Scavengers in Space

by Alan Edward Nourse

  “But that would only take a few men,” Johnny said. “As soon as the generators went out, they’d look for us, and if we were missing, well, they’d have a whole crew beatin’ the bushes for us. It wouldn’t be long before somebody thought of the ventilators.”

  “But we’ve got to do something, and do it fast,” Tom said.

  “I know.” Johnny chewed his lip. “It’s a good idea, but we need more than just the generators. We’ve got to disable the ship, throw so many things at them so fast from so many different directions that they won’t know which way to turn. That means well need to split up, and we’ll need weapons.” He hefted the guard’s Markheim. “One stunner for the three of us isn’t enough.”

  “Well, we have this.” Tom unbuckled the gun case from his belt. “Dad’s revolver. It’s not a stunner, but it might help.” He tossed the case to Johnny. “I can give you both a rundown on how the shafts go. We could plan to meet at a certain spot in a certain length of time—”

  He broke off, looking at Johnny. The big miner had taken Roger Hunter’s gun from the case and hefted it in his hand, starting to check it automatically as Tom talked. But now his hand froze as he stared at the weapon.

  “What’s wrong?” Tom asked.

  “This gun is wrong,” Johnny said. “All wrong. Where did you get this thing?”

  “From Dad’s spacer pack, the one the patrol brought back. The major gave it to us in Sun Lake City.” Tom peered at the gun. “Is it broken or something? It’s just Dad’s revolver.”

  “It is, eh?” Johnny turned the gun over in his hand. “Who ever told you about guns?”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  There was an odd expression on Johnny’s face as he handed the weapon back to Tom. “Take a look at it,” he said. “Tell me whether it’s loaded or not.”

  Tom looked at it. Except for a few hours on the firing range, he had had no experience with guns; he couldn’t have taken apart a Markheim and reassembled it if his life depended on it. But he had seen his- father take the old revolver out of the leather case many times before.

  Now Tom could see that this was not the same gun.

  The thing in his hand was large and awkward. The handgrips didn’t fit; there was no trigger guard, and no trigger. Several inches along the gleaming metal barrel was a shiny stud, and below it a dial with notches on it.

  “That’s funny,” Tom said. “I’ve never seen anything like this thing before.”

  Greg took it from him, balanced it in his hand. “Doesn’t feel right,” he said. “All out of balance.”

  “Look at the barrel,” Johnny said quietly.

  Greg looked. There was no hole in the end of the barrel. “This thing’s crazy,” he said.

  “And then some,” Johnny said. “You haven’t had this out of the case since you took it from the pack?”

  “Just once,” said Tom, “and I put it right back. I hardly looked at it. Say, maybe it’s just a new model Dad got.”

  “It’s no new model. I’m not even sure it’s a gun,” Johnny said. “Doesn’t feel like a gun.”

  “What happens when you push the stud here?” Greg asked.

  Johnny licked his lips nervously. “Try it,” he said.

  Greg leveled the thing at the rear wall of the lounge and pressed the stud. There was a sharp buzzing sound, and a blinding flash of blue light against the wall. It looked for all the world like the flash of a live power line shorting out. They squinted at the flash, rubbed their eyes, and stared at the wall—or at what was left of the wall, because most of the wall was gone. The metal had bellied out in a six-foot hole into the storage hold beyond.

  Johnny whistled. “This thing did that?” he whispered.

  “It must have.”

  “But there’s no gun ever made that could do that.” He walked over to the hole in the wall. “That’s half-inch steel plate. There’s no way to pack that kind of energy into a hand gun.”

  They stared at the innocent-looking weapon in Greg’s hand. “Whatever it is, Dad must have put it in the gun case.”

  “Yes, he must have,” Johnny said.

  “Well, don’t you see what that means? Dad must have found it somewhere. Somewhere out here in the belt—a gun that no man could have made.”

  Tom took the weapon, ran his finger along the gleaming barrel. “I wonder,” he said, “what else Dad found.”

