Scavengers in Space

by Alan Edward Nourse

  “What are you planning to do with us?” he demanded.

  “You’ll find out soon enough.” Doc’s mouth twisted angrily. “You’re important people, didn’t you know that? Kid gloves they told us to use. So now I’ve got nine stun-shocked men, and you haven’t even been scratched.” He threw his suit in the comer. “You ever been stun-shocked?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s lots of fun. Maybe when Tawney gets through with you we’ll have a chance to show you how much fun it is.”

  A guard burst into the cabin. “Doc, there’s nobody there! We’ve scoured the ship.”

  “You think he just floated away in his space suit?” Doc growled. “Find him. Tawney only needs one of them, but we can’t take a chance on the other one getting back—” He broke off, his eyes on the view screen. “Did you check those scout ships?”

  “No, I thought—”

  “Get down there and check them.” Doc turned back to the view screen impatiently.

  Greg caught Johnny’s eye, saw the big miner’s worried frown. “Where is he?” he whispered.

  “I don’t know. Thought you did.”

  “All I know is he had some kind of scheme in mind.”

  “Shut up,” Doc said to them. “If you’re smart, you’ll be strapping down before we—” He broke off in midsentence, listening.

  Suddenly, the Ranger ship had begun to vibrate. Somewhere, far away, there was the muffled rumble of engines.

  Doc whirled to the view screen. Greg and Johnny looked at the same instant, and Johnny groaned.

  Below them, the Scavengers jets were flaring. First the pale starter flame, then a long stream of fire, growing longer as the engines developed thrust.

  Doc slammed down a switch, roared into the speaker. “That scout ship—stop it! He’s trying to make a break!”

  Two guards appeared at the lode almost instantly, but it was too late. Already she was straining at her magnetic cable moorings; then the exhaust flared, and the little scout ship leaped away from the orbit ship, moving out at a tangent to the asteroid’s orbit, picking up speed, moving faster and faster. . ..

  In toward the orbit of Mars.

  Doc had gone pale. Now he snapped on the speaker again. “Frank? Stand by on missile control. He’s asking for it.”

  “Right,” a voice came back. “I’m sighting in.”

  The Scavenger was moving fast now, dwindling in the view screen. One panel of the screen went telescopic to track her. “All right,” Doc said. “Fire one and two.”

  From both sides of the Ranger, tiny rockets flared. Like twin bullets the homing shells moved out, side by side, in the track of the escaping Scavenger. With a strangled cry, Greg leaped forward, but Johnny caught his arm.

  “Johnny, Tom’s on that thing!”

  I know. But he’s got a chance.”

  Already the homing shells were out of sight; only the twin flares were visible. Greg stared helplessly at the tiny light spot of the Scavenger. At first she had been moving straight, but now she was dodging and twisting, her side jets flaring at irregular intervals. The twin pursuit shells mimicked each change in course, drawing closer to her every second.

  There was a flash, so brilliant it nearly blinded them, and the Scavenger burst apart in space. The second shell struck a fragment; there was another flash. Then there was nothing but a nebulous powdering of tiny metal fragments.

  The last run of the Scavenger had ended.

  Dazed, Greg turned away from the screen, and somewhere, as if in a dream, he heard Doc saying, “All right, boys, strap this pair down. We’ve got a lot of work to do before we can get out of here.”

  Chapter Seven

  Prisoners

  Wherever they were planning to take them, the captors took great pains to make sure that their prisoners did not escape before they were underway. Greg and Johnny were strapped down securely into acceleration cots. Two burly guards were assigned to them. The guards took their job seriously. One of them watched the captives at all times, and both held their stunners on ready.

  Meanwhile, under Doc’s orders, the crew of the Jupiter Equilateral ship began a systematic looting of the orbit ship they had disabled. Earlier they had merely searched the cabins and compartments. Now a steady stream of pressure suited men crossed through the airlocks into the crippled vessel and marched back with packing cases full of tape records, microfilm spools, stored computer data—anything that might conceivably contain information. The control cabin was literally torn apart. Every storage hold was ransacked.

