Part 2

But Sam had already started talking in the liquid-sounding language, and Joel decided it was better for him to keep his own mouth shut and be thought stupid than open it and remove all doubt. Damn it, the whole thing was making him feel just the way he had twenty years ago, when he landed his first explorer on an alien world! It had been that long, and how many hundred meetings with alien life-forms since then, under how many fantastic circumstances, on how many God-forsaken, unworldly places? By now he was supposed to know the score. By now he was supposed to have seen everything. By now he knew the book inside and out, and had the ability to take charge no matter where in the black universe they sent him. Nicholas Joel, United Americas Intergalactic Exploration Fleet, of the Ship _White Whale_, commanding....

But nobody was challenging his right to have what he'd come for!

No _trouble_, that was the hell of it, and--and there was nothing to hate.

For a miserable moment, Captain Nicholas Joel stood becalmed, with not so much as a breeze in his sagging sails.

But he would not let them know it. He looked levelly into the eyes of each of the twelve, but even that did little to make him feel more at ease.

For he saw wisdom in the lined, kindly faces. He saw a humility and sincerity that matched the simple clothing they wore. He saw a kindness that men talked about in books and sometimes felt in their hearts, but seldom held openly in their faces for the world to see. These men were handsome in their physical stature, but they could have been little men three feet high, and they would have been the biggest that Joel had ever seen.

Now they were talking in subdued tones to Sam, and then one produced a document, and handed Sam a slender writing stylus.

"Hey Sam--" The hoarseness of his voice unnerved him, but Joel plowed ahead. "Hadn't you oughtta read that thing?"

"It's already been read, Skipper. By Dobermann. It took him three days to draw it up--he did most of the writing himself. It's already been electrostated; we've got ten copies of our own. Now keep your mouth shut or they'll think we don't trust them. You sign first, because you're the guest. Then K'hall-i-k'hall, and it's all over."

Sam's thin face had a seriousness in it that Joel knew he did not dare question. _The trouble is_, the thought stung him, _you doubt, because you were born and raised on Earth. Sam knows that. And he knows how these people think. And he says sign.... So sign, you big boob._

Silently, Joel took the stylus from Sam, bent quickly over the papyrus-like document, and put his name, rank and ship where Sam pointed. Then he gave the stylus to Sam, who returned it to K'hall-i-k'hall. And in another instant, all the mneurium-4 the _White Whale_ could lift clear was theirs for the taking.

* * * * *

Once he'd put his mind to it, Joel could converse in the language of his hosts as fluently as either Dobermann or Carruthers, and within a month he had been able to finish a limited round of visits to a full dozen of the smaller cities and towns. These people had respected his wish that he be allowed to roam their streets and public buildings without official escort, and with an ever-quickening fading of his self-consciousness, he did.

He did, more and more frequently.

And from the vantage point of their peacefully winding roads or their quaint little shops where they dispensed a fluid amazingly similar to Martian Colony Bond, Joel could hate the _White Whale_ from a comfortable distance, and with a healthy, untiring diligence. This he also did, more and more frequently.

It was during one of these self-assigned off-duty periods, alone in his personal jeep, that his most recent pint of Bond decided to harass him, and he discovered almost too late that he had ignored a turn of the dirt roadway. He skidded wickedly, and frightened one of the zebra-like animals drawing a vehicle much resembling a four-wheeled surrey. The animal let go with a terrified whinny, and with a sickening splintering noise, the _dhennah_ went plunging off the road into the deep drainage ditch at its edge. There was also another sound, and Joel practically stood the jeep on its nose slewing it to a stop.

By the time he was out and running back, the frightened animal had gotten itself out of the ditch and was working frantically to bring the _dhennah_ out after it. But the vehicle was canted at a crazy angle, and it was obvious to Joel that at least one of its starboard wheels was broken, and that it would take more than one _kaelli_ to haul it out.

None of this, he reflected as he ran, was going to help diplomatic relations a bit. And he was no Dobermann. But it was none of these things that worried him at the moment.

She was screaming bloody murder, and still was hard at it when he jumped into the ditch.

