the elastic, yielding stuffunderfoot. Harper halted, to look behind. Carol's voice came in thehelmet-phones.
"_We're watching out for you. We'll try to warn you if--anything showsup._"
"Better watch me!" snapped Moran. "If I should kill Harper after all,you might have to pass me for him presently!"
He heard a small, inarticulate sound, as if Carol protested. Then heheard an angry shrill whine. He'd turned aside from the direct line tothe wreck. Something black, the size of a fair-sized dog, faced himbelligerently. Multiple lensed eyes, five inches across, seemed toregard him in a peculiarly daunting fashion. The creature had a narrow,unearthly, triangular face, with mandibles that worked from side to sideinstead of up and down like an animal's jaws. The head was utterlyunlike any animal such as breed and raise their young and will fight forthem. There was a small thorax, from which six spiny, glistening legssprang. There was a bulbous abdomen.
"This," said Moran coldly, "is an ant. I've stepped on them for noreason, and killed them. I've probably killed many times as many withoutknowing it. But this could kill me."
The almost yard-long enormity standing two and a half feet high, was inthe act of carrying away a section of one of the legs of the giantcentipede Moran had killed earlier. It still moved. The leg was manytimes the size of the ant. Moran moved toward it. It made a louderbuzzing sound, threatening him.
Moran cut it apart with a slashing sweep of the flame that afinger-touch sent leaping from his torch. The thing presumably died, butit continued to writhe senselessly.
"I killed this one," said Moran savagely, "because I rememberedsomething from my childhood. When one ant finds something to eat andcan't carry it all away, it brings back its friends to get the rest.The big thing I killed would be such an item. How'd you like to have ahorde of these things about us? Come on!"
Through his helmet-phone he heard Harper breathing harshly. He led theway once more toward the wreck.
* * * * *
Black beetles swarmed about when he entered the cut in the mould-yeastsoil. They popped out of tunnels as if in astonishment that what hadbeen subterranean passages suddenly opened to the air. Harper stepped onone, and it did not crush. It struggled frantically and he almost fell.He gasped. Two of the creatures crawled swiftly up the legs of Moran'ssuit, and he knocked them savagely away. He found himself grinding histeeth in invincible revulsion.
They reached the end of the cut he'd made in the fungus-stuff. Metalshowed past burned-away soil. Moran growled;
"You keep watch. I'll finish the cut."
The flame leaped out. Dense clouds of smoke and steam poured out and up.With the intolerably bright light of the torch overwhelming theperpetual grayness under the clouds and playing upon curling vapors, thetwo space-suited men looked like figures in some sort of inferno.
Carol's voice came anxiously into Moran's helmet-phone;
"_Are you all right?_"
"So far, both of us," said Moran sourly. "I've just uncovered the crackof an airlock door."
He swept the flame around again. A mass of undercut fungus toppledtoward him. He burned it and went on. He swept the flame more widely.There was carbonized matter from the previously burned stuff on themetal, but he cleared all the metal. Carol's voice again;
"_There's something flying.... It's huge! It's a wasp!It's--monstrous!_"
Moran growled;
"Harper, we're in a sort of trench. If it hovers, you'll burn it as itcomes down. Cut through its waist. It won't crawl toward us along thetrench. It'd have to back toward us to use its sting."
He burned and burned, white light glaring upon a mass of steam and smokewhich curled upward and looked as if lightning-flashes played within it.
Carol's voice;
"_It--went on past.... It was as big as a cow!_"
* * * * *
Moran wrenched at the port-door. It partly revolved. He pulled. It felloutward. The wreck was not standing upright on its fins. It lay on itsside. The lock inside the toppled-out port was choked with a horriblemass of thread-like fungi. Moran swept the flame in. The fungusshriveled and was not. He opened the inner lock-door. There was pureblackness within. He held the torch for light.
For an instant everything was confusion, because the wreck was lying onits side instead of standing in a normal position. Then he saw a sheetof metal, propped up to be seen instantly by anyone entering the wreckedspace-vessel.
