A small, black scout-ship, commanded jointly by Master Pilot John K. Kinnison and Master Electronicist Mason M. Northrop, was blasting along a course very close indeed to RA17: D+10. In equipment and personnel, however, she was not an ordinary scout. Her control room was so full of electronics racks and computing machines that there was scarcely footway in any direction; her graduated circles and vernier scales were of a size and a fineness usually seen only in the great vessels of the Galactic Survey. And her crew, instead of the usual twenty-odd men, numbered only seven--one cook, three engineers, and three watch officers. For some time the young Third Officer, then at the board, had been studying something on his plate; comparing it minutely with the chart clipped into the rack in front of him. Now he turned, with a highly exaggerated deference, to the two Lensmen.
"Sirs, which of your Magnificences is officially the commander of this here bucket of odds and ends at the present instant?"
"Him." Jack used his cigarette as a pointer. "The guy with the misplaced plucked eyebrow on his upper lip. I don't come on duty until sixteen hundred hours--one precious Tellurian minute yet in which to dream of the beauties of Earth so distant in space and in both past and future time."
"Huh? Beauties? Plural? Next time I see a party whose pictures are cluttering up this whole ship I'll tell her about your polygamous ideas. I'll ignore that crack about my mustache, though, since you can't raise one of your own. I'm ignoring you, too--like this, see?" Ostentatiously turning his back upon the lounging Kinnison, Northrop stepped carefully over three or four breadboard hookups and stared into the plate over the watch officer's shoulder. He then studied the chart. "Was ist los, Stu? I don't see a thing."
"More Jack's line than yours, Mase. This system we're headed for is a triple, and the chart says it's a double. Natural enough, of course. This whole region is unexplored, so the charts are astronomicals, not surveys. But that makes us Prime Discoverers, and our Commanding Officer--and the book says 'Officer', not 'Officers'--has got to...."
"That's me, now," Jack announced, striding grandly toward the plate. "Amscray, oobsbay. I will name the baby. I will report. I will go down in history...."
"Bounce back, small fry. You weren't at the time of discovery." Northrop placed a huge hand flat against Jack's face and pushed gently. "You'll go down, sure enough--not in history, but from a knock on the knob--if you try to steal any thunder away from me. And besides, you'd name it 'Dimples'--what a revolting thought!"
"And what would you name it? 'Virgilia', I suppose?"
"Far from it, my boy." He had intended doing just that, but now he did not quite dare. "After our project, of course. The planet we're heading for will be Zabriska; the suns will be A-, B-, and C-Zabriskae, in order of size; and the watch officer then on duty, Lieutenant L. Stuart Rawlings, will engross these and all other pertinent data in the log. Can you classify 'em from here, Jack?"
"I can make some guesses--close enough, probably, for Discovery work." Then, after a few minutes: "Two giants, a blue-white and a bluish yellow; and a yellow dwarf."
"Dwarf in the Trojan?"
"That would be my guess, since that is the only place it could stay very long, but you can't tell much from one look. I can tell you one thing, though--unless your Zabriska is in a system straight beyond this one, it's got to be a planet of the big fellow himself; and brother, that sun is hot!"
"It's got to be here, Jack. I haven't made that big an error in reading a beam since I was a sophomore."
"I'll buy that ... well, we're close enough, I guess." Jack killed the driving blasts, but not the Bergenholm; the inertialess vessel stopped instantaneously in open space. "Now we've got to find out which one of those twelve or fifteen planets was on our line when that last message was sent.... There, we're stable enough, I hope. Open your cameras, Mase. Pull the first plate in fifteen minutes. That ought to give me enough track so I can start the job, since we're at a wide angle to their ecliptic."
The work went on for an hour or so. Then:
"Something coming from the direction of Tellus," the watch officer reported. "Big and fast. Shall I hail her?"
"Might as well," but the stranger hailed first.
"Space-ship Chicago, NA2AA, calling. Are you in trouble? Identify yourself, please."
"Space-ship NA774J acknowledging. No trouble...."
