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  Jellico slowly drew his weapon. Like those of the others, it was set at broad beam to slay to provide the greatest possible defense. He glanced once more at Rael and nodded in satisfaction. She, too, had her weapon at ready in her hand.

  Determination hardened in him. If the worst happened, if they found themselves facing the horde they had come to detect and could then not fight their way free, he would see to it that this woman met a clean death and then give that same grace to as many more of his companions as he could before being brought down himself. That responsibility, too, lay upon a starship Captain ...

  For several interminable seconds, there was no response, then an irregular stain of deeper darkness flowed, flooded, out from the base of the building. A cluttering squeal, as if issuing simultaneously from a hundred thousand small throats, accompanied the charge. In the next moment, the bait was covered.

  "Let's have the beams," Ursula commanded in a tone hushed as much by horror as by the need to conceal their presence.

  The flier's lights might have penetrated the Federation's worst hell. There before them was a mouse-brown sea of writhing, struggling bodies, all snarling and fighting to reach the impossibly inadequate bounty that had summoned them.

  A myriad on the outer fringes turned to face the intruders, fixing them with baleful, red-reflecting eyes, cruel fangs exposed in a desire that needed no common tongue to translate.

  The outermost rodents came for the humans but stopped again as if at a wall a couple of inches from the fence. There they remained, stymied, access to the rambeef denied by the mass of their fellows, frustrated in their hunger to claim the greater feast beyond by the well-known power of the fence.

  "That explains why it's electrified," Cohn muttered.

  She brought the transceiver clutched in her left hand to her lips. "The rats are here," she said tersely to the raiders awaiting her order. "Go on, but in the name of all we revere, be careful when you hit the cellars. These things came out of there. They may go back in, and there might be still more of them waiting down there."

  11

  The crew of the Solar Queen crowded into the mess the following morning to hear their Captain's summary of the report he had just received from Ursula Cohn.

  "... The Patrol got everything they needed—records and live rats, four-legged and plenty of the biped variety just begging to sing in order to save their own hides, if only to spend the remainder of their days in the galactic pen.

  "It was as nasty an operation as I've ever heard described. There's a lot of gem mining on Canuche, apparently, mostly mid-quality amethysts and garnets with an occasional small sunstone thrown in to keep the prospectors dreaming. Everything's minor scale, one or two guys roaming around the mineral country and leasing claims for a couple of years, then coming in with the take. No one ever gets enough to make a larger or more complex operation economically feasible, but the total is a welcome addition to the stocks of the local gem merchants, even without the odd sunstone. The stones facet nicely and can be priced low enough to be readily affordable by the bulk of the laboring people, who form a steady market for them."

  "Maybe we should keep that in mind and bring a small stock of semiprecious material back with us if we plan a return visit," Van Rycke said half to himself. "But go on, Miceal. What do a few not particularly exciting gemstones have to do with murder by rat?"

  "They can't be eaten," he responded grimly. The Captain marshaled his thoughts. "The prospectors fall into two general types. The most common are those who work at it for a few years, then take the money and use it to complete their education, stake a business start, or finance a trading venture or some personal dream. The rest are the perpetual drifters, not much different from their counterparts throughout the Federation, marginal folk, many of them in their middle years or older, forever talking of striking a big pocket of sunstones and retiring, in luxury but lacking any real purpose or concrete ambition. Some eventually do save a good bit, enough for them to finally leave the work comfortably fixed, but most're content to mine their claims until their leases expire, sell off the rights, and use most of the credits to pick up another, then blow the better part of whatever remains on a week-long fling in Happy City or one of the other pleasure districts."

  "The prospectors were the targets?" Jasper Weeks inquired.

  The Captain nodded. "The drifters, chiefly. The others have plans for their gains and aren't about to spend or lose much on a binge. If they show up in Happy City at all, it's with a very small squandering purse.

  "Most of the others aren't vacuum-brains, either. They don't want to get back-alleyed for flashing a big roll after they've been sampling the local wares for a while. They make sure they've secured a new lease and have whatever stones or credits they want to keep banked somewhere safe before they start to party.

  "There are always the few, though, who insist on a couple of drinks or a smoke at once, as soon as they get their hands on some credits, much to the joy of the unscrupulous. It goes without saying that they usually wind up voluntarily tossing away or being relieved of everything they have on them, whatever their original intentions.

  "About twelve years ago, the proprietor of the Red Garnet began to cast about for ways to capitalize on that particular source of income. First off, he assigned employees to try to sniff out vulnerable prospectors at the leasing office or, failing to carry them off there, to trail them to another establishment and lure them back to the Garnet.

  "The next problem was to keep them there long enough for them to hand over whatever credits they had. According to Colonel Cohn, most Canucheans want to sample the full spectrum of a pleasure district when they visit one, move from one place to another, stretch out their fun as much as possible. To counter that tendency, he brought his neighbors in on his plan. He knew he would have to do so anyway if he was going to carry it to fruition. They were already in partnership for importing and distributing controlled substances and rigging gambling, so he knew he'd have no trouble convincing or working with them. He kept full control of the operation from the start and gradually introduced its grosser aspects.

