Scavengers in Space Read online

  “Jail!”

  “That’s what I said. The brig. The place they put people when they don’t behave. You three are sitting on a nice, big powder keg right now, and when it blows I don’t know how much of you is going to be left.”

  “Do you think we’re lying?” Greg asked.

  “Do you know what you’re charged with?” the major snapped back.

  “Some sort of nonsense about piracy.”

  “Plus kidnaping. Plus murder. To say nothing of totally disabling a seventeen-million-dollar orbit ship and placing the lives of four hundred crewmen in jeopardy.” The major picked up a sheet of paper from his desk. “According to Merrill Tawney’s statement, the three of you hijacked a company scout ship that chanced to be scouting in the vicinity of your father’s claim. Your attack was unprovoked and violent. Everybody on Mars knows you were convinced that Jupiter Equilateral was responsible for your father’s death.” He looked up. “In the absence of any evidence, I might add, although I did my best to tell you that.” He rattled the report sheet. “All right. You took the scout ship by force, with the pilot at gunpoint, and made him home in on his orbit ship. Then you proceeded to reduce that orbit ship to a leaking wreck, although Tawney tried to reason with you and even offered you amnesty if you would desist. By the time the crew stopped shooting each other in the dark—fifteen of them subsequently expired, it says here—you had stolen another scout ship and kidnaped Tawney for the purpose of extorting a confession out of Jupiter Equilateral, threatening him with torture if he did not comply.” The major dropped the paper on the desk.

  Johnny Coombs picked it up, looked at it owlishly, and put it back again. “Pretty large operation for three men, Major,” he said.

  The major shrugged. “You were armed. That orbit ship was registered as a commercial vessel. It had no reason to expect a surprise attack and had no way to defend itself.”

  “They were armed to the teeth,” Greg said disgustedly. “Why don’t you send somebody out to look?”

  “Oh, I could, but why waste the time and fuel? There wouldn’t be any weapons aboard.”

  “Then how do they explain the fact that the Scavenger was blown to bits and Dad’s orbit ship ripped apart from top to bottom?”

  “Details,” the major said. “Mere details. I’m sure that the company’s lawyers can muddy the waters quite enough so that little details like that are overlooked. Particularly with a sympathetic jury and a judge that plays along.”

  He stood up and ran his hand through his hair. “All right, granted I’m painting the worst picture possible, but I’m afraid that’s the way it’s going to be. I believe your story, don’t worry about that. I know why you went out there to the belt and I can’t really blame you, I suppose. But you were asking for trouble, and that’s what you got. Frankly, I am amazed that you ever returned to Mars, and how you managed to make rubble of an orbit ship with a crew of four hundred men trying to stop you is more than I can comprehend. But you did it. All right, fine. You were justified; they attacked you, held you prisoner, threatened you. Fine. They’d have cut your throats in another few hours, perhaps. Fine. I believe you. But there’s one big question that you can’t answer, and unless you can no court in the solar system will listen to you.”

  “What question?” Tom said.

  “The question of motives,” the major replied. “You had plenty of motive for doing what Tawney says you did. But what motive did Jupiter Equilateral have, if your story is true?”

  “They wanted to get what Dad found, out in the belt.”

  “Ah, yes, that mysterious bonanza that Roger Hunter found. I was afraid that was what you’d say. And it’s the reason that Jupiter Equilateral is going to win this fight, and you’re going to lose it.”

  “I don’t think I understand,” Tom said slowly.

  “I mean that I’m going to have to testify against you,” the major said. “Because your father didn’t find a thing in the Asteroid Belt, and I happen to know it.”

  “It’s been a war,” the major said later, “a dirty vicious war with no holds barred and no quarter given. Not a shooting war, of course, nothing out in the open, but a war just the same, with the highest stakes of any war in history.”

  It was late; the office staff in the co-ordinator’s suite had gone home. On the streets of the city there was a momentary lull as the colonists rested from the day’s work, and prepared for the evening activities.

  “It didn’t look like a war, at first,” the major went on. “Back when the colonies were being built, nobody really believed that anything of value would come of them, scientific outposts, perhaps, places for laboratories and observatories, not much more. The colonies were placed under United Nations control. Nobody argued about it.

  “And then things began to change. There was wealth out here and opportunities for power. With the overpopulation at home, Earth was looking more and more to Mars and Venus for a place to move, not tiny colonies, but places for millions of people. And as Mars grew, Jupiter Equilateral grew.”

  “But it was just a mining company,” Tom said.

  “At first it was, but then its interests began to expand. The company accumulated wealth, unbelievable wealth, and it developed many friends. Very soon it had friends back on Earth fighting for it, and the United Nations found itself fighting to stay on Mars.”

  “I don’t see why,” Tom said. “The company already has half the mining claims in the belt.”

  “They aren’t interested in the mining,” the major said. “They have a much longer-range goal than that. The men behind Jupiter Equilateral are looking ahead. They know that some day Earthmen are going to have to go to the stars for colonies. It won’t be a matter of choice after a while; they’ll have to go. Well, Jupiter Equilateral’s terms are very simple. They’re perfectly willing to let the United Nations control things on Earth. All they want is control of everything else. Mars, if they can drive us out. Venus too, if it ever proves suitable for colonization. If they can gain control of the ships that leave our solar system for the stars, they can build an empire, and they know it.”

