The Lost Kafoozalum Page 5

because that may be secret, but the rest's History if you knowwhere to look."

  * * * * *

  Maybe the colonel approves this discretion; anyway his face thaws veryslightly unless I am Imagining it.

  "_Gilgamesh_ crashed," he says. "Near as we can make out from the log,she visited Seleucis system. That's a swarmer sun. Fifty-sevenplanets, three settled; and any number of fragments. The navigatorcalculated that after a few more revolutions one of the fragments wasgoing to crash on an inhabited planet. Might have done a lot ofdamage. They decided to tow it out of the way.

  "Grappling-beams hadn't been invented. They thought they could useMass-Time on it a kind of reverse thrust--throw it off course.

  "Mass-Time wasn't so well understood then. Bit off more than theycould chew. Set up a topological relation that drained all the freeenergy out of the system. Drive, heating system--everything.

  "She had emergency circuits. When the engines came on again they tookover--landed the ship, more or less, on the nearest planet. Too late,of course. Heating system never came on--there was a safety switchthat had to be thrown by hand. She was embedded in ice when she wasfound. Hull breached at one point--no other serious damage."

  "And the ... the crew?"

  Dillie ought to know better than that.

  "Lost with all hands," says the colonel.

  "How about weapons?"

  We are all startled. Cray is looking whitish like the rest of us butmaintains his normal manner, i.e. offensive affection while pointingout that _Gilgamesh_ can hardly be taken for a Menace unless she hassome means of aggression about her.

  Lennie says The Explorer Class were all armed--

  Fine, says Cray, presumably the weapons will be thoroughly obsoleteand recognizable only to a Historian--

  Lennie says the construction of no weapon developed by the SpaceDepartment has ever been released; making it plain that anyone but aNitwit knows that already.

  Eru and Kirsty have been busy for some time writing notes to eachother and she now gives a small sharp cough and having collected ourattention utters the following Address.

  "There is a point we seem to have missed. If I may recapitulate, theidea is to take this ship _Gilgamesh_ to Incognita and make it appearas though she had crashed there while attempting to land. I understandthat the ship has been buried in the polar cap; though she must havebeen melted out if the people on _Crusoe_ examined the engines. Ofcourse the cold--All the same there may have been ... well ...changes. Or when ... when we thaw the ship out again--"

  I find I am swallowing good and hard, and several of the others looksick, especially Lennie. Lennie has his eyes fixed on the colonel; itis not prescience, but a slight sideways movement of the colonel's eyecauses him to blurt out, "What is _he_ doing here?"

  Meaning Mr. Yardo who seems to have been asleep for some time, withhis eyes open and grinning like the spikes on a dog collar. Thecolonel gives him another sideways look and says, "Mr. Yardo is anexpert on the rehabilitation of space-packed materials."

  This is stuff transported in un-powered hulls towed bygrappling-beams; the hulls are open to space hence no need forrefrigeration, and the contents are transferred to specially equippedorbital stations before being taken down to the planet. But--

  Mr. Yardo comes to life at the sound of his name and his grin widensalarmingly.

  "Especially meat," he says.

  * * * * *

  It is maybe two hours afterwards, Eru having adjourned the meetingabruptly so that we can ... er ... take in the implications of the newdata. Lennie has gone off somewhere by himself; Kirsty has gone afterhim with a view to Mothering him; Eru, I suspect, is looking forKirsty; Pavel and Aro and Dillie and the Crow are in a cabin arguingin whispers; Nick and P. Zapotec are exploring one of the Hoppers,cargo-carrying, drop-shaped, and I only hope they don't hop throughthe hull in it.

  B and I having done a tour of the ship and ascertained all this havewithdrawn to the Conference Room because we are tired of our cabinsand this seems to be the only other place to sit.

  B breaks a long silence with the remark that However often you see itM'Clare's technique is something to watch, like choosing my statementto open with, it broke the ice beautifully.