"Northrop! Jack!" came Virgil Samms' highly concerned thought. The superdreadnaught flashed alongside, a bare few hundred miles away, and stopped. "Why did you stop here?"
"This is where our signal came from, sir."
"Oh." A hundred thoughts raced through Samms' mind, too fast and too fragmentary to be intelligible. "I see you're computing. Would it throw you off too much to go inert and match intrinsics, so that I can join you?"
"No sir; I've got everything I need for a while."
Samms came aboard; three Lensmen studied the chart.
"Cavenda is there," Samms pointed out. "Trenco is there, off to one side. I felt sure that your signal originated on Cavenda; but Zabriska, here, while on almost the same line, is less than half as far from Tellus." He did not ask whether the two young Lensmen were sure of their findings. He knew. "This arouses my curiosity no end--does it merely complicate the thionite problem, or does it set up an entirely new problem? Go ahead, boys, with whatever you were going to do next."
Jack had already determined that the planet they wanted was the second out; A-Zabriskae Two. He drove the scout as close to the planet as he could without losing complete coverage; stationed it on the line toward Sol.
"Now we wait a bit," he answered. "According to recent periodicity, not less than four hours and not more than ten. With the next signal we'll nail that transmitter down to within a few feet. Got your spotting screens full out, Mase?"
"Recent periodicity?" Samms snapped. "It has improved, then, lately?"
"Very much, sir."
"That helps immensely. With George Olmstead harvesting broadleaf, it would. It is still one problem. While we wait, shall we study the planet a little?"
They explored; finding that A-Zabriskae Two was a disappointing planet indeed. It was small, waterless, airless, utterly featureless, utterly barren. There were no elevations, no depressions, no visible markings whatever--not even a meteor crater. Every square yard of its surface was apparently exactly like every other.
"No rotation," Jack reported, looking up from the bolometer. "That sand-pile is not inhabited and never will be. I'm beginning to wonder."
"So am I, now," Northrop admitted. "I still say that those signals came from this line and distance, but it looks as though they must have been sent from a ship. If so, now that we're here--particularly the Chicago--there will be no more signals."
"Not necessarily." Again Samms' mind transcended his Tellurian experience and knowledge. He did not suspect the truth, but he was not jumping at conclusions. "There may be highly intelligent life, even upon such a planet as this."
They waited, and in a few hours a communications beam snapped into life.
"READY--READY--READY...." it said briskly, for not quite one minute, but that was time enough.
Northrop yelped a string of numbers; Jack blasted the little vessel forward and downward; the three watch officers, keen-eyed at their plates, stabbed their visibeams, ultra-beams, and spy-rays along the indicated line.
"And bore straight through the planet if you have to--they may be on the other side!" Jack cautioned, sharply.
"They aren't--it's here, on this side!" Rawlings saw it first. "Nothing much to it, though ... it looks like a relay station."
"A relay! I'll be a...." Jack started to express an unexpurgated opinion, but shut himself up. Young cubs did not swear in front of the First Lensman. "Let's land, sir, and look the place over, anyway."
"By all means."
They landed, and cautiously disembarked. The horizon, while actually quite a little closer than that of Earth, seemed much more distant because there was nothing whatever--no tree, no shrub, no rock or pebble, not even the slightest ripple--to break the geometrical perfection of that surface of smooth, hard, blindingly reflective, fiendishly hot white sand. Samms was highly dubious at first--a ground-temperature of four hundred seventy-five degrees was not to be taken lightly; he did not at all like the looks of that ultra-fervent blue-white sun; and in his wildest imaginings he had never pictured such a desert. Their space-suits, however, were very well insulated, particularly as to the feet, and highly polished; and in lieu of atmosphere there was an almost perfect vacuum. They could stand it for a while.
The box which housed the relay station was made of non-ferrous metal and was roughly cubical in shape, perhaps five feet on a side. It was so buried that its upper edge was flush with the surface; its top, which was practically indistinguishable from the surrounding sand, was not bolted or welded, but was simply laid on, loose.
