Greg stared at him. “But if it wasn’t an ore strike, what was it?”
“I don’t know,” Johnny said. “But I’m sure of one thing. It was something so important that he was ready to die before he’d reveal it. And that means it’s so important that Tawney won’t dare kill us until he finds out what it is.”
Chapter Nine
The Invisible Man
Crouching back into the shadow, Tom waited as the heavy footsteps moved up the corridor, then back down, then up and down again. He peered around the comer for a moment, looking quickly up and down the curving corridor. The guard was twenty yards away, moving toward him in a slow measured pace. Tom jerked his head back, then peered out again as the footsteps receded.
The guard was a big man, with a heavy duty stunner resting in the crook of his elbow. He paused, scratched himself, and resumed his pacing. Tom waited, hoping that something might distract the big man, but he moved stolidly back and forth, far too alert for Tom to risk breaking out into the main corridor.
Tom moved back into the darkened corridor where he was standing, trying to decide what to do. It was a side corridor, and a blind alley; it ended in a large hatchway marked HYDROPONICS, and there were no branching corridors. If he were discovered here, there would be no place to hide.
But he knew that he could never hope to accomplish his purpose here.
A hatch clanged open, and there were more footsteps down the main corridor as a change of guards hurried by. There was a rumble of voices, and Tom listened to catch the words.
“. . . don’t care what you think, the boss says tighten it up.”
“But they got them locked in.”
“So tell it to the boss. We’re supposed to check every compartment in the section every hour. Now get moving.”
The footsteps moved up and down the corridor, and Tom heard hatches clanging open. If they sent a light down this spur ... he turned to the hatch, spun the big wheel on the door, and slipped inside just as the footsteps came closer.
The stench inside was almost overpowering. The big, darkened room was extremely warm, the air damp with vapor. The plastic-coated walls streamed with moisture. Against the walls Tom could see the great hydroponic vats that held the yeast and algae cultures that fed the crew. Water was splashing in one of the vats, and there was a gurgling sound as the nutrient broth was exchanged automatically.
He moved swiftly across the compartment, into a darkened area behind the rows of vats, and crouched down. He heard footsteps, and the ring of metal as the hatchway came open. One of the guards walked in, peered into the gloom, wrinkled his nose, and walked out again, closing the hatchway behind him.
It would do for a while if he didn’t suffocate, but if this ship was organized like smaller ones, it would be a blind alley. Modern hydroponic tanks did not require much servicing, once the cultures were growing; the broth was drained automatically and slucied through a series of pipes to the rendering plant where the yeasts could be flavored and pressed into surrogate steaks and other foods for space ship cuisine. There would be no other entrances, no way to leave except the way he had come in.
With the guards on duty, that was out of the question. He waited, listening, as the check-down continued in near-by compartments. Then silence fell again. The heavy yeast aroma had grown more and more opporessive; now suddenly a fan went on with a whir, and a cool draft of freshened, reprocessed air poured down from the ventilator shaft above his head.
Getting into the orbit ship had been easier than Tom had hoped. In the excitement, as the new prisoners were brought aboard, security measures had been lax. No one had expected a third visitor; in consequence, no one looked for one. Huge as it was, the Jupiter Equilateral ship had never been planned as a prison, and it had taken time to stake out the guards in a security system that was at all effective. In addition, every man who served as a guard had been taken from duty somewhere else on the ship.
So there had been no guard at the airlock in the first few moments after the prisoners were taken off the Ranger ship. Tom had waited until the ship was moored, clinging to the fin strut. He watched Greg and Johnny being taken through the lock, and soon the last of the crew had crossed over after securing the ship. Presently the orbit ship’s airlock had gone dark, and only then had he ventured from his place of concealment, creeping along the dark hull of the Ranger ship and leaping across to the airlock.
A momentary risk, then, as he opened the lock. In the control room, he knew, a signal light would blink on a panel as the lock was opened. Tom moved as quickly as he could, hoping that in the excitement of the new visitors, the signal would go unnoticed, or if spotted, that the spotter would assume it was only a crewman making a final trip across to the Ranger ship.
But once inside, he began to realize the magnitude of his problem. This was not a tiny independent orbit ship with a few corridors and compartments. This was a huge ship, a vast complex of corridors and compartments and holds. There was probably a crew of a thousand men on this ship, and there was no sign of where Greg and Johnny might have been taken.
He moved forward, trying to keep to side corridors and darkened areas. In the airlock he had wrapped up his pressure suit and stored it on a rack; no one would notice it there, and It might be handy later. He had strapped his father’s gun case to his side—a comfort, but a small one.
Now, crouching behind the yeast vat, he lifted out the gun, hefted it idly in his hand. It was a weapon, at least. He was not well acquainted with guns, and in the shadowy light it seemed to him that this one looked odd for a revolver; it even felt wrong, out of balance in his hand. He slipped it back in the case. After all, it had been fitted to Dad’s hand, not his. And Johnny or Greg would know how to use it better than he did—if he could find them.
But to do that he would have to search the ship. He would have to move about, he couldn’t just wait in a storage hold. And with all the guards that were posted, he would certainly stumble into one of them sooner or later if he tried leaving this spot. He shook his head, and started for the hatch. He would have to chance it. There was no way to tell how much time he had, but it was a sure bet that he didn’t have very long.
In the spur corridor again, he waited until the guard’s footsteps were muffled and distant. Then he darted out into the main corridor, moving swiftly and silently away from the guard. At the first hatchway he ducked inside and waited in the darkness, panting.
The guard stopped walking. Then his footsteps resumed, but more quickly, coming down the corridor. He stopped, almost outside the hatchway door. “Funny,” Tom heard him mutter. “I’d have sworn—”
Tom held his breath, waiting. This was a storage hold, but he didn’t dare move, even to take cover. The guard stood motionless for a moment, grunted, and resumed his slow pacing. When he had moved away Tom caught his breath in huge gasps, his heart beating in his throat. It was no use, he thought in despair. Once or twice he might get away with it, but sooner or later a guard would be alert enough to investigate an obscure noise, a flicker of movement in the comer of his eye.
There had to be another way. His eye probed the storage hold hopelessly, and stopped on a metal grill in the wall.
For a moment, he didn’t recognize what it was. He heard a whoosh-whoosh-whoosh as a fan went on, and he felt cool air against his cheek. He held out his liand to the grill and found the air coming from there.
It was a ventilation shaft. Every space craft had to have reconditioning units for the air inside the ship. The men inside needed a constant supply of fresh oxygen; but even more, without pumps to move the air in each compartment, they would soon suffocate from the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the air they breathed out, or bake from the heat their bodies radiated. On the other hand, the yeasts and algae required carbon dioxide and yielded copious amounts of oxygen as they grew.