She stopped when he clambered up on the steeply tilted narrow seat to which she clung. There was suddenly not a sound from her as his big hands circled her waist and gently lifted her to the ground.

Then he discovered that his voice was stuck. Dammit, an explorer captain for over fifteen years, and he didn't know what to say when he banged up some farm girl's _dhennah_!

"I--ah, am terribly sorry. It will be replaced, of course. Very stupid and clumsy of me. I--ah, you hurt?" Rather smooth, at that!

She smiled. Slender lips, golden-colored eyes, delicately contoured face--all seemed to smile together. A breeze ruffled her tawny mass of shoulder-length hair, and Nicholas Joel just stood there.

"You are forgiven, the _dhennah_ was not a costly one. I know how difficult it must be for you to guide those machines of yours at such terrible speeds ... but of course the speeds are necessary to you in your work. Thank you for helping me."

Joel reassured himself that if only the conversation were in his mother tongue, he would of course not feel so ridiculously at a loss for words. After all, this young female was only an--an alien being.

"It was my pleasure, of course," Joel said. He thought perhaps if he could manage a smile--"I am gratified that you accept my clumsiness with such excellent grace. As intruders to begin with, my men and I--"

"Intruders, sir?" She had taken a few steps away from him to stroke the neck of the _kaelli_ and quiet it, but she was still looking at him. "Why intruders? At one time, all the people of this world were not of one great community as they are now, surely you know that. But when one group travelled and visited another, no one thought of it as an intrusion." She laughed. "Are we all not one under the sun?"

"But they were of your own kind, from elsewhere on your own planet--"

"A visitor is a visitor," she said, as though suddenly puzzled. "What can it matter where he is from?"

Joel started to reply, but checked himself. Of course these people had no way of knowing. Of course they were still under the impression that intelligent life, wherever it might exist, would necessarily be in their own form. The fact that it might not be had never occurred to them! Then that was why they had not feared the _White Whale_ and her crew. It was something Carruthers had probably perceived at once, something he could no doubt explain. But now Joel was seeing it first-hand for himself. Psychologically, this girl and her people were incapable of conceiving a way of life based on different reasons for living than their own, with different motives, different--ambitions.

Just, he reflected, as his own people were psychologically incapable of greeting a stranger without subconscious suspicion.

To these people, a visitor was--a visitor, and therefore a friend!

He wondered how many others beside himself, Carruthers and Dobermann knew.

"Perhaps it does not matter at all," Joel said, and he was surprised at the gentleness in his voice. He had not felt it that way in his throat for a long time. Not for a terribly long time. "Now, if you'll let me help you with that harness, we'll free your _kaelli_, and see what can be done about getting you on toward your destination!"

Joel's big fingers started fumbling with the thick leather thongs of the _kaelli's_ rig. The harness felt strange and confusing to hands disciplined to the limiting exactnesses of servocircuits and pressure-control studs, and the complexity of their co-ordination was thrown into confusion by sheer simplicity.

The girl laughed as she watched his efforts, then guided his hands with her own, and Joel felt a strange warmth mounting in his neck. And when the _kaelli_ was at last freed, he said, "Now then, where can I take you? I owe you something more than just the replacement of your _dhennah_. I shall drive slowly so that the _kaelli_ can follow, and you can see for yourself what it is like to ride in one of our machines!"

"But--they go like the wind!"

"Indeed they do!" Joel laughed, unaccountably pleased with her excitement. "Yes, ma'm, just like the wind!"

Quite unexpectedly, she reached for his hand, and Joel clasped hers with a quickness he had not intended. But then he was leading her to the jeep, helping her into it.

He started the powerful turbine engine, chuckled aloud at her quick gasp, then joined in her laughter.

"Just like the wind!" he cried and they were off.

The day was clear and bright and to Joel the air itself seemed to come alive with a heady excitement. This was something, it told him. This was not to hate. This was not to drink in bitterness. This was _not_ to be alone.

* * * * *

Captain Nicholas Joel paced the fore-waist bridge. There was a full, untouched flagon on the mahogany desk, and the bottle of Martian Colony Bond stood, tightly corked, beside it.

