6/ TAKING THE BAIT

 

Although the upper 5th was taken up with the prison, the Star Of Arkon was Ent-Than’s largest hotel.

Perry Rhodan and his 3 mutants found quarters in the vast building’s lower third.

They had left the Mab 1 just a few minutes after landing without taking any special security precautions. An automatic ground taxi had taken them to an airtaxi stop and from there along with Springers and Arkonides from various other spacers they were taken to the flightdeck on the roof of the Star of Arkon.

They were registered at the front desk and according to their identification and other papers they came from all directions on different spaceships. But not one had arrived with the Mab 1.

The 4 Terrans were given quarters on 3 different floors. The mutants were told to meet Perry Rhodan in his room in 30 minutes.

Before Rhodan parted company with Fellmer Lloyd, he had the telepath and sensor attempt to discern the whereabouts of Maj. Clyde Ostal and the crew of the Tigris by means of his psychic abilities.

Fellmer Lloyd was quite familiar with Ostal’s brainwave pattern but no matter where he turned, he could not perceive the Major’s pattern among the thousands he sensed.

When he entered Perry Rhodan’s hotel room half an hour later, Kitai Ishibashi and Tako Kakuta were already present.

Lloyd understood Rhodan’s telepathic question. No, he replied in the same manner. I haven’t been able to contact them.

Rhodan looked at him, meditating. He could not forget what he had seen at the spaceport: the merchant ship Tigris standing out in the portion of the field reserved exclusively for the Arkonide fleet. All its ramps had been extended and all hatches were wide open.

"Kakuta," Rhodan said to the slender teleporter, whose small figure passed least well for that of a Springer, "I’d very much like to know what’s going on now aboard the Tigris and if any of the crew are still there. But don’t take any risks. Would 10 minutes be enough?"

Kakuta, who like the others was disguised as a Springer, chuckled. "I’ll be back right on time, sir!"

Then the air where he was sitting began to shimmer strangely. The energy the small Japanese was now developing within himself allowed him to leave the room and rematerialise in the place he was concentrating on: Maj. Clyde Ostal’s cabin aboard the Tigris.

Hardly had the teleporter disappeared then Fellmer Lloyd was given his orders.

"Try to find the commanding general in the Arkonide fleet headquarters, Lloyd. We have to find out as soon as we can where Maj. Ostal and his men are. I have the feeling someone is searching for us."

Fellmer Lloyd, leaning back comfortably in his seat, closed his eyes. For him the world consisted only of brainwave patterns, of telepathic energy and his spotting sense. He no longer perceived what Perry Rhodan was now saying to Kitai Ishibashi.

"The crew of the Mab 1 is going to make problems for us, Ishibashi. That is not meant as a reproach. I’m able to judge whether or not you’ve done your work well but if from here on in we don’t have enough time for good work, then we’ll have to be ready for trouble of any kind. Because of the capture of the Tigris, the Ekhonides are going to be uneasy and so doubly distrustful. That means that they’ll examine very closely every spaceship that doesn’t carry passengers and they’ll surely notice that there isn’t any captain on board the Mab 1."

"I could influence anyone who tries to investigate the Mab 1…"

"It’s too late," Rhodan said. "Because of what happened on it, we arrived here too late. Who knows how many people are already involved with the Springer ship by now and…"

Kakuta made his reappearance in a shimmering of air, sitting in his former seat as though he had never left. Rhodan and Ishibashi looked at him expectantly but Fellmer Lloyd saw and heard nothing of what was going on around him.

"Sir," the slender Oriental began. "The control room and Com Centre are swarming with scientists from the planetary defence. Their chief is named Egg-Or. I heard the men talking about him. I also heard that they’ve swallowed our bait whole. They believe that in a few hours they’ll have the Earth’s coördinates. Not one Ekhonide suspects that all the information they’ve laboured so long to extract is fallacious."

"Did you learn anything about the crew?" Rhodan wanted to know.

"Not a word. Everyone was too busy trying to get their job done. No one spoke of our men."

Rhodan glanced at Fellmer Lloyd but he still sat with his eyes closed, seeming to be listening to something far away.

"Ishibashi, I don’t want to underestimate the Ekhonide defence and alien police. Go down to the reception desk in the lobby and put a block on the 5 or 8 Ekhonides I saw on duty there."

"Right, sir," answered the thin suggestor and quietly left the well-furnished hotel room.

He went down by way of the antigrav lift and crossed the huge lobby to the reception desk. Everywhere he saw registrar robots and had the feeling that they were somehow perceiving him, for their staring lens-eyes were trained on him. He went up to the desk, behaving like a traveller who had left his home planet for the first time and felt lonely and uncertain on this alien world.

Kitai Ishibashi did not force his way through the crowd to the desk but the others did. Springers, Aras, Arkonides and intelligences belonging to non-human races, even some in spacesuits because the local atmosphere was deadly for them—they all pushed and shoved towards the desk, wanting information from the 9 Ekhonides on duty behind the counter.

