Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids

by Isaac Asimov

  He interrupted himself as the signal light of the Com-mum-tube flashed on and off in rapid dots of light.

  Conway, with an impatient motion of his hand, cut in the signal analyzer, then sat up straight.

  He said, "It's on the Council wave length and, by Ceres, it's one of the Council scramblings."

  The small visiplate above the Communi-tube was showing a characteristic rapidly shifting pattern of light and dark.

  Conway inserted a sliver of metal, which he took from a group of such in his wallet, into a narrow slot in the Communi-tube. The sliver was a crystallite unscrambler, the active portion of the gadget consisting of a particular pattern of tiny crystals of tungsten embedded in an aluminum matrix. It filtered the sub-etheric signal in a specific way. Slowly Conway adjusted the unscrambler, pushing it in deeper and extracting it again until it matched exactly a scrambler, similar in nature but opposite in function, at the other end of the signal.

  The moment of complete adjustment was heralded by the sudden sharp focusing of the visiplate.

  Lucky half-rose to his feet. "Bigman!" he said. "Where in space are you?"

  Bigman's little face was grinning puckishly out at them. "I'm in space all right. A hundred thousand miles off Ceres. I'm in the hermit's ship."

  Conway whispered furiously, "Is this another of your tricks? I thought you said he was on Ceres?"

  "I thought he was," Lucky said. Then, "What happened, Bigman?"

  "You said we had to act quickly, so I fixed things up myself. One of the wise guys in the Control Tower was giving me the business. So I slammed him around a little and took off." He laughed. "Check the guardhouse and see if they're not on the lookout for a guy like me with a complaint of assault and battery against him."

  "That wasn't the brightest thing you could have done," said Lucky gravely. "You'll have a hard time convincing the men of the asteroids that you're the type for assault. I don't want to hurt your feelings, but you look a little small for the job."

  "I'll knock down a few," Bigman retorted. "They'll believe me. But that's not why I called."

  "Well, why did you?"

  "How do I get to this guy's asteroid?"

  Lucky frowned. "Have you looked in the logbook?"

  "Great Galaxy! I've looked everywhere. I've looked under the mattress even. There's no record anywhere of any kind of co-ordinates."

  Lucky's look of uneasiness grew. "That's strange. In fact it's worse than strange. Look, Bigman," he spoke rapidly and incisively, "match Ceres' speed. Give me your co-ordinates with respect to Ceres right now and keep them that way, whatever you do, till I call you. You're too close to Ceres now for any pirates to bother you, but if you drift out further, you may be in a bad way. Do you hear me?"

  "Check. Got you. Let me calculate my co-ordinates."

  Lucky wrote them down and broke connections. He said, "Space, when will I learn not to make assumptions."

  Henree said, "Hadn't you better have Bigman come back? It's a foolhardy setup at best and as long as you haven't the co-ordinates, give the whole thing up."

  "Give it up?" said Lucky. "Give up the one asteroid we know to be a pirates' base? Do you know of any other? One single other? We've got to find the asteroid. It's our only clue to the inside of this knot."

  Conway said, "He's got a point there, Gus. It is a base."

  Lucky jiggled a switch on the intercom briskly and waited.

  Hansen's voice, sleep-filled but startled, said, "Hello! Hello!"

  Lucky said briskly, "This is Lucky Starr, Mr. Hansen. Sorry to disturb you, but I would like to have you come down here to Dr. Conway's room as fast as you can."

  The hermit's voice answered after a pause, "Certainly, but I don't know the way."

  "The guard at your door will take you. I'll contact him. Can you make it in two minutes?"

  "Two and a half anyway," he said, good-humoredly. He sounded more awake.

  "Good enough!"

  Hansen was as good as his word. Lucky was waiting for him.

  Lucky paused for a moment, holding the door open. He said to the guard, "Has there been any trouble at the base earlier this evening? An assault, perhaps?"

  The guard looked surprised. "Yes, sir. The man who got hurt refused to press charges, though. Claimed it was a fair fight."

