SOS Spaceship Titan Read online

  Wuriu Sengu shouted a warning. "Watch out, sir! The tree is about to break any minute—it's swelling like a balloon!"

  Perry held a light control-finger on the antigrav breaker bar, ready to activate with split-second timing. But he was fascinated by the unheard-of strength of the tree beneath them.

  "Now!" yelled Sengu.

  A short shock went through the scoutship. They were aware of the long-forgotten gravity sensation of an elevator—then the antigravs shot into full power, bringing the weight of the Gazelle to zero. The treetop that had shown such an uncanny holding power disintegrated as though in a biological chain reaction. Nothing remained but a dirty grey dust cloud. However, a thick jet of water shot up and exploded against the antigrav field banks, then gushed in a wide spray over the neighboring treetops. Suddenly, strange and weird colors flickered across the umbrella rooftops where the spray had touched them. Fluorescent hues appeared and disappeared then came a familiar velvety blackness, followed by a return of the ugly greyish-green coloration.

  "And there's the final process," observed Khrest, indicating the edges of the umbrella roofs. They moved slowly, simultaneously from all sides, toward the hole created by exploded tree. A few minutes later the foliage under the Gazelle presented a tightly packed surface—so solid that Tifflor's altimeter gave a wrong reading again.

  "You got that figured out yet?" asked Perry.

  "Yes, sir," beamed Tifflor. "Each umbrella roof presents an ionic field tension of some kind and that of course reflects back the electromagnetics of the regular altimeter. I can only get a true ground reading with a sonic probe."

  • • •

  The ominous primeval jungle extended more than 1200 miles. Beyond it rose a hilly terrain consisting of vast boulder-strewn slopes and valleys which were reminiscent of glacial moraines on Earth. But here their dimensions were more gigantic."

  The explorers in the Gazelle continued in vain to look for signs of settlements or signs of human habitation. On one occasion they hovered over a swarm of giant centipede-like creatures which moved about casually until one of them noticed the scoutship. What happened then seemed to be beyond explanation. They found themselves in a flak of sand and stones—in a veritable dust cloud. This phenomenon lasted several minutes. Men the air cleared they saw nothing beneath them other than the lifeless and barren boulder-strewn hillsides.

  "Where are all those squiggly things?" asked Tifflor, amazed.

  Their Japanese seer smiled knowingly. "That aerial debris was from their frantic effort to dig underground. They are already about 30 feet beneath the surface."

  Perry and Khrest exchanged glances of near resignation. Honur was a hopeless, dry and crazy world, yet offered no specific danger to them.

  They flew into the night portion of the globe. As the last light disappeared behind them, Perry set the Gazelle down and sent a short message to the Titan. Bell seemed to be right in the Com Central because he answered personally and apparently in the best of spirits.

  By noon the next day they had completed reconnoitering Honur, except for the South Polar Region—apparently just as hot and dry as all other regions they had seen.

  "Honur is one big Death Valley alright," commented Perry, who was bored enough to be thinking wistfully of the Titan again.

  Scanning the entire planet with its strange flora and stranger fauna had become almost intolerably monotonous. Everything lived only to catch the nightly dew. It was all a permanent struggle for water. The Gazelle was flying along in the only direction left to them, to the south, and was slowly approaching the last unexplored section.

  Suddenly Rhodan straightened up, staring ahead. "Khrest, what's that? Are those buildings?"

  They had expected anything but a metropolis. The scoutship accelerated so swiftly that without its energy-shield deflectors the atmosphere would have become like a wall of cement. Rhodan bit top atmospheric speed, in his desire to examine the towering structures ahead.

  The Gazelle clove like an arrow toward the visual targets. The picture on the panob grew with crystal clarity.

  "Spaceships!"

  The Gazelle pulled out of its dive and headed skyward on a perpendicular course.

  "Tiff!" Perry called, using the young lieutenant's nickname. "Have they tracked us?"

  Tifflor was too busy to notice the compliment of friendship Perry had paid him. He also knew there were more than amenities on the Chief's mind just now and why the booster impulse generators had been cut in. He worked with a swift precision, almost like a robot, because of the crisis attached to the question. There could hardly be any doubt that the ships had tracked them and he knew what that meant.

