by Anthology
"The poor boy can't control the chair, dear," said Mrs. Frobisher, still looking out the window after the vanished twins. "There's something wrong with his nervous system. I understand that he was exposed to some kind of radiation when he was only two years old. That's why the chair has to have all those funny instruments built into it. Even his heartbeat has to be controlled electronically."
"Shame," said Frobisher, spearing a bit of sausage. "Kind of rough on both of 'em, I'd guess."
"How do you mean, dear?"
"Well, I mean, like ... well, for instance, why are they going over to the play area? Play games, right? So the one that's well has got to push his brother over there. Can't just get out and go; has to take the brother along, too. Kind of a burden, see?"
Mrs. Frobisher turned away from the window. "Why, Larry! I'm surprised at you. Really! Don't you think the boy should take care of his brother?"
"Oh, now, honey, I didn't mean that. It's hard on both of 'em. The kid in the chair has to sit there and watch his brother play baseball or jai alai or whatever, while he can't do anything himself. Like I say, kind of rough on both of 'em."
"Well, yes, I suppose it must be. Want some more coffee?"
"Thanks, honey. And another slice of toast, hunh?"
[10]
Like some horrendous, watchful gargoyle, the Nipe crouched motionlessly on the shadowed roof of the low building. A short projection from the air-conditioning intake was wide enough to keep him from being seen from the air, and the darkness of the roof prevented anyone on the street from seeing the four violet eyes that kept a careful account of all that went on in the store across the way from his observation post.
The lights were still on inside the shop, shedding their glareless brightness through the transparent display windows to fall upon the street outside in large luminous pools. The Nipe knew exactly what each man remaining inside was doing, and approximately what each would be doing for the next few minutes, and he watched with the expectation that his prophecies would be fulfilled.
He had watched long and made a thorough study of this establishment, and tonight he expected to attain the goal for which he had worked so patiently.
This raid was important in two ways. There were pieces of equipment he had to get, and they were in that shop. On the other hand, this raid was, and would be, basically a diversionary tactic. Now that he had located his real target, it was time to create a diversion that would draw his enemy's attention away from his immediate surroundings. This would be a raid that Colonel Walther Mannheim could not ignore!
Two men came out the front door. They spoke to someone still inside. "So long." "See you tomorrow." Then they walked down the street together, conversing in low tones.
The Nipe waited.
Not until a fifth man stopped after he opened the door and flipped a switch on the inside did the Nipe make any motion. Then he flexed his four pairs of limbs in anticipation--but it wasn't quite time to act yet.
The interior lights of the shop went out. Then the man carefully locked the front door, setting the alarms within the shop. Then, serene in the belief that his establishment was thoroughly protected from burglars, he, too, went down the street.
The Nipe waited a few minutes longer before he left his observation post. All was normal, he decided. The time for action had come.
* * * * *
The Nipe moved cautiously along the alley toward the rear of the building that was his target. The night watchman had returned to his cubicle, as he always did after his preliminary inspection of the building's alarm system. He would not leave for some time yet, if he followed his habits. And the Nipe saw no reason why he should not.
Carefully he approached the rear door of the little optical shop.
[11]
The two massive objects floating in space looked very much like deeply pitted pieces of rock. The larger one, roughly pear-shaped and about a quarter of a mile in its greatest dimension, was actually that--a huge hunk of rock. The smaller--much smaller--of the two was not what it appeared to be. It was a phony. Anyone who had been able to conduct a very close personal inspection of it would have recognized it for what it was--a camouflaged spaceboat.
The camouflaged spaceboat was on a near-collision course with reference to the larger mass, although their relative velocities were not great.
At precisely the right time, the smaller drifted by the larger, only a few hundred yards away. The weakness of the gravitational fields generated between the two caused only a slight change of orbit on the part of both bodies. Then they began to separate.
But, during the few seconds of their closest approach, a third body detached itself from the camouflaged spaceboat and shot rapidly across the intervening distance to land on the surface of the floating mountain.
The third body was a man in a spacesuit. As soon as he landed, he sat down, stock-still, and checked the instrument case he held in his hands.
No response. Thus far, then, he had succeeded.
He had had to pick his time precisely. The people who were already on this small planetoid could not use their detection equipment while the planetoid itself was within detection range of Beacon 971, only two hundred and eighty miles away. Not if they wanted to keep from being found. Radar pulses emanating from a presumably lifeless planetoid would be a dead giveaway.
Other than that, they were mathematically safe. Mathematically safe they would be if--and only if--they depended upon the laws of chance. No ship moving through the Asteroid Belt would dare to move at any decent velocity without using radar, so the people on this particular lump of planetary flotsam would be able to spot a ship's approach easily, long before their own weak detection system would register on the pickups of an approaching ship.
The power and range needed by a given detector depends on the relative velocity--the greater that velocity becomes, the more power, the greater range needed. At one mile per second, a ship needs a range of only thirty miles to spot an obstacle thirty seconds away; at ten miles per second, it needs a range of three hundred miles.
