Gold in the Sky Page 9

  9. The Invisible Man

  Crouching back into the shadow, Tom Hunter waited as the heavy footstepsmoved up the corridor, then back down, then up and down again. He peeredaround the corner for a moment, looking quickly up and down the curvingcorridor. The guard was twenty yards away, moving toward him in a slowmeasured pace. Tom jerked his head back, then peered out again as thefootsteps receded.

  The guard was a big man, with a heavy-duty stunner resting in the crookof his elbow. He paused, scratched himself, and resumed his pacing. Tomwaited, hoping that something might distract the big man, but he movedstolidly back and forth, not too alert, but far too alert to riskbreaking out into the main corridor.

  Tom moved back into the darkened corridor where he was standing, tryingto decide what to do. It was a side corridor, and a blind alley; itended in a large hatchway marked HYDROPONICS, and there were nobranching corridors. If he were discovered here, there would be no placeto 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 maincorridor 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 inthe section every hour. Now get moving...."

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

  The stench inside was almost overpowering. The big, darkened room wasextremely warm, the air damp with vapor. The plastic-coated wallsstreamed with moisture. Against the walls Tom could see the greathydroponic vats that held the yeast and algae cultures that fed the crewof the ship. Water was splashing in one of the vats, and there was agurgling sound as nutrient broth drained out, to be replaced withfresh.

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

  It would do for a while ... if he didn't suffocate ... but if this shipwas organized like smaller ones, it would be a blind alley. Modernhydroponic tanks did not require much servicing, once the cultures weregrowing; the broth was drained automatically and sluiced through aseries of pipes to the rendering plant where the yeasts could beflavored and pressed into surrogate steaks and other items for spaceshipcuisine. There would be no other entrances, no way to leave except theway he had come in.

  And with the guards on duty, that was out of the question. He waited,listening, as the check-down continued in nearby compartments. Thensilence fell again. The heavy yeast aroma had grown more and moreoppressive; now suddenly a fan went on with a whir, and a cool draft offreshened reprocessed air poured down from the ventilator shaft abovehis head.

  Getting into the orbit-ship had been easier than he had hoped. In theexcitement as the new prisoners were brought aboard, security measureshad been lax. No one had expected a third visitor; in consequence, noone looked for one. Huge as it was, the Jupiter Equilateral ship hadnever been planned as a prison, and it had taken time to stake out theguards in a security system that was at all effective. In addition,every man who served as a guard had been taken from duty somewhere elseon the ship.

  So there had been no guard at the airlock in the first few moments afterthe prisoners were taken off the Ranger ship. Tom had waited until theship was moored, clinging to the fin strut. He watched Greg and Johnnytaken through the lock, and soon the last of the crew had crossed overafter securing the ship. Presently the orbit-ship airlock had gone dark,and only then had he ventured from his place of concealment, creepingalong the dark hull of the Ranger ship and leaping across to theairlock.

  A momentary risk, then, as he opened the lock. In the control room, heknew, a signal light would blink on a panel as the lock was opened. Tommoved as quickly as he could, hoping that in the excitement of the newvisitors, the signal would go unnoticed ... or if spotted, that thespotter would assume it was only a crewman making a final trip across tothe Ranger ship.

  But once inside, he began to realize the magnitude of his problem. Thiswas not a tiny independent orbit-ship with a few corridors andcompartments. This was a huge ship, a vast complex of corridors andcompartments and holds. There was probably a crew of a thousand men onthis ship ... and there was no sign where Greg and Johnny might havebeen 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 arack; no one would notice it there, and it might be handy later. He hadstrapped his father's gun case to his side, some comfort, but a smallone.

  Now, crouching behind the yeast vat, he lifted out the gun, hefted itidly in his hand. It was a weapon, at least. He was not well acquaintedwith guns, and in the shadowy light it seemed to him that this onelooked odd for a revolver; it even felt wrong, out of balance in hishand. He slipped it back in the case. After all, it had been fitted toDad's hand, not his. And Johnny or Greg would know how to use it betterthan he would.

  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 stumbleinto 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 chanceit. There was no way to tell how much time he had, but it was a sure betthat he didn't have very long.

