The Children

"Look, Ben! Down there!"

Dagget's ice-blue eyes flared as he peered earthward through the glass-clear transalloy walls of the cabin. In the forest below a score or more of tiny shapes were visible as they crossed open spaces in the network of trees, running to follow the jeet's flight.

"People!" Dagget burst out, awe sharpening the bass timbre of his voice. "And, Phil... they look human!"

The awe in Dagget's tone found an echo in Sprague's long face. People . . . human people! Was it possible? How many habitable planets had been discovered by the interstellar rovers of Earth? Sprague could not begin to remember. But he could remember that few of those planets had been inhabited by intelligent beings, that fewer still had been inhabited by beings even remotely human in appearance.

Here on Hindemuth IV seemed to be a human, or a near-human, race.

The running figures became lost in distance as the jeet soared on through the clear blue-green sky. Sprague turned back to the controls and swung the craft around to retrace its former course at a slower speed. He sent a questioning glance at Dagget.

"Is the camera getting this?"

Dagget briefly inspected one of a number of instru­ments in a framework behind him. "Still running," he reported. Then, taking a pair of binoculars from a compartment, he fell to an intent scrutiny of the chang­ing terrain below.

"I can see them again," he announced presently. He released a whispered exclamation. "What in space—! Phil.. .they're kids!"

Sprague stared at the other for a moment, disbeliev­ing; then he took the binoculars and peered down­ward in turn.

Dagget's eyes had not been playing tricks. Magni­fied now, the moving shapes were indeed those of children; slim brown children, long-haired and un­clothed, gesturing up at the jeet in evident excite­ment. Amid the shadowed green forest setting they had an unreal, elfin appearance—almost like creatures out of fantasy.

"Put the ship down, Phil," Dagget said abruptly. "We've got to give this a first-hand scanning. It . . . why, it's almost the biggest thing that's happened since interstellar travel!"

Sprague shook his head slowly. "This is an alien planet, Ben, and those kids down there are members of an alien race. We can't take chances until we know much more than we do right now. There must be adults around somewhere; we don't know how they'll react to us."

"Guess you're on course there." Dagget's lips took on a sullen curve that denied his spoken agreement. "The camera is getting all this," Sprague went on.

"We'll check the film when we get back to the ship and see what it shows. We might find something we missed."

"We didn't find the Colonial Administration ship," Dagget returned. "If it's here at all." His resentment was now obvious.

Sprague was aware of it, but for the moment he occupied himself with swinging the jeet around again. Then he said mildly, "The Colonial Administration ship might be here for all you know, Ben."

The other's head swung around in growing ill-tem­per. "You know blasted well how I feel about this little junket of yours. We've already spent a year in galactic space, searching for the Colonial ship. We covered the area to which we were assigned; headquarters didn't tell us to do any more than that. But instead of hypering back to the System, you take a jump out here, to Hindemuth IV, a planet right in the middle of no­where."

Sprague lifted his spare shoulders. "I had the idea that the ship might be here, if it wasn't anywhere else."

"Idea!" Dagget snorted. "I call it an attack of space fits."

"Up to a certain limit you're welcome to your own opinions," Sprague answered calmly. He made a slight correction in the jeet's course and went on, "Special Services Division has a habit of expecting considerably more from its members than is stated in orders. It's an official if unwritten rule. You should have thought of that when you volunteered, Ben."

"I was thinking of the nice long vacation between jobs," Dagget grunted. "But now I'm beginning to see I made a mistake. I should have stayed with the Space Force."

"But you didn't," Sprague pointed out. "That's partly the reason why you're here right now, instead of in some pleasure dive back in the System, swilling aphrolac with a bunch of dizzy females."

"Partly?" Dagget questioned. His freckled, muscular features were sardonic; a long-smoldering hostility showed in the hard thrust of his eyes.

"Partly," Sprague said. "The other part is that I happened to remember Special Service agents are often required to use brains in carrying out orders. So when we were briefed on our search for the missing Colonial ship, I decided to do a little checking in Galactic Department archives. I looked up the reports and records of the ship's commander—and came across the name of the sun in this plane­tary system: Hindemuth. The commander had discov­ered and named it a number of years back, while running a Mapping Bureau ship; but his find had remained unofficial. The matter was never referred to the Expeditions Bureau, or to authorities in the Galactic Department. It received no attention or pub­licity whatever, and stayed buried in a mass of other records."

"Something's out of place there," Dagget muttered, grudgingly interested. "The Galactic Department usu­ally doesn't slip up like that. Little things like newly diskovered suns that might have planets are too im­portant to overlook."

"The commander in question wanted the matter to be overlooked," Sprague said. "That showed in the way he worded his report and presented his figures. He didn't want to tell all, but at the same time he wanted to play safe in the event that official inquiries were later made."

"What do you suppose was his idea?"

"A likely guess is that he hoped the find would be important, and if important, he wanted to make it into something more than a routine and subordinate capacity."

"But how can you be certain that he made a jump to the Hindemuth system while in command of the Colonial Administration ship?"

"I checked on that, too," Sprague said. "If you take the galactic coordinates of the planet for which the Colonial ship was bound and run them off on a com­puter for deviations in the Hyper-Drive coordinates, you find that one particular jump will end up in the general neighborhood of Hindemuth."

"All right," Dagget growled. "Say he came here. Where is the ship? Where are the colonists who were aboard? This fourth planet is the only habitable one in the Hindemuth system, and we've already searched most of it. This is the last great island. We haven't found any evidence —"

Dagget broke off; he was suddenly rigid. "The chil­dren!"

Sprague shook his head. "I know what you're think­ing; but the Colonial ship vanished slightly more than four years ago. There weren't any children aboard. The colonists were all young married couples. And in four years they couldn't have had children as grown as the

ones we saw The children seem to be members of a

race native to this world; a race living at a very primi­tive level of culture. We've seen no buildings, no towns or communities of any sort."

"That puts us exactly where we started from," Dagget pointed out with bleak satisfaction. "I'm glad to hear you finally admit it."

Sprague shrugged. "The instruments might have turned up something this trip. We'll check them as soon as we get back to the cruiser."