Previous spy-ray inspection having proved that the thing was not booby-trapped, Jack lifted the cover by one edge and all three Lensmen studied the mechanisms at close range; learning nothing new. There was an extremely sensitive non-directional receiver, a highly directional sender, a beautifully precise uranium-clock director, and an "eternal" powerpack. There was nothing else.
"What next, sir?" Northrop asked. "There'll be an incoming signal, probably, in a couple of days. Shall we stick around and see whether it comes in from Cavenda or not?"
"You and Jack had better wait, yes." Samms thought for minutes. "I do not believe, now, that the signal will come from Cavenda, or that it will ever come twice from the same direction, but we will have to make sure. But I can't see any reason for it!"
"I think I can, sir." This was Northrop's specialty. "No space-ship could possibly hit Tellus from here except by accident with a single-ended beam, and they can't use a double-ender because it would have to be on all the time and would be as easy to trace as the Mississippi River. But this planet did all its settling ages ago--which is undoubtedly why they picked it out--and that director in there is a Marchanti--the second Marchanti I have ever seen."
"Whatever that is," Jack put in, and even Samms thought a question.
"The most precise thing ever built," the specialist explained. "Accuracy limited only by that of determination of relative motions. Give me an accurate enough equation to feed into it, like that tape is doing, and two sighting shots, and I'll guarantee to pour an eighteen-inch beam into any two foot cup on Earth. My guess is that it's aimed at some particular bucket-antenna on one of the Solar planets. I could spoil its aim easily enough, but I don't suppose that is what you're after."
"Decidedly not. We want to trace them, without exciting any more suspicion than is absolutely necessary. How often, would you say, do they have to come here to service this station--change tapes, and whatever else might be necessary?"
"Change tapes, is all. Not very often, by the size of those reels. If they know the relative motions exactly enough, they could compute as far ahead as they care to. I've been timing that reel--it's got pretty close to three months left on it."
"And more than that much has been used. It's no wonder we didn't see anything." Samms straightened up and stared out across the frightful waste. "Look there--I thought I saw something move--it is moving!"
"There's something moving closer than that, and it's really funny." Jack laughed deeply. "It's like the paddle-wheels, shaft and all, of an old-fashioned river steam-boat, rolling along as unconcernedly as you please. He won't miss me by over four feet, but he isn't swerving a hair. I think I'll block him off, just to see what he does."
"Be careful, Jack!" Samms cautioned, sharply. "Don't touch it--it may be charged, or worse."
Jack took the metal cover, which he was still holding, and by working it back and forth edgewise in the sand, made of it a vertical barrier squarely across the thing's path. The traveler paid no attention, did not alter its steady pace of a couple of miles per hour. It measured about twelve inches long over all; its paddle-wheel-like extremities were perhaps two inches wide and three inches in diameter.
"Do you think it's actually alive, sir? In a place like this?"
"I'm sure of it. Watch carefully."
It struck the barrier and stopped. That is, its forward motion stopped, but its rolling did not. Its rate of revolution did not change; it either did not know or did not care that its drivers were slipping on the smooth, hard sand; that it could not climb the vertical metal plate; that it was not getting anywhere.
"What a brain!" Northrop chortled, squatting down closer. "Why doesn't it back up or turn around? It may be alive, but it certainly isn't very bright."
The creature, now in the shadow of the 'Troncist's helmet, slowed down abruptly--went limp--collapsed.
"Get out of his light!" Jack snapped, and pushed his friend violently away; and as the vicious sunlight struck it, the native revived and began to revolve as vigorously as before. "I've got a hunch. Sounds screwy--never heard of such a thing--but it acts like an energy-converter. Eats energy, raw and straight. No storage capacity--on this world he wouldn't need it--a few more seconds in the shade would probably have killed him, but there's no shade here. Therefore, he can't be dangerous."
He reached out and touched the middle of the revolving shaft. Nothing happened. He turned it at right angles to the plate. The thing rolled away in a straight line, perfectly contented with the new direction. He recaptured it and stuck a test-prod lightly into the sand, just ahead of its shaft and just inside one paddle wheel. Around and around that slim wire the creature went: unable, it seemed, to escape from even such a simple trap; perfectly willing, it seemed, to spend all the rest of its life traversing that tiny circle.
