Part 2

Gramer smiled. "Sure. It's just to Venus; but you can bet your life that every kid that sees this take-off on video or here on the field will be dreaming of the fabulous adventures you'll be having. Those kids _know_ this is for real, Dusty."

"Include me elsewhere," mumbled Dusty. He started for the spacelock.

"You can't let those kids down!" roared Gramer.

Dusty paused at the sill of the spacelock. "Gramer," he said cynically, "I'm not letting anybody down. I'm just keeping the hide of Dusty Britton in one unscarred piece."

"But the public--"

"That's what you've got press agents for, Gramer. So you can get your high-priced publicity men to run a few miles of paper explaining how I happen to have left this shooting star four minutes before take-off!"

"Dusty, you're a no-good louse."

"But a whole one. And let me tell you this, Gramer, you're less worried about the state of youthful morals than you are about losing the thread of a good, high-selling series. So I'm going to sail out of here as though I was scared to death of rockets--which I sure as hell am--and you're going to tell some bright explainist to get busy earning the dough you pay him. And when the smoke is all cleared away, I'll be safe and you'll be safe, and Dusty Britton will continue to go rolling along and the box office will continue to come rolling in. Spend a few short months in space? Not while the geegees are running at Hialeah!"

"But Dusty--"

"Space? Bah! Nothing, floating gently from vacuum to void and back again. Not for Dusty Britton!"

Dusty paused long enough to run splayed fingers through his hair and then he headed for the spacelock with a determined step.

"Wait!" roared Gramer.

Dusty paused.

"The least you could do is to go out of here not looking like Dusty Britton. Don't be an ass! I'll cover for you, but you've got to help!"

"All right but--" Outside another bomb racketed and the amplifier announced laconically, "X Minus Three Minutes!" and startled Dusty with the realization that he did not have much time. "--make it quick!"

"You--there!"

A technician coming up the ladder looked startled.

"Fifty bucks to swap clothing with Britton, here."

"Done," and the tech started to peel. He balked at Dusty's famous 'Blaster'? "That's worth another--"

"Another fifty--dammit!" agreed Gramer. "Now, wave out the door while Dusty leaves."

The roar that went up was for their beloved hero waving out of the spacelock, not the tech that came down the ramp with a rush, followed by the portly Martin Gramer. The spacelock swung closed as the spaceport jeep pulled away with Dusty and Gramer in the back.

They were a half mile away when the thunder came. No one even noticed them wending their way through the crowd, for every eye on the field was looking upwards, straining to see the spacecraft that was carrying Dusty Britton and The Space Patrol off to new adventures.

* * * * *

About a hundred miles off the coast of Baja California, Scyth Radnor sat in the control room of the big spacecraft. The dome was awash. Scyth sat high in the dome watching the pleasantly lazy progress of a forty foot schooner that was coming in his direction. It was a pretty sight and Scyth appreciated it even though he had been born on Marandis some thirty thousand years after the sail as a functional device had been outmoded. Sail, to Scyth, was strictly a vacation sort of thing, just as it was to Dusty Britton and a few billion other people whose lives are geared to a time-table except for vacation time.

If there was any puzzlement over this, it was because Scyth's menslator was not following the rocket, now laboring in free flight towards Venus. Dusty, according to what Scyth had been able to pick up, should have been there instead of here. But Scyth was not the burning inquisitive type. He knew that there was some explanation and that he could afford to wait until it was given instead of wasting a lot of energy trying to figure out the motives of a member of a race unknown to him.

He had better things to contemplate.

In the field of his telescope he could see a sight he approved of.

It was not Dusty Britton, lazing easily near the wheel of the schooner, keeping the helm steady with his left foot because his hands were occupied with a drink on one and a cigarette in the other. It was Barbara Crandall, lying on the cabin on a blanket. Her ankles were crossed and the arch of the upper foot was high and graceful. One thigh, slightly higher than the other, glinted from the sunshine, dark tan. Her breasts pointed at the sky, molded in dazzling white that contrasted sharply against the healthy, animal tan of her flat tummy. There were many more square feet of healthy hide showing than there were of the white shark-skin affair she wore, and Scyth approved of the view.

