“Maybe we’re lucky,” Greg said.
“Maybe.” Johnny didn’t sound convinced.
Inside the ship Tom and Johnny strapped down while Greg made his final check-down on the engines, gyros and wiring. The cabin was a tiny vault, with none of the spacious “living room” of the orbit ships. Tom leaned back in the acceleration cot, and listened to the count-down signals that came at one-minute intervals now. In the earphone he could hear the sporadic chatter between Greg and the control tower. No hint that this was anything but a routine blast-off.
But there was trouble ahead, Tom was certain of that. Everybody on Mars was aware that Roger Hunter’s sons were heading out to the belt to pick up where he had left off. Greg had secured a leave of absence from Project Star-Jump, unwillingly granted, even though his part in their program had already been disrupted. Even they had heard rumors that were adrift.
And if there was trouble now, they were on their own. The Asteroid Belt was a wilderness, untracked and unexplored, and except for an almost insignificant fraction, completely unknown. If there was trouble out there, there would be no one to help.
Somewhere below, the engines roared, and Tom felt the weight on his chest, sudden and breathtaking. In the view screen the Martian horizon began to widen below them as the little ship rose into the dark sky.
They were on their way.
Chapter Four
“Between Mars And Jupiter”
After all the tension of preparing for it, the trip out seemed interminable.
They were all impatient to reach their destination. During blast-off and acceleration they had watched Mars dwindle to a tiny red dot; then time seemed to stop altogether, and there was nothing to do but wait.
For the first eight hours of free-fall, after the engines had cut out, Tom was violently ill. He fought it desperately, gulping the pills Johnny offered and trying to keep them down. Gradually the waves of nausea subsided, but it was a full twenty-four hours before Tom felt like stirring from his cot to take up the shipboard routine.
And then there was nothing for him to do. Greg handled the navigation skillfully, while Johnny kept radio contact and busied himself in the storeroom, so Tom spent hours at the view screen. On the second day he spotted a tiny chunk of rock that was unquestionably an asteroid moving swiftly toward them. It passed at a tangent ten thousand miles ahead of them, and Greg started work at the computer, feeding in the data tapes that would ultimately guide the ship to its goal.
Pinpointing a given spot in the Asteroid Belt was a Gargantuan task, virtually impossible without the aid of the ship’s computer to calculate orbits, speeds, and distances. Tom spent more and more time at the view screen, searching the blackness of space for more asteroid sightings. But except for an occasional tiny bit of debris hurtling by, he saw nothing but the changeless panorama of stars.
Johnny Coombs found him there on the third day, and laughed at his sour expression. “Gettin’ impatient?”
“Just wondering when we’ll reach the belt, is all,” Tom said.
Johnny chuckled. “Hope you’re not holdin’ your breath. We’ve already been in the belt for the last forty-eight hours.”
“Then where are all the asteroids?” Tom asked.
“Oh, they’re here. You just won’t see many of them. People always think there ought to be dozens of them around, like sheep on a hillside, but it doesn’t work that way.” Johnny peered at the screen. “Of course, to an astronomer the belt is loaded . . . hundreds of thousands of chunks, all sizes from five hundred miles in diameter on down. But actually, those chunks are all tens of thousands of miles apart, and the belt looks just as empty as the space between Mars and Earth.”
“Well, I don’t see how we’re ever going to find one particular rock,” Tom said, watching the screen gloomily.
“It’s not too hard. Every asteroid has its own orbit around the sun, and every one that’s been registered as a claim has the orbit charted. The one we want isn’t where it was when your dad’s body was found . . . it’s been traveling in its orbit ever since. But by figuring in the fourth dimension, we can locate it.”
Tom blinked. “Fourth dimension?”
“Time,” Johnny Coombs said. “If we used only the three linear dimensions—length, width and depth—we’d end up at the place where the asteroid was, but that wouldn’t help us much because it’s been moving in its orbit ever since the patrol ship last pinpointed it. So we figure in a fourth dimension—the time that’s passed since it was last spotted—and we can chart a collision course with it, figure out just where we’ll have to be to meet it.”
It was the first time that the idea of time as a “dimension” had ever made sense to Tom. They talked some more, until Johnny started bringing in fifth and sixth dimensions, and problems of irrational space and hyperspace, and got even himself confused.
“Anyway,” Tom said, “I’m glad we’ve got a computer aboard.”
“And a navigator,” Johnny added. “Don’t sell your brother short.”
“Fat chance of that. Greg would never stand for it.”
Johnny frowned. “You lads don’t like each other very much, do you?” he said.
Tom was silent for a moment. Then he looked away. “We get along, I guess.”
“Maybe. But sometimes just gettin’ along isn’t enough. Especially when there’s trouble. Give it a thought, when you’ve got a minute or two.”
Later, the three of them went over the computer results together. Johnny and Greg fed the navigation data into the ship’s drive mechanism, checking and re-checking speeds and inclination angles. Already the Dutchman’s orbital speed was matching the speed of Roger Hunter’s asteroid, but the orbit had to be tracked so that they would arrive at the exact point in space to make contact. Tom was assigned to the view screen, and the long wait began.
He spotted their destination point an hour before the computer had predicted contact. At first a tiny pinpoint of reflected light in the scope, it gradually resolved into two pinpoints, and then three, in a tiny cluster. Greg cut in the rear and lateral jets momentarily, stabilizing their contact course. The dots grew larger.
Ten minutes later, Tom could see their goal clearly in the view screen—the place where Roger Hunter had died.
It was neither large nor small for an asteroid, an irregular chunk of rock and metal, perhaps five miles in diameter, lighted only by the dull reddish glow from the dime-sized sun. Like many such jagged chunks of debris that sprinkled the belt, this asteroid did not spin on any axis, but constantly presented the same face to the sun.
Just off the bright side the orbit ship floated, stable in its orbit next to the big rock, but so small in comparison that it looked like a tiny glittering toy balloon. Clamped in its rack on the orbit ship’s side, airlock to airlock, was the Scavenger, the little scout ship that Roger Hunter had brought out from Mars on his last journey.
While Greg maneuvered the Dutchman into the empty landing rack below the Scavenger on the hull of the orbit ship, Johnny scanned the blackness around them through the viewscope, a frown wrinkling his forehead.
“Do you see anybody?” Tom asked.
“Not a sign. But I’m really lookin’ for other rocks. I can see three that aren’t too far away, but none has claim marks. This must have been the only one Roger was workin’.”
“Claim marks?” Tom said.
Johnny pointed to the white markings on the surface of the rock below. “Chalk,” he said. “It shows up almost before the rock does, and it gets down into the crevices in the rock, so that it’s hard to erase. Discourages claim jumpin’. -That’s your dad’s mark down there, and whatever he found must be down there too.”