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trained on the dirigible. He knew there would be nothing fresh to see he
was just passing the time but then his attention was caught by a bright,
intermittent flickering. A weapon? Hardly. It did not look like muzzie
flashes, and surely these people did not yet have laser. The reflection of the
sunlight from a control cabin window? Probably. He realized that he was
trying to read the long and short flashes as though they were Morse, and
laughed at himself for making the futile attempt.
Hoses in, sir.
Good. Grimes started to walk back to his control chair and stopped
in mid-stride as a violent explosion from somewhere outside shook the
ship. In the lake! somebody was shouting. The lake! Over the suddenly
disturbed water a column of spray, intermingled with dirty yellow smoke,
was slowly subsiding. And something big and black and glistening had
surfaced, was threshing in its death throes. But nobody could spare the
time to look at it to determine what manner of beast it was. There was a
second burst, a flame-centered eruption of sand and water on the beach
itself, closer to the ship than the first one had been.
Suddenly that flickering light from the dirigible made sense to Grimes.
It was either a heliograph or a daylight signaling lamp, and the function of
the airship was not to attack but to spot for a surface vessel with heavy
long-range guns, hidden from Discovery s view, just as Discovery was
hidden from hers. And what was she doing? he wondered. Laddering, or
bracketing? The question was an academic one.
A third projectile screamed in this one much too close for comfort.
Fragments of stone, earth, and metal rattled against the spaceship s hull
and she shuddered and complained, rocking in her tripedal landing gear.
There was no time for normal liftoff procedure the ritual countdown, the
warning to all hands over the intercom to secure for space. There was no
time, even, for Grimes to adjust himself properly in his chair. The-inertial
drive was ready, as was the auxiliary reaction drive. He slammed the
controls of each straight from Standby to Maximum Lift, hoping
desperately that at this time, of all times, the temperamental engines
would not decide to play up. The violent acceleration pushed him deep
into the padding of his seat; others, not so lucky, were thrown to the deck.
Discovery did not have time to complain about the rough handling.
(Normally she was the sort of ship that creaks and groans piteously at the
least provocation.) She went up like a shot from a gun and a real shot,
from a real gun, blew a smoking crater into the ground upon which she,
only a split second before, had been resting.
Upward she roared on her column of incandescent steam, with the
overworked inertial drive deafeningly cacophonous. Already the island was
showing as a map in the periscope screen. Off the northern coast, a gray
slug on the blue water, stood the warship. There was a scintillation of
yellow flashes as her guns, hastily elevated, loosed off a wild, futile salvo,
and another, and another. The shell bursts were all well below the rapidly
climbing Discovery.
Laboriously Grimes turned his head, forcing it around against the
crushing weight of acceleration, looked through the viewports. The airship
was closer now, driving in at its maximum speed. But it did not matter.
Discovery would be well above the dirigible by the time the courses
intersected, at such an altitude that the down-licking exhaust would be
dissipated, would not ignite the hydrogen in the gas cells. He bore the
aviators no grudge, felt only admiration for them.
Admiration, and& helpless pity.
He stared, horror-stricken, into the periscope screen as the airship, now
almost directly beneath Discovery, was caught in the turbulence of the
spaceship s wake. Giant, invisible hands caught the fragile craft, wrenched
her, twisted her, wrung her apart. But there was buoyancy still in the
sundered bow and stern sections, there was hope yet for her crew.
There was hope until chance sparks, friction engendered, ignited the
slowly escaping hydrogen. She blossomed then into a dreadful flower of
blue and yellow flame from the center of which there was a spillage of
wreckage, animate and inanimate.
Grimes cut the reaction drive. He did not wish to blow away all the
water that had been purchased at too great a cost. He continued his
passage up through the atmosphere on inertial drive only. It was time that
he started to think about the casualties among his own people the
sprains, contusions, and abrasions, if nothing worse. He told Brabham to
get hold of Dr. Rath and to find out how things were. Luckily nobody in
the control room was badly hurt; everybody there had seen what was
happening, had been given a chance to prepare for what was going to
happen.
Grimes pushed the ship up and out, looking with regret at the
dwindling world displayed in the screen. There was so much that could
have been learned about it and its people, so much that should have been
learned.
But, as far as he was concerned, it was no more than a big black mark
on his service record.
Chapter Twenty
« ^ »
So he was back in Deep Space again and the planet, the native name of
which he had never learned, was no more than a tiny shapeless blob of
luminescence, barely discernible to one side of the greater (but fast
diminishing) blob that was its primary, Star 1717 in the Ballchin Catalog.
He was back in Deep Space, and trajectory had been set for 1716, and
Discovery had settled down, more or less, to her normal Deep Space
routine.
More or less.
Officers and ratings were doing their jobs as usual and also as
usual in a manner that wasn t quite grossly inefficient. The ship was even
less happy than she ever had been. Cases of minor insubordination were
all too common, and all too often the insubordination had been provoked.
Perhaps, hoped Grimes, things would be better after planetfall had been
made on the most likely world of Star 1716. Perhaps that world would
prove to be the home of a Lost Colony, with genuinely human inhabitants.
Perhaps it would be possible to make an unopposed landing and to
establish amicable relations with the people at once, .in which case
everybody (including, eventually, the Lords Commissioners of the
Admiralty) would be happy.
Meanwhile, he did not forget his promise to Captain Davinas. He made
out the message, using the simple code that he and the tramp master had
agreed upon. To: Davinos, d/s/s Sundowner. Happy Birthday. Peter.
There would be little chance of such a short transmission being picked up
by the Waverley monitors. It was transmitted on a tight beam, not
broadcast, directed at the Carlotti relay station on Elsinore. There it would
be picked up and immediately and automatically retransmitted,
broadcast, at regular intervals, until it was acknowledged by Sundowner.
Davinas would know from whom it came and what it meant. The Elsinore
station would know the exact direction from which it had been
beamed but the straight line from Discovery to Elsinore was a very long
one, stretching over many light-years. In the unlikely event of the
broadcast s being received by any station within the Empire of Waverley it
would be utterly meaningless.
The message on its way, he started to write his report on the
happenings on and around the unlucky planet of 1717. It would be a long
time before this report was handed in, he knew, but he wanted to get it on
paper while the events were still fresh in his memory. It would not be, he
was well aware, the only report. Brandt would be putting one in, probably
arguing during the course of it that expeditions such as this should be
under the command of scientists, not mere spacemen. The disgraced
Swinton would be writing his, addressed to the General Officer
Commanding Federation Space Marines, claiming, most certainly, that by
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