A Matter of Importance Part 3

The _Aldeb_ came in a full day later. It descended, following the s.p.a.ce beacon the squad s.h.i.+p sent up from its resting place. The _Aldeb_ was not an impressive sight, of course. It was a medium-sized police salvage s.h.i.+p. It had a crew of fifteen, and it was powerfully engined, and it contained a respectable amount of engineering experience and ability, plus some spare parts and, much more important, the tools with which to make others. It came down in a highly matter-of-fact fas.h.i.+on, and Sergeant Madden and Patrolman Willis went over to it to explain the situation.

"The _Cerberus_ came in on rockets," rumbled the sergeant, in the salvage s.h.i.+p's skipper's cabin. "She landed. We found signs that some of her people came out an' strolled around lookin' for souvenirs and such.

I make a guess that there was a minin' man among them, but it's only a guess. Anyhow somebody went over to where there's some parti-colored cliffs, where the sea comes away inland. And when they got to that place ... why ... there was a s.h.i.+p there. Then."

He paused, frowning.

"It would've been standing on an artificial shoal place, about thirty yards from a shaft that was the mouth of a mine. Uranium. And there's been a lot of uranium taken outta there! It was hauled right outta the mine shaft across the beach to the s.h.i.+p that was waitin'. And there's fresh work in that mine, but not a tool or a sc.r.a.p of paper to tell who was workin' it. It must've been cleaned up like that every time a s.h.i.+p left after loadin' up. Humans wouldn't've done it. They wouldn't care.

Huks would. There's not supposed to be any of them left in these parts, but I'm guessing the mine was dug by Huks, and the _Cerberus_ was taken away by them because the humans on the _Cerberus_ found out there was Huks around."

Patrolman Willis said: "The sergeant took a chance on the mine being b.o.o.by-trapped and went in, after sending me out of range."

The sergeant scowled at him and went on.

"How it happened don't matter. Maybe somebody spotted the s.h.i.+p from the _Cerberus_ as it was comin' down. Maybe anything. But whoever run the mine found out somebody knew they were there, so they rushed the _Cerberus_--there prob'ly wasn't even a stun-pistol on board to fight with--and they put new rockets on her."

The skipper of the salvage s.h.i.+p _Aldeb_ nodded wisely.

"A s.h.i.+p comin' to load up minerals where there wasn't any s.p.a.ceport," he observed, "would have a set of rockets to land on, empty, and a double set to take off on, loaded. Yeah."

"They must've figured," said Sergeant Madden, "that we just couldn't make any sense out of what we found. And if we hadn't turned up that mine, maybe never would. But anyhow they sent the _Cerberus_ off and covered everything up and went off to stay, themselves, until we gave up and went home."

"I wonder," said the skipper of the _Aldeb_, "where they took the _Cerberus_? That's my job!"

"Not far," grunted Sergeant Madden. "They had to be taking the _Cerberus_ somewhere. If they just wanted to wipe it out, after they rushed it, they coulda just set off its fuel like it'd happened in a bad landing. And that landing was bad! If there'd been a fuel-explosion crater at the end of that burnt line on the ground, n.o.body'd ever've looked further. But there wasn't. So there's a place they're takin' the _Cerberus_ to. But it's got a brokedown drive. It can only hobble along.

They can't try to get but so far! What's the nearest sol-type star?"

The _Aldeb_'s skipper pushed a b.u.t.ton and the Precinct Atlas came out of its slot. The skipper punched keys and the atlas clicked and whirred.

Then its screen lighted. It showed a report on a solar system that had been fully surveyed.

"Uh-uh," grunted the sergeant. "A survey woulda showed up if a planet was Huk-occupied. What's next nearest?"

Again the atlas whirred and clicked. A single line of type appeared. It said, "_Sirene, 1432. Unsurveyed._" The galactic co-ordinates followed.

That was all.

"This looks likely!" said the sergeant. "Unsurveyed, and off the s.h.i.+p lanes. It ain't between any place and any other. It could go a thousand years and never be landed on. It's got planets."

It was highly logical. According to Krishnamurti's Law, any sol-type sun was bound to have planets of such-and-such relative sizes in orbits of such-and-such relative distances.

"Willis and me," said the sergeant, "we'll go over and see if there's Huks there and if they've got the _Cerberus_. You better get this stuff on a message-torp ready to send off if you have to. Are you going to come over to this--Sirene 1432?"

The skipper of the _Aldeb_ shrugged.

"Might as well. Why go home and have to come back again? There could be a lot of Huks there."

"Yeah," admitted Sergeant Madden. "I'd guess a whole planet full of 'em that laid low when the rest were sc.r.a.pping with the Force. The others lost and went clean across the galaxy. These characters stayed close.

I'm guessing. But they hid their mine, here. They could've been stewing in their own juice these past eighty years, getting set to put up a h.e.l.l of a sc.r.a.p when somebody found 'em. We'll be the ones to do it."

He stood up and shook himself.

