To make a hero

Leland Hale looked at the planet that loomed large in his visiscreen and his eyes narrowed automatically, as they always did when he was in deep thought. The planet wasn't registered in the Navigator's Manual or on the stellographic charts. The sun itself had a number, but the planet wasn't mentioned.

Hale was a big man; his shoulders were much wider than they had any right to be, his arms were thick and cabled with muscle, and his chest was broad and deep. Most men who stand six-feet-six look lean and lanky, but Hale actually looked broad and somewhat squat. At one standard gee of acceleration--1000 cm/sec^2--he topped three hundred pounds. There was just enough fat on his body to smooth the outlines a little; his bones were big, as they had to be to anchor tendons solidly; and he had the normal complement of glands and nerves to keep the body functioning well. All the rest of him seemed to be muscle--pounds and pounds of hard, powerful muscle.

His head was large in proportion; a size 8 hat would have suited him perfectly--if he'd ever troubled to buy a hat. His face was regular enough to be considered handsome, and too blocky and hard to be considered pretty. His dark hair, brown eyes, and tanned skin marked him as most likely being of late-migration Earth stock.

He looked from the visiscreen to the detector plate. There wasn't a trace on it. There hadn't been for days. The skewed, almost random orbit he had taken from Bargell IV had lifted him well above the galactic plane, and he was a long way, now, from where he had started.

If the yellow light from Bargell's Sun could have penetrated the heavy clouds of dust and gas that congregated at the galactic center, it would have taken it more than seventy thousand years to reach Cardigan's Green.

No trace on the detector. Good. There was one advantage in stealing a fully equipped Interstellar Police ship; if his pursuers couldn't be detected on their own equipment, they couldn't detect him either--they were out of range of each other.

There were certain disadvantages in stealing an IP vessel, too. If he hadn't done it, the IP wouldn't be after him; his crime on Bargell IV hadn't come under their jurisdiction. Unfortunately, stealing the ship had been the only way to leave Bargell IV. Hale shrugged mentally; it was too late to worry about such trivialities now.

The empty detector plate meant something else. If there were no interstellar ships at all in the area, it was likely that the planet below was an isolated planet. There were plenty of them in the galaxy; when the infraspace drive had combined with Terrestrial overcrowding to produce the great migration, many of the pioneers had simply found themselves a planet, settled themselves into a community, dismantled their ship, and forgotten about the rest of mankind.

Well, that was all to the good. At top magnification, the view-screen showed what appeared to be small villages and plowed lands, which indicated colonization. At least there would be someone around to talk to, and--maybe--a little profit to be made.

But the first thing he'd have to look for was a place to hide his ship.

The Peniyan Range is a bleak, windswept series of serrated peaks that crosses the northern tip of the largest continent on Cardigan's Green. Geologically young, craggy, and with poor soil, they are uninhabited, for there is too little there to support life in any great numbers; the valleys and low hills to the south are more inviting and comfortable for humanity. Until the press of numbers forces it, there will be no need for the inhabitants of Cardigan's Green to live in the mountainous wasteland.

Finding a place of concealment in those jagged mountains ought to be fairly easy, Hale decided. He settled the spherical vessel gently to the ground at the bottom of a narrow gorge which had been cut out by a mountain freshet for a first look-around.

Grand larceny, fraud, and murder are first-magnitude crimes, but they are far more common than police statistics would lead one to believe. The galaxy is unbelievably vast, and the universe as a whole unthinkably vaster. The really adept criminal can easily lose himself in the tremendous whirlpool of stars that forms the Milky Way. Hale knew he had eluded the IP ships; therefore, unless he were found by the sheerest accident, he would be perfectly safe from the police for a long time to come.

Not that he intended to stay on Cardigan's Green for the rest of his life; far from it. He had five and a half million stellors in negotiable notes in the hold of his ship, and he would eventually want to get back to one of the civilized worlds where he could spend it. But that meant waiting until the scream for Leland Hale's blood had become submerged again in the general, galaxy-wide cry against a thousand million other marauders. Eventually, there would be other crimes, more recent, and therefore more important because they were still fresh in the public mind.

Leland Hale would wait.

For the first two weeks, he had plenty to do. He had to hide the ship well enough to keep it from being spotted from the air. It wasn't likely that the IP would find him, but if the colonists of this world had aircraft, they might wonder what a globe of metal was doing in their mountains.

He finally found a place under an overhanging monolith--a huge, solid slab of granite that would have taken an atomic disruptor to dislodge. Then he began piling rocks and gravel around it, working steadily from dawn until daylight--a goodly stretch of labor, since it was summer in the northern hemisphere and the planet made a complete rotation in a little less than twenty-eight hours.

It didn't bother Hale. His powerful body was more than a match for ordinary physical labor, and he liked to have something to do to stave off boredom.

That was Hale's big trouble--boredom. Inactivity and monotony made him frantic. So it wasn't surprising that after the first two weeks, when the ship was finally well hidden, he strapped a pack on his back and went exploring.

He had a good reason for it. Leland Hale never did anything without a good, logical reason. He could never say to himself: "I'm bored; I'll just go out and look over the countryside to have something to do." He could not say it, even to himself, because it would be admitting to himself that he actually did not like his own company. And Hale was convinced that he was, in all respects, a thoroughly likable fellow.

His reason for exploration was a need for food. He had plenty in the ship, of course, and the synthesizer could use almost any organic material to make food as long as it had an energy source. But Hale didn't like synthetics, and he didn't want to draw on his power reserves, so he decided to see what kind of menu the local countryside had to offer.

The plant life he found in the mountains wasn't much. There were a few dry, hard bristly bushes, and a tough, gray-green growth that clung to the rocks--a mosslike lichen or a lichenlike moss, take your pick. Neither looked in the least edible.