Fisk was five feet ten, eight inches taller than Bigman, whose slight figure was more like a boy's than a man's. But Bigman's muscles were steel springs under perfect control. He awaited the other's approach without expression.
Fisk did not bother to put up a guard. He simply extended his right hand as though he were going to lift Bigman by the collar and toss him through the still open door.
Bigman ducked under the arm. His left and right thudded into the larger man's solar plexus in a rapid one-two, and almost in the same instant he danced out of reach.
Fisk turned green and sat down, holding his stomach and groaning.
"Stand up, big boy," said Bigman. "I'll wait for you."
The other two Tower men seemed frozen into immobility by the sudden turn of events.
Slowly Fisk rose to his feet. His face glowed with rage, but he approached more slowly.
Bigman drifted away.
Fisk lunged! Bigman was not there by two inches. Fisk whipped a sharp overhand right. It's thrust ended an inch short of Bigman's jaw.
Bigman bobbed about like a cork on rippling water. His arms lifted occasionally to deflect a blow.
Fisk, yelling incoherently, rushed blindly at his gnat-like opponent. Bigman stepped to one side and his open hand slapped sharply at the other's smooth-shaven cheek. It hit with a sharp report, like a meteor hitting the first layers of dense air above a planet. The marks of four fingers were outlined in red on Fisk's face.
For a moment Fisk stood there, dazed. Like a striking snake, Bigman stepped in again, his fists moving upward to crack against Fisk's jaw. Fisk went down into a half crouch.
Distantly Bigman was suddenly aware of the steady ringing of the alarm.
Without a moment's hesitation he turned on his heel and was out the door. He wove through a startled trio of guards heading up the corridor at a clattering run, and was gone!
"And why," questioned Conway, "are we waiting for Bigman?"
Lucky said, "Here's the way I see the situation. There is nothing we need so badly as more information about the pirates. I mean inside information. I tried to get it and things didn't quite break the way I hoped they would. I'm a marked man now. They know me. But they don't know Bigman. He has no official connection with the Council. Now it's my idea that if we can trump up a criminal charge against him, for realism, you know, he can hightail it out of Ceres in the hermit's ship-"
"Oh, space," groaned Conway.
"Listen, will you! He'll go back to the hermit's asteroid. If the pirates are there, good! If not, he'll leave the ship in plain view and wait for them inside. It's a very comfortable place to wait in."
"And when they come," said Henree, "they'll shoot him."
"They will not. That's why he's taking the hermit's ship. They'll have to know where Hansen went, to say nothing of myself, where Bigman came from, how he got hold of the ship. They'll have to know. That will give him time to talk."
"And to explain how he picked out Hansen's asteroid out of all the rocks in creation? That would take some tall talking."
"That won't take any talking at all. The hermit's ship was on Ceres, which it is. I've arranged to leave it out there unguarded, so he can take it. He'll find the ship's home asteroid's space-time co-ordinates in the logbook. It would just be an asteroid to him, not too far from Ceres, as good as any other, and he would make a beeline for it in order to wait for the furor on Ceres to die down."
"It's a risk," grumbled Conway.
"Bigman knows it. And I tell you right now, we've got to take risks. Earth is underestimating the pirate menace so badly that-"
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."