Chapter 3

Dumbly frightened at the face of the unknown, Dusty was far more frightened at being confined in the cabin of his schooner than he was of the nameless horror he would have to face above. He left the cabin in a hurry, and with mental desperation he turned deliberately to face the danger in the hope of getting it over with. He figured there would be less anguish if it came quickly.

The spacelock door was open wide and a man was standing there with a fluted-barrelled thing in his hand. On the deck were droplets of copper still hot enough to send up little wisps of smoke from the deck. The stub end of the antenna was melted down in a blob. As Dusty looked from Scyth Radnor to his ruined antenna and back again, Scyth leaned back in the spacelock and dropped his weapon. Then he made a relaxed show of sitting on the sill of the airlock with his feet dangling almost to the tips of the waves. He looked relaxed and calm and the trace of a smile was on his face; the kind of smile that would open into honest pleasure if he were greeted with the same.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I am Scyth Radnor of Marandis. Despite the fact that I was forced to ruin your antenna, I do come on a peaceful mission, Dusty Britton.”

“Yeah—” mumbled Dusty stupidly. Barbara was leaning flat against the mast, white-faced under her tan.

“Believe me, Dusty. I mean no harm. I did have to prevent you from broadcasting that which would bring a bad impression of me to your people.”

Scyth reached up and pressed a button in the wall of the spacelock above his head. The sill of the spacelock came out abruptly in an extensible runway, carrying Scyth forward over the deck of the Buccaneer. Scyth dropped to the deck and stood facing Dusty with a hand extended.

“What do you want?” stammered Dusty. “And how come you talk our language?”

Scyth pointed to the tiny case slung around his neck. “This is a menslator,” he explained. “When used in direct conversation with a man of another tongue, it acts to translate for both parties their meaning. It isn’t perfect by any means, but it does help to make people of different tongues understand one another.” Scyth smiled and then said, “For a quick and amusing explanation, observe this.” Scyth clicked the switch off and began to speak. His speech was utterly comprehensible to Dusty and Barbara at first, but Scyth clicked the little switch after he had said a few words. They heard Scyth like this:

“Fa d snall id, an expression meaning to consign to the region of theological punishment, which when repeated through the menslator becomes ‘Go to hell!’ See?”

Dusty nodded dumbly. Barbara relaxed slightly.

“Now,” said Scyth, “I am from Marandis. Marandis is a planet only a few thousand light-years from the Galactic Center, which makes it nearly thirty thousand light-years from here. Marandis is the seat of the Galactic Government. Look, Dusty, I came here to explain all this to you. There is a lot to say, and there is a lot you must take on faith until you know all of it. Let’s relax. Will you come aboard my ship and have a drink? It’s comfortable there and—”

“No!” snapped Dusty.

“Why not?”

“Nobody, but nobody, is going to get me in any space ship,” said Dusty positively.

Scyth eyed Dusty queerly. His thoughts would have been obvious to anybody but Dusty and Barbara. Scyth was trying to justify in his own mind the attitude of a High Brass in The Space Patrol (any space patrol) who would not enter a spacecraft. Scyth finally decided that Dusty’s reticence was due to Dusty’s suspicious nature. Dusty was unarmed and he was not getting into a spacecraft capable of carrying him across the galaxy, perhaps operated by other members of the crew. There were no other members, but the ship was big enough to have many. Scyth nodded to himself and smiled at Dusty.

“As you prefer. I only repeat that I mean no harm and I add that the salon inside is pleasant. We can all have a—”

“We’ve got a drink,” blurted Dusty. He turned on his heel and got the quart from the seat by the helm. He stopped to get a third glass. He poured.

Scyth tasted gingerly. “Very smooth,” he said. “What is it?”

“Bourbon.”

“Bourbon. Tastes like an excellent liquor. Thank you. Now—” Scyth sat down on the edge of the deck with his feet hanging into the cockpit and settled himself for a session. “Dusty, we are here because we are creating a beacon for our galactic spacelanes.”

“Beacon?”

Scyth nodded. “You have the insular viewpoint,” he remarked. “You can stand at night and point out your destination. But you cannot even see Marandis from here, even with the finest telescope ever built. Stars lie in the way, huge gas fields and nebular clouds block fast direct passage. To chart our course safely past such stellar menaces, we establish beacons at the ends of certain free passages. For instance, Sol lies at the end of a fifteen hundred light year straightaway from the last beacon we set up. Here at Sol a slight turn in the course is made and there is another straightaway for a thousand light-years toward the Spiral Cluster. We—my friends and I—are charting the course through a rather interesting rift from Marandis to the Spiral Cluster. This rift, along which you lie, has been hidden from us for thousands of years. When it is finished it will cut hours from our travel-time.”