couple of 'em once and ran 'em halfway over
to the Mound before mother caught up with him and stopped him. Wilf had
his blood up, that time!"

"Maybe the ghouls built the Mound," Channok suggested. "Their
great-great-ancestors, anyway."

"They won't go near it now," Peer said, following-his gaze. "They're
scared of that, too!"

They studied the rugged, ungainly slopes of the huge artifact for a
moment. There was something fascinating about it, Channok thought.
Perhaps just its size.

"Santis said the plain was the bottom of a sea a while ago," Peer
offered. "So it could have been some sort of sea-things that built it."

"Any entrances into it?" he asked casually.

"Just one, right at the top."

"You know," he said, "I think I'd like to go over and have a look at
that thing before we leave."

"No!" said Peer, alarmed. "You'd better not. Santis said it was
dangerous--and there is something there! We saw a light one night."

"What kind of a light?"

"Like someone walking around the top of it, near that entrance, with
a big lamp in his hand," Peer remembered. "Like he might have been
looking for something."

"Sounds a bit like your old friend, the Space Ghost," Channok murmured
suspiciously.

"No," Peer grinned. "This was a _real_ light--and we took off the next
evening. Santis said it might be as well if we moved somewhere else for
a while."

Channok considered a moment. "Look," he said finally, "we can do it
like this. I'll jet myself over there and stroll around it a bit
in daylight; and if you're worried, you could hang overhead in the
_Asteroid_ with a couple of turrets out. Just in case someone gets
tough."

"I could, maybe," said Peer, in a tight voice, "but I'm not going to.
If you're going to go walking around there, after all Santis said, I'm
going to be walking right behind you!"

"Oh, no, you're not," Channok said.

"Oh, yes, I am!" said Peer. "You can't make me stay here!"

He looked at her in surprise. Her eyes were angry, but her lower lip
quivered.

"Hey," he said, startled. "Maybe I'm being a pig!"

"You sure are!" Peer said, relieved. The lip stopped quivering. "You're
not going over there, then?"

"Not if you feel that way about it," Channok said. He paused. "I
guess," he admitted awkwardly, "I just didn't like the idea of Santis
flitting around space, Holy Aynstyn knows where, and still putting in
his two millicredits worth every so often, through crew-member Peer!"

Peer blew her nose and considered in turn. "Just the same," she
concluded, "when Santis says something like that, it's a lot better if
people do it. Is 'Holy Aynstyn knows where' a swear-word?"

"No," said Channok. "Not exactly."

       *       *       *       *       *

He'd finished his lunch and was just going to suggest they run the
tractor out of the cache and back the few hundred yards to the
_Asteroid_ for the first load of Santis' cargo, when he noticed that
all the ghouls had vanished.

He called Peer's attention to the fact.

"Uh-huh," she said in an absent-minded tone. "They do that
sometimes...."

Channok looked at her. She was staring at a high boulder a short
distance away, with a queer, intent expression, as if she were deep in
thought about something. He hoped she wasn't still brooding about their
little argument--

Then she glanced at him, gave him a sudden grin, swung herself around
and slid nimbly off the rock.

"Come on down quick!" she said. "I want to show you something before
you get back to work. A ghoul-burrow!"

"A ghoul-burrow?" Channok repeated unenthusiastically.

"Yes, sure!" said Peer impatiently. "They're cute! They're all lined
with glass or something." She spread her arms wide. "Jump, and I'll
catch you!"

Channok laughed, flopped over on his stomach with his legs over
the edge of the rock, and slid down in a fair imitation of Peer's
nonchalant style of descent, spraining his ankle only a little.
Well, he hadn't grown up skipping from craggy moon to asteroid to
heavy-planet to whatnot like she had....

They threaded their way about the rocks to the spot she had been
studying. She explained that he'd have to climb into the burrow to get
a good idea of what it was like.

"Well, look now, Peer!" Channok protested, staring into the big, round
hole that slanted downwards under a big boulder--it did seem to be
lined with black glass or some similar stuff. "That cave's got 'No
Trespassing' written all over it. Supposing I slide down a half a mile
and land in a mess of ghouls!"

