“Good luck, then.” The captain cut off, and the blast-off buzzer sounded.
Somewhere below, the ship’s engines began to throb, a low steady vibration. The hum rose to a rumble, then to a roar. Like a giant hand pressing against his chest, the pressure began, growing heavier with every second. Greg’s arms sagged against the straps; his legs felt like lead weights, and he could feel his lips pulling back as the acceleration increased. The scream of the engines grew higher as the weight bore down on him, pressing the air out of his lungs.
He was off. His heart hammered in his throat, and his eyes ached fiercely, but he paid no attention. His finger crept to the air-speed indicator, then to the cut-off switch. When the pressure became too great, when he began to black out, he would press it.
But not yet. Like a tiny metal dart, the ship was moving away from the Star-Jump satellite, out into space, accelerating steadily. It was speed they wanted; they had to know how much acceleration a man could take for how long and still survive. It was up to him now to show them.
Fleetingly, he thought of Tom—poor old stick-in-the-mud Tom—working away in his grubby little Mars-bound laboratory, watching bacteria grow. Tom could never have qualified for a job like this. Tom couldn’t even go into free-fall for ten minutes without getting sick all over the place. Greg felt a surge of pity for his brother, and then a twinge of malicious anticipation. Wait until Tom read the reports on this runl It was all right to spend your time poking around with bottles and test tubes if you couldn’t do anything else, but it took something special to pilot an XP ship for Project Star-Jump. And after this run was over, even Tom would have to admit it.
There was a lurch, and quite suddenly the enormous pressure was gone. Greg took an unexpected gasp of air, felt his arms and legs rising up in reaction, out of control. He grabbed the shock bar, and stared down at the control panel.
Something was wrong. He hadn’t pushed the cut-off button, yet the ship’s engines were suddenly silent. He jabbed at the power switch. Nothing happened. Then the side jets spurted, and he was slammed sideways into the cot.
He snapped on the radio speaker. “Control . . . can you read me? Something’s gone wrong out here.”
“Nothing’s wrong,” the captain’s voice said in his earphones. “Just sit tight. I’m bringing you back in.”
“Back!” Greg sat up against the webbing. “What do you mean?”
“Sorry, Greg. There’s a call here from Sun Lake City. They want you down there in a hurry. We’ll have to scratch you on this run.”
“Who wants me down there?”
“The U.N. Council office. Signed by Major Briarton himself.”
“But I can’t go down to Mars now.”
“Sorry. I can’t argue with the major. We’re bringing you in.”
Greg sank dack, disappointment so thick he could taste it in his mouth. Sun Lake Cityl That meant two days at least, one down, one back, maybe more if connections weren’t right. It meant that the captain would send Morton or one of the others out in his place. It meant. . . .
Suddenly he thought of what else it meant, and a chill ran up his back. There was only one reason Major Briarton would call him in like this. Something had happened to Dad.
Greg leaned back in the cot, suddenly tense. A thousand frightful possibilities flooded his mind. It could only mean that Dad was in some kind of trouble.
And if anything had happened to Dad. . ..
The sun was sinking rapidly toward the horizon when the city finally came into sight in the distance, but try as he would, Tom Hunter could not urge more than thirty-five miles an hour from the huge lurching vehicle he was driving.
On an open paved highway the big pillow-wheeled Sloppy Joe would do sixty in a breeze, but this desert route was far from a paved road. Inside the pressurized passenger cab, Tom gripped the shock bars with one arm and the other leg, and jammed the accelerator to the floor. The engine coughed, but thirty-five was all it would do.
Through the windshield Tom could see the endless rolling dunes of the Martian desert stretching to the horizon on every side. They called Mars the red planet, but it was not red when you were close to it. There were multitudes of colors here—yellow, orange, brown, gray, occasional patches of gray-green—all shifting and changing in the fading sunlight. Off to the right were the wom-down peaks of the Mesabi II, one of the long, low mountain ranges of almost pure iron ore that helped give the planet its dull red appearance from outer space. And behind him, near the horizon, the tiny sun glowed orange out of a blue-black sky.
Tom fought the wheel as the Sloppy Joe jounced across a dry creek bed and swore softly to himself. Why hadn’t he kept his head and waited for the mail ship that had been due at the lab to give him a lift back? He’d have been in Sim Lake City an hour ago. But the urgency of the message had driven caution from his mind. No information, no hint of what was wrong, just a single sentence telling him to come in to the city at once, by whatever means he had available.
Ten minutes later he had commandeered the Sloppy Joe and started out on the long cross-country run. A summons from the Mars Co-ordinator of the U.N. Interplanetary Council was the same as an order. But there was more to Tom’s haste than that. There was only one reason that Major Briarton would be calling him in to Sun Lake City, and that reason meant trouble.
Something was wrong. Something had happened to Dad.
Now Tom peered up at the dark sky, squinting into the sun. Somewhere out there, between Mars and Jupiter, was a no man’s land of danger, a great circling ring of space dirt and debris, the Asteroid Belt. And somewhere out there, Dad was working.
Tom thought for a moment of the pitiful little mining rig that Dad had taken out to the belt; the tiny orbit ship to be used for headquarters and storage of the ore; the even tinier scout ship, Pete Racely’s old Scavenger that he had sold to Roger Hunter for back taxes and repairs when he went broke in the belt looking for his big strike. It wasn’t much of a mining rig for anybody to use, and the dangers of a small mining operation in the Asteroid Belt were frightening. It took skill to bring a little scout ship in for a landing on an asteroid rock hardly bigger than the ship itself; it took even more skill to rig the controlled Murexide charges to blast the rock into tiny fragments, and then run out the shiny magnetic net to catch the explosion debris and bring it in to the hold of the orbit ship.
Tom scowled, trying to shake off the feeling of uneasiness that was nibbling at his mind. Asteroid mining was dangerous, but Dad was no novice. Nobody on Mars knew how to handle a mining rig better than he did. He knew what he was doing out there, there was no real danger for him.
But what of the rumors that had found their way even to the obscurity of the outpost experimental lab where Tom was working?
Roger Hunter, a good man, a gentle and peaceful man, had finally seen all he could stomach of Jupiter Equilateral and its company mining policies six months before. He had told them so in plain, simple language when he turned in his resignation. They didn’t try to stop him. A man was still free to quit a job on Mars if he wanted to, even a job with Jupiter Equilateral. But it was an open secret that the big mining outfit had not liked Hunter’s way of resigning, taking half a dozen of their first-rate mining engineers with him. There had been veiled threats, rumors of attempts to close the markets to Hunter’s ore, in open violation of U.N. Council policies on Mars.