Asteroid Man

by R. L. Fanthorpe

  "Me too," said Rotherson. "O.K."

  They left the pathetic pile of wreckage, a wandering, metallic corpse in the vastness of space, and moved back through the airlock into the confines of their own ship. A few seconds later they had blasted off, and the wreckage had disappeared—was no longer even a blip on the radar screen.

  They coasted on, and then the observation indicator tinkled a sudden warning.

  Rotherson switched on the repeller field. His hand had hardly left the switch when Sparks said, with dull, toneless edge to his voice:

  "Radio seems to be showing up another wreck, sir."

  "Darn," said Rotherson. "We came out here to verify things and effect a rescue if possible. I don't like coming out here on a postmortem mission."

  It was another wreck, very much the same as the first.

  They examined it. It was not Greg Masterson's ship. Less than an hour later they encountered the third, and half an hour after that, the fourth.

  It was three hours after sighting the first wreck that they came across the fifth. This time it was Masterson's.

  Krull could feel a great lump in his throat. They gathered round the airlock for what would be the last of their wreckage examinations.

  "Think there's any chance of anybody being alive?"

  "No. Let's not build up any false hopes," said Rotherson. "If he did survive the crash, what chance would he have had? What suit would have stood up to that impact?"

  The radio operator's voice suddenly broke in on the conversation: "I've thought of something, sir," he said. "Why did the ships break free of the asteroid again?"

  "Good grief," answered Rotherson. "That's a point."

  "Certainly is," chimed in Jonga. "If they'd been dragged in there by some kind of super-gravity, smashed into the surface to embed those pebbles, or whatever they are, into the very fabric of the ships, wouldn't they have been inclined to stay put? What drove them off again?"

  "The beam must have been switched off, I suppose," volunteered Krull. "Wonder what kind of time interval there was between the impact and jettisoning of the wreckage into space."

  Jonga was looking very thoughtful. "And why crash them only to jettison them again? It doesn't make sense to me."

  "It does to me," said Rotherson. "It's the perfect weapon. If you can switch off your enemies' engines, and switch on a super gravity at the same time, if you can crash him into the surface of our planet and then repel him again, you're going to save an awful lot of ammunition. It's the most effective thing there is."

  "Didn't they carry a bomb load?" chimed in Dolores with feminine intuition.

  "Yes, of course they did," replied the general. "They carried one or two of the three-megaton type—mainly used for experimental survey blasting… but highly effective weapons! For an emergency!"

  "That's strange," said Krull, "because the bombs are missing. We haven't found a ship yet with bombs aboard; all the racks were empty. I wonder why?"

  "It looks as though they tried to fight back at this thing when they found it was dragging them down."

  "They can't have been awfully successful, then, because if they'd been able to blow the asteroid to fragments before they hit, they wouldn't have hit."

  It was simple straightforward logic which raised another question.

  "What manner of things are we up against?" whispered the young radio operator. "A thing that can control gravity, a thing that is able to throw out some kind of nullifying ray that prevents megaton missiles from exploding?"

  "What indeed?" whispered the general. "Whatever kind of creature inhabits that asteroid must belong to a technology way, way in advance of ours."

  A cold shiver of apprehensive fear began running down every back. They felt like children who had gone out hunting rabbits and had suddenly stumbled across the lair of a savage bear… standing amid bones and bloody carcases.

  "Still, forewarned is forearmed," said Rotherson grimly. "If we know what we're up against, we can't rush into it blindly, like those other poor devils did."

  "Begging your pardon, sir, but I don't think Greg Masterson would have run into anything with his eyes closed; he was a real Boy Scout in the sense that he was always prepared. There's nothing would have caught old Greg unawares; he wasn't that type of man. He'd have rushed in—but he wouldn't have rushed in with his eyes shut; he'd have taken every possible precaution."

  "Yes, I know he would," said the general. "On the other hand, we've gained by his experience." They looked from one to the other.

