“Yeah! Can’t beat those shells for close work. Just turn ’em loose, and whammo! Guy musta been crazy, tryin’ to pull out like that.”
Greg caught Johnny’s eye, then turned away, suddenly sick. Johnny shook his head. “Take it easy, boy.”
“He didn’t even have a chance,” Greg said.
“I know. He must have known too.”
“But why? What was he thinking of?”
“Maybe he thought he could make it. Maybe he thought it was the only chance.”
There was no other answer that Greg could see, and the ache in his chest cut deeper. A skillful pilot in a well-armed, powerful ship might have had a chance, at least a chance to try outrunning the shells. But Tom barely knew which switches to pull to start the engine running. Something deep in Greg’s mind kept digging at him. It was your fault, the something seemed to say. You let him come out here, you should never have let him leave Mars.
He thrust the gnawing thought from his mind and tried to make himself worry about what might be waiting for them wherever they were going. Where were they going? Certainly not back to Mars. Probably to one of the Jupiter Equilateral orbit ships tending the mining rigs somewhere else in the belt. Somehow, he couldn’t worry, he didn’t even care what was going to happen, not any more.
First Dad, then Tom, and all because of something he didn’t even know about, something he couldn’t even guess. Whatever Dad had found, he had concealed it so well that nobody could find it. Dad had found a bonanza, and died for it.
But no bonanza in the world could bring Tom back. Nothing but a miracle could do that, and miracles didn’t happen. Now, gradually, the shock was wearing off, and Greg felt a cold ball of anger growing in his throat.
There was no way to bring his brother back now. However things had been between them, they could never be changed now. But he knew that as long as he was still breathing, sdme- body, somehow, was going to answer for that last desperate run of the Scavenger.
He lay back in the couch, gripping the handgrips, waiting for the count-down to begin.
He didn’t know that the miracle had already happened.
It had been an excellent idea, Tom Hunter thought to himself, and it had worked perfectly, exactly as he had planned it—so far. But now, as he clung to his precarious perch, he wondered if it had not worked out a little too well. The first flush of excitement that he had felt when he saw the Scavenger blow apart in space had begun to die down; on its heels came the unpleasant truth, the realization that only the easy part now lay behind him. The hard part was yet to come, and if that were to fail. .. .
He fought down panic, struggled to get a more comfortable -position. Now, more than anything else, he wished that there had been some way to warn Greg and Johnny of what he intended to do.
But of course there had been no way to do that if the plan was to work. They weren’t good enough actors; they would certainly give the show away if they suspected, even for a moment that Tom was still very much alive.
Now that the first part was over, he was committed. There could be no turning back, no reconsidering. The crew from the Ranger had done too good a job of wrecking the orbit ship and the Dutchman they had brought out from Mars. There was no alternative now but to follow through.
He realized, suddenly, that he was afraid. He was well enough concealed at the moment, clinging tightly against the outside hull of the Ranger ship, hidden behind the open airlock door. But soon the airlock would be pulled closed, and then the real test would come.
Carefully, he ran through the plan again in his mind. He was certain now that his reasoning was right. There had been two dozen men on the raider ship; there had been no question, even at the start, that they would succeed in boarding the orbit ship and taking its occupants prisoner. The Jupiter Equilateral ship had not appeared there by coincidence. Its occupants had come looking for something that they had not found.
And the only source of information left was Roger Hunter’s sons. They with their friend, Johnny Coombs, might have held the ship for hours, or even days, but with engines and radios smashed, there had been no hope of contacting Mars for help. Ultimately, they would have been taken.
As he crouched in the dark storage hold of the orbit ship, Tom had realized this. He had also realized that, once captured, they would never have been freed and allowed to return to Mars. They would have been safe only until the Jupiter Equilateral men were convinced that they could not, or would not reveal where Roger Hunter had hidden his treasure. From that point on, they were dead; it would only be a matter of where, when, and how. Perhaps another “accident” like the “accident” that had happened to Dad. They would be found, sometime, somewhere, frozen corpses in space, and that would be the end of it.
It had been that line of thought, as he waited in the storage hold, that had led to his plan. If the three of them were taken, they were finished. But what if only two were taken? He had pushed it aside as a foolish idea, at first. The boarding party would never rest until they had accounted for all three. They wouldn’t dare go back to their headquarters leaving one live man behind to tell the story. . . .
Unless they thought the man was not alive! If they could be sure of that—absolutely certain of it—they would not hesitate to take away the remaining two. And if, by chance, the third man wasn’t as dead as they thought he was, and could find a way to follow them home, there might still be a chance to free the other two.
It was then that Tom thought of the Scavenger and knew that he had found a way.
In the cabin of the little scout ship he had worked swiftly, fearful that at any minute one of the maurauders might come aboard to search it. Tom was no rocket pilot, but he did know that the count-down was automatic, and that every ship could run on an autopilot, as a drone, following a prescribed course until it ran out of fuel. Even the shell evasion mechanism could be set on automatic.
Quickly he set the autopilot, plotted a simple high-school math course for the ship, a course the Ranger ship would be certain to see, and to fire upon. He set the count-down clock to give himself plenty of time for the next step—and stopped.
A flaw. He knew a moment of panic. What if somebody came aboard in the meantime and found the controls set?
A simple flip of a switch, and the plan would be scuttled.
His mind raced to find a way around the problem. Both the airlock to the Scavenger and to the orbit ship worked on electric motors. The Scavenger was grappled to the orbit ship’s hull by magnetic cables. Tom dug into the ship’s repair locker, found the wires and fuses that he needed, and swiftly started to work.
It was an ingenious device, he decided, when he was finished, very simple, and almost fool-proof. The inner airlock door in the orbit ship was triggered to a fuse. He had left it ajar; the moment it was closed by anyone intending to board the Scavenger, the fuse would bum, a circuit would open, and the little ship’s autopilot would go on active. The ship would blast away from its moorings, head out towards Mars.
And the fireworks would begin. All that he would have to worry about then would be getting himself aboard the Ranger ship without being detected.
Which was impossible, of course. With guards at the #3 lock, nothing could get aboard that they wouldn’t know about. Even supposing he could manage it, there were no large storage holds in the Ranger to offer concealment, no good place for a stowaway to hide on the ship.