As he watched her, Dusty drained his drink, tossed his cigarette overboard, and called:

"Hey, Barb! Get us another quart, will you?"

Scyth did not hear it, for his menslator was by no means that competent a device. He just watched and wondered what they were saying.

Barbara called back, "Out of it already?"

"Yeah. I'd get it myself but someone's got to drive this rig."

"Don't mind." She stretched languorously and stood up, stretching high; pulling in her stomach and arching her back with her arms stretched high above her head. Scyth whistled inadvertently as her body went taut against the wisps of dazzling white that crossed her breasts and hips. She came along the cabin top, dropped into the cockpit, and disappeared into the cabin. She came out a moment later with a bottle which she opened and handed to Dusty. She took the wheel while he poured. They toasted one another. They sat side by side, their shoulders touching.

"Nice," she said quietly.

"You bet."

"Nice, quiet and peaceful."

Dusty addressed his glass and held it high. "Here's to the G. D. Space Patrol."

"What are you supposed to be doing?"

Dusty laughed. "I don't know. I'll find out when we get back. Gramer will have some flanged-up explanation right and ready for me."

"You'd better hope that the G. D. Space Patrol doesn't catch you all at sea with me."

"Phooey," he said. He pursed his lips and Barbara gave him a gentle peck that made Scyth's blood bubble slightly.

"Phooey nothing," she said. "You'd be--er--cashiered. Imagine a member of The Space Patrol consorting with a woman."

"What's good enough for pappy is good enough for me."

Barbara chuckled knowingly. "Where are we heading, if it's of any importance?"

"There's an island dead ahead. We might camp on the beach for the night. It's fine clean sand and--"

"You mean that hummock over there?"

"Hummock--humm--Good Lord!"

* * * * *

The hummock, dome of Scyth's spacecraft, began to rise out of the sea. Yard after yard it rose, coming upward glistening wet, the sea water running down in rivulets along its sleek flank. Ponderously and inexorably it rose with a steadiness of living rock. Yet it carried the air of feather-lightness, of an untold monster of sheer power held in easy leash. This was no rocket, straining against the formidable pull of gravity; this was a thing above material forces, its engines idling, its control in complete command. Without a second glimpse it was no spacecraft of Earth.

Up out of the sea it rose until its hundred yards towered above them. The spacelock was just above the waterline when the rising stopped and the alien spacecraft stopped, rock-steady. It was poised on its inexplicable driving forces with the same confident ease that an elevator shows when poised on its cables at the twentieth floor of a building. It stood rock-still and let the ocean waves break against its sleek, polished metal flank.

Whatever it was, Dusty did not like it.

He kicked the auxiliary engine into life, loosed the halyards and let the sails drop. He turned the helm hard as the engine roared into full throat. But the schooner defied its helm and aimed bowsprit-on to the spacelock of the spacecraft, starting through the sea like a dolphin toward the ship of space. The engine raced without bite because the ship was being hauled forward by some unknown force faster than the screw could drive it; the helm shuddered but had no effect, it tried to slue the stern sidewise but only succeeded in making the hull strain out of line. The wheel whipped out of Dusty's hand and spun to dead-ahead.

Dusty left the helm and dived into the cabin. He flipped on his radio and waited with rising panic while the tubes warmed and the meter rose to the red line that meant that it was ripe and ready for use. He grabbed the microphone, flipped the bandswitch to the Coast Guard Frequency, and yelled:

"This is Dusty Britton of the schooner Buccaneer. We are about a hundred miles off the coast of Baja California. Help! We are attacked by an alien spacecraft! Help! This is--"

He let his voice trail off because the output meter dropped abruptly to zero. Something had gone kaput.

III

Dumbly frightened at the face of the unknown, Dusty was far more frightened at being confined in the cabin of his schooner than he was of the nameless horror he would have to face above. He left the cabin in a hurry, and with mental desperation he turned deliberately to face the danger in the hope of getting it over with. He figured there would be less anguish if it came quickly.