"No, you won't," Peer said hurriedly. "It goes level right away, and
they're never more than thirty feet long. And the ghoul's out--there's
never more than one to a burrow; and I saw this one pop out and run off
just before we started here! You're not scared, are you? Wilf and I
crawled in and out of hundreds of them!"

"Well, just for a moment then," said Channok resignedly.

       *       *       *       *       *

He got down on hands and knees and crept into the tunnel. After about
six feet, he stopped and found he could turn around without too much
trouble. "Peer?" he called back.

"Yes?" said Peer.

"How can I see anything here," Channok demanded peevishly, "when it's
all dark?"

"Well, you're in far enough now," said Peer, who had sat down before
the entrance of the tunnel and was looking in after him. "And now I've
got to ask you to do something! You know how I always promptly carry
out any orders you give me, like getting in my full sleep-period and
all?" she added anxiously.

"No, you do not!" Channok stated flatly, resting on his elbows. "Half
the time I practically have to drag you to the cabin. Anyway, what's
that got to do with--"

"It's like this," Peer said desperately. She glanced up for a moment,
as if she had caught sight of something in the dim red sky overhead.
"You've got to stay in there a while, Channy!"

"Eh?" said Channok.

"When those ghouls pop out of sight in daytime like that, it's because
there's a ship or something coming."

"Peer, are you crazy? A ship! Who--I'm coming right out!"

"Stay there, Channy! It's hanging over the _Asteroid_ right now. A big
lifeboat with its guns out--it must be those men from the _Ra-Twelve_!
They must have had a tracer of some sort on her!"

"Then get in here quick, Peer!" Channok choked, hauling out one of the
Reapers. "You know good and well that bunch would kill a woman as soon
as a man!"

"They've already seen me--I wanted them to," Peer informed him. She was
talking out of the side of her mouth, looking straight ahead of her,
away from the cave. "I'm not going to be a woman. I'm going to be a
dumb little girl, ordinary size. I can pull that one off any time!"

"But--"

"They'll want to ask questions. I think I can get them to send that
lifeboat away. We can't fight that, Channy; it's a regular armed
launch! Santis says you can always get the other side to split its
forces, if you're smart about it."

"But how--"

"And then, when I yell 'Here we go!' then you pop out. That'll be the
right moment--" She stood up suddenly. "We can't talk any more! They're
getting close--" She vanished with that from before the mouth of the
burrow.

"Hold on there!" a voice yelled in the distance a few seconds later,
as Channok came crawling clumsily up the glassy floor of the tunnel,
hampered by the Reaper he still clutched in one hand. It seemed to come
from up in the air, and it was using the Empire's universal dialect.

Peer's footsteps stopped abruptly.

"Who you people?" her voice screeched in shrill alarm. "You cops? I
ain't done nothing!"


                                  VI

"And just look at those guns she's carrying!" the deeper of the two
strange voices commented. "The real stuff, too--a stunner and an Ophto
Needle! Better get them from her. If it isn't a baby Flauval!"

"I didn't shoot nobody lately!" Peer said, trembly-voiced.

"No, and you ain't going to shoot nobody either!" the other strange
voice mimicked her. That one was high-pitched and thin, with a
pronounced nasal twang to it. "Chief, if there're kids with them, it's
just a bunch of space-rats that happened along. It couldn't be Flauval!"

"I'd say 'it couldn't be Flauval', if we'd found her dead in her
cabin," the deep voice said irritably. "But that door was burned out
from inside--and _somebody_ ditched the _Ra-Twelve_ on this clod!" It
sounded as if the discovery of Peer had interrupted an argument between
them.