The man who called himself Stanley Martin had carefully plotted the orbit of this particular planetoid and had let his spaceboat coast in without using any detection equipment except the visual. It had been necessary, but very risky.
The Asteroid Belt, that magnificently useful collection of stone and metal lumps revolving about the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, is somewhat like the old-fashioned merry-go-round. If every orbit in the Belt were perfectly circular, the analogy would be more exact. If they were, then every rock in the Belt would follow every other in almost exactly the way every merry-go-round horse follows every other. (The gravitational attraction between the various bodies in the Belt can be neglected. It is much less, on the average, than the gravitational pull between any two horses on a carousel.) If every orbit of those millions upon millions of pieces of rock and metal were precisely circular, then they would constitute the grandest, biggest merry-go-round in the universe.
But those orbits are not circular. And even if they were, they would not remain so long. The great mass of Jupiter would soon pull them out of such perfect orbits and force them to travel about the sun in elliptical paths. And therein lies the trouble.
If their paths were exactly circular, then no two of that vast number of planetoids would ever collide. They would march about the sun in precise order, like the soldiers in a military parade, except that they would retain their spacing much longer than any group of soldiers could possibly manage to do.
But the orbits are elliptical. There is a chance that any two given bodies might collide, although the chance is small. The one compensation is that if they do collide they won't strike each other very hard.
The detective was not worried about collision; he was worried about observation. Had the people here seen his boat? If so, had they recognized it in spite of the heavy camouflage? And, even if they only suspected, what would be their reaction?
He waite
d.
It takes nerve and patience to wait for thirteen solid hours without making any motion other than an occasional flexing of muscles, but he managed that long before the instrument case that he held waggled a meter needle at him. The one tension-relieving factor was the low gravity; the problem of sleeping on a bed of nails is caused by the likelihood of the sleeper accidentally throwing himself off the bed. The probability of puncture or discomfort from the points is almost negligible.
When the needle on the instrument panel flickered, he got to his feet and began moving. He was almost certain that he had not been detected.
Walking was out of the question. This was a silicate-alumina rock, not a nickel-iron one. The group of people that occupied it had deliberately chosen it that way, so that there would be no chance of its being picked out for slicing by one of the mining teams in the Asteroid Belt. Granted, the chance of any given metallic planetoid's being selected was very small--but they had not wanted to take even that chance.
Therefore, without any magnetic field to hold him down, and with only a very tiny gravitic field, the detective had to use different tactics.
It was more like mountain climbing than anything else, except that there was no danger of falling. He crawled over the surface in the same way that an Alpine climber might crawl up the side of a steep slope--seeking handholds and toeholds and using them to propel himself onward. The only difference was that he covered distance a great deal more rapidly than a mountain climber could.
When he reached the spot he wanted, he carefully concealed himself beneath a craggy overhang. It took a little searching to find exactly the right spot, but when he did, he settled himself into place in a small pit and began more elaborate preparations.
Self-hypnosis required nearly ten minutes. The first five or six minutes were taken up in relaxing from his exertions. Gravity notwithstanding, he had had to push his hundred and eighty pounds over a considerable distance. When he was completely relaxed and completely hypnotized, he reached up and cut down the valve that fed oxygen into his suit.
Then--of his own will--he went cataleptic.
A single note, sounded by the instruments in the case at his side, woke him instantly. He came fully awake, as he had commanded himself to do.
Immediately he turned up his oxygen intake, at the same time glancing at the clock dial in his helmet. He smiled. Nineteen days and seven hours. He had calculated it almost precisely.
He wasn't more than an hour off, which was really pretty good, all things considered.
He consulted his instruments again. The supply ship was ten minutes away. The smile stayed on his face as he prepared for further action.
The first two minutes were conscientiously spent in inhaling oxygen. Even under the best cataleptic conditions, the human body tended to slow down too much. He had to get himself prepared for violent movement.
Eight minutes left.
He climbed out of the little grotto where he had concealed himself and moved toward the spot where he knew the airlock to the caverns underneath the planetoid's surface was hidden.
Then again he concealed himself and waited, while he continued to breathe deeply of the highly oxygenated air in his suit. Five minutes before the ship landed, he swallowed eight ounces of the nutrient solution from the tank in the back of his helmet. The solution of amino acids, vitamins, and honey sugar also contained a small amount of stimulant of the dexedrine type and one percent ethanol.
He waited for another minute for the solution to take effect, then he unholstered his gun.
The supply ship wasn't a big one. He had known it wouldn't be. It was only a little larger than the one he had used to come out here. It dropped down to the surface of the small planetoid only ten meters from the hidden trapdoor that led to the airlock beneath the surface.
Suddenly he could hear voices in the earphones of his helmet.
Lasser?
Yeah. It's me, Fritz. I got all the supplies and a nice package of good news.
