The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

doubtful.
    “No. Not after that warn-off. Terra!”
    For a second or two the other three stared at Rip agape. The audacity and danger of what he suggested was a little stunning. Since men had taken regularly to space no ship had made a direct landing on their home planet—all had passed through the quarantine on Luna.
    It was not only risky—it was so unheard of that for some minutes they did not understand him.
    “We try to set down at Terraport,” Dane found his tongue first, “and they flame us out—”
    Rip was smiling. “The trouble with you,” he addressed them all, “is that you think of earth only in terms of Terraport—”
    “Well, there is the Patrol field at Stella,” Weeks agreed doubtfully. “But we’d be right in the middle of trouble there—”
    “Did we have a regular port on Sargol—on Limbo—on fifty others I can name out of our log?” Rip wanted to know.
    Ali voiced a new objection. “So—we have the luck of Jones and we set down somewhere out of sight. Then what do we do?”
    “We seal ship until we find the pest—then we bring in a Medic and get to the bottom of the whole thing,” Rip’s confidence was contagious. Dane almost believed that it could be done that way.
    “Did you ever think,” Ali cut in, “what would happen if we were wrong—if the Queen really is a plague carrier?”
    “I said—we seal the ship—tight,” countered Shannon. “And when we earth it’ll be where we won’t have visitors to infect—”
    “And that is where?” Ali, who knew the deserts of Mars better than he did the greener planet from which his stock had sprung, pursued the question.
    “Right in the middle of the Big Burn!”
    Dane, Terra born and bred, realized first what Rip was planning and what it meant. Sealed off was right—the Queen would be amply protected from investigation. Whether her crew would survive was another matter—whether she could even make a landing there was also to be considered.
    The Big Burn was the horrible scar left by the last of the Atomic Wars—a section of radiation poisoned land comprising hundreds of square miles—land which generations had never daredto penetrate. Originally the survivors of that war had shunned the whole continent which it disfigured. It had been close to two centuries before men had gone into the still wholesome land laying to the far west and the south. And through the years, the avoidance of the Big Burn had become part of their racial instinct as they shrank from it. It was a symbol of something no Terran wanted to remember.
    But Ali now had only one question to ask. “Can we do it?”
    “We’ll never know until we try,” was Rip’s reply.
    “The Patrol’ll be watching—” that was Weeks. With his Venusian background he had less respect for the dangers of the Big Burn than he did for the forces of Law and order which ranged the star lanes.
    “They’ll be watching the route lanes,” Rip pointed out. “They won’t expect a ship to come in on that vector, steering away from the ports. Why should they? As far as I know it’s never been tried since Terraport was laid out. It’ll be tricky—” And he himself would have to bear most of the responsibility for it. “But I believe that it can be done. And we can’t just roam around out here. With I-S out for our blood and a Patrol warn-off it won’t do us any good to head for Luna—”
    None of his listeners could argue with that. And, Dane’s spirits began to rise, after all they knew so little about the Big Burn—it might afford them just the temporary sanctuary they needed. In the end they agreed to try it, mainly because none of them could see any alternative, except the too dangerous one of trying to contact the authorities and being summarily treated as a plague ship before they could defend themselves.
    And their decision was ably endorsed not long afterwards by a sardonic warning on the com—a warning which Ali who had been tending the machine passed along to them.
    “Greetings, pirates—”
    “What do you mean?” Dane was heating broth to feed to Captain Jellico.
    “The word has gone out—our raid on the E-Stat is now a matter of history and Patrol record—we’ve been Posted!”
    Dane felt a cold finger drawn along his backbone. Now they were fair game for the whole system. Any Patrol ship that wanted could shoot them down with no questions asked. Of course that had always been a possibility from the first after their raid on the E-Stat.