Letters burned into the metal gave a date a century and a half old.Straggly torch-writing said baldly;
"_This ship the Malabar crashed here on Tethys II a week ago. We cannot repair. We are going on to Candida III in the boats. We are carrying what bessendium we can with us. We resign salvage rights in this ship to its finders, but we have more bessendium with us. We will give that to our rescuers._
"_Jos. White, Captain._"
Moran made a peculiar, sardonic sound like a bark.
"Calling the _Nadine_!" he said in mirthless amusement. "This planet isTethys Two. Do you read me? Tethys II! Look it up!"
A pause. Then Carol's voice, relieved;
"_Tethys is in the Directory! That's good!_" There was the sound ofmurmurings in the control-room behind her. "_Yes!... Oh,--wonderful!It's not far off the course we should have followed! We won't besuspiciously late at Loris! Wonderful!_"
"I share your joy," said Moran sarcastically. "More information! Theship's name was the _Malabar_. She carried bessendium among her cargo.Her crew went on to Candida III a hundred and fifty years ago, leaving apromise to pay in more bessendium whoever should rescue them. Morebessendium! Which suggests that some bessendium was left behind."
Silence. The bald memorandum left behind the vanished crew was, ofcourse, pure tragedy. A ship's lifeboat could travel four light-years,or possibly even six. But there were limits. A castaway crew had leftthis world on a desperate journey to another in the hope that life therewould be tolerable. If they arrived, they waited for some other ship tocross the illimitable emptiness and discover either the beacon here orone they'd set up on the other world. The likelihood was small, at best.It had worked out zero. If the lifeboats made Candida III, their crewsstayed there because they could go no farther. They'd died there,because if they'd been found this ship would have been visited and itscargo salvaged.
* * * * *
Moran went inside. He climbed through the compartments of the toppledcraft, using his torch for light. He found where the cargo-hold had beenopened from the living part of the ship. He saw the cargo. There weresmall, obviously heavy boxes in one part of the hold. Some had beenbroken open. He found scraps of purple bessendium ore dropped whilebeing carried to the lifeboats. A century and a half ago it had notseemed worth while to pick them up, though bessendium was the mostprecious material in the galaxy. It couldn't be synthesized. It had tobe made by some natural process not yet understood, but involvinglong-continued pressures of megatons to the square inch withtemperatures in the millions of degrees. It was purple. It wascrystalline. Fractions of it in blocks of other metals made thefuel-blocks that carried liners winging through the void. But here werepounds of it dropped carelessly....
Moran gathered a double handful. He slipped it in a pocket of hisspace-suit. He went clambering back to the lock.
He heard the roaring of a flame-torch. He found Harper playing itsqueamishly on the wriggling fragments of another yard-long ant. It hadexplored the trench burned out of the fungus soil and down to the rock.Harper'd killed it as it neared him.
"That's three of them I've killed," said Harper in a dogged voice."There seem to be more."
"Did you hear my news?" asked Moran sardonically.
"Yes," said Harper. "How'll we get back to the _Nadine_?"
"Oh, we'll fight our way through," said Moran, as sardonically asbefore. "We'll practice splendid heroism, giving battle to ants whothink we're other ants trying to rob them of some fragments of anover-sized
dead centipede. A splendid cause to fight for, Harper!"
He felt an almost overpowering sense of irony. The quantity ofbessendium he'd seen was riches incalculable. The mere pocketfull ofcrystals in his pocket would make any man wealthy if he could get to asettled planet and sell them. And there was much, much more back in thecargo-hold of the wreck. He'd seen it.
But his own situation was unchanged. Bessendium could be hiddensomehow,--perhaps between the inner and outer hulls of the _Nadine_. Butit was not possible to land the _Nadine_ at any space-port with an extraman aboard her. In a sense, Moran might be one of the richest men in thegalaxy in his salvagers' right to the treasure in the wrecked_Malabar's_
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