Read Ebook: A Matter of Importance by Leinster Murray

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Ebook has 245 lines and 17080 words, and 5 pages

He centered the shoreline of the bay and put on maximum magnification. Then he pointed a stubby forefinger. A singular, perfectly straight streak of black appeared, beginning a little distance inland from the bay and running up into what appeared to be higher ground. The streak ended not far from a serpentine arm of the sea which almost cut the island in half.

The squad ship drove for ground.

Patrolman Willis steadied the ship no more than a few thousand feet high, above the streak of scorched ground and ashes.

"It was heading inland, all right," rumbled Sergeant Madden. "Lucky! If it'd been heading the other way, it could've gone out and landed in the sea. That would ha' been a mess! But where is it?"

"Set down," grunted Sergeant Madden.

Patrolman Willis obeyed. The squad ship came to rest in a minor valley, a few hundred yards from the end of the rocket-blast trail. Sergeant Madden got out. Patrolman Willis followed him. This was a duly surveyed and recommended refuge planet. There was no need to check the air or take precautions against inimical animal or vegetable life. The planet was safe.

They clambered over small rocky obstacles until they came to the end of the scorched line. They surveyed the state of things in silence.

A ship had landed here recently. Its blue-white rocket flames had melted gulleys in the soil, turned it to slag, and then flung silky, gossamer threads of slag-wool over the rocks nearby.

At the end of the melted-away hollows, twin slag-lined holes went down deep into the ground. They were take-off holes. Rockets had burned them deeply as they gathered force to lift the ship away again.

Sergeant Madden scrambled to the edge of the nearest blast-well. He put his hand on the now-solidified, glassy slag. It wasn't warm, but it wasn't cold. The glass-lined hole a rocket leaves takes a long time to cool down.

"She landed here, all right," he grunted. "But she took off again before the torp arrived to tell us about it."

Willis protested:

"But, sergeant! She only had one set of rockets! She couldn't have taken off again! She didn't have the rockets to do it with!"

"I know she couldn't," growled the sergeant. "But she did."

There was also the fact that no ship which had made such a landing would have extra rockets with which to take off for departure.

Patrolman Willis asked hesitantly:

"D'you think, sergeant, it could be Huks sneaked back--?"

Sergeant Madden did not answer. He went back to the squad ship and armed himself. Patrolman Willis followed suit. The sergeant boobied the squad ship so no unauthorized person could make use of it, and so it would disable itself if anyone with expert knowledge tried. Therefore, nobody with expert knowledge would try.

Sergeant Madden and Patrolman Willis were, self-evidently, the only human beings on a planet some nine thousand miles in diameter. It was easy to compute that the nearest other humans would be at least some thousands of thousands of millions of miles away--so far away that distance had no meaning. This planet was something over nine-tenth rolling sea, but there were a few tens of thousands of square miles of solid ground in the one archipelago that broke the ocean's surface. It was such loneliness as very few people ever experience. But they did not notice it. They were busy.

"Where'd the other ship land?"

Patrolman Willis blinked at him.

"There had to be another ship!" said Sergeant Madden irritably. "To bring the extra rockets. The other ship had to've brought 'em. And it had to have rockets of its own. There's no spaceport here!"

Patrolman Willis frowned.

"We looked pretty carefully from aloft," he said uncomfortably. "If there'd been another burned-off landing place, we'd have seen it."

Patrolman Willis hesitated, and then said:

"There used to be pirates, sergeant."

"Uh-huh," said the sergeant. "You had it right the first time, most likely. Not delinks. Not pirates. You said Huks." He looked around, estimatingly. "The rockets had to be brought here from somewhere else where they'd been landed. I'm betting the tracks were covered pretty careful. But rockets are heavy. Manhandlin' them, whoever was doin' it would take the easiest way. Hm-m-m. There's water close by over yonder. Sort of a sound in there--too narrow to be a bay. Let's have a look. And the slopes are easiest that way, too."

The route he chose was rocky, but it was nearly the only practicable route away from the burned-dead landing place. He climbed toward what on this planet was the east. There were pinnacles and small precipices. There were small, fleshy-leaved bushes growing out of such tiny collections of soil as had formed in cracks and crevices in the rock.

"Who did it?" demanded Patrolman Willis.

"Who we want to know about," growled Sergeant Madden. "Maybe Huks. Come on!"

He scrambled ahead. He wheezed as he climbed and descended. After half a mile, Patrolman Willis said abruptly:

"You figure they all left, before anybody tried to find 'em?"

The sergeant grunted affirmatively. A quarter mile still farther, the rocky ground fell away. There was the gleam of water below them. Rocky cliffs enclosed an arm of the sea that came deep into the land, here. In the cliffs rock-strata tilted insanely. There were red and yellow and black layers--mostly yellow and black. They showed in startlingly clear contrast.

"Right!" said Sergeant Madden in morose satisfaction. "I thought there might've been a boat. But this's it!"

He went down a steep descent to the very edge of the sound--it was even more like a fjord--where the waters of the ocean came in among the island's hills. On the far side, a little cascade leaped and bubbled down to join the sea.

He lumbered away along the water's edge. There were no creatures which sang or chirped. The only sounds were wind and the lapping of waves against the shore. It was very, very lonely.

Half a mile from the point of his first descent, the sergeant found a shoal. It was a flat space of shallow water--discoverable by the color of the bottom. The water was not over four feet deep. It was a remarkably level shoal place.

He whistled on his fingers. When Patrolman Willis reached him, he pointed to the cliffs directly across the beach from the shallow water. Lurid yellow tints stained the cliff walls. Odd masses of fallen stone dotted the cliff foot. At one place they were piled high. That pile looked quite natural--except that it was at the very center of the shore line next the shoal.

"This rock's yellow," said Sergeant Madden, rumbling a little. "It's mineral. If we had a Geiger, it'd be raising hell, here. There's a mine in there. Uranium. If a ship came down on rockets, an' landed in that shoal place yonder ... why ... it wouldn't leave a burned spot comin' down or takin' off, either. Y'see?"

Patrolman Willis said: "Look here, sergeant--"

Patrolman Willis expostulated. Sergeant Madden was firm. In the end, Patrolman Willis went away. And Sergeant Madden sat at ease and rested until he had time enough to get back to the squad ship. It was true that the Huks didn't booby trap. They hadn't had the practice, anyhow, eighty years ago. But this was a very important matter. Maybe they considered it so important that they'd changed their policy concerning this.

Wheezing a little, Sergeant Madden pulled away large stones and small ones. An opening appeared behind them. He grunted and continued his labor. Nothing happened. The mouth of a mine shaft appeared, going horizontally into the cliff.

Puffing from his exertions, Sergeant Madden went in. It was necessary if he were to make a routine examination.

He paused, frowning.

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

The sergeant scowled at him and went on.

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

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

"This looks likely!" said the sergeant. "Unsurveyed, and off the ship 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.

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

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