He pondered the badly mixed metaphor and wished Jane would say something. But he was darned if he’d exhibit weakness by opening the conversation himself.
As a result, there was no conversation until some time later when Jane observed, “It seems to me you’re floundering all over the Belt. Do you really know where you’re going?”
“I know exactly where I’m going. What do you want me to do—bang into every asteroid on the route?”
“I only want to get where we’re going as soon as possible. I’m not enjoying this trip in the least.”
“Are you implying that I am?”
“I merely made a statement,” Jane said frostily.
“All right, you’ve got your wish. Look out to your right—at five o’clock. You’ll see a cone-shaped asteroid. That’s my claim. And the three men on it are claim-jumpers.”
Involuntarily, Jane, after looking where Pete directed, tensed, laid a hand on Pete’s arm, and drew it away quickly. If he’d had time to notice, this might have told Pete a great deal. But he was busy lowering the ship in and was giving the task all his attention.
Blasting operations had already begun, making it obvious that the three men were wasting no time. This, Pete realized, made sense from their point of view. Due to the notoriously slow movement of Belt law as administered by the Federation, an injunction prohibiting the removal of ore could not be served for at least a week. In that length of time, with a rich strike, three experienced miners could conceivably take out a fortune and leave the Belt with their pockets lined.
“It is Uncle Homer,” Jane said. For the first time a small bit of uncertainty had come into her voice.
“Did you doubt it?”
Jane didn’t answer and Pete realized that she’d been hoping for a mistake in identity.
The three men had stopped work and were standing motionless, watching the monocar. As its grapples tightened against the surface of the asteroid, one of them bent over. When he again came erect, he held a rifle in the crook of his arm.
“Peaceful miners,” Pete commented acidly.
“They’re just taking precautions. They don’t know who we are.”
“If Uncle Homer can’t see you from here, he’d better have his eyes checked.”
As he shut off the jets, Pete studied the two strangers. They wore the more elaborate helmet gear used by miners rather than the lighter oxygen equipment with the smaller headpiece. Thus their faces were pretty well hidden, and all Pete could tell for sure was that they were both big, brawny men. Uncle Homer, somewhat slighter and quicker of movement, dropped the magnetized bar he’d been working with. It rang against the surface of the asteroid and anchored itself firmly. Pete opened the bubble and started to get out of the car. Jane laid a restraining hand on his arm. He obeyed it without quite knowing why and stayed where he was.
There was a moment when everything on the asteroid alive or inanimate stood motionless. Then Uncle Homer advanced toward the car.
“What are you two doing here?”
Pete could see only his eyes. He watched them for indications of mood and attitude. They were narrowed and somewhat veiled. His abrupt tone of voice was more of a clue.
But Jane was no less abrupt. “We came here to settle something, Uncle Homer. Did you file on this claim legally?”
The eyes became a part of a deep scowl. “That’s a rotten thing to say, Jane. I’m surprised at you. How else would I file on a claim?”
“That’s what we’re here to find out. Pete says he found this asteroid and plotted the orbit yesterday afternoon.”
“That’s a bald-faced lie.”
“Wait a minute. He helped me home later and says he had the form in his pocket. He was wrestling with the girls and he didn’t have it when he got to the claim office and he thinks one of them slipped it out of his pocket.”
“Why, that’s the craziest thing—”
The other two men were moving forward slowly. The one with the rifle stepped carefully, his body rigid and alert.
“I agree with you, Uncle Homer. Neither of the girls would do a thing like that except out of curiosity, maybe, and then they’d show it to Pete and ask him what it was.”
“You let him make a charge like that and didn’t—”
Jane wasn’t letting him finish his sentences. She was commanding the situation, but this margin of advantage was dubious at best.
“Never mind that. As I said, the girls didn’t take the form. But it might have dropped out of his pocket.”
“You’re talking in riddles!”
The retort meant nothing so far as Pete could see and he didn’t think it was meant to. Homer Deeds, his scowl deepening, was grabbing words at random.
“I’m making complete sense,” Jane retorted. “I’m saying the form might have been dropped. None of us found it or we would have returned it to Pete. But you came into the ship right after he left.”
There was another of those motionless pauses in which the people acting out this tableau could have been part of the asteroid they were anchored to. Then Jane asked the next question.
“Did you pick up the form, Uncle Homer? Did you pick it up and put it into your pocket and use it to file on Pete’s claim?”
“Jane! For heaven’s sake!”
“You don’t have to get excited, Uncle Homer. Just answer the question. A simple yes or no will do.”
The man with the rifle had been moving forward.
He was holding the weapon at a more threatening angle now.
“What is this?” he demanded. His voice was deep and quiet. There was a calm, deadly quality about it.
“We’re trying to get at the truth,” Jane said.
“Possession is the proof,” the man replied. “This claim is legally filed.”