  Somewhere below them they heard a hatch clang shut, and even deeper in the ship generator motors began throbbing in a steady even rhythm. In the silence of the lounge they could hear their own breathing, and outside, a thousand tiny sounds of the ship’s activity were audible.

  But now the only things that claimed their attention were the odd-shaped piece of metal in Greg’s hand and the hole that gaped in the wall.

  “You think that this was what Dad found?” Greg said. “The big strike he told Johnny about?”

  “It must be part of it,” Tom said.

  “But what is it? And where did it come from? It doesn’t make sense,” Greg protested.

  “It doesn’t make sense the way we’ve been looking at it,” Tom said. “All we’ve found was some gobbledegook in Dad’s private log to tell us what he found. But it couldn’t have been a vein of ore, or Tawney’s men would have unearthed it. It had to be something else. Something that was so big and important that Dad didn’t even dare let Johnny in on it.”

  “Yes, that’s been the craziest part of it, to me,” Johnny said. “I’ve done a lot of mining with your Dad. If he’d hit rich ore, he would have taken me out there to mine it with him. But he didn’t. He said it was something he had to work alone for a while, and he sent me back.”

  “As if he’d found something that scared him,” Tom said, “or something that he didn’t understand. He was afraid to tell anybody. And whatever he found, he managed to hide it somewhere, so that nobody would find it.”

  “Then why didn’t he hide this part of it, too?” Greg said.

  “Maybe to be sure there was some trace left, if anything happened to him,” Tom said.

  They were silent for a moment. The only sound was the stertorous breathing of the unconscious guard. “Well,” Greg said finally, “I have to admit it makes sense. It makes other things add up better, too. Dad was no fool, he must have known that Tawney was onto something. And Dad would never have risked his life for an ore strike. He’d either have made a deal with Tawney or let him hijack the lode, if that was all there was to it. But there’s still one big question. Where did he hide what he found? We aren’t going to find the answer here, that’s certain.” He walked over to the hole in the wall.

  “Made quite a mess of it, didn’t it?” Johnny said.

  “Looks like it. I wonder what that thing would do to a ship’s generator plant.” He turned to Johnny. “We haven’t much time. With this thing, we could tear this ship apart, leave them so confused they’ll never know what broke loose. And if we could get this gun back to Major Briarton, he’d have to listen to us, and get the U.N. patrol into the search.”

  They had been so intent on their conversation that they did not hear the footsteps in the corridor until the door swung open. It was another guard, the one who had departed with Tawney. He stopped short, blinking at his companion on the floor and at the gaping hole in the wall. A strangled sound came from his throat.

  Johnny grabbed his arm, jerked him into the lounge, and slammed the hatch shut. Greg pulled the stunner from his holster and tossed it to Tom. The guard let out a roar, twisted free, and met Johnny’s fist as he came around. He sagged at the knees and slid to the floor beside the other guard. “All right,” Johnny said, “we’ve dealt the cards, now we’d better play the hand. Tom, you first.”

  Tom pulled the ventilator grill down and climbed up into the shaft. Greg followed, with Johnny at his heels, pulling the grill back up into place from the inside. They waited for a moment, but there was no sound from the lounge. “All right,” Johnny said breathlessly. “Let’s move.�
�� Swiftly they started down the dark tunnel.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Haunted Ship

  They did not pause, even to catch their breath, for the first twenty minutes as Tom led them swiftly and silently through the maze of corridors and chutes that made up the ventilation system of the huge ship. Greg lost his bearings completely in the first twenty seconds; each time his brother paused at a junction of tubes, he felt a wave of panic rise up in his throat. Suppose they lost themselves in here! He heard Johnny’s trousers flapping behind him, saw Tom’s figure flit past another grill up ahead, and plunged doggedly on.

  It was amazingly hard to move quietly. Even in stocking feet they made a soft thud with each footfall. In the darkness their breathing was magnified as thousandfold. It seemed incredible that they did not sound like steam engines chugging past each compartment grill.

