The sound of two grenades roared, close together. There was an outcry after the second. Chenery yelped in triumph. It was bad tactics for him to show his position by such a shrill clamor. But Chenery was not himself.
Scott reached the main freight hold. There was another dead man on the floor. His blaster had detonated with the grenade that had killed him. Scott couldn’t spare the time for an appropriate reaction. He heard Bugsy, farther away, screaming with rage and shouting orders so thickened by fury that no one could understand them. And then Scott came out on the stairway leading down into the engine room, and he saw the battle.
There was smoke, where blaster bolts had scorched paint, and grenades had detonated near inflammable stuff. Scott could see two men behind a set-up of machinery. They fired furiously at the edges of a massive metal mounting for the overdrive equipment left over from the buoy’s days as a liner. Chenery danced and shrilled hysterically behind the mounting. From time to time he lobbed a grenade over its top.
Scott grimly opened fire from his elevated position. The clothing of a man behind a disconnected switchboard burst into flames. He leaped convulsively and disappeared through the doorway to other stairs astern. Scott fired again, and another man’s shoe caught fire. He fled. Another man ran. Chenery howled crazily at them and plunged in pursuit.
“Chenery!” roared Scott. “Chenery!”
He fired at yet another man whom he could see and Chenery couldn’t. It was a near miss, but Chenery plunged into this formerly concealed antagonist. They went to the floor together and Scott could not fire again. A blaster went off where they struggled.
A blaster bolt missed Scott’s ear by inches.
“Chenery!” he roared. “This way!”
The two intertwined figures seemed to collapse. One lay still. The other twitched. Then blue-white, brilliant blaster bolts came streaking toward Scott. He fired savagely and drew back. Chenery had cut down the number of Bugsy’s fighting men, but there was Janet. The way to make her safe was to lock up Bugsy and his men, since he’d joined Chenery too late for total victory. So the imprisonment of the men now searching for him with blaster bolts must be his primary purpose.
He was in the level above the engine room. There was a side door, which was in one of the inter-level stairway tubes, leading from top to bottom of the buoy. He tossed a grenade. The stair appeared as the tube was ripped open. There were bales of merchandise. He flung blaster bolts into them. Dense smoke and then flames leaped up. One bale was Durlanian floss. It swelled as it burned and the reek of it was unbearable. He hastily closed his helmet face plate and went coldly about the process of imprisonment. He smashed the other stair-tubes with grenades. He scattered inflammables and shot blaster bolts into them.
Flames leaped up to the ceiling, but they’d exhaust the air of oxygen and go out before they could do any great damage. Afterward, with the air tubes shut off, the air would be unbreathable to anyone not wearing a space suit like Scott’s. And there were no more in this part of the buoy. There’d only been one in the stern lifeboat blister, and he was wearing that now.
He retreated to the next deck above, and the next and next, setting fires and jamming all air-locks, closing off all supplies of purified air and leaving behind him only compartments filled with smoke-saturated gas that no man could breathe and live.
He’d just come to the bottom one of the three passenger cabin levels when the deck shivered under his feet. There was a gigantic crashing sound. Loose objects fell.
He raced up the grand stairway. As he reached the top, there was a second monstrous crashing. Again the floor quivered underfoot. He redoubled his speed. Across the lobby. Up the last stair. He burst into the control room. Janet had her face in her hands, sobbing. The vision-screens showed what should have been impossible. The portside screen showed the scarred crystalline, utterly bright metal of the asteroid only yards away. The buoy had just rebounded from the second of two slow, ponderous, power-filled collisions with it. Janet hadn’t slowed it quite enough to prevent an impact.
Scott swiftly adjusted the steering drives. Lambda then neither drifted away nor floated back to a third contact. He ran his eyes over the air pressure repeaters, indicating what the condition of the air was in every compartment of the ship. None showed diminished pressure. Some showed an increase. That was where the fires Scott had set expanded the air. They’d cool off presently. Janet sobbed again.
“What’s the matter?” Scott demanded. “No leaks show up. Not yet, anyhow! We bumped, but there’s apparently no damage. And Bugsy and his men are locked up if ever men were!”
She tried to say, “Chenery,” but a sob cut off the word.
“He’s dead,” said Scott. “But he had the time of his life getting killed.”
“N-no!”
She pointed a shaking hand at a speaker. Scott didn’t understand. The speaker was the one belonging to that closed-circuit communicator system by which crewmen in different parts of the buoy could communicate with the control room. Then he guessed, and turned it on. Janet had evidently shut it off. He heard Bugsy’s voice, unspeakably malevolent, “Don’t rush me, Chenery! You’ll get it! Janet said he’d be back soon. Don’t be in a hurry for what’s comin’!”
Scott felt himself going pale. He heard Chenery, “To hell with you! You won’t get anything from the Lieutenant. An’ I had the gas-chamber comin’ anyways!”
Scott cut it off. His hands clenched. He said unsteadily, “I thought he was dead. It’s Chenery. And Bugsy’s got him and I—thought I saw him killed…”
Janet said in a thin, shocked voice, “Bugsy called. He said he had Chenery. He said you put something over on him. He said you lied about the comets. Comets are gas. He said he’ll do horrible things to Chenery if you don’t do as he demands. But he said he knows how to beat the fix you’ve tried to put him in. He knows how to beat it! And if you want to live—”
“He’s bluffing,” said Scott grimly. “Except about Chenery. He probably isn’t bluffing about that!”
He went to the instrument board. The vision-screens showed half the universe as a shining mist, with one angry haloed yellow sun in the center of it. The other half of the universe was the surface of the asteroid, seen from close by. It was rent and torn and irregular. It was scarred and pitted by old bombardments.
The shadow of Lambda lay long and sharp-edged over its small, steep mounts and hollow places. Lambda, though, was not in its center. It was definitely close to one edge. Scott bent close suddenly, and watched the surface of the metal mountain flow smoothly past. Lambda was not perfectly still in relation to it. It would have been remarkable if it had been. Very, very slowly the crystalline surface seemed to move. Actually it was the buoy which moved, a little way only from its scarred companion.
“He’s got Chenery,” said Scott with surpassing bitterness. “And his mind works as only his can. He knows he’s beaten. He’s imprisoned in the stern levels. He knows, now, that you’re safe, and he can’t threaten me with crimes against you. And he knows he was wrong about the comets. He knows that! He heard the impacts on the hull! So there’s only one thing left for him. He’ll demand that I fix things for him—immediately! He knows it can’t be done. But he can make threats, and then carry them out…”
Janet said desperately, “But he—but you—”
“He wins,” said Scott very grimly indeed, “You’re safe, Janet. You stay right here, and whether it’s the Golconda Ship or a Patrol vessel that gets here first, you’ll explain everything to them. Bugsy’s in the stern. You’re in the bow. There’s no breathable air between them, either inside or outside Lambda. Nobody can get at you. You’re safe. You may be lonely, but you’ll be all right.”