ride a rocket out of atmosphere. As a major, he was in the first
piloted space craft to achieve an orbit and land again in one
piece, and he helped to build the Space Platform. But it seemed
likely that after he made colonel he was likely to be stuck with
administrative tasks and go on no more trips. There was the affair
of the Bramwell-Faraday screen, to be sure, but that was pure luck.
He gloomily expected nothing more exciting than desk duty in some
deadly tedious minor base upon the moon. But it happened that the
asteroid Eros--very small, very irregular in shape, and very, very
eccentric in its orbit--was due to pass close to Earth again as it
went out from the sun. It had passed within two million miles of
Earth in the 1930s, and nothing happened. But now McCauley was
looking for an excuse to be more than a desk Colonel. He added up
Eros and Mars and drone rockets, and the resources of the Space
Service and a certain amount of imagination. He came up with
something the Space Service had believed was still twenty years
in the future. He'd worked out a way to get back from Mars. So
he was assigned to try it.)
The Personnel Ship of the First Martian Expedition was within two
million miles of Mars when McCauley missed his watch. Everything had
gone along as predicted, up to that moment. The ship had taken off from
Earth and headed outward for its rendezvous with the tiny asteroid
Eros. It burned rocket fuel lavishly to get the necessary velocity for
the journey. Then it floated interminably while Earth grew small and
far away behind it, and the sun dwindled and its heat lessened. Then
Eros appeared like the tiniest pinpoint of light, and the ship drew
up to it and braked--it had very little fuel left for its braking--and
touched, and then moored itself to the half acre of previously moored
bales and cases and special drones that the asteroid had ferried out
from Earth. The ship's crew went outside in space suits, each one
separately tethered to the ship by a long cable. They began to check
the condition of their waiting supplies. Everything had to be examined
because it had lain--hung--rested for two years on Eros' surface in the
network of cables and drill rods needed to hold it there. The condition
of the stores was satisfactory. So Colonel Ed McCauley took a shower.
In its way, even that was an adventure. The ship, of course, had no
gravitational field, and Eros was very small indeed. Of almost solid
nickel-iron, it was five miles by two by three; and though it dwarfed
the ship, its gravity pull was on the order of one five-millionth that
of Earth. So taking a shower in a ship moored to Eros was something
special. It meant holding fast to handholds in a furious fan-made
gale that blew water against one and then blew it off and to a water
collector where it could be filtered and sterilized and pumped around
to the showerhead again. It was quite different from a bath on Earth,
but McCauley was much refreshed. He toweled himself and put on his ship
clothes again--and his watch was gone from the pocket he'd put it in.
It made no sense at all.
He was still looking for the watch in every corner of the compartment
outside the shower tank, when Major Randy Hall came in, propelling
himself in that extremely unlikely fashion which has to be used in zero
gravity.
"Randy," said McCauley vexedly, "I've lost my watch."
"I lost mine a week ago," said Randy. He caught a handhold and pulled
himself to a sitting position, resting on nothing whatever. "Hathaway
lost his the week we started out. Fallon told me privately that
somebody'd swiped his wallet only a day or so after we started out."
McCauley swung around to face him.
"That's nonsense!" he said angrily. "It's lunacy! Who'd want to steal
in a space ship?"
"I thought it was lunacy, too," said Randy, "until a few minutes ago.
Now I'm more credulous. From checking supplies outside, it appears that
some very fancy small instruments are missing. A case was broken open.
Since we tied up here."
McCauley stared at him. On the face of it, Randy's statement was flatly
impossible. Personal character aside, it was unthinkable that a member
of the Expedition should steal from another member or from its stores.
Nobody could use a stolen article in a ship containing exactly five
other men. Nobody could sell stolen goods to his fellow crewmen. And
nobody could hope to take any loot back to Earth. If all went well,
the men themselves might hope to get back to Earth at some problematic
future time. But every ounce of Earth-bound cargo would be scientific
material, mostly microfilm. Stolen goods couldn't be used or sold or
taken back to Earth. Money itself wasn't worth stealing. Nothing was.
Many millions of dollars' worth of equipment now outside the ship had
lain unguarded and untouched for two years in empty space. Nobody had
stolen any of it before. There was no sense in stealing it now.
But somebody was.