“That’s right,” Uncle Homer echoed in a weaker, more sullen voice. “I’m surprised at you, Jane. Coming out here and bringing him with you. You know how it is with us. Everybody is down on the Barrys. We’ve got to stick together.”
“She’s got to stick,” the man with the rifle said. “What else can she do?”
Uncle Homer turned and glanced uncertainly at the man, then looked back at Jane. “Honey, how would you like to have everything you ever wanted?”
“Uncle Homer, I asked you a question. All I want you to do is tell me the truth. Did you steal this claim?”
“Listen here, Deeds. This is no time to lose your nerve. The girl’s got to play it our way. If I’ve got it figured right, the kid’s got all the papers on him. Nobody can connect him with the claim if he’s not around to push his complaint. He has an accident…”
Pete saw Uncle Homer’s eyes harden. He didn’t have the courage to commit murder himself, but with the triggerman’s recklessness to lean on, he would go along with it.
Pete sat frozen. This was incredible. He’d heard stories of men desperate enough to murder for a rich claim, but he’d never believed them, because no proof had ever been found. The Asteroid Belt was vast—most of it uncharted. Millions of miles of ever-moving, ever-restless rock clusters, where finding a body was next to impossible.
“Let’s quit jabbering and get it over with,” the third man said. It was the first time he’d spoken and now it appeared that he was the leader. Without hesitation, the other man brought up his rifle.
Left on his own, Pete would have been dead within the next three seconds. But he was not without an ally. As the rifle began moving upward, Jane jammed her foot down on the switch that controlled the movement of the bubble. It snapped into place. The rifle cracked simultaneously and a slug scratched the thick, bullet-proof surface of the bubble and angled down against the rock of the asteroid.
Another slug followed it; then another, and Pete heard Jane shrieking in his ear. “Move it! Don’t sit there! Do you want to get killed?”
U
ncle Homer was coming closer. With Pete’s possible escape looming as a danger to him, he became more decisive. Had he been able to bring his weight to bear, he might have held the car back long enough for the other two men to come to his aid. Then it would have been a simple matter to prevent its take-off and pry the bubble away with the tools they had available.
But Pete cut off the magnetic grapple and hit the jet switch with the same motion and the monocar shot upward, Uncle Homer’s hand scraping the sides as it pulled away from him.
The man with the rifle was still firing, pouring slugs after the car with frantic haste. They smashed against the underplating of the car, but construction heavy enough to stand against Belt conditions stood also against a rifle of the caliber that threw the slugs.
As they arced away from the asteroid, the third man was already moving toward the scout car they had used to pirate the claim.
“They’ll come after us,” Jane said. “They’ll have to. And that scout’s bigger and faster than we are. Open up your jets! Gain whatever distance you can.”
“Thanks—thanks for saving my life,” Pete mumbled as he peered backward and saw the three men climbing into the scout.
“Shut up and move this go-cart! Your life isn’t saved yet by any means.”
They sat silent now as Pete opened the jets wide and took chance after chance with possible collision in order to maintain the speed. The initial shock over, Pete’s mind was beginning to work again. He was surprised at his own lack of fear even as he looked back and saw the scout already in space, circling to locate the still visible monocar.
“You’re right about the speed difference. They’ll run us down in ten minutes.”
“If we dodge and twist—”
“No. We can’t run, so we’ve got to hide. I think I can make the Badlands before they catch us. In there we’ll have a chance.”
Jane relinquished leadership, her silence an acknowledgment of this.
“Hang on for possible collision,” Pete ordered. “I’ve got to cut across the stream.”
“Be careful,” Jane whispered. And reverting from strong savior to the fragile female, she closed her eyes and put her face against Pete’s shoulder.
The agile, highly responsive monocar did insane loops and turns as Pete kept changing course to avoid the asteroid stream that would have casually crushed them and gone on its way undisturbed. Once a lumbering asteroid twice the size of the monocar hit the bubble. But the crushing surface was smooth rather than murderously jagged, and the car bounced away to roll over several times before it balanced off. As they approached the edge of the Badlands, Pete guessed wrong and blundered into a swarm of fist-sized asteroids that smashed savagely against the little car’s plates. But again, providentially, none of them were large enough nor was there a differential in speed great enough to allow damage.
Two minutes later Pete reduced speed and crept into the vast, moving field of supreme danger known as the Badlands. It was an eerie place at the point they entered, with the sunlight sifting through only in ever-changing shafts and the continual ominous sound of too-closely clustered boulders grinding each other to dust.
“They may follow us in if they’re desperate enough, but now we’ve got an even chance,” Pete said.
“Even if they don’t find us, we may not get out alive.” Jane, pale from reaction, lay with her head back against the rest, her eyes closed, possibly to blot out the dangerously tumbling asteroids around them.
“We’ll try and hide out here for a while. Maybe they’ll give up. Then we’ll cross to the other side of this cluster.”
“Cross over—that’s so easily said. But not quite so easily done.”
