Holcomb:I don't know exactly why—except that you're the best there is, I guess—but you've been picked for this job.As you may have guessed, Transolar Express is a blind for some pretty big Government bureaus. This isn't a ship the TSN cancelled, of course. It's a top-secret job built according to the specifications laid down by the Titan labs.When you hit Titan, turn the ship over to the technicians there, and they'll install the additional equipment that's part of your cargo of "pile fuels." The rest of your load really is fuel, but it's not meant for the Titan pile—it's for the engines in the ship.When it's ready, you'll fly the ship to God knows where. You won't refuse, I know, because I wouldn't either, if I'd been given the chance to fly the first ship into hyperspace.Luck,Weidmann.
Holcomb:
I don't know exactly why—except that you're the best there is, I guess—but you've been picked for this job.
As you may have guessed, Transolar Express is a blind for some pretty big Government bureaus. This isn't a ship the TSN cancelled, of course. It's a top-secret job built according to the specifications laid down by the Titan labs.
When you hit Titan, turn the ship over to the technicians there, and they'll install the additional equipment that's part of your cargo of "pile fuels." The rest of your load really is fuel, but it's not meant for the Titan pile—it's for the engines in the ship.
When it's ready, you'll fly the ship to God knows where. You won't refuse, I know, because I wouldn't either, if I'd been given the chance to fly the first ship into hyperspace.
Luck,Weidmann.
When I'd finished it, I went back to the engine room and took a look at the drive. Then I went to the cargo compartment and stood looking at the hatches. They were sealed—welded shut.
I went back up forward, and waited until Pat had to leave the controls for a few minutes.
The minute she dropped through the hatch I was over at an emergency tool kit, and a few seconds later I was ripping off bulkhead panels with a screwdriver. I got a fast look at banks of dials and instruments, and slapped the panels back up before Pat got back. Then I went down to my cabin and just sat on a bunk, staring at the wall.
That cocky little bastard! That frozen-faced terrier of a man, cursing me with all his heart because I was getting the chance he'd have had, if he hadn't given his right arm too soon!
And he had wished me luck.
I was proud, then, of being an Earthman, of being a fighting man, of having earned the right to get my name in the history books.
I stood there, a big dumb jack-ass.
All of a sudden, it had hit me. I'd been asking a lot of questions lately, and getting only partial answers. Now I had all the answers, and I hated every one of them.
The misdirection and lying on Weidmann's part was clear as a bell. It had been designed to get me off Earth and headed for Titan without anybody knowing the real reasons—even me. They knew that if the real secret ever leaked out, every renegade and pirate in the system would swarm down, battling to the death to get their hands on this ship.
So they pulled the purloined letter gag. They hid the ship and its mission in plain sight. They sent me off in her to deliver the engine parts to where the hyperspatial drive could be assembled, and from there I'd be able to fly her to whatever star they chose, ghosting along in a universe where the speed of light as we knew it was not the fastest speed a ship could hit.
They'd given me a good excuse, too. "Pile fuels!" A big enough cargo to justify using me and a special ship, but not so big that I couldn't handle the opposition I'd get from the Belt gangs, who'd fight for it, sure, but who'd try a lot less hard, and discourage a lot easier, than they would if they knew what was really up.
The only trouble with that was that they did know.
Sure—what else could it be? Earth was thick with two-bit sneaks and spies who sold information to anybody with the price. Even Earth government thought enough of them to cook up this big production. One of them must have dug deeper than anyone thought.
Thorsten knew, that was a cinch. He knew so well, that he hadn't even wanted to chance a fight out in space, where the drive might get shot up. He'd sent Pat out to decoy me into him.
I stood there, cursing, my big fists closed into sledges. Pat—Pat, that beautiful, wonderful actress. Pat, who was death with a gun and arson for me with her lips.
All my life, I'd been getting mad at people and things. During the war, I was crazy mad at Marties. Afterward, I was mad at anybody who wanted to push other people around. I got mad at Pat, because I thought she was playing me for a sucker.
And Pat had taught me what hatred could do. She'd given me love to replace it.
