Redemption

By ROBERT F. YOUNG
Illustrated by EMSH
To love a saint is hard. To be one, that is harder. But rejoice, now in the search of Capt. Nathaniel Drake for Saint Annabelle Leigh. For you will read this story many times in the future, as it assumes what will be its rightful reputation as a classic.
They called him The Jet-propelled Dutchman , but he was neither Dutch nor jet-propelled. He was neo-Terran. In common with all interplanetary spaceships of his day, his ship employed the Lamarre displacement-drive. His name was Nathaniel Drake.
Legend has it that whenever he put into port he searched for a certain woman in the hope of redeeming himself through love, but the makers of legends are prone to draw parallels where no true parallels exist. Nathaniel Drake searched for a certain woman—yes; but the woman for whom he searched was even more of a ghost than he was, and it was not love through which he hoped to redeem himself, but hate.
His story begins in a region of space off the orbital shores of Iago Iago, not long after the Suez Canal sprang its first leak. In those days, the Sirian Satrapy was at the height of her industrial career. Her globular merchant ships busily plied her interplanetary seas, and her Suez Canal freighters left Wayout almost daily for the ravenous marts of Earth. Her planets prospered and her peoples dwelled in peace and plenty and her politicians lived high on the hog. Only one of her ten eco-sphere worlds knew not the blessings of civilization. This one—Iago Iago—had been set aside for displaced indigenes in accordance with section 5, paragraph B-81, of the Interstellar Code, and was out of bounds to poet and pillager alike.
Nathaniel Drake was transporting a cargo of pastelsilk from Forget Me Not to Dior. Forget Me Not and Dior, as any schoolboy will tell you, are Sirius VIII and X respectively. Between their orbits lies the orbit of Sirius IX, or Iago Iago. Now at the time of Drake's run, these three planets were in conjunction, and consequently, in order to avoid the gravitic pull of Iago Iago, he had programmed the automatic pilot to swing the one-man ship into a wide detour. Although he did not know it at the time, this detour had already brought the Fly by Night into an area of space seldom trodden by the foot of man.