Scavengers in Space

by Alan Edward Nourse

  At the same moment, a report came in from a guard on the opposite side of the ship. He had just spotted Greg Hunter there, it seemed, moving down a spur corridor. The guard had held his fire (according to Tawney’s orders) and summoned help to comer the quarry, but when help arrived, the quarry had vanished.

  Five minutes later the Hunter boy was discovered in the hydroponics section, busily reducing all the yeast vats to shambles with a curious weapon that seemed to eat holes in things. It ate the deck out from under the guard’s feet, sending him plunging through the floor into the galley. By the time he had scrambled back again, the Hunter boy was gone, and a rapid move to seal off the region failed to turn him up again. The guard was upset. Tawney was a great deal more upset, because at the time Greg Hunter was (reportedly) playing havoc with the yeast vats in Hydroponics he was also (reportedly) knocking guards down like tenpins in the main corridor off the engine room while reinforcements tried to pin him down with a wide-beam stunner.

  Suddenly emergency circuits closed and lights flashed in the control cabin, the special signal for a meteor collision with the outer shell in #3 hold. Tawney signaled frantically for the section chief. “What’s happening down there?”

  “I can’t talk,” the section chief gasped. “Gotta get into a suit, we’re leaking air in here.”

  “Well, plug up the hole!”

  “The hole’s four feet wide, sir!” There was a fit of coughing and the contact broke. The signals for #4 hold and #5 hold were flashing now. While crew members in the vicinity scrambled for pressure suits, someone systematically proceeded to blow holes in #9, #10, #11 holds.

  It was impossible, but the reports came in thick and fast. Greg Hunter was in two places at once, and everywhere he went in both places he left a trail of unbelievable destruction—bulkheads demolished, gaping holes torn in the outer shell, the air-reconditioning units smashed beyond repair. Tawney buzzed for his first mate.

  An emergency switch cut into the line. The frantic voice of a section chief reported that Johnny Coombs had been spotted disappearing into a ventilator shaft in the engine sector. “Go in after him!” Tawney screamed. He got his first mate finally, and snarled orders into the speaker. “They’re in the ventilators. Get a crew in there and stop them.”

  But it was dark in the ventilator shafts. No emergency lights in there. Worse, the crewmen were hearing the rumors that were being whispered around the ship. The ventilator shafts yawned menacingly before them; they went in reluctantly. Once in the dark maze of tunnels, identification was difficult. Two guards met each other headlong in the darkness, and put each other out of the fight in a flurry of nervous stunner fire. While others searched, more of the holds were broken open, leaking air through gaping rents in the hull.

  Tawney felt the panic spreading; he tried to curb it, but it spread in spite of him. The fugitives were appearing and disappearing like wraiths. Reports back to control cabin took on a hysterical note, confused and garbled. Now the second- level bulkheads were being attacked. Over a third of the compartments were leaking precious air into outer space.

  When a terrified section chief came through with a report that two Greg Hunters had been spotted by the same man at the same time, and that the guards in the sector were shooting at anything that moved, including other guards, Tawney made his way to the radio cabin and put through a frantic signal to Jupiter Equilateral headquarters on Mars.

  The contact took forever, even with the ship’s powerful emergency boosters. By the time someone at headquarters was reading him, Tawney’s report made little sense. He was trying for the third time to explain, clearly and logically, how two men and a ghost were scuttling his orbit ship under his very feet when one wall of the cabin vanished in a crackle of blue fire, and he found himself staring at two Greg Hunters and a grim-faced Johnny Coombs.

  He made squeaky noises into the microphone and dropped it with a crash. He groped for a chair; Johnny jerked him to his feet again. “A scout ship,” he said tersely. “Clear it for launchin’. We want one with plenty of fuel, and we don’t want a single guard anywhere near the airlock.” He picked up an intercom microphone and thrust it into the little fat man’s trembling hand. “Now move! And you’d better be sure they understand you, because you’re comin’ with us.”

  Merrill Tawney stared first at Tom, then at Greg, and finally at the microphone. Then he moved. The orders he gave to his section chiefs were very clear.