  Lucky closed the door. He said, "That follows. Any normal man would hate to get up in a guardhouse and admit a fellow the size of Bigman had given him a banging. I'll call the authorities later and have them put the charge on paper anyway. For the record..,. Mr. Hansen."

  "Yes, Mr. Starr?"

  "I have a question the answer to which I did not want floating around the intercom system. Tell me, what are the co-ordinates of your home asteroid. Standard and temporal both, of course."

  Hansen stared and his china-blue eyes grew round. "Well, you may find this hard to believe, but do you know, I really couldn't tell you."

  Chapter 9

  The Asteroid That Wasn't

  Lucky met his eye steadily. "That is hard to believe, Mr. Hansen. I should think you would know your coordinates as well as a planet dweller would know his home address."

  The hermit looked at his toes and said mildly, "I suppose so. It is my home address, really. Yet I don't know it."

  Conway said, "If this man is deliberately-"

  Lucky broke in. "Now wait. Let's force patience on ourselves if we have to. Mr. Hansen must have some explanation."

  They waited for the hermit to speak.

  Co-ordinates of the various bodies in the Galaxy were the lifeblood of space travel. They fulfilled the same function that lines of latitude and longitude did on the two-dimensional surface of a planet. However, since space is three dimensional, and since the bodies in it move about in every possible way, the necessary coordinates are more complicated.

  Basically there is first a standard zero position. In the case of the Solar System, the Sun was the usual standard. Based on that standard, three numbers are necessary. The first number is the distance of an object or a position in space from the Sun. The second and third numbers are two angular measurements indicating the position of the object with reference to an imaginary line connecting the Sun and the center of the Galaxy. If three sets of such co-ordinates are known for three different times, set well apart, the orbit of a moving body could be calculated and its position, relative to the Sun, known for any given time.

  Ships could calculate their own co-ordinates with respect to the Sun or, if it were more convenient, with respect to the nearest large body, whatever it was. On the Lunar Lines, for instance, of which vessels traveled from Earth to the Moon and back, Earth was the customary "zero point." The Sun's own co-ordinates could be calculated with respect to the Galactic Center and the Galactic Prime Meridian, but that was only important in traveling between the stars.

  Some of all this might have been passing through the hermit's mind as he sat there with the three Councilmen watching him narrowly. It was hard to tell.

  Hansen said suddenly, "Yes, I can explain."

  "We're waiting," said Lucky.

  "I've never had occasion to use the co-ordinates in fifteen years. I haven't left my asteroid at all for two years and before that any trips I made, maybe one or two a year, were short ones to Ceres or Vesta for supplies of one sort or another. When I did that, I used local coordinates which I always calculated out for the moment. I never worked out a table because I didn't have to.

  "I'd only be gone a day or two, three at the most, and my own rock wouldn't drift far in that time. It travels with the stream, a little slower than Ceres or Vesta when it's further from the Sun and a little faster when it's nearer. When I'd head back for the position I calculated, my rock might have drifted ten thousand or even a hundred thousand miles off its original spot, but it was always close enough to pick up with the ship's telescope. After that, I could always adjust my course by eye. I never used the solar standard co-ordinates because I never had to, and there it is."

&nb
sp; "What you're saying," said Lucky, "is that you couldn't get back to your rock now. Or did you calculate its local co-ordinates before you left?"

  "I never thought to," said the hermit sadly."It's been so long since I left it that I never gave the matter a second's attention. Not until the minute you called me in here."

  Dr. Henree said, "Wait. Wait." He had lit up a fresh pipeful of tobacco and was puffing strongly. "I may be wrong, Mr. Hansen, but when you first took over ownership of your asteroid, you must have filed a claim with the Terrestrial Outer World Bureau. Is that right?"

  "Yes," said Hansen, "but it was only a formality."

  "That could be. I'm not arguing that. Still, the coordinates of your asteroid would be on record there."

  Hansen thought a bit, then shook his head. "I'm afraid not, Dr. Henree. They took only the standard co-ordinate set for January 1 of that year. That was just to identify the asteroid, like a code number, in case of disputed ownership. They weren't interested in anything more than that and you can't compute an orbit from only one set of numbers."

