“We’ll see,” said Anne confidently.
They climbed down the slope of the ravine and stepped onto the smooth surface of the ship. They checked with the guard, who passed them in.
Lights had been strung through many of the corridors of the ship since Ron had first seen it, but he borrowed a flashlight from one of the men since they could expect to go into some of the still darkened areas.
“O.K. Pete,” Ron said. “Find Clonar.”
Guards were scattered about, but the technicians had been pulled out in accord with Gillispie’s agreement with Ron. They had stopped their analyzing and dismantling and were merely guarding the saucer against the curious.
Most of them recognized Ron and knew who he was. Their expressions varied as he encountered them. Some tried to follow along.
“Uh-uh. This is a private party. You guys remain as you were,” he said. “Or do I have to get Gillispie to tell you that?”
Glowering, they remained behind and watched him and Anne and the dog disappear down the darkened corridors. In the light of the flash Pete strolled confidently onward as if following an old and familiar trail. Then he stopped abruptly before an utterly blank section of wall panel. He stood on his hind legs and scratched and barked softly.
Ron examined the wall closely. It appeared utterly seamless. He stood in dismay and disgust.
“You really made a bust that time, Pete! That’s a blind wall. It looks like the outer rim of the ship.”
Anne ignored him. She pounded gently on the wall and called out. “Clonar. Clonar, this is Anne and Ron. Can you hear us?”
She screamed suddenly then and jumped aside. Above their heads a section of the ceiling split and two halves of the panel dropped slowly on either side.
From the opening a face peered down at them. A familiar face, now wan and unkempt. Clutching the edge of the opening, a hand bore what was obviously a lethal weapon.
“I don’t want to see you,” said Clonar. “Go away now. Please go away.”
Chapter 15 I Can Go Home!”
“Clonar!” exclaimed Ron. He backed slowly at the sight of the weapon. “You can’t mean that, Clonar. We want to talk to you. Let us come in and talk with you.”
Clonar hesitated, then lowered the weapon and nodded. “You may as well, I guess. I should have known Pete would lead you here. I should have let him alone. I warn you that I understand you now. Nothing you say will change my mind.”
The opening was a foot or so above Ron’s head. He made a step for Anne with his hands and boosted her up, Clonar helping from above. Ron leaped for a grip on the edge of the opening and swung himself up. When they were in, Clonar turned a crank that slowly closed the opening.
Clonar had a light of some kind by which he led the way down a metal ladder to some chamber opposite the wall at which Pete had barked.
“How did Pete know you were here?” said Ron. “Can he communicate at will with you?”
“No. I’ve been lonely. I talked with him. He’s all I had.”
In a world of human beings, Ron thought, Pete was all Clonar had! He felt chilled and uncomfortable by that indictment of his own kind.
He tried to find new ground for them to meet upon. “It’s no wonder the searchers missed you. What are these compartments?”
“This is the double wall of the ship, built this way to prevent atmosphere leaks in case of accident in space,” said Clonar. “I suppose your guards thought the individual sections were sealed because they have only emergency openings which are not obvious from inside the ship.
“I have managed very comfortably. I get food from the ship’s stores at night. There was a little difficulty in getting through the ring of guards outside. But they are not of high intelligence.”
“But you can’t stay here forever!” exclaimed Anne. “What are you going to do?”
“This won’t be forever. I came to see if there weren’t some possible way of assembling a transmitter from what was left here. I found the lifeboats intact. They carry very tiny transmitters, but each has the same type of wave generator as the one that was destroyed. I have not succeeded in increasing their power, but
I believe I shall be able to do so by connecting several of them together.
“Whether I do or not, I need no further help from you. I will ask you to go if you will, please.”
“Clonar,” said Ron miserably, “isn’t there anything we can do to make you understand that we did not betray you?”
He tried to explain the thing that Anne had meant by her outburst, the thing that Gillispie had wanted them to do. But Clonar shook his head in bewilderment.
“It is too much for me to try to understand the ways of men. Your race is not to be trusted to offer friendship. All I want now is a chance to reach my own fleet and leave your planet forever.
“I am sorry that this is so, Ron and Anne. I would like to have remained with you if I could have trusted you. As it is, if I fail to contact my own people—”
He left the remainder of the sentence unspoken, but glanced down at the weapon he had placed on the table near by.
“No!” cried Anne. “Not that—ever! We’ve got to make you understand our feelings and our thoughts, Clonar.”
“You’ve tried,” he said harshly, “and I want no more. Please go. I suppose you will feel it necessary to disclose my hiding place to your guards. I assure you it will be very difficult for them to find me in these hidden chambers. If they do—I’ll defend myself. Make that plain to them when you tell them.”
“We won’t tell,” said Ron soberly. “Well never tell.
But aren’t we going to have any other word from you in case you do get a ship to come for you—or if you don’t?”
“There have been too many words already. Please go.
A tone of anger crept into his voice and the muscles of his jaw and neck stood out tensely.
“All right,” said Ron. “We’ll go, and we won’t tell. But, Clonar, we’ll be back.”