  He had never argued with a ghost before, and he didn’t care to start now.

  It was over so quickly that it seemed to Tom it had just begun, and if so much had not been at stake, it might have been fun.

  It was the gun—the remarkable gun that Roger Hunter had left as his legacy—that was the key. It ate through steel and aluminium alloy like putty. Whatever its source of power, however, it worked, by whatever means it had been built, there had been no match for it on the orbit ship.

  It had worked, and that was all that mattered right then. With it, and with the advantage of a ghost that walked like a man—Tom Hunter, to be exact—they reduced the Jupiter Equilateral orbit ship to a smoking wreck in something less than thirty minutes.

  The signal came back that a scout ship was ready, unguarded. Johnny prodded Tawney with the stunner. “You first,” he said.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “You’ll see,” Johnny said.

  “It was a trick,” Tawney said, glaring at Tom. “They told me they shot your ship to pieces.”

  “The ship, yes,” Tom said. “Not me.”

  “Well—well, that’s good, that’s good,” Tawney said quickly. He turned to Greg. “You don’t have to take me back. Our bargain is still good.”

  “Move,” Johnny Coombs said.

  With Tawney between them, Greg and Tom marched down the corridor toward the airlock, Johnny bringing up the rear. No one stopped them. No one even came near them. One crewman stumbled on them in the corridor. He saw Tawney with a gun in his back and fled in terror.

  They found the scout ship, and strapped Tawney down to an acceleration bunk, binding his hands and feet so he couldn’t move. Greg checked the controls while Tom and Johnny strapped down. A moment later the engines fired, and the leaking wreck of the orbit ship fell away, dwindling and disappearing in the blackness of space.

  It was a quiet journey. The red dot that was Mars grew larger every hour. One of the three stayed awake at all times to watch Tawney while the others slept. In the second rest period, Tom woke up to find Greg peering toward Mars with the view screen on telescopic.

  “Looking for a German band to welcome us home?”

  Greg grinned and leaned back, rubbing his eyes. “No, just looking. I thought I could see the Star-Jump satellite for a minute, but I guess not.”

  “You wish you were back there, I suppose.”

  Greg thought about it, and nodded his head. “It’s what I want to do. Someday the men at Star-Jump will be the ones that make the long trip out. Probably Alpha Centauri first, that’s closest. Then Sirius, Vega, Altair, Arcturus—” He nodded again. “The ones that will go will be the lucky ones.”

  “Or the crazy ones,” Tom said.

  Greg laughed. “Maybe crazy, too, I don’t know. But somebody has to find the way to go.” He stood up, snapped off the view screen. “I’d like to be back there, sure, but right now I’ve a more important job.”

  “How’s our prisoner doing?”

  “No problem there, he can barely move. I almost wish he’d try something, he’s too quiet.”

  It was true. Tawney had recovered from his shock, but rather than grow more worried as Mars grew larger on the screen, he seemed to become more cheerful by the minute. “He doesn’t seem very worried, does he?” Tom said.

  “No, and it doesn’t quite add up. We’ve got enough on him to get Jupiter Equilateral pushed right out of the belt.”

  They mentioned it to Johnny later. “Almost as though he had something up his sleeve,” Greg said.
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br />   Johnny chewed his lip thoughtfully. “His company has plenty of power on Mars. But with the three of us to testify, I don’t see how he has a chance.”

  “I’d still feel better if we had the whole picture for the major,” Tom said. “We still don’t know what Dad found, or where he hid it.”

  They slept on it, but the uneasiness grew. Tawney ignored them, staring at the image of the red planet on the view screen almost eagerly. Then, eight hours out of Sun Lake City a U.N. patrol ship appeared, moving toward them swiftly. “Intercepting orbit,” Greg said. “Looks like they were waiting for us.”

  They watched as the big ship moved in to tangential orbit, matching its speed to theirs. Then Greg snapped the communicator switch. “Sound off,” he said cheerfully. “We’ve got a prize for you.”

  “Stand by, we’re boarding you,” the patrol sent back. “And put your weapons aside.”

