Scavengers in Space Read online

  Then the scout ship moved into a slow arc back toward the orbit ship, drawing its net behind it.

  This was asteroid mining. The same techniques were used by the huge mining companies and the tiny independents alike, but few of the independents had the top-grade equipment, the man power or the sheer engineering skill to do the sort of slick professional job that Johnny and Greg were witnessing now.

  True to his word, Tawney had given them the freedom of the ship. Greg and Johnny discovered that their guard was also an excellent guide. All day he had been leading them through the ship, chatting and answering their questions, until they almost forgot that they were prisoners here. And the guard’s obvious pride in the scope and skill of his company’s mining operations was strangely infectious.

  Certainly the orbit ship was an excellent headquarters; it lacked nothing as a base for mining operations. Orbiting in an asteroid cluster chosen for the high density of asteroids in the vicinity, the ship buzzed with activity like a nest of hornets. Two dozen scout ships nestled at the side of the huge ship, shooting out to their various sites of operation, buzzing back with glittering nets in tow, pulling in asteroid fragments. Down in the storage holds crews of workmen were sorting the fragments, analyzing them in the compact assay lab, separating them into high-grade and low-grade ores for the smelters on Earth and Mars.

  When a particularly high-grade ore turned up in a batch, the whole ship hummed with excitement. “We take our chances, just like the independents,” the guard told them. “Each man gets his percentage of the earnings on every trip. Give us one big strike, and everybody on this ship will be rich.”

  “Do you pick and choose your rocks?” Johnny asked.

  “Oh, yes. We have prospectors working all over the belt, claiming the best-looking rocks for the company. When they hit something rich, an orbit ship moves in to work it.” The guard laughed. “You should hear the astronomers hoot at us, the ones that go for the incomplete-formation theory of the asteroids. They say well never hit a big strike because no such thing can exist. But we don’t pay any attention to them.”

  Greg was familiar with the story. Every schoolboy on Mars knew about the two opposing theories of formation which attempted to solve once and for all the age-old mystery of how the Asteroid Belt had been formed. Many astronomers believed that the asteroids were fragments of a planet that had never formed completely, that while the other planets in the solar system were forming, these chunks of debris had been held apart and kept from coalescing into a planet by the overwhelming gravitational pull of the giant planet lying just beyond the belt. . . . Jupiter itself.

  But an older theory held that the asteroids had once been a fully formed planet between Mars and Jupiter, a planet that had been blown apart geological ages before in a series of cataclysmic explosions. Gradually the fragments of those explosions had taken up their individual orbits as tiny planetoids in a wide belt around the sun where the parent planet had once been. What might have caused those explosions nobody could guess, nor could anyone guess what sort of planet it might have been.

  Which theory was right, nobody knew. When the solar system was first explored, the asteroids had been eagerly studied in hopes that the true answer might be found. But as yet neither side could claim the answer. The mystery remained unsolved.

  Greg had thought about it many times. If there had been a planet here, hundreds of thousands of years ago, what had it been like? Had it been warm, as Earth was now, with an atmosphere, perhaps even with life on it? Or was it a barren rock, free of atmosphere, as dead and lifeless as Earth’s moon? What could have caused it to explode? There were no answers, and the fragments, the asteroids themselves, had never yielded a clue.

  Now Greg watched as the scout ship moved in to the orbit ship’s side with its net. Whatever the origin of the asteroids, these fragments of rock contained rich metal waiting to be taken by the men who could find it. Watching the Jupiter Equilateral ship in operation, Greg felt his heart sink. Here was a huge, powerful organization, with all the equipment and men and know-how they could ever need. How could one man, or two or even a team of three hope to compete with them? For the independent miner, the only hope was the big strike, the single lode that could make him rich. He might work all his life without finding it, and then stumble upon it by sheer chance.

