The two objects floating in space both looked like pitted pieces of rock.
The larger one, roughly pear-shaped and about a quarter of a mile in its
greatest dimension, was actually that--a hunk of rock. The smaller--_much_
smaller--of the two was a camouflaged spaceboat. The smaller was on a
near-collision course with reference to the larger, although their
relative velocities were not great.
At precisely the right time, the smaller drifted by the larger, only a few
hundred yards away. The weakness of the gravitational fields generated
between the two caused only a slight change of orbit on the part of both
bodies. Then they began to separate.
But, during the few seconds of their closest approach, a third body had
detached itself from the camouflaged spaceboat and shot rapidly across the
intervening distance to land on the surface of the floating mountain.
The third body was a man in a spacesuit. As soon as he landed, he sat
down, stock-still, and checked the instrument case he held in his hands.
No response. Thus far, then, he had succeeded.
He had had to pick his time precisely. The people who were already on this
small planetoid could not use their detection equipment while the
planetoid itself was within detection range of Beacon 971, only two
hundred and eighty miles away. Not if they wanted to keep from being
found. Radar pulses emanating from a presumably lifeless planetoid would
be a dead giveaway.
Other than that, they were mathematically safe--if they depended on the
laws of chance. No ship moving through the Asteroid Belt would dare to
move at any decent velocity without using radar, so the people on this
particular lump of planetary flotsam would be able to spot a ship's
approach easily, long before their own weak detection system would
register on the pick-ups of the approaching ship.
The power and range needed by a given detector depends on the relative
velocity--the greater that velocity, the more power, the greater range
needed. At one mile per second, a ship needs a range of only thirty miles
to spot an obstacle thirty seconds away; at ten miles per second, it needs
a range of three hundred miles.
The man who called himself Stanley Martin had carefully plotted the orbit
of this particular planetoid and then let his spaceboat coast in without
using any detection equipment except the visual. It had been necessary,
but very risky.
Had the people here seen his boat? If so, had they recognized it, in spite
of the heavy camouflage? And, even if they only suspected, what would be
their reaction?
He waited.
It takes nerve and patience to wait for thirteen solid hours without
moving more than an occasional flexure of muscles, but he managed that
long before the instrument case waggled a meter needle at him. The one
relieving factor was the low gravity; on an asteroid, the problem of
sleeping on a bed of nails is caused by the likelihood of accidentally
throwing oneself off the bed. The probability of puncture or discomfort
from the points is almost negligible.
When the needle on the instrument panel flickered, he got to his feet and
began moving. He was almost certain that he had not been detected.
Walking was out of the question. This was a silicate-alumina rock, not a
nickel-iron one. The group that occupied it had deliberately chosen it
that way, so that there would be no chance of its being picked out for
slicing by one of the mining teams in the Asteroid Belt. Granted, the
chance of any given metallic planetoid's being selected was very small,
they had not even wanted to take that chance. Therefore, without any
magnetic field to hold him down, and only a very tiny gravitic field, the
man had to use different tactics.
It was more like mountain climbing than anything else, except that there
was no danger of falling. He crawled over the surface in the same way that
an Alpine climber might crawl up the side of a steep slope--seeking
handholds and toeholds and using them to propel himself onward. The only
difference was that he covered distance a great deal more rapidly than a
mountain climber could.
When he reached the spot he wanted, he carefully concealed himself beneath
a craggy overhang. It took a little searching to find exactly the right
spot, but when he did, he settled himself into place in a small pit and
began more elaborate preparations.
Self-hypnosis required nearly ten minutes. The first five or six minutes
were taken up in relaxing from his exertion. Gravity notwithstanding, he
had had to push his hundred and eighty pounds of mass over a considerable
distance. When he was completely relaxed and completely hypnotized, he
reached up and cut down the valve that fed oxygen into his suit.
Then, of his own will, he went cataleptic.
* * * * *
A single note, sounded by the instruments in the case by his side, woke
him instantly. He came fully awake, as he had commanded himself to do.
Immediately, he turned up his oxygen intake, at the same time glancing at
the clock dial in his helmet. He smiled. Nineteen days and seven hours. He
had calculated it almost precisely. He wasn't more than an hour off, which
was pretty good, all things considered.