It was a serious matter because of its implications rather than the
facts themselves. The First Martian Expedition needed everything
its members could give it for the safety of them all. If somebody
considered himself apart from the rest, if one member of the crew was
willing to injure the others by stealing from them, the situation
was very, very bad. In fact, having a thief among the six was like a
serious accident occurring to the Expedition's equipment. It would be
comparable to a vital defect in the miniature atom-pile which was to
supply energy for them to live by when they reached Mars' surface.
In a sense, though, the Expedition itself was the result of an accident
of a different sort. The first part of this coincidence was the fact
that some two years earlier the asteroid Eros had passed close to Earth
on its elongated elliptical orbit around the sun. Eros is one of those
rock and metal fragments which are found most often in orbits between
Mars and Jupiter. Some people maintain that they are fragments of a
planet which exploded some hundreds of millions of years ago, and
there is some evidence to back this view. For one thing, some circle
the sun in extremely eccentric paths. Eros swings out at its farthest
between Mars and Jupiter, but when nearest the sun it dives in between
Earth and Venus. Sometimes--rarely--it comes close to Earth in its
passage across Earth's orbit. This had happened two years ago.
The second part of the coincidence was the purely fortuitous fact that
only two Earth-years later Eros would pass even closer to the planet
Mars. The two accidents added up to an opportunity, when McCauley added
rockets and other resources of the Space Service. And the Service
seized it.
So two years ago Colonel Ed McCauley had landed a ship on the asteroid,
then close to Earth. He'd led a work crew which drove drill holes
into the asteroid's solid metal substance. They made anchorages to
fasten supplies to, and McCauley'd anchored the supplies. Then he
took his ship back to Earth. On the way he'd passed other ships going
out to Eros. They also anchored supplies on it. In one hectic month,
the Space Service unloaded on the tiny asteroid all the supplies and
equipment--some two hundred-odd tons of it--that the First Martian
Expedition would need not only on Mars, but in getting back from Mars,
which was equally important. Then the Space Service waited.
Nearly two years later, but now some months ago, the ship that was
now moored to Eros took off from Earth. Enormous amounts of fuel were
required for the journey out to Mars. No ship could carry fuel for
the trip and the landing, much less a return trip. But if a ship made
a rendezvous with Eros when the asteroid was close to Mars, it could
refuel from the stores waiting on Eros. It could guide drone rockets
from Eros to landings on Mars, carrying more supplies. The drones would
not even need to be ships. They could be mere outlines of ships, with
motors and guidance systems, their cargo lashed to their framework.
So the asteroid would serve as a cargo carrier for the supplies the
Expedition required, and also as the landing craft needed to put them
ashore on the red planet.
So far, everything had worked out. Very shortly the first of the
drones would be sent off to land the first cargo near an oasis close
to the summer pole of Mars. Others would follow till all had been
sent out; then the ship, refueled, would leave Eros and overtake the
equipment that had preceded it. Its crew would recover the landed
rocket cargoes, set up a base, be well equipped and amply supplied for
several months of Martian exploration, and then have adequate fuel for
the voyage home. More than that, it would leave a base that was ready
to function, and fuel for return flights, for a reasonable number
of other ships in the future. In fact, the passage of Eros close to
Earth and then to Mars had provided a freight service that meant the
difference between men going to Mars and staying home.
But there was a thief among the six men making the first trip. There
was McCauley and Randy Hall and Fallon and Brett and Soames. Hathaway
was the meteorologist who would learn all that was to be known about
Mars' atmosphere. Fallon was the atom-power mechanic. Brett and Soames
had their specialties, but all had been trained in the remote control
of drone rockets with their loads of precious material. All were needed.
"Hmmm," said McCauley, frowning. "You say Hathaway and Fallon lost
things, the one a watch and the other a wallet. You and I ... I lost an
electric watch. It runs on a battery the size of a pea. I never have
to wind it." He looked up. "Are you sure Brett and Soames haven't lost
anything?"
Randy looked curiously at McCauley.
"Come to think of it, Brett asked me if I'd seen his fancy gold pen.
That was weeks ago. He uses an issue pen now. And I think--I _think_
Soames was turning things upside down once, looking for some sort of
gold luck-piece he carries. Yes. He did."
"I'll find the stuff," said McCauley, frowning, "but I'm bothered."