Kitai Ishibashi heard the stock answer over and over again: "Please direct your question to one of our information robots! Please direct your question to one of…"

Kitai Ishibashi’s face was relaxed. It betrayed nothing of the strain of his efforts to concentrate his suggestive power and beam it at the Ekhonides behind the desk.

His suggestive order was simple: "Tell any officials who inquire about 4, 5 or 6 Springers that with more than 20,000 guests in your hotel you cannot give any information. Refer them to your information robots!"

It was an order that could not be any simpler and still attempt to protect Perry Rhodan and his 3 mutants.

But Kitai Ishibashi was not through with his work yet. Suddenly he pushed his way up to the desk. "May I help you, sir?" he was asked by the Ekhonide behind the counter.

"I’d like…" Ishibashi began, and thereafter he only moved his lips. Any chance observers would have heard nothing. Using all his power, the mutant suggested to the young Ekhonide: Tell me when the registrar robots are changed!

"Only once a year, sir," answered the Ekhonide politely, convinced that the slender Springer had asked the question out loud.

Who gives the order for the robots to be changed? Ishibashi next demanded.

"Ulgald, our chief engineer, sir…"

Where can I find him?

"On the 1st floor, wing gg-/3, Registry Dept., sir."

"Thank you," said Ishibashi out loud. He left quickly, then searched for the registry department on the 1st floor. He spoke to an Ekhonide he met on the way and got directions.

"Forget that you ever spoke to a Springer!" Ishibashi ordered suggestively, then went on with his search for chief engineer Ulgald.

But he was not sufficiently familiar with the arrangement of Ekhonide offices in the building and lost his way. He asked directions of another Ekhonide after a long wandering about, and the reply was:

"I am Ulgald, Springer…"

As the 2 went to the antigrav lift shaft, as companionable as old friends, the chief engineer seemed no different than usual. He gave the tall, thin galactic trader with the slightly bent posture a hearty farewell, then quickly went off to his office to order a change of robots.

His order was accompanied with a note of such urgency that no refusal or even questioning of his instructions was possible.

The young Ekhonide at the reception desk did not remember Ishibashi or his questioning even while the robots were being changed.

10 minutes before the alien police arrived, the robot change was complete. The memory banks containing information covering the last 9 months and 3 days were completely erased and blank.

Bits of information that might have led to Perry Rhodan and his mutants no longer existed.

For the first time in the hotel’s history, the Star of Akron had no records concerning its guests. To make the confusion complete, the memory bank erasure had taken place just before the robots were scheduled to transmit their recorded data to the bookkeeping department, as they did regularly every 3 hours.

Ulgald, who would remember this terrible day with a shudder still 20 years later, did not lose his position for the alien police wrote the inconvenient robot change off as an act of pure chance and left, shrugging their shoulders in resignation.

Subjecting every single one of the more than 20,000 guests of the Star of Arkon was beyond even their capabilities.

When Kitai Ishibashi reentered Perry Rhodan’s room after a 45-minute absence, Tako Kakuta was already back from his 2nd teleportation spring. In the meantime, Fellmer Lloyd had read the thoughts of General Sutokk—and once during the telepathic reception even laughed out loud.

"What?" Perry Rhodan had demanded in surprise, looking at Fellmer Lloyd in disbelief. "Ostal and his men made their escape stark naked? Are you sure the General wasn’t telling some disreputable joke while you were reading his mind, Lloyd?"

Fellmer Lloyd swore that the General had not been telling any jokes. In any event, the General had no good thoughts of any sort for the chief of the planetary defence because Egg-Or had refused to allow the Arkonide fleet to brainlash even one solitary Terran.

"But is he trying to make a connection between the Mab 1 and the capture of the Tigris?" Rhodan pressed.

"He isn’t exerting himself especially in that area, sir. He’s much more interested in getting Earth’s galactic coördinates into his hands as fast as he can."

"He’ll have them before long," said Perry Rhodan, half sunk in thought. "Kakuta is taking his time…"

The small, slender Oriental had made his 2nd spring to the flagship of General Sutokk for a look at the newly developed Compensator Detector.

As a mutant he, like most of his comrades, had not only received a cell renewal on the planet Wanderer to keep him from aging for the next 62 years but again like most of his comrades he had undergone an intensive hypno-training that made him well-informed in all areas of knowledge.

Tako Kakuta rematerialised in the vast transformer chamber of the flagship Ebneb, in the shadow of a house-sized, ring-shaped magnetic coil that reached from the floor to the ceiling and angled over the transformer at 45°.

The light noise that Tako Kakuta made by his materialization was drowned out by the constant humming of a large number of energy banks.