"'What a brain!' is right, Mase," Jack exclaimed. "What a brain!"
"This is wonderful, boys, really wonderful; something completely new to our science." Samms' thought was deep with feeling. "I am going to see if I can reach its mind or consciousness. Would you like to come along?"
"Would we!"
Samms tuned low and probed; lower and lower; deeper and deeper; and Jack and Mase stayed with him. The thing was certainly alive; it throbbed and vibrated with vitality: equally certainly, it was not very intelligent. But it had a definite consciousness of its own existence; and therefore, however tiny and primitive, a mind. Although its rudimentary ego could neither receive nor transmit thought, it knew that it was a fontema, that it must roll and roll and roll, endlessly, that by virtue of determined rolling its species would continue and would increase.
"Well, that's one for the book!" Jack exclaimed, but Samms was entranced.
"I would like to find one or two more of them, to find out ... I think I'll take the time. Can you see any more of them, either of you?"
"No, but we can find some--Stu!" Northrop called.
"Yes?"
"Look around, will you? Find us a couple more of these fontema things and flick them over here with a tractor."
"Coming up!" and in a few seconds they were there.
"Are you photographing this, Lance?" Samms called the Chief Communications Officer of the Chicago.
"We certainly are, sir--all of it. What are they, anyway? Animal, vegetable, or mineral?"
"I don't know. Probably no one of the three, strictly speaking. I'd like to take a couple back to Tellus, but I'm afraid that they'd die, even under an atomic lamp. We'll report to the Society."
Jack liberated his captive and aimed it to pass within a few feet of one of the newcomers, but the two fontemas did not ignore each other. Both swerved, so that they came together wheel to wheel. The shafts bent toward each other, each into a right angle. The angles touched and fused. The point of fusion swelled rapidly into a double fist-sized lump. The half-shafts doubled in length. The lump split into four; became four perfect paddle-wheels. Four full-grown fontemas rolled away from the spot upon which two had met; their courses forming two mutually perpendicular straight lines.
"Beautiful!" Samms exclaimed. "And notice, boys, the method of avoiding inbreeding. Upon a perfectly smooth planet such as this, no two of those four can ever meet, and the chance is almost vanishingly small that any of their first-generation offspring will ever meet. But I'm afraid I've been wasting time. Take me back out to the Chicago, please, and I'll be on my way."
"You don't seem at all optimistic, sir," Jack ventured, as the NA774J approached the Chicago.
"Unfortunately, I am not. The signal will almost certainly come in from an unpredictable direction, from a ship so far away that even a super-fast cruiser could not get close enough to her to detect--just a minute. Rod!" He Lensed the elder Kinnison so sharply that both young Lensmen jumped.
"What is it, Virge?"
Samms explained rapidly, concluding: "So I would like to have you throw a globe of scouts around this whole Zabriskan system. One detet out and one detet apart, so as to be able to slap a tracer onto any ship laying a beam to this planet, from any direction whatever. It would not take too many scouts, would it?"
"No; but it wouldn't be worth while."
"Why not?"
"Because it wouldn't prove a thing except what we already know--that Spaceways is involved in the thionite racket. The ship would be clean. Merely another relay."
"Oh. You're probably right." If Virgil Samms was in the least put out at this cavalier dismissal of his idea, he made no sign. He thought intensely for a couple of minutes. "You are right. I will have to work from the Cavenda end. How are you coming with Operation Bennett?"
"Nice!" Kinnison enthused. "When you get a couple of days, come over and see it grow. This is a fine world, Virge--it'll be ready!"
"I'll do that." Samms broke the connection and called Dronvire.
"The only change here is for the worse," the Rigellian reported, tersely. "The slight positive correlation between deaths from thionite and the arrival of Spaceways vessels has disappeared."
There was no need to elaborate on that bare statement. Both Lensmen knew what it meant. The enemy, either in anticipation of statistical analysis or for economic reasons, was rationing his small supply of the drug.