  A team of six men was dispatched to the asteroid surface, searching for any sign of mining or prospecting activity. They came back an hour later, long-faced and empty-handed. Doc took their reports, his scowl growing deeper and deeper.

  Finally the last of the searchers reported in. “Doc, we’ve scraped it clean, and there’s nothing there. Not one thing that we didn’t check before.”

  “There’s got to be something there,” Doc said.

  “You tell me where else to look, and I’ll do it.”

  Doc shook his head ominously. “Tawney’s not going to like it,” he said. “There’s no other place it could be.”

  “Well, at least we have this pair,” the other said, jerking a thumb at Greg and Johnny. “They’ll know.”

  Doc looked at them darkly. “Yes, and they’ll tell, too> or I don’t know Tawney.”

  Greg watched all this happening. He heard the noises, saw the packing cases come through the cabin, and still he could not quite believe it. He had had nightmares, years before, when horrible things seemed to be happening around him without quite including him. Now this seemed like one of those nightmares. He kept telling himself that it wasn’t true, that the thing he had seen happen to the Scavenger had not really happened at all. But unlike the others, this nightmare didn’t go away. It was real, and this time he was part of it.

  He and Johnny. He saw Johnny on the cot next to him, watching the busy crewmen with dull eyes, and he knew that it had hit Johnny as hard as it hit him. Except for the guards, the crewmen hardly noticed them; it was as though what had happened to the Scavenger was just part of the day’s work to them, as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened at all. At one point Greg caught a few words, as a couple of men paused for a smoke; there was nothing but pleased satisfaction in. their voices. “Frankie done a great job of shootin’, huh?”

  “Yeah! Can’t beat those shells for close work. Just turn ’em loose, and whammo! Guy musta been crazy, tryin’ to pull out like that.”

  Greg caught Johnny’s eye, then turned away, suddenly sick. Johnny shook his head. “Take it easy, boy.”

  “He didn’t even have a chance,” Greg said.

  “I know. He must have known too.”

  “But why? What was he thinking of?”

  “Maybe he thought he could make it. Maybe he thought it was the only chance.”

  There was no other answer that Greg could see, and the ache in his chest cut deeper. A skillful pilot in a well-armed, powerful ship might have had a chance, at least a chance to try outrunning the shells. But Tom barely knew which switches to pull to start the engine running. Something deep in Greg’s mind kept digging at him. It was your fault, the something seemed to say. You let him come out here, you should never have let him leave Mars.

  He thrust the gnawing thought from his mind and tried to make himself worry about what might be waiting for them wherever they were going. Where were they going? Certainly not back to Mars. Probably to one of the Jupiter Equilateral orbit ships tending the mining rigs somewhere else in the belt. Somehow, he couldn’t worry, he didn’t even care what was going to happen, not any more.

  First Dad, then Tom, and all because of something he didn’t even know about, something he couldn’t even guess. Whatever Dad had found, he had concealed it so well that nobody could find it. Dad had found a bonanza, and died for it.

  But no bonanza in the world could bring Tom back. Nothing but a miracl
e could do that, and miracles didn’t happen. Now, gradually, the shock was wearing off, and Greg felt a cold ball of anger growing in his throat.

  There was no way to bring his brother back now. However things had been between them, they could never be changed now. But he knew that as long as he was still breathing, sdme- body, somehow, was going to answer for that last desperate run of the Scavenger.

  He lay back in the couch, gripping the handgrips, waiting for the count-down to begin.

  He didn’t know that the miracle had already happened.

  It had been an excellent idea, Tom Hunter thought to himself, and it had worked perfectly, exactly as he had planned it—so far. But now, as he clung to his precarious perch, he wondered if it had not worked out a little too well. The first flush of excitement that he had felt when he saw the Scavenger blow apart in space had begun to die down; on its heels came the unpleasant truth, the realization that only the easy part now lay behind him. The hard part was yet to come, and if that were to fail. .. .