  They were silent for a moment. Then Johnny Coombs said, “Doesn’t anybody on Earth know about this?”

  “There are some who know but they don’t see the danger. They think of Jupiter Equilateral as just another big company. So far, U.N. control of Mars and Venus has held up, even though the pressure on the legislators back on Earth has been getting heavier and heavier. Jupiter Equilateral won the greatest fight in its history when they got U.N. jurisdiction limited to Mars, and kept us out of the belt. And now they hope to convince the lawmakers that we’re incompetent to administer the Martian colonies and keep peace out here. If they succeed, well be called home in nothing flat; we’ve had to fight just to stay.”

  The major spread his hands helplessly. “As I said, itis been a war. Our only hope was to prove that the company was using piracy and murder to gain control of the asteroids. We had to find a way to smash the picture they’ve been painting of themselves back on Earth as a big, benevolent organization interested only in the best for Earth colonists on the planets. We had to expose them before they had the Earth in chains, not now, maybe not even a century from now, but sometime, years from now, when the break-through to the stars comes and Earthmen discover that if they want to leave Earth they have to pay a toll.”

  “They could never do that!” Greg protested.

  “They’re doing it, son. And they’re winning. We have been searching desperately for a way to fight back, and that was where your father came in. He could see the handwriting on the wall, he knew what was happening. That was why he broke with the company and tried to organize a competing force before it was too late. And it was why he died in the belt. He knew I couldn’t send an agent out there without unquestionable evidence of major crime of some sort or another. But a private citizen could go out there, and if he happened to be working with the U.N. hand in glove, nobody could do anything about, it.”
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br />   “Then Dad was a U.N. agent?”

  “Oh, not officially. There’s not a word in the records. If I were forced to testify under oath, I would have to deny any connection. But unofficially, he went out there to lay a trap.”

  The major told them then. It had been an incredible risk that Roger Hunter had taken, but the decision had been his. The plan was simple: to involve Jupiter Equilateral in a case of claim jumping and piracy that would hold up in court, pressed by a man who would not be intimidated and could not be bought out. Roger Hunter had made a trip to the belt and come back with stories—very carefully planted in just the right ears—of a fabulous strike. He knew that Jupiter Equilateral had jumped a hundred rich claims in the past, forcing the independent miners to agree, frightening them into silence or disposing of them with “accidents.”

  But this was “one claim they were not going to jump. The U.N. co-operated, helping him spread the story of his big strike until they were certain that Jupiter Equilateral would go for the bait. Then Roger Hunter had returned to the belt, with a U.N. patrol ship close by in case he needed help.

  “We thought it would be enough,” the major said unhappily. “We were wrong, of course. At first nothing happened, not a sign of a company ship, nothing. Your father contacted me finally. He was ready to give up. Somehow they must have learned that it was a trap. But they were careful. They waited until our guard was down, and then moved in fast and hit hard.”

  He sank down in his seat behind the desk, regarding the Hunter twins sadly. “You know the rest. Perhaps you can see now why I tried to keep you from going out there. There was no proof to uncover, and no bonanza lode for you to find. There never was a bonanza lode.”

  The twins looked at each other, and then at the major. “Why didn’t you tell us?” Greg said.

  “Would you have listened? Would telling you have kept you from going out there? There was no point to telling you, I knew you would have to find out for yourselves, however painfully. But what I’m telling you now is the truth.”

  “As far as it goes,” Tom said. “But if this is really the truth, there’s one thing that doesn’t fit into the picture.”

  Slowly he pulled the gun case from his pack and set it down on the major’s desk. “It doesn’t explain what Dad was doing with this.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “. . . I Will Put A Planet”

  Tom knew now that it was the right thing to do. There was no question, after the major’s story, of what Dad had been doing out in the belt at the time he had been killed. He had been doing a job that was more important to him than asteroid mining, but he had found something more important than his own life, and had no chance to send word of what he had found back to Major Briarton on Mars. That had been the unforeseeable part of the trap.

  But now, of course, the major had to know.

  The Mars co-ordinator looked at the thing on his desk for a long moment before he reached out to touch it. The bright metal bleamed in the light—pale gray, lustrous. The major picked it up, balanced it expertly in his hand, and a puzzled frown wrinkled his face. He examined it minutely.

  “What is this thing?” he asked.

  “Suppose you tell us,” Johnny Coombs said from across the room.

  “It looks like a gun.”

  “That’s what it is, all right.”

  “You’ve fired it?”

  “Yes, but I wouldn’t fire it in here, if I were you,” Johnny said. “You were wonderin’ how we wrecked Tawney’s orbit ship so thoroughly. That’s your answer right there.” He told about the hole in the bulkhead, the way the ship’s generators had melted like clay under the powerful blast of the weapon.

  The major could hardly control his excitement. “Where did you get it?” he asked, turning to Tom.

  “From the space pack that you turned over to us. I didn’t even look at it, until we needed a gun in a hurry. I just assumed it was Dad’s revolver.”