The airlock trapdoor opened, and a spacesuited figure came out. How about the deal?
That's the good news, said the second suited figure as it came from the airlock of the grounded spaceboat. Another five million.
The detective, hidden behind the nearby crag of rock, listened and watched for a minute or so while the two men began unloading cases of foodstuffs from the spaceboat. Then, satisfied that it was perfectly safe, he aimed his gun and shot twice in rapid succession.
The range was almost point-blank, and there was, of course, no need to take either gravity or air resistance into account.
The pellets of the shotgun-like charge that blasted out from the gun were small, needle-shaped, and massive. They were oriented point-forward by the magnetic field along the barrel of the weapon. Of the hundreds of charges fired, only a few penetrated the spacesuits of the targets, but those few were enough. The powerful drug in the needle-pointed head of each tiny crystal went directly into the bloodstream of each target.
Each man felt an itching sensation. He had less than two seconds to think about it before unconsciousness overtook him and he slumped nervelessly.
Gun in hand, the detective ran across the intervening space quickly, his body only a few degrees from the horizontal, and his toes paddling rapidly to propel him over the rough rock.
He braked himself to a halt and slapped air patches over the areas where his charges had struck the men's suits, sealing the tiny air leaks, and, at the same time, driving more of the tiny needles into their skins. They would be out for a long time.
Neither of them had yet fallen to the ground. That would take several minutes under this low gravity. He left them to drop and headed toward the open airlock.
This was what he had been waiting for all those nineteen days in cataleptic hypnosis. He couldn't have cut his way into the hideout from the outside; he had had to wait until it was opened, and that time had come only with the supply ship.
Once in the airlock, he touched the control stud that would close the outer door, pump air into the waiting room, and open the inner door. Here was his greatest point of danger--greater, even, than the danger of coming to the planetoid itself, or the danger of waiting nineteen days in a cataleptic trance for the coming of the supply ship. If the ones who remained within suspected anything--anything at all!--then his chances of coming out of this alive were practically nil.
But there was no reason why they should suspect. They should think that the man coming in was one of their own. The radio contact between the men outside had been limited to a few micromilliwatts of power--necessarily, since radio waves of very small wattage can be decoded at tremendous distances in open space. The men inside the planetoid certainly should not have been able to pick up any more than the beginning of the early conversation before it had been cut completely off by the intervening layers of solid rock.
The chamber he entered was a high-speed airlock. Unlike the soundless discharge of his special gun in the outer airlessness, the blast of air that came into the waiting chamber was like a hurricane in noise and force. The room filled with air in a very few seconds.
The detective held on to the handholds tightly while the brief but violent winds buffeted him. He turned as the inner door opened.
His eyes took in the picture in a fraction of a second. In an even smaller fraction, his mind assimilated the picture.
The woman was dark-haired, dark-eyed, and muscular. Her mouth was wide and thick-lipped beneath a large nose.
The man was leaner and lighter, bony-faced, and beady-eyed.
The woman said: "Fritz, what--?"
And then he shot them both with gun number two.
No needle charges this time. Such shots would have blown them both in two, unprotected as they were by spacesuits. The small handgun merely jangled their nerves with a high-powered blast of accurately beamed supersonics. While they were still twitching, he went over and jabbed them with a drug needle.
Then he went on into the hid
eout.
He had to knock out one more man, whom he found asleep in a small room off the short corridor.
It took a gas bomb to get the two women who were guarding the kid.
He made sure that the BenChaim boy was all right, then he went to the little communications room and called for help.
[12]
St. Louis hadn't been hit during the Holocaust. It still retained much of the old-fashioned flavor of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in the residential districts. The old homes, some of them dating clear back to the time of Sam Clemens and the paddle-wheel steamboat, still stood, warm and well preserved.
Bart Stanton liked to walk along those quiet streets of an evening, just to let the placid peacefulness seep into him.
And, knowing it was rather childish, he still enjoyed the small Huckleberry Finn pleasure of playing hooky from the Neurophysical Institute.
Technically, he supposed, he was still a patient there. More, now that he had completely accepted Colonel Walther Mannheim's assignment, he was presumably under military discipline. He assumed that if he had asked permission to leave the Institute's grounds he would have been given that permission without question.
But, like playing hooky or stealing watermelon, it was more fun if it was done on the sly. The boy who comes home feeling deliciously wicked and delightfully sinful after staying away from school all day can have his whole day ruined completely by being told that it was a holiday and the school had been closed. Bart Stanton didn't want to spoil his own fun by asking for permission to leave the grounds when it was so easy for a man with his special abilities to get out without asking.
Besides, there was a chance--a small one, he thought--that permission might be refused for one reason or another, and Stanton was fully aware that he would not disobey a direct request--to say nothing of a direct order--that he stay within the walls of the Institute.
He didn't want to run any risk of losing his freedom, small though it was. After five years of mental and physical hell, he felt a need to get out into the world of normal, ordinary, everyday people.