"I still can't see how she got out," Nasal-voice Ezeff said sullenly.
"She must have been sleeping in her spacesuit. We were out of the ship
thirty seconds after I slap-welded that lock across her door! She must
have felt the boat leaving and started burning her way out the same
instant--"

"It doesn't matter how she did it," said the deep voice. Apparently, it
belonged to someone with authority. "If Flauval could think and move
fast enough to switch the drives to Full Emergency and still get alive
out of a ship full of the Yomm, she could cheat space, too! She always
did have the luck of the devil. If we'd had just that minute to spare
before leaving, to make sure--"

It paused a moment and resumed gloomily: "That stubborn old maniac of a
Koyle--'I'm the Duke's man, sir!' Committing suicide--like _that_--so
no one else would get control of the Yomm! If we hadn't managed to
start the launch's locators in time.... Well, I hope I'll never have
to sweat out another four days like the last. And now we still have to
find whoever got Koyle's records!"

"Flauval ain't here," Peer offered at that point, brightly.

There was a pause. It seemed that the two newcomers must have almost
forgotten their prisoner for a moment.

       *       *       *       *       *

"What was that you said, kid?" Nasal-voice inquired carefully.

"Those space-rats are all half crazy," the deep voice said
contemptuously. "She doesn't know what we're talking about."

"Sure I know!" Peer said indignantly. "You was talking about Flauval.
It's Wilf that's the crazy one--I ain't! And she ain't here. Flauval."

"She ain't, eh?" Nasal-voice said, with speculative alertness.

"No, sir," Peer said, timid again. "She's went with the rest of'm."

Both voices swore together in startled shock.

"Where are they?" the deep voice demanded. "Hiding on the ship?"

"No, sir," quavered Peer. "It's just me on the ship, till they come
back."

"You mean," the deep voice said, with strained patience, "you're
supposed to be on the ship?"

"Yes, sir," said Peer. She added in a guilty mutter, "Sleepin'...."

"Where did the others go?" Nasal-voice inquired sharply.

"But I ain't tired," said Peer. "Well, with the boxes and stuff! What
Flauval wants buried."

There was another duet of exclamations which Channok, at almost any
other time, would have considered highly unsuitable for Peer's ears.
Right now, it escaped his attention.

"She's got Koyle's records!" stated the deep voice then.

"What's in those boxes?" Nasal-voice snapped.

"D-d-don't shake me!" wept Peer. "Papers and stuff--I don't know. They
don't never tell me nothing," she wailed, "because I'm just a little
girl!"

"Yes, you're just a little girl," said Nasal-voice, exasperated.
"You're not going to get much bigger either."

"Cut that," said the deep voice. "No sense scaring the kid."

"Well, you're not figuring on taking them back, are you?" Nasal-voice
inquired.

"No. Just Flauval. The colonel will be glad to chat with Flauval a bit,
now that she's turned up alive again. Koyle may have told her plenty
before we soured him on her. But there's no point in making the rest of
them desperate. It's easier when they surrender."

There was a short pause. Then the deep voice addressed Peer with a sort
of amiable gruffness:

"So they all went off to bury the boxes, but you don't know where they
went--is that it, little girl?"

"Oh, sure!" Peer said, anxious to please. "Yes, sir! I know that!"

"WHERE?" said both voices together, chorusing for the third time.

"It's that big Mound over there," Peer said; and Channok started
nervously. "It's got a big door on top. No," she added, "I guess you
can't see from down here--and you can't see from the ship. That's why I
came out. To watch for'm. But you can see it plain from the top of the
rocks."

"That would be the old reservoir or whatever it was we passed back
there," said the deep voice.

"That's right," said Peer. "That's just what Flauval called it at
lunch! The word you said. There was water there oncet, she said. They
flew the boxes over with jets, but they'll be back before it's dark,
they said."

There was a brief silence.

"Scares me when it's dark, it does!" grumbled the idiot-child.

"Well, that ties it up!" the deep voice said, satisfied. "It's the
exact kind of stunt Flauval would try. But she's outsmarted herself,
this time!"

       *       *       *       *       *

"How do you figure on handling it?" Nasal-voice inquired.

"Get up on one of those rocks with the kid where you can watch
both that 'mound' and the lock of their ship. Yes, I know it's
more trouble that way--but don't, ah, do anything conclusive about
the--uh--aforementioned, before we've corralled the rest! Much more
useful while capable of inhaling. Hostage possibilities. Inducement to
surrender!"

"Uh-huh," Nasal-voice said comprehendingly.

