"I'm a space pig," Pop said. "Space takes care of its own."
"You're in a bad way, old timer," Kane said, "and you haven't much
sense. I'm doing you a favor."
Pop lifted his hands in an instinctive gesture of futile protection as
the blaster erupted flame.
There was a smell in the control room like burnt meat as Kane
holstered his weapon and turned the old man over with a foot. Pop was
a blackened mass. Kane dragged him to the valve and jettisoned the
body into space.
* * * * *
Alone among the stars, _The Luck_ moved across the velvet night. The
steady beat of flame from her tubes was a tiny spark of man-made
vengeance on the face of the deeps.
From her turnover point, she drove outward toward the spinning Jovian
moons. For a short while she could be seen from the EMV Observatory on
Callisto, but very soon she faded into the outer darkness.
Much later, the Observatory at Land's End on Triton watched her
heading past the gibbous mass of Pluto--out into the interstellar
fastnesses.
The thrumming of the jets was still at last. A wild-eyed thing that
may once have been a man stared in horror at the fading light of the
yellow star far astern.
It had taken Kane time to understand what had happened to him, and now
it was too late. Space had taken care of its own. The air in _The
Luck_ was growing foul and the food was gone. Death hung in the fetid
atmosphere of the tiny control room.
The old man--the boy--the money. They all seemed to spin in a
narrowing circle. Kane wanted suddenly to shriek with laughter. A
circle. The turnover circle. The full circle that the old man had made
instead of the proper half-turn of a turnover. Three hundred sixty
degrees instead of one hundred eighty. Three hundred sixty degrees to
leave the nose of _The Luck_ pointing outward toward the stars,
instead of properly toward the Sun. A full circle to pile G on G until
the Jovian moons were missed, and the Uranian moons and Triton, too.
_Ad Astra per Ardua...._
With the last fragment of his failing sanity, Kane thought of how Pop
Ganlon and the boy must be laughing. He was still thinking that as the
long night closed in around him.
* * * * *