  "Come on," said Jonga suddenly. "Let's get it over with." They opened the lock and moved out toward the fifth wreck. They found the identification plate strangely intact and readable.

  "This was Masterson's ship," said the general flatly. Everyone seemed to be under a great black cloud that had mentally descended upon the whole expedition. Twenty bodies so far… would this make up the twenty-five?

  They combed the wreckage from end to end. Again there were no bombs. Again there were strange smoothly granular particles embedded in the fabric, but there were not five bodies. There were only four. Hardly daring to hope at first, Krull examined each of the corpses slowly and carefully. He would not allow himself to hope until he was sure, and even then the hope was the slimmest and the faintest that any man could have had. Space was a fantastically wide area. Within that infinity of universal dimension, the body or the shattered remnants of the body of one can could be hidden and lost from the knowledge of society for ever. Yet Krull still had that feeling that Greg Masterson was not dead.

  The feeling had been leaving him with every wreck they encountered, but now it suddenly came back with renewed strength. The sense of Greg's danger was brought in more strongly upon him that it had been before, and just for once he gave his instinct full reign.

  He let his hunch have its head, and as they made their way back to the ship and secured the airlock behind them, he slid off his helmet and turned to speak to Rotherson.

  "I've got an idea, sir, it's only the slimmest of theories and founded on supposition rather than fact. But my idea is that Masterson is alive!"

  "I shouldn't build up your hopes too highly," said the general. "I hope he is—I hope he is as much as any of you. What makes you think so, Krull?"

  "In the first place, the only evidence we have is that we haven't found his body—but not finding a body doesn't matter much one way or another when you have a place as big as the universe to hide it in. On the other hand, on all the other ships everyone has been together. There's no reason to believe that Greg would have been separate. He's not the kind of man to abandon ship and leave his crew to crash. I think there's only one possible explanation to fit the facts. He was in the ship, but he wasn't killed. Call it luck, chance, destiny, or anything you like, but his name wasn't written on one of those fragments of flying beryllium. His number hadn't come up on Fate's wheel. Fate missed him. His four companions were killed, but he wasn't. What would you or I do if our ship had crashed? What would be the first thing you'd do when you had recovered consciousness, when you'd checked and found that all your pals were dead?"

  "Get out of the wreckage… get away from it, I suppose," said the general.

  "It's my guess that's what Masterson did," went on Krull, "and if that asteroid was artificial, he probably spotted it. And if the exterior looked like a perfectly ordinary chunk of rock on the testing apparatus, then the inside of the thing would be where the creature or creatures, or whatever inhabits it, lived."

  "Agreed," said Rotherson, laying his helmet aside.

  "Now," went on Krull very thoughtfully, ticking off the points on his fingers as he made them, "if he could once get inside it, he could probably hide. He'd have his guns, no doubt, and the asteroid, though quite small in astronomical terms, is pretty big if you think about it as a hollow vessel from inside. It might have been one enormous cavern, in which case the ship would probably have crashed right through the shell… no, that doesn't make sense. I think it must be uniq
ue, perhaps with some kind of labyrinth inside it. This is only one of the wildest of guesses." He leaned forward confidingly. "Without knowing it, and much as I hate to admit the existence of things like extra-sensory perception, or ESP, I may have gotten some queer telepathic communication with Greg. Things that I'm putting forward as wild guesses may be things that he is seeing and experiencing. There is a very slim possibility…"

  "Leaving out the telepathic element, and judging your theory on its merits alone, I see quite a bit to recommend it."

  There was a sudden shout from the radio operator, who had resumed his post after getting out of his suit.

  "What's the matter now?" asked Rotherson. The lad beckoned him over.

  "Look here, Chief!" Rotherson's heavy brows creased into a puzzled frown. The others gathered round the screen.

  "It's another ship," said Sparks.