He sat down, hating the feel of the chair of command beneath his big body.

What he was thinking was wrong, of course. But no man could be two men; a man could not split himself down the middle and say: this is your life _here_, this is your life _there_, for it is unthinkable that a man be prisoner of one life only--No, a man could not do that; a man had only one life.

Wrong, was it?

And who, any more a man than himself, could dare to be judge?

He would call Carruthers; he would explain, and Carruthers would inform the rest. As for Command--

A buzzer roared on the desk in front of him. It was the dispatch unit communicator--it would be Southard.

A huge forefinger hit the toggle almost hard enough to wrench it from its socket.

"Command!" Joel grated into the sensitive pick-up. "Proceed with your message." He reached for the flagon, drained it, filled it again.

"Lieutenant Southard calls Command from Servogroup 4." The youngster's voice sounded tight, excited. Now what the hell--"Request task mission. Request task mission. Position--"

Joel quickly jacked in the ship's armory circuit. An alarm klaxon would be electrifying the entire complement of combat personnel stationed in that quarter of the ship even as armory communications was taking down the co-ordinates Southard was dictating. And within one minute and forty-five seconds after that, combat units would be assembling in machine-like precision, deploying into advance order at the ship's stern.

And as the two huge sections between the _White Whale's_ slender atmosphere fins opened like hungry steel mouths, disgorging flat, thick-bodied machines with their grim burdens of armed men and destroyer-artillery. Ship's Guard would be taking up defense positions, manning gun stations which commanded an energy potential sufficient to destroy a minor planet in a single, searing second of blue-white heat.

All this was automatic. A dispatch-unit request for task mission was an order, momentarily transcending even Command authority. It worked that way because the men who travelled space had learned that with the first foot they rose off the surface of Earth, theirs was no longer the privilege of living, but the task of survival. Space was emergency. And if you regarded it otherwise, it would kill you.

Joel waited. He watched only the sweep second hand on his desk chronometer; he did not need his screens, for he knew too well what was transpiring three hundred and twelve feet below him. He had seen it too many times. And too many times had he waited the necessary two minutes, listened to the taut silence of the waiting communicator.

"Command to Southard. Task mission dispatched and advancing. Now describe your situation."

"As follows--" The young lieutenant's voice was still taut, but it was not at the edge of panic. Of that Joel was certain. It was just that this was the first time, and it wasn't a field exercise, and it hadn't just been learned the night before from an Academy manual....

"Servounit 4, sample tapping with four facilities at two hundred feet. Metal encountered; processed. Object depth-screened; fabricated. Extends from minus two zero zero to minus five two seven. Diameter three zero feet. Further investigation withheld pending arrival of task mission. Over for Command."

_Over for Command_, the young voice said. So many, many times....

He was not exactly the same Nicholas Joel, now. He was Command....

"All right, boy, sit easy and try to relax. What the hell is it you've got holed up out there?"

"It's a--a space ship, sir."

"What class?"

"I don't know, sir. It isn't Terrestrial."

"All right, what do the counters tell you?"

"It's about a thousand years old, sir. That's as close as the counters can come, working off a screen. Perhaps, sir, you'd--"

"Well I don't want to look at pictures! Inform task mission when they show up that I'm coming out for a look around--and I'll have their hides if they go unnailing things before I get there. You got any Bond with you, Southard?"

"Yes sir."

"All right, you get my point? Don't drink it all! This is Command, _Whale_, out!"

Joel broke the circuit just as the admittance buzzer went off; he thumbed a stud and the narrow bulkhead door slid back, admitting Carruthers and Dobermann.

"Was wondering when you two were going to report. Sent a T-M to Southard--says he's found a space ship two hundred feet under the desert. Sometimes I think that kid works too hard. All right, got the 'copter ready?"

"Warming up on the waist ramp now," Dobermann said.

Joel stood up, reached for his guns and belt and strapped them around his thick middle. He gave Carruthers a quick look. The thin face was taut, almost expressionless, but there was an excitement smouldering in the dark eyes; the old excitement Joel had seen in them so many times before.