  But there was no sign of detection, no sound of alarm. Finally they came out into a large shaft which allowed them to stand upright. They stopped to catch their breath.

  “Main tube to the living quarters,” Tom said when they caught up with him. “Joins with the lower level tube by a series of chutes. We’ve actually been circumnavigating the ship. I wanted to get as far away from that lounge compartment as possible, in case they check up on you right away.”

  “We can’t have much time,” Johnny said. “That second guard must have been comin’ to relieve the other, and when the first one doesn’t report back, they’ll smell somethin’ fishy.”

  They talked it over for a moment. Johnny had been careful to leave the hatchway into the corridor ajar before he climbed into the ventilator shaft, and then he had pulled the shaft snugly into place behind him. Anyone who came would find two unconscious guards, a burnt-out hole in the wall, and the door unlocked.

  “Let’s hope that whoever gets to the lounge first will take things at face value and assume we’re at large in the ship somewhere, for a while at least,” Johnny said. “That hole in the wall is going to slow them up a bit too.”

  “But they’ll sound the alarm,” Tom said.

  “You bet they will! They’ll have every man on the crew shakin’ down the ship for us. But they may not think of the ventilators until they can’t find us anywhere else.”

  “But sooner or later they’re bound to think of it.”

  “That’s true,” Johnny said. “Unless they keep seein’ us in the ship. The way I figure it, this crew has been on battle stations plenty of times. They’ll be able to search the whole ship in half an hour. We’re just goin’ to have to show ourselves—at least enough to keep them searchin’.”

  “Well, what if they do think of the ventilators?” Greg asked. “They’d still have a time finding us.”

  “Maybe, but don’t underestimate Tawney. He might mask up his crew and flood the tubes with cyanide.”

  They thought about that for a minute. There was no sound but their own breathing, and the low chug-chug-chug of the pumps somewhere deep in the ship. Momentarily they expected to hear the raucous clang of the alarm bell, as some crew member or another walked into the lounge and found them gone. But so far there was no sign that they had been discovered missing.

  “No,” Johnny said finally, “if we just hide out in here, and hope for a chance at one of the scout ships, they’ll find us eventually. But we’ve got three big advantages, if we can figure out how to use them. That fancy gun, for one. A way to get around the ship, for another. And the fact that there’s one more of us than they count on.” He flipped on his pocket flash and began to draw lines on the dusty floor of the shaft. “My idea is to keep them so busy fightin’ little fires that they won’t have a chance to worry about where the big one is.”

  He drew a rough outline sketch of the organization of the ship. “This look right to you, from what you’ve seen?” he asked Tom.

  “Pretty much,” Tom said. “There are more connecting tubes.”

  “All the better. We want to get the generators with our little toy here first. That’ll darken the ship and put the blowers out of commission in case they think of using gas. Also, it will cut out their computers and missile launching rigs, which might give us a chance to get a scout ship away in one piece if we could get aboard one.”

  “All right, the generators are first,” Tom said. “But then what? There are four hundred men on this ship. They’ll have every airlock triple guarded.”

  “Not when we get through, they won’t,” Johnny grinned. “We’ve got an old friend aboard who’s going to help us.”

  “Friend?”

  “Ever hear of panic?” Johnny said. “Just listen a minute.”

  Quickly he outlined his plan. Tom and Greg listened carefully, watching Johnny make marks with his finger in the dust. When he finished, Greg whistled softly. “You missed your life work,” he said. “You should have gone into crime.”

  “If I’d had a ghost to help me, I might have,” Johnny said.

  “It’s perfect,” Tom said, “if it works. But it all depends on one thing—keeping things rolling after we start.”

  For another five minutes they went over the details. Then Johnny clapped them each on the shoulder. “It’s up to you two,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  The three moved down the large shaft to the place where it broke into several spurs. Johnny started down the chute toward the engine rooms; Tom and Greg headed in opposite directions toward the main body of the ship. Just as they broke up, they heard a muffled metallic sound from the nearest compartment grill.

