CHAPTER 3 .

It was a queer place, they soon learned. The climate was cool, but pleasant. There were no radio waves beneath a readily detectable ionosphere. Yet apparatus over an area three hundred miles by an average sixty—the white spot—had responded in seconds; in parts of seconds. Which meant electric control. Which implied radio. But there were no radio waves, which should have been proof that there was no civilization on this planet capable of doing what certainly had been done. Which was nonsense. On the fourth day after landing there had been no alarm, but there was a good-sized group of furry bipeds always waiting hopefully about the Danaë for one of the humans to come out and scratch them. All but Sattell. When he came out of the Danaë, the bipeds moved away. They would not go near him.

"I am not comfortable," Borden said to Jerry. "Something drained power from us. Enough to run the ship for two years was drained out in eight seconds! But we land, and the only inhabitants are your fine furry friends whose one purpose in life seems to be to get scratched. They act more like pets than wild animals, and sometimes more like people than pets. But if they're pets, did their masters try to kill us? What does go on on this planet, anyhow?"

Jerry said modestly, "I'm beginning to understand the furry creatures a little, sir. They're remarkably intelligent, for animals. They want me to go somewhere with them. I'd like to. Is it all right?"

Borden said, "If you think it's safe. Ellen has the planting well under way, and the fuel synthesizer is working after a fashion, although I'd a lot rather have it working near the equator. I'm getting along fairly well with rebuilding our drive, but there's a long job ahead. If other planetary inhabitants don't find us and kill us, we're all right. If they do find us, what you do won't matter. Go along if you like, within reason. But I wish you could take Sattell with you."

That couldn't be done. The two-legged creatures hung about the ship wearing an air of happy anticipation when all the humans were inside, and flopping eagerly on their backs to be scratched, when they came out. But when Sattell tried to approach one of the creatures, they fled as if in terror. Not one had ever been knowingly within a hundred yards of him—and he hated them.

When Jerry first reported that they had some sort of language and could exchange simple facts—he didn't know whether they could exchange ideas or not—Sattell savagely insisted that those who knew of the existence of the ship should be killed, and any others who discovered it also killed. The idea would be to keep the news of the Danaë's landing from reaching whatever other race might inhabit the white spot of the heat-ray.

But there were always some of the furry ones around. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Maybe only the same ones came to the ship. Maybe they went away and others took their places. Neither Borden nor Jerry was sure, but both demurred at killing. Besides, the news had already gone as far as such creatures were likely to take it before Sattell proposed to wipe them out.

Sattell raged when he was overruled. He was overruled over most things because he couldn't be trusted. Borden wouldn't let him work on the drive. He might try to make sure that if he didn't get back to Earth, nobody else should, either.

Ellen took the dibble stick and the seed capsules and planted the crop that might supply them with food. Each seed was enclosed in a gelatine capsule with a bit of fertilizer and a spore culture of terrestrial soil micro-organisms. Planted, by the time moisture reached the seed there was a bed of Earth's own microscopic soil-flora around the seed to help it grow.

But Sattell couldn't be trusted to plant seed, either, if the others would benefit.

He couldn't even be allowed to work the fuel synthesizer. In that apparatus plain water entered a force-field in which H¹ and H² simply could not exist as molecules or ions. So the atoms frantically absorbed heat energy from their surroundings to make pseudo valence-bonds and develop giant hydrogen molecules which could only be written down as being of molecular weight.

The fuel synthesizer was set up a good half-mile from the space-ship and was developing a small ice-cap of its own. But it would be a long time before there was drive fuel to refill the ship's tanks. Sattell might sabotage that.

So he had to be treated as the pampered guest of those who believed implicitly in his will to murder them. All arms were safely locked away. Even the air-lock fastening had to be dismantled, so he couldn't lock everybody else out of the ship.

And Borden and Ellen and Jerry went armed, and had nerve-rackingly to be on guard at all times. But it would have been ridiculous to confine Sattell so he had the status of a nonworking guest because he was a potential murderer.

There was not much for Jerry to do either, except hold conferences with his admirers. On the fifth twenty-hour day after the Danaë's landing, Jerry set off with an excited mob of furry, trunk-waving friends. He carried a walkie-talkie, depending on the absence of radio waves from the planet's atmosphere to make its use safe.

Two hours after he had headed north toward the ice, Borden and Ellen came back from an inspection tour of the crops and fuel synthesizer, and found that Sattell had disappeared, too. He'd taken all the food he could conveniently carry from their depressingly short supply.

Borden swore bitterly. Sattell underfoot was a nuisance and a menace. But Sattell at large might be more, and worse. There was no glamor in being cast-away on this alien world, such as is shown in visi-screen plays. The Danaë was a small utility ship, suitable for small expeditions for scientific purposes, or for the staking out of private planetary estates—a common practice, these days—and the servicing of such establishments.

Her eighty-foot length now rested slightly askew in the pit her landing had made. About her was arctic flora, and the thick fur of the bipeds suggested that they were arctic animals themselves. But here close to the ice-cap was the only place on this planet where a man might hope to survive. It was madness for Sattell to leave the ship.

"It doesn't make sense!" Borden said. "What has he to gain? He was afraid we'd go off and maroon him. We can't do that with crops going, the synthesizer working, and the drive pulled down. So what can he gain by running off?"

Ellen said uneasily, "Jerry's armed. And he won't be suspecting anything."

Borden scowled. "Get out the talkie and warn him. If Sattell surprises Jerry and gets his blaster, he might bushwhack us!" Ellen brought out the talkie. She turned it on and said crisply: "Jerry, Sattell's disappeared. Come in please." Jerry did not answer. Borden paced up and down, frowning and thinking of ever more disastrous possibilities.