  By the time the Gazelle passed a 600-mile altitude, Tiff could not believe the results of his instruments. "Sir... I can't—and I mean I just can't pick up any tracking scans at all!"

  Wuriu Sengu interrupted. "Sir?"

  "Well? Well? Out with it, Sengu!" he snapped, having overcome his initial enthusiasm.

  "I can perceive only deserted, destroyed and looted spaceships! Its a spacer cemetery!"

  The announcement coincided with the cadet's findings. The Gazelle had topped an altitude of over 1000 miles. Rhodan made a 180° back-loop and the Gazelle shot straight downward. The planet seemed to hurtle upward to meet them. Braking decelerators, inertial shocks screaming, the air howling past them—all experienced a thousand times before, yet always new again. Honur again lost its spherical shape and flattened out beneath them, spreading out swiftly into an immense, flat surface.

  Then the deceleration Gazelle was drifting toward the endless graveyard of spaceships lying at Honur's South Pole.

  6/ TEDDY BEARS OF TROY

  The small portable respirator hissed softly, providing Rhodan's lungs with oxygen. He stood alone in the scoutship's airlock and brooded over the incredible scene of the spaceship cemetery before him. Khrest had been with him a few moments before, attempting to take the thin air without a backpack respirator. He had gotten short of wind, however, and had returned for breathing equipment with a grumbling complaint about growing old.

  Sengu, Tiff and Pucky sat inside the Gazelle behind the weapon consoles. All fighting equipment was in firing position, made ready against this immense conglomeration of rotting spacers, and capable of unleashing their annihilating power at a moment's notice.

  Perry Rhodan continued a steadfast surveillance of this picture of ghastly devastation and decay. Arkon steel, capable of resisting more than 50,000° of temperature and supposedly able to retain its gleaming satin finish indefinitely—but here it was, all dulled down, rusted and dead! He was looking at nothing but dead spacers—derelicts of the void...

  He had given up trying to count them. The giant ship hulls were piled up clear to the horizon. Side by side or facing each other, leaning against each other or even lying on top of one another. Some had sunk two-thirds into the ground due to the thrust of their huge weight. Their skins had taken on the dirty color of the soil. So this was the final resting-place of all ships that had defied the ban against Honur landings.

  "Good Lord!" Perry whispered half to himself. "How could all this have happened...?" He heard a sound behind him and turned to see Khrest emerging from the lock, now wearing his respirator.

  Khrest had heard his question and replied, "So this is the way it all ends..."

  Their position was about half a mile removed from the hull of the first ship. Knowing that Pucky was scanning his outer thoughts as a matter of course, Rhodan projected to him with an order to join them and to bring Sengu along but to leave Tiff for cover at his weapon console.

  Pucky appeared instantly in a tiny teleport leap.

  The Japanese mutant had to walk like a normal man, through the airlock. "Sir," he reported simultaneously, I have been unable to discover any trace of life or robots in these ships—only stripped cabins and command centers."

  "No mental impulses detected, sir!" Pucky made a poor attempt to mimic the military tone of the Japanese.
Then he asked, "Shall I make a little snooping foray?"

  "All right, Pucky, but don't take any chances," Rhodan warned. But the air flickered simultaneously and the mouse-beaver disappeared. Pucky had teleported himself into his solo mission.

  "Okay, lets go," said Perry, and the remaining party moved out toward the long, silent array of derelicts.

  They soon stood in the slightly canted control central of a stripped-out spacer. When they walked down the decks, their footsteps reverberated hollowly. The metallic reflections of sound seemed to merge into a mocking whisper of warning: "Wait! Soon it will be your turn!"

  They examined the next deck, and the next, and everywhere their feverish gaze encountered the same spectacle of completely cannibalized wreckage. Anything and everything that had not been integrally joined to the Arkon steel of ceiling, decks and bulkheads had been dismantled, ripped out and taken away by unknowns. Traces of their work were everywhere to be seen, but not a single clue as to who they were.