He looked out a port at the crew members on the surface of the
asteroid. Randy followed his eyes. The four other members of the
Expedition, in bulky space suits, worked busily in a landscape--or an
Eros-scape--too fantastic to be real. All of them now accepted the
view that Eros was an explosion-created fragment of something much
larger, and that that something must have been remarkable. Nine-tenths
of the surface of Eros was solid metal such as forms the core of
all the heavier planets. Now, metal rods stuck here and there out
of drill holes in the raw, glistening crystalline mass. Between the
drill rods ran cables holding nets under which objects were tethered.
There were drone rockets by the dozen, and bales and boxes and tanks
seemingly by the hundred. They would drift away to nowhere but for the
nets which held them fast. They'd been held thus during two years of
unaccompanied, uneventful cartage from the orbit of Earth out to the
orbit of Mars. Most of the stuff needed only to be sorted and loaded
on the drones, which would take off under control by the drone-master
keyboard on the ship. There was an enormous mass of supplies. There
could be a loss of up to fifty per cent in transit without irreparable
damage being done to the Expedition's purposes.
When Randy looked back from the laboring, space-suited figures outside,
he was alone. McCauley had gone to the ship's small workshop, all of
whose tools would be left in the base on Mars. Frowning, he connected
a microphone and an audio amplifier and a headset and went back to
explain to Randy. But Randy was no longer there. He'd gone outside to
carry on as second-in-command. His business was largely finding things
to worry about and telling McCauley, who made them turn out all right.
McCauley went purposefully through the ship with his
microphone-amplifier unit, touching it here and there against the
fabric of the vessel. The idea was perfectly simple. If there was a
thief on board, he would certainly not keep his loot on his person
or in his locker. He'd have a hiding place for it. The loot included
McCauley's watch, which would not run down for months. And solid things
conduct sound much better than air does. The ticking of a watch which
can't be heard at five feet, in air, can be heard through fifty feet of
wood or metal if the watch is in contact with the farther end.
So McCauley methodically listened for the ticking of a watch conducted
through the metal of a spaceship. There was no one else on board.
There was no operating machinery to make extraneous noises. Presently
he heard the five-times-a-second click-click of his watch. He traced
it to its loudest, unscrewed a floorplate, and found three watches, a
very expensive gold pencil, and a luck-piece that was a gold coin some
hundreds of years old. There were also three small and very expensive
instruments that came from a smashed case on the asteroid.
McCauley put them in his pocket and went to the compartment that was
his sanctum as commander of the ship. He pulled out the personnel
report on one member of the crew. It was not believable.... Then he
thought of something. He pushed the outside-communicator button.
"Fallon," he said, "report to the ship. A job for you."
He drummed on the desk before him as he waited for Fallon. This was a
singularly unpleasant situation.
Fallon came in, still in his space suit. He opened the faceplate and
grinned. He was an exuberant personality, this Fallon.
"Reporting in, Colonel."
Without a word, McCauley brought out the three watches, the
instruments, the elaborate gold pencil, and the luck-piece. He picked
out his own watch and the instruments and waved his hand toward the
rest.
"Get these back where they belong," he ordered. "I'll take care of the
instruments. Don't let anybody know they're being returned. Let it
appear they've been found misplaced."
Fallon stared. Then he went white and licked his lips. But he said
nothing.
"I found this stuff," said McCauley, "as soon as I looked for it. I
knew you'd hidden it, because you said your wallet was gone and there
was no wallet with the other missing stuff. You should have put it in
with the rest of the loot, Fallon, if you wanted to be convincing."
Fallon stared.
"It's about as stupid a performance as I've ever heard of," said
McCauley. "Why did you do it?"
Fallon swallowed. Then he braced himself and looked defiant. In
a moment or two he managed a grin. It was a shaky grin, but he
straightened up and then shrugged.
"Why should I tell you?" he said. "What can you do about it, anyway?"
"I can think of a few things," said McCauley.
"Name one!" said Fallon defiantly. "You can't kill me. You can't put
me out of the ship, because that'd kill me. You can't lock me up,
because you need everybody. You can't do anything! You might as well
forget it! This trip was dull. I wanted some excitement. I thought
there'd be a big fuss when things started to disappear. There wasn't.
All right, I'll put the stuff back. But you might as well forget the
whole business because you can't do a thing about it."
