"Dr. Innogow, please continue this research," Rhodan urged him. "And above all I want to assure you that in my eyes you have by no means put your professional reputation on the line. On the contrary I must thank you for your display of courage. But let me know at once if you happen to find anything new in this area."

  Rhodan noticed that Dr. Innogow left his office with more self-assurance than he had had when he entered it a good half-hour before.

  "Hm-m..." he murmured aloud to himself and then put in a call to Terrania's vast hypersensor station. The connection with Walter Grimpel was finally made. Rhodan's viewscreen revealed the chief officer's startled face. "Grimpel, do you know whether or not Pucky's second hyperjump has been tracked?" he asked in his more typically curt manner.

  "Yes sir! We've picked up both transitions very clearly here. The mouse-beaver must have landed on Vagabond by now. But so far he has not reported in over telecom."

  A faint smile of amusement touched Rhodan's lips. He knew what a show the little fellow hoped to put on for his fellow mouse-beavers. Pucky had plenty of time for mischief but not a second for a hypercom check-in with Terrania.

  "He'll report in sooner or later," replied Rhodan but he had a momentary flash of uneasiness when he spoke these words. "Which brings me to why I called you, Grimpel. Keep Vagabond under observation with your energy sensors until we know that Puck's on his return flight to Earth. Thank you!"

  Shortly thereafter, Grimpel went upstairs in the station where eight men were on duty in the space radiation tracking and analysis center. "Anything new, gentlemen?" he asked.

  "The man in charge on the present shift was a Singhalese named Malya. "No, Mr. Grimpel—except for a plus deviation of 2.35%. Vagabond appears to have too much energy. I checked it out with the astrophysical department but they reassured us immediately. They say the plus deviation is due to residual scatter effects from the original energy eruption."

  Grimpel smiled cynically. After all he was one of the top specialists in his own field and he knew plenty about astrophysics. "Who gave you that information, Malya?" he asked.

  "Prof. Alskund of the Astrophysical Lab."

  "Hm-m... If he said that, it could well be. But something still bothers me about that. Advise me immediately if you pick up anything unusual from Vagabond. Pass that instruction along to the other shifts. Good day!"

  When he was back at his desk, however, this 2.35% deviation kept bothering him. He made a video-voice contact with the same central he had just left. "Malya, did you give Prof. Alskundall the data you have on that deviation reading?"

  "That goes without saying, Mr. Grimpel. We even had to wait three hours until we got the results back from Astrophysics. Prof. Alskund went all the way and put it all through the main computer."

  That seemed to close the subject.

  Unfortunately, Grimpel was not Bell who only trusted positronic readouts to a limited extent and was always opposed to regarding such mechanical sources as the ultimate authority for decision.

  Walter Grimpel forgot the 2.35% plus deviation. However, when the personnel car took him to his apartment later the subject tugged once more at his instincts. Yet he did not pursue it. He rested on the fact that Prof. Alskund was the astrophysicist of Terrania.

  • • •

  Completely crestfallen, Pucky stood in the middle of the control room of the wrecked Space-jet. Tears of anger and self-recrimination fell from his eyes. "What a colossal idiot!" he exclaimed inside his helmet. He had put on his suit immediately when the first awakening of reason had come to him—when he realized that the temperature on his home world had risen from below freezing to an infernally high degree of heat. "My beautiful SJ-90... it's scrap! And I... I flew it like a rank amateur—a double-tailed donk!"

  He staggered to the special pilot seat and sank down into it. Outside the heat hurricane was sweeping across the deserts of Vagabond. The sun had doubled its apparent size now and was flooding the small planet with its searing heat waves. Although the control central was still in one piece the temperature inside had already crept up to 108° Fahrenheit.

  The air-conditioning system had also been knocked out. The telecom was dead. The ship's machinery was a confused tangle of bent and twisted metal. Pucky had made a thorough inspection of his beautiful star ship, which brought him to the realization that he must have tried a landing against every dictate of reason.