And DalNalten was very much unlike his usual equable self. He was glum and unhappy; so much so that it took much urging to make him report at all.
"We have, as you know, put our best operatives to work on the inter-planetary lines," he said finally, half sullenly. "We have secured quite a little data. The accumulating facts, however, point more and more definitely toward an utterly preposterous conclusion. Can you think of any valid reason why the exports and imports of thionite between Tellus and Mars, Mars and Venus, and Venus and Tellus, should all be exactly equal to each other?"
"What!"
"Precisely. That is why Knobos and I are not yet ready to present even a preliminary report."
Then Jill. "I can't prove it, any more than I could before, but I'm pretty sure that Morgan is the Boss. I have drawn every picture I can think of with Isaacson in the driver's seat, but none of them fit?" She paused, questioningly.
"I am already reconciled to adopting that view; at least as a working hypothesis. Go ahead."
"The fact seems to be that Morgan has always had all the left-wingers of the Nationalists under his thumb. Now he and his man Friday, Representative Flierce, are wooing all the radicals and so-called liberals on our side of both Senate and House--a new technique for him--and they're offering plenty of the right kind of bait. He has the commentators guessing, but there's no doubt whatever in my mind that he is aiming at next Election Day and our Galactic Council."
"And you and Dronvire are sitting idly by, doing nothing, of course?"
"Of course!" Jill giggled, but sobered quickly. "He's a smooth, smooth worker, Dad. We are organizing, of course, and putting out propaganda of our own, but there's so pitifully little that we can actually do--look and listen to this for a minute, and you'll see what I mean."
In her distant room Jill manipulated a reel and flipped a switch. A plate came to life, showing Morgan's big, sweating, passionately earnest face.
"... and who are these Lensmen, anyway?" Morgan's voice bellowed, passionate conviction in every syllable. "They are the hired minions of the classes, stabbers in the back, crooks and scoundrels, TOOLS OF RUTHLESS WEALTH! They are hirelings of the inter-planetary bankers, those unspeakable excrescences on the body politic who are still grinding down into the dirt, under an iron heel, the face of the common man! In the guise of democracy they are trying to set up the worst, the most outrageous tyranny that this universe has ever...." Jill snapped the switch viciously.
"And a lot of people swallow that ... that bilge!" she almost snarled. "If they had the brains of a ... of even that Zabriskan fontema Mase told me about, they wouldn't, but they do!"
"I know they do. We have known all along that he is a masterly actor; we now know that he is more than that."
"Yes, and we're finding out that no appeal to reason, no psychological counter-measures, will work. Dronvire and I agree that you'll have to arrange matters so that you can do solid months of stumping yourself. Personally."
"It may come to that, but there's a lot of other things to do first."
Samms broke the connection and thought. He did not consciously try to exclude the two youths, but his mind was working so fast and in such a disjointed fashion that they could catch only a few fragments. The incomprehensible vastness of space--tracing--detection--Cavenda's one tiny, fast moving moon--back, and solidly, to DETECTION.
"Mase," Samms thought then, carefully. "As a specialist in such things, why is it that the detectors of the smallest scout--lifeboat, even--have practically the same range as those of the largest liners and battleships?"
"Noise level and hash, sir, from the atomics."
"But can't they be screened out?"
"Not entirely, sir, without blocking reception completely."
"I see. Suppose, then, that all atomics aboard were to be shut down; that for the necessary heat and light we use electricity, from storage or primary batteries or from a generator driven by an internal-combustion motor or a heat-engine. Could the range of detection then be increased?"
"Tremendously, sir. My guess is that the limiting factor would then be the cosmics."
"I hope you're right. While you are waiting for the next signal to come in, you might work out a preliminary design for such a detector. If, as I anticipate, this Zabriska proves to be a dead end, Operation Zabriska ends here--becomes a part of Zwilnik--and you two will follow me at max to Tellus. You, Jack, are very badly needed on Operation Boskone. You and I, Mase, will make appropriate alterations aboard a J-class vessel of the Patrol."