“You’d better not.”
They went back to the hidden emergency entrance. Clonar pressed the spring release which lowered the doors. Ron jumped down and caught Anne. They watched Clonar’s grimy face as he cranked the doors shut and hid himself from view.
“That does it,” said Ron as they moved slowly down the corridor. “That does it up in a neat round package. What in Jupiter do we do next?”
Pete grumbled in dismal wonder as to why he had not been permitted to go to Clonar, and now had to leave without him.
They said nothing to the guards who spoke to them as they left the ship. They walked back to the car and sat in it without starting the motor.
“I hate to go back and meet that mob of reporters now,” said Ron. “I feel like the thing is all over. There isn’t a doggone thing we can do. If we told Gillispie, he’d just go in there and drag Clonar out and give him the third degree again, as long as Clonar doesn’t want anything to do with me.”
“Couldn’t we just get Gillispie to maintain a close watch so that we’d know if he does come out and contact another of his ships?”
“I wouldn’t trust Gillispie that far. Unless Clonar is right under my nose, Gillispie will find some way to get his paws on him again. He’ll pick his brain if he has to do it with hypnosis or truth serum. No, we can’t tell Gillispie. We can’t tell anyone. We may never know for sure whether Clonar gets back home or whether he does what he threatened to do with that gun of his.”
“I don’t think he’ll do that,” said Anne. “A person has to be pushed a long way down for that to happen. I don’t believe Clonar can be pushed that far.”
“I hate to gamble on that.”
They returned to town, and Ron gave his promised interviews to several dozen reporters that afternoon. He and Anne posed with Pete for more pictures. And they discovered the truth of Dan’s prediction about the mail. There was almost half a bag of it in just one day.
The first letter Ron opened was a scathing denunciation o
f his friendship with the “enemy.” He threw it on the pile with disgust. “They’ll make a good fire, anyway,” he said.
“Oh, they’re not all like that,” said Anne impatiently. “Here’s one with a five-dollar check to help Clonar. We’ve got to go through them. I’ll bet you’ll be surprised at the number offering help and favorable comment.”
“There’s one guy I’d like to tell about this, and see if he’s got any bright ideas.”
“Who?”
“Dan.”
“Can you trust him completely?”
“Probably not. He’s out for a story. He’d like to break the finding of Clonar to his papers. I guess there’s really nobody you can trust completely, any more.”
“Oh, no! Look at these letters. In a dozen of them there are two checks and only one denunciation of you.”
He scanned the miscellaneous sheets quickly, but their favorable comments didn’t lift his spirits very high.
“Are you going to tell your father?”
Ron shook his head. “I don’t want to. It would only be bothersome information for him. There’s nothing he could do. There’s nothing any of us can do—except wait, and we don’t even know what we’re waiting for.”
“The only way we can make Clonar change his mind is offering him something he wants. What could we offer him that would induce him to come out of hiding?”
“A trip home. That’s all the poor guy wants.”
“He said something about power. Power for his transmitter. Maybe we could induce him to come out by making it possible for him to get the power. Not that I know exactly what he needs—”
Ron grasped her arm tightly, his face brightening. “By golly, Anne, that may be it! As I get the setup, the important element is the wave generators, but he lacks enough push to reach the fleet with the little lifeboat sets.
“Maybe a conventional transmitter of ours could help. I wonder. Gillispie is the only answer to that. The radio lab at the Air Base is the research center for the whole Air Force electronics division. They toss kilowatts around by the basketful. Maybe we could make a deal. But we don’t know if it would really work, or if it would entice Clonar, anyway—”
“Let’s stew about it. Tonight my ham schedule’s right after dinner. How about sticking around and sitting in on it?”
“My mother—”
“I’ll get Mom to call her. They can usually work a deal.”
They did, and Anne remained.
At dinner, George Barron announced, “I had an interesting piece of news today. Gillispie called me.”
“More trouble,” said Ron.
“For him, not for us. It seems that our conversation with Senator Clausen backfired. He ended up in favor of more supervision of Clonar than Gillispie had already given.
“So now the Senator is extremely unhappy about your radio speech, and he is practically tearing his hair out—what’s left of it—over Clonar’s escape. He’s blaming Gillispie for everything and anything, promises a full Senate investigation of the entire affair.
“The General is a very unhappy man tonight. You can be pretty sure he wishes he’d never heard of flying saucers or Clonar or Ron Barron or Senator Clausen.”
Ron grinned broadly. “I sure can’t work up much sympathy for him. But I’m glad the Senator didn’t get his hooks into Gillispie before I was able to bargain on this deal.”
His father nodded. “Clonar would have been in a straitjacket if Clausen had had his way. I was very much surprised. I thought he was inclined our way for a while, but he made a complete switch when he saw the ship. I guess he didn’t really believe it until then. Have you heard anything of Clonar today?”
“Not a word that anyone has told us.”
“It’s too bad. I’m afraid it’s highly probable now that he will never be found.”