  In the spur corridor again, he waited until the guard's footsteps weremuffled and distant. Then he darted out into the main corridor, movingswiftly and silently away from the guard. At the first hatchway heducked inside, waited in the darkness, panting....

  The guard had stopped walking. Then his footsteps resumed, but morequickly, coming down the corridor. He stopped, almost outside thehatchway door. "Funny," Tom heard him mutter. "I'd have sworn...."

  Tom held his breath, waiting. This was a storage hold, but he didn'tdare to move, even to take cover. The guard stood motionless for amoment, then grunted, and resumed his slow pacing.

  When he had moved away Tom caught his breath in huge gasps, his heartbeating in his throat. It was no use, he thought in despair. Once ortwice he might get away with it, but sooner or later a guard would bealert enough to investigate an obscure noise, a flicker of movement inthe corner of his eye....

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

  For a moment, he didn't recognize what it was. Then there was a_whoosh-whoosh-whoosh_ as a fan went on, and he felt cool air againsthis cheek. He held out his hand to the grill, found the air coming fromthere.

  A ventilation shaft. Every space craft had to have reconditioning unitsfor the air inside the ship; the men inside needed a constant supply offresh oxygen, but even more, without pumps to move the air in eachcompartment they would soon suffocate from the accumulation of carbondioxide in the air they breathed out, or bake from the heat their bodiesradiated. On the other hand, the yeasts and algae required carbondioxide and yielded copious amounts of oxygen as they grew.

  In Roger Hunter's little orbit-ship the ventilation shafts were small, aloose network of foot-square ducts leading from the central pumps andair-reconditioning units to every compartment in the ship. But in a shipof this size....

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

  And then he was laughing out loud, working the grill out of the slo
tsthat held it to the wall, trying to make his hands work in hisexcitement.

  He knew he had found his answer.

  The grill came loose, lifted down in a piece. He stopped short asfootsteps approached in the corridor, paused, and went on. Then hepeered into the black gaping hole behind the grill. It was big enoughfor a man to crawl in. He shinned up into the hole, and pulled the grillback into its slot behind him.

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

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

  Somewhere in the ship Johnny Coombs and Greg Hunter wereprisoners ... but now, Tom knew, there was a way to escape.

  * * * * *

  It was a completely different world, a world within a world, a world ofdarkness and silence, of a thousand curving and intersecting tunnels,some large, some small. For hours it seemed to him that he had beenwandering through a tomb, moving through the corridors of a dead ship,the lone surviving crewman. There was some contact with the other world,of course, the world of the spaceship outside ... each compartment hadits metal grill, and he passed many of them. But there were like doorsthat only he knew existed. He met no one in _these_ corridors, there wasno danger of sudden discovery and arrest in these dark alleys....

  His boots had made too much noise as he started out, so he had slippedthem off, hanging them from his belt and moving on in his stocking feet.As he went from duct to duct, he had an almost ridiculous feeling offreedom and power. In every sense, he was an invisible man. Not one soulon this great ship knew he was here, or even suspected. He had the runof the ship, complete freedom to go wherever he chose. He could movefrom compartment to compartment as silently and invisibly as if he hadno substance at all.

  * * * * *

  He knew the first job was to learn the pattern of the ducts, andorientation was a problem. He had heard stories of men getting lost inthe deep underground mining tunnels on Mars, wandering in circles fordays until their food gave out and they starved. And there was thathazard here, for every duct looked like every other one.

  But there was a difference here, because the ducts curved just as themain ship's corridors did. He could always identify the center of theship by the force of false gravity pulling the other way. Furthermore,as the ducts drew closer to the pumps and reconditioning units, theyopened into larger vents, and the noise of the pumps thundered in hisears. After an hour of exploration, Tom was certain that from any placein the ship he could at least find his way to the outer layer, and fromthere to one of the scout-ship airlocks.

  Finding Greg and Johnny was quite a different matter.

  He could not see enough through the compartment grills to identify justwhat the compartments were; he was forced to rely on what he could hear.The engine rooms were easily identified. In one area he heard thebanging of pots and pans, the steaming of kettles ... obviously thegalley. He found the control area. He could hear the clatter of typinginstruments, the _click-click-click_ of the computers working out theorbits and trajectories for the scout-ships as they moved out from theorbit-ship or came back in. In another compartment he heard a dispatcherchattering his own special code-language into a microphone in alow-pitched voice. He passed another grill, and then stopped short as afamiliar voice drifted through.