  "I think it must be," said Jonga, and pressed the identification tabulator. "It records as a ship, anyway," he said slowly. "Let's see if we can match courses."

  "Right," said the general. They put their computer into action and swung the steering rockets over.

  "Moving pretty fast," said Jonga.

  "Certainly is," commented Dolores. They increased speed.

  "I've got the direction velocity matching equation," said Krull, as his hands hand over the computer again.

  "Good man."

  The ship suddenly took violent, evasive action.

  "They must have seen us coming and swerved off course," said Rotherson. "This looks fishy. The indicators below the screen were registering all sorts of rather odd measurements." Sparks had suddenly gone very white, the others noticed.

  "What's the trouble, son?" asked Krull. For answer the lad handed him the direction slip, and the identifying symbols on the sheet of plain white paper. They translated themselves almost instantaneously in Krull's intelligent, practised mind; he too caught his breath in astonishment.

  "Look at this, sir," he said. "It must be an alien, an Out-worlder. It doesn't fall in with any of the system classification."

  "An alien," echoed the general.

  "An Out-worlder," repeated Jonga. "I wonder if it has any connection with that asteroid?"

  "It'll be a pretty big coincidence if it hasn't," said Rotherson grimly. "We may not be able to fight an asteroid, but we'll fight this beggar. Right, lads; stand by for action stations."

  CHAPTER XII

  Once clear of that central chamber in the heart of the asteroid's labyrinth, Greg raced on, yet cautiously, despite his speed, as though all the devils in hell were pursuing him. He knew that if he got into one of those nets again, he was done for. For this time, as soon as he was helpless, the knife and the hand of the asteroid man's servants would sever, not the net cords, but his throat. And suddenly the obvious solution presented itself to him. Instead of being the hunted, he would be the hunter. He would have to track down that creature with the knife and destroy it. The question was—what with?

  His guns wouldn't work, and anyway, he only had one left. He had lost the axe somewhere in the labyrinth. It would be a chance in a million against his finding it again.

  He was being stalked by fantastic, grotesque monsters, with the strength of bull elephants. His only weapon against them would be an axe, a spear, a sword, something of that nature. For guns or similar mechanisms wouldn't fire while the nullifying ray was on. His first job, then, was to re-equip himself with a weapon. His second task was to find the creature with the atomically condensed knife that would cut his way out of one of those nets, or any other difficulties that he might encounter. The only other possible weapons that he could use were hanging on the belt of the space suit that he had lost somewhere far, far away in the labyrinth. Because if only he could find Astra, she would probably know where he could find some sort of weapon. But the enemy had gotten Astra, and he couldn't rescue her until he could find something with which to fight the creatures. It was a vicious circle. He remembered an old adage of the blackout of the last interplanetary war—the blackout that had been largely a farce due to the fact that modern electronic detection devices made night and day practically equivalent to one another. It was only the humor that remained as a memory of that war.

  He stood still, trying to think; somewhere or other he had to find a weapon. The passage ahead of him branched suddenly. He wondered again, as he had wondered before, whether to go right, left, or straight ahead.

  He decided to try the passageway on the left.

  He turned slowly and carefully into it; the light of his flash, which he had managed to retain throughout all his weird hazards and misadventures, revealed for him in its bright luminescence, another of those massive and enormous doors.

  Again he was in a cleft stick, uncertain which way to turn. Should he open the door and risk stumbling straight into a nest of those hideous Frankensteinean servants of the master. Or should he retrace his steps and go quietly the other way? A door in the labyrinth almost invariably meant some kind of chamber beyond.

  He would make no progress at all, stumbling along half-blind in these corridors. That room might, just might, contain something that would be advantageous to him.

  The odds were against it; the odds were, in fact, in favor of it containing something dangerous and hostile. He might have come round back into the presence of the asteroid man. He shuddered as he remembered the terrible disfigurement of the creature.