  “Your father found it somewhere in the belt,” the major said softly. He looked at the weapon again, shaking his head. “There couldn’t be any such gun,” he said finally. “The things you say it can do would require energy enough to break down the cohesive forces of molecules. There isn’t any way we know of to harness that kind of energy and channel it in a hand weapon. Nobody on Earth—”

  He broke off and stared at them.

  “That’s right,” Johnny Coombs said quietly. “Nobody on Earth.”

  “You mean—extraterrestrial?”

  “There isn’t any other answer,” Johnny said. “Look at the thing, Major. Feel it. Does it feel like it was made for a human hand? It doesn’t fit, it doesn’t balance, you have to hold it with both hands to aim it.”

  “But where did it come from?” the Major asked. “We’ve never had visitors from another star system, not in the course of recorded history. And we know that Earthmen are the only intelligent creatures in our solar system.”

  “You mean that they’re the only ones now, Tom said.

  “Or any other time.”

  “We don’t know that, for sure,” Tom said.

  “Look, we’ve explored Venus, Mars, all the major satellites. If there had ever been any signs of intelligent beings on any of them, we’d have known it.”

  “Maybe there was a planet that Earthmen haven’t explored,” Tom said. “Dad tried to tell us that. The quotation from Kepler that he scribbled down in his log: ‘Between Jupiter and Mars I will put a planet.’ Why would Dad write that? Unless he suddenly discovered proof that there had been a planet there?”

  “You mean this gun,” the major said.

  “And whatever else he found.”

  “But there’s never been any proof of that theory, not even a hint of proof.”

  “Maybe Dad found proof. There are hundreds of thousands of asteroid fragments out there in the belt, and only a few hundred of them have ever been examined by men.”

  On the desk the strange weapon stared up at them. Evidence, mute evidence, and yet its very existence said more than a thousand words. It was there. It could not be denied.

  And someone—or something—had made it.

  Slowly the major pulled himself to his feet. “It must have happened after his last message to me,” he said. “It wasn’t part of the scheme we had set up, but he made a strike just the same, an archeological strike, and this gun was part of it.” He picked up the weapon, turned it over in his hand. “But it was days after that last message before his signal went off, and the patrol ship moved in.”

  “It makes sense,” Johnny Coombs said. “He found the gun, and somethin’ more.”

  “Like what?”

  “I wouldn’t even guess,” Johnny said. “A planet with a race of creatures intelligent enough and advanced enough to make a weapon like that—it could have been anything. But whatever it was, it must have scared him. He must have known that a company ship might turn up any minute, so he hid whatever he had found.”

  “And now it’s vanished,” the major said. “The big flaw in the whole idea. My patrol ship found nothing when it searched the region. You looked, and drew a blank. The company men scoured the area.” He sighed. “You see, it just won’t hold up, not a bit of it. Even with this gun, it won’t hold up.”

  “It’s out there somewhere,” Tom said doggedly. “It’s got to be.”

  “But where? Don’t you see that everything hangs on that one thing? If we could prove that your father found something just before he was killed, we could tear Jupiter Equilateral’s case against you to shreds. We could charge them with piracy and murder, and make it stick. We could break their power once and for all, but until we know what Roger Hunter found, we’re helpless. They’ll take you three to court, and I won’t be able to stop them. And if you lose that case, it may mean the end of U.N. authority on Mars.”

  “Then there’s just one thing to do,” Johnny Coombs said. “We’ve got to find Roger Hunter’s bonanza.”

  It was almost midnight when they
left the major’s office, a gloomy trio, walking silently up the ramp to the main concourse, heading toward the living quarters.

  They had been talking with the major for hours, going over every facet of the story, wracking their brains for the answer—but the answer had not come.

  Roger Hunter had found something and hidden it so well that three groups of searchers had failed to uncover it. After seeing the gun, the major was convinced that there had indeed been a discovery made. But whatever that discovery had been, it was gone as if it had never existed, as if by some sort of magic it had been turned invisible, or conjured away to another part of the solar system.

  Finally, they gave up, at least for the moment. “It has to be there,” the major said wearily. “It hasn’t vanished, or miraculously ceased to exist. We know he was working on one claim, one asteroid. There were no other asteroids in the region, and even the ones within a wide radius have been searched.”

  “It’s there, all right,” Tom said. “And somewhere there must be a clue.”

  “But what? Asteroids have stable orbits. Nobody can just make one disappear.”

  They called it a night, finally; the major had to complete a report for the forthcoming hearing, and the others were too weary to think any more. They felt talked out, physically and mentally drained.

  On the main concourse they found a commissary store still open, and stopped for surro-steaks and coffee-mix. It was a gloomy meal. They hurried through it and rode a late jitney back to the Hunter apartment.

  Once home they found more bad news waiting. There were two messages on the recordomat. The first was an official summons to appear before the United Nations Board of Investigations at nine the following morning to answer “certain charges placed against the above named persons by the Governing Board of Jupiter Equilateral Mining Industries, and by one Merrill Tawney, plaintiff, representing said Governing Board.” They listened to the plastic record twice. Then Greg tossed it down the waste chute.