After dinner, Ron and Anne went out to the lab and turned on the transmitter. Ron didn’t feel much like working any schedules tonight, but they had to be kept if physically possible. There might be some items of traffic to be handled.
He had a seven-thirty schedule with a ham named Walt Grange, in Chicago. Walt had no traffic for him, but he had heard the news of Clonar and pumped questions at him one after another. This was the last thing in the world Ron wanted to talk about, but out of courtesy he answered the questions.
There was an eight o’clock schedule with a Denver ham that had to be handled by code instead of radiotelephone. There were a half dozen items of traffic to be handled, some messages to be delivered locally, and some to be relayed to the East Coast. This saved Ron from more questioning.
He looked at the clock as he signed off. “One more and we’re through,” he said to Anne.
He began retuning the receiver slightly for the new station when suddenly a broad, sloppy wave burst all over the dial. It was full of distortion, but it bore his name.
He heard someone calling, “Ron Barron. Calling Ron Barron. Ron Barron.”
For a moment the back of his neck prickled. Then Anne burst out, “That’s Clonar! I’d know his voice anywhere!”
“Yes—but how in the world—!” He cut in his own mike. “Clonar, is that you? Can you hear me? This is Ron Barron. Come in, Clonar.”
He flipped the switch and the voice came in again.
“Yes, Ron, this is Clonar, I am hearing you. I remembered you said you were broadcasting once a week. I hoped I had kept the days in order.
“Ron, if you meant what you said, you can prove it now and help me. I’ve got my generators working. But I haven’t got the power.
“And Ron—tonight I heard them!”
“Who-oh-!”
“They’re looking for me. I got a receiver in operation and heard an automatic signal they’re sending out. They know the ship’s missing, but they’re at least ten light-years away in their search for it. I can never reach them with the little power I’ve got here. Can you help me? Will you help me?”
Through the ragged wave he was using to reach them, they could hear the break in his voice. For an instant they let themselves imagine his position, how it must be to hear the voice of home, and yet have it so far away and unattainable.
“What do you need?” said Ron.
“One of your own high-power transmitters could be adapted to the purpose, with my wave generators feeding the input. If you can get me access to such a transmitter, I’ll know you meant what you said, Ron.”
“The only thing I can think of right now is the lab at the Air Base. They’ve got some pretty big stuff there, up to a hundred kilowatts, I’ve heard. But we’ll have to bargain with Gillispie. Suppose I tell him you’ll exchange information about your generator in return for use of his facilities. Would you do that?”
“Yes—anything, almost—”
“I’ll try to make a deal. But now will you come out of hiding and come here? I promise you’ll not be molested again. Gillispie has promised to let you stay with me.”
There was a long moment of silence except for the raw hissing of Clonar’s unstable carrier wave, which he must have been producing with baling wire modifications of his own equipment.
At last he said, “I will come, Ron. I’ll trust your offer of friendship once again. I want us to be friends—because soon, I am going home!”
Chapter 16 Deadline
Ron canceled his remaining schedule and hurried into the house with Anne.
“Dad—Mother!” he called as he hurried into the living room. “We’ve found Clonar! We’re going after him.” “Where?” his parents exclaimed together. “On the ship. He just contacted us by radio.”
“But you can’t drive way out there tonight,” Mrs. Barron protested. “He can wait until morning.”
“Oh, it will be all right,” said Ron’s father. “They can’t leave Clonar there all night after discovering him. You go ahead, Ron. I’ll take Anne home.”
“I guess I’ll have to go sometime,” said Anne, “but I would like to see Clonar when he comes in.”
Ron patted her arm. “I’ll give you a call first thing in the morning.”
He dashed out whistling for Pete, then ran back up the steps and called inside. “You’ll fix up his room, huh, Mother? Get something for him to eat. The poor guy probably hasn’t had a decent meal since he left here.”
“We’ll get things ready,” she said.
He backed the silver torpedo out of the driveway at a pace for which he would have had to reprimand any other member of the Mercury Club had they been caught doing it. He turned down the quiet streets, and out onto the flats beyond town. He felt a strange exuberance, as if everything were going to proceed as it should for Clonar from now on.
He would have liked to have known Clonar through the years to come, but he hoped with all his heart that Clonar would be successful in building communication equipment that would reach his people.
His mother, too, Ron thought, was beginning to break down the icy prejudice that walled her off from Clonar. Tonight, when he had mentioned that he had been found, he was sure that her eyes had glowed with satisfaction, as if she had hoped all along that he would come back to them.
As he braked the car at the turn-off point on the mountain road, Pete jumped out and dashed through the underbrush, barking noisily. Then Ron realized that he had not arranged for this second visit. But it was too late for that. He would have to bluff it through or get them to call Gillispie on the radio.
He was challenged by the outer guard. “Ron Barron/’ he said. “I have permission from Gillispie.”
The guard hesitated. “That wasn’t a blanket permission.”
“Oh, yes, it was. Do I have to check with Gillispie on it again?”
“All right—I guess it’s O.K. You’ve been in once—”
Son of the Stars Page 12