And played me for a sucker.
I stood there—Ash Holcomb, the toughest man in space, maybe. Not the smartest—no, not the smartest. The dumbest, the stupidest chump who'd ever fallen for the oldest gag in history.
And nobody knew about it. Back on Earth, they were sure they'd gotten away with it. Even Weidmann—Weidmann with the grin, Mort Weidmann who had gone helling around in a hundred dives with me, who didn't need obvious signs like long hair or breasts to spot a woman's figure—he thought everything was all right, too. He was probably shaking his head with envy, back on Earth, thinking of all the fun I'd be having in hyperspace.
Nobody knew the mess the System was in, except me. And nobody could do anything about it, now, except me.
That thought knocked me out of the raging mood I had been working myself into. I couldn't afford to lose my head.
I'd been wondering how Thorsten was going to work a rendezvous right in the middle of the Belt, with renegade Marties that had held out from the war swarming all over the place, just waiting for a prize like this.
The answer was simple—he'd worked out an alliance with them. Probably the Marties thought they could use it to reconquer the System. If I knew Harry, he had other plans, but they were probably just as bad.
What in hell was I going to do?
One more thought hit me, that was the worst one of all, because it held out an impossible hope.
It was all right to picture Weidmann getting a boot out of me taking a woman along. Under ordinary circumstances, that might have been true. But this was too big, too important. There were two alternatives.
Weidmann must have known I was a D.O. I could assume that. But, knowing how important the job was, Weidmann wouldn't have let Pat come along, no matter what,if he hadn't thought she and I were working together.
And that one stopped me cold.
Was she, or wasn't she?
V
What was Pat doing, tied up with Thorsten? She was a high grade operator now, as far from the immature tease I'd known at the Academy as I could imagine. Where had she learned to handle a gun like that? Where had she gotten the experience that let her handle a job this size by herself?
I couldn't answer that—not any of it, and it was driving me nuts. I stared over the control banks at the forward screen, watching the stars, and beating my brains out.
We'd been out in space for two days, and I hadn't dared to try and find out. You don't, when you're alone with the woman you love.
She was standing next to me, and I looked up at her. The coveralls gave a pretty good indication of what lay beneath, and it was top grade. Not that her figure was that spectacular—she had something more than figures on a tape measure. There was a precision, a slim freshness and freedom to the way one curve flowed into another. It sounds silly, but the way she held herself reminded me of a thing I'd seen once; a rocket transiting the sun, fire sparkling from the shimmering hull, and the Milky Way behind it.
I finally caught what I was trying to phrase; she looked as if she was poised for flight.
She grinned down at me. "Like it?" she asked, chuckling. Her green eyes crackled with light, and there were little demons in her laugh.
I tried to think of a clever comeback, but I couldn't. I just said, "Yes."
I did like it. And I hated it, at the same time.
The ship was fast, but space is big. I had a week to plan my next moves while we worked our way through the area between Earth and Mars' orbit where the TSN kept the raiders down.
But the week went by, and I didn't think of anything. I'd be working over the control board, and then I'd look up, and she'd be smiling at me. I'd raise an eyebrow, and she'd stick her tongue out. We shared cigarettes. I'd take a drag, hand her the butt, and she'd cuff me when I blew smoke in her face.
"Hey, Goon," she'd say from behind the plotting board, "d'ja hear the one about the lady sociologist who wandered into Bessie's place on Venus?"
I taught her original verses toThe Song of the Wandering Spacemen. Then she taught me the verses she knew.
We crossed Mars' orbit. I couldn't think of any way to find out what I'd been killing myself over except to ask.
"Ever hear of the D.O.'s?" I asked quietly.
"Will chewing chlorophyl tablets cure 'em?" she asked.
I laughed so hard that I cried.
"I don't think so," I answered automatically, and got busy checking the breech assembly on one of the ship's rocket launchers.
"Lay off that, apeface," Pat said. "We won't need it."
"How come?"
"If anybody comes around looking unfriendly, just give 'em this on the radio," she said, and whistled off a recognition signal in Martian.
I turned slowly away from the launcher.
