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  Scavengers in Space

  Alan Edward Nourse

  The death of an independent asteroid miner would be no unusual news to the Martian colony. Asteroid mining was gambling for high stakes with your life in jeopardy.

  But when Roger Hunter’s mangled body was found in the exploded wreck of his scout ship, his two sons found reason to suspect murder, and the possibility of a discovery that could alter space history.

  And certain space pirates soon found they had to cope with a ghost that belonged in the past—and a weapon that belonged in the future.

  Scavengers In Space

  by Alan E. Nourse

  Cover

  Intriguing and fast-peaced.

  —Ameican Library Association

  This fast-moving tale of the far future deals with the quest of the Hunter brothers for a mysterious bonanza located somewhere in the asteroid belt. The dangers and details of asteroid mining are carefully outlined, and the bonanza itself proves to be an open gate to wider future in the stars.

  Realistic background, good plotting and vivid writing add up to a good adventure.

  —Cleveland Press

  About the Author

  ALAN E. NOURSE is a young doctor who is successfully combining his vocation, medicine, with his avocation, writing. He is generally recognized as one of the outstanding writers of science-fiction today, and his sound medical background stands him in good stead for the many technical and scientific details which lend authenticity to his stories.

  Dr. Nourse lives in North Bend, Washington, with his wife and young son and daughter.

  Ace Books have also published his novels: A Man Obsessed (D-96), The Invaders Are Coming (D-366), and Rocket To Limbo (D-385).

  Copyright Page

  Scavengers In Space

  by

  Alan E. Nourse

  Ace Books, Inc. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N.Y.

  Copyright ©, 1958, 1959, by Alan E. Nourse

  An Ace Book, by arrangement with David McKay Co., Inc.

  All Rights Reserved

  Printed in U.S.A.

  Scavengers In Space

  “Between Jupiter and Mars I will put a planet. . . .”

  . . . Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)

  (Written before the discovery of the Asteroid Belt)

  Prologue

  Roger Hunter had completed his work long before the marauders appeared.

  For two days now he had spent his waking hours down on the rock, prospecting it, taking samples of ore back to the little orbit ship for testing, doing the things that any miner in the Asteroid Belt would be expected to do. But he didn’t really care what he found on the rock, because the important work was done. The incredible thing that he had found was hidden now, hidden and safe in a place that no one would think of searching, and that was all that mattered to Roger Hunter.

  His treasure, he thought to himself as he worked. His big strike, safe now, until the time came to reveal it. He had not expected to find it when he had come out here the last time. He had never dreamed that such a thing was here, but when he found it he knew what he had to do.

  It was on the second day that he saw the dark ship appear, moving in swiftly on contact course with his own ship. He knew what it was the instant he saw it, long before the golden triangle-and-J insignia became visible on its hull.

  He dropped the samples he had been working with and strapped himself quickly onto the scooter. He opened the valve and saw the little asteroid drop away from him as he moved swiftly up toward the loading lock of his ship. He knew what his visitors wanted, he knew too well why they were here.

  Once in the control cabin he tore the roll of microfilm from the camera he had been using and thrust it into the storage bin. They would read it, of course, but it would have no meaning to them. In the view screen he saw the dark ship move closer, almost close enough for boarding.

  Then he saw the leather gun case lying on the drafting board, and his heart sank.

  He picked it up, searching wildly for a place to hide it. His eye stopped on his space pack lying on the floor, the battered aluminum case he had used for so many years. Quickly he threw open the lid, thrust the leather case under the pile of clothing, and slammed the lid down again.

  It was bad. If they searched it they might discover the truth, but it was a risk he had to take.

  For just a moment he thought of the boys and wondered if he would ever see them again. Then he heard the lock crash open somewhere below. Heavy boots pounded the corridor, and three men walked into the control cabin.

  Quietly, Roger Hunger turned to face them.

  Chapter One

  Trouble Times Two

  The sun was glowing dull red as it slipped down behind the curving horizon of Mars, but Gregory Hunter was not able to see it.

  There was no view screen in the ship’s cabin; it was too tiny for that. Greg twisted around in the cockpit that had been built just big enough to hold him, and shifted his long legs against the brace-webbing, trying to get them comfortable. He took a deep breath and wrinkled his nose. Already the cabin was taking on the dank, musty smell of mechanically replaced air that made him think of the locker rooms and crowded gymnasiums of his school days. He shifted his legs again, fiddling with the straps across his chest to keep his hands from trembling.

  His earphones crackled, and a familiar voice said, “Five minutes, Greg.”

  “Right.” His own voice sounded harsh. He realized that he was frightened. Quickly he made the final check-through that he had rehearsed so many times in the past weeks. The straps were all secure; he could reach the buttons on the control panel easily; and the handgrips felt right. He leaned back, forcing himself to relax, closing his eyes for a moment.

  Here in the tiny experimental ship’s cabin, he had no sense of time or motion, but he knew that the ship was clinging to its launching rack on the shell of the Star-Jump satellite station, spinning slowly in its twenty-four-hour orbit around Mars. Somewhere far below was the surface of the red planet itself, a huge dull-orange ball that filled the horizon from side to side.