  It was precisely this fact he could not comprehend. But what frightened him more was that he couldn't remember what had happened.

  He tried again to remember but he did not succeed. His memory appeared to have blanked out shortly after the second transition. As of a certain moment in time there was nothing in Pucky's mind but a gaping hole as far as recall was concerned. What he had done, thought or felt during that span of time—he had no idea.

  Although it was still only 65° inside his suit the temperature in the control room had risen two more degrees within a space of 10 minutes. Now it read 110° Fahrenheit.

  Suddenly he straightened up with a start. He was aware of a telepathic distress call. Only this time it did not throw him into a mind-blanking frenzy of panic. He carefully traced the location of the sender, concentrated for a moment, then disappeared in a teleport jump.

  He rematerialized in complete darkness.

  Abruptly Pucky came to the realization that he must now operate as Lt. Puck of the Solar Mutant Corps. His suit's spotlight flashed on. Before him he saw the kind of subterranean passage which he had not visited for more than 70 years.

  He was home!

  He was in a burrow! In such a burrow he had been born. Here he had lived with his parents and brothers and sisters. In such a place he had eaten, slept—and played.

  But now he was receiving telepathic cries of distress from his people. They came from the far end of this unusually deep burrow. Pucky moved forward as swiftly as he could. The wide beam of the spotlight lighted his way. Now the tunnel led steeply downward as the telepathic cries for help continued uninterruptedly.

  What has happened to my world?—he thought. Why have they dug themselves this deeply under ground?

  He stumbled but regained his balance in time, then thought of covering the remaining distance in a short teleport jump. But just then the passage leveled out and opened into a cavern. A flurry of chirping cries greeted him as his spotlight revealed a small group of mouse-beavers.

  Good Lord!—he thought, horrified. They're all just children! Where on Vagabond are their parents?

  The half-grown whelps were blinded by the light and quickly closed their big eyes only to break out in a pitiable whimpering. Pucky tried to read their thoughts but only reached a few of them. Most of this group of some 50 mouse-beavers were babies and their weak mental emanations merely expressed instinctive wants: water, food, sleep. Their common cry was for the protection of their mothers.

  Pucky did not attempt to speak with any of them. There was a certain relief in being able to communicate telepathically, he thought, but he soon discovered to his dismay that these puppies could not concentrate sufficiently to carry on any exchange of information.

  Fear, anguish, hunger and thirst dominated the youngsters' entire emotional output. Water and food had to be brought here.

  Pucky did not hesitate. He teleported back to the SJ-09. There he was shocked to discover that the Space-jet's coldroom was no longer functioning. The thermometer was already at 48°. He pulled open the door to the storage locker, jumped inside and closed it behind him.

  Child nutrition... Holy cow! I never learned that at the Space Academy! What can their little tom-toms digest and what not? (No doubt he was confusing the term in his thoughts with tum-tums.)

  Pucky started to plunder the supply of canned milk. He also stacked up four crates of fancy-grade carrots and filled a 50-litre canister with water. Gathering it all together, he made his jump.

  The cavern was more than 800 meters under ground. The abandoned mouse-beaver whelps chirped in fright again as Pucky rematerialized among them with his load of provisions and his bright spotlight. He snapped his helmet open and found the air in the cave to be quite breathable. Then for the first time he spoke aloud to them.

  He spoke in his mother language to tiny mouse-beaver pups and to youngsters who were the equivalent of 5-year-old Earth children. The longer he spoke, the more they seemed to be pacified.

  He removed his spacesuit and sensed a heart-tug of compassion as he carefully picked up one of the babies and pressed it to him. He felt tears in his eyes as the little hands clutched at his fur and the little creature snuggled his head against him. In spite of hunger and thirst it was soon asleep.

  "What do I do now?" he asked himself unhappily.

  Completely helpless he stood there among the little whelps who were starting to whimper again. With ineffable tenderness he held the baby in his arms, not daring to move.

  "Little one," he whispered. "Poor little tyke—just go to sleep now. Pucky won't leave you in the launch, or any of the others."

