The Greatest Works of E. E. Smith. E. E. Smith

for some, not so long for others," Morgan said, blandly. "But what makes you think Herkimer here never took one of the same?"

      "Huh?" Again two pairs of eyes locked and held; and this time the duel was longer and more pregnant. "What do you think? How do you suppose I lived to get as old as I am now? By being dumb?"

      Morgan unwrapped a Venerian cigar, settled it comfortably between his teeth, lit it, and drew three slow puffs before replying.

      "Ah, a student. An analytical mind," he said, evenly, and—apparently—irrelevantly. "Let's skip Herkimer for the moment. Try your hand on me."

      "Why not? From what we hear out in the field, you have always been in the upper brackets, so you probably never had to prove that you could take it or let it alone. My guess would be, though, that you could."

      "The good old oil, eh?" Morgan allowed his face and voice to register a modicum, precisely metered, of contempt. "How to get along in the world; Lesson One: Butter up the Boss."

      "Nice try, Senator, but I'll have to score you a clean miss." Samms, now back almost to normal, grinned companionably. "We both know that if I were still in the kindergarten I wouldn't be here now."

      "I'll let that one pass—this time." Under that look and tone Morgan's underlings were wont to cringe, but this Olmstead was not the cringing type. "Don't do it again. It might not be safe."

      "Oh, it would be safe enough—for today, at least. There are two factors which you are very carefully ignoring. First, I haven't accepted the job yet."

      "Are you innocent enough to think you'll get out of this building alive if I don't accept you?"

      "If you want to call it innocence, yes. Oh, I know you've got gunnies all over the place, but they don't mean a thing."

      "No?" Morgan's voice was silkily venomous.

      "No." Olmstead was completely unimpressed. "Put yourself in my place. You know I've been around a long time; and not just around my mother. I was weaned quite a number of years ago."

      "I see. You don't scare worth a damn. A point. And you are testing me, just as I am testing you. Another point. I'm beginning to like you, George. I think I know what your second point is, but let's have it, just for the record."

      "I'm sure you do. Any man, to be my boss, has got to be at least as good a man as I am. Otherwise I take his job away from him."

      "Fair enough. By God, I do like you, Olmstead!" Morgan, his big face wreathed in smiles, got up, strode over, and shook hands vigorously; and Samms, scan as he would, could not even hazard a guess as to how much—if any—of this enthusiasm was real. "Do you want the job? And when can you go to work?"

      "Yes, sir. Two hours ago, sir."

      "That's fine!" Morgan boomed. Although he did not comment upon it, he noticed and understood the change in the form of address. "Without knowing what the job is or how much it pays?"

      "Neither is important, sir, at the moment." Samms, who had got up easily enough to shake hands, now shook his head experimentally. Nothing rattled. Good—he was in pretty good shape already. "As to the job, I can either do it or find out why it can't be done. As to pay, I've heard you called a lot of things, but 'piker' was never one of them."

      "Very well. I predict that you will go far." Morgan again shook the Lensman's hand; and again Samms could not evaluate the Senator's sincerity. "Tuesday afternoon. New York Spaceport. Space-ship Virgin Queen. Report to Captain Willoughby in the dock office at fourteen hundred hours. Stop at the cashier's office on your way out. Good-bye."

      CHAPTER 9

       Table of Contents

      Piracy was rife. There was no suspicion, however, nor would there be for many years, that there was anything of very large purpose about the business. Murgatroyd was simply a Captain Kidd of space; and even if he were actually connected with Galactic Spaceways, that fact would not be surprising. Such relationships had always existed; the most ferocious and dreaded pirates of the ancient world worked in full partnership with the First Families of that world.

      Virgil Samms was thinking of pirates and of piracy when he left Senator Morgan's office. He was still thinking of them while he was reporting to Roderick Kinnison. Hence:

      "But that's enough about this stuff and me, Rod. Bring me up to date on Operation Boskone."

      "Branching out no end. Your guess was right that Spaceways' losses to pirates are probably phony. But it wasn't the known attacks—that is, those cases in which the ship was found, later, with some or most of the personnel alive—that gave us the real information. They were all pretty much alike. But when we studied the total disappearances we really hit the jack-pot."

      "That doesn't sound just right, but I'm listening."

      "You'd better, since it goes farther than even you suspected. It was no trouble at all to get the passenger lists and the names of the crews of the independent ships that were lost without a trace. Their relatives and friends—we concentrated mostly on wives—could be located, except for the usual few who moved around so much that they got lost. Spacemen average young, you know, and their wives are still younger. Well, these young women got jobs, most of them remarried, and so on. In short, normal."

      "And in the case of Spaceways, not normal?"

      "Decidedly not. In the first place, you'd be amazed at how little publication was ever done of passenger lists, and apparently crew lists were not published at all. No use going into detail as to how we got the stuff, but we got it. However, nine tenths of the wives had disappeared, and none had remarried. The only ones we could find were those who did not care, even when their husbands were alive, whether they ever saw them again or not. But the big break was—you remember the disappearance of that girls'-school cruise ship?"

      "Of course. It made a lot of noise."

      "An interesting point in connection with that cruise is that two days before the ship blasted off the school was robbed. The vault was opened with thermite and the whole Administration Building burned to the ground. All the school's records were destroyed. Thus, the list of missing had to be made up from statements made by friends, relatives, and what not."

      "I remember something of the kind. My impression was, though, that the space-ship company furnished.... Oh!" The tone of Samms' thought alerted sharply. "That was Spaceways, under cover?"

      "Definitely. Our best guess is that there were quite a few shiploads of women disappeared about that time, instead of one. Austine's College had more students that year than ever before or since. It was the extras, not the regulars, who went on that cruise; the ones who figured it would be more convenient to disappear in space than to become ordinary missing persons."

      "But Rod! That would mean ... but where?"

      "It means just that. And finding out 'where' will run into a project. There are over two thousand million suns in this galaxy, and the best estimate is that there are more than that many planets habitable by beings more or less human in type. You know how much of the galaxy has been explored and how fast the work of exploring the rest of it is going. Your guess is just as good as mine as to where those spacemen and engineers and their wives and girl-friends are now. I am sure, though, of four things; none of which we can ever begin to prove. One; they didn't die in space. Two; they landed on a comfortable and very well equipped Tellurian planet. Three; they built a fleet there. Four; that fleet attacked the Hill."

      "Murgatroyd, do you suppose?" Although surprised by Kinnison's tremendous report, Samms was not dismayed.

      "No idea. No data—yet."

      "And they'll keep on building," Samms said. "They had a fleet much larger than the one they expected to meet. Now they'll build one larger than all our combined forces. And since the politicians will always know what we are doing ... or it might be ... I wonder...?"

      "You can