"It's not far," he repeated. "Our boat's just fast enough we ought to get there a couple of days after the _Cerberus_ sets down. You'd ought to be five-six hours behind us." He considered. "Meet you north pole farthest planet out this side of the sun. Right?"

"I'll look for you there," said the skipper of the _Aldeb_.

Sergeant Madden and Patrolman Willis went out of the salvage s.h.i.+p and trudged to the squad s.h.i.+p. They climbed in.

"You got the co-ordinates?" asked the sergeant.

"I copied them off the atlas," said Willis.

Sergeant Madden settled himself comfortably.

"We'll go over," he grumbled, "and see what makes these Huks tick. They raised a lot of h.e.l.l, eighty years ago. It took all the off-duty men from six precincts to handle the last riot. The Huks had got together and built themselves a fightin' fleet then, though. It's not likely there's more than one planetful of them where we're going. I thought they'd all been moved out."

He shook his head vexedly.

"No need for 'em to have to go, except they wouldn't play along with humans. Acted like delinks, they did. Only proud. Y'don't get mad fighting 'em. So I heard, anyway. If they only had sense you could get along with them."

He dogged the door shut. Patrolman Willis pushed a b.u.t.ton. The squad s.h.i.+p fell toward the sky.

Very matter-of-factly.

On the way over, in overdrive, Sergeant Madden again dozed a great deal of the time. Sergeants do not fraternize extensively with mere patrolmen, even on a.s.signments. Especially not very senior sergeants only two years from retirement. Patrolman Willis met with the sergeant's approval, to be sure. Timmy was undoubtedly more competent as a cop, but Timmy would have been in a highly emotional state with his girl on the _Cerberus_ and that s.h.i.+p in the hands of the Huks.

Between naps, the sergeant somnolently went over what he knew about the alien race. He'd heard that their thumbs were on the outside of their hands. Intelligent nonhumans would have to have hands, and with some equivalent of opposable thumbs, if their intelligence was to be of any use to them. They pretty well had to be bipeds, too, and if they weren't warm-blooded they couldn't have the oxygen-supply that highgrade brain cells require.

There were even certain necessary psychological facts. They had to be capable of learning and of pa.s.sing on what they'd learned, or they'd never have gotten past an instinctual social system. To pa.s.s on acquired knowledge, they had to have family units in which teaching was done to the young--at least at the beginning. Schools might have been invented later. Most of all, their minds had to work logically to cope with a logically constructed universe. In fact, they had to be very much like humans, in almost all significant respects, in order to build up a civilization and develop sciences and splendidly to invade s.p.a.ce just a few centuries before humans found them.

_But_, said Sergeant Madden to himself, _I bet they've still got armies and navies!_

Patrolman Willis looked at him inquiringly, but the sergeant scowled at his own thoughts. Yet the idea was very likely. When Huks first encountered humans, they bristled with suspicion. They were definitely on the defensive when they learned that humans had been in s.p.a.ce longer--much longer--than they had, and already occupied planets in almost fifteen per cent of the galaxy.

Sergeant Madden found his mind obscurely switching to the matter of delinks--those characters who act like adolescents, not only while they are kids, but after. They were the permanent major annoyance of the cops, because what they did didn't make sense. Learned books explained why people went delink, of course. Mostly it was that they were madly ambitious to be significant, to matter in some fas.h.i.+on, and didn't have the ability to matter in the only ways they could understand. They wanted to drive themselves to eminence, and frantically s.n.a.t.c.hed at chances to make themselves nuisances because they couldn't wait to be important any other way.

Sergeant Madden blinked slowly to himself. When humans first took to s.p.a.ce a lot of them were after glamour, which is the seeming of importance. His son Timmy was on the cops because he thought it glamorous. Patrolman Willis was probably the same way. Glamour is the offer of importance. An offer of importance is glamour.

The sergeant grunted to himself. A possible course of action came into his mind. He and Patrolman Willis were on the way to the solar system Sirene 1432, where Krishnamurti's Law said there ought to be something very close to a terran-type planet in either the third or fourth orbit out from the sun. That planet would be inhabited by Huks, who were very much like humans. They knew of the defeat and forced emigration of their fellow-Huks in other solar systems. They'd hidden from humans--and it must have outraged their pride. So they must be ready to put up a desperate and fanatical fight if they were ever discovered.

A squad s.h.i.+p with two cops in it, and a dumpy salvage s.h.i.+p with fifteen more, did not make an impressive force to try to deal with a planetary population which bitterly hated humans. But the cops did not plan conquest. They were neither a fighting rescue expedition nor a punitive one. They were simply cops on a.s.signment to get the semi-freighter _Cerberus_ back in shape to travel on her lawful occasions among the stars, and to see that she and her pa.s.sengers and crew got to the destination for which they'd started. The cop's purpose was essentially routine. And the Huks couldn't possibly imagine it.

Sergeant Madden settled some things in his mind and dozed off again.