  It was the clang-clang-clang of the orbit ship’s general alarm.

  Merrill Tawney had not noticed the first guard’s failure to report back for almost half an hour after the second guard had been dispatched. Then he had glanced angrily at the wall clock, and rang the lounge. There was no answer. Another guard was summoned and told to head for the nearest shuttle car. He found the hatchway standing ajar, with the two guards on the floor, just groggily coming around.

  Something had hit them, but neither was quite sure what. The guard took one look at the hole bumed in the wall, and ran to the wall phone in the corridor.

  “They’re gone,” he panted when he finally reached Tawney in control cabin. “Must have jumped the guards. Got their stunners, and—” he hesitated, then told Tawney about the wall.

  “What do you mean, blew a hole through it?” Tawney snarled.

  “I swear that’s what they did, boss, six feet across.”

  “You mean a blowtorch?”

  “Doesn’t look like a torch. I never saw anything like it.”

  “Well, get a crew in there,” Tawney said. “Seal off every corridor in the area, and search every compartment. They can’t hide on this ship, stunners or no stunners.”

  Tawney waited, seething, until the first reports began coming in. All the corridors in the quadrant were sealed. Guard crews went through them from both ends, meeting in the middle. Every compartment in the quadrant had been searched and then locked.

  But there was no sign of the fugitives.

  Moments later the general alarm bell went off, beating its reverberating tattoo in every compartment on the ship. Crewmen stopped with food halfway to their mouths, jerked away from tables. Orders buzzed along a dozen wires, and section chiefs began reporting their battle stations alert and ready. Finally Tawney snapped on the general public address system speaker. “Now get this,” he roared. “I want every inch of this ship searched—every corridor, every compartment. I want a special crew standing by for missile launching. I want double guards at every airlock. If they get a ship away from here, the man who lets them through had better be dead when I find him.” He broke off, clutching the speaker until his voice was under control again. “All right, move. They’re armed, but there’s no place they can go. Find them.”

  A section chief came back over the speaker. “Dead or alive, boss?”

  “Alive, you idiot! At least the Hunter brat. I’ll take the other one any way you can get him.”

&
nbsp; He switched off, and waited, pacing the control cabin like a caged animal. Ten minutes later a buzzer sounded. “Hydroponics, boss. All clear.”

  “No sign of them?”

  “Nothing.”

  Another buzz. “Number Seven ore hold. Nothing here.”

  Still another buzz. “Crew’s quarters. Nothing, boss.”

  One by one the reports came in. Fuming, Tawney checked off the sections, watched the net draw tighter throughout the ship. They were somewhere, they had to be.

  But nobody seemed to find them.

  He was buzzing for his first mate when the power went off. The lights went out, the speaker went dead in his hand. The computers sighed contentedly and stopped computing. Abruptly, the emergency circuits went into operation, flooding the darkness with harsh white light. The intercom started buzzing again.

  “Engine room, boss.”

  “What happened down there?” Tawney roared.

  The man sounded as if he’s just run the mile. “Generators,” he panted. “Blown out.”

  “Well, get somebody in there to fix them. Have a crew seal off the area.”

  “Can’t, boss. Fix them, I mean.”

  “Why not? What have we got electricians for?”

  “There’s nothing left to fix. The generators aren’t wrecked. They’re demolished.”

  “Then get the pair that did it.”

  “They’re not here. We’ve been sealed up tight. There’s no way anybody could have gotten in here.”

  After that, things really began to get confusing!

  For a while Merrill Tawney thought his crew was going crazy. Then he began to wonder if he were the one who was losing his mind.

  Whatever the case, Merrill Tawney was certain of one thing. The things that were happening on his orbit ship could not possibly be happening.

  A guard in one of the outer-shell storage holds called in with a disquieting report. Greg Hunter, it seemed, had just been spotted vanishing into one of the storage compartments from- the main outer-shell corridor. When the guard had broken through the jammed hatchway to collar his trapped victim, there was no sign of the victim anywhere around.