McCauley stiffened. Fallon was right. There wasn't anything he could
do, in the ordinary sense of the word. He couldn't execute Fallon
for theft. He couldn't imprison him. If he punished him in any way
that aroused his resentment, Fallon could no longer be trusted, and
any of the six men could destroy the other five simply by neglecting
some essential duty assigned to him. In space, men have to trust each
other and be worthy of trust in return. There is no room in unlimited
emptiness for a man who arouses suspicion and antagonism among his
shipmates solely for his own amusement. But Fallon had done just that.
He was as dangerous as an atom bomb on the expedition to Mars. But
whereas an atom bomb can be disarmed, nobody can disarm a man who
chooses to play the fool.
Fallon picked up the objects McCauley had given him. He spoke with
sudden truculence.
"Well?" he said. "What can you do? Just suppose I don't feel like
giving these things back. I'm going to, but if I wouldn't do it, what'd
you do?... You won't even tell the rest you caught me! You want the
stuff put back without their knowing it was taken!"
"Yes-s-s," McCauley said very slowly. "That's right. I shan't tell
the rest. I want things to go along smoothly, without squabbles or
suspicions. But you want excitement, more than our job provides. You'll
look for it in some other fashion now, won't you?"
Fallon said defiantly:
"I'll do what I feel like doing!"
"Yes," said McCauley, nodding. "You'll get your excitement regardless.
You're as independent as a hog on ice, because you think that I can't
do anything to stop you. Very well. I'll try to provide you with some
excitement. You do what you please. I'll do what I please about it."
Fallon's eyes narrowed.
"You don't care what I do?" he demanded skeptically.
"I do care," McCauley told him. "You're the one who doesn't care. But
I'll be able to make use of you somehow. All right; you can go, now."
Fallon hesitated, scowling. Then he went out. He was uneasy. He could
have understood had McCauley threatened him, or flown into a rage, or
possibly tried to appeal to a nonexistent loyalty to his companions or
to the purposes of the Expedition. But McCauley had not reacted in any
fashion that Fallon could understand.
Later in the day Randy consulted with McCauley.
"Funny thing happened," he said vexedly. "Fallon went around and gave
Brett back his fancy gold pen. He said he'd taken it for a joke. He
gave Soames back his luck-piece and Hathaway his watch. He explained
that they were jokes, too. He gave me mine.... Did you get yours back?"
McCauley nodded. He explained what had happened. Randy blinked.
"But why didn't he just slip them back like you told him to?"
"He's worried," said McCauley. "I didn't threaten and I didn't reason
with him. So he figures that I've something special in mind. So he
wants to be on good terms with everybody but me. Now if I accused him
of stealing, he could insist that he was joking and that he'd proved
it."
"That's crazy!" said Randy.
McCauley did not contradict him. He shrugged. Presently Randy went out
on the surface of Eros. A single incautious movement might send him
floating off into emptiness except for the moorings to the drilled-in
metal rods that anchored supplies and ship and crew alike. On the
nickel-iron surface of the asteroid, to be sure, magnetic-soled shoes
ought to hold a man down. But the emergency wasn't great enough to make
depending on them necessary. Everyone kept himself anchored to a drill
rod, and did not let go, anywhere, until another anchorage had been
secured.
The five-mile-long and two-mile-thick mass that was Eros floated onward
in its orbit. It rotated very slowly--its day was half an hour and
its night was thirty minutes--and all the stars appeared in turn,
including that nearest star which was the sun. The Milky Way spread
incredibly across the sky. Earth was blue-green and a bare speck of a
crescent--a crescent because it was to sunward, and a speck because
it was well over forty millions of miles away. Mars, to the outward,
was a perceptible disk the size of a quarter at forty feet. Already
photographs taken on spaceships and sent back to Earth by scanning
signal had disclosed features that even the giant telescopes on the
moon had not detected. Randy claimed to have seen Phobos and Deimos
with his naked eye, and perhaps he had. But most of the crew were too
busy for more than an occasional glance out at Mars.
The supply items to be carried by each drone rocket had to be regrouped
so that no one rocket would contain a disproportionate amount of any
one kind of supplies. It was to be expected that some loads would be
lost, so it was important to make sure that no one load, if it was not
landed or recovered, would cause crippling shortages of this item or
that.
