Jack Vance by The Five Gold Bands

Author:The Five Gold Bands
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-06-21T23:44:52+00:00

VIII

PADDY AWOKE from deep sleep to find the ship floating free. He peered out a bull’s-eye. Space surrounded them like a vast pool of clear water. Astem glittered Scheat, to one side hung yellow Alpheratz, and ahead down a foreshortened line ran the stars of Andromeda’s body—Adhil the train. Mirach the loins, Almach the shoulder.

Paddy unzipped the elastic sheet, clambered out, stepped into the shower, stripped, turned on the mist. The foam searched his pores, slushed out oil, dust, perspiration. A blast of warm air dried him.

He dressed, stepped up to the bridge deck, where he found Fay bending over the chart table, her dark hair tousled, the line of her profile as clean and delicate as a mathematical curve.

Paddy scowled. Fay was wearing her white blouse, dark green slacks and sandals and seemed very calm and matter-of-fact. To his mind’s eye came the picture of the near-naked dancer in the fantastic gilt headdress. He saw the motion of her cream-colored body. The clench of muscles, the abandoned tilt of her head. And this was the same girl.

Fay looked up into his eyes and, as if divining his thoughts, smiled faintly, maddeningly.

Paddy maintained an injured silence, as if somehow Fay had cheated him. Fay, for motives of her own, did nothing to soothe him but turned back to the sheet of metal she had taken from the Badau book. After a minute she leaned back, handed it to Paddy.

It was minutely engraved in the Badaic block. The first paragraph described the space-drive tube, giving optimum dimensions, composition, the tri-axial equations for its inner and outer surfaces.

The second paragraph specified the type of field-coils found to be most efficient. Then followed two columns of five-digit numbers, three to a column, which Paddy—remembering the secret room at Akhabats he had broken into—knew to be field-strength settings.

Fay said, “I opened the Pherasic can, looked into it also. It had a metal sheet something like that one—describing the tube—but instead of detailing the coils it prescribed their spacing.”

Paddy nodded. “Duplication of information.”

“We’ve got two of these things, said Fay seriously, “and it’s uncomfortable carrying them around with us.”

“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” said Paddy. “And since we can’t get in to Earth— Well, let’s see. Delta Frianguli is pretty handy and there’s an uninhabited planet.”

The planet was dead and dull as a clinker, showing a reticulated surface of black plains and random flows of cratered scoria three miles high, ten miles wide.

Paddy made an abrupt gesture. “The problem is not so much hiding our loot as finding it again ourselves.”

“It’s a big planet,” said Fay dubiously. “One spot looks like another.”

“It’s a misfit among planets,” declared Paddy. “A dirty outcast, shunned by polite society—all ragged and grimy and patched. Sure, I’d hate to be afoot down there in the waste.”

“There,” said Fay. “There’s a landmark—that pillar or volcanic neck or whatever it is.”

They settled to the black sand of the plain and it creaked harshly under the ship. The pillar rose high above them.

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