The spacelock door was open wide and a man was standing there with a fluted-barrelled thing in his hand. On the deck were droplets of copper still hot enough to send up little wisps of smoke from the deck. The stub end of the antenna was melted down in a blob. As Dusty looked from Scyth Radnor to his ruined antenna and back again, Scyth leaned back in the spacelock and dropped his weapon. Then he made a relaxed show of sitting on the sill of the airlock with his feet dangling almost to the tips of the waves. He looked relaxed and calm and the trace of a smile was on his face; the kind of smile that would open into honest pleasure if he were greeted with the same.

"I am sorry," he said. "I am Scyth Radnor of Marandis. Despite the fact that I was forced to ruin your antenna, I do come on a peaceful mission, Dusty Britton."

"Yeah--" mumbled Dusty stupidly. Barbara was leaning flat against the mast, white-faced under her tan.

"Believe me, Dusty. I mean no harm. I did have to prevent you from broadcasting that which would bring a bad impression of me to your people."

Scyth reached up and pressed a button in the wall of the spacelock above his head. The sill of the spacelock came out abruptly in an extensible runway, carrying Scyth forward over the deck of the Buccaneer. Scyth dropped to the deck and stood facing Dusty with a hand extended.

"What do you want?" stammered Dusty. "And how come you talk our language?"

Scyth pointed to the tiny case slung around his neck. "This is a menslator," he explained. "When used in direct conversation with a man of another tongue, it acts to translate for both parties their meaning. It isn't perfect by any means, but it does help to make people of different tongues understand one another." Scyth smiled and then said, "For a quick and amusing explanation, observe this." Scyth clicked the switch off and began to speak. His speech was utterly comprehensible to Dusty and Barbara at first, but Scyth clicked the little switch after he had said a few words. They heard Scyth like this:

"_Fa d snall id_, an expression meaning to consign to the region of theological punishment, which when repeated through the menslator becomes 'Go to hell!' See?"

Dusty nodded dumbly. Barbara relaxed slightly.

"Now," said Scyth, "I am from Marandis. Marandis is a planet only a few thousand light-years from the Galactic Center, which makes it nearly thirty thousand light-years from here. Marandis is the seat of the Galactic Government. Look, Dusty, I came here to explain all this to you. There is a lot to say, and there is a lot you must take on faith until you know all of it. Let's relax. Will you come aboard my ship and have a drink? It's comfortable there and--"

"No!" snapped Dusty.

"Why not?"

"Nobody, but nobody, is going to get me in any space ship," said Dusty positively.

* * * * *

Scyth eyed Dusty queerly. His thoughts would have been obvious to anybody but Dusty and Barbara. Scyth was trying to justify in his own mind the attitude of a High Brass in The Space Patrol (_any_ space patrol) who would not enter a spacecraft. Scyth finally decided that Dusty's reticence was due to Dusty's suspicious nature. Dusty was unarmed and he was not getting into a spacecraft capable of carrying him across the galaxy, perhaps operated by other members of the crew. There were no other members, but the ship was big enough to have many. Scyth nodded to himself and smiled at Dusty.

"As you prefer. I only repeat that I mean no harm and I add that the salon inside is pleasant. We can all have a--"

"We've got a drink," blurted Dusty. He turned on his heel and got the quart from the seat by the helm. He stopped to get a third glass. He poured.

Scyth tasted gingerly. "Very smooth," he said. "What is it?"

"Bourbon."

"Bourbon. Tastes like an excellent liquor. Thank you. Now--" Scyth sat down on the edge of the deck with his feet hanging into the cockpit and settled himself for a session. "Dusty, we are here because we are creating a beacon for our galactic spacelanes."

"Beacon?"

Scyth nodded. "You have the insular viewpoint," he remarked. "You can stand at night and point out your destination. But you cannot even see Marandis from here, even with the finest telescope ever built. Stars lie in the way, huge gas fields and nebular clouds block fast direct passage. To chart our course safely past such stellar menaces, we establish beacons at the ends of certain free passages. For instance, Sol lies at the end of a fifteen hundred light year straightaway from the last beacon we set up. Here at Sol a slight turn in the course is made and there is another straightaway for a thousand light-years toward the Spiral Cluster. We--my friends and I--are charting the course through a rather interesting rift from Marandis to the Spiral Cluster. This rift, along which you lie, has been hidden from us for thousands of years. When it is finished it will cut hours from our travel-time."

