"The Stanton boys. Come look."
Frobisher sighed. "Who are the Stanton boys, and why should I come
look?" But he got up and came over to the window.
"See--over there on the walkway toward the play area," his wife said.
"I see a boy pushing a wheeled contraption and three girls playing with
a skip rope," Frobisher said. "Or do you mean that the Stanford boys are
dressed up as girls?"
"_Stanton_," she corrected him. "They just moved into the apartment on
the first floor."
"Who? The three girls?"
"No, silly! The two Stanton boys and their mother. One of them is in
that 'wheeled contraption'. It's called a therapeutic chair."
"Oh? So the poor kid's been hurt. What's so interesting about that,
aside from morbid curiosity?"
The boy pushing the chair went around a bend in the walkway, out of
sight, and Frobisher went back to his coffee while his wife spoke.
"Their names are Mart and Bart," she said. "They're twins."
"I should think," Frobisher said, applying himself to his breakfast,
"that the mother would get a self-powered chair for the boy instead of
making the other boy push it."
"The poor boy can't control the chair, dear," said Mrs. Frobisher, still
looking out the window after the vanished twins. "There's something
wrong with his nervous system. I understand that he was exposed to some
kind of radiation when he was only two years old. That's why the chair
has to have all those funny instruments built into it. Even his
heartbeat has to be controlled electronically."
"Shame," said Frobisher, spearing a bit of sausage. "Kind of rough on
both of 'em, I'd guess."
"How do you mean, dear?"
"Well, I mean, like ... well, for instance, why are they going over to
the play area? Play games, right? So the one that's well has got to push
his brother over there. Can't just get out and go; has to take the
brother along, too. Kind of a burden, see?"
Mrs. Frobisher turned away from the window. "Why, Larry! I'm surprised
at you. Really! Don't you think the boy _should_ take care of his
brother?"
"Oh, now, honey, I didn't mean that. It's hard on _both_ of 'em. The kid
in the chair has to sit there and watch his brother play baseball or
jai alai or whatever, while he can't do anything himself. Like I say,
kind of rough on both of 'em."
"Well, yes, I suppose it must be. Want some more coffee?"
"Thanks, honey. And another slice of toast, hunh?"
_[10]_
Like some horrendous, watchful gargoyle, the Nipe crouched motionlessly
on the shadowed roof of the low building. A short projection from the
air-conditioning intake was wide enough to keep him from being seen from
the air, and the darkness of the roof prevented anyone on the street
from seeing the four violet eyes that kept a careful account of all that
went on in the store across the way from his observation post.
The lights were still on inside the shop, shedding their glareless
brightness through the transparent display windows to fall upon the
street outside in large luminous pools. The Nipe knew exactly what each
man remaining inside was doing, and approximately what each would be
doing for the next few minutes, and he watched with the expectation that
his prophecies would be fulfilled.
He had watched long and made a thorough study of this establishment, and
tonight he expected to attain the goal for which he had worked so
patiently.
This raid was important in two ways. There were pieces of equipment he
had to get, and they were in that shop. On the other hand, this raid
was, and would be, basically a diversionary tactic. Now that he had
located his real target, it was time to create a diversion that would
draw his enemy's attention away from his immediate surroundings. This
would be a raid that Colonel Walther Mannheim could not ignore!
Two men came out the front door. They spoke to someone still inside. "So
long." "See you tomorrow." Then they walked down the street together,
conversing in low tones.
The Nipe waited.
Not until a fifth man stopped after he opened the door and flipped a
switch on the inside did the Nipe make any motion. Then he flexed his
four pairs of limbs in anticipation--but it wasn't quite time to act
yet.
The interior lights of the shop went out. Then the man carefully locked
the front door, setting the alarms within the shop. Then, serene in the
belief that his establishment was thoroughly protected from burglars,
he, too, went down the street.
The Nipe waited a few minutes longer before he left his observation
post. All was normal, he decided. The time for action had come.
* * * * *
The Nipe moved cautiously along the alley toward the rear of the
building that was his target. The night watchman had returned to his
cubicle, as he always did after his preliminary inspection of the
building's alarm system. He would not leave for some time yet, if he
followed his habits. And the Nipe saw no reason why he should not.
