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Men leaped swiftly out of them and trotted toward a small town, a settlement, a group of houses hardly larger than a village. One man delayed by each grounded space-boat, and then ran to overtake the others. Local inhabitants appeared, to stare and to wonder. The two landing-parties, ten men in each, did not pause. They swarmed into the village's single street.
"We must never forget," continued the man on the platform, "that, but for the explorations of this man and his space-boat, some eighty years ago, we should know very little. Can any one tell me why his explorations have never been repeated?" Two hands went up. The professor nodded to a girl seated next to the young fellow whom the doctor now knew as "Ernol."
Don't you remember what that Department works on? Of course you've got to send those news-reports!" Bors ordered a space-boat to come from the cargo-ship for the reports. "Would you like to come to dinner on the yacht?" asked Gwenlyn. "You're all living on emergency rations. Nobody asked us to divide our supplies with the fleet. I can give you a nice meal."
What Bors asked was what a commanding officer would need to know about a new ship, and his new followers realized it. They had been exultant and triumphant when he entered the space-boat. In the brief time needed to get to the Liberty they became ardently confident. His reception was undisciplined but enthusiastic. He made a hurried inspection.
The Horus went on. There was a cargo-ship aground on Dover, and the Horus threatened bombs and a space-boat went down and brought it up. That ship also went away to Glamis where the fleet was accumulating an inconvenient number of prisoners.
One of the space-boats flew to bits. Before the cars had vanished, there was a second explosion. Another space-boat vanished in flame and debris. The landing-party had no way to return to space. The inhabitants of the village had no way to report their coming except in person and by traveling some considerable distance on foot. They were singularly slow in making that report.
We can supply you!" Bors went tense all over. He'd been called by name! If he was known by name on this world twenty light-years from Mekin and thirty-five from Kandar then everything was lost. "Can you send up a space-boat?" he asked in a voice he did not recognize. "I'd like to have your news." It must be a trap.
Bors had himself ferried to the flagship by space-boat, because what he had to report was too disheartening to be spoken where all the fleet might hear. Gwenlyn met him at the flagship's airlock. She looked very glad, as if she'd been uneasy about him. "Call for a boat," Bors commanded her curtly, "to take you to the Sylva. Go on board with anybody else who belongs on it, your father, anybody.
Somehow a slow rotary motion had been imparted to it during the process of abandoning ship. The little fighting ship pointed as though wistfully at all the stars about her, to none of which she would ever drive again. The Sylva loomed up. The last space-boat nestled into its blister and the grapples clanked. The leaves closed.
Calhoun put Murgatroyd into the Med Ship and went back to the spaceport office. A small space-boat, designed to inspect the circling grain-ships from time, was already aloft. The landing-grid had thrust it swiftly out most of the way. Now it droned and drove on sturdily toward the enigmatic ship.
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