"Yes, sir!" added Peer.

There was another short pause.

"Might as well skip the circumlocutions," the deep voice continued.
"Barely human! I'll send a couple of men through the ship and, if it's
empty, I'll leave one of them in the forward lock where you can see
him. That's just in case anyone slips past us and comes back. The rest
of us will go over to the reservoir in the launch. If the entrance is
where she says it is, we've got them bottled. If it looks right, we'll
go in."

"That'll be only four of you," said Nasal-voice. "No; three--you're
keeping one at the launch-guns, aren't you?"

"Yes, of course. Hey, little girl--how many are with Flauval?"

"Of us, you mean?" Peer asked.

"Of what else?" snarled Nasal-voice.

"Now don't get her so scared she can't talk!" the deep voice reproved.
"That's right, little girl--how many of you?"

"Well, there's me," sniffled Peer, "and my old man, and my big brother
Dobby. And then there's Wilf--that's all. But I don't like Wilf!"

"I don't like Wilf either!" agreed Nasal-voice. "Four against three,
chief! It might be safer to bring over the two from the _Ra-Twelve_
first--no point in searching her anyway, now that we know where the
records are!"

"No," said the deep voice. "Flauval could just happen to decide to
come out in the few minutes we're gone. It's sewed up too neatly right
now. We'll have the heavy guns from the launch and we'll give them a
chance to surrender. Flauval's too intelligent to pass that up--she
never stops hoping! The chances are there won't be any shooting, till
afterwards."

"Any friends of hers are likely to be tough," Nasal-voice warned.

"Very tough," said his chief. "Like the kid there! You worry at the
wrong times, my boy. A parcel of space-rats that happened along."
He swore again. "That woman's unbelievable luck! Well, take care of
yourself, Ezeff. I'm off. Keep your eyes open both ways! Just in case--"


                                  VII

There was silence for a moment. Then footsteps came crunching over the
rocks towards the ghoul-burrow, and Channok got set. But the footsteps
halted a few yards away.

"That's the one I was sitting on," Peer volunteered. "Nice, easy one to
climb!"

"Yeah, I never saw a nicer looking rock," Nasal-voice said sourly.
"We've got to climb it, too! I'm not trying any point-landings with
jets. Get on up there then, before I boot you up!"

There were sounds of scrambling.

"Don't you move now!" Peer said suddenly.

"What are you talking about?" demanded Nasal-voice.

"Durn rock come loose!" muttered Peer. "Near flung me off!"

But Channok, meanwhile, had got the idea and settled back. It was not
yet the Right Moment....

There were more scrambling sounds and some breathless swearing
from Ezeff, who obviously had not spent his formative years in
asteroid-hopping either. But at last all become quiet.

"And here we are!" Peer's voice floated down clearly. A small chunk
of rock dropped right in front of the burrow's entrance, like a
punctuation mark.

"Sit still, blast you!" said Nasal-voice, badly out of breath.

A large, dim shadow swept silently over the ground before the ghoul's
burrow just then. That would be the launch, going towards the Mound. A
prolonged silence overhead confirmed the impression.

"They want to give Flauval a surprise?" Peer inquired meekly at last.

Rather startlingly, Nasal-voice laughed.

"They sure do!" he agreed. "That's a good one! Yes, sir, they sure do!"

"Flauval's nice, don't you think?" continued Peer conversationally,
picking up courage.

"Depends a lot on how you look at it," Nasal-voice said dreamily.
"She's a real pretty thing anyhow, that Flauval! Luck of the devil
she's had, too. But it's got to run out sometime."

There was another silence. Then Peer remarked:

"Boy, he set that launch down nice! Right quick spang on top of
the--what the big guy said it was. On the Mound."

"We've got a good pilot," Nasal-voice agreed. "Flauval's going to get
her surprise in just a minute now!"

"And there they come out of the launch," continued Peer. "One, two,
three, four. All four of them. Marching right down into the Mound!"

"You've got sharp eyes," Nasal-voice acknowledged. "But that's funny!"
he continued worriedly. "One of them was to stay with the guns."

