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  There was a deflated silence. No survey auctioneer would accept that amount. It was Wilcox who broke the quiet.

  “Why are they having an auction here, anyway? Naxos is no Federation district planet.”

  It was queer, come to think of it, Dane agreed. He had never before heard of a trading auction being held on any world which was not at least a sector capitol.

  “The Survey ship Rimwald has been reported too long overdue,” Jellico’s voice came flatly. “All available ships have been ordered to conclude business and get into space to quarter for her. This ship here—the Giswald—came in to the nearest planet to hold auction. It’s some kind of legal rocket wash—”

  Van Rycke’s broad finger tips drummed on the table top. “There are Company agents here. On the other hand there are only two other independent Traders in port. Unless another planets before sixteen hours today, we have four worlds to share between the three of us. The Companies don’t want D-s—their agents have definite orders not to bid for them.”

  “Look here, sir,” that was Rip, “In that twenty-five thousand—did you include the pay-roll?”

  When Van Rycke shook his head Dane guessed what Rip was about to suggest. And for a moment he knew resentment. To be asked to throw one’s voyage earnings into a wild gamble— and that was what would happen he was sure—was pretty tough. He wouldn’t have the courage to vote against it either—

  “With the pay-roll in?” Tau’s soft, unaccented voice questioned.

  “About thirty-eight thousand—”

  “Pretty lean for a Survey auction,” Wilcox was openly dubious.

  “Miracles have happened,” Tang Ya pointed out. “I say—try it. If we lose we’re not any the worse—”

  It was agreed by a hand vote, no one dissenting, that the crew of the Queen would add their pay to the reserve—sharing in proportion to the sum they had surrendered in any profits to come. Van Rycke by common consent was appointed the bidder. But none of them would have willingly stayed away from the scene of action and Captain Jellico agreed to hire a Field guard as they left the ship in a body to try their luck.

  The dusk of Naxos was early, the air away from the fuel vapours of the Field scented with growing things, almost too much so to suit their Terran nostrils. It was a typical frontier town, alive with the flashing signs of noisy cafes. But the men from the Queen went straight to the open market which was to be the auction place.

  A pile of boxes made a none-too-stable platform on which stood several men, two in the blue-green uniforms of the Survey, one in rough leather and fabric of the town, and one in the black and silver of the Patrol. All the legalities would be strictly observed even if Naxos was sparsely settled frontier.

  Nor were the men gathering there all wearing brown Trade tunics. Some were from the town, come to see the fun. Dane tried to check the badges of rivals by the limited light of the portable flares. Yes, there was an Inter-Solar man, and slightly to his left, the triple circle of the Combine.

  The A-s and B-s would be put up first—planets newly contacted by Galactic Survey but with a high degree of civilization —perhaps carrying on interplanetary trade within their own systems, planets which the Companies would find worth dealing with. The C-s—worlds with backward cultures—were more of a gamble and would not be so feverishly sought. And the D-s, those with only the most primitive of intelligent life, or perhaps no intelligent life at all—were the chances within the reach of the Queen.

  “Cofort is here—” he heard Wilcox tell the Captain and caught Jellico’s bitter answering exclamation.

  Dane looked more closely at the milling crowd. Which one of the men without Company insignia was the legendary prince of Free Traders, the man who had made so many strikes that his luck was famous along the star lanes? But he could not guess.

  One of the Survey officers came to the edge of the platform and the noise of the crowd died. His cohort held up a box—the box containing the sealed packets of micro-film—each with the co-ordinates and the description of a newly discovered planet.

  The A-s went. There were only three and the Combine man snaffled two of them from the Inter-Solar bidder. But Inter-Solar did much better with the B-s, scooping up both of them. And another Company who specialized in opening up backward worlds plunged on the four C-s. The D-s—

  The men of the Queen pressed forward, until with a handful of their independent fellows they were right below the platform.

  Rip’s thumb caught Dane in the lower ribs and his lips shaped the name, “Cofort!”