  "But you yourself must have had orbital values. Lucky told us that you first used the asteroid as an annual vacation spot. So you must have been able to find it from year to year."

  "That was fifteen years ago, Dr. Henree. I had the values, yes. And those values are somewhere in my record books on the rock, but they're not in my memory."

  Lucky, his brown eyes clouded, said, "There's nothing else at the moment, Mr. Hansen. The guard will take you back to the room and we'll let you know when we need you again. And, Mr. Hansen," he added as the hermit rose, "if you should happen to think of the co-ordinates, let us know."

  "My word on that, Mr. Starr," said Hansen gravely.

  The three were alone again. Lucky's hand shot out to the Communi-tube. "Key me in for transmission," he said.

  The voice of the man at Central Communications came back. "Was the previous incoming message for you, sir? I couldn't unscramble it so I thought-"

  "You did well. Transmission, please."

  Lucky adjusted a scrambler and used Bigman's coordinates to zero in the sub-etheric beam.

  "Bigman," he said when the other's face appeared, "open the logbook again."

  "Do you have the co-ordinates, Lucky?"

  "Not yet. Have you got the logbook open?"

  "Yes."

  "Is there a sheet of scrap paper somewhere in it? Loose, with calculations all over it?"

  "Wait. Yes. Here it is."

  "Hold it up in front of your transmitter. I want to see it."

  Lucky pulled a sheet of paper before him and copied down the figuring. "All right, Bigman, take it away. Now listen, stay put. Get me? Stay put, no matter what, till you hear from me. Signing off."

  He turned to the two older men. "I navigated the ship from the hermit's rock to Ceres by eye. I adjusted course three or four times, using his ship's telescope and vernier instruments for observation and measurements. These are my calculations."

  Conway nodded. "Now, I suppose, you intend calculating backwards to find out the rock's co-ordinates."

  "It can be done easily enough, particularly if we make use of the Ceres Observatory."

  Conway rose heavily. "I can't help but think you make too much of all this, but I'll follow your instinct for a while. Let's go to the Observatory."

  * * *

  Corridors and elevators took them close to Ceres' surface, one half mile above the Council of Science offices on the asteroid. It was chilly there, since the Observatory made every attempt to keep the temperature as constant as possible and as near surface temperature as the human body could endure.

  Slowly and carefully a young technician was unraveling Lucky's calculations, feeding them into the computer and controlling the operations.

  Dr. Henree, in a not too comfortable chair, huddled his thin body together and seemed to be trying to extract warmth from his pipe, for his large-knuckled hands hovered closely about its bowl.

  He said, "I hope this comes to something."

  Lucky said, "It had better." He sat back, his eyes fixed thoughtfully on the opposite wall. "Look, Uncle Hector, you referred to my 'instinct' a while back. It isn't instinct; not any more. This run of piracy is entirely different from that of a quarter century ago."

  "Their ships are harder to catch or stop, if that's what you mean," said Conway.

  "Yes, but doesn't that make it all the stranger that their raids are confined to the asteroid belt? It's only here in the asteroids that trade has been disrupted."

  "They're being cautious. Twenty-five years ago, when their ships ranged all the way to Venus, we were forced to mount an offensive and crush them. Now they stick to the asteroids and the government hesitates to take expensive measures."

  "So far, so good," said Lucky, "but how do they support themselves? It's always been the assumption that pirates didn't raid for pure joy of it alone, but to pick up ships, food, water, and supplies. You would think that now more than ever that was a necessity. Captain Anton boasted to me of hundreds of ships and thousands of worlds. That may have been a lie to impress me, but he certainly took time for the push-gun duel, drifting openly in space for hours as though he had no fear whatever of government interference. And Hansen said, moreover, that the pirates had appropriated the various hermit worlds as stopping-off places. There are hundreds of hermit worlds. If the pirates dealt with all of them, or even a good part of them, that also means a large organization.