  Suddenly now, Greg wished he could see it for just a moment. Many times during his off-duty hours he had stood on the observation deck of the satellite station, watching the line of darkness crawl across Mars’ surface. Sometimes, when the atmosphere was free of clouds, he could see the lights going on in Sun Lake City, Elysium, Poke’s Hole, and a dozen other colony settlements dotting the equatorial surface of the planet. There were people down there . . . thousands of people . . . but here he was alone.

  He knew he was afraid . . . but nobody else knew that, not even the captain waiting at the control board on the satellite, and in spite of the fear Greg Hunter would not have traded places at this moment with anyone else in the universe. He had worked too hard and waited too long for this moment.

  He heard the count-down monitor clicking in his ears, and his hands clenched into fists. How far from Mars would he be ten minutes from now? He didn’t know. Farther than any man had ever traveled before in the space of ten minutes, he knew, and faster. How far and how fast would depend on him alone. He gripped the handgrips, waiting.

  “All set, Greg?” The captain’s voice in the earphones cut into the silence.

  “All set, Captain.”

  “You understand the program?”

  Greg nodded. “Twenty-four hours out, twenty-four hours back, ninety degrees to the ecliptic, and all the acceleration I can stand both ways,” he said slowly.

  “That’s right. But Greg—” the captain hesitated. “Don’t overdo it. This is only a test run. We want you back in one piece.”

  Greg grinned to himself. He thought of the months of conditioning he had gone through
to prepare for this run, the hours in the centrifuge to build up his tolerance to acceleration, the careful diet, the rigorous hours of physical conditioning. It was only one experiment, one tiny step in the work that could someday give men the stars, but to Gregory Hunter at this moment it was everything. “Ill be all right,” he said.

  “Good luck, then.” The captain cut off, and the blast-off buzzer sounded.

  Somewhere below, the ship’s engines began to throb, a low steady vibration. The hum rose to a rumble, then to a roar. Like a giant hand pressing against his chest, the pressure began, growing heavier with every second. Greg’s arms sagged against the straps; his legs felt like lead weights, and he could feel his lips pulling back as the acceleration increased. The scream of the engines grew higher as the weight bore down on him, pressing the air out of his lungs.

  He was off. His heart hammered in his throat, and his eyes ached fiercely, but he paid no attention. His finger crept to the air-speed indicator, then to the cut-off switch. When the pressure became too great, when he began to black out, he would press it.

  But not yet. Like a tiny metal dart, the ship was moving away from the Star-Jump satellite, out into space, accelerating steadily. It was speed they wanted; they had to know how much acceleration a man could take for how long and still survive. It was up to him now to show them.

  Fleetingly, he thought of Tom—poor old stick-in-the-mud Tom—working away in his grubby little Mars-bound laboratory, watching bacteria grow. Tom could never have qualified for a job like this. Tom couldn’t even go into free-fall for ten minutes without getting sick all over the place. Greg felt a surge of pity for his brother, and then a twinge of malicious anticipation. Wait until Tom read the reports on this runl It was all right to spend your time poking around with bottles and test tubes if you couldn’t do anything else, but it took something special to pilot an XP ship for Project Star-Jump. And after this run was over, even Tom would have to admit it.

  There was a lurch, and quite suddenly the enormous pressure was gone. Greg took an unexpected gasp of air, felt his arms and legs rising up in reaction, out of control. He grabbed the shock bar, and stared down at the control panel.

  Something was wrong. He hadn’t pushed the cut-off button, yet the ship’s engines were suddenly silent. He jabbed at the power switch. Nothing happened. Then the side jets spurted, and he was slammed sideways into the cot.

  He snapped on the radio speaker. “Control . . . can you read me? Something’s gone wrong out here.”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” the captain’s voice said in his earphones. “Just sit tight. I’m bringing you back in.”

  “Back!” Greg sat up against the webbing. “What do you mean?”

  “Sorry, Greg. There’s a call here from Sun Lake City. They want you down there in a hurry. We’ll have to scratch you on this run.”

  “Who wants me down there?”

  “The U.N. Council office. Signed by Major Briarton himself.”

  “But I can’t go down to Mars now.”

  “Sorry. I can’t argue with the major. We’re bringing you in.”

  Greg sank dack, disappointment so thick he could taste it in his mouth. Sun Lake Cityl That meant two days at least, one down, one back, maybe more if connections weren’t right. It meant that the captain would send Morton or one of the others out in his place. It meant. . . .

  Suddenly he thought of what else it meant, and a chill ran up his back. There was only one reason Major Briarton would call him in like this. Something had happened to Dad.

  Greg leaned back in the cot, suddenly tense. A thousand frightful possibilities flooded his mind. It could only mean that Dad was in some kind of trouble.

  And if anything had happened to Dad. . ..

  The sun was sinking rapidly toward the horizon when the city finally came into sight in the distance, but try as he would, Tom Hunter could not urge more than thirty-five miles an hour from the huge lurching vehicle he was driving.