  • • •

  When Pucky finally checked his watch again he was startled to see that he had taken more than seven hours to attend to feeding the mouse-beaver children. In the meantime he had sensed other telepathic distress calls. Either they were coming from the south or north polar regions where 70 Years ago no mouse-beaver group had ever ventured before. His own search calls throughout the equatorial zones had remained unanswered.

  As time passed he was being forced more and more to accept the terrible realization that only a few hundred of his race were still alive on Vagabond. All the rest of them, and especially the adults of his species, must have died in the meantime.

  He quickly climbed into his spacesuit again. He placed a spare spotlight with fresh batteries in the cavern where it would continue to illuminate the food and water supplies. In contrast to Earth children the mouse-beaver pups were able to eat and drink by themselves only a few days after they were born.

  "I'll come back soon!" he reassured them before he disappeared.

  He made a return jump to the Space-jet. The cabin temperature had risen to 117°. His first thought now was to alert Perry Rhodan concerning the present crisis. The fact that the SJ-09's hyper-telecom was not functioning presented no insurmountable problem. He knew it would be possible to make a series hookup of the microcom sets in the spacesuits so that the amplified output could easily reach the interstellar hypercom station in Terrania.

  He hurried to the supply locker. His eyes lit up behind the clear faceplate of his helmet when he saw the 30 spacesuits hanging there in a neat row, one after another. Using his telekinesis he drew the first one to him and opened it—then froze!

  By the time he had inspected 10 of the suits he was trembling with rage. "Those bumblebee idiots!" he fumed. "Ye gods! How can I contact Perry or any of his spaceships now? I can't just stand by and see everything here go down to destruction!"

  There was not a single minicom set in any of the 30 suits.

  And his Space-jet was a miserable pile of junk.

  And with each rotation of its axis Vagabond moved a step closer to that deadly sun.

  The mouse-beavers had brought their children into the deepest burrows on Vagabond in the desperate hope of saving them from the destruction. The adults of the species must have all died in their further attempts to rescue their offspring.

  Pucky only felt contempt for the Terranians who had neglected to install minicom sets in the spacesuits. Yet he did not hate them for it. He made no paranoiac transfer of responsibility to them for the demise of the mouse-beaver nation. Instead, Pucky accepted the blame himself.

  His Space-jet was a tattered derelict. With his crash-landing he had cut off any possibility of return and thus he had condemned himself and the last of his kind to death. He buried all hope of being able to contact a Solar ship with the single minicom he possessed. The transceiver's low power capacity had a very limited hypercom range. But in the last few days of his life he was not going to use that as an excuse to merely sit around and complain.

  Pucky turned on the minicom. He sent out his distress signal, gave his name and position and repeated the call 20 times, after which he listened. The loudspeaker only returned the static of the void; there was no answer to his distress call.

  • • •

  So far he had located eight mouse-beaver colonies which were widely separated over the planet and hidden in the deepest possible caverns. He had taken care of the most important groups. In this process he soon determined that even his supplies of food and water were not inexhaustible. He was completely out of carrots by now and since yesterday the condensed milk had also been used up. He still had 1,120 liters of water left in the ship's tank.

  Pucky had just finished taking his inventory and was about to go back to the control room when he detected a strong telepathic impulse.

  At last—an adult mouse-beaver!

  I'm coming!

  he called back mentally. I'm bringing food and water. What is your name? My name is Pucky... ah, Plofre fre dag ga...!

  The latter phrase was untranslatable but all the more understandable to the other mouse-beaver. Pucky was amazed to receive the impression that he was not to bring either water or food.

  Why put off death only another few days when the black wall can come upon us at any minute?

  In spite of his astonishment over this cryptic statement he did not ask questions in return. Wait for me—I'm coming at once! he telepathed. He hurried back to the cold storage locker which no longer deserved its name. He filled a canister with water and obtained a large package of energy concentrates. Then he went to the supply locker and took one of the spacesuits with him.

