“Well, what if they do think of the ventilators?” Greg asked. “They’d still have a time finding us.”
“Maybe, but don’t underestimate Tawney. He might mask up his crew and flood the tubes with cyanide.”
They thought about that for a minute. There was no sound but their own breathing, and the low chug-chug-chug of the pumps somewhere deep in the ship. Momentarily they expected to hear the raucous clang of the alarm bell, as some crew member or another walked into the lounge and found them gone. But so far there was no sign that they had been discovered missing.
“No,” Johnny said finally, “if we just hide out in here, and hope for a chance at one of the scout ships, they’ll find us eventually. But we’ve got three big advantages, if we can figure out how to use them. That fancy gun, for one. A way to get around the ship, for another. And the fact that there’s one more of us than they count on.” He flipped on his pocket flash and began to draw lines on the dusty floor of the shaft. “My idea is to keep them so busy fightin’ little fires that they won’t have a chance to worry about where the big one is.”
He drew a rough outline sketch of the organization of the ship. “This look right to you, from what you’ve seen?” he asked Tom.
“Pretty much,” Tom said. “There are more connecting tubes.”
“All the better. We want to get the generators with our little toy here first. That’ll darken the ship and put the blowers out of commission in case they think of using gas. Also, it will cut out their computers and missile launching rigs, which might give us a chance to get a scout ship away in one piece if we could get aboard one.”
“All right, the generators are first,” Tom said. “But then what? There are four hundred men on this ship. They’ll have every airlock triple guarded.”
“Not when we get through, they won’t,” Johnny grinned. “We’ve got an old friend aboard who’s going to help us.”
“Friend?”
“Ever hear of panic?” Johnny said. “Just listen a minute.”
Quickly he outlined his plan. Tom and Greg listened carefully, watching Johnny make marks with his finger in the dust. When he finished, Greg whistled softly. “You missed your life work,” he said. “You should have gone into crime.”
“If I’d had a ghost to help me, I might have,” Johnny said.
“It’s perfect,” Tom said, “if it works. But it all depends on one thing—keeping things rolling after we start.”
For another five minutes they went over the details. Then Johnny clapped them each on the shoulder. “It’s up to you two,” he said. “Let’s go.”
The three moved down the large shaft to the place where it broke into several spurs. Johnny started down the chute toward the engine rooms; Tom and Greg headed in opposite directions toward the main body of the ship. Just as they broke up, they heard a muffled metallic sound from the nearest compartment grill.
It was the clang-clang-clang of the orbit ship’s general alarm.
Merrill Tawney had not noticed the first guard’s failure to report back for almost half an hour after the second guard had been dispatched. Then he had glanced angrily at the wall clock, and rang the lounge. There was no answer. Another guard was summoned and told to head for the nearest shuttle car. He found the hatchway standing ajar, with the two guards on the floor, just groggily coming around.
Something had hit them, but neither was quite sure what. The guard took one look at the hole bumed in the wall, and ran to the wall phone in the corridor.
“They’re gone,” he panted when he finally reached Tawney in control cabin. “Must have jumped the guards. Got their stunners, and—” he hesitated, then told Tawney about the wall.
“What do you mean, blew a hole through it?” Tawney snarled.
“I swear that’s what they did, boss, six feet across.”
“You mean a blowtorch?”
“Doesn’t look like a torch. I never saw anything like it.”
“Well, get a crew in there,” Tawney said. “Seal off every corridor in the area, and search every compartment. They can’t hide on this ship, stunners or no stunners.”
Tawney waited, seething, until the first reports began coming in. All the corridors in the quadrant were sealed. Guard crews went through them from both ends, meeting in the middle. Every compartment in the quadrant had been searched and then locked.
But there was no sign of the fugitives.
Moments later the general alarm bell went off, beating its reverberating tattoo in every compartment on the ship. Crewmen stopped with food halfway to their mouths, jerked away from tables. Orders buzzed along a dozen wires, and section chiefs began reporting their battle stations alert and ready. Finally Tawney snapped on the general public address system speaker. “Now get this,” he roared. “I want every inch of this ship searched—every corridor, every compartment. I want a special crew standing by for missile launching. I want double guards at every airlock. If they get a ship away from here, the man who lets them through had better be dead when I find him.” He broke off, clutching the speaker until his voice was under control again. “All right, move. They’re armed, but there’s no place they can go. Find them.”
A section chief came back over the speaker. “Dead or alive, boss?”
“Alive, you idiot! At least the Hunter brat. I’ll take the other one any way you can get him.”
He switched off, and waited, pacing the control cabin like a caged animal. Ten minutes later a buzzer sounded. “Hydroponics, boss. All clear.”
“No sign of them?”
“Nothing.”
Another buzz. “Number Seven ore hold. Nothing here.”
Still another buzz. “Crew’s quarters. Nothing, boss.”
One by one the reports came in. Fuming, Tawney checked off the sections, watched the net draw tighter throughout the ship. They were somewhere, they had to be.
But nobody seemed to find them.
He was buzzing for his first mate when the power went off. The lights went out, the speaker went dead in his hand. The computers sighed contentedly and stopped computing. Abruptly, the emergency circuits went into operation, flooding the darkness with harsh white light. The intercom started buzzing again.
“Engine room, boss.”
“What happened down there?” Tawney roared.
The man sounded as if he’s just run the mile. “Generators,” he panted. “Blown out.”
“Well, get somebody in there to fix them. Have a crew seal off the area.”
“Can’t, boss. Fix them, I mean.”
“Why not? What have we got electricians for?”
“There’s nothing left to fix. The generators aren’t wrecked. They’re demolished.”
“Then get the pair that did it.”
“They’re not here. We’ve been sealed up tight. There’s no way anybody could have gotten in here.”
After that, things really began to get confusing!
For a while Merrill Tawney thought his crew was going crazy. Then he began to wonder if he were the one who was losing his mind.
Whatever the case, Merrill Tawney was certain of one thing. The things that were happening on his orbit ship could not possibly be happening.
A guard in one of the outer-shell storage holds called in with a disquieting report. Greg Hunter, it seemed, had just been spotted vanishing into one of the storage compartments from- the main outer-shell corridor. When the guard had broken through the jammed hatchway to collar his trapped victim, there was no sign of the victim anywhere around.
At the same moment, a report came in from a guard on the opposite side of the ship. He had just spotted Greg Hunter there, it seemed, moving down a spur corridor. The guard had held his fire (according to Tawney’s orders) and summoned help to comer the quarry, but when help arrived, the quarry had vanished.