Thorsten did have a deal with the Marties. What was more, Pat was in on it. She had to be.
She looked at my face.
"What's the matter, Lump? Something you ate?"
"Sit down, Pat," I said, pointing to the navigation table. "Go on, sit down!" I yelled.
She turned white.
"You know what kind of a ship this is, don't you?" I said, feeling like I was a hundred years old.
"Sure." She nodded. She was beginning to get it. "You weren't supposed to know about that."
"I didn't. Not until we were spaceborne."
Didn't she realize? Couldn't she see what she was doing to me?
"Pat, do you know what'll happen if the Marties get this drive? They'll be able to hit Earth and Venus with everything they've got, coming out of nowhere and going back into hyperspace when they're through. The TSN won't stand a chance against them."
She shrugged. "They probably would, if they ever got it, but they won't. Harry's going to assemble the drive, install it in his ships, and then we'll take off. The Marties'll be stuck."
"Wait a minute—you just mentioned taking off. Where to?"
She looked up at me. "Harry says there's another planet out in hyperspace, somewhere, circling another star. He says people can live on it." Her eyes were shining, and I remembered a girl on a terrace, back at the Academy, with a dream in her voice that I'd been too dumb to recognize.
"He does, does he? Can he prove it? How do you know what he's really going to do?"
"Because he's told me!" she flared. "He's going to by-pass the fumbling bureaucrats who run things on Earth and take mankind out to the stars—mankind, Ash, the toughest, the strongest men in space, and their women. Space belongs to us, Ash, not to those Earthbound lilies!"
"And whose speech are you repeating?" I said, getting more and more mad every minute. "Thorsten's?"
"Yes!"
"All right, if you think so God damned much of him, suppose you tell me what he is to you now?" I asked.
"He's my husband." She didn't even hesitate.
I started for her, before I could think of words for the doublecrossing....
She came off the navigation table like a coiled spring. She had a gun in her hand.
"Ash—get back! I don't want to hurt you. Ash—can't you see why? Do you think I'm the kind who—?"
I kept coming. "No," I said, "I can't see why. I'm not built so I could see why. And yes, I do think you're the kind."
"I don't know why I had to pick you!" she screamed then. "Maybe I remembered something—maybe I found something out, after it was too late—"
She was crying, but she was bringing the gun up at the same time.
I didn't care. I didn't care if she pulled the trigger or not.
"I told you," I said between my teeth.
She had the gun aimed right at me. Her face was gray, and her hand was shaking.
"I told you the last time what I'd do if you ever pointed a gun at me again." My voice was coming out low, but it had absolutely nothing in it. It was just words, coming out one by one.
The gun muzzle was shaking badly. She put up her hand to steady it.
"I—" she said. There were tears running down her cheeks in a steady wet stream.
She should have pulled the trigger. I think she should have. But she didn't.
I smashed my fist against the gun, and it was out of her hands, crashing into metal somewhere.
"Ash!" she screamed, and raked her nails across my face.
She kicked up her knee, and fire exploded in my groin. I fell forward, slamming her down on the deck, and threw my entire dead weight across her shoulders.
I didn't have to. Her head had hit the deck, and she lay unconscious, blood seeping out through her hair.
She wouldn't talk to me. She lay on her bunk, her chest rising and falling under the straps I'd buckled around her.
I tried to explain, to make her understand, somehow.
"Pat, I've got a responsibility to the people I work for. I've spent the last ten years keeping characters like Harry Thorsten from taking over this System. It's a rough job, and it's a dirty one. I can't help that. I don't like it. Pat, it's got to be this way."
She wouldn't talk to me. She wouldn't listen. I walked out of her cabin, locking the door behind me.
Locking a door and forgetting what's on the other side are two different things.
I went up to the control room and set a course for Titan. Maybe once we got out there, I'd be able to convince her.
It was a lousy hope. I didn't even understand her—she was like something I'd never seen before. How could she be like she was? How, goddam it,how?
VI
Titan lay ahead of me, pursuing its track around Saturn.