  I say, "Shall I tell you something?"

  B says Yes if it's interesting.

  "My statement," I inform her, "ran something like this: The best hopeof inducing a suspension of the aggressive attitude of both parties,long enough to offer hope of ultimate reconciliation, lies in theintrusion of a new factor in the shape of an outside force seen to beimpartially hostile to both."

  B says: "Gosh. Come to think of it Liz you have not written like thatin years, you have gone all pompous like everyone else; well thatmakes it even _more_ clever of M'Clare."

  Enter Cray Patterson and drapes himself sideways on a chair,announcing that his own thoughts begin to weary him.

  I say this does not surprise me, at all.

  "Lizzie my love," says he, "you are twice blessed being not only wittyyourself but a cause of wit in others; was that bit of Primitive Leewith which M'Clare regaled us really not from the hand of themistress, or was it a mere pastiche?"

  I say Whoever wrote that it was not me anyway.

  "It seemed to me pale and luke-warm compared with the real thing,"says Cray languidly, "which brings me to a point that, to quote dearKirsty, seems to have been missed."

  I say, "Yep. Like what language it was that these people wrote theirlog in that we can be _certain_ the Incognitans won't know."

  "More than that," says B, "we didn't decide who they are or where theywere coming from or how they came to crash or anything."

  "Come to think of it, though," I point out, "the language and a goodmany other things must have been decided already because of gettingthe right hypnotapes and translators on board."

  B suddenly lights up.

  "Yes, but look, I bet that's what we're here for, I mean that's whythey picked us instead of Space Department people--the ship's got tohave a past history, it has to come from a planet somewhere only noone must ever find out _where_ it's supposed to be. Someone will haveto fake a log, only I don't see how--"

  "The first reel with data showing the planet of origin got damagedduring the crash," says Cray impatiently.

  "Yes, of course--but we have to find a reason why they were in thatpart of Space and it has to be a _nice_ one, I mean so that theIncognitans when they finally read the log won't hate them any more--"

  "Maybe they were bravely defending their own planet by hunting down aninterplanetary raider," I suggest.

  Cray says it will take only the briefest contact with other planets toconvince the Incognitans that interplanetary raiders can't and don'texist, modern planetary alarm and defense systems put them out of thequestion.

  "That's all he knows," says B, "some interplanetary pirates raidedLizzie's father's farm once. Didn't they, Liz?"

  "Yes in a manner of speaking, but they were bums who pinched aspaceship from a planet not many parsecs away, a sparsely inhabitedmining world like my own which had no real call for an alarm system,so that hardly alters the argument."

  "Well," says B, "the alarm system on Incognita can't be so hot or theobservation ships could not have got in, or out, for that matter,unless of course they have some other gadget we don't know about."

  "On the other hand," she considers, "to mention Interplanetary raidersraises the idea of Menace in an Unfriendly Universe again, and this iswhat we want to cancel out.

  "These people," she says at last with a visionary look in her eye,"come from a planet which went isolationist and abandoned spacetravel; now they have built up their civilization to a point wherethey can build ships of their own again, and the ones on Gilgameshhave cut loose from the ideas of their ancestors that led to theirgoing so far afield--"

  "How far afield?" says Cray.

  "No one will ever know," I point out to him. "Don't interrupt."

/>   "Anyway," says B, "they set out to rejoin the rest of the Human Racejust like the people on _Gilgamesh_ _really_ did, in fact, a lot ofthis is the truth only kind of backwards--they were looking for theCradle of the Race, that's what. Then there was some sort of disasterthat threw them off course to land on an uninhabited section of aplanet that couldn't understand their signals. And when Incognitafinally does take to space flight again I bet the first thing thepeople do is to try and follow back to where _Gilgamesh_ came from andmake contact with them. It'll become a legend on Incognita--the LostPeople ... the Lost ... Lost--"

  "The Lost Kafoozalum," says Cray. "In other