"And now look at the launch!" cried Peer in a high, bright voice.
"Getting _pulled_ right into the Mound!"

Nasal-voice was making loud, choking sounds.

"What _was_ that?" he screamed then. "What's happened? What's that over
there?"

"Let go my arm!" cried Peer. "Don't pull it--you're pushing me off!
_Here we go!_"

       *       *       *       *       *

A small avalanche of weathered rock came down before the burrow's
mouth as Channok shot out through it into the open. He looked up. In
what looked like an inextricable tangle of arms and legs, Peer and
Nasal-voice were sliding and scuffling down the steep side of the rock
together. Nasal-voice was trying to hang on to the rock, but Peer was
hanging on to him and jerking like a hooked fish whenever he got a
momentary hold.

She looked down and saw Channok, put her boots into the small of
Nasal-voice's back, pushed off and landed two yards from Channok on
hands and feet. He flattened himself back against the boulder, while
Nasal-voice skidded down the rest of the way unaided, wisely refraining
from triggering his jets. In the position he was in, they simply would
have accelerated his descent to a fatal degree.

He arrived more or less on his feet. Peer bounced up and down before
him, her finger pointed, like a small lunatic.

"Surprise!" she screamed. "Surprise! Like Flauval got! When you locked
her in her cabin and ran off with the launch, so she'd have to jump out
into space!"

"That's right, kid," Nasal-voice panted softly, fumbling for his gun
without taking his eyes off her. He looked somewhat like a white-faced
lunatic himself just then. "Don't get scared, kid! Don't run off! I
won't shoot."

He pulled the gun out suddenly.

But Channok had taken two soft steps forward by then, and he had only
to swing. The Reaper was clubbed in his right hand, and he brought the
butt end down on the top of Nasal-voice Ezeff's skull-tight flying cap
as if he were trying to ram a stake through the surface rock of Old
Nameless.

       *       *       *       *       *

"What happened over there on the Mound?" he inquired in a voice that
kept wanting to quaver. He was hurriedly pulling on Nasal-voice's
flight suit.

"Here's his goggles," said Peer, also shakily. "Tell you tonight about
the Mound. But Santis was right!"

"That's what it sounded like," Channok admitted. He slipped on the
goggles. "Do I look like this Ezeff now?"

"Not very much," Peer said doubtfully. "You still got that nose and
that jaw. Better hold me close up to your face! I'll put on a good act."

"All right. As soon as I set you down in the lock, jump past the guard
and yell, or something. If he looks after you, we mightn't have to
kill this one." He held out his arms. "Hop up! We'd better get started
before those last two on the _Ra-Twelve_ decide to come over."

Peer hopped up. Channok wrapped his right arm carefully around her.
They looked at each other thoughtfully for a moment.

"All set?" he asked.

"Sure," said crew-member Peer. She smiled faintly.

He triggered the jets with his left hand, and they shot upwards. Peer
drew a deep breath.

"Quit bossing me around all the time, you big lug!" she yelled
suddenly. She reached up for that nose and gave it a good yank.

"All right," Channok muttered, startled. "You don't have to be so
realistic! He can't even see us yet!"

"Just because you're bigger'n me!" shrieked Peer as they soared over
the top of the rocks into view of the _Asteroid's_ lock. She hooked a
smart right to Channok's left ear.

"Cut that out now, Peer!" he ordered futilely.

He was lightly battered all around by the time they reached the
_Asteroid's_ lock, though the act did get them in safely. But
then--whether it was the nose or the jaw--the instant he dropped Peer
to her feet, the guard stopped laughing and brought a gun out and up
faster than Channok ever had seen a man produce one before. However,
the Reaper had been ready in his hand all the time; so, with a safe
fraction of a second to spare, it talked first--

[Illustration: With a fraction of a second to spare, the Reaper talked
first....]

The glare of the discharge seemed about fifty times brighter than
normal.

"Hit the floor, Channy!" he heard Peer's shout.

He hit it without thought, dropping over the dead guard's legs....

Sound rammed at him enormously, roared on and began banging itself
about and away among distant mountains. The _Asteroid's_ floor had
surged up ponderously, settled back, quivered a bit and become stable
again.