My ship drove toward it, flaming out fuel in reckless amounts as I poured on the acceleration. I had to get there fast. We'd already missed our rendezvous time with Thorsten by two days. He was going to figure out what happened—must have done so already—and would be hot behind us. I had to land, get the engines installed, load supplies, and take off into hyperspace before he hit.
It was a race against time. I built up velocity to a point no sane skipper would ever dream of, leaving just enough fuel to brake with, knowing I wouldn't need it to get back.
Part of me sat in the control room, plotting curves, charting fuel consumption figures on a graph, watching the black line rise hour by hour to the red crayon slash that meant I had done all I could.
And part of me was down in the cabin with Pat, but if I'd let the two parts mix....
No ship in the System had ever hit the speed I begged out of my ship's heaving engines. No human being had ever traveled as fast before, tracing his track across the white stars in the blue fire of his jets.
If I made it to Titan in time to get into hyperspace, I would have Pat with me. There'd be stars to look at, and the worlds that circled them. Star on star, marching past the ship, world after spinning world, fair against the stars, and a million things to see, a thousand lifetimes to live.
Out there, where other beings lived, was adventure enough for both of us, and enough of dreaming. Maybe she'd forget Thorsten, maybe some of the things she'd said had been lies, maybe the whisperings in darkness were true.
If I could get to Titan in time.
I might as well have walked. I knew there was no hope before I finished landing.
Titan was an empty moon. Where the project bubble had been was a circle of fused concrete around a mess of melted alloys. A corpse in a TSN spacesuit lay on its back and stared at Saturn.
I looked down at it, cursing, my shoulders slumping under the weight of my helmet.
And I heard the voice on the command frequency.
"Hey—you—you down by the bubble." The voice was weak, and getting weaker.
"Yeah!" I shouted into my mike.
"Holcomb?"
"Yeah, for Christ's sake! Where are you?"
"Your right—about a hundred yards. Start walking over here. I'll talk you in."
I started off at a lope, kicking my way over the rough ground. That voice was pitifully weak.
I found him, curled around a rock, his head and arm supported on a rifle that was leaned against the stone.
"Holcomb—"
"Yeah." He couldn't even turn his head to look at me.
"I'm Foster—Lou Foster. Commanding, Marine guard detail."
I remembered him. The one who filled a practice football with water.
"Yeah, Lou. How's it?"
"No damn good at all, Ash. I've been waiting for you."
"Thorsten?"
"Yeah—our old classmate, Harry the horse. About thirty-forty hours back."
"You been in that thing all this time!"
"Sure—snap, if you breathe shallow and don't drink anything. Helps to have a couple of spare tanks." He could still try to chuckle.
"Well, hell, guy, let's get you over to my ship."
"No can do, Ash. No sense to it."
I was straining to hear the words now, even with his set right next to mine, I knelt down and touched helmets with him.
"Listen, Ash—he's got the stuff. The diagrams, the charts, the figures—everything. He's even got the tech detail to put it together for him."
"All right, Lou. It figured. But can the yak. Come on, boy, over my shoulder you go, and down to the can with you."
"Lemme lay! Goddam it, quit tryin' to move me! I didn't walk over here—I got flung when the dome let go!" He was screaming.
"Sorry, Lou!"
"S'all right." He bubbled a chuckle. "I see by my infallible little TSN instruments that I'm gonna run outta breathin' material 'na couple minutes. 'S'all right by me. Luck to ya, Ash."
"Yeah."
But he didn't strangle. He didn't choke in his helmet; there was still air in his tanks when he died.
I went back to my ship and sat behind the control board, smoking a cigarette. I rubbed a hand across my tired eyes, and wondered what I was going to do next.
Thorsten had thought of everything. He couldn't have found technicians to assemble the drive anywhere else, so he'd come out here and kidnapped them. That was an elementary move, obviously planned far in advance.
I'd been running a useless race. I would have realized it long ago, if I hadn't been half-crazy about Pat.
She laughed at me when I told her about it, but she laughed in a peculiar way.
"I could have told you," she said, laughing. "Ash Holcomb, the big undercover agent, heading like mad for Titan! And what does he find?"