  "Now where do they get the food to support a large organization and at the same time mount fewer raids now than pirates did twenty-five years ago? The pirate crewman, Martin Maniu, spoke to me of wives and families. He was a vat-man, he said. Presumably he cultured yeast. Hansen had yeast foods on his asteroid and they weren't Venus yeast. I know the taste of Venus yeast.

  "Put it all together. They grow their own food in small yeast farms distributed among asteroid caverns. They can get carbon dioxide directly from limestone rocks, and water and extra oxygen from the Jovian satellites. Machinery and power units may be imported from Sirius or obtained by an occasional raid. Raids will also supply them with more recruits, both men and women.

  "What it amounts to is that Sirius is building an independent government against us. It's making use of discontented people to build a widespread society that will be difficult or impossible to crush if we wait too long. The leaders, the Captain Antons, are after power in the first place and they're perfectly willing to give half the Terrestrial Empire to Sirius if they themselves can keep the other half."

  Conway shook his head. "That's an awfully big structure for the small foundation of fact you have. I doubt if we could convince the government. The Council of Science can act by itself only so far, you know. We don't have a fleet of our own, unfortunately."

  "I know. That's exactly why we need more information. If, while it is still early in the game, we can find their major bases, capture their leaders, expose their Sirian connections-"

  "Well?"

  "Why, it's my opinion the movement would be done with. I'm convinced that the average 'man of the asteroids,' to use their own phrase, has no idea he's being made a Sirian puppet. He probably has a grievance against Earth. He may think he's had a raw deal, resent the fact that he couldn't find a job or advancement, that he wasn't getting along as well as he should have. He may have been attracted to what he thought would be a colorfyl life. All that, maybe. Still, that's a long way from saying he'd be willing to side with Earth's worst enemy. When he finds out that his leaders have been tricking him into doing just that, the pirate menace will fall apart."

  Lucky halted his intense whispering as the technician approached, holding a flexible transparent tape with the computer's code prickings upon it.

  "Say," he said, "are you sure these figures you gave me were right?"

  Lucky said, "I'm sure. Why?"

  The technician shook his head. "There's something wrong. The final co-ordinates put your rock inside one of the forbid
den zones. That's allowing for proper motion, too. I mean it can't be."

  Lucky's eyebrows lifted sharply. The man was certainly right about the forbidden zones. No asteroids could possibly be found within them. Those zones represented portions of the asteroid belt in which asteroids, if they had existed, would have had times of revolution about the Sun that were an even fraction of Jupiter's twelve-year period of revolution. That would have meant that the asteroid and Jupiter would have continually approached, every few years, in the same portion of space. Jupiter's repeated pull would slowly move the asteroid out of that zone. In the two billion years since the planets had been formed Jupiter had cleared every asteroid out of the forbidden zones and that was that.

  "Are you sure," Lucky said, "that your calculations are right?"

  The technician shrugged as though to say, "I know my business.' * But aloud he only said, "We can check it by telescope. The thousand-incher is busy, but that's no good for close work anyway. We'll get one of the smaller ones. Will you follow me, please?"

  The Observatory proper was almost like a shrine, with the various telescopes the altars. Men were absorbed in their work and did not pause to look up when the technician and the three Councilmen entered.

  The technician led the way to one of the wings into which the huge, cavernous room was divided.

  "Charlie," he said to a prematurely balding young man, "can you swing Bertha into action?"

  "What for?" Charlie looked up from a series of photographic prints, star-speckled, over which he had been bending.

  "I want to check the spot represented by these coordinates." He held out the computer film.

  Charlie glanced at it and frowned. "What for? That's forbidden-zone territory."

  "Would you focus the point anyway?" asked the technician. "It's Council of Science business."

  "Oh? Yes, sir." He was suddenly far more pleasant. "It won't take long."

  He closed a switch and a flexible diaphragm sucked inward high above, closing about the shaft of "Bertha," a hundred-twenty-inch telescope used for close work. The diaphragm made an air-tight seal, and above it Lucky could make out the smooth whir of the surface-lock opening. Bertha's large eye lifted upward, the diaphragm clinging, and was exposed to the heavens.