  The famous Free Trader was surprisingly young. He looked more like a tough Patrol Officer than a Trader, and Dane noted that he wore a blaster which fitted so exactly to the curve of his hip that he must never be without it. Otherwise, though rumour credited him with several fortunes, he was little different in outward appearance from the other Free Traders. He made no display of wrist bands, rings or the single earring the more spectacular of the well-to-do Traders flaunted, and his tunic was as plain and worn as Jellico’s.

  “Four planets—D class—” the voice of the Survey officer brought Dane’s attention back to the business at hand. “Number One—Federation minimum bid—Twenty thousand credits—”

  There was a concentrated sigh from the Queen’s crew. No use trying for that. With such a high minimum they would be edged out almost before they had begun. To Dane’s surprise Cofort did not bid either and it went to a Trader from the rim for fifty thousand.

  But at the presentation of planet number two, Cofort came to life and briskly walked away from the rest of the field with a bid close to a hundred thousand. No one was supposed to know what information was inside each of those packets, but now they began to wonder if Cofort did have an advance tip.

  “Planet Three—D Class—Federation minimum—Fifteen thousand—”

  That was more like it! Dane was certain Van Rycke would rise to that. And he did, until Cofort over-topped him with a jump from thirty to fifty thousand in a single offer. Only one chance left. The men from the Queen drew together, forming a knot behind Van Rycke as if they were backing the Cargo-Master in a do or die effort.

  “Planet Four—D class—Federation minimum bid fourteen thousand—”

  “Sixteen—” Van Rycke’s boom tripped over the Survey announcement.

  ”Twenty—” that was not Cofort, but a dark man they did not know.

  “Twenty-five—” Van Rycke was pushing it.

  “Thirty—” the other man matching him in haste.

  “Thirty-five!” Van Rycke sounded confident as if he had Cofort’s resources to draw upon.

  “Thirty-six—” the dark trader turned cautious.

  “Thirty-eight!” Van Rycke made his last offer.

  There was no answer. Dane, glancing, saw that Cofort was passing over a voucher and collecting his two packets. The dark man shook his head when the Survey man turned to him. They had it!

  For an instant the Queen’s men could hardly believe in their good luck. Then Kamil let out a whoop and the staid Wilcox could be seen pounding Jellico on the back as Van Rycke stepped up to claim their purchase. They spilled out into the street, piling in and on the scooter with but one thought in mind—to get back to the Queen and find out what they had bought.

  CHAPTER THREE:

  CHARTERED GAMBLE

  They were all in the mess cabin again, the only space in the Queen large enough for the crew to assemble. Tang Ya set a reader on the table while Captain Jellico slit the packet and brought out the tiny roll of film it contained. Dane believed afterwards that few of them drew a really deep breath until it was fitted into place and the machine focused on the wall in lieu of the regular screen.

  “Planet—Limbo—only habitable one of three in a yellow star system—” the impersonal voice of some bored Survey clerk droned through the cabin.

  On the wall of the Queen appeared a flat representation of a three world system with the sun in the centre. Yellow sun—perhaps the planet had the same
climate as Terra! Dane’s spirits soared. Maybe they were in luck—real luck.

  “Limbo—” that was Rip wedged beside him. “Man, oh, man, that’s no lucky name—that sure isn’t!”

  But Dane could not identify the title. Half the planets on the trade lanes had outlandish names didn’t they—any a Survey man slapped on them.

  “Co-ordinates—” the voice rippled out lines of formulae which Wilcox took down in quick notes. It would be his job to set the course to Limbo.

  “Climate—resembling colder section of Terra. Atmosphere—” more code numbers which were Tau’s concern. But Dane gathered that it was one in which human beings could live and work.

  The image in the screen changed. Now they might be hanging above Limbo, looking at it through their own view ports. And that vision was greeted with at least one exclamation of shocked horror.

  For there was no mistaking the cause of those brown-grey patches disfiguring the land masses. It was the leprosy of war—a war so vast and terrible that no Terran could be able to visualize its details.