"I found Lou Foster, Pat," I said, feeling the steel in my voice slicing upward in my throat.
"That wasn't anybody's fault!" she said quickly. "He happened to get in Harry's way."
"Go tell Andrea Foster," I said.
"Stop it, Ash! You can keep bringing up horrible examples, but it still doesn't mean anything, compared to travel to the stars."
"What was wrong with the way it was going to be done?" I asked.
But she was pulling her protective shell of mockery around her again. "Oh, stop it, Ash! You're licked, and now you're trying to justify it by claiming foul, the way losers always have."
But the last thing she said, as I slammed out of the cabin, was: "This time, you got the spanking, Ash. Now stop crying about it." But somehow, she didn't sound as happy as she'd probably expected.
I took the ship back out into space, finally, heading Sunward. All I could do was hope I'd get within radio range of a TSN ship before Thorsten found me.
But that didn't happen. I wasn't anywhere near the Belt when I had to sit and watch Thorsten's fleet come flaming at me out of space and surround my ship, sliding into tight courses that held me on a deadly and invisible leash.
And I could feel things crumbling inside me. All the principles the Academy had built in, and love, and fear—remorse, friendship, bravery—none of it meant anything. They were things that human hearts and minds were capable of, but when yesterday's love is today's revulsion, when friends are deadly enemies, when all the world thinks of you as just another space bum—what then? I had the destiny of the System riding in the holds behind me, and nobody really knew or cared that I'd break my heart to keep it safe.
They were my eyes, but they weren't altogether normal as I stared out of the control room screens at the waiting fleet.
They kept their distances. They all had their launchers pointed at me, and on a few of the old T Class rack-mounts I could see the homing torps lying in wait on the flat upper decks.
I went back to Pat's cabin. She was sitting up on her bunk, staring at me. Fire lay buried deep in her eyes, but she kept her face smooth.
"Okay, Pat," I said. "Thorsten's got his crew in a globe around me. He wants this ship. Should I give it to him?"
What I was saying didn't match my voice. I was tired, and mad, and I couldn't look at her. I could feel my lower teeth sliding back and forth against my upper ones.
"No—I know you too well, Ash," she said. "Not the way you'd give it to him." She pushed herself up and stood in front of me. Her eyes kept getting wider and wider. "Ash! You're crazy. If you think you can fight your way out of this—" her voice broke. "You know you don't have a chance. I've seen Harry's fleet in action. This is one ship, Ash—one ship!"
Her entire body was radiating urgency. She was standing stiff-legged, every muscle quivering, trying to get her words through the desperate red haze that was building up in front of my eyes. I couldn't see her very clearly.
But I could see her well enough to laugh at her.
"Fight?" I said. "Fight?I've had fighting—all the fighting I'm ever going to do. I've been fighting too much, too often. I had a name and a friend, once—and I had a girl, once, too. Now all I've got is a job, and some orders, and a conscience, maybe. No—I'm not going to fight." I threw back my head and laughed again. I reached out and grabbed her arm. "Come on—you're going to have a grandstand seat."
I pulled her up the companionway and into the control room, and threw her into the co-pilot's seat. I pulled out my gun.
"Reach for those controls," I said, "and I'll blow your hand off." She sat in the chair, her face gray, staring out at Thorsten's fleet.
I reached over and switched the radio to Thorsten's frequency.
"Thorsten!"
"Yes. Holcomb?"
His, too, wasn't quite the same voice it had been. It was even, clipped, used to commanding a crew that didn't enjoy being commanded.
"I've got Pat," I said, keeping my gun on her.
"Let's stick to relevancies, Holcomb. How much for the ship?"
He'd given himself away! I could have laughed.
"No, Thorsten, let's keep it where I want it—how much for Pat?"
There was a pause on the other transmitter. I was playing my cards right. Thorsten had me, and the ship. But I had his wife, and that was swinging the scales my way. Why should he offer to pay me, now? A bluff? No—he had a better one in the ships, with their launchers ready. Why should he be willing to dicker for the ship? Because she was in it, that was why. If I refused to give up, he could always blow me out of space, or take the ticklish chance of trying to disable the ship without wrecking the engines. But he wasn't going to do that. Pat was worth too much to him.
