It flared a little as it burned, making an acrid white smoke, hissing evilly from the dampness. But it burned slowly, and finally crumbled into a soggy ash in the washbowl. Tuck stared at it, his heart pounding in his ears. He had seen a Murexide bomb only once before, in a demonstration at school, but he knew that there was enough high explosive in that innocent-looking envelope to blow his father’s head off when he pulled the opener-tab—
And they had used his name to booby-trap his own father! The Colonel wouldn’t even have had a chance. Angrily, Tuck snatched up the telephone, started to dial Police Headquarters; then quite suddenly he set the receiver down again. Someone was trying to kill his father. There was no other conclusion possible. Someone who hated him enough, or feared him enough, to use a vicious trick like that. Someone had filled the envelope with a Murexide plate, rigged the opener-tab to detonate it, and mailed the letter with Tuck’s own name on the return, to make sure the Colonel would open it quickly. Someone had known that the Colonel would be home, that he would be leaving again soon. Someone had known everything, except the single fact that Tuck would be home that night. His father had said that the trouble on Titan was nothing dangerous, nothing but a few rumors, a little unpleasant talk. But the assassin had meant to see that the Colonel never boarded the rocket—
Tuck sat thinking for a long time. The police would have little to offer, for the Colonel would be leaving in just a day, and then all the police in the world wouldn’t be able to help him. And his father couldn’t realize the danger—he would never have offered to take Tuck with him if he had. And yet, before he even left Earth there had been an attack on his life, carefully planned. What might happen on the rocket, on Titan itself?
A moment later Tuck was on the telephone, waiting for the operator to locate Colonel Benedict, somewhere in the Security Commission conference rooms. At last he heard his father’s voice, and he tried frantically to keep his own voice level, to keep his words from choking. “I’ve been thinking about the trip, Dad,” he said. “When did you say your rocket was leaving?”
The Colonel’s voice was puzzled. “0800, day after tomorrow. What’s the matter, son? Something wrong?”
“No—” Tuck gritted his teeth in the face of the lie. “Nothing wrong. I’ve just changed my mind, that’s all. I’ve decided to go with you.”
Chapter 3
The Land of Incredible Cold
An alarm bell clanged in Tuck’s ears, and he sat bolt upright, staring out into the darkness. Then he felt his heart jump as the pilot’s deep voice rang out over the public address system: “All hands, muster in landing quarters! Prepare ship for landing! Landing scheduled for 0900 hours—”
Tuck snapped on the cabin wall lamp, and checked his wrist watch. It seemed as if he had barely gotten to sleep; actually, he had slept a full eight-hour period, and his watch read five minutes to eight.
In an hour they would be landing! Excitedly, Tuck dressed, and then threw open the oval-shaped lock to his father’s sleeping quarters. “Come on, Dad! We’re going down in an hour!”
Colonel Benedict was half dressed, his eyes still blurry from interrupted sleep. “So I hear,” he said dryly, rubbing his ear. “I was wondering why they had those speakers built so close to the heads of the bunks.”
Tuck took a deep breath, and lifted his feet experimentally. “We’re decelerating lots faster, too. I’ve been feeling like I was sliding out onto the floor for the past six hours.”
The Colonel chuckled. “You get used to it, after a while. Let’s go forward. The orders for landing are very strict—we’ll have to strap down, and prepare for a good jolting.” Carefully he packed some gear into a footlocker near his bunk. “We won’t be needing these magnetic boots any more—and you might as well store your wrist watch out of harm’s way, too. It won’t do you any good, once we land. An hour on Titan is only forty minutes long.”
Tuck stored his own gear in the footlocker, and together they started up the corridor. There was a breath of excitement throughout the ship. Crewmen were moving swiftly from chamber to chamber, checking the thousand details that must be checked prior to landing operations. Far down in the rear of the ship the engines were whining, and every so often the ship shuddered as the forward and belly jets took hold. Tuck and the Colonel reached the landing bunks, and settled back in the deep, spongy seats, strapping belts tightly around their shoulders and hips as they waited for the landing hour to approach. The tedious journey was nearly at an end.
It had been a long trip out. Even with the powerful atomic engines to accelerate the ship, the journey had taken over two months. For many it might have been dull, but for Tuck it had been wonderful—two long months to become reacquainted with his father, two months to talk, to plan, two months to get used to the idea of once more being father and son. There had been no trouble about the scholarship. The Institute had promised to hold it open for Tuck when he returned, and the journey seemed almost like an incredible vacation trip.
But the time was not spent loafing. Crates of information tapes and microfilm spools had come aboard the rocket before they left, and both Tuck and his father had spent hours every day listening and reading—data and reports on the planet Saturn, studying about her major and minor satellites, reading up on the founding of the colony on Titan, about the working of the mines. Tuck had found the study a little tiresome; he would much rather have spent his time with the pilot and navigator of the ship, and he often managed, on one pretext or another, to turn up in the control room. There he would settle down on the nearest stool, and spend hours listening to the navigator hold forth enthusiastically on the problems of celestial navigation.
But there were many other times when Tuck and his father had sat up in the great plexiglass bay in the nose of the ship, staring out at the black, diamond-studded expanse of space through which the ship sped. They talked of many things, watching Saturn, a tiny dot far in the distance, gradually become bigger, day by day, watching the strange, disklike rings as the planet rotated, one day so far on edge that they were all but invisible, another day surrounding the planet like a halo. Tuck made a game of counting the tiny bright dots circling the planet, the moons of Saturn, considering this an acceptable measure of how close they were coming.
“Hey!” he cried out one day. “I can see another!”
“Where?” The Colonel had peered in the direction Tuck was pointing. “I can’t see any that we didn’t see yesterday.”
“Sure you can—away out, just a little tiny one.”
“Right you are! That would be Phoebe, the baby of the lot. Looks like we’ve counted all nine moons now—”
“I wonder,” said Tuck, “why they picked Titan.”
The Colonel looked up, and drew out his pipe. “For what?”
“For the mining colony. What was wrong with Japetus, for instance? Or Rhea? They’re almost as large as Titan. Why is Titan the only moon of Saturn with a mining colony?”
“Probably because it’s richest, among other things. The ore from the Titan mines is very rich—comparatively speaking. Of course, that doesn’t mean much, since ruthenium ore is almost as poor in the metal as uranium ore is in uranium. Probably they could have mined Rhea, or Tethys, or any of the other moons, except Japetus—”