  “A burnt off!” that was Tau, but above his voice rose that of the Captain’s.

  “It’s a filthy trick!”

  “Hold it!” Van Rycke’s rumble drowned out both outbursts, his big hand shot out to the reader’s control button. “Let’s have a close up. North a bit, along those burn scars—”

  The globe on the screen shot towards them, enlarging so that its limits vanished and they might have been going in for a landing. The awful waste of the long ago war was plain, earth burned and tortured into slag, maybe still even poisonous with radioactive wastes. But the Cargo-Master had not been mistaken, along the horrible scars to the north was a band of strangely tinted green which could only be vegetation. Van Rycke gave a sigh of satisfaction.

  “She isn’t a total loss—” he pointed out.

  “No,” retorted Jellico bitterly, “probably shows just enough life so we can’t claim fraud and get back our money.”

  “Forerunner ruins?” the suggestion came from Rip, timidly as if he felt he might be laughed down.

  Jellico shrugged. “We aren’t museum men,” he snapped. “And where would we have to go to make a deal with them—off Naxos anyway. And how are we going to lift from here now without cash for the cargo bond?”

  He had hammered home every bad point of their present situation. They owned ten-year trading rights to a planet which obviously had no trade—they had paid for those rights with the cash they needed to assemble a cargo. They might not be able to lift from Naxos. They had taken a Free Trader’s gamble and had lost.

  Only the Cargo-Master showed no dejection. He was still studying the picture of Limbo.

  “Let’s not go off with only half our jets spitting,” he said mildly. “Survey doesn’t sell worlds which can’t be exploited—”

  ”Not to the Companies, no,” Wilcox commented, “but who’s going to listen to a kick from a Free Trader—unless he’s Cofort!”

  “I still say,” Van Rycke continued in the same even tone, “that we ought to explore a little farther—”

  “Yes?” Jellico’s eyes held a spark of smouldering anger. “You want us to go there and be stranded? She’s burnt off—so she’s got to be written off our books. You know there’s never any life left on a Forerunner planet that was assaulted—”

  “Most of them are just bare rock now,” Van Rycke said reasonably. “It looks to me as if Limbo didn’t get the full treatment. After all—what do we know about the Forerunners—precious little! They were gone centuries, maybe even thousands of years, before we broke into space. They were a great race, ruling whole systems of planets, and they went out in a war which left dead worlds and even dead suns swinging in its wake. All right.

  “But maybe Limbo was struck in the last years of that war, when their power was on the wane. I’ve seen the other blasted worlds—Hades and Hel, Sodom, and Satan, and they’re nothing but cinders. This Limbo still has vegetation. And because it isn’t as badly hit as those others I think we might just have something—”

  He is winning his point, Dane told himself—noticing the change of expression on the faces around the table. Maybe it’s because we don’t want to believe that we’ve been taken so badly, because we want to hope that we can win even yet. Only Captain Jellico looked stubbornly unconvinced.

  “We can’t take the chance,” he repeated, his lips in an obstinate line. “We can fuel this ship for one trip—one trip. If we make it to Limbo and there’s no return cargo—well,” he slapped his hand on the table, “you know what that will mean—dirt-side for us!”

  Steen Wilcox cleared his throat with a sharp rasp which drew their attention. “Any chance of a deal with Survey?” he wanted to know.

  Kamil laughed, scorn more than amusement in the sound. ”Do the Feds ever give up any cash once they get their fingers on it?” he inquired.

  No one answered him until Captain Jellico got to his feet, moving heavily as if some of the resilience had oozed out of his tough body.

  “We’ll see them in the morning. You willing to try it, Van?”

  The Cargo-Master shrugged. “All right, I’ll tag along. Not that it’ll do us any good.”

  “Blasted—right off course—”

  Dane stood again at the open hatch looking out into a night made almost too bright by Naxos’ twin moons. Kamil’s words were not directed to him, he was sure. And a moment later that was confirmed by an answer from Rip.

