Tichron's trigger finger tightened. A thin beam flicked from the
blaster. Sound and light jarred the caverns....
V
Echoes of the blast died away in the distance. For a fragment of time,
the curious tableau held, then thought and perception began again.
Wilding, his face bleak, was amazed that he still lived.
At such range, a miss was impossible. But where Credus had stood was an
untidy heap of smoldering cloth and calcined rags of flesh.
Dazed by concussion, the survivors of Credus' party stared at the
grinning Tichron.
"I'm playing along with Wilding," he told them. "The one thing nobody
ever thought to offer me is a fair deal. I guess I'm just curious."
Still over aimed guns, the two groups faced each other as the strain
mounted between them.
"Go on, shoot," urged Wilding. "The odds are even now. You can kill
both of us, but we will take you with us. You have one second to drop
your guns or start shooting."
Indecision tortured the pair briefly, but their nerve failed. Weapons
clattered on the floor.
"What are you going to do with us?" one asked unhappily.
"Nothing, if you do as you're told. Where is everyone?"
The men talked willingly enough. As soon as the lighter had left,
Credus took over. Weapons were confiscated, all the women were seized
and taken to the lower caverns as hostages. Of the others, some had
followed Credus willingly, the rest had been threatened into obedience.
Except for his trusted cohorts, all convicts were ordered out of the
way pending the return of the lighter. If Wilding's project succeeded,
Credus wanted no one to interfere with his idea of snatching it away
for his own use.
Wilding snapped commands. The women were to be brought to the main
caverns at once. All others who wished to leave Alcatraz were to
assemble there without delay. Alarm had gone out during the taking of
the supply ship. Probably the patrol cruisers were already converging
upon the asteroid, so time was short.
Half an hour later, Wilding stepped before the thronged convicts to
address them. A hush fell as he looked grimly into the sea of faces,
pale from their sunless quarters and from excitement.
"I can't promise you freedom," he warned. "What I have in mind may
not be freedom at all to your way of thinking. All I offer is a
hard, dangerous life, and possibly a short one. I'll need strong men
and women for what I have in mind if we reach our destination. And
competent technicians, first, to see that we get there. If we make
it, you'll have a fighting chance at a new way of life. Life totally
different from any you may have known before."
"How many can go?" Tiny asked soberly.
Wilding shrugged. "All who will want to, probably ... when they've
heard my plan. It may be crowded, but for a short distance the lighter
and supply ship can carry all of you. And at the moment, the trip to
the asteroid belt is only a ferry run. Shorter than it will be for a
long time again."
He told them, then, of his plan. He told them of the fabulous treasure
he had stumbled upon in a derelict spaceship, and how he had invested
his treasure trove in a new-type spaceship bought and assembled
secretly, and hidden among the asteroids.
Like many others, Wilding had dreamed of leaving the Solar System and
plunging beyond the space barrier to find a new home among the stars.
Unlike some, he had tried to implement his dream, turning the loot
of his crime career to that purpose. But to head out beyond Pluto,
a venturer needs more than a spaceship. He needs other people as
desperate and as venturesome as himself to join his attempt. He needs a
hardy crew to get to the nearer stars, and once there, a people strong
and daring enough to seize a strange new world and colonize it.
Originally, Wilding had planned a raid on Alcatraz to pick up a likely
complement of tough souls, but the authorities had short-circuited
his scheme by sending him there. An opportunist and a realist, he had
adjusted his plan to the circumstances.
"Just breaking out of here to go back to the familiar worlds would be
useless. We need not freedom to go back to our old lives, but a new
kind of freedom. None of us can ever fit into the neatly standardized
social structures in the planets and moons we call our homes. We need
new settings where the adventurous man is not an anachronism. We must
start fresh and make a world over to our specifications. It will not
be a safe world, but it will never be as dull as those into which we
cannot fit.
"Who will go with me?"
Dead silence fell as Wilding finished. Even the most hardened convicts
exchanged dubious glances as if Wilding's words had given them new
perspectives on themselves and each other. Discussion started as a
murmurous trickle, increasing quickly to a flood of confused sound.
"What about those who don't go?" someone asked.