  Khrest shuddered inwardly and looked questioningly at Rhodan. The chief's face was frozen in a mask of deliberation as he desperately probed the problem of this obvious but evasive menace. He could find no answer. The dust under their feet was more than 6-inches deep—a fine, powdery dust, as dry as the planet itself. The dust cover spread out before them in all directions without a sign of having been recently disturbed.

  "No footprints of the Honos here," Rhodan observed. "And yet there has to be a connection between them and this spaceship cannibalizing. But what? —can you tell me, Khrest?"

  The Arkonide's failure to answer the question only emphasized the hopelessness of the case. "My advice is to get back to the Titan and get it off the ground while you can. We can meet Freyt in orbit. Its better to take a chance of being tracked by other ships than to let the Titan end up one of these days like a squashed beetle in this bug-pile of empty carcasses."

  "What do you mean—get off the ground while we can? You're an Arkonide and you know I have to weigh what you say, Khrest. Do you think it's too late, already?"

  Khrest made a deprecating gesture with his hands. "Perry, this is no time to favor Arkonide knowledge or any other. Just don't lose sight of where we are—a graveyard! When we approached this place on foot, I had a chance to look over those wrecks and make some sort of a classification of them. About one third of these dead spacers are first line warships cruisers, battleships, interceptors, all of them almost invincible fighter ships—yet they are grounded here in the same helpless condition as the merchant ships, freighters and nondescript trading scows from the backwaters of the universe. If I hadn't discovered some of the Galactic Traders' vessels in the same junk pile, I might at least have suspected the Springers for this horrifying spectacle of devastation."

  Khrest and Rhodan suddenly felt the grip of Wuriu Sengu's hands on their arms as he came to them in startled excitement. The 'seer' had just had a ghoulish vision. His special eyes had penetrated more decks of the spacer, to the cabins in the bow of the ship.

  "I see skeletons," he half-whispered. "In every personnel cabin there are skeletons—it's creepy! Hundreds of them... and I'm seeing more of them... and more...!"

  "Sengu, take a look at the next spacer, too advised Rhodan. Now he understood how the destruction had come to these ships.

  From inside!

  The seer confirmed his suspicions. "The crew cabins of the next three ships are empty—only filled with dust, and over there it's not just inches deep but maybe as much as three feet deep! Anyway, in the fourth ship I'm picking up a slew of skeletons again. My God! It must have been a battleship or a passenger ship! There must be more than a thousand bodies!"

  "Thanks, Sengu," Rhodan said with a slightly hoarse voice. "It's alright."

  At this moment the air before them danced in familiar shimmers, the dust swirled up around them and they heard Pucky's squeaky shout. —Lousy dam dust!" He made the equivalent of a 3-point precision landing, exactly in front of Rhodan, Khrest and Sengu. He stood on his hind legs, supported by his beaver tail, and tried to make a military salute. "Chief—' and this time he spoke English, I have never seen so many skeletons in my life! Where I thought there weren't any I found them under the dust piles. The Arkonides must have all been nudists or something. I couldn't find a stitch of clothing on them. Then just by accident I came across the spaceport."

  "Uh—the what, did you say, Pucky?" Perry asked, spurred suddenly to new attentiveness. "An actual spaceport?"

  "Not a modern one, Chief. It's just a cleared place, mirror smooth, and the ground must have been treated. It's harder than cement."

  "Pucky, ask Tiff to bring the Gazelle over here," Rhodan ordered. He had left strict orders for radio silence.

  "Okay, Boss!" Pucky grinned with his single incisor—and shimmered away into nothing.

  The three men hadn't left the derelict's command central before Pucky reported back from his leap to the Gazelle.

  "He's coming," he lisped.

  Then he tried to lift up his broad beaver tail to avoid stirring up dust clouds. But with all of Pucky's many skills, this act was beyond his capacity. With a cussword he had learned from Bell, he teleported himself out of the scavenger-stripped spaceship.

  Shortly thereafter the Gazelle soared into view and landed. The airlock opened and the personnel ramp lowered. Everyone walked through the airlock with the exception of Pucky again, who made one of his 'leaps' to the inside. Then, while Rhodan piloted, Pucky gave him the course to the spaceport he had discovered.

  Rhodan set the Gazelle down flawlessly and gave orders to Tiff for soil samples.

