Grant Gage switched off the message drone transcriber, leaned back in his chair, flipped on ship intercom. "Jill?"
"I'm in here," Jill's voice announced from the adjoining communicator room.
"Oh! Didn't hear you go in. What date was it that Farquhar last contacted us?"
"Eight planet days ago. Check it against the Galestral calendar."
Grant's gaze shifted to the console calendars. "Getting a response?"
"The usual kind. His truck's recording the call. Farquhar either isn't at home, or doesn't want to talk. I said one of the Zuron cameras had disappeared, and asked him to call back if he was interested in hearing the details." She'd come to the door as she spoke. Grant regarded her a moment. Survey Technician Second Class. Multilevel training. Four-year veteran of the Galestral Space Exploration Corps at age twenty-two. Three completed outworld tours. Jill Hastings. One of Galestral's more valuable employee-shareholders.
"I've finished the standard reports," he said. He tapped the intercom switch. "Ned?"
The intercom grunted. "About done."
"Got a report we can feed the drone?"
"Doing that now. Be there in three-four minutes."
Intercom off again. Grant said to Jill, "How about shaping up breakfast for three?"
"We're going back out?"
"Uh-huh. I want to make a run inland, up to the area of the ghost camp. If it's my lucky day, there'll be neither fog nor rain on the hills and we'll find and bag one of those big birds."
Jill set her face in prim lines, recited in a good-girl voice, "Company orders state clearly that at present we are to concern ourselves with the quote Kulkoor Problem unquote only to the extent we are instructed to do so by Biota Analyst First Class Frank Farquhar! We have received no"
"I'm aware of it. And the Biota Analyst may have good reasons for his games, but I'm beginning to get tired of them. Company orders don't say we can't go hunting. Go rustle up the grub, woman! You and Ned can catch up on sleep on the way."
Jill got busy in the mess. She heard Ned Brock come along the passage presently, on his way to the drone room. Her thoughts remained preoccupied with Frank Farquhar. Almost all they knew about him was what they'd learned since his arrival on Kulkoor, and that was chiefly that he was a loner by preference. He might find it an asset in his line of work, but he carried it to irritating extremes. He'd landed with his own supplies and equipmenta small aircar, an airtruck with a laboratory, a drone receiver and supply of message drones. His reports went separately to Galestral. It probably would be two days before they heard from him next; and the chances were it would be nothing but a recorded message then. He was supposed to check in with his back-up team every ten planet days, solely to let them know he was still around. So far, he'd done it. If two weeks went by without word from him and they couldn't make contact with him, they were to assume he'd run afoul of the Kulkoor Problem and was dead or disabled. They'd notify Galestral of the fact and start seeing what they could do about the problem themselves. If they failed in turn to solve it, the Galestral Company would take both failures into account in selecting the personnel who were to form its new front line on Kulkoor.
In the meantime, they ran routine checks, adjusted and repositioned survey instruments, stood by to carry out the occasional instructions Farquhar had for them, and maintained the security precautions called for by Condition Abnormal. The last meant that their ship was stationed six hundred feet in the air, moored by magnetic beam to Kulkoor's surface. They left the ship and returned to it by aircar, and their Suesvant rifles went wherever they went.
Until this morning, that had been all.
That morning, coming back from a dawn check of the survey devices, Ned and Jill discovered that one of the Zuron cameras set up in the vicinity of the hovering spaceship was gone. The Zurons, stilt-mounted twenty feet above the ground, swiveled toward, focused on and took pictures of any moving object more than six inches in diameter which came within a two-hundred-yard range. A large variety of Kulkoor fauna had been catalogued in this manner; but less than a dozen species turned out to be of interest to Farquhar, for whose benefit the cameras were being operated. During the past weeks, the survey team had collected a sample of each of those species for him; he'd be picking them up when he got around to it. He hadn't said why he was interested; and whatever the assorted animals had in common remained obscure to the team.
The missing camera introduced a new factor. The shaft supporting it had been snapped off near the upper end, and the broken section had vanished with the camera. The Zurons were protected by deterrent energy fields which discouraged large animals from running into the stilts and smaller ones from climbing them. Until now, they'd been effective. Ned Brock went over the surrounding ground with a tracker and picked up no indication that anything had come near the stilt during the night.
But something could have come flying up to itsomething powerful enough to break the metal shaftsomething which then hadn't simply let the Zuron fall to the ground but had carried it away.
They'd come across only one life form on Kulkoor that might be capable of doing both; and that was the big winged forest hunter who alsojust possiblycould be responsible for the fact that there was a mysteriously abandoned mining camp on Kulkoor. It hadn't been observed so far down in the plains, but there was nothing to keep it from going there.
"Let's assume for now that's what it was," said Grant. "The question is why it did it."