"Thorsten! You heard me—how much for your wife?"
He cursed me. His voice was a lot lower than it had been.
"I've got a gun on her, Thorsten."
Suddenly, he sighed. "All right, Holcomb. You win—but not as much as you'd think. I'll make a deal."
I laughed at him, still keeping my gun pointed at Pat with a rock-steady hand. "What am I supposed to think you'vebeendoing, Thorsten?"
It was getting to be too much for me. I could feel all the pressure that had built up in the last ten days starting to come to a head, ready to explode and to hell with who the pieces hit.
"Oh, no, Thorsten—no deals. No bargains, no sell-outs, no compromises. I'm up to here on doublecrossing and crisscrossing. I hired out to you and Transolar, and before that I hired out to anybody who had money or a chance for me to get some. And all the time, I was hired out to Earth government. I've had too many jobs, Thorsten—my gun's been on the line too long. There are too many oaths and too many loyalties. Too much of my honor's been spread from one end of the System to the other. Now I'm quitting. The towel's going in, and from now on, it's me that I fight for."
I had the mike up against my mouth, and I was yelling into it. "I know what you're going to offer me, Thorsten. I know what I'd offer. You want the girl and the ship. You want one as bad as the other, but you won't settle for half. So you're offering me my life, and a free ride to Earth. Well, you can take that deal and stuff it. Earth! Who the hell would want to live on the Earth you'd leave, after you and your Martie friends got through with it. No, Thorsten, it's no bargain. It's a Heads you win, Tails I lose proposition, no matter how you slice it."
I laughed again, enjoying it, because it was going to be my last laugh.
"Holcomb!" He must have guessed what I was working myself up to do, because there was sheer desperation in his voice, but I cut him off.
"Shut up, Harry! I told you I was quitting. You know the racket I'm in. You don't just quit it. You go out with your hand on the wheel and your jets full on.And here I come!"
I fed flame into my portside jets, throwing the mike away from me as I grabbed the controls. The ship arced over, singing her death-song in snapping stanchions and straining plates, in the angry howl of the converters, in the drumfire of jets that coughed and choked as fuel poured into them, but which opened their throats and bellowed just the same.
"Ash!" That was Pat.
"Holcomb!" That was Thorsten.
But I was pure metal-jacketed, fireborne death, howling silently toward the sleek cruiser that was Thorsten's flagship, the best known and most feared silhouette in space.
The gates of Hell opened in space. Every ship in the hemisphere ahead of me vomitted fire as the ones behind me and beside me lanced out of the way of the arrowing missiles.
There was no way for Thorsten to avoid me. Fire blossomed at the throats of his jets, and the flagship shot forward.
I snarled, twisted the wheel, and kept my nose pointed for his bridge.
Proximity torps began exploding all around me. They weren't doing Thorsten a bit of good. Either they hit me, or, without air to carry the shock, they were as good as not there at all.
"Here's your hyperspacial drive, Harry!" I howled. "Here it comes—compliments of Ash Holcomb, hired gun!"
Suddenly a missile exploded under my bow. It was a clean hit. The ship screamed escaping air, and shuddered, bucking upward. It wasn't just stanchions ripping loose now, or buckling plates. It was snapping girders, and metal spewing out into space like teeth from a broken mouth. The trouble board winked solid fire at me.
I didn't care about that. The ship was unhurt in the only place that counted—her engine room—and the stern jets kept firing. But I was bent over the wheel, sobbing in pure, white-hot, frustrated rage, because I was going to miss. I'd been slammed up off my trajectory high enough to miss, and Thorsten's ship was firing every tube he had to drive herself down and away, behind a protective screen of other ships.
I could hear the hysterical relief in Thorsten's laugh over the radio.
I could hear something else, too. It hadn't mattered what Pat did, once I'd swung the ship into line. I couldn't have pulled it out of the collision course myself. It had taken an atomic rocket to blast me out of the way.
But it was different, now.
