In Roger Hunter’s little orbit ship the ventilation shafts were small, a loose network of foot-square ducts leading from the central pumps and air-reconditioning units to every compartment in the ship. But in a ship of this size—
The grill was over a yard wide, four feet tall. It started about shoulder height and ran up to the overhead. The ducts would network the ship, opening into every compartment, and no one would ever open them unless something went wrong.
• He grinned happily as he got busy, working the grill out of the slots that held it to the wall and trying to keep his hands from shaking in his excitement.
He knew he had found his answer.
The grill came loose and Tom lifted it down in one piece. He stopped short as footsteps approached in the corridor, paused, and went on. Then he peered into the black gaping hole behind the grill. It was big enough for a man to crawl in. He shinnied up into the hole, and pulled the grill back into its slot behind him.
Somewhere far away he heard a throbbing of giant pumps. There was a rush of cool fresh air past his cheek, cold when it contacted the sweat pouring down his forehead. He could not quite stand up, but there was plenty of room for him to crouch and move.
Ahead of him was a black tunnel, broken only by a patch of light coming through the grill that opened into the next compartment. He stared into the blackness, his heart racing.
Somewhere in the ship Johnny and Greg were prisoners, but now, Tom knew, there was a way to escape.
It was a completely different world, a world within a world, a world of darkness and silence, of a thousand curving and intersecting tunnels, some large, some small. For hours it seemed to Tom that he had been wandering through a tomb, moving through the corridors of a dead ship, the lone surviving crewman. There was some contact with the other world, of course, the world of the space ship outside. Each compartment had its metal grill, and he passed many of them. But these were like doors that only he knew existed. He met no one in these corridors, there was no danger of sudden discovery and arrest in these dark alleys.
His boots had made too much noise when he started out, so he had slipped them off, hanging them from his belt and moving on in his stocking feet. As he went from duct to duct, he had an almost ridiculous feeling of freedom and power. In every sense, he was an invisible man. Not one soul on this great ship knew he was here, or even suspected it. He had the run of the ship, complete freedom to go wherever he chose. He could move from compartment to compartment as. silently and invisibly as if he had no substance at all.
He knew his first job was to learn the pattern of the ducts, and orientation was a problem. He had heard stories of men getting lost in the deep underground mining tunnels on Mars, wandering in circles for days until their food gave out and they starved. And there was that hazard here, for every duct looked like every other one.
Yet there was a difference, because the ducts curved just as the main ship’s corridors did. He could always identify the center of the ship by the force of false gravity pulling the other way. Furthermore, as the ducts drew closer to the pumps and reconditioning units, they opened into larger vents, and the noise of the pumps thundered in his ears. After an hour of exploration, Tom was certain that from any place in the ship he could at least find his way to the outer layer, and from there to one of the scout ship s airlocks.
Finding Greg and Johnny was a different matter.
He could not see enough through the compartment grills to identify just what the compartments were; he was forced to rely on what he could hear. The engine rooms were easily identified. In one area he heard the banging of pots and pans, the steaming of kettles—obviously the galley. From the storage holds came a vast silence, broken by a rumbling crash as ore poured down the metal chutes for storage.
He found the crew’s living quarters and paused at one compartment as voices came through the grill. A man with a squeaky voice was complaining bitterly about his turn on guard; a deeper voice was more philosophical. “Be too bad if they broke out somehow, after all this work,” he was saying.
“You think they’re going to talk?” the squeaky voice asked.
“Sure they’ll talk. What else can they do?”
“Maybe they’ll just clam up and thumb their noses at the boss,” Squeaky said.
The other laughed. “That I’d like to see, somebody thumbing his nose at the boss! Don’t worry, they’ll talk, and when they do there’ll be enough to take care of everybody.”
“Well, maybe,” Squeaky said, not too convinced. “I still wish they hadn’t blasted that other one.”
“You scared of ghosts or something?”
“No, but if something went wrong, the whole crew might be held.”
“Don’t worry. The U.N. can’t touch us. The boss has got ’em running. Why, ten years ago they’d have been out here questioning every outfit in the belt after they found the old man’s body. And what do they do now? Nothing, that’s what.”
Tom moved on, grinning to himself. The man was right, of course. Nothing had been done about Roger Hunter’s death, nothing much, not yet.
But the fun hadn’t even started.
He kept moving, stopping to listen at each grill. At one point, as he moved in toward the center of the ship, his wrist Geiger began to sputter. He stopped and turned back, making a wide circle around the area. He knew that a separate system of ventilators handled the radioactive waste gases when the engines were in operation, but there was no need to venture into those regions.
Later, he found the control area. He could hear the clatter of typing instruments, the click-click-click of the computers working out the orbits and trajectories for the scout ships as they moved out from the orbit ship or came back in. In another compartment he heard a dispatcher chattering his own special code-language into a microphone in a low-pitched voice. He passed another grill, and then stopped short as a familiar voice drifted through.
Merrill Tawney’s voice.
Tom hugged the grill, straining to catch the words. The company man sounded angry; the man he was talking to sounded even angrier. “I can’t help what you want or don’t want, Merrill, I can only report what we’ve found, and that’s nothing at all. Every one of those claims has been searched twice over. Doc and his boys went over them, and we didn’t find anything they might have missed. I think you’re barking up the wrong tree.”
“There’s got to to be something,” Tawney said, his voice tight with anger. “Hunter couldn’t have taken anything away from there, he didn’t have a chance to. You read the reports.”
“I know,” the other said wearily, “I know what the reports said.”
“Then what he found is still there. There’s no other possibility,” Tawney said.
“We went over that rock with a microscope. We blew it to shreds. Assay has gone through the fragments literally piece by piece. They found low-grade iron, a trace of nickel, a little tin. And just lots and lots of granite. If we never found anything richer than that, we’d have been out of business ten years ago.”
There was a long silence. Tom pressed closer to the grill.
He heard Tawney slam his fist into his palm. “You know what Roger Hunter’s doing, don’t you?” he cried. “He’s making fools of us, that’s whatl The man’s dead, and he’s making us look like idiots. If we hadn’t been so sure we had the lode spotted—” He broke off. “Well, that’s done; we can’t undo it But this brat of his—”