“Its engines use nitrogen,” said Freddy. “It runs nitrogen fifteen into a little gadget we know how to make, now. It’s very simple, but it’s a sort of atom smasher. It turns nitrogen fifteen into nitrogen fourteen and hydrogen. I think we can make use of that for ourselves. Nitrogen fourteen is the kind we have. It can be handled in aluminum pipes and tanks, because there’s only one aluminium, which is stable under all conditions. But when it bits the alien isotopes in the drive tubes, it breaks down—”
He took a deep breath.
“I gave them a double aluminum tank of nitrogen, and bypassed their atom smasher. Nitrogen fourteen goes into their drive tubes, and they drive! And … I figured back their orbit, and set a gyro to head them back for their own solar system for as long as the first tank of nitrogen holds out. They’ll make it out of the sun’s gravitational field on that, anyhow. And I reconnected their thermobatteries. When they start to wake up they’ll see the gyro and know that somebody gave it to them. The double tank is like their own and they’ll realize they have a fresh supply of fuel to land with. It … may be a thousand years before they’re back home, but when they get there they’ll know we’re friendly and … not afraid of them. And meanwhile we’ve got all their gadgets to work on and work with—”
Freddy was silent. The little spaceboat clung to the side of the Arnina, which with its drive off was now drifting in sunward past the orbit of Jupiter.
“It is very rare,” said the skipper ungraciously, “that a superior officer in the Patrol apologizes to an inferior, But I apologize to you, Mr. Holmes, for thinking you a fool. And when I think that I, and certainly every other Patrol officer of experience, would have thought of nothing but setting that ship down at Patrol Base for study, and when I think what an atomic explosion of a hundred thousand tons of matter would have done to Earth … I apologize a second time.”
Freddy said uncomfortably:
“If there are to be any apologies made, sir, I guess I’ve got to make them. Every man on the Arnina has figured he’s rich, and I’ve sent it all back where it came from. But you see, sir, the Ethical Equations—”
When Freddy’s resignation went in with the report of his investigation of the alien vessel, it was returned marked “Not Accepted.” And Freddy was ordered to report to a tiny, hardworked spacecan on which a junior Space Patrol officer normally gets his ears pinned back and learns his work the hard way. And Freddy was happy, because he wanted to be a Space Patrol officer more than he wanted anything else in the world. His uncle was satisfied, too, because he wanted Freddy to be content, and because certain space-admirals truculently told him that Freddy was needed in the Patrol and would get all the consideration and promotion he needed without any politicians butting in. And the Space Patrol was happy because it had a lot of new gadgets to work with which were going to make it a force able not only to look after interplanetary traffic but defend it, if necessary.
And, for that matter, the Ethical Equations were satisfied.
Pipeline to Pluto
FAR, FAR OUT on Pluto, where the sun is only a very bright star and a frozen, airless globe circles in emptiness; far out on Pluto, there was motion. The perpetual faint starlight was abruptly broken. Yellow lights shone suddenly in a circle, and men in spacesuits waddled to a space tug—absurdly marked Betsy-Anne in huge white letters. They climbed up its side and went in the air lock. Presently a faint, jetting glow appeared below its drive tubes. It flared suddenly and the tug lifted, to hover expertly a brief distance above what seemed an unmarred field of frozen atmosphere. But that field heaved and broke. The nose of a Pipeline carrier appeared in the center of a cruciform opening. It thrust through. It stood half its length above the surface of the dead and lifeless planet. The tug drifted above it. Its grapnel dropped down, jetted minute flames, and engaged in the monster tow ring at the carrier’s bow.
The tug’s drive tubes flared luridly. The carrier heaved abruptly up out of its hiding place and plunged for the heavens behind the tug. It had a huge class mark and number painted on its side, which was barely visible as it whisked out of sight. It went on up at four gravities acceleration, while the space tug lined out on the most precise of courses and drove fiercely for emptiness.
A long, long time later, when Pluto was barely a pallid disk behind, the tug cast off. The carrier went on, sunward. Its ringed nose pointed unwaveringly to the sun, toward which it would drift for years. It was one of a long, long line of carriers drifting through space, a day apart in time but millions of miles apart in distance.
They would go on until a tug from Earth came out and grappled them and towed them in to their actual home planet.
But the Betsy-Anne, of Pluto, did not pause for contemplation of the two-billion-mile-long line of ore carriers taking the metal of Pluto back to Earth. It darted off from the line its late tow now followed. Its radio locator beam flickered invisibly in emptiness. Presently its course changed. It turned about. It braked violently, going up to six gravities deceleration for as long as half a minute at a time. Presently it came to rest and there floated toward it an object from Earth, a carrier with great white numerals on its sides. It had been hauled off Earth and flung into an orbit which would fetch it out to Pluto. The Betsy-Anne’s grapnel floated toward it and jetted tiny sparks until the towring was engaged. Then the tug and its new tow from Earth started back to Pluto.
There were two long lines of white-numbered carriers floating sedately through space. One line drifted tranquilly in to Earth. One drifted no less tranquilly out past the orbits of six planets to reach the closed-in, underground colony of the mines on Pluto.
Together they made up the Pipeline.
The evening Moon-rocket took off over to the north and went straight up to the zenith. Its blue-white rocket-flare changed color as it fell behind, until the tail end was a deep, rich crimson. The Pipeline docks were silent, now, but opposite the yard the row of flimsy eating- and drinking-places rattled and thuttered to themselves from the lower-than-sound vibrations of the Moon-ship.
There was a youngish, battered man named Hill in the Pluto Bar, opposite the docks. He paid no attention to the Moon-rocket, but he looked up sharply as a man came out of the Pipeline gate and came across the street toward the bar. But Hill was staring at his drink when the door opened and the man from the dock looked the small dive over. Besides Hill—who looked definitely tough, and as if he had but recently recovered from a ravaging illness—there was only the bartender, a catawheel-truck driver and his girl having a drink together, and another man at a table by himself and fidgeting nervously as if he were waiting for someone. Hill’s eyes flickered again to the man in the door. He looked suspicious. But then he looked back at his glass.
The other man came in and went to the bar.
“Evenin’, Mr. Crowder,” said the bartender.
Hill’s eyes darted up, and down again. The bartender reached below the bar, filled a glass, and slid it across the mahogany.
“Evenin’,” said Crowder curtly. He looked deliberately at the fidgety man. He seemed to note that the fidgety man was alone. He gave no sign of recognition, but his features pinched a little, as some men’s do when they feel a little, crawling unease. But there was nothing wrong except that the fidgety man seemed to be upset because he was waiting for someone who hadn’t come.
Crowder sat down in a booth, alone. Hill waited a moment, looked sharply about him, and then stood up. He crossed purposefully to the booth in which Crowder sat.