  Four scooters broke from the side of the patrol ship. Greg activated the airlock. Five minutes later a man in patrol uniform with captain’s bars stepped into the control cabin, a stunner on ready in his hand. Three patrolmen came in behind him.

  The captain looked around the cabin, saw Tawney, and took a deep breath. “Well, thank the stars you’re safe at any rate. Pete, Jimmy, take the controls.”

  “Hold on,” Greg said. “We don’t need a pilot.”

  The captain looked at hm. “Sorry, but we’re taking you in. There won’t be any trouble unless you make it. You three are under arrest, and I’m authorized to make it stick if I have to.”

  They stared at him. Then Johnny said, “What are the charges?”

  “You ought to know,” the captain said. “We have a formal complaint from the main offices of Jupiter Equilateral, charging you with piracy, murder, kidnaping of a company official, and totally wrecking a company orbit ship. I don’t quite see how you managed it, but we’re going to find out in short order.”

  There was a stunned silence in the cabin, and then a sound came from the rear of the cabin that made the three of them turn.

  Merrill Tawney was laughing.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Razor’s Edge

  The room was small and drab, lit only by pale afternoon sunlight filtering in through the tiny windows. Tom had seen the internment rooms at the Sun Lake City space port before from the outside; from the inside, with the heavy door closed and bolted, things looked very much different. It seemed like hours since the captain had escorted them down the long corridor into the room. Actually only twenty minutes had crept by on the wall clock. They stared through the windows at the failing sunight, and wondered what was delaying the major.

  Outside, the port was humming with activity. One of the great Jupiter Equilateral freighters had just finished loading its holds with a cargo of finished vanadium steel milling tools, bound for a dozen factories on Earth. The gantry cranes which had lifted the cartons into the afterholds of the ship were being moved away now, and preparations for blast-off began. At midnight, Mars time, one of the Earth-Mars orbit ships would reach its point of closest apposition to Mais. The freighter would be there to meet her, to unload the precious cargo for its long run to Earth.

  Now a crew of power-pile men in their bright yellow uniforms went aboard to complete their check-over of the engines, to make certain that the fusion reaction that powered the freighter would develop the necessary thrust to lift it and its cargo against Mars’ gravitational pull, and to make sure too that those engines would cut off at the proper time. Still another crew moved around the perimeter of the radiation screen, ready with radiation detecting apparatus to make sure that none of the furiously radioactive backwash from the engines escaped from the tight circle of the damping screen to contaminate the surrounding field and buildings.

  It was all very businesslike and efficient. Tom thought gloomily as he watched. Sim Lake City, Mars, was coming into its own as a city, not as a city of Earth, but as a city of the solar system. For a hundred years the Mars colonies had cost Earth-side taxpayers billions of dollars for their support. The cost of just establishing those colonies had been fantastic; it had cost even more to keep them going, to provide food and machinery and living space for the men and women who had come here.

  But now, slowly, the tables were turning. An economy was developing on Mars, a mining economy. Like Alaska in the early days of its statehood, Mars had struggled to produce more than it cost, and now it was winning the struggle. Mars was beginning now to pay its own way, and more.

  And in the future, what would Mars become? A place for the overflow of population from the huge Earth cities? A place to provide homes and work and a way of life for millions of humans who would soon have no place on Earth?

  Perhaps. Tom thought of his one short visit to Earth, the last vacation trip his family had taken before the sickness came. He remembered the mammoth crowded city they had visited, stretching from Boston Sector in the north down to Richmond Sector in the south, and west almost to the borders of Greater Pittsburgh—one huge, teeming city rising in sky-scrapers almost to the sky, and digging deep into the ground. It had been an exciting place to see, but he knew now that it was only one of the sprawling cities that covered the Earth.

  It was not a problem of enough food, or enough work—it was a problem of standing room. Another hundred years, and Earth would be bursting at the, seams. Even the most optimistic dreamers knew that when that time came, even Mars would not be enough. Mars and Venus together would not be enough. Even if the planetary engineers succeeded in turning Mars into a habitable planet for humans not requiring bubble-enclosed cities; even if they could change Venus from a poisonous hot-box into a warm tropical planet with plenty of oxygen and water, it would not be enough.

