But a sound from outside halted him. Together the two men stared at the
viewplates. A siren had begun to shriek in the distance, the siren of a
racing ground car. Through the gates it plunged, scattering the light
wooden barrier. It spun crazily around on two wheels and came roaring
for the ship.
Andrias was in it.
Peter turned on the captain, and the gun was rigidly outthrust in his
hand.
"Close your ports!" he snarled. "Up rockets--in a hurry!"
"Listen, Peter," the captain began.
"I said, hurry!" The car's brakes shrieked outside, and it disappeared
from the view of the men. There was an abrupt babble of voices.
"Close your ports!" Peter shouted savagely. "Now!"
The captain opened his mouth to speak, then snapped it shut. He touched
the stud of a communications set, said into it, "Close ports. Snap to
it. Engine room--up rockets in ten seconds. All crew--stand by for
lift!"
The ship's own take-off siren howled shrilly, drowning out the angry
voices from below. Peter felt the whine of the electrics that dogged
shut the heavy pressure doors. He stepped to the pilot's chair, slid
into it, buckled the compression straps around him.
The instruments--he recognized them all, knew how to use them! Had he
been a rocket pilot before his mind had blanked--before embarking on
the more lucrative profession of gun smuggler? He wondered....
But it was the captain who took the ship off. "Ten seconds," Peter
said. "Get moving!"
The captain hesitated the barest fraction, but his eyes were on the
heat gun and he knew that Duane was capable of using it. "The men--" he
said. "If they're underneath when the jets go, they'll burn!"
"That's the chance they take," said Duane. "They heard the siren!"
The captain turned his head quickly, and his fingers flashed out.
He was in his own acceleration seat too, laced down by heavy canvas
webbing. His hands reached out to the controls before him, and his
fingers took on a life of their own as they wove dexterously across the
keys, setting up fire-patterns, charting a course of take-off. Then the
heel of his hand settled on the firing stop....
* * * * *
The acceleration was worse than Peter's clouded mind had expected,
but no more than he could stand. In his frame of mind, he could stand
almost anything, he thought--short of instant annihilation!
The thin air of Callisto howled past them, forming a high obligato to
the thunder of the jets. Then the air-howl faded sharply to silence,
and the booming of the rockets became less a thing of sound than a
rumble in the framework of the _Cameroon_. They were in space.
[Illustration: _The Cameroon blasted from its cradle, racing Andrias'
ships for open space._]
The captain's foot kicked the pedal that shut off the over-drive jets,
reducing the thrust to a mere one-gravity acceleration. He turned to
Duane.
"What now?" he asked.
Duane, busy unstrapping himself from the restraining belts, shook his
head without answering. What now? "_A damn good question!_" he thought.
The captain, with the ease of long practice, was already out of his own
pressure straps. He stood there by his chair, watching Duane closely.
But the gun was still in Duane's hand, despite his preoccupation.
Duane cocked an ear as he threw off the last strap. Did he hear voices
in the corridor, a distance away but coming.
The captain, looking out the port with considerable interest,
interrupted his train of thought. "What," he asked, "for instance, are
you going to do about--those?"
His arm was outstretched, pointing outward and down. Duane looked in
that direction--
The two patrol rockets were streaking up after his commandeered ship.
Fairy-like in their pastel shades, with the delicate tracery of girders
over their fighting noses, they nevertheless represented grim menace to
Duane!
He swore under his breath. The _Cameroon_, huge and lumbering, was
helpless as a sitting bird before those lithe hawks of prey. If only he
knew which side the ships were on. If only he knew--anything!
He couldn't afford to take a chance. "Stand back!" he ordered the
captain. The man in blue gave ground before him, staring wonderingly as
Duane advanced. Duane took a quick look at the control set-up, tried to
remember how to work it.
It was so tantalizingly close to his memory! He cursed again; then
stabbed down on a dozen keys at random, heeled the main control down,
jumped back, even as the ship careened madly about in its flight, and
blasted the delicate controls to shattered ashes with a bolt from his
heat gun. Now the ship was crippled, for the time being at least. Short
of a nigh-impossible boarding in space, the two patrol cruisers could
do nothing with it till the controls were repaired. The _Cameroon_, and
its cargo of political dynamite, would circle through space for hours
or days.
It wasn't much--but it was the best he could do. At least it would give
him time to think things over.
No. He heard the voices of the men in the corridor again, tumbled about
by the abrupt course change--luckily, it had been only a mild thing
compared to the one that had killed Stevens and caused his own present
dilemma--but regaining their feet and coming on. And one of the voices,
loud and harsh, was Andrias! Somehow, before the ports closed, he'd
managed to board the _Cameroon_!
* * * * *
Duane stood erect, whirled to face the door. The captain stood by it.
Duane thrust his heat gun at him.
"The door!" he commanded. "Lock it!"
Urged by the menace of the heat gun, the captain hurriedly put out a
hand to the lock of the door--
And jerked it back, nursing smashed knuckles, as Andrias and four men
burst in, hurling the door open before them. They came to a sliding,
tumbling halt, though, as they faced grim Duane and his ready heat
pistol.
"Hold it!" he ordered. "That's right.... Stay that way while I figure
things out. The first man that moves, dies for it."
Dark blood flooded into Andrias' face, but he said no word, only
stood there glaring hatred. The smear of crimson had been brushed
from his face, but his nose was still awry and a huge purplish bruise
was spreading over it and across one cheek. The three men with him
were guards. All were armed--the police with hand weapons as lethal
as Duane's own, Andrias with an old-style projective-type weapon--an
ancient pistol, snatched from some bewildered spaceman as they burst
into the _Cameroon_.
Duane braced himself with one arm against the pilot's chair and stared
at them. The crazy circular course the blasted controls had given the
ship had a strong lateral component; around and around the ship went,
in a screaming circle, chasing its own tail. There was a sudden change
in the light from the port outside; Duane involuntarily looked up for a
moment. Dulled and purplish was the gleam from the brilliant stars all
about; the _Cameroon_, in its locked orbit, had completed a circle and
was plunging through its own wake of expelled jet-gases. He saw the two
patrol rockets streak past; then saw the flood of rocket-flares from
their side jets as they spun and braked, trying to match course and
speed with the crazy orbit of the _Cameroon_.
He'd looked away for only a second; abruptly he looked back.
"Easy!" he snapped. Andrias' arm, which had begun to lift, straightened
out, and the scowl on the governor's face darkened even more.
_Clackety-clack._ There was the sound of a girl's high heels running
along the corridor, followed by heavier thumps from the space boots of
men. Duane jerked his gun at Andrias and his police.
"Out of the way!" he said. "Let's see who's coming now."
It was the girl. Red hair fluttering in the wake of her running, face
alight with anxiety, she burst into the room.
"Peter!" she cried. "Andrias and his men--"
She stopped short and took in the tableau. Duane's eyes were on her,
and he was about to speak. Then he became conscious of something in her
own eyes, a sudden spark that flared even before her lips opened and a
thin cry came from them; even before she leaped to one side, at Andrias.
Peter cursed and tried to turn, to dodge; tried to bring his heat gun
around. But a thunder louder than the bellowing jets outside filled the
room, and a streak of livid fire crossed the fringe of Peter's brain.
Sudden blackness closed in around him. He fell--and his closing eyes
saw new figures running into the room, saw the counterplay of lashing
heat beams.
_This is it_--he thought grimly, and then thought no more.