  "He realized from the outset, of course, that even with gaming he had few legitimate or semilegitimate means of getting at the stones his victims might be carrying, which in most cases form the principal part of a prospector's hoard. It's not permitted to accept them as payment for any goods or services in Happy City, and the police keep the district crawling with spotters to catch any violations of that rule."

  "Drunks can be back-alleyed," Shannon pointed out.

  "Only so many before the authorities begin to establish a pattern. However, if the victims can be made to vanish quickly, quietly, and completely, the operation could conceivably go on indefinitely as long as the conspirators don't get too greedy or overconfident and move too often or without proper care."

  "Twelve years?" Dane whispered.

  "Very nearly."

  "The rats?"

  "They were in it almost from the start," he averred. "The whole cellar of the Red Garnet was given over to them.

  They were closely caged but had free access via ramps to the alley, having been trained early to avoid the barrier of the fences. Similar guards defended the rest of the building and the other conspirators' places. They were always well enough fed to keep them willing to remain and accept the confinement. The only times feeding was cut back were the two periods each year when leases came due and prospectors were in town in number,"

  Craig was frowning. "That's still an awful lot of people in on a very black secret. The bosses I accept, but all those underlings? For that span of time?"

  "Control was no problem," Jellico told him grimly, "not with raklick and a couple of the old opiates to tighten the leash, and if anyone seemed likely to rebel after learning a bit too much, well, the rats would have full bellies that night.

  "It looks like only the four swill joints were involved, by the way. The erotic houses both appear to be clean."

 
He eyed Rael somberly. "You'll get a Patrol commendation for your part in this and maybe one from Trade as well. Those rumors of spacers vanishing now and then in Happy City have taken on a new significance in the last several hours." Particularly for Jan Van Rycke, he thought grimly.

  An old Pool comrade of his, a loner, never very successful, had been among those thought to have disappeared in that wretched hole.

  She shuddered. "I'll be content if it's just all over."

  "Everything but the trials and executions," he assured her.

  "One question, Rael," Rip Shannon put in. "Would you have been so quick to go to the Patrol if those two agents hadn't cornered us?"

  The Medic looked surprised. "Naturally. I had to report my suspicions to someone. Surplanetary police are usually all right, but an off-worlder can never be sure in a situation like this. On the other hand, corruption's almost nonexistent in the Stellar Patrol, and some of its agents know how to think. Besides," she concluded practically, "Teague says it doesn't hurt any ship to gain the reputation of cooperating with them, as long as she doesn't play the fool about it, that is."

  "I wonder if you'd be speaking in such glowing terms about the folks in black and silver if you'd shared our recent experience with them," Alt observed lazily.

  "They were only doing their job! Those Company sons who framed you should've been sent to the Lunar mines for attempted murder, but to the Patrol, you were suspected pestilence carriers. They had no choice but to act strongly against you."

  "Very magnanimous of you," Kamil commented with the same sleepy sarcasm, "especially when you can do your judging after the fact from a nice, safe distance."

  Rael placed her hands palm down on the table. She fixed her attention on them. "It's true that I've never had to go through what you did, but I was part of the real thing."

  Her eyes rose once more to briefly meet his before dropping again. Their expression was as somber as the memories she was recalling. "I was still a child at the time. Father had planeted on a pre-mech world and was treating with the inhabitants of one of her chief trading centers when we discovered that some sort of sickness had broken out in the community, in the very section where we were operating, and was slowly but steadily gaining ominous force. We'd been on-world for several days at that point, in daily contact with the inhabitants of the infected region, and our Medic could make no more headway against the disease than could his primitive counterparts. Only one course of action was possible for us, and we took it, even as other-spacers trapped in similar situations have in the past. We couldn't risk carrying an unidentified and as yet incurable, highly contagious, deadly illness back with us into space, so we chose to stay where we were. We couldn't even remove ourselves from the stricken city for fear of bringing the infection to uncontaminated areas of the planet."

  Her fingers whitened where they met the table. "What ever our fears at that stage, they paled before the reality that followed. About three hundred thousand people lived and worked in that community when we arrived. Ten months later, one hundred thousand of them were dead, more than eight thousand in a single, awful week. Seven of our crew, including my father, were among them.

  "So was our Medic, but he had identified the causative organism, and before he died he gave those people both a cure and a vaccine that stopped the plague as if it had hit a high security wall. The on-worlders realized what we had done for them and recognized that we had chosen both to remain and to work among them despite the proven danger to ourselves. They were grateful, and when Teague took our survivors off-world, it was with the means to buy a fine new ship outright, re-crew with top-rate hands, and fill the holds with prime trade stock."

  Her eyes suddenly locked with Kamil's, then moved to fix each of her shipmates sitting or standing opposite her.

  "That fact neither softened the horror of those ten months nor clouded the memory of it, no more than any on- worlder living through that time is likely to forget it. The dying and the sickness itself were only part of it. The misery and want were everywhere, the fear, the ever-growing, crushing despair, and with all that, too much, far too much human-nastiness. I was young and a stranger, but even I was aware of rampant filth and evil.

