Rogue Ship

11

John Lesbee IV did not pause in his picking of the ripened fruit. The nearest wall of the hydroponic gardens was two hundred feet away, but his caution was boundless. He listened with a deliberate casualness as the girl spoke to him: 'Mother says the sparks started two days ago. So we must be near Procyon.'

Lesbee IV said nothing. He accepted the old explanation for the spark phenomenon, that they occurred wherever there were two or more suns to draw huge numbers of high-energy particles from each other's magnetic fields and accelerate them far out into interstellar space.

Although his pretense at leadership was wearing thin, he had 'policies,' one of which was that he did not discuss technical matters with his followers. He had given the girl her instructions the 'night' before. It was now up to her to make a report.

His fingers continued their automatic movements as she went on: 'The others think you should run in this election. Browne is putting his older son up for the council. If we can elect you in his place-' She stopped; then: 'Remember, you're now twenty-nine years old. And the council still has paid no attention to your rights. You'll have to fight for them.'

Lesbee IV made no answer. He felt a weariness at these stupid people who were always urging him to come out into the open. Didn't they realize the danger? And besides, it was important to wait till they had been to Procyon. Then, with Earth as the next destination, the scoundrels who had cheated him out of his rights would begin to think twice.

'If you don't act,' said the girl anxiously, 'the men are going to take things into their own hands. They're tired – we're all tired – of doing all the hard work, and getting the poorest food. Gourdy says' – she paused – 'we'll take the ship.'

She sounded awed. And for the first time Lesbee made a dismissing motion that had nothing to do with fruit picking. 'Aaaaa!' he said, and brought his hand down, contemptuously. These ignorant fools, he thought. They didn't know what they were talking about.

Take the ship indeed – a bunch of working people, who had never even seen space, except on a screen.

'You'd better hurry!' the girl said. 'You'd better hurry and make up your mind -'

The vague reports of the underground resurrection that was developing failed to disturb Captain Browne. 'Those dirty beggars,' he said to Lieutenant George Browne, his younger son and chief officer of the ship, 'haven't enough brains to steal my hat. Besides, just wait until they find out what my plans are when we get into the Procyon system. That'll make them think twice.'

The younger Browne said nothing. He considered his father a fool, and it had already struck him that it would be a long, long time before the burly captain would start to decline seriously. At a hundred and four, the commander looked good for another twenty years.

It was a long time to wait for the captaincy. He'd be an old man himself before it happened. The subject was one that he had already discussed with his elder brother, who was due to run for the council at the elections next month.

Perhaps he should also let the underground group become aware of the tenor of his thoughts. A few vague promises -

Procyon A, with six times the luminosity of Sol, swam in the darkness ahead. A yellow-white sun, it loomed larger and larger, brighter and brighter. In the blackness, billions of miles to one side, Procyon B was a pale husk of a sun, clearly visible only in the telescopes.

Surprisingly, Procyon boasted more planets than had the brilliant, the massively bright Sirius. Twenty-five huge worlds revealed themselves in the telescopes. The ship investigated the two, with diameters of twenty-five thousand miles, found both were inhabited) and both had predominantly chlorine atmospheres.

'These other fellows had good ideas,' said Captain Browne, 'but they never gave these alien civilizations credit for goodwill. The thing we've got to remember is, not once have the inhabitants of these systems made any attempt to harm us. You may say, what about old Captain Lesbee? Nonsense, I say. He looked at something that wasn't for human eyes, it wrecked his brain, and he died. The important thing is, that thing in the shell that looked at him had the ship completely at its mercy, and it made no effort to do damage.

'So!' The big captain looked around the council room. 'Where does that leave us? In the best position we've ever been in. Old man Lesbee didn't dare to force issues at Centaurus because he was dealing with the unknown. At Sirius we got scared and beat it because the unknown showed itself to be absolutely and completely unhuman. But now we know. There seems to be an interstellar civilization here, and it can tell us what we want to know. What do we want to know? Why, which stars have Earth-sized planets with oxygen atmospheres.

'They don't care if we find them. Why should they? Oxygen planets are forever beyond their reach, just as sulfur and chlorine planets are beyond ours.

'All right then, let's tell them what we want to know. How?' He gri

Actually, it was the fourth ship that found out. The first three ignored the Hope of Man. The fourth one came to a full stop in the space of a score of miles. It returned to within a hundred yards of the Earth ship, and remained quiet throughout the whole of the show that Browne put on.

The mechanism he used was simple enough. He rigged a huge motion-picture screen inside one of the lifeboats, then sent the lifeboat outside. The projector was mounted inside the bridge, and the series of pictures that followed showed the Hope of Man leaving Earth, arriving first at Alpha Centauri, then at Sirius and the discovery that the inhabited planets were based on chlorine and sulfur atmospheres respectively.

This was shown by the simple method of projecting beside the planets pictures of the atomic structures of chlorine and sulfur. Earth was pictured with oxygen and nitrogen, although it was assumed that these beings would understand that it was the oxygen that made life possible.

Then began the most important phase of the weird showing. A star map was flashed on to the screen. It pictured sixty-odd stars within twenty light-years of Sol. Onto this scene was imposed a triumvirate of atomic structures – chlorine, oxygen, sulfur. The trio was jerked in front of one sun, held for a moment, then moved on to another.

'Let's see,' said Browne, 'how quickly they catch on that we don't know what kind of atmosphere the planets on those stars have.'

They caught on as the camera was moving its three-headed question mark from the sixth to the seventh star. They acted by blotting out the moving trio. Onto the stationary map they imposed a solid rank of atomic structures, one beside each star.

Browne counted four that were shown as having oxygen atmospheres. As he watched, another star map was synchronized with the Earth one. It showed thousands of suns, and beside each one was the revealing atomic symbol that indicated the nature of the atmospheres of the habitable planets.

He saw that the alien ship was moving away; its image on the screen swiftly grew smaller.

'Get the lifeboat in!' Browne commanded. 'I guess we'd better get started, too. I think I'll recommend that we go to Alta. That's the nearest.'

Later, as he reported to the council, there was an almost fatuous smile on his large face. He was proud of himself. His plan had worked, and so an Earth-born vessel had a film record of scores, perhaps hundreds, of planets that might be colonized by human beings.

The feeling of success suffused him, as he let his gaze move from face to face. He wondered if these councillors were thinking what they should: how right they had been to elect him captain at their a