He consulted his instruments again. The supply ship was ten minutes away.
The smile stayed on his face as he prepared for further action.
The first two minutes were conscientiously spent in inhaling oxygen. Even
under the best cataleptic conditions, the body tended to slow down too
much. He had to get himself prepared for violent movement.
Eight minutes left. He climbed out of the little grotto where he had
concealed himself and moved toward the spot where he knew the air lock to
the caverns underneath the planetoid's surface was hidden. Then again, he
concealed himself and waited, while he continued to breathe deeply of the
highly oxygenated air in his suit. Five minutes before the ship landed, he
swallowed eight ounces of the nutrient solution from the tank in the back
of his helmet. The solution of amino acids, vitamins, and honey sugar also
contained a small amount of stimulant of the dexedrine type and one per
cent ethanol. Then he unholstered his gun.
It wasn't a big ship. He had known it wouldn't be. It was only a little
larger than the one he had used to come here. It dropped down to the
surface of the small planetoid only ten meters from the hidden trapdoor
that led to the air lock beneath the surface.
He could suddenly hear voices in the earphones of his helmet.
_Lasser?_
_It's me, Fritz. I got your supplies and good news._
The air lock trapdoor opened, and a spacesuited figure came out. _How
about the deal?_
_That's the good news,_ said the second suited figure as it came from the
air lock of the grounded spaceboat. _Another five million._
The man who was hidden behind the nearby crag of rock listened and watched
for a minute or so more while the two men began unloading cases of
foodstuffs from the spaceboat. Then, satisfied that it was perfectly safe,
he aimed his gun and shot twice in rapid succession. The range was almost
point-blank, and there was, of course, no need to take either gravity or
air resistance into account.
The pellets of the shotgun-like charge that blasted out from the gun were
small, needle-shaped, and heavy. They were oriented point-forward by the
magnetic field along the barrel of the weapon. Of the hundreds in each
charge fired, only a few penetrated the spacesuits of the targets, but
those few were enough. The powerful drug in the needle-pointed head of
each went into the bloodstream of the target.
Each man felt an itching sensation. He had less than two seconds to think
about it before unconsciousness overtook him and he slumped nervelessly.
The man with the gun ran across the intervening space quickly, his body
only a few degrees from the horizontal, and his toes paddling rapidly to
propel him over the rough rock.
He braked himself to a halt and slapped air patches over the area where
his charges had struck the men's suits, sealing the tiny air leaks, and,
at the same time, driving more of the tiny needles into their skins. They
would be out for a long time.
Neither of them had yet fallen to the ground; that would take several
minutes under this low gravity. He left them to drop and headed toward the
open air lock.
This was what he had been waiting for all those nineteen days in
cataleptic hypnosis. He couldn't have cut his way in from the outside; he
had had to wait until it was opened, and that time would come only when
the supply ship came.
Once in the air lock, he touched the control stud that would close the
outer door, pump air into the waiting room, and open the inner door. Here
was his greatest point of danger--greater, even, than the danger of coming
to the planetoid, or the danger of waiting nineteen days for the coming of
the supply ship. If the ones who remained within suspected
anything--anything at all!--then his chances of coming out of this alive
were practically nil.
But there was no reason why they should suspect. They should think that
the man coming in was one of their own. The radio contact between the men
outside had been limited to a few millimicrowatts of power--necessarily,
since radio waves of very small wattage can be decoded at tremendous
distances in open space. The men inside the planetoid certainly should not
have been able to pick up any more than the beginning of the conversation,
before it had been cut off by solid rock.
It was a high-speed air lock. Unlike the soundless discharge of his
special gun in the outer airlessness, the blast of air that came into the
waiting chamber was like a hurricane in noise and force, as the room
filled in a few seconds.
He held onto the handholds tightly while the brief but violent winds
buffeted him. He turned as the inner door opened.
His eyes took in the picture in a fraction of a second. In an even smaller
fraction, his mind assimilated the picture.
The woman was dark-haired, dark-eyed, and muscular. Her mouth was wide and
thick-lipped beneath a large nose.
The man was leaner and lighter, bony-faced and beady-eyed.