There was, though, one bit of freight that would not be trusted to
rocket transport. The fuel for the atom-pile would go on the ship,
because if the ship did not land safely there'd be no Expedition, and
if it landed safely, the atomic fuel would be essential. The thin air
of Mars would have to be pumped up to the pressure required by the
human body, and its oxygen would have to be concentrated. There would
be need for heat during the bitter Martian nights. Power was necessary
for human life on Mars. And only atomic power would be adequate.
The first drone rocket lifted off Eros when the asteroid was a million
and a half miles from Mars. The rocket rushed ahead, dwindling until
it could no longer be seen among the stars. It carried a tank of
rocket fuel, a rocket motor, and a communications unit. That was all.
The drone was not streamlined, not pretty. It was a skeleton with
its drive at the tail, a shaft to tie the cargo to, and a television
camera at its nose. The first loads shipped were relatively unimportant
ones, so that initial disasters due to lack of experience would have
the least serious consequences. When the asteroid was a quarter of a
million miles farther on, more rockets were on the way. There were
two near-disasters. The rockets were prepared for launching during
the planetoid's half-hour "daylight," but they were launched when the
launching site was away from the sun and toward Mars farther out.
During daylight McCauley prepared one rocket for firing and returned to
the ship. Later Hathaway went out to set off that "night's" salvo. The
first rocket blew itself to bits when fired. Hathaway had a very narrow
escape.
The men figured out, afterward, that in the utter cold of the
planetoid's "night" the rocket motor had cooled to the brittle point
of metal. When the rocket was fired, the frozen metal flew apart
before it could warm up and thus restore normal strength throughout
its thickness. McCauley berated himself to Randy, because he had not
anticipated this fact. The rest of the salvo was held until "sunset"
the next day, and was fired within five minutes of the coming of
darkness, before the metal could cool to brittleness.
The other near-tragedy happened when a rocket took off and the flame
splashed against a glistening metallic upcrop and licked fiercely at
Soames' space-suited legs. He jumped convulsively, rose out of the
flame before it could either cook his legs or melt down his space suit,
and, gasping in horror, soared off and up to the length of his safety
rope. The rocket went past him no more than a dozen feet away. Its
exhaust could have burned him to a crisp, or at the least flashed his
plastic faceplate. That was a very close call indeed.
Presently Fallon came looking for McCauley. The mechanic was coming
off-shift and still wore his space suit. He opened the faceplate,
grinning nervously.
"Look here, Colonel," he said ingratiatingly, "I've got something I
want to say to you."
"Go ahead," said McCauley. He was still bitterly discontented with
himself. Actually, Soames should not have been so near the rocket
blast, but McCauley felt responsible because he hadn't ordered him
specifically away.
"Soames had a pretty close call," said Fallon nervously.
"Yes," said McCauley curtly.
"Hathaway had another," said Fallon. "When that rocket blew, he could
have been killed. He should've been."
"I know it," snapped McCauley.
"I ... I ..." Fallon hesitated. "Look, Colonel! We had a--disagreement.
I acted like a fool. I want to apologize."
McCauley scowled. There were innumerable things to worry about, and
Fallon was one of them. McCauley had taken the one line that might keep
Fallon from making trouble. He'd scared him, and it seemed to have
worked. But for Fallon to come to apologize was something else. It
meant that his attitude had changed from almost mutinous defiance to
panic.
"Forget it," said McCauley.
"I--didn't have you figured right," said Fallon shakily. "I thought
you were ... just the usual kind of character. I ... I know better
now. I'd--I'd like to ... well ... you're likely to need somebody to
help you. Maybe you don't think so, but if you knew you could count on
me...."
Fallon's voice practically clicked off, and McCauley realized that he
was terrified. The man was afraid to say something, but he was more
afraid not to.
"What would I need you for besides your duty?"
Fallon hesitated, licked his lips, and then said desperately:
"Soames and Hathaway--they almost got theirs. I've been thinking.
If ... accidents happened to us ... to all but you...."
"Go on," said McCauley, frowning.
"We're ... sending most of the stuff to Mars," stammered Fallon.
"B-but we're keeping the atom fuel on the ship. It's w-worth a lot. If
something happened to most of us ... why ... two men could take the
ship back to Earth and land it anywhere they wanted to. And if ... if a
person had contacts, that atom fuel would be w-worth a lot. Millions."
McCauley was jolted.
"Suppose," he said grimly, "that you tell me the rest of your idea."