That, indeed, was the question. It could have been an accident. A simple-witted predator, coming into the Zuron's range and catching the camera's motion as it swung toward it, might attack instinctively, wrench the Zuron off and carry it away, simply because it hadn't realized that what it grasped wasn't edible.
Ned Brock said, "That's how it almost has to have happened. But I keep thinking"
"Ned, it's what we're all thinking," said Jill.
On Galestral, it wouldn't have been considered an accident. Too many of the indigenous life forms there, whipped back eventually out of the sections of the planet men wanted for themselves, had been intelligent enough to understand that man's instruments were his allies. Such a creature, approaching stealthily at night for a closer look at the floating ship and coming across the Zuron, might have broken the camera away and disposed of it to keep its presence from being reported, even though it couldn't know how the report would be made.
Until now, the only thing which might hint that any of Kulkoor's native life had reached that level of intelligence was whatever had occurred at the mining camp on the mountain slopes, months before. Jill could understand why Grant wanted to examine a specimen of the big flier they'd seen moving with shadowy quickness through the nearby forests.
A special report on the loss of the Zuron, and the circumstances under which it had been lost, was added to the contents of the message drone. Ned had calculated the degree of force required to snap the camera shaft; the figure should raise a few eyebrows on Galestral. The team kept its speculations to itself. Speculation in that area remained Farquhar's business at present.
They dispatched the drone, had their breakfast, set out.
Ned had taken Grant at his word and stretched out in the back of the car to catch up on sack time lost by the dawn patrol. Jill, not at all sleepy, took the seat behind Grant, Suesvant lying across her knees. Her thoughts roamed, tinged with discontent.
Galestral, the Galestral Company, and the Star Union . . . the only significant powers in this galactic region. Perhaps equal powers effectively, though Galestral maintained a stable population of thirty-two million people, while the Star Union's citizens numbered over half a billionbut half a billion scattered widely in space cities and mobile asteroid bases, divided further by political manipulations and walker and swimmer factions. Now that the Galestral Company had begun to move back into space, there'd been the risk of a serious clash of interests with the Star Union.
The Santrask Agreement, set up eight years before, had been designed to minimize that risk. It regulated the exploitation of uncolonized and unclaimed worlds for the benefit of any human government willing to abide by its terms. The discovery of a profusion of heavy metal pockets on Kulkoor had been the first significant test of the Agreement. Their value was immense and estimates of the value kept being increased as surveys continued. If it hadn't been immense, the exploitation of Kulkoor couldn't have been considered. It lay almost at the rim of explored space, as distant from the closest Star Union bases as from Galestral, still farther from most of the scattered colony worlds of the minor Santrask powers. Even message drones took weeks to reach it. Ferrying in and maintaining equipment for large-scale mining operations would be a project which should strain the resources of the Galestral Company and the Star Union. The lesser Santrask signatories couldn't begin to undertake such projects. The Star Union would act as their agent on Kulkoor.
And now the operations had been stalled before they began. Kulkoor had presented the human intruders with a riddle . . .
Superficially, it mightn't seem too significant. Grant and Jill had been among the first survey teams assigned to Kulkoor. Starting out on an uncharted area one morning, they'd spotted mining machinery and a space shuttle on a forested mountain slope below. Legitimate mining work wasn't scheduled to begin for more than another year. They'd notified other teams, dropped down to investigate.
Some surface mining had been done in the area. The shuttle was partly loaded with ore. But nobody was in sight; and the machines evidently hadn't been used recently. It wasn't until they'd landed that they discovered the camp, set up among trees nearby and concealed from the sky by a camouflage effect. The camp area was silent, appeared deserted, but they waited until another Galestral car was circling overhead before they approached it, Suesvants held fire-ready.
Jill could recall the growing eeriness of that experience. Brown forest mold, small clumps of dry vegetation, dead branches littered the camp, carried in by gusts of wind. A few small animals scuttled away from them. Nothing else stirred. They saw what should be the control shack some fifty yards from the point they'd entered. They went up to it, moving warily. The shack had no windows, and its door was closed. While Jill covered him from twelve feet away, Grant touched the door handle, shifted it cautiously. Unlocked. Holding the Suesvant in one hand, he threw the door back.
The interior of the shack was brightly lit and obviously unoccupied. They didn't enter immediately. From the door, their gaze shifted about the room. Office of the camp boss. Control panel along one wall. Glassy shimmer of a dust and small-vermin screen across the doorspace. The normal degree of disorder . . . From the appearance of it, whoever had worked here might have stepped out of the place ten minutes ago. Jill's skin was prickling; she wasn't sure why.