"And maybe so. But what is a beacon and how do you establish it?"

"Dusty, when a spacecraft is running at fifteen hundred light-years per hour, a three-day-variable star winks in the sky ahead like a blinker-light." Scyth chopped his left palm rapidly with the edge of his right hand. "Wink-wink-wink it goes. And the pilot puts his spacecraft point-of-drive on the beacon and holds it there until he passes it and aims to the next. You--"

"Variable star!" blurted Dusty.

"Yes. The three-day variables are used for course markers; the longer variables are used to denote gas fields, nebular dust, and the like, and the still-longer beacons are used to denote places where various well-travelled starlanes meet, cross or merge. It is--"

"Three day variable--" breathed Dusty.

"Yes. In three days Sol will rise ten times its present brightness and fall again to less than one tenth of the present brightness. This is accomplished by creating an atomic instab--"

"My God! How can any race live under such conditions?"

"They cannot. Not unless properly prepared, well taken care of, aware and ready for it."

"Look," snapped Dusty. "Why not go out and use some other star for your damned beacon?"

Scyth shook his head. "If we were gods," he said quietly, "we could park the Galaxy on our desk, pick up a broom-straw and by fitting and trying we could locate the best course through the star-fields. But--"

"If you were gods," grunted Dusty bitterly, "you could reach in and move a few stars aside and run your damned channel on a dead line from one end to the other. So why do you use Sol?"

"Because the two straightaway lanes that meet at Sol do not meet at some other star. In one or two cases along this rift the original surveyors provided alternates in case we ran into trouble. But not on this one. No, Dusty, we cannot change our plans."

"But see here--"

"Dusty, you wouldn't stand in the way of Galactic Civilization, would you?"

"You're damn well tootin' I would if it's going to mow me down if I don't."

Scyth said soothingly, "Doubtless you have cases on your Earth where a state highway is surveyed right through someone's home. Tell me, Dusty, what happens then?"

"We buy the property at a fair price so that the family can find another home of the same value."

"So you don't stand like a barrier in the way of advancement."

"No we don't. But where are we--" Dusty eyed Scyth with a frown. "You're not going to tell me that your gang will migrate the people of Earth to another solar system, lock, stock and barrel?"

"That would be impossible, of course."

Dusty grunted. "So we gotta alternately cook and freeze just so your outfit can run a goddamned traffic pattern through our living room?"

"Well, now, it's not that bad," said Scyth placatingly.

* * * * *

Dusty did not hear the Marandanian. He was thinking of Los Angeles suffering under the effects of a variable star. Or, rather, he was trying to visualize such a condition. His imagination provided alternating scenes of icy blast and deadly heat, but Dusty's overall technical knowledge was far too meager to offer him even a slight glimpse of the real truth. To merely consider Sol varying about one hundred to one in brightness and warmth every three days was as far as Dusty could go. What would happen to the weather, the general climate, agriculture, and all of the rest were far beyond Dusty.

Even so, the sketchy picture provided Dusty with enough data to say, "Why, we couldn't go on living on Earth at all!"

"Right. Which is why I'm here."

"But you said--"

Scyth smiled confidently. "I'm not here to preside over the death of your part of our human race," he said. "I--"

"Our part of your human race--?" exploded Dusty.

"Of course," said Scyth in a matter-of-fact tone. "So far as we know, human life was first spawned on Marandis. About thirty thousand years ago we became galactic in scope, spreading out, colonizing, expanding, exploring. Many expeditions left home and were lost. But I'll not belabor this any more, just accept my word for the following: nowhere in this galaxy have we found intelligent life that did not spring as an offshoot of misplaced Marandanian culture."

"How can you be so damned certain?"

"The easiest way is to check the cross fertility. It has always worked, to date at least," said Scyth, inadvertently letting his eyes slide up and down the very pleasant sight of Barbara Crandall's body. Barbara knew Scyth's contemplative look and she reacted as any uninhibited woman does when some man is measuring her. The deep high breath raised her breasts and flattened her stomach even though she had no great yen toward wanton promiscuity.