Pete began searching for a likely refuge. Concentrating on the job, he was hardly aware of the silence that fell between them. Then Jane said, “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?”
“You were right. And finally, I had no way out. I had to admit the truth of what Uncle Homer really is.”
“You had no way of knowing.”
“Oh, I knew,” Jane retorted bitterly. “I’ve known for a long time. Mother is sweet and wonderful but—well, she has a way of believing what she wants to believe. She doesn’t like to think badly of anyone. And Uncle Homer is close to us. But I knew.”
“You had to be loyal to your family.”
“He wasn’t really a part of the family. No, that wasn’t the reason. Like Mother, I believed him because I wanted to. He was a pretty sorry specimen of a man, but he was all we had, and I guess the thought of the four of us being alone scared me. And Father believed in Homer, so I kept giving him the benefit of the doubt—until there weren’t any doubts left.”
“I want to thank you again for saving my life.”
“Somehow I knew from the moment we set down that they would kill you before they’d let you go. So I was ready.”
The car nosed carefully in and out among the grumbling, grinding boulders. At times, thunderous crashes were heard in the distance but none of them were close enough to send chain-reaction crashes into the area where the monocar pushed timidly forward among the great rock monsters.
There was another period of silence. Then Pete became aware of small sounds and turned to look. Jane was crying ever so quietly, her face in her hands.
Pete was frightened. He was out of his depth in coping with emotional females—and this new softness in Jane. It robbed him of the only weapon he’d ever had against her—a countering hostility.
“Here now! None of that,” he said, a defensive gruffness in his voice. “You’ve been great. This is no time to crack up.”
“I’m not cracking up. It’s just that…”
“I know. You’ve had a terrific emotional shock. After years of trying hard to believe in Homer you’ve had to face things as they are. It’s not easy to take.”
“I guess that’s how it is,” Jane sniffled.
“But you’ve got to admit that it’s better to know the truth.”
“I hope so, because there are no doubts left now.”
“Just be thankful he isn’t a relative. That way, family loyalty doesn’t enter into it.”
“I think I’m crying for my father. He was so sweet. He was like Mother. He believed in everybody.”
“He must have been a great guy.”
“He—look out!”
Pete’s glance had been momentarily on Jane. He saw her eyes widen in terror as she looked upward. “Look out! There it is again!”
Pete jerked his head around and saw a great, dark shadow bearing swiftly down upon them.
CHAPTER NINE
PHANTOM SHIP—KILLER SHIP
Jane’s mood and manner changed magically. In an instant, her eyes were glowing and she was an image of razor-sharp alertness.
“There it is! There it is! You thought I was crazy! Now what have you got to say?”
She was clutching his arm and Pete shook her off. “Let go of me! That thing’s trying to crush us.”
That impression was inescapable. It was definitely a huge spaceship of some sort. At first glance it looked to possess a grotesque, lopsided nose of fantastic proportions. Then Pete saw that the protuberance wasn’t a nose at all. It was an asteroid against which the ship was lodged—fusion of some sort following a crash, he surmised.
But he had little time to ponder this weird phenomenon because the vast elongated bulk of the ship was smashing directly down upon the monocar. Without time to select a path, Pete jetted the car into a sharp forty-five-degree horizontal turn and slithered out from under the monster with the hull scarcely three feet away.
The maneuver could have driven him head-on into an asteroid, but he found the way clear. He jetted to the edge of a cluster well beyond range of the flailing hull and eased to a halt. Turning the car and setting his speed at drift, silently they looked back at the
thing that had almost killed them.
“It’s—it’s impossible!” Pete babbled “What kind of a ship is it? How did it get in here?”
“The getting here isn’t too hard to figure out,” Jane said. “It drifted in—pushed its way through because it’s bigger than anything it encountered.”
“But what pilot in his right mind would permit such a thing?”
“It doesn’t look to me as though there’s anyone alive inside. It’s just drifting.”
“Then where did they go?”
“How would I know?” Jane snapped, and if Pete had been in the mood to notice, he would have concluded that Jane was her snappish, disagreeable self again.
But his attention was elsewhere “There’s something funny about that ship,” he said.
“That’s certainly the understatement of the day.”
“I mean something really funny. Something more than just a strange ship adrift in the Badlands. It tried to kill us.”
“What’s odd about that? You moved right in under it.”
“Do you notice anything strange about this layout?”
“What do you mean?”
“This is a pretty solid area of the Badlands. It’s thick with drifting asteroids. Yet there’s an empty pocket around that ship. Not a rock within range of it.”
“Pure coincidence?”
“I’m not so sure. I’ll swear that wasn’t a casual drift that almost got us. It was controlled movement.”
“You’re crazy. The ship came back to balance and now it’s just running along with the drift.”
“I’m not blind,” Pete grumbled. “I can see what it’s doing. But—wait a minute. Hold on tight.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to try something.”
“Don’t be stupid! You’ll get us killed yet.”
Rocket from Infinity Page 8