Grant went in, opened the camouflage field switch. Pools of pale sunlight appeared suddenly in the camp area between the trees. A third aircar had arrived by then. Its crew joined Grant and Jill, and they went through the rest of the camp. There was no one, living or dead, in the shelters, nothing to indicate that the eruption of some local plague had driven away the men. Nor was there anything to suggest violence or a planned departure. The camp looked normal except for the degree of disturbance which could be accounted for by prowling animals, wind and rain. The machinery was set up to work. The miners' personal belongings lay about in the shelters; it was possible to calculate from them that there had been forty-three men quartered here. Light and heating systems were functioning, and most of the force screens designed to keep vermin out of the shelters were powered. The camouflage field was nearly exhausted.
What had become of the men? The shuttle had been their only link with the ore carrier which had brought them to Kulkoor but presumably had come no closer than the flow of meteorite clouds nearest the planet where it would have been almost safe from chance detection. And the shuttle stood here, as enigmatic as the rest of it. Where had they gone? Why had they gone?
The questions remained unanswered. Biotracker readings indicated there had been no human beings in the camp area for at least a month before Grant and Jill arrived. The ore carrier presumably had left when the shuttle failed to return from the planet. Nothing was found to show from where it had come. The shuttle and most of the other machinery were Star Union manufacture, decades old. They could have been picked up almost anywhere. Personal belongings provided no clues. A ragtag outfit, probably from some regressed walker colony, which had got wind of the Kulkoor bonanza and considered it worth the long haul to slip in and load up what it could before authorized mining operations began and the planet came under a degree of surveillance which made private projects impossible.
That was the appearance of it.
It could have been a deliberate mystification. It could have been a number of other things, which might or might not turn out to have wider significance. In any case, every effort must be made to explain what had happened before major operations on Kulkoor were started. The Galestral Company and Cencom were agreed on that. They went about their efforts to obtain the explanation in different ways.
The Galestral Company proceeded by the book, by the disciplined rules established in the conquest of its own planet. It left three observers and a scout ship stationed on Kulkoor, hauled off its other personnel. Grant Gage and Jill Hastings were two of the observers. They were selected for the job because, of the people then on Kulkoor, they were, by their record, the best qualified to handle it. Because there was, also by their record, a streak of the nonconformist in both of them, they were joined by Ned Brock, almost as qualified and by nature a Company man, a stabilizing influence in the team. They were skilled, highly trained people; they weren't to stick out their necks in this matter. A specialist would be sent to do that. The Galestral Company was frugal in the use of human resources. Those it used were expendable when the purpose was worth the price, but they weren't expended if calculation could prevent it.
Cencom, with less direct experience in dealing with abnormal planetary conditions, set up a test project staffed with a hundred and fifty people, to subject Kulkoor to overall analysis during a planned ten-month period. The problem, if it existed, should be brought to light somewhere along the line. The peril, if it arose, would be met by conventional means; the Base was protected by defensive and offensive armament. The sentinel ship, stationed in synchronous orbit above the Base, was equipped to evacuate all personnel as a last resort.
The Star Union project was now beginning its third month. A mapping crew of two had been lost with their aircar. The indications were that they'd attempted to fly through a violent storm in mountainous country. No trace of car or crew had been found; but no one seemed inclined to blame the Kulkoor Problem for the disappearance. An occasional accident of that kind could be expected.
There'd been no other losses.
Jill sighed. The Star Union, by its own lights, was also going by the book on Kulkoor. And the book was getting old. Throughout its two hundred and sixty-three years of existence, Cencom, the tunneled planetoid, still the most formidable space fortress known, had been the Star Union's strategic center. The Galestral Company wasn't much younger.
Between them, they'd grown to dominate the area. You were a Star Union citizenwalker or swimmer; essentially space-oriented, space-housed, in either case. Or you were a working shareholder of the Galestral Company. Galestral was as magnificent a world as Earth ever could have been, but it was the only world like that around. Ragnor never had been able to support as much as half a million Mailliards; and the Mailliards had been regressing technologically for decades before they tangled with the Star Union. Scores of colonies on other worlds led a marginal existence, or dropped below it and failed. Kulkoor, though four fifths of its land surface was cold desert, might have made a better man home than almost all of them.
But that was the way it was at present. Men had moved away from Earth, come this far. Planets that weren't fit for human habitation remained inexhaustible sources of raw material. Motion had stopped; it was time for organization, for consolidation. The Star Union was formed; and presently the Galestral Company split away from the Star Union, conquered the almost unconquerable native terrors of Galestral, and held the planet against all human comers until no more felt tempted to come.
Consolidation continued. It became stagnation, Jill thought. There'd been no change in basic ship design in three hundred years. The ships were goodbut only that. They didn't have the range to go unsupported out of this sterile area, far enough to leave the Star Union and the Galestral Company behind.
Far enough to break the strings.