  He fought down panic, struggled to get a more comfortable -position. Now, more than anything else, he wished that there had been some way to warn Greg and Johnny of what he intended to do.

  But of course there had been no way to do that if the plan was to work. They weren’t good enough actors; they would certainly give the show away if they suspected, even for a moment that Tom was still very much alive.

  Now that the first part was over, he was committed. There could be no turning back, no reconsidering. The crew from the Ranger had done too good a job of wrecking the orbit ship and the Dutchman they had brought out from Mars. There was no alternative now but to follow through.

  He realized, suddenly, that he was afraid. He was well enough concealed at the moment, clinging tightly against the outside hull of the Ranger ship, hidden behind the open airlock door. But soon the airlock would be pulled closed, and then the real test would come.

  Carefully, he ran through the plan again in his mind. He was certain now that his reasoning was right. There had been two dozen men on the raider ship; there had been no question, even at the start, that they would succeed in boarding the orbit ship and taking its occupants prisoner. The Jupiter Equilateral ship had not appeared there by coincidence. Its occupants had come looking for something that they had not found.

  And the only source of information left was Roger Hunter’s sons. They with their friend, Johnny Coombs, might have held the ship for hours, or even days, but with engines and radios smashed, there had been no hope of contacting Mars for help. Ultimately, they would have been taken.

  As he crouched in the dark storage hold of the orbit ship, Tom had realized this. He had also realized that, once captured, they would never have been freed and allowed to return to Mars. They would have been safe only until the Jupiter Equilateral men were convinced that they could not, or would not reveal where Roger Hunter had hidden his treasure. From that point on, they were dead; it would only be a matter of where, when, and how. Perhaps another “accident” like the “accident” that had happened to Dad. They would be found, sometime, somewhere, frozen corpses in space, and that would be the end of it.

  It had been that line of thought, as he waited in the storage hold, that had led to his plan. If the three of them were taken, they were finished. But what if only two were taken? He had pushed it aside as a foolish idea, at first. The boarding party would never rest until they had accounted for all three. They wouldn’t dare go back to their headquarters leaving one live man behind to tell the story. . . .

  Unless they thought the man was not alive! If they could be sure of that—absolutely certain of it—they would not hesitate to take away the remaining two. And if, by chance, the third man wasn’t as dead as they thought he was, and could find a way to follow them home, there might still be a chance to free the other two.

  It was then that Tom thought of the Scavenger and knew that he had found a way.

  In the cabin of the little scout ship he had worked swiftly, fearful that at any minute one of the maurauders might come aboard to search it. Tom was no rocket pilot, but he did know that the count-down was automatic, and that every ship could run on an autopilot, as a drone, following a prescribed course until it ran out of fuel. Even the shell evasion mechanism could be set on automatic.

  Quickly he set the autopilot, plotted a simple high-school math course for the ship, a course the Ranger ship would be certain to see, and to fire upon. He set the count-down clock to give himself plenty of time for the next step—and stopped.

  A flaw. He knew a moment of panic. What if somebody came aboard in the meantime and found the controls set?

  A simple flip of a switch, and the plan would be scuttled.

  His mind raced to find a way around the problem. Both the airlock to the Scavenger and to the orbit ship worked on electric motors. The Scavenger was grappled to the orbit ship’s hull by magnetic cables. Tom dug into the ship’s repair locker, found the wires and fuses that he needed, and swiftly started to work.

  It was an ingenious device, he decided, when he was finished, very simple, and almost fool-proof. The inner airlock door in the orbit ship was triggered to a fuse. He had left it ajar; the moment it was closed by anyone intending to board the Scavenger, the fuse would bum, a circuit would open, and the little ship’s autopilot would go on active. The ship would blast away from its moorings, head out towards Mars.

  And the fireworks would begin. All that he would have to worry about then would be getting himself aboard the Ranger ship without being detected.