  Merrill Tawney's voice.

  Tom hugged the grill, straining to catch the words. The company mansounded angry; the man he was talking to sounded even angrier. "I can'thelp what you want or don't want, Merrill, I can only report what we'vefound, and that's nothing at all. Every one of those claims has beensearched twice over. Doc and his boys went over them, and we didn't findanything they missed. I think you're barking up the wrong tree."

  "There's _got_ to be something," Tawney said, his voice tight withanger. "Hunter couldn't have taken anything away from there, he didn'thave a chance to. You read the reports..."

  "I know," the other said wearily, "I know what the reports said."

  "Then what he found is still there. There's no other possibility,"Tawney said.

  "We went over that rock with a microscope. We blew it to shreds. Assayhas gone through the fragments literally piece by piece. They found lowgrade iron, a trace of nickel, a little tin, and lots of granite. If wenever found anything richer than that, we'd have been out of businessten years ago."

  There was a long silence. Tom pressed closer to the grill. Then he heardTawney slam his fist into his palm. "You know what Roger Hunter's doing,don't you?" he said. "He's making fools of us, that's what! The man'sdead, and he's making us look like idiots. If we hadn't been so sure wehad the lode spotted ..." He broke off. "Well, that's done, we can'tundo it. But this brat of his...."

  "Any luck there?"

  "Not a word. He's playing coy."

  "Maybe he doesn't know anything. Doc made a bad mistake when he blastedthe other one ... suppose _he_ was the only one that knew."

  "All right, it was a mistake," Tawney snapped. "What was he supposed todo, let him get back to Mars? We've got a good front there, but it's notthat good. If the United Nations gets a toehold out here, the whole Beltwill go into their pocket, you realize that. They're waiting for us tomake one slip." He paused, and Tom heard him pacing the compartment."But I think we've got our boy. This one knows. We've been spoiling himso far, that's all. Well, now we start digging. When I get through withhim, he'll be begging us to let him tell. You just watch me, as soon asthe okay comes through...."

  Tom drew back from the grill, moving on in the darkness. So far he hadnot rushed his exploration ... there was a chance to use the ducts forescape, he wanted to know them well. But now he knew the hour wasgetting late. So far Greg and Johnny had been stalling Tawney ... butTawney was getting impatient.

  He moved quickly and he thought again of what Tawney had said. Tawneywas right about one thing ... there was no way that Dad could havehidden a Big Strike so nobody could find it. It had to be there....

  And yet it wasn't. He and Greg hadn't found it. Tawney's men hadn'tfound it, either. Why not? There must be a reason.

  But he could not put his finger on it.

  Half an hour later he was seriously worried. Half the compartments inthe area were deserted, the men leaving for the cafeteria. The thoughtreminded Tom how hungry he was, and thirsty. His small emergency rationkit was empty. He toyed with the thought of sneaking into a food storagecompartment, then thrust it out of his mind as too risky. He had to findGreg and Johnny before anything.

  He passed a grill, and heard a murmur of voices; something in the deepbass rumble caught his ear, and he stopped, listened.

  The voices stopped also.

  He waited for them to begin, pressing against the grill. Johnny Coombswas not the only man with a deep bass voice, he might have beenmistaken. He listened, but there was no sound. He heard the whir of afan begin, still no sound, not even footsteps.

  And then it happened, so fast he was taken completely off guard. Thegrill suddenly gave way, pitching him forward into the compartment.Something struck him behind the ear as he fell; there was a grunt, asharp command, and he was pinned to the floor in the semi-darkness ofthe compartment.

  Then he heard a gasp, and he opened his eyes. He was staring into hisbrother's startled face. Greg was pinning his shoulders to the carpeteddeck, and behind him Johnny Coombs had a fist raised....

  But they had stopped in mid-air, like a tableau of puppets. Greg gaped,his jaw falling open, and Tom heard himself saying, "What are you tryingto do, kill a guy? Seems to me one time is enough."

  He had found them.