  “I don’t call luck bad, man, ’til it up and slaps me in the face. Van had an idea—that planet wasn’t blasted black. You’ve seen pictures of Hel and Sodom, haven’t you? They’re cinders, as Van said. This Limbo, now—it shows green. Did you ever think, Ali, what might happen if we walked on to a world where some of the Forerunners’ stuff was lying around?”

  “Hm—” the idea Rip presented struck home. “But would trading rights give us ownership of such a find?”

  “Van would know—that’s part of his job. Why—” for the first tune Rip must have sighted Dane at the hatch, “here’s Thorson. How about it, Dane? If we found Forerunner material, could we claim it legally?”

  Dane was forced to admit that he didn’t know. But he determined to hunt up the answer in the Cargo-Master’s tape library of rules and regulations.

  “I don’t think that the question has ever come up,” he said dubiously. “Have they ever found usable Forerunner remains—anything except empty ruins? The planets on which their big installations must have been are the burnt off ones—”

  “I wonder,” Kamil leaned back against the hatch door and looked at the winking lights of the town, “what they were like. All of the strictly human races we have encountered are descended from Terran colonies. And the five non-human ones we know are all as ignorant of the Forerunners as we are. If they left any descendants we haven’t contacted them yet. And—” he paused for a long moment before he added, “did you ever think it is just as well we haven’t found any of their installations? It’s been exactly ten years since the Crater War—”

  His words trailed off into a thick silence which had a faint menacing quality Dane could not identify, though he understood what Kamil must be aiming at. Terrans fought, viciously, devastatingly. The Crater War on Mars had been only the tail end of a long struggle between home planet and colonist across the void. The Federation kept an uneasy peace, the men of Trade worked frantically to make that permanent before another and more deadly conflict might wreck the whole Service and perhaps end their own precarious civilization.

  What would happen if weapons such as the Forerunners had wielded in their last struggle, or even the knowledge of such weapons, fell into the wrong Terran hands? Would Sol become a dead star circled by burnt off cinder worlds?

  “Sure, it might cause trouble if we found weapons,” Rip had followed the same argument. “But they had other things besides arms. And maybe on Limbo—”

  Kamil straightened. “Maybe on Limbo they left a treasure house
stored with bags of Thork gems and Lamgrim silk—or their equivalent, sure. But I don’t think the Captain is in the mood to hunt for it. We’re twelve men and one ship—how long do you think it would take us to comb a whole planet? And our scout flitters eat fuel too, remember? How’d you like to be stranded dirt-side on some planet like this Naxos—have to turn farmer to get food? You wouldn’t care for it.”

  Dane had to admit inwardly that he certainly wouldn’t care for that. And if the Queen did set down so—locked in some port for lack of funds to get her off-world again—he wouldn’t even have his back pay as a meagre stake to tide him over until he could get another ship. The others must be thinking of that also.

  Sometime later Dane lay awake on his narrow bunk amazed at how quickly all their hopes had crashed. If Limbo had only proved to be what they first thought—or even if they only had a big enough reserve to go and inspect their purchase—But suddenly Dane sat up—there had been that other Trader who had bid against Van Rycke at the auction. Could be be persuaded to take Limbo off their hands at a big discount?

  But with a burnt off, he wouldn’t want it even at half what they had paid Survey. The risk was too great—no one would make a dry-run on such short odds. Only a man with Cofort’s backing could take a chance—and Cofort had shown no interest in this particular “bargain”.

  In the morning it was a glum crew who trailed in and out of the mess cabin. All of them carefully avoided the end of the table where a grim Captain Jellico sat sipping at a cup of Mura’s own secret brew which was usually served only at moments of rejoicing. This was no celebration—it must be that the steward believed they needed heartening.

  Van Rycke came in, his tunic sealed trimly from his belt to his broad chin, his winged officer’s cap perched on his head, ready for a town visit. Jellico grunted and pushed away his cup as he arose to join him. And so daunting was the Captain’s scowl that not one of the others dared to wish them good luck on their mission.