"I gather, then, that you and your gang are going to do something about us?" she asked.

"Of course. We have a program for cases like this. Since you cannot live on a planet rotating about a variable star, we'll move Earth to another star of the same classification."

"But--" objected Dusty.

Scyth went on as though he had not been interrupted. "We'll set up a barytrine field around Earth which serves to do two things. A barytrine field cuts the force of gravity that holds Earth to Sol. It also produces a complete stoppage of objective and subjective time within the field. Then with machinus force-fields we'll put Earth in motion towards another star of Sol's general size. In a thousand years you'll come out of the barytrine field and resume your daily lives under the light of a brand-new sun. It's as simple as that."

Dusty eyed Scyth sourly. "Maybe I've got this wrong," he said. "Maybe you think we live a hell of a lot longer than we do. Maybe you live a thousand years and more but we--"

Scyth held up a hand. It was the hand that held the glass, which was empty. Dusty, reacting as he always did to the sight of an empty glass, filled it despite the fact that he felt that Scyth Radnor was a long way from being a friend.

* * * * *

The visitor from space smiled indulgently. "You miss the point, Dusty," said Scyth, nodding his thanks for the drink. "I said that the barytrine field produces a complete stasis in time. It will snap on ... a thousand years will pass ... it will snap off. To us, we will live and die and never see you again. But for you and yours, if you drop a marble before the field goes on, time will cease for you until the field goes off, and your marble will hit the floor a thousand years from now. You will feel nothing. There will be a tiny flick of light. If you are watching the sun it will probably blink and return slightly off-center because we never can be that precise. If you are watching the stars at night, they will wink out and wink on, and be in a new pattern. You will feel nothing."

"Yes, but, look here, we--"

Scyth smiled again. "Oh, you'll be repaid. We'll raise you from your present primitive level--"

"Primitive?"

Scyth nodded. "Primitive," he said. "You're as primitive to us as your savages are to you."

"But--"

"Look, Dusty, thirty thousand years ago, Marandis was still ahead of your present state of development. I can say this because your people at the present time still have no inkling as to the inconsistencies in the theory of general relativity. Someday soon you will discover that general relativity does not fit all the cases. Then you will propose the machinus theory of space-time. The machinus theory works where relativity does not. Then," glowed Scyth, "you will discover the phanoband carriers which operate in a way as to completely deny relativity in every concept. From there you find the barytrine field forces. But you're still primitive, Dusty."

Dusty eyed the Marandanian sourly.

Scyth continued, "You'd find little in common with us," he said. "You'd find that you would have to re-educate yourself before you could even understand us. Why, there are people in our culture who would take advantage of your ignorance."

Dusty nodded. His hazy knowledge of history presented him with a costume drama of Sir Walter Raleigh handing over a ten, two fives, and four ones to Chief Sitting Bull and receiving in return an engraved bill of sale for the Island of Manhattan. This negotiation was sealed with a slug of liquor out of a bottle labeled 'Bourbon, Bottled in Kentucky.' (Pocahontas, standing to one side, received a string of beads.)

Scyth went on:

"The big problem, Dusty, so far as you are concerned is the preparation of your people. We cannot be precise about the position of the new sun. We could not possibly hope to keep any semblance of your stellar geography. When the barytrine field goes on, it will produce an effect similar to reaching the splice in a reel of film. With no warning, no pain, strain, nor furor the sun will snap slightly aside to its new position. On the night-side the stars will flick instantly to a new pattern. This sort of change would cause great hysteria and fear. Unless the people are prepared for the sudden change. So, Dusty, you as a high official in your Space Patrol must carry our message to your people."

Dusty said, "But--"

"You've mentioned the possibility of payment," said Scyth smoothly. "We expect and intend to pay. But not in money, Dusty. In service and commerce and in many other ways. For instance, we know that your group--I cannot call it your 'race' because your race is ours--must stem from an early expedition and so you are a lost offshoot. As soon as we can, we will come to you with teachers and learned men to help you regain your rightful place as a part of our Galactic Culture."