Postmarked the Stars sq-4

by Andre Norton

  “Who—?”

  Jellico gestured to the mask. “The man behind that. You don’t know him?” “Never saw him—that I can remember.”

  “He had your belongings, a forged ident in the bargain, and that mask. He was sent aboard to be you. And where were you?”

  Dane outlined his adventures after waking in the inn, adding the information about the missing package—if it was missing.

  “Inform the port police?” he suggested tentatively.

  “Not for robbery, I think.” Jellico turned the tridee to look down at the face in it, as if, by the very intensity of his gaze, he could force some answer to the riddle. “This was a setup that required a lot of planning. It was, I believe, a means of getting a man on board.”

  “A cargo master aboard, sir,” Dane corrected eagerly, “who would have access to—”

  Jellico nodded sharply. “Fair assumption. Stowage reports—what are we shipping that would be worth such a long-range plan?”

  Dane, entrusted for the first time with full authority for the stowage, could have recited the entire list. He ran over it swiftly now in his mind. But there was nothing—nothing that important. A mask would require time to make, a reason for a long-thought-out buildup. He turned to Tau.

  “I was poisoned?”

  “You were. If it hadn’t been for the metabolism shift after that ceremonial drink on Sargol—” He shook his head. “Whether they meant to have you dead or just put you out for a long time—anyway, normally it would have finished you.”

  “Then he was meant to be me—for how long?” He asked that question of himself, but the captain answered.

  “No longer than Trewsworld, I would say. First, unless he was exceptionally well briefed, he couldn’t play the part with shipmates who really knew you. It would require a complete memory switch for that, and they didn’t have you in their hands long enough for that. You went off-ship and apparently were back again in one Xechoian cin-cycle. A memory switch takes a planetary day at least. Also, he couldn’t play sick either. Tau would have been after him. So, he could say he was uncertain about his work—first run for him in cargo command—and could hole up to check his tapes and the like. The Trewsworld run is not a long one. He might have been able—with luck—to pull it off, or think he could, with that excuse.

  “Second, there are only two reasons why he’d come on board—he was carrying something he had to transport under guard, or he himself had a very necessary reason for reaching Trewsworld in disguise. He was defeated mainly by chance—first, that you had your insides shaken up badly on Sargol so that their poison didn’t work, and, second, that he himself was not fit for space travel.”

  “Did he bring anything with him?” Dane asked. “The registered package—they might have been after that all the time but have planned to walk off with it on Trewsworld, not jump me for it on Xecho.”

  “Trouble was,” Jellico answered, “he was checked on board by the ramp cell, not by any of us. We don’t know whether he brought anything or not. There’s nothing in the cabin, and the holds are safe-locked.”

  Safe-locked!

  “Not the treasure room,” Dane returned. “I left that on half seal—couldn’t close it until the package came.”

  Jellico went to the com. “Shannon!” His call to the bridge alerting the assistant astrogator was loud enough to make Dane’s ears ring. “Down to the treasure room on the double. See if it’s fully sealed or not!”

  Dane tried to think. Where else, if the holds were on full seal, where else could something be hidden on the Queen?

  2. MEMORY LOST AND FOUND

  “Two holds full seal, treasure half seal.” Rip’s voice rang hollowly over the inter-cabin com, loud enough for Dane to hear. Captain Jellico looked to him for confirmation, and he nodded.

  “As I left them. Must check the treasure—” Once on full seal, the intruder could not have opened either of the lower compartments where the bulk of their cargo rested. But the treasure room, for registered and special security shipments—Since nothing had been found in Dane’s cabin with the dead stranger and it was apparent from the fact he had strapped down that he had intended to ride out the voyage and not use the elaborate disguise for an on-and-off invasion of the Queen, then if he did bring something on board, they had better find out what as quickly as possible.

  “You’re in no shape—” began Tau, but Dane was already sitting up.

  “We may be in no shape later if I don’t!” he returned grimly. Once before the Queen had carried an almost lethal cargo unwittingly, and that memory would ride with her crew for years. Wood taken on ship on Sargol had been infested with creatures able to assume the color of anything they touched, creatures whose claws carried a soporific that hit the crew like a plague.

  Dane was sure an inspection of the treasure room would assure him whether or not there was any unaccounted-for cargo on board, since a cargo master by long training carried most of his inventory in his head, as well as on record tapes.

  They had to let him do it. The safety of the Queen by necessity came above all else. But it was Tau who gave him a shoulder to lean on and the captain himself who went down ladder ahead of Dane, reaching up to support the younger man’s weak legs.

  And Dane needed that support by the time they reached the level of the treasure room. He held fast to Tau for a long instant, his heart pounding, gasping. Now Tau’s words that he had been very close to death struck starkly, but he stumbled on, reaching for the release.

  Trewsworld was a frontier planet, lightly settled. The bulk of the mail they carried for her single port city was light—micro tapes of agricultural information, personal communications between settlers and off- world, a bag of official tapes for the Patrol post. There was little enough security material, and the major portion was the embryo boxes.

