Five minutes later the Hunter boy was discovered in the hydroponics section, busily reducing all the yeast vats to shambles with a curious weapon that seemed to eat holes in things. It ate the deck out from under the guard’s feet, sending him plunging through the floor into the galley. By the time he had scrambled back again, the Hunter boy was gone, and a rapid move to seal off the region failed to turn him up again. The guard was upset. Tawney was a great deal more upset, because at the time Greg Hunter was (reportedly) playing havoc with the yeast vats in Hydroponics he was also (reportedly) knocking guards down like tenpins in the main corridor off the engine room while reinforcements tried to pin him down with a wide-beam stunner.
Suddenly emergency circuits closed and lights flashed in the control cabin, the special signal for a meteor collision with the outer shell in #3 hold. Tawney signaled frantically for the section chief. “What’s happening down there?”
“I can’t talk,” the section chief gasped. “Gotta get into a suit, we’re leaking air in here.”
“Well, plug up the hole!”
“The hole’s four feet wide, sir!” There was a fit of coughing and the contact broke. The signals for #4 hold and #5 hold were flashing now. While crew members in the vicinity scrambled for pressure suits, someone systematically proceeded to blow holes in #9, #10, #11 holds.
It was impossible, but the reports came in thick and fast. Greg Hunter was in two places at once, and everywhere he went in both places he left a trail of unbelievable destruction—bulkheads demolished, gaping holes torn in the outer shell, the air-reconditioning units smashed beyond repair. Tawney buzzed for his first mate.
An emergency switch cut into the line. The frantic voice of a section chief reported that Johnny Coombs had been spotted disappearing into a ventilator shaft in the engine sector. “Go in after him!” Tawney screamed. He got his first mate finally, and snarled orders into the speaker. “They’re in the ventilators. Get a crew in there and stop them.”
But it was dark in the ventilator shafts. No emergency lights in there. Worse, the crewmen were hearing the rumors that were being whispered around the ship. The ventilator shafts yawned menacingly before them; they went in reluctantly. Once in the dark maze of tunnels, identification was difficult. Two guards met each other headlong in the darkness, and put each other out of the fight in a flurry of nervous stunner fire. While others searched, more of the holds were broken open, leaking air through gaping rents in the hull.
Tawney felt the panic spreading; he tried to curb it, but it spread in spite of him. The fugitives were appearing and disappearing like wraiths. Reports back to control cabin took on a hysterical note, confused and garbled. Now the second- level bulkheads were being attacked. Over a third of the compartments were leaking precious air into outer space.
When a terrified section chief came through with a report that two Greg Hunters had been spotted by the same man at the same time, and that the guards in the sector were shooting at anything that moved, including other guards, Tawney made his way to the radio cabin and put through a frantic signal to Jupiter Equilateral headquarters on Mars.
The contact took forever, even with the ship’s powerful emergency boosters. By the time someone at headquarters was reading him, Tawney’s report made little sense. He was trying for the third time to explain, clearly and logically, how two men and a ghost were scuttling his orbit ship under his very feet when one wall of the cabin vanished in a crackle of blue fire, and he found himself staring at two Greg Hunters and a grim-faced Johnny Coombs.
He made squeaky noises into the microphone and dropped it with a crash. He groped for a chair; Johnny jerked him to his feet again. “A scout ship,” he said tersely. “Clear it for launchin’. We want one with plenty of fuel, and we don’t want a single guard anywhere near the airlock.” He picked up an intercom microphone and thrust it into the little fat man’s trembling hand. “Now move! And you’d better be sure they understand you, because you’re comin’ with us.”
Merrill Tawney stared first at Tom, then at Greg, and finally at the microphone. Then he moved. The orders he gave to his section chiefs were very clear.
He had never argued with a ghost before, and he didn’t care to start now.
It was over so quickly that it seemed to Tom it had just begun, and if so much had not been at stake, it might have been fun.
It was the gun—the remarkable gun that Roger Hunter had left as his legacy—that was the key. It ate through steel and aluminium alloy like putty. Whatever its source of power, however, it worked, by whatever means it had been built, there had been no match for it on the orbit ship.
It had worked, and that was all that mattered right then. With it, and with the advantage of a ghost that walked like a man—Tom Hunter, to be exact—they reduced the Jupiter Equilateral orbit ship to a smoking wreck in something less than thirty minutes.
The signal came back that a scout ship was ready, unguarded. Johnny prodded Tawney with the stunner. “You first,” he said.
“Where are you taking me?”
“You’ll see,” Johnny said.
“It was a trick,” Tawney said, glaring at Tom. “They told me they shot your ship to pieces.”
“The ship, yes,” Tom said. “Not me.”
“Well—well, that’s good, that’s good,” Tawney said quickly. He turned to Greg. “You don’t have to take me back. Our bargain is still good.”
“Move,” Johnny Coombs said.
With Tawney between them, Greg and Tom marched down the corridor toward the airlock, Johnny bringing up the rear. No one stopped them. No one even came near them. One crewman stumbled on them in the corridor. He saw Tawney with a gun in his back and fled in terror.
They found the scout ship, and strapped Tawney down to an acceleration bunk, binding his hands and feet so he couldn’t move. Greg checked the controls while Tom and Johnny strapped down. A moment later the engines fired, and the leaking wreck of the orbit ship fell away, dwindling and disappearing in the blackness of space.
It was a quiet journey. The red dot that was Mars grew larger every hour. One of the three stayed awake at all times to watch Tawney while the others slept. In the second rest period, Tom woke up to find Greg peering toward Mars with the view screen on telescopic.
“Looking for a German band to welcome us home?”
Greg grinned and leaned back, rubbing his eyes. “No, just looking. I thought I could see the Star-Jump satellite for a minute, but I guess not.”
“You wish you were back there, I suppose.”
Greg thought about it, and nodded his head. “It’s what I want to do. Someday the men at Star-Jump will be the ones that make the long trip out. Probably Alpha Centauri first, that’s closest. Then Sirius, Vega, Altair, Arcturus—” He nodded again. “The ones that will go will be the lucky ones.”
“Or the crazy ones,” Tom said.
Greg laughed. “Maybe crazy, too, I don’t know. But somebody has to find the way to go.” He stood up, snapped off the view screen. “I’d like to be back there, sure, but right now I’ve a more important job.”
“How’s our prisoner doing?”
“No problem there, he can barely move. I almost wish he’d try something, he’s too quiet.”
It was true. Tawney had recovered from his shock, but rather than grow more worried as Mars grew larger on the screen, he seemed to become more cheerful by the minute. “He doesn’t seem very worried, does he?” Tom said.