The Stars, Like Dust (Page 38)

Aboard the Remorseless, the wait was proving increasingly unpleasant. For two days they hadn’t budged from their orbit.

Gillbret watched the controls with relentless concentration. His voice had an edge to it. "Wouldn’t you say they were moving?"

Biron looked up briefly. He was shaving, and handling the Tyranni erosive spray with finicky care.

"No," he said, "they’re not moving. Why should they? They’re watching us, and they’ll keep on watching us."

He concentrated upon the difficult area of the upper lip, and frowned impatiently as he felt the slightly sour taste of the spray upon his tongue. A Tyrannian could handle the spray with a grace that was almost poetic. It was undoubtedly the quickest and closest non-permanent shaving method in existence, in the hands of an expert. In essence, it was an extremely fine air-blown abrasive that scoured off the hairs without harming the skin. Certainly the skin felt like nothing more than the gentle pressure of what might have been an air stream.

However, Biron felt queasy about it. There was the well-known legend, or story, or fact (whatever it was), about the incidence of face cancer being higher among the Tyranni than among other cultural groups, and some attributed this to the Tyranni shave spray. Biron wondered for the first time if it might not be better to have his face completely depilated. It was done in some parts of the Galaxy, as a matter of course. He rejected the thought. Depilation was permanent. The fashion might always shift to mustaches or cheek curls.

Biron was surveying his face in the mirror, wondering how he would look in sideburns down to the angle of the jaw, when Artemisia said from the doorway, "I thought you were going to sleep."

"I did," he said. "Then I woke up." He looked up at her and smiled.

She patted his cheek, then stroked it gently with her fingers. "It’s smooth. You look about eighteen."

He carried her hand to his lips. "Don’t let that fool you," he said.,

She said, "They’re still watching?"

"Still watching. Isn’t it annoying, these dull interludes that give you time to sit and worry?"

"I don’t find this interlude dull."

"You’re talking about other aspects of it now, Arta."

She said, "Why don’t we cross them up and land on Lingane?"

"We’ve thought of it. I don’t think we’re ready for that kind of risk. We can afford to wait till the water supply gets a bit lower."

Gillbret said loudly, "I tell you they are moving."

Biron crossed over to the control panel and considered the massometer readings. He looked at Gillbret and said, "You may be right."

He pecked away at the calculator for a moment or two and stared at its dials.

"No, the two ships haven’t moved relative to us, Gillbret. What’s changed the massometer is that a third ship has joined them. As near as I can tell, it’s five thousand miles off, about 46 degrees? and 192 degrees f from the ship-planet line, if I’ve got the clockwise and counterclockwise conventions straight. If ‘ I haven’t, the figures are, respectively, 314 and 168 degrees."

He paused to take another reading. "I think they’re approaching. It’s a small ship. Do you think you can get in touch with them, Gillbret?"

"I can try," said Gillbret.

"All right. No vision. Let’s leave it at sound, till we get some notion of what’s coming."

It was amazing to watch Gillbret at the controls of the etheric radio. He was obviously the possessor of a native talent. Contacting an isolated point in space with a tight radio beam remains, after all, a task in which the ship’s control-panel information can participate only slightly. He had a notion of the distance of the ship which might be off by a hundred miles plus or minus. He had two angles, either or both of which might easily be wrong by five or six degrees in any direction.

This left a volume of about ten million cubic miles within which the ship might be. The rest was left to the human operator, and a radio beam which was a probing finger not half a mile in cross section at the widest point of its receivable range. It was said that a skilled operator could tell by the feel of the controls how closely the beam missed the target. Scientifically, that theory was nonsense, of course, but it often seemed that no other explanation was possible.

In less than ten minutes the activity gauge of the radio was jumping and the Remorseless was both sending and receiving.

In another ten minutes Biron was able to lean back and say, "They’re going to send a man aboard."

"Ought we to let them?" asked Artemisia.

"Why not? One man? We’re armed."

"But if we let their ship get too close?"

"We’re a Tyrannian cruiser, Arta. We’ve got three to five times their power, even if they were the best warship Lingane had. They’re not allowed too much by their precious Articles of Association, and we’ve got five high-caliber blasters."

Artemisia said, "Do you know how to use the Tyrannian blasters? I didn’t know you did."

Biron hated to turn the admiration off, but he said, "Unfortunately, I don’t. At least, not yet. But then, the Linganian ship won’t know that, you see."

Half an hour later the visiplate showed a visible ship. It was a stubby little craft, fitted with two sets of four fins, as though it were frequently called upon to double for stratospheric flight.

At its first appearance in the telescope, Gillbret shouted in delight. "That’s the Autarch’s yacht," he cried, and his face wrinkled into a grin. "It’s his private yacht. I’m sure of it. I told you that the bare mention of my name was the surest way to get his attention."

There was the period of deceleration and adjustment of velocity on the part of the Linganian ship, until it hung motionless in the plate.