I was folded over the wheel, blood running down my chin from my bitten lip, my knuckles aching as I tightened my fists.
Pat said: "Ash—I'm sorry." There was a sob in her voice. "But you won't give up," she stumbled on. "You'll never give up, until you and Harry are both dead. And I couldn't stand losing both of you."
I never knew what she hit me with, but the back of my skull seemed to explode inward, and I slid out of the seat to the deck. I started crawling toward her. She sobbed, but she hit me again.
VII
The fleet had scattered back to the hundreds of hidden berths among the farflung Asteroids. I came awake in a pressurized burrow dug out in the particular rock Thorsten had chosen for himself and his crew. I'd been dropped in a corner and searched down to my shorts. There wasn't anything on me that I could use for a weapon.
Except—no, I caught myself before there was even a quiver in my left arm. Now wasn't the time to press against my ribs, to try to feel the almost imperceptible bulge of the singleshot capsule between my ribs.
I groaned and let my eyes flicker open.
"How's it, Ash?"
I looked up. Thorsten was standing a few feet away from me, looking down from under his spreading black eyebrows.
I put my hand up to my head. "Crummy. She hits hard."
Harry chuckled.
He wasn't a specially big man, but he was large enough. He had deep black eyes under his brows, an aristocratic nose that had been broken, a slightly off-center mouth whose lower lip was tighter on one side than the other, and a firm jaw. His hair was black—almost as black as mine, and as short. He hadn't changed much.
His voice started in the pit of his stomach, and worked its way up. When he chuckled, the sound was almost operatic, deeper than I remembered it.
"Why shouldn't I kill you, Holcomb?" he said.
I climbed to my feet, and looked into those probing eyes. "Go ahead. Give me half a chance, and I'll kill you."
He laughed. "The old school tie," he said. His voice dropped an octave. "Relax, Holcomb. You're alive, for the time being. Come on, let's get some food."
He reached out and slapped me on the back.
Thorsten's mess hall was another pocket in the Asteroid. It was connected to the burrow I'd been in by a tunnel in the rock, and as we walked down it, I'd had a chance to get quick looks into branching corridors and other burrows that were machine shops, arsenals, ration dumps, and living quarters. Just before we turned into the mess hall, I caught a glimpse of an airlock hatch at the end of the tunnel. That was where Thorsten's ship had to be—and my own, too, unless I missed my guess.
As long as I had a functioning mind, I was going to use it. Automatically, a map of as much of the layout as I'd seen was filed away in my brain.
The mess hall must have been the largest single unit in the entire chain of burrows that honeycombed the Asteroid. It was lit by clamp-on units, like the rest of the place, but the lamps were spread a little farther apart, so it was darker. Even so, I could see that most of the space was filled with men sitting at the long mess tables.
"Quite a setup, isn't it, Holcomb?" Thorsten asked, leading me toward a table that was slightly set apart from the others.
"Looks like an improved standard TSN base," I said.
Thorsten chuckled again. He must have liked the sound of it.
"In many ways, that's more or less what it is," he said, sounding pleased.
We got to the table, and stopped.
All the other mess tables ran end to end from the far side of the burrow to this. Thorsten's table was set at right angles to the others, and a separate chair that was obviously his was placed so that he could look over all the other men. The table had a snow-fresh cloth on it, and was set in high-polish silver. Heavy napkins lay beside each of the places. I glanced down at the other tables. They were bare-boarded, but that wasn't going to make much difference to the men sitting at them.
But all of that took about half a minute's looking. What stopped my eye cold was Pat, dressed in an elaborate gown, seated at one end of Thorsten's table.
"Stop staring, Ash," Thorsten said, the laughter running under his words like the whisper of a river. "Let's not keep our hostess waiting."
"Hello, Pat," I said as I walked over to the chair that Thorsten indicated was mine. I was sitting next to her.
She half-smiled, but her eyes were uncertain. "Hello, Ash." She glanced quickly over toward Thorsten, who had reached his own chair.
Thorsten stopped next to the chair and laid his hand on its back. It was a signal.
"Attention!"
A paradeground