The specks of carbon cirrus on the front plate were describing circles now — circles whose size was visibly increasing. For part of each turn the nose was now pointing into space; La Roque tried to fight his way back to the board to take advantage of one of those moments.
He might have made it, in spite of the agony of his burns, but the overstrained insulation had done its best. It failed; and failed, of all places, over the water tanks that lined part of the hull. The tanks themselves offered only token resistance as steam pressure suddenly built up in them. La Roque never knew when scalding water shorted the control board, for a jet of superheated steam had caught him just before he reached it.
On the enforcement cruiser, a man straightened up from a plotting board.
“That does it, I think,” he said. “He was using heavy current for a while, probably trying to turn out with his gyros; then there was a flash of S.H.F., and everything stopped. That must have taken out his second-order, and he'd have had to use about sixty gravities of first-order to pull out of that spot. I wonder what he was doing so close to those suns.”
“Could have been hiding,” suggested a second pilot. “He might have thought the suns would mask most of his radiation. I wonder how he expected to stay there any length of time, though.”
“I know what I'd have done in his place,” replied the first man. “I'd have put my ship into a Trojan position and waited the business out. He could have lasted indefinitely there. I wonder why he didn't try that.”
“He probably did.” The speaker was a navigator, who had kept silent up to this point. “If a smart man like you would do it, a fellow like that couldn't be expected to know any better. Have you ever seen a planet in the Trojan points of any double sun? I'll bet you haven't. That Trojan solution works fine for Sol and Jupiter — Sol is a thousand times the more massive. It would work for Earth and Luna, since one has about eighty times the mass of the other. But I have never seen a binary star where the mass ratio was anywhere near twenty-five to one; and if it's less, the Trojan solution to the three-body problem doesn't work. Don't ask me why; I couldn't show you the math; but I know it's true — the stability function breaks, with surprising sharpness, right about the twenty-five-to-one mass ratio. Our elusive friend didn't know that, any more than you did, and parked — his ship right in the path of a rapidly moving sun.” He shrugged his shoulders, and turned away. “Live and learn, they say,” he finished, “but the difficulty seems to lie in living while you learn.”
Fireproof
Hart waited a full hour after the last sounds had died away before cautiously opening the cover of his refuge. Even then he did not feel secure for some minutes, until he had made a thorough search of the storage chamber; then a smile of contempt curled his lips.
“The fools!” he muttered. “They do not examine their shipments at all. How do they expect to maintain their zone controls with such incompetents in charge?” He glanced at the analyzers in the forearm of his spacesuit, and revised his opinion a trifle — the air in the chamber was pure carbon dioxide; any man attempting to come as Hart had, but without his own air supply, would not have survived the experiment. Still, the agent felt, they should have searched.
There was, however, no real time for analyzing the actions of others. He had a job to do, and not too long in which to do it. However slack the organization of this launching station might be, there was no chance whatever of reaching any of its vital parts unchallenged; and after the first challenge, success and death would be running a frightfully close race.
He glided back to the crate which had barely contained his doubled-up body, carefully replaced and resealed the cover, and then rearranged the contents of the chamber to minimize the chance of that crate's being opened first. The containers were bulky, but nothing in the free-falling station had any weight, and the job-did not take long even for a man unaccustomed to a total lack of apparent gravity. Satisfied with these precautions, Hart approached the door of the storeroom; but before opening it, he stopped to review his plan.
He must, of course, be near the outer shell of the station. Central Intelligence had been unable to obtain plans of this launcher — a fact which should have given him food for thought — but there was no doubt about its general design. Storage and living quarters would be just inside the surface of the sphere; then would come a level of machine shops and control systems; and at the heart, within the shielding that represented most of the station's mass, would be the “hot” section — the chambers containing the fission piles and power plants, the extractors and the remote-controlled machinery that loaded the war heads of the torpedoes which were the main reason for the station's existence.
There were many of these structures circling Earth; every nation on the globe maintained at least one, and usually several. Hart had visited one of those belonging to his own country, partly for technical familiarity and partly to accustom himself to weightlessness. He had studied its plans with care, and scientists had carefully explained to him the functions of each part, and the ways in which the launchers of the Western Alliance were likely to differ. Most important, they had described to him several ways by which such structures might be destroyed. Hart's smile was wolfish as he thought of that; these people who preferred the pleasures of personal liberty to those of efficiency would see what efficiency could do.
But this delay was not efficient. He had made his plans long before, and it was more than time to set about their execution. He must be reasonably near a store of rocket fuel; and some at least of the air in this station must contain a breathable percentage of oxygen. Without further deliberation, he opened the door and floated out into the corridor.
He did not go blindly. Tiny detectors built into the wrists of his suit reacted to the infrared radiations, the water vapor and carbon dioxide and even the breathing sounds that would herald the approach of a human being — unless he were wearing a nonmetallic suit similar to Hart's own. Apparently the personnel of the base did not normally wear these, however, for twice in the first ten minutes the saboteur was warned into shelter by the indications of the tiny instruments. In that ten minutes he covered a good deal of the outer zone.
He learned quickly that the area in which a carbon dioxide atmosphere was maintained was quite limited in extent, and probably constituted either a quarantine zone for newly arrived supplies, or a food storage area. It was surrounded by an uninterrupted corridor lined on one side with airtight doors leading into the COs rooms, and on the other by flimsier portals closing off other storage spaces. Hart wondered briefly at the reason for such a vast amount of storage room; then his attention was taken by another matter. He had been about to launch himself in another long, weightless glide down the corridor in search of branch passages which might lead to the rocket fuel stores, when a tiny spot on one wall caught his eye.
He instantly went to examine it more closely, and as quickly recognized a photoelectric eye. There appeared to be no lens, which suggested a beam-interruption unit; but the beam itself was not visible, nor could he find any projector. That meant a rather interesting and vital problem lay in avoiding the ray. He stopped to think.
In the scanning room on the second level, Dr. Bruce Mayhew chuckled aloud.
“It's wonderful what a superiority complex can do. He's stopped for the first time — didn't seem to have any doubts of his safety until he spotted that eye. The old oil about `decadent democracies' seems to have taken deep hold somewhere, at least. He must be a military agent rather than a scientist.”