"Bring the talkie into the ship," he said presently. "We'll hook it to an outside aerial. Jerry won't be traveling with his turned on. But he's bound to call us eventually."

He took the talkie from her, carried it inside the ship, and plugged it in there. In minutes a speaker in the control room was emitting the nondescript hissing which was the random electronic noises made by metal objects nearby. The ship itself, for one.

"I'm going to look in Sattell's cabin," said Borden grimly.

That was drastic action. On a space journey privacy is at once so difficult and so essential that nobody on a space expedition ever enters another's private cabin. To look in Sattell's cabin was a great violation of normal rules of conduct. But it had to be done now.

Borden went in the cabin and through Sattell's possessions. He came out looking sick.

"I found something," he told Ellen. "When we were coming in I looked at that white spot through a telescope. I didn't see anything worth noting, but I snapped the telecamera out of pure habit. Then I forgot it. But Sattell didn't. He made this."

He showed her a photographic print. Sattell had made it from the infra red image on the full color photograph. It was an enlargement, showing more detail than Borden had seen with the naked eye. There were shadows on this print, the shadows of structures. There were buildings rising from the white. There were towers. There was a city on the white spot from which a heat-ray had been projected at the Danaë out in space!

Quite as important, the threadlike lines they had noticed were here plainly highways leading away from it. One led north, judging directions from the shadows. It reached toward the polar ice-cap near which the small space-ship was grounded.

"If Sattell really expects us to kill him," said Borden, "he could have headed for that highway. He might expect to make a deal with our enemies by selling us out. Even if they killed him out of hand, the fact that he was an alien would make them hunt for us. So he could figure that he might make friends, but even if he didn't he would be sure to ruin us. A win for him either way."

Ellen paled a little. "And the drive's pulled down and Jerry's gone."

"So there's nothing to do but wait and see," said Borden.

He tried to work on the space-drive. All its parts were spread out on the drive room floor. When they'd repaired it before, it had been so thoroughly fused that a part looked good even if repaired to the accuracy of a bent wax candle straightened out by hand.

Now the repairs looked very bad. It seemed incredible that anything so clumsily made should have worked. But Borden couldn't keep his mind on it.

"Just on the off chance, Ellen," he said abruptly, "you will not leave the ship by yourself. We'd better replace the lock-door fastening, too. If we do have visitors from the city on the white spot, that won't stop them. But it might keep them from taking us off-guard."

He opened the thief-proof locker where an essential part of the lock-catch had been stored, to protect it from Sattell. It had a combination fastening, intended merely to prevent pilfering when the ship was in a space-port.

Borden reached in. Then he went completely and terribly white.

"He's got the star charts and the log! He got in here somehow!"

This was the ultimate in disaster. Because space is trackless. At fifty light years from Earth the Milky Way is still plain, of course, but the constellations have ceased to be. At a hundred light years one is lost. At a thousand light years—and the Danaë had passed that point months ago—a ship in space is in much the position of a canary whose universe has consisted of a cage in a single room, and has escaped out a window into the wide, wide world.

A space-ship has to keep an infinitely precise log of bearings run and distances traveled in all three dimensions. It must make photographic star charts. And the accuracy of all its records must be perfect if it is to find the place it left nearly enough for the stars to become familiar again so it can locate the Solar System—barely four light hours in span.

"I think I made a serious mistake," Borden said quietly, "when I didn't kill Sattell!"

To find a spot four light years across in a galaxy a hundred thousand light years wide would be difficult enough with good maps. With no maps, they could spend the rest of their lives wandering hopelessly among the stars, of which not one in ten thousand had yet been named by men, landing on planets not one in a hundred thousand of which had known human footsteps. And they might search for months or years upon a planet where there was a human colony, and never discover its location.

Borden clenched and unclenched his hands. Sattell had been foisted upon him as a crew-member while the Danaë was being fitted out for space. Borden was filled with a deadly cold fury in which regret for his own past forbearance was his principal emotion.

"Since he's taken the log and charts," he told Ellen icily, "he means either to bargain with us or to destroy us. And if I know Sattell, it's six of one and half a dozen of the other!"

It would be. Sattell now had the power of life and death over Borden and Ellen and Jerry. He would not trade that power for anything less. In fact, he would not dare yield it at all, because he was so sure he would be killed himself if he did. The only bargain he could conceivably make would be one in which they surrendered themselves to him absolutely, armed him and disarmed themselves, and threw themselves on Sattell's mercy. And Sattell had little mercy.

"You might try calling Jerry again," said Borden. "Once we've warned him, we can try to track Sattell by his footprints. His shoes have heels, and the ground is soft."

Ellen picked up the walkie-talkie microphone again.

"Jerry, Sattell's disappeared. Come in, please.... Jerry, Sattell's disappeared. Come in, please...."

Her voice went on and on. Borden went grimly over the ship, looking for signs of what else Sattell might have busied himself with in the past twenty-four hours. He had believed that Sattell, being in the same boat with the rest of them—in the same space-ship, anyhow—would automatically have thought of the group. No sane man did think of anything but cooperation with his companions in disaster.

But there exists a kind of human being, he knew, which may be a mutant, which makes a career of the gratification of all emotions, impulses, momentary desires. Which knows no purpose save personal satisfaction, and simply does not think like nonmutant human beings. There were all too many specimens of this type among humans. Some ordinarily masked themselves, but if Sattell ever had, he now had been unmasked.