The Inheritors Read Online Free PDF Page A

great affection for Mr. Francis Delamere . . . . He grinned. But Frankie loves Tabbie . . . .

    He said, "And is Southerly Buster bound for Morrowvia?"

    "I cannot say, Captain. But she is around. And just before you came in I 'heard' Myra Bracegirdle think, "Thank the gods there're only seven more days to go before we arrive!' "

    And that, Grimes told himself, means that she gets there at the same time as us . . . .

    He clambered laboriously to his feet, went to Hayakawa's telephone. He punched, first of all, for Lieutenant Connery's quarters, but the engineering officer was not there. He called the engine room, and found him.

    "Captain here, Chief. Can you squeeze out another half lume?"

    "I can't." Connery's voice was sharp. "The governor's playing up, an' we're havin' to run the Drive on manual control. If I try to push her any more we'll finish up last Thursday in the middle of sweet fuck all!"

    "Can't you fix the governor?"

    "Not without stoppin' her an' shuttin' down. If you want to carry on, it'll have to wait until we get to Morrowvia."

    "Carry on the way you're doing," said Grimes.

6

    Seeker saw nothing at all of Southerly Buster until both vessels were in orbit about Morrowvia, just prior to landing. This was not surprising, as Drongo Kane's ship had been approaching the planet from the Shakespearian Sector, whilst Grimes had been coming in from Lindisfarne. The angle subtended by these points of origin was little short of 180°. Furthermore, once Morrowvia itself had come within MPI range the instrument, insofar as bodies of less than planetary mass were concerned, was practically useless. And radar had been useless until the shutting down of the time-space twisting interstellar drive.

    There was Seeker, hanging in equatorial orbit three hundred miles up from the surface, and below her was Morrowvia, an Earth-type world, but unspoiled. There were blue seas and vast expanses of green prairie and forest land, yellow deserts and polar icecaps as dazzlingly white as the drifting cloud masses. There were snow-peaked mountain ranges, and long, winding rivers, on the banks of which, sparsely scattered, were what seemed to be towns and villages—but from a range of hundreds of miles, even with excellent telescopes, human habitations can look like natural formations, and natural formations like buildings, and telltale industrial smog was altogether lacking.

    On the night hemisphere the evidence was more conclusive. There were clusters of lights, faint and yellowish. Said Grimes, "Where there's light there's life, intelligent life . . . ."

    "Not necessarily," Maggie Lazenby told him. "There are such things as volcanoes, you know . . ."

    "On this hemisphere only? Come off it, Maggie."

    "And there are such things as luminescent living organisms."

    "So what we're seeing are glowworm colonies? And what about the reports from our agents on Siluria and Elsinore and Drroomoorr? Would either the Dog Star Line or Drongo Kane be interested in glowworms?"

    "They might be," she said. "They might be."

    "Yeah?"

    "Yeah. It's high time, Commander Grimes, that you cured yourself of your habit of jumping to conclusions, that you adopted a scientific approach."

    Grimes decided against making some cutting retort. The other officers in the control room were looking far too amused by the exchange. He grunted, then demanded of Lieutenant Saul, "Any sign yet of Southerly Buster, Number One?"

    "No, sir. Perhaps Mr. Hayakawa . . ."

    "I've already asked him. As far as his Peke's brain in aspic and he are concerned, the Buster's maintaining absolute psionic silence."

    "Peke's brain?" asked Maggie.

    "Can you think of any definitely Japanese dog at a second's notice?"

    And then a voice came from the NST transceiver. It was a man's voice, harsh, yet not unpleasant, strongly accented." Southerly Buster to Aero-Space Control. Southerly Buster to Aero-Space Control. Do you read me? Over."

    "But there's not any