  Which was impossible, of course. With guards at the #3 lock, nothing could get aboard that they wouldn’t know about. Even supposing he could manage it, there were no large storage holds in the Ranger to offer concealment, no good place for a stowaway to hide on the ship.

  Was there any other way? Tom wracked his brains and—suddenly—he had it! Yes, there was another way. There was one place no one would think of looking for him if he could manage to keep out of range of the view screen lenses—the outer hull of the ship. If he could clamp himself to the hull, somehow, and manage to cling there during blast-off, he could follow Greg and Johnny right home.

  He checked the fuse on the airlock once again to make certain it would work. Then he waited, hidden behind the little scout ship’s hull, until the orbit ship swung around into shadow. He checked his suit dials: oxygen for twenty-two hours, heater pack fully charged, soda ash only half saturated—it would do. Above him he could see the rear jets of the Ranger. He swung out onto the orbit ship’s hull, and began to crawl up toward the enemy ship.

  It was slow going. Every pressure suit had magnetic boots and hand-pads to enable crewmen to go outside and make repairs on the hull of a ship in transit. Tom clung, and moved, and clung again, trying to reach the protecting hull of the Ranger before the orbit ship swung him around to the sun side again.

  He couldn’t move fast enough. He saw the line of sunlight coming around the ship as it swung full into the sun. He froze, crouching motionless. If somebody on the Ranger spotted him now, all would be over. He was exposed like a lizard on a rock. He waited, hardly daring to breathe, as the ship spun ponderously around, carrying him into shadow again.

  Nothing happened. He started to crawl upward again, reached up to grab the mooring cable, and swung himself across to the hull of the Ranger. The airlock hung open; he scuttled behind it, clinging to the hull in its shadow just as Greg and Johnny were herded across by the Jupiter Equilateral guards.

  Then he waited. There was no sound, no sign of life. After a while the Ranger’s inner lock opened, and a group of men hurried across to the orbit ship. Probably a searching party, Tom thought. Soon the men came back, then returned to the orbit ship. After another minute, he felt the vibration of the Scavengers motors, and he knew that his snare had been triggered.

  He saw the little ship break free and streak out in its curving trajectory. He saw the homing shells burst from the Ranger’s tubes. The Scavenger va
nished from his range of vision, but moments later he saw the sudden flare of light reflected against the hull of the orbit ship, and he knew his plan had worked.

  He waited then until the three searchers returned to the Ranger. Everything in the plan had worked to this point, but the ordeal lay ahead.

  And at the end of it, he might really be a dead man.

  Hours later, the last group of looters left the orbit ship, and the airlock to the Ranger clanged shut. Tom heard the sucking sound of the airtight seals, then silence. The orbit ship was empty, its insides gutted, its engines no longer operable. The Ranger hung like a long splinter of silver alongside her hull, poised and ready to move on.

  Tom knew that the time had come. Very soon the blast-off and the acceleration would begin. He had a few moments to find a position of safety, no more.

  Quickly, he began to scramble toward the rear of the Rangers hull, hugging the metal sides, moving sideways like a crab. Ahead, he knew, the view-screen lenses would be active; if one of them picked him up, it would be quite a jolt to the men inside the ship, and it would be the end of his free ride.

  But the major peril was the blast-off. Once the engines cut off, the ship would be in free-fall. Then he could cling easily to the hull, walk all over it if he chose, with the aid of his boots and hand-pads. But unless he found a way to anchor himself firmly to the hull during blast-off, he could be flung off like a pebble. He would never be seen if that happened. Either the jet would catch him, or he would be left hanging in space, with nothing to do but wait for his oxygen supply to be exhausted, and the end would come swiftly then.

  He heard a whirring sound and saw the magnetic mooring cables jerk. The ship was preparing for blast-off. Automatic motors were drawing the cable and grappling plates into the hull. Moving quickly, Tom reached the rear cable. Here was his anchor, something to hold him tight to the hull! With one hand he loosened the web belt of his suit and looped it over a corner of the grappling plate as it pulled in to the hull.