"No objections to the artillery this time, I take it, Sam?" Joel grunted as he clasped the big buckle, let the weight of the blasters sag their holsters down into position on his thighs. "Damn good of you! And I'm glad you understand these people so well--while we're on our way maybe you can tell me why they bury space ships."

"Maybe we ought to ask them, Skipper," Sam said with a half-smile on his thin lips.

"I get your point. But maybe they should've told us! Come on."

* * * * *

On Joel's order, the task mission's guns had been reversed; drawn about the area where Southard's servounits were noisily sucking up sand, they no longer were concentrated on the excavation site, but instead defended it, slender snouts commanding an immense circular field of fire.

"You don't trust them at that, do you, Nicholas?" Carruthers said above the racket of the servounits. "Lord, you could slaughter an army--"

"This is what it says to do in the goddamn books!" Joel snapped. "You're the guys who were so glad to make a strike."

The heavy, tracked machinery with its towering drill-housings and down-thrust vacuum-scoops whined and growled in a nerve-wrenching discord of power. Men sweated under the mild sun with a silent hurry, with a disciplined excitement.

Southard was fast and efficient.

Dobermann was silent, watching, analyzing.

Carruthers had the hungry look in his eyes that Joel did not understand.

And Joel was impatient. It was a tableau of men and machines that he had watched before, and always, at the end of it, there was something big for him to handle--frustrating if not dangerous, a mind and bone-wearying struggle if not an outright battle. They never came smooth, never.

"Forehull clear, sir!" It was Southard, calling from the lip of the immense hole his machines had excavated.

"Cut your servos!"

Southard signalled to his units, and they muttered slowly into silence, and then the silence hung over them all like a heavy thing, and Captain Nicholas Joel knew that what happened next was up to him.

With a motion of one gauntleted hand he brought Dobermann and Carruthers in next to him, and then the three of them walked with a disciplined haste to the sandy lip, past Southard, and looked down.

A pitted forehull jutted up out of the moist sand two hundred feet below them, its plates glittering darkly in the rays of the powerful illumination units which had already been lowered.

Dobermann's quick eyes took in each detail in seconds, and then they darted up to Joel's face. Carruthers was silent, and his face was white.

"All right, let's get some winch-lifts over here!" Joel bellowed. "Torches, can-openers, let's get with it!"

And within minutes, Joel was on his way down in a bucket, big boots planted solidly on a small mountain of heavy tools.

Dobermann was following, and Carruthers was in the third bucket.

Joel's bare hands were exploring the gnurled lip of the forehull lock-hatch before either of them hit bottom. Dobermann was first up beside him, a heavy torch cradled in his short, thick arms.

"Ready?"

"Won't need that thing," Joel grunted. "Nobody locked up when they left. Give me a hand."

The hatch, like the rest of the hull, was pitted, but despite the moistness of the sand in which the ship was imbedded, there were no indications of corrosion. Joel made a mental note to have the lubricants in which the hinge-gymbals were packed analyzed later; they were still as good as new; the hatch was giving almost easily.

Carruthers, with an arc lantern, lit their way inside.

They walked into what was obviously a pilots' compartment. Instruments, control panels, ack-seats, notations on metal-leaf note-pads which they did not understand; Dobermann copied them.

They descended ladder-walks into the fore-waist; crew compartment. Functional, compact, reflecting the same efficient engineering which they had encountered in the previous compartment.

Through a second bulkhead opening; supply compartment. Through another; cargo hold. It was not empty, and loading gear was in evidence, although neatly stowed in its locks.

"Mneurium-4," Carruthers said. The words made a hollow sound in the emptiness behind them.

They kept going. Armory. All units still in place. Engine room. Dobermann's counter ticked slowly in the stillness. Still a little kick left in the piles. Machine-shop; lab. Spotless, perfect order. Finally, tubes. The smooth metal gleamed in the light of Carruthers' lamp.

And that was all.

Joel turned wordlessly and started back up the ladder-walks. Dobermann and Carruthers clanged hollowly after him, scrambling to keep up.

Joel didn't stop until he had climbed back into one of the buckets, and then he waved impatiently. Machinery whined above him, and his bucket swung clear.

At the lip, he motioned for Southard.