"I don't know," admitted Wilding. "Probably the authorities will
abandon the asteroid as a prison. They may remove all who stay behind
to some safer preserve. The stay-behinds are no concern of mine. Make
up your minds. As soon as the stores are aboard, we are leaving. Any
delay will be fatal, since the lighter and supply ship must get away
before the patrol ships can mine the likely orbits and establish a
spaceblock. There are no formalities, nothing to sign. Just be aboard
if you are going along...."
* * * * *
To the casual eye, the asteroid belt seemed as empty as the rest of
space. True, some suspiciously feeble stars altered the familiar
patterns of constellations, and several larger asteroids were clearly
visible by their own reflection of sunlight. But for the most part the
debris of a long-ago shattered planet was so widely distributed in
its orbital ring around the sun that only a trained astrogator could
realize the near approach to it.
Nearing the end of their long deceleration, the two ships seemed to
hang, unmoving, in blank space. Mass-detectors and proximity alarms
warned frequently of meteoric fragments, but the pair of fugitive ships
had so far encountered nothing of formidable or even interesting size.
Matter in the asteroid belt is so scattered, and most units so small,
that the odds are heavily against even accidental collision. Finding
one particle in a shower of dust motes is a matter of instruments and
mathematical calculators, not luck.
Pursuit was inevitable, but still invisible. Patrol ships were
certainly converging to hunt down the fugitives, but they were still
beyond range of the instruments. Wilding was satisfied by the progress
of his venture, though still under strain. There had been trouble
getting away from Alcatraz. Many convicts, though willing enough to
attempt escape, objected to joining his further plans. A determined few
had rioted and tried to seize the escape vessels for a mad dash back
to the familiar moons and planets of men. The riots had been brief and
bloody, though abortive.
Wilding avoided contact with his fellow fugitives. Grouth and Concor
had taken over technical management of the ships. Tiny and Tichron
were organizing the personnel. Amyth and Elshar, discovering a mutual
curiosity, were inseparable, and Wilding had seen neither of them
during the voyage. He felt, uneasily, that their long discussions might
be concerned with settling something in regard to him. And now that
the machinery of his great dream was actually in operation, he found
himself oddly depressed. When there is no immediate occupation for
hands or brain, the way of a leader is hard and lonely.
Brooding in his synthetic solitude, he wrestled with his greatest
opponent--himself. Black doubts crept into his soul. He longed for
crisis and the need for action.
It would come soon enough, he realized. Reaching the hidden spaceship
with his cargoes of human raw material was only the first step in
an endless obstacle course. Before personnel and materials could
be transferred to the starship and the ship itself made ready for
deep space, time would pass. Already the facts of the break-out
from Alcatraz must be known. A network of fast patrol cruisers was
slowly but surely closing in upon him. A getaway in the face of such
opposition would be touch and go at best. At worst, it would mean a
quick, inglorious end to his venture.
Troubled, he sought out Concor in the control room.
The Martian grinned at him, gestured toward the view-screen showing
space ahead. "Any moment now. The charts of this part of the Belt are
not too reliable. We're shaping our orbit now, and if the figures are
right, we'll overhaul your asteroid--"
Mass-detector alarms set up a demoniac clangor.
Grouth came into the control room. "Right on the nose," he said.
A point of light swam into visibility on the view-screen. It grew
swiftly, steadily, first in intensity, then in size, until it bulked
large, filling up the field of the screen.
Weak with relief, Wilding ordered the ship set down.
Hours later, in a spacesuit, he was overseeing removal of the
camouflaging which had turned the hidden ship into an irregular rock
protuberance. Gangs of workmen swarmed over the savage surface of the
asteroid, clearing away staging, loading supplies, and putting the ship
in readiness for take-off.
Doubts forgotten, Wilding threw himself into the work. He was in his
glory. Everything was working smoothly. Too smoothly. The work of
trans-shipping was approaching completion when disaster struck.
Tiny came out to him with word that Grouth and Concor wanted him in the
control room of the giant spacer christened _Starship I_. Her face was
very grave.
"It was a good try," she whispered as they entered the control room.
Wilding did not need to ask the trouble. Grouth's and Concor's faces
told him everything.
"The patrol cruisers?"