"An earthquake," Channok muttered, sitting up dazedly, "was exactly all
we needed right now!"

"That wasn't any earthquake!" said Peer, standing pale-faced above him.
"Get up and look!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Long veils of stuff, presumably solid chunks of mountain, were drifting
down the distant, towering face of the cliff at the foot of which they
had buried the _Ra-Twelve_. Rising to meet them, its source concealed
beyond the horizon of the plain, was the slow, grey cloud of some
super-explosion.

"I guess," he said slowly, "one of those two must have got curious
about Koyle's wall-safe!"

"We were pretty smart about that," nodded Peer.

"We were, for once!" Channok agreed. He was looking around for
something to sit down on quietly when he caught sight of the dead guard
again. He started violently.

"Almost forgot about him! I guess now I'll have to bury him, and that
Ezeff, the first thing. Maybe this one is carrying something that will
show who they were."

He found something almost instantly--and he was glad then that Peer was
still watching the oily writhings of the cloud across the plain. It was
in a flat steel case he took out of one of the dead man's pockets: the
identification disk of a member of the Imperial Secret Service--

_The_ Service!

And they would have murdered us, he thought, shocked. They were going
to do it!

He turned the guard over on his back. A big muscular young man with a
look of sudden purpose and confidence still fixed on his face. It was
the same face as the one on the disk.

Channok put the disk back in its case and shoved the case into the dead
man's pocket. He stood up, feeling rather sick. Peer turned around from
the lock and regarded him reflectively for a moment.

"You know, Channy," she stated carefully, "if you can't help it, it
doesn't count."

He looked back at her. "I guess not," he said--and suddenly, for a
moment, he could see four men marching one after the other down into
the Mound. "Of course, it doesn't count!" he told her firmly.


                                 VIII

They worked hard at shifting the cargo into the cache, but the
Nameless Sun was beginning to slide down behind the mountains before
they were finished. And by the time Channok had rammed the tunnel
full of rocks with the tractor and cemented them into a glassy plug
with the drill-blast, and scattered a camouflaging mess of boulders
over everything, only a foggy red glow over the mountain crests,
half obscured by the lingering upper drifts of the explosion of the
_Ra-Twelve_, remained of the day.

There was no moon, but the sky had come full of stars big and little
over the opposite section of the plain; and so there was light enough
to make out the dark hump of the Mound in the distance. Every time
Channok looked in that direction, the low, sinister pile seemed to have
edged a little closer; and he looked as often as his work gave him a
chance to do it. Santis might have been right in stating that the Mound
wasn't dangerous if you didn't get too close to it--but the instant he
suspected there might be something going on over there, Channok was
going to hop off the tractor, grab up Peer and get off Old Nameless at
the best speed he and the _Asteroid_ could produce.

However, the Mound remained quiet. With everything done, he gave Peer
a last ride back to the _Asteroid_ on the tractor, ran it up the ramp
into the storage section and closed the rear lock. Then they discovered
they'd left their lunch containers lying among the rocks.

If he'd been alone, Channok would have left them there. But Peer looked
so matter-of-fact about it that he detached the tractor's headlight and
started back with her on foot. It was only a couple of hundred yards,
and they found the containers without any difficulty. The Mound seemed
to have moved a little closer again, but not too much. He gave it only
a casual glance this time.

"Where are your friends, the ghouls?" he inquired, shining the light
around the rocks as they started back. The grisly creatures had put
in a few cautious appearances during the afternoon, but their nerves
seemed to have suffered even more than his own from all that had
happened.

"The ghouls always hit their burrows at sundown," Peer explained.
"They're not like the story ones."

"What do they find to eat around here?" Channok inquired.

"Some sorts of rocks. They've got no real teeth but their mouth is like
a grinder inside. Most of the rest of their insides, too, Santis said.
I had a tame one I used to pitch stones at and he'd snap 'em up. But
all that weren't blue he'd spit out. The blue ones went right down--you
could hear them crunching for about a foot."