  On an open paved highway the big pillow-wheeled Sloppy Joe would do sixty in a breeze, but this desert route was far from a paved road. Inside the pressurized passenger cab, Tom gripped the shock bars with one arm and the other leg, and jammed the accelerator to the floor. The engine coughed, but thirty-five was all it would do.

  Through the windshield Tom could see the endless rolling dunes of the Martian desert stretching to the horizon on every side. They called Mars the red planet, but it was not red when you were close to it. There were multitudes of colors here—yellow, orange, brown, gray, occasional patches of gray-green—all shifting and changing in the fading sunlight. Off to the right were the wom-down peaks of the Mesabi II, one of the long, low mountain ranges of almost pure iron ore that helped give the planet its dull red appearance from outer space. And behind him, near the horizon, the tiny sun glowed orange out of a blue-black sky.

  Tom fought the wheel as the Sloppy Joe jounced across a dry creek bed and swore softly to himself. Why hadn’t he kept his head and waited for the mail ship that had been due at the lab to give him a lift back? He’d have been in Sim Lake City an hour ago. But the urgency of the message had driven caution from his mind. No information, no hint of what was wrong, just a single sentence telling him to come in to the city at once, by whatever means he had available.

  Ten minutes later he had commandeered the Sloppy Joe and started out on the long cross-country run. A summons from the Mars Co-ordinator of the U.N. Interplanetary Council was the same as an order. But there was more to Tom’s haste than that. There was only one reason that Major Briarton would be calling him in to Sun Lake City, and that reason meant trouble.

  Something was wrong. Something had happened to Dad.

  Now Tom peered up at the dark sky, squinting into the sun. Somewhere out there, between Mars and Jupiter, was a no man’s land of danger, a great circling ring of space dirt and debris, the Asteroid Belt. And somewhere out there, Dad was working.

  Tom thought for a moment of the pitiful little mining rig that Dad had taken out to the belt; the tiny orbit ship to be used for headquarters and storage of the ore; the even tinier scout ship, Pete Racely’s old Scavenger that he had sold to Roger Hunter for back taxes and repairs when he went broke in the belt looking for his big strike. It wasn’t much of a mining rig for anybody to use, and the dangers of a small mining operation in the Asteroid Belt were frightening. It took skill to bring a little scout ship in for a landing on an asteroid rock hardly bigger than the ship itself; it took even more skill to rig the controlled Murexide charges to blast the rock into tiny fragments, and then run out the shiny magnetic net to catch the explosion debris and bring it in to the hold of the orbit ship.

  Tom scowled, trying to shake off the feeling of uneasiness that was nibbling at his mind. Asteroid mining was dangerous, but Dad was no novice. Nobody on Mars knew how to handle a mining rig better than he did. He knew what he was doing out there, there was no real danger for him.

  But what of the rumors that had found their way even to the obscurity of the outpost experimental lab where Tom was working?

  Roger Hunter, a good man, a gentle and peaceful man, had finally seen all he could stomach of Jupiter Equilateral and its company mining policies six months before. He had told them so in plain, simple language when he turned in his resignation. They didn’t try to stop him. A man was still free to quit a job on Mars if he wanted to, even a job with Jupiter Equilateral. But it was an open secret that the big mining outfit had not liked Hunter’s way of resigning, taking half a dozen of their first-rate mining engineers with him. There had been veiled threats, rumors of attempts to close the markets to Hunter’s ore, in open violation of U.N. Council policies on Mars.

  Tom fought the wheel as the big tractor lumbered up another rise, and the huge plastic bubble of Sun Lake City came into view far down the valley below. Off to the right was the space port, with the tall spires of the shuttle ships rising up in sharp relief against the dark sky. One of the ships was landing now, settling down on
a mushroom-shaped cloud of fire after its run out to the travel lanes where the huge interplanetary orbit ships made their endless circuits between Mars and Earth.

  Tom clung to the shock bar and rode the tractor down the slope. Seeing the ships made him think of Greg. Had Greg been summoned too? He closed his lips tightly as a wave of anger passed through his mind. If anything had happened, no matter what, he thought, Greg would be there. Taking over and running things, as usual. He thought of the last time he had seen his brother, and then deliberately blocked out the engulfing bitterness. That had been more than a year ago. Maybe Greg had changed since then. But somehow, Tom didn’t think so.

  The Sloppy Joe was on the valley floor now, and ahead, the bubble covering the city was drawing closer. The Sun was almost gone; lights were appearing inside the plastic shielding. Bom and raised on Mars, Tom had seen the teeming cities of Earth only once in his life, but to him none of the splendors of the Earth cities could match the simple, quiet beauty of this Martian outpost settlement. There had been a time when people had said that Sun Lake City could never be built, that it could never survive if it were, but with each successive year it grew larger and stronger, the headquarters city for the planet that had become the new frontier of Earth.

  The radiophone buzzed, and the airlock guard hailed him when he returned the signal. Tom gave his routine ID. He guided the tractor into the lock, waited until pressure and atmosphere rose to normal, and then leaped out of the cab.

  Five minutes later he was walking across the lobby of the Interplanetary Council building, stepping into the down elevator. Three flights below, he stepped out into the office corridor of the U.N. Interplanetary Council on Mars.