Protector

“Not at the moment,” said Nick. “Don’t call back, because we’re going to be too busy landing.” He signed off. He sat drumming on the console with long, tapering fingers. “Helium. That ought to tell us something.”

“A small world with no moon,” Luke speculated. “Big moons tend to skim away a planet’s atmosphere. The Earth would look like Venus without her oversized moon. The helium would be the first to go, wouldn’t it?”

“Maybe. It would also be the first to leave a small planet. Think about the Outsider’s strength. It was no small planet he came from.”

Nick and Luke were men who would stop to think before speaking. Conversation aboard U Thant would lapse for minutes, then take up just where it had left off.

“What then?”

“From somewhere in a gas cloud, with lots of helium. The galactic core is in the direction he came from. Plenty of gas clouds and dust clouds in that direction.”

“But thaes an unholy distance away. Will you stop that drumming?”

“It helps me think. Like your smoking.”

“Drum then.”

“Theres no limit to how far he could have come. The faster a Bussard ramjet ship moves, the more fuel it would pick up.”

“There has to be a limit at which the exhaust velocity equals the velocity at which the gas hits the ramscoop field.”

“Possible. But it must be way the Finagle up there. That air tank was huge. The Outsider is a long way from home.”

The autodoc was built into the back wall, set over one of the three disaster couches. Einar was in that couch. His arm was in the ’doc almost to the shoulder.

Tina watched his face. He had been getting progressively worse. It did not look like sickness; it looked like age. Einar had aged decades in the past hour. He urgently needed a human doctor… but a higher thrust than the Ox’s would have killed him, and the Ox was all they had.

Could they have stopped him? If she’d yelled at once — but then Ei

His chest stopped moving.

Tina looked up at the dial faces on the ’doc. Usually a panel covered those dials; a spaceship has enough gadgets to watch without added distractions. Tina had been looking at those dials every five minutes, for hours. This time they all showed red.

“He’s dead,” she said. She heard the surprise in her voice, and wondered at it. The cabin walls began to blur and recede.

Nate squirmed out of the control couch and bent over Einar. “And you just noticed! He must have been dead for an hour!”

“No, I swear…” Tina gulped against the rising anaesthesia in her veins. Her body was water. She was going to faint.

“Look at his face and tell me that!”

Tina climbed onto watery legs. She looked down at the ravaged face. Einar, dead, looked hundreds of years old. In sorrow and guilt and repugnance, she reached to touch the dead cheek.

“He’s still warm.”

“Warm?” Nate touched the corpse. “He’s on fire. Fever. Must have been alive seconds ago. Sorry, Tina, I jumped at conclusions. Hey! Are you all right?”

“How dangerous are these approaches?”

“Get that brave little quiver out of your voice,” said Nick. It was pure slander; Luke was nothing but interested. “I’ve made a couple of hundred of these in my life. For sheer thrills I’ve never found anything to beat letting you fly me to Death Valley Port.”

“You said you were in a hurry.”

“So I did. Luke, I’d like to request an admiring silence for the next few minutes.”

“Aha! Ah HA!”

The red planet reached for them, unfolding like a wargod’s fist. Nick’s bantering mood drained away. His face took on a set, stony look. He had not been quite candid with Luke. He had made several hundred powered approaches in his life; true. But those had been asteroid approaches, with gravity negligible or nearly so.

Diemos went by in the direction technically known as “ship’s upward.” Nick inched a lever toward him. Mars was flattening out and simultaneously sliding away as they moved north.

“The base should be there,” said Luke. “At the north edge of that arc. Ah, that must be it, that little crater.”

“Use the scope.”

“Mmmmm… dammit. Ah. There it is. Deflated, of course. See it, Nick?”

“Yah.”

It looked like the abandoned shred of a sky-blue toy balloon.

Dust rose in churning clouds to meet their drive flame. Nick swore viciously and increased thrust. By now Luke had caught on to Nick’s vagaries in blasphemy. When he swore by Finagle it was for humor or emphasis. When he blasphemed in Christian fashion, he meant it.

U Thant slowed and hovered. She was above the dust, then in the dust, and gradually the ochre clouds thi

Nick said, “I’ll have to land in the crater. That dust will flow back in as soon as I turn off the motor.” He angled the ship left and killed the drive. The bottom dropped out. They fell.

They fell all the way on attitude jets, and touched with hardly a bounce.

“Beautiful,” said Luke.

“I do that all the time. I’m going to search the base. You monitor me on helmet camera.”

The ring wall rose above him in worn, rounded, volcanic-looking stone. Dust dripped back from the rim, ran like molasses down the shallow slope to collect in a pool around the ship’s shock legs. The crater was half a mile across. In the approximate center was the dome, surrounded by a lapping sea of dust.

Nick looked about him, frowning. There seemed no way to reach the dome without crossing the dust, which might not be as shallow as it looked. The crater was ancient; it looked just younger than the planet itself. But it was criss-crossed with younger cracks. Some of the edges were almost sharp; the air and dust were too thin to erode things quickly. There would be bad footing.

He started around the base of the ring wall, walking with care. Dust concealed some of the cracks.

A small, intense sun hung above the crater rim, in a deep purple sky.

On the far side of the dome a narrow path of laser-fused dust led from the dome to the ring wall. It must have been made with the base’s communications laser. The boats were there, moored along the path. Nick did not pause to study them.

There must have been dozens of slits in the dome material. Nick found twelve dried bodies within. Martians had murdered the base perso

Nick searched each of the small buildings in turn. At some places he had to crawl beneath the transparent folds of the dome. There was no Outsider to meet him. There was no sign of tampering since Müller’s forced visit.

“Dead end,” he reported. “Next step?”

“You’ll have to carry me piggyback until we can find a sand boat.”

Dust had settled over the boats, leaving only flat, wide shapes the color of everything else. For twelve years they had waited for another wave of explorers — explorers who had lost interest and gone home.

It was like seeing ghosts. An Egyptian pharaoh might find such ghosts waiting for him in the afterworld: rank on rank of dumb, faithful retainers, gone before him, and waiting, waiting.

“From here they look good,” said Luke. He settled himself more comfortably on Nick’s shoulders. “We’re in luck, Sinbad.”