  "I can do it better and faster," proposed Pucky. He took a geological core probe with him in a teleport jump and soon came back with samples of the cement-like surface composition.

  Meanwhile, Rhodan and Khrest had reached conclusions about the area. This single emergency spaceport was the reason the wrecks were concentrated here and not scattered all over the planet. This was the only place to set down spacers with any consistent facility or without having to compensate weight with operative antigrav units as in the present case of the Titan. It appeared that the pirates flew the seized ships to this place to ransack all installations and transfer the spoils to their own spacers.

  "Tifflor, contact the Titan!" Perry ordered. He knew now that low-band terrestrial-type frequencies would not be picked up by anyone here on Honur, so it was safe. Only long distance hyperspace transmissions would be dangerous.

  Julian Tifflor seemed to have anticipated the order, making the contact immediately. Seconds later, the call was answered by Reginald Bell, who was the Titan's commander in Perry's absence.

  Bell was heard bubbling with a strange sort of euphoria. "Hi, Perry! What's cooking?" he chuckled merrily.

  Perry was noncommittal. "Everything secure on board, Reg?"

  "Couldn't be better! Everybody here is having a ball! It's only when I have to look at these poor 'Approved' kooks that it spoils the fun around here. Anything new over there, Boss?"

  "No... Nothing new, Reggie—thank you."

  Khrest, Tifflor and Sengu were puzzled by Rhodan's reply but Pucky was already reading his thoughts.

  "Do you want me to take a jump over there, Chief, to see what is really going on?"

  Rhodan met the puzzled stares of his companions, then absorbed the knowing look in Pucky's sharp little mouse eyes—loyal and full of concern. "I don't think so, Pucky. We'd better do it together!"

  The scoutship lifted lightly away and once more the wind shrieked and roared about them as the atmosphere was parted by the forcefields. Again the Gazelle shot at full thrust into its course. It hurtled toward the main base, where the Titan rested in the shadow of the 12,000-foot mountain wall beside the lake. To Perry Rhodan, the Gazelle was crawling. Each second seemed like a week of precious time.

  He sensed that something of a deadly and sinister nature was developing on board the Titan. Bell's words had been laced with unwarranted merriment and even t
he Com Officer near him had been heard chuckling in the background. Most alarming of all was Bell's reference to everyone's 'having a ball'. What could it mean?

  Khrest sat with his head between his hands, staring at the command deck. Tifflor and Sengu exchanged puzzled looks behind Perry's back. Even Pucky had lost his customary grin...

  • • •

  On board the Titan, Bell responded once more to a call from Rhodan. "Perry! What gives?" he grinned happily into the mike, while petting the little creature called Hannibal.

  From the Gazelle,—Rhodan repeated his previous question. "Are you sure everything is alright there, Reggie?"

  "Couldn't be better!" chuckled Bell ecstatically. And like a broken record replay, he repeated his enthusiastic statement as before, with a reference again to everyone's 'having a ball.'

  "What's on the burner, Chief?" he asked.

  "Nothing much, Reggie—nothing much..."

  Bell, lounging in a seat by the communications console, turned his broad, laughing face up to John Marshall, the telepath. "Boy, will he be surprised when he gets here!" He chuckled and pushed Hannibal's little pink paw away from his nose, which the little fellow seemed to be using as a drum. "Hannibal, you sweet little rascal, you leave my nose alone!" he gently chided the little bear. "Hey, John—what name did you give to your little guy?"

  Marshall kept his pet under his coat. I call him Tannhauser."

  "Hm-m... Sounds like the make of some car."

  "Wagner's Tannhauser, Reggie!" Marshall enlightened Rhodan's chief deputy amicably with a broad smile—a smile that was weirdly foreign to the mutant's nature.

  Bell had supported his legs on the console and now Hannibal was using them for little gymnastics. "Oh sure! Wagner. How could I forget! But I never knew his son's name was Tannhauser, John. You'll have to tell me about that, man! Come on—to heck with the duty bit, pall The Titan's sitting pretty here. If there's any old thing to be done, Perry will take care of it. You can count on him. Yeah, and on us, tool Right, John?"