"All right, I want ten of your people with technical research rates. Leave them with Dobermann and Carruthers. Issue return orders to your T-M, and then get these units out of here and digging up what we came after."

"But--yes sir."

Dobermann and Carruthers were at the lip, climbing out of their buckets. There was a puzzled look, even on Dobermann's usually taciturn face.

"You two," Joel snapped, "will have a crew of researchers. Ten men. Take twenty-four hours and scrape the insides of this thing. Carruthers will report directly to me when you're finished. Dobermann, you'll nail K'hall-i-k'hall to a wall somewhere and don't let him down until you find out what became of whoever flew this tank."

He turned and walked away before anyone could protest.

* * * * *

Captain Nicholas Joel drained the flagon. He looked again at the faded image in the small, rectangular frame, finally returned it to the breast pocket of his tunic. Then he looked up across the mahogany desk at Carruthers and Dobermann.

"So," he said slowly, "so he told you he didn't know, did he?"

"Yes, Captain, that is what he told me. He was surprised about the space ship. He called the others in. There was the same reaction. They--"

Joel leaped to his feet. "Don't give me that!" he thundered. He grabbed at the bottle of Bond; spilled it as he poured. "You _know_ he knows!"

"Captain, I was quite convinced."

"Quite convinced, quite convinced, were you.... All right, Dobermann, get out of here. You find out anything, let me know. Sam, I want to talk to you. Go on Dobermann, _git_!"

Joel slumped back behind the desk as his first officer pivoted, left. He tried a swallow from the flagon; fumbled at his tunic pocket for the small frame, extracted it; looked at it again. Then put it back a second time.

Carruthers sat down opposite him.

"You going to talk to me, Nicholas, or pass out before you get the chance?"

"All right, Sam." Joel got up, put the Bond back in its cabinet; emptied the flagon and put it in too. "I get your point. Only you listen. The crew of that ship was deliberately murdered. Cold-bloodedly murdered, and it isn't going to happen to us."

"I see." The ship's surgeon eyed the tips of his fingernails, then slowly looked up into Joel's red, swollen face. "Naturally, there wouldn't be any bodies around to prove your theory, would there, Skipper? And no signs of struggle. We didn't see any. Of course, their guns _were_ racked up pretty neatly--But it's all there in the report--" he waved a slender hand toward a roll of tape on the desk.

"Never mind your sarcastic technicalities! They were--"

"Nicholas, sit down. And listen."

"All right. But I _don't_ get your point! And I don't want any of your double-talk! The trouble with you guys--"

"First of all, Nicholas, you know that crew wasn't murdered or anything of the kind. And you know, and Dobermann realizes that you know _he_ knows, that K'hall-i-k'hall was lying in his teeth. And K'hall-i-k'hall knows _we_ know it."

Joel lowered his eyes. "All right, Sam," he said. No, there hadn't been any use in trying to drum up a bunch of tripe--no use in trying to fool Sam. He had known that from the start. But sometimes--sometimes, even when a man knew he was fooling himself, he had to give it a try, just to see-- "They went native, didn't they, Sam?" he said.

"Yes, Skipper. They did. Somebody back where they came from needed that mneurium-4 real bad. Somebody had guts and sweat and brains enough to get ships into space looking for it. And in their own way, somebody had faith enough to think they'd get it if it was to be found. Only, as you say--"

"Liked it here, I suppose. Liked it better than anything they'd ever seen before--and that can of theirs had a thumping set of drives, so they'd seen plenty."

There was silence for a moment. And then Sam said, "Well, Nicholas, there it is. The psychology of the thing is obvious enough, isn't it?" Carruthers gave him a meaningful look, and Joel's nerves rebelled at it.

"All right, I get your point!" A big fist slammed down on the desktop. "So somebody didn't get their mneurium-4! Somebody probably ornery enough to keep on living anyway. What do you want to bet they're still going strong, who or wherever they are out in that black hell up there? What do you want to bet, Sam?"

The surgeon's thin lips smiled gently. "I'd bet right along with you, Nicholas. They're probably still going strong. I imagine they made out."

"But K'hall-i-k'hall--"