John Dalmas - Return to Fanglith

Her eyes grabbed mine and wouldn't let them go. "And you pulled that one off."

That was beside the point, I wanted to tell her. That had been then. The situation had been

different. I'd been lucky. But all I could answer was: "Dad had as much to do with it as I did."

"Not according to him he didn't." Her gaze withdrew for a minute. "I can see the difficulties you're talking about, and the dangers. But it seems to me that when we get down to it, having a scout ship will make up for a lot. And if things don't shape up for us there, we can take on fresh provisions and try another world somewhere. The fuel slug on this rig is good for years and years if we don't run her too long at high speeds in proximity mode."

She had a point. I'd been letting myself get bogged down in the difficulties. And although dad had played as big a role as I had in the final showdown on Fanglith, all in all, it had been my show. So I said okay, she'd made sense, and we didn't talk much about it the rest of the way.

Meanwhile, Tarel and I let our hair grow, to look more like Fanglithans. Also, we found a drawer with several remotes-small receiver units you can put in your ear for confidential radio reception. They operate on a wireless relay from your belt communicator, and with our hair over our ears, no Fanglithan would know we had them.

Eventually, one day near ship's "midnight," the scout's honker woke us up. We'd set it to let us know when the computer kicked us down out of FTL mode. Ahead of us we could see the system's primary-the sun that Fanglith circled. Seen from where we were, it was a glaring, small white globule against a star-frosted backdrop of deepest black. We were farther out from Fanglith than we'd expected-part of the tiny error inherent in servomechanisms and ancient equations-but still less than a day away in mass-proximity mode.

I had flitter bugs in my stomach. I wasn't sure how much of it was just plain excitement and how much was fear, There'd be enough of both in store for me on Fanglith. I took a deep breath. Whatever, I told myself. When we'd taken care of a few preliminaries, we'd be eating real food again, all of us, breathing unrecycled air, and seeing the surface of a planet where surely the Empire hadn't landed.

The first time we'd arrived, I'd been sixteen and Deneen fourteen, and we'd known almost nothing about Fanglith. So we'd looked it over pretty carefully. You might think we wouldn't need to a second time, but we weren't taking any chances. We made several slow swings around it at 40,000 miles, monitoring for radio signals just in case Imperials had landed. We got nothing, and the radio monitoring equipment aboard the Jav-we'd named our scout The Rebel Javelin-was pretty sensitive. It was certainly a lot more sensitive than most private craft would carry, so we could assume that if we hadn't picked up anything, there was nothing to pick up.

But to make doubly sure, we moved in below both zones of heavy radiation and circled at 150 miles above the surface. We didn't pick up anything from down there, either. Meanwhile, I'd had the computer establishing a reference grid for the planet, and because the scout had a recording broad-band EM scanner, I had it map the surface for us as we flew over it.

All of which used up another day-another day of short and monotonous rations. By then we were ready to put down somewhere, anywhere, to get something fit to eat. So I called a council.

The immediate problem, I pointed out, was that I didn't have anything to buy food with, and what I could think of to trade, they'd have no use for. Except weapons of course-stunners and guns. We had a locker full of them, but they weren't anything we wanted the locals to have. For one thing, they might decide to use them on us.

Which meant I'd have to trade my services for food. The question was, what services?

Deneen eyed me coolly. "Larn," she said, "you're thinking like a planner, which is fine when you have data to plan with, but right now you don't. What you need to do is let me put you down somewhere. Then you circulate and find out what services people want that you can give them."

It sounded simple, the way she said it, but doing it,.. Mainly it bothered me that she'd pointed it out to me in front of Tarel, but she was right. I tended to worry sometimes when I didn't have a plan of action all figured out ahead. And there were-are-times when that just isn't possible. There are times when a person needs to do whatever comes next, and figure that somehow he'll make it come out right.

My mind went back then to something our Norman knight, Arno de Courmeron, had mentioned when we'd been here before. There was a seaport in Provence, on the Mediterranean coast, from which he had planned to ship horses to-somewhere. Sicily. The island of Sicily.

"Okay," I said, "let's see if we can find a seaport named Marseille, in Provence. It's probably as good a town as any to put down near, and maybe while I'm at it, I can get a lead on Arno." I smiled smugly. "Meanwhile, you guys will have to make do with what's left of the dry food while I line up something down below."

Which I'd do for them as fast as I could.

We didn't know whether it was Marseille or not. But it was definitely the biggest Mediterranean seaport west of the high mountains, with a population of maybe, oh, eight or ten thousand, at a guess. The river near it seemed to be the one Arno had called the Rhone-part of the route he'd probably have taken from Normandy. We'd followed it once, farther north.

Here it divided into a number of channels, to flow into the sea through broad, wild, delta marshes. The town we were assuming to be Marseille was the nearest seaport, lying not many miles east of the river, away from the marshes. If it wasn't Marseille, it would do for the time being.

Actually I was enjoying working without a plan. Not that I considered "no plan" a virtue-I looked forward to having one. But it was kind of exhilarating, playing by ear, and it wasn't entirely "no plan"-it was more as if the plan only existed for a step or two in advance, not all the way to the goal.

We'd spied out the terrain from three miles up, with a viewscreen magnification that let us examine things in detail when we wanted to. Especially the road that led from river to town. Where it approached the town, it ran along not far from the sea, with high, rugged hills close behind it to the north. As a road, it was mainly the tracks of animals in the stony, muddy ground, with the cartwheel ruts mostly broken down by hooves. It looked as if it had rained a lot lately.

Just then there wasn't much moving on it. On one stretch, for example, two peasants on foot, with long sharpened sticks, prodded along six of Fanglith's version of cattle. These are big, hoofed animals, with two horns curving out from above their ears. Behind the two peasants, a heavy-bodied man rode on a "horse," an animal resembling a gorn. He seemed to be the men's boss-their "master," as they call them on Fanglith.

A quarter mile ahead of them were three men walking together, carrying stout staffs that could be used for fighting as well as walking. Their clothes were old, dirty, and patched. A hundred yards ahead of them was a two-wheeled cart pulled by a donkey-a small, long-eared animal a little like a horse. The cartwheels looked almost as if they'd been sawed from tree trunks in single pieces.

That was all the traffic on a half-mile piece of road. Not what you'd call heavy use or high speed.

Next, there was the question of where to put me down. From our earlier experience on Fanglith, we'd concluded it was best to keep our ship secret until we needed to exercise some power, because unless we handled things right, people would react to it in one of two ways: either hate and fear, on the assumption that we were what they thought of as devils or demons (I'm still not sure what the difference is); or with greed for our ship and weapons. Either reaction was dangerous to us.