Carefully he approached the rear door of the little optical shop.
_[11]_
The two massive objects floating in space looked very much like deeply
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 huge
hunk of rock. The smaller--_much_ smaller--of the two was not what it
appeared to be. It was a phony. Anyone who had been able to conduct a
very close personal inspection of it would have recognized it for what
it was--a camouflaged spaceboat.
The camouflaged spaceboat was on a near-collision course with reference
to the larger mass, 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
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. Mathematically safe they
would be if--and only if--they depended upon 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 pickups of
an approaching ship.
The power and range needed by a given detector depends on the relative
velocity--the greater that velocity becomes, 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 had let his spaceboat coast in
without using any detection equipment except the visual. It had been
necessary, but very risky.
The Asteroid Belt, that magnificently useful collection of stone and
metal lumps revolving about the sun between the orbits of Mars and
Jupiter, is somewhat like the old-fashioned merry-go-round. If every
orbit in the Belt were perfectly circular, the analogy would be more
exact. If they were, then every rock in the Belt would follow every
other in almost exactly the way every merry-go-round horse follows every
other. (The gravitational attraction between the various bodies in the
Belt can be neglected. It is much less, on the average, than the
gravitational pull between any two horses on a carousel.) If every orbit
of those millions upon millions of pieces of rock and metal were
precisely circular, then they would constitute the grandest, biggest
merry-go-round in the universe.
But those orbits are not circular. And even if they were, they would not
remain so long. The great mass of Jupiter would soon pull them out of
such perfect orbits and force them to travel about the sun in elliptical
paths. And therein lies the trouble.
If their paths were exactly circular, then no two of that vast number of
planetoids would ever collide. They would march about the sun in precise
order, like the soldiers in a military parade, except that they would
retain their spacing much longer than any group of soldiers could
possibly manage to do.
But the orbits are elliptical. There is a chance that any two given
bodies _might_ collide, although the chance is small. The one
compensation is that if they do collide they won't strike each other
very hard.
The detective was not worried about collision; he was worried about
observation. 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
making any motion other than an occasional flexing of muscles, but he
managed that long before the instrument case that he held waggled a
meter needle at him. The one tension-relieving factor was the low
gravity; the problem of sleeping on a bed of nails is caused by the
likelihood of the sleeper accidentally throwing himself 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 of people 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--but they had not wanted to take even that chance.
Therefore, without any magnetic field to hold him down, and with only a
very tiny gravitic field, the detective 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 exertions. Gravity notwithstanding,
he had had to push his hundred and eighty pounds 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 at 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 really 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 human 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 airlock 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 percent ethanol.
He waited for another minute for the solution to take effect, then he
unholstered his gun.
The supply ship wasn't a big one. He had known it wouldn't be. It was
only a little larger than the one he had used to come out here. It
dropped down to the surface of the small planetoid only ten meters from
the hidden trapdoor that led to the airlock beneath the surface.
Suddenly he could hear voices in the earphones of his helmet.
_Lasser?_
_Yeah. It's me, Fritz. I got all the supplies and a nice package of good
news._
The airlock 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 airlock of the grounded spaceboat. _Another five million._
The detective, hidden behind the nearby crag of rock, listened and
watched for a minute or so 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 massive. They were oriented point-forward
by the magnetic field along the barrel of the weapon. Of the hundreds of
charges 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 tiny crystal went directly into the bloodstream of each 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.
Gun in hand, the detective 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 areas 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 airlock.
This was what he had been waiting for all those nineteen days in
cataleptic hypnosis. He couldn't have cut his way into the hideout from
the outside; he had had to wait until it was opened, and that time had
come only with the supply ship.
Once in the airlock, 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 itself, or the danger of waiting nineteen days
in a cataleptic trance 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 micromilliwatts 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 early conversation before it had been cut
completely off by the intervening layers of solid rock.
The chamber he entered was a high-speed airlock. 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. The room filled with air in a very few seconds.
The detective held on to 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.