"What a diet!" Channok commented. Then he stopped short. "Say, Peer! If
they bite like that, they could chew right into our cache!"

"They won't," said Peer. "Come on."

"How do you know?" Channok asked, following her.

"They can't bite through a good grade of steel-alloy. And they don't
like its taste anyhow. Santis said so."

       *       *       *       *       *

Well, it had been Santis this and Santis that for quite a while now!
Peer's father seemed to be on record with a definite opinion on just
about everything. And what made him think he knew what a ghoul liked to
chew on?

Perhaps Channok couldn't be blamed too much. He was dog-tired and dirty
and hungry. He'd killed his first two men that day, and not in fair
fight either but with an assassin's sneak thrusts, from behind and by
trickery; and he'd buried them, too. He'd seen the shining ISS disclose
itself in action as something very tarnished and ugly, and a salvaged
ship worth a fortune go up in a cloud of writhing grey smoke....

There had been a number of other things--close shaves that had felt too
close, mostly.

At any rate, Channok stated, in flat unequivocal terms, that he didn't
wish to hear anything else that Santis had said. Not ever!

"You're taking the wrong attitude," Peer informed him, frowning.
"Santis is a very smart man. He could teach you a lot!"

"What makes you think I want to learn anything from a space-rat?"
Channok inquired, exasperated.

Peer stopped short. "That was a dirty thing to say!" she said in a low,
furious voice. "I'm not talking to you any more."

She drew away till there was a space of about six feet between them and
marched on briskly towards the _Asteroid_, looking straight ahead.

Channok had to hurry to keep abreast of her. He watched her in the
starlight for a few moments from the corners of his eyes. He probably
shouldn't have used that term--the half-pint did look good and mad!

"Tsk! Tsk!" he said, disturbed.

Peer said nothing. She walked a bit faster. Channok lengthened his
stride again.

"Who's my nice little girl friend?" he inquired wheedlingly.

"Shuddup!" growled Peer.

She climbed into the _Asteroid_ ahead of him and disappeared while he
sealed the locks. The control room was dark, but he felt she was around
somewhere. He switched on the power and the instruments. Familiar
dim pools of green and pink gleamings sprang up in quick sequence
like witchfire quivering over the control desk. Perhaps it wasn't an
exceptionally beautiful sight, but it looked home-like to Channok. Like
fires lighting up on a hearth.

"Well, let's see you handle this take-off!" he invited the shadows
around him briskly. This time there weren't any mountains nearby to
worry about.

"You handle it," Peer said from behind his shoulder. "It's my turn to
laugh."

She did, too, a few minutes later--loud and long! After he'd got
over the first shock of narrowly missing the Mound, Channok gave a
convincing imitation of a chagrined pilot and indignantly blamed the
_Asteroid_....

       *       *       *       *       *

He'd guided them halfway out of the Nameless System when she
came behind the control chair in the dark, wrapped her arms in a
stranglehold around his neck, and fondly bit his ear.

"Cut it out," Channok choked.

"Just the same," stated Peer, loosening her grip a trifle, "you're
_not_ so smart, like Santis is!"

"I'm not, eh?"

"No," said Peer. "But Santis said you would be some time. 'That
Channok's going to make a real spacer!' he said. 'Just give him a
chance to catch on.'"

"Well," Channok muttered, secretly flattered, "we'll hope he was right."

"And, anyway," said Peer, "I _LOVE_ you just as much!"

"Well, that's something, too!" Channok admitted. He was beginning to
feel very much better.

"And guess what I've got here," Peer said tenderly.

"What?"

"A nice, soapy cloth. For what you said when you saw the first ghoul.
So just open that big trap right up now, Channy!"

He couldn't tell in the dark; but it tasted like she'd taken the
trouble to mix something extra foul into the soap lather, too.

"And after you've stopped spitting bubbles," said crew-member Peer, who
was switching on all lights to observe that part of the business, "I'll
tell you what I saw on the Mound."

Channok shuddered.

"If you don't mind, Peer," he suggested soapily, "let's wait with that
till we're a lightyear or two farther out!"



*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Captives of the Thieve-Star" ***

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