"Two of 'em. Just starting on an intersect with McGinty."
"Can we make it first, do you think?"
"Nip and tuck, skipper. Maybe. It's almost as if it's all a big
surprise to 'em. They're still way out in left field, maybe not quite
as close as we are."
Knight muttered something over the rasping voice on his H-F. "--ought
to get an Academy Award--"
He was right. Their acting and their timing couldn't have been more
perfect except that they had had to gamble from the first on getting to
McGinty before we did and still make things look all innocence. Maybe
we could make them lose that one, anyway. You could be too clever.
But they were armed, and that hedged their gamble pretty convincingly.
We had two clumsy jury-rigged torpedoes which might or might not hit
whatever they were fired at.
The voice halted, and then it was up to me. I was supposed to be the
one to make up the excuses, not Kolomar. I was the one who had to give
"an immediate account of the untoward and unadvised action" of my L-8s.
And Kolomar would let me sweat it out by myself.
"What'll I tell 'em, Ken?"
"Tell 'em--oh, hell. Tell them one of our crew went Space-psycho, and
that we're doing all in our power to recover him and the rig he's
flying before any inconvenience can occur which might disturb the
planned schedules of our esteemed Comrades of Space. One fairy tale's
as good as another."
Loftus reworded the message as nice as pie, and then after a minute
the H-F was quiet. For the record, things were fine. Of course, our
Comrades were going to "assist" in the recovery of our wayward crewman--
"We'll beat 'em, I think!" Knight was hollering.
"Any guns--" Loftus began. I answered that one myself.
"They'd ruin their own show," I said. "A premature show of muscle would
tip their hand. If they make it work this way, all we can ever do is
accuse, but we won't be able to prove a damn thing. And they'll know
what they want to know, and be ready for our quick little shuffle.
They'll be ready at those conference tables. If they miss this time,
they'll just try again later, another way."
"It sure reads fine," Loftus said. "But I wonder how soon they start
shooting."
We were both at the starboard port, watching. We could see McGinty's
L-8 out there, floating like a three-barrelled hour-glass, its tiny
rocket bank glowing red against the blackness, one side a blinding
white brightness in the sun.
The Moon hung like a chewed-up white basketball below the both of us,
and you could see the greenish cast of Earthshine stretching out a
little beyond the night shadow over the ridge of the lunar Appenines.
"How do you suppose they ever got wise to the microstats in the first
place?" Loftus was asking.
"We're still not sure they did. Or sure that he--or sure of anything,"
I snapped back at him.
"But you think it's McGinty all right, by this time. I mean--"
"I guess so," I said.
* * * * *
He turned from the port and looked square at me. His youthful face was
a strained, white thing, and if I saw a certain innocence in his young
eyes, I saw something else, too. He was the strange kid-man combination
you get in Space--just a youngster on the one side, and a latter-day
wizard on the other. A head full of scientific answers down to the last
decimal point--and full of that other stuff that makes a young man a
very young man; the kind of stuff we older guys like to wish could be
true, but know just can't be.
"Add it up yourself," I said. I was looking over his shoulder and
through the port again. There were other hour glasses out there now,
further from McGinty than we were still, but not by much. And to
our stern was another pin-point of winking red light and flashing
whiteness. Kolomar. We were closing on McGinty's L-8 fast now, and I
started for the closet where we kept the suits. Loftus grabbed my arm.
"Not the torpedoes if we can help it, kid," I said. "I'm going out when
we pull above him. On a line. If I can grab onto any of the framework,
maybe I can put his motors out of commission without blowing things
apart. If I can, then maybe we can nudge him all the way around, and
shove him all the way back if we have to."
Loftus just turned away. He was watching the red-white flash in the
blackness that was Kolomar's rig. I knew what he was thinking, and I
was glad he thought that way. Maybe, sometime, the youngsters could
play things their way, and we'd have that something a "little better"
that McGinty had always been hoping for.
And I guess Loftus knew the plan I outlined had less than a
thousand-in-one chance of coming through. Even if I managed to break
McGinty's fuel lines some way, this "nudging" business I talked about
was probably ninety per cent hokum. Even in an orbital state of
comparative weightlessness there was still inertia to consider, and any
direct contact we made with McGinty's L-8 could cave in our bulging
plasti-fabric fuel tanks. That, or split him wide open.
But I'd never be able to sleep again if I didn't try something before
Kolomar's torpedoes, and I didn't care what he saw me do.
I was all rigged out, standing by the airlock, about five hundred feet
of line in one gauntlet and a reaction tube in the other, when Knight's
voice slurred in my helmet receivers.
"Ken--hold it! He's busting the orbit! He's going to--my God. _Ken,
he's ditching her Moonside!_"
I had a time getting over to the port Loftus was crowding. What Knight
was saying was true. I made motions, and Loftus started helping me out
of my cumbersome Space outfit while I watched.
We were just about dead center over the Moon itself, and McGinty had
started drifting in what would have been a perfect, if wide, orbit
around it. Continuing in it, he'd've circled the side opposite Earth,
and then started back toward the orbit of our satellite. Either that,
or, as we'd expected, broken from it and rendezvoused with one of the
Comrades. Only it wasn't working that way.
* * * * *
McGinty was breaking his orbit, all right, but not toward Space. He
was going _down_. He had cut the stern rockets and was using his bow
jets to slow himself enough to kill the velocity that had balanced him
in his orbit. Slowly but as surely as politicians have two faces, Moon
gravity would take over, pull him down, split him wide open on the
jagged edge of Aristillus crater.
"He's out of his head," I heard Loftus saying. "Clean gone. An L-8
can't land; an orbit rig can't take even two Gs and hold together."
McGinty was peeling off, falling.
We just stood at the port and watched. Knight kept him in the
two-incher.
Falling in that lazy, gradual, ever-steepening airless glide until soon
it would be straight up-and-down. The Moon just hung there, cold,
bleak, waiting. Waiting to rip McGinty all to hell on the ragged peaks
of its gutted, inhumanly beautiful terrain. A strange love affair had
McGinty, through the satellite port as he played his accordion.
I was pulled out of it by the racket on the H-F receiver, and Loftus
was clambering over to it as fast as I was.
"This is Kolomar," the voice said. "Destroy him. Now. That's an order,
Kenton."
Loftus looked at me. So did Knight.