  "Never, ever, can a similar scourge be permitted to strike any planet, not while the power or the possibility of preventing it exists. That need holds true and must hold despite the danger of occasionally serving individuals or starships with the gravest injustice."

  "I don't think any of us will argue that. Doctor," Miceal Jellico said quietly after several seconds of grim silence. "If our lads had believed us to be plague-stricken in fact, the Solar Queen would've met her end in a star's heart. Spirit of Space! Had I imagined them capable of any other course, that's where I would've sent the Queen myself before I passed out."

  Rael smiled. "I know. If I'd doubted that, I'd never have come on board at all."

  Jellico shook his head as he watched the woman leave the cabin several minutes later. She would have been young, he thought, probably not much more than eleven, when she had gone through that plague. It would have been a hard experience at any age and explained both her basic gravity and her fascination with mass illness and other disaster situations.

  That was no condemnation of her. Every human being reaching adulthood had his defenses and his own way of viewing the universe around him. Those who experienced massive trauma, physical or mental, and who were not shattered by it had made some pretty powerful adaptations to accommodate it, especially when it had been suffered in their vulnerable formative years. The awesome slaughter of the Crater War had shredded Ali's childhood. Somehow, he had lived through that carnage, but it had left him one of life's observers. He would allow nothing to penetrate the armor he had carefully constructed around himself. Rael Cofort had been somewhat older and the deadly situation in which she found herself had been of considerably shorter duration, but even so, she, too, had her facade and, her scars ...

  He saw the Cargo-Master start to push out into the corridor. "Van, hold up."

  The other waited for him and fell into step beside him. "Quite a story," he remarked.

  "Aye."

  "You believe it?" Van Rycke asked. "She never mentioned a ship's name or a planet's."

  "That can all be checked. The timing'd be right. Cofort appeared as a force on the scene suddenly and very young out of a spacer clan who should never under normal circumstances have been able to finance the setup he created for himself." The rest of his history, of course, was the result of a lot of luck and even more hard work and shrewd dealing, but that early start had often been a source of speculation among the ranks of the Free Traders.

  Jellico shrugged, dismissing the question for the time being. "It's Rael herself who interests me at the moment.

  You and Thorson'll be checking out the market soon. Take her with you and give her as free a hand as seems prudent.

  I want to see what she can do."

  "Her brother never or only rarely used her in that capacity," Van Rycke reminded him doubtfully. "From what I saw, she'd choose the goods, but Cofort would trade for them."

  "Put it to the test anyway."

  Van gave him a curious look. "Why bother?"

  He shrugged. "A xenobiologist looking for more data, maybe. Cofort's a puzzle however you try to look at her."

  His eyes narrowed. "You and I're both old foxes, but given .all the information she had, would you have reached the same conclusion or come to it as quickly as she did?"

  "Not in a star's life span," he admitted.

  "That kind of deductive power might prove very handy to a Free Trader—if she can use it for more mundane purposes than uncovering bizarre murder plots."

  "It wouldn't do to make a career of that," his companion agreed dryly.

  "Not unless one was straight Whisperer bait or planning to ally himself permanently with the Patrol, which would amount to the same thing."

  "You don't believe Rael Cofort's thinking along those lines?" th
e Cargo-Master asked.

  "Who knows what that woman's thinking?" he responded wearily.

  Van Rycke eyed him closely. "Craig mentioned that you had some serious reservations about her."

  Jellico smiled. "I still do, but at least I think I know now why Cofort dumped her."

  Jan's pale brows rose. "That's more than I can claim."

  "Some perfectly capable people draw trouble. I believe Doctor Cofort is a prime example."

  "A jinx?"

  Miceal gave a short laugh. "Does the Cofort operation show much sign of any such influence? — No, but Rael appears to have an overdeveloped sense of what's right, or maybe the sight of the downtrodden just sparks a powerful protective response in her. Whatever the cause, the result can be pure headache for her Captain and shipmates, if not outright disaster.

  "Look at her behavior in that alley, Van. The starlight was scared out of her, but she was all set to march in for that scrap of bone and then blast off to the Stellar Patrol at warp speed. She never gave a thought to our strained relations with that organization or a Trader's natural instinct to navigate clear of all brass as much as possible. Add to that the fact that she's admitted to dragging her brother into more than one scrape he'd have preferred to duck and you have the makings of a problem of no mean magnitude."

  "Why court trouble ourselves? We'll be rid of her soon."

  "Curiosity mostly," the other responded. "Besides, she's tied to us until we're ready to lift anyway. I'd like to see if she's any good in real Trade. The Queen might as well reap some benefit if she is."

  "All right, I'll give her a shot at the market," the Cargo- Master promised willingly enough. "Come with us yourself. She'll know she's under observation anyway, and it'll be late enough now by the time we're ready to go that some of the big industrialists might be scouting around there. I understand they usually do when a new ship comes into port, and several have this past week. We could possibly pick up a charter."