  He shuddered and closed his eyes to try and shut out the vision—but there was no shutting it out. It was still with him, and he focused his attention on the door handle. The handle proved to be as stiff as those of its predecessors, with which he had tried conclusions. He got his shoulder under it the first time, for he knew it was useless to rely on his hands alone.

  This time, too, he pressed more cautiously, not wanting to be caught off balance in case there was some kind of danger or enemy lurking behind it. He imagined one of those horrible and thumbless hands grasping at him, clutching at him…

  He exerted every ounce of his strength, and the handle rose sharply, as it had done before, but this time he was ready for it. The door began to move inward. He swung the door wide open and took a quick, instinctive pace back.

  Nothing happened.

  The room was filled with a pale green luminescence, very similar to the luminescence which had accompanied the girl, and just for a second he was hopeful that he might find her again within. But it was empty. He took a deep breath and began looking all round this chamber. It was an unbelievably fantastic room. It was domed, and something about the ornate elaboration of its interior reminded him of some prehistoric basilica. He went slowly forward, on the watch for a trap. Even when this peculiar labyrinthine world looked straightforward, there were traps.

  When it looked ornate, there must be an even greater possibility that something unpleasant awaited him; something either mechanical or animal. Would one of the master's servants, with its hideous misshapen face, suddenly come lurching and lumbering at him? Would another net descend, or would the floor open beneath his feet? There were a thousand unpleasant possibilities. He continued moving slowly across the room. He didn't like the interior of this room at all. There was something indefinably evil, for all its church-like appearance. It seemed almost like a mockery of religion, with a cheap crude impersonation. It was a burlesque, a caricature. Then he realized what it was. It was a museum. The room was obviously the central collection point of the odd bric-a-brac which the odd man had designed, collected, or created over the centuries. It was beautifully arranged, as though it had been put into position by some being who had all the time in the world at its disposal. It had the appearance of being checked and resorted. The layout of the exhibits reminded Greg of the layout of Tennyson's poetry, where the living language had been polished until nothing was left of it but dry, dead phrases.

  Greg looked for some other means of egress from the chamber.

  He had no particular desire to go out the way he had com
e. They might have picked up his track by now. The asteroid man said he could, but that may have been boasting; he was not sure.

  Anyway, he decided the best plan would be to double back on his tracks. He might be in a cul-de-sac, but he thought not. It was difficult to find a door. It was difficult to find anything in that vast underground auditorium, so packed with exhibits, machinery, dials, switches, vast banks of electronic relays, looking as if they were ready to start the complicated job they had been designed to do.

  Greg kept on looking for a door. This was a labyrinth within a labyrinth. And the faint greenish light was not exactly an aid to easy direction finding. He moved on in puzzled bewilderment. He realized that he had already passed this strange machine for the fourth time. It occurred to him that this might be the purpose of some of the machines—to produce a kind of mental bewilderment. Had that been the asteroid man's plan all along, to allow him to escape, only to find this museum, where his brain would be caught in the web of some mental paralyzer that would confuse him and set him walking round in circles till he dropped of sheer exhaustion.

  He wondered again whether the machines were real, or whether they were images of machines being projected from some concealed point, much as the camera projected universal movement on the dome of a planetarium.

  Greg kept on moving slowly but determinedly around the exhibits, trying desperately to keep in a straight line, but the museum had been so designed that it was impossible to keep in a straight line. You could do that for a certain length of time only, perhaps long enough to take two score paces. Then the exhibits that you had been using to line up your vision were out of perspective, and you found that you were coming back to your point of departure.

  Greg had gotten lost among the more advanced exhibits. He was a long way now from the original door. He doubted now whether he could have found that.

  It occurred to him that he must be using the wrong technique. He was deliberately trying to move in a straight line.

  Suppose, instead of that, he just allowed himself to wander aimlessly, to allow his subconscious to direct him, to rely on his instinctive knowledge, rather than to work anything out as a conscious problem. He moved on again, as though he were trying to lose the exhibits.