Neither the transformer nor the energy banks—huge machines that would have been enough to have supplied a planet of average industrialization with electrical power for 5 years—nor the magnetic coils nor the insulated circuit boards of gigantic dimensions could impress Tako Kakuta. The engine rooms of the Titan and the Drusus had accustomed him to a larger scale.

He had arrived where he had wanted to go. Arkonide space-battleships differed from one another about as much as so many eggs; only in the class of ship and in the weaponry could any variation be seen. Kakuta felt as much at home here in the Ebneb as he would have aboard the Lotus, the Ganymede or the Drusus.

He saw a metal catwalk winding around the transformer about 3 meters above the floor. He teleported himself up to it, looked out over the circuitry and discovered 2 Ekhonides conversing with one another. They turned their backs to him, sat down on an energy cable, dangled their legs and laughed aloud.

He had to get them out of the transformer chamber or at least to distract them that they would not hear the opening and closing of a diaphragm-like hatch.

Tako Kakuta had no love for radical methods. He always tried to find means that would bring him safely to his goal without having unfortunate consequences for innocent bystanders.

He stood next to the magnet regulator, which could alter the position of the giant magnetic coil. A fleeting smile crossed his face. He grasped the regulator with both hands and under the force of his fingers the wheel turned. The huge coil began to sink from 45° to 30°.

The coil was held floating in place by controlled antigrav fields and as it changed position a positronic warning system sensed that it had sunk too far. A siren screamed out, growing louder the more Tako Kakuta allowed the floating magnetic coil to sink. It was a work of seconds and would have been suicidal for any normal man to attempt, for he would have been seen by the Ekhonides. Since he was a teleporter, however, the place where he had been standing was suddenly empty.

2 frightened Ekhonides; raced up the steps to the control board after first having had to run around the transformer.

The alarm still howled. The 2 Ekhonide space soldiers thought only of the punishment awaiting them and so far had not concerned themselves for the reason for the magnetic coil alarm.

Tako Kakuta had performed 2 short teleportations. The last spring brought him to the hatch. Behind it lay the structocomp, an improbably small device in relation to its power.

But the newly developed compensator detector must be here, too. Marshal Allan D. Mercant’s scientific staff had at least reasoned as much and they had not been wrong yet in their analyses.

The hatch opened, let the Japanese through and closed again.

Seconds later, Kakuta stood before the great secret.

"So that’s the thing that’s supposed to bring about our downfall!" he heard himself say. Then his eyes searched for the grey-coloured bulges that would unfasten the machinery’s covering once he had rested his hand on them.

The compensator detector, about 3 meters high and more than 10 meters long, was connected to the structural compensator located next to it. Tako Kakuta did not think of sabotage. The Chief had not given him any orders for it. Perry Rhodan wanted much more to know the details of the compensator detector’s construction.

He laid his hands against 2 bulges in the covering and a piece of it separated from the rest. Kakuta let it drop to the floor.

The newly developed compensator detector revealed its secrets to the knowing eyes of the Japanese mutant. In the same moment that he had first glimpsed the inner workings of the machinery through the hole in the covering, his entire knowledge of this area of technology had awakened within him.

He gave a start. The construction as displayed in its fundamentals was familiar to him! It reminded him of the pickle people, the Swoons, and at the same time he understood that Arkon’s newly developed sensing device was simply an enlarged copy of the Swoonish invention.

An uncanny intimation struck him all at once and he glanced back at the hatch.

As his head turned he concentrated for a teleport spring behind the structocomp.

The hatch sprang open. A man, one of the 2 Ekhonide space soldiers, started to come in and let out a yell—and then Kakuta saw him no more. His short teleport had brought him behind the structocomp. But he hesitated to disappear completely. He wanted to find out what the Ekhonide would do when he saw that a piece of the detector covering had been removed. Kakuta was fortunate that the Ekhonide was motivated solely by a desire to escape punishment and was thus ready to cover up events he would have otherwise reported.

"Stars and suns!" Kakuta heard him mutter with a trembling voice. "I haven’t been drinking any Uquir! I’ve never believed in ghosts before but I do now. Why, the little stardevils must have taken this plate off the machine…!"

Kakuta listened as the Ekhonide replaced the covering, then with the force of his will sprang back to Perry Rhodan’s room in the Star of Arkon.

And after him Kitai Ishibashi arrived. Ishibashi had been away the longest but had the least to report.

"Now, where are Ostal and his men?" asked Perry Rhodan.

Fellmer Lloyd looked at him without the faintest idea. "I can’t perceive them, sir. If only at least one Ekhonide or even that fleet general knew something… but the general is only toying with the notion of giving some Springer a brainlashing."

A dangerous light seemed to appear in Perry Rhodan’s eyes. "He won’t succeed in that. We’ll have to see to that but I think we also must be prepared in the event they find our men. Certainly at the moment they aren’t feeling any too comfortable. Let’s go."