  After that, he made his jump.

  1,700 km north of the equator on this 4th day following his crash-landing on Vagabond, he encountered his first adult mouse-beaver. His outside thermometer indicated the murderous temperature of 142°.

  At first there was no sign of him but after sending out repeated search calls he finally received a weak answering cry: here! It was so attenuated that he could not determine its source.

  Think harder so that I can find you!Pucky sent back urgently.

  It was impossible to see more than three steps in any direction. A single, unceasing sandstorm enveloped the whole world of Vagabond, whipping the air masses to ever higher temperatures.

  Then came the call—from below. Its sender was in one of the earlier inhabited burrows which seldom went deeper than 50 meters.

  Pucky teleported. His spotlight came on. He kneeled down beside a full-grown mouse-beaver who seemed to be close to asphyxiation. By this time Pucky had regained the cool collectedness which was typical of all Rhodan's close companions. He reached for the spare spacesuit and forced his kinsman to get into it, after which he closed his helmet for him. Then he had a chance to check the natural air pressure in the cavern.

  The instrument clearly indicated that the planet Vagabond was getting ready to throw off its atmosphere. For Pucky it was proof that the hours of his native world were counted. The gravitational field of the sun was already reaching out its greedy claws for its mantle of air. Or was it?

  Pucky thought a moment.

  Could it be that Vagabond was revolving so fast that it neared the point where the atmospheric envelope would automatically be spun away into space? But in that case wouldn't the process of total dissolution begin, where there would be earthquakes and the whole planetary structure would be shaken by its approach to the sun until it finally broke into pieces?

  Inside his spacesuit where the temperature was more bearable at 65°, the other mouse-beaver recovered swiftly. He blinked curiously at Pucky but his apathy was depressing. He neither asked where his rescuer had come from or who had put the suit on him. Nor did he expend a single word concerning the brilliant rays from the spotlight.

  So Pucky had to take the initiative. He wanted to know more about the "black wall".

  Lt. Puck of the Mutant Corps, himself a mouse-beaver, soon came to realize what 70 years among Terranians had made of him. It was only with the greatest effort that he could grasp the other's thoughts because of the latter's complete lack of technical knowledge.

  Thirst! Thirst!This was all that the thoughts kept repeating.

  Pucky took a quick look at his air-pressure manometer. He knew that if he quickly opened the other's helmet and didn't let him take long to drink there would be little danger of his suffocating, in spite of the lowered outside pressure.

  When the canister meter showed that the mouse-beaver had taken in about a liter of fluid he stopped him. That's enough! —he telepathed, and closed his helmet for him. And now Bikre, repeat what you told me about the black wall.

  Bikre began to relate his experience with the black wall and also asserted that many, many of his kind had suddenly disappeared. Then without any connection or preliminary explanation he began suddenly to speak mentally of "black flying shadows."

  What, Bikre? Black flying shadows? What did they look like?

  Pucky began to tense inwardly with excitement. He could clearly remember what he and his brothers and sisters and parents and all of his family had called Perry Rhodan's Stardust two when it had landed here 70 years ago: a black flying shadow!

  He forced Bikre to draw the form of the spaceships on the floor of the cavern. He couldn't make much out of the two-dimensional rendering. Try to imagine what the flying shadows looked like when you saw them, Bikre!

  In the next moment Pucky pricked up his ears, even though listening with his mind. Teardrops? Two teardrop shapes hooked together in a single unit? Dark grey, almost black in color? And what had these alien spaceships unloaded from their holds?

  Imagine it once again, Bikre... these long, twisted things...

  He backed up his order with a strong hypnotic suggestion.

  The 'thing' was described as a super-sized corkscrew or spiral. It was 100 meters long. But what was Bakre envisioning?—this whole construction buried in the ground with only a small part protruding? Then the black wall had suddenly swept across the observers but Bikre had teleported even more swiftly. When he had finally dared to return to the place where it had happened he found that there were no more of his kind existing in a wide area surrounding the buried spiral machine.

 

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