  But if he couldn’t keep it when he found it, what then? What if the great mining company became so strong that they could be their own law in the belt? What if they grew strong enough and powerful enough to challenge the United Nations on Mars itself, and gain control of the entire mining industry? What chance would the independent miner have then?

  It was a frightening picture. Suddenly something began to make sense to Greg; he realized something about his father that he had never known before. Roger Hunter had been a miner, yes. But he had been something else too, something far more important than just a miner. Roger Hunter had been a fighter, fighting to the end for something he believed in.

  The scout ship shot out its grappling cables as Greg and Johnny watched in the view screen. Merrill Tawney was in the observation room, watching too. The first scout ship moored and secured; from another direction another ship came in with a loaded net. Tawney rubbed his hands together.

  “Quite an operation,” he said.

  Greg looked at him. “So I see.”

  “And very efficient, too. Our men have everything they need to work with. We can mine at far less cost than anyone else.”

  “But you still can’t stand the idea of independent miners working the belt,” Greg said.

  Tawney’s eyebrows went up. “Why not? There’s lots of room out here. Our operation with Jupiter Equilateral is no different from an independent miner’s operation. We aren’t different kinds of people.” He smiled. “When you get right down to it, we’re both exactly the same thing—scavengers in space, vultures picking over the dead remains to see what we can find. We come out to the asteroids, and we bring back what we want and leave the rest behind. And it doesn’t matter whether we’ve got one ship working or four hundred, we’re still scavengers.”

  “With just one difference,” Greg said, turning away from the view screen.

  “Difference?”

  Greg nodded. “Even vultures don’t kill their prey,” he said.

  Later, when they were again alone in their quarters, Greg and Johnny stared at each other gloomily. For all its luxurious appointments, the place was a prison. The only sound was the intermittent whir of the ventilator fan in the wall. The single hatchway was locked, and they knew that the guard was stationed in the corridor outside.

  Johnny had even found a microphone pickup hidden in one of the chair cushions; he had carefully disconnected it, and they had poked and probed to find any others that might be there. But the rest of the furniture was innocent enough; except for the fine metal grill over the ventilator shaft the walls were featureless.

  “Didn’t you see anything that might help us?” Greg asked.

  “Not much. For an orbit ship, this place is a fortress. I got a good look at that scout ship coming in. It was armed to the teeth. Prob’bly they all are. And they’re keepin’ a guard now at every airlock.”

  “So we’re sewed up tight,” Greg said.

  “Looks that way. They’ve got us, boy, and I think Tawney’s patience is wearing thin, too. We’re either going to have to produce or else.”

  “But what can we do?”

  “Start bluffin’.”

  “It seems to me we’re fust about bluffed out.”

  “I mean talk business,” Johnny said. “Tell Tawney what he wants to know.”

  “When we don’t know any more than he does? How?”

  Johnny Coombs scratched his jaw. “I’ve been thinking about that,” he said slowly, “and I wonder if we don’t know a whole lot more than we think we do.”

  “Like what?” Greg said.

  “We’ve all been looking for the same thing—a big strike, a bonanza lode.
Tawney’s men have raked over every one of your dad’s claims, and they haven’t turned up a thing.” Johnny looked at Greg. “Makes you wonder a little, doesn’t it? Your dad was smart, but he was no magician. And how does a man go about hidin’ somethin’ like a vein of ore?”

  “I don’t know,” Greg said. “It doesn’t seem possible.”

  “It isn’t possible,” Johnny said flatly. “There’s only one possible explanation, and we’ve been missin’ it all along.

  Whatever he found, it wasn’t an ore strike. It was somethin’ else, something far different from anything we’ve been thinkin’ of.”

  Greg stared at him. “But if it wasn’t an ore strike, what was it?”

  “I don’t know,” Johnny said. “But I’m sure of one thing. It was something so important that he was ready to die before he’d reveal it. And that means it’s so important that Tawney won’t dare kill us until he finds out what it is.”