  Since the importation of domestic animals was experimental on most worlds and very carefully supervised, any such shipment was top security. And Ecology had firm rules on what might or might not be transferred. Too many times in the past, the balance of nature on some planet had been thoughtlessly overturned by such importation of a life form that had no local enemy, which perhaps developed a mutated strain beyond control, to speedily become a menace rather than the source of profit the importers had intended.

  After exhaustive tests the pioneers were allowed imports of embryos for stock raising, and the Queen now carried fifty such—lathsmer chicks in sealed containers. These were lab-developed and worth far more than their weight in credits—since Trewsworld had proved an acceptable climate and lathsmer fowl were luxury items across a wide sector of space. Not only could the adults be plucked once a year for their fine

  down, but young chicks were epicures’ delight for the table. If the lathsmer were raised in quantity, the pioneer settlers of the planet had an export item to establish them firmly in galactic trade.

  To Dane these were the major “treasures” the Queen carried. But the boxes were secured by double bolting and shock packing, just as he had supervised. They were intact and protected. The few other bags and boxes were as undisturbed, and he finally had to admit that as far as he could tell, there had been no tampering. But when Tau helped him out, he double-sealed the portal as it should have been before the Queen lifted.

  The original problem remained unsolved. A dead man in a mask, aboard for what reason? Until they came out of hyper, which meant into the Trewsworld system, there was no chance to communicate with the Patrol or other authorities.

  Tau had made a detailed study of the body before it had been sealed off in a hull pocket for deep freeze. Save that the stranger had plainly died from a heart condition aggravated by the strain of take-off, that examination told them nothing. The man was of Terran descent with no mutating modifications. In these years of space travel he could have been any age past youth and from a number of worlds where the inhabitants were so akin to Terrans as to make them indistinguishable. None of the Queen’s crew had seen him before,
nor was the poison used on Dane isolated and named by the medic, in spite of his research.

  The forgery of the ident disk was perfect. Jellico stood now flipping that back and forth as if it alone could somehow prove a key to unlock the puzzle.

  “Such a careful plan means a big deal. You say that call to pick up the security package came through the field tower?” he asked Dane.

  “Regular channels. I had no reason to doubt it.”

  “Probably was straight, as far as they knew. Anyone could have put it in to them,” Steen Wilcox, the astrogator, commented. “You’re sure there’s nothing on the manifests that is suspicious?”

  “Nothing.” Dane suppressed a sigh. Of course he was only a stand-in for Van Ryke (and how he wished now that the usually omniscient cargo master was here and that he himself could return to the less responsible role of assistant), but at least he knew what he had seen stored away. He had personally clamped most of it into the special racks. The biggest things they had handled were the embryo boxes and the brach cage. The brach cage! That was the only thing he had not remembered, mainly because its inhabitants, being alive and needing attention, had been placed in Mura’s territory of the hydro compartment.

  “What about the brachs?” he asked now.

  Tau had a ready answer. “Nothing there. I give them daily inspections. The female’s about to have kits— not until after we planet—but she should be checked. That traveling cage can’t conceal anything.”

  Dane thought about the brachs. They were common on Xecho—the largest native animal, that is, land animal.

  But that did not make them very big. An adult male was about as tall as Dane’s knee, the female slightly larger. They were amusing, appealing creatures, covered with a soft growth that was really neither fur nor under-feathers but had some of the texture of both. This was cream-colored with a faint rosy underlight in the female, darker in the male, who was in addition equipped with folds of skin under his throat that could be inflated and, when so, flushed crimson. Their heads were long with pointed, narrow muzzles and a small, sharp horn on the very tip, which they put to excellent use when dealing with their favorite food, a shellfish that had to be pried open. The ears had feathery fringe. They were easily tamed but now rigidly protected by law on Xecho after early settlers there had carried on an illegal trade in their skins. Selected

  pairs were sometimes exported only under bond to specialists in xenobiology, as these were due to be delivered to a lab on Trewsworld. For some reason they seemed to present a puzzle to most biologists, and several different planets had scientists devoting time to a detailed study of them.

  “That’s it,” Dane said a short time later. He had run through the tape of inventory—nothing anywhere, except a dead man who must have been part of a very elaborate plan.

  “So—” Wilcox looked as if he were now faced with one of his beloved mathematical formulas, one that was new and he was now admiring, before solving, for its very intricacy. “If this was not for the cargo, it is the man himself. He needed to get to Trewsworld under cover. Either the disguise was meant to operate to pass him at both ports or one alone. He risked our uncovering him and putting him under arrest. And murder, since they must have meant to eliminate you permanently”—he nodded to Dane—“is a very high price to pay. What’s going on on Trewsworld according to rumor?”

  Planet politics could be a perilous business on some worlds, as they all knew. Free Traders carefully did not take sides. It was hammered into every crewman that the ship itself was his planet and to it he owed allegiance, first, last, and always. No involvement in local matters. That could be a hard fact to face when one’s sympathies or emotions were aroused by sights and sounds, but every one of them knew that it was the backbone of their own lives and it must be adhered to. So far, Dane had never come face to face with a choice between the ship’s safety and his own emotional urge to join or refrain. He knew that he had been lucky, and he only hoped that luck would continue to hold for him. He did not know whether any of the others had faced that dilemma, but the past, before he had joined the Queen, was theirs and not his to remember.