  Tom turned away from the window, and looked up at the wall clock. How many people were born on Earth every minute? Greg was right when he said that Project Star-Jump was the only hope. The new land in the Amazon, in Greenland and Antarctica had been swallowed up in two decades. Mars and Venus would be swallowed up in a hundred years. The stars would have to be next. A place for men to escape. . . .

  The thought of escape brought him back sharply. Half an hour now, and still no word from the major. From the moment the patrol crew had boarded them, everything had seemed like a bad dream. The shock of the arrest, the realization that the captain had been serious when he reeled off the charges lodged against them—they had been certain it was some kind of ill-planned joke until they saw the delegation of Jupiter Equilateral officials waiting at the port to greet Merrill Tawney like a man returned from the dead. They watched Tawney climb into the sleek company car and drive off toward the gate, while the captain escorted them without a word to the internment room.

  True, they had not been stripped of their clothes and held under guard. No one had touched them. In fact, no one had spoken to them, or paid any attention to their protests. The U.N. officer at the desk checked their ID’s, jotted a note on the pad in front of him, and flipped the speaker switch to contact Major Briarton.

  And now, angry and shaken, they were staring through the windows and waiting.

  The door clicked, and the captain looked in. “All right, come along now,” he said.

  “Is the major here?” Tom asked.

  “You’ll see the major soon enough.” The captain herded them into another room, where a clerk efficiently fingerprinted them. Then they went down a ramp to a jitney platform, and boarded a U.N. official car. The trip into the city was slow; rush-hour traffic from the port was heavy. When they reached U.N. headquarters, there was another wait in an upper level anteroom. The captain stood stiffly with his hands behind his back and ignored them.

  “Look, this is ridiculous,” Greg burst out finally. “We haven’t done anything. You haven’t even let us make a statement.”

  “Make your statement to the major. It’s his headache, not mine, I’m happy to say.”

  “But you let that man walk out of there scot free.”

  The
captain looked at him. “If I were you,” he said, “I’d stop complaining and start worrying. If I had Jupiter Equilateral at my throat, I’d worry plenty, because once they start they don’t stop.”

  A signal light blinked and he took them downstairs. Major Briarton was behind his desk, his eyes tired, his face grim. He dismissed the captain, and motioned them to seats. “All right, let’s have the story,” he said, “and by the ten moons of Saturn it had better be convincing, because I’ve about had my fill of you three.”

  He listened without interruption as Tom told the story, with Greg and Johnny adding details from time to time. Tom told him everything, from the moment they had blasted off for Roger Hunter’s claim to the moment the patrol ship had boarded them, except for a single detail. He didn’t mention the remarkable gun from Roger Hunter’s gun case. The gun was still in the spacer’s pack he had slung over his shoulder; he had not mentioned it when the patrolmen had taken their stunners away. Now as he talked, he felt a twinge of guilt in not mentioning it.

  But he had a reason. Dad had died to keep the gun a secret. It seemed only right to keep the secret a little longer. When he came to the part about their weapons, he simply spoke of “Dad’s gun” and omitted any details. All through the story, the major listened intently, interrupting only occasionally, pulling at his hp and scowling.

  “So we decided that the best way to convince you that we had the evidence you wanted was to bring Tawney back with us,” Tom concluded.

  “But then the patrol ship intercepted us and told us we were under arrest. And when we landed, they let Tawney drive off without even questioning him.”

  “The least they could do, under the circumstances,” the major said.

  “Well, I’d like to know why,” Greg broke in bitterly. “Why pick on us? We’ve just been telling you—”

  “Yes, yes, I heard every word of it,” the major sighed. “If you knew the trouble—oh, what’s the use? I’ve spent the last three solid hours talking myself hoarse, throwing in every bit of authority I could muster and jeopardizing my position as co-ordinator here, for the sole purpose of keeping you three idiots out of jail for a few hours.”