  Chapter Nine

  The Invisible Man

  Crouching back into the shadow, Tom waited as the heavy footsteps moved up the corridor, then back down, then up and down again. He peered around the comer for a moment, looking quickly up and down the curving corridor. The guard was twenty yards away, moving toward him in a slow measured pace. Tom jerked his head back, then peered out again as the footsteps receded.

  The guard was a big man, with a heavy duty stunner resting in the crook of his elbow. He paused, scratched himself, and resumed his pacing. Tom waited, hoping that something might distract the big man, but he moved stolidly back and forth, far too alert for Tom to risk breaking out into the main corridor.

  Tom moved back into the darkened corridor where he was standing, trying to decide what to do. It was a side corridor, and a blind alley; it ended in a large hatchway marked HYDROPONICS, and there were no branching corridors. If he were discovered here, there would be no place to hide.

  But he knew that he could never hope to accomplish his purpose here.

  A hatch clanged open, and there were more footsteps down the main corridor as a change of guards hurried by. There was a rumble of voices, and Tom listened to catch the words.

  “. . . don’t care what you think, the boss says tighten it up.”

  “But they got them locked in.”

  “So tell it to the boss. We’re supposed to check every compartment in the section every hour. Now get moving.”

  The footsteps moved up and down the corridor, and Tom heard hatches clanging open. If they sent a light down this spur ... he turned to the hatch, spun the big wheel on the door, and slipped inside just as the footsteps came closer.

  The stench inside was almost overpowering. The big, darkened room was extremely warm, the air damp with vapor. The plastic-coated walls streamed with moisture. Against the walls Tom could see the great hydroponic vats that held the yeast and algae cultures that fed the crew. Water was splashing in one of the vats, and there was a gurgling sound as the nutrient broth was exchanged automatically.

  He moved swiftly across the compartment, into a darkened area behind the rows of vats, and crouched down. He heard footsteps, and the ring of metal as the hatchway came open. One of the guards walked in, peered into the gloom, wrinkled his nose, and walked out again, closing the hatchway behind him.

  It would do for a while if he didn’t suffocate, but if this ship was organized like smaller ones, it would be a blind alley. Modern hydroponic tanks did not require much servicing, once the cultures were growing; the broth was drained automatically and slucied through a series of pipes to the rendering plant where the yeasts could be flavored and pressed into surrogate steaks and other foods for space ship cuisine. There would be no other entrances, no way to leave except the way he had come in.

  With the guards on duty, that was out of the question. He waited, listening, as the check-down continued in near-by compartments. Then silence fell again. The heavy yeast aroma had grown more and more opporessive; now suddenly a fan went on with a whir, and a cool draft of freshened, reprocessed air poured down from the ventilator shaft above his head.

  Getting into the orbit ship had been easier than Tom had hoped. In the excitement, as the new prisoners were brought aboard, security measures had been lax. No one had expected a third visitor; in consequence, no one looked for one. Huge as it was, the Jupiter Equilateral ship had never been planned as a prison, and it had taken time to stake out the guards in a security system that was at all effective. In addition, every man who served as a guard had been taken from duty somewhere else on the ship.

  So there had been no guard at the airlock in the first few moments after the prisoners were taken off the Ranger ship. Tom had waited until the ship was moored, clinging to the fin strut. He watched Greg and Johnny being taken through the lock, and soon the last of the crew had crossed over after securing the ship. Presently the orbit ship’s airlock had gone dark, and only then had he ventured from his place of concealment, creeping along the dark hull of the Ranger ship and leaping across to the airlock.

  A momentary risk, then, as he opened the lock. In the control room, he knew, a signal light would blink on a panel as the lock was opened. Tom moved as quickly as he could, hoping that in the excitement of the new visitors, the signal would go unnoticed, or if spotted, that the spotter would assume it was only a crewman making a final trip across to the Ranger ship.

  But once inside, he began to realize the magnitude of his problem. This was not a tiny independent orbit ship with a few corridors and compartments. This was a huge ship, a vast complex of corridors and compartments and holds. There was probably a crew of a thousand men on this ship, and there was no sign of where Greg and Johnny might have been taken.

  He moved forward, trying to keep to side corridors and darkened areas. In the airlock he had wrapped up his pressure suit and stored it on a rack; no one would notice it there, and It might be handy later. He had strapped his father’s gun case to his side—a comfort, but a small one.

  Now, crouching behind the yeast vat, he lifted out the gun, hefted it idly in his hand. It was a weapon, at least. He was not well acquainted with guns, and in the shadowy light it seemed to him that this one looked odd for a revolver; it even felt wrong, out of balance in his hand. He slipped it back in the case. After all, it had been fitted to Dad’s hand, not his. And Johnny or Greg would know how to use it better than he did—if he could find them.

  But to do that he would have to search the ship. He would have to move about, he couldn’t just wait in a storage hold. And with all the guards that were posted, he would certainly stumble into one of them sooner or later if he tried leaving this spot. He shook his head, and started for the hatch. He would have to chance it. There was no way to tell how much time he had, but it was a sure bet that he didn’t have very long.

  In the spur corridor again, he waited until the guard’s footsteps were muffled and distant. Then he darted out into the main corridor, moving swiftly and silently away from the guard. At the first hatchway he ducked inside and waited in the darkness, panting.

  The guard stopped walking. Then his footsteps resumed, but more quickly, coming down the corridor. He stopped, almost outside the hatchway door. “Funny,” Tom heard him mutter. “I’d have sworn—”

  Tom held his breath, waiting. This was a storage hold, but he didn’t dare move, even to take cover. The guard stood motionless for a moment, grunted, and resumed his slow pacing. When he had moved away Tom caught his breath in huge gasps, his heart beating in his throat. It was no use, he thought in despair. Once or twice he might get away with it, but sooner or later a guard would be alert enough to investigate an obscure noise, a flicker of movement in the comer of his eye.

  There had to be another way. His eye probed the storage hold hopelessly, and stopped on a metal grill in the wall.

  For a moment, he didn’t recognize what it was. He heard a whoosh-whoosh-whoosh as a fan went on, and he felt cool air against his cheek. He held out his liand to the grill and found the air coming from
there.

  It was a ventilation shaft. Every space craft had to have reconditioning units for the air inside the ship. The men inside needed a constant supply of fresh oxygen; but even more, without pumps to move the air in each compartment, they would soon suffocate from the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the air they breathed out, or bake from the heat their bodies radiated. On the other hand, the yeasts and algae required carbon dioxide and yielded copious amounts of oxygen as they grew.

  In Roger Hunter’s little orbit ship the ventilation shafts were small, a loose network of foot-square ducts leading from the central pumps and air-reconditioning units to every compartment in the ship. But in a ship of this size—

  The grill was over a yard wide, four feet tall. It started about shoulder height and ran up to the overhead. The ducts would network the ship, opening into every compartment, and no one would ever open them unless something went wrong.

  • He grinned happily as he got busy, working the grill out of the slots that held it to the wall and trying to keep his hands from shaking in his excitement.

  He knew he had found his answer.

  The grill came loose and Tom lifted it down in one piece. He stopped short as footsteps approached in the corridor, paused, and went on. Then he peered into the black gaping hole behind the grill. It was big enough for a man to crawl in. He shinnied up into the hole, and pulled the grill back into its slot behind him.

  Somewhere far away he heard a throbbing of giant pumps. There was a rush of cool fresh air past his cheek, cold when it contacted the sweat pouring down his forehead. He could not quite stand up, but there was plenty of room for him to crouch and move.

  Ahead of him was a black tunnel, broken only by a patch of light coming through the grill that opened into the next compartment. He stared into the blackness, his heart racing.

  Somewhere in the ship Johnny and Greg were prisoners, but now, Tom knew, there was a way to escape.