  “Nothing off course that I know of.” Jellico still slapped the ident disk against the palm of his hand. “We’d have been warned in the general orders if there was. Combine had this run. They turned over all their general tapes with the contract.”

  “There is always,” Ali said, “the I-S.”

  I-S—Inter-Solar. Twice in the past the Solar Queen had had a brush with that company. And both times the Free Trader had won the round, a pygmy successfully facing down one of the giants of the star lanes. The companies with their huge trading empires, their fleets of ships, thousands, even millions of employees strung out along the galactic trade routes, were monopolists, sparring with each other for the control of new planet trade. The Free Traders were the beggars at the feast, snatching at such crumbs of profit as the big ones overlooked contemptuously, or thought it not worth the effort to exploit.

  The Solar Queen had held a contract on Sargol for the taking of Koros gems—her captain had even fought a Salarik duel with an I-S man to claim and hold their rights. It was the I-S who had had the Queen proclaimed a plague ship when the mysterious pest they had unwittingly brought aboard with cargo had knocked out most of the crew. And only grit, determination, and an appeal made over the law, but effectively, to Terra at large, broadcast from a port by the junior members, who had not succumbed to the pest, had saved their ship and their lives.

  And it had again been an I-S representative whose poaching trade they had broken on Khatka when Captain Jellico, Medic Tau, and Dane had visited there at the Chief Ranger’s request during what might have been a disastrous planet leave.

  So the I-S people certainly had no love for the Queen, and her crew would be inclined to think first of their meddling in any trouble. Dane drew a deep breath. This could be I-S! They would have the means, the facilities to set up such a plan. There had not been any I-S ship planeting on Xecho while the Queen was there—it was Combine territory—but that meant nothing. They could have shipped in their man on a neutral shuttle from another system. But if this was part of an I-S plot— “Could be,” Jellico returned. “But I doubt it. In the first place, they may not look upon us with any warmth of feeling—or at least a warmth of feeling we would relish. But to them we are very small fry. If they saw a chance to fuse our tubes without difficulty, they’d probably do it. But to set up some elaborate plan—no. We’re carrying mail, and any trouble would bring a Patrol investigation. I won’t cut out I-S, but they are not my first choice. Combine reported no political trouble on Trewsworld, so what—”

  “There is one way of learning something.” Tau drummed absently on the edge of a swing shelf with his fingertip, and Dane caught himself watching that. Craig Tau’s hobby was magic, or rather those unexplainable powers and talents that the primitive (and sometimes not so primitive) men on half a thousand worlds used to gain their ends. He had used his knowledge of such things to bring them safely out of danger on Khatka, and in that particular action a drum had had a great deal to do with the building up of whatever force he had drawn upon to break the will of a feared witch doctor. Only Dane had beat the drum then, to Tau’s orders.

  Now it was almost as if some suggestion reached from the medic’s mind to his. Though Dane had no claim to esper talents, Tau had admitted that was in fact why he had made a good foil on Khatka.

  “You can’t remember what happened between your leaving the ship and your awaking in the inn, consciously,” the medic continued. Dane lost interest in that drumming finger and guessed.

  “Deep probe?”

  “Will it work?” Jellico demanded.

  “You can’t tell until you try. Dane has a block against some hypo techniques. How deep that goes, we can’t tell. But the dead man was wearing his tunic, which means they might have met. If he’s willing to try, deep probe might give us some answers.”

  Dane wanted to shout �
�no” with all the force the illness had left in him. Deep probe was used on criminals by court order. If a man were susceptible enough, it would wring every incident of his life out of him back to the first childhood memories. But they would not be after that, just the immediate past. Dane could see the sense in Tau’s suggestion. It was just that to accept it meant facing up to something from which he shrank with every fiber of his being.

  “We can set it only for the time you left the ship.” Tau appeared to understand the cause of his reservation. “And it may not work—you’re not a good subject—plus the fact we have no idea what alteration of body chemistry the poison may have worked. In one way, such a testing might be to your advantage, for then we can judge any change that dose may have caused.”

  Dane felt a return of that same chill that had struck him when he had fought for strength in the inn. Did Tau believe that he had taken mental damage? But he had remembered the stowage, and the tapes had confirmed the accuracy of his memory. There was only the period of time that Tau wanted to research that eluded him. He wavered—the distaste for the probe’s revelations, together with a feeling he did not want to know if the drug had affected him, combined to make him hesitate. Only, if he did not agree, then in days to come his ignorance might be worse to face than certain knowledge.

  “All right,” he said, and then, for a second or two, wished he had refused.

  Since the ship was in hyper and needed only a standby watch on the bridge, Rip was set that duty, and both the Captain and Wilcox were present as Tau made ready to activate a probe. Dane was not quite certain how it worked, though that it was able to turn a man inside out as far as his past was concerned was a known fact.

  Jellico made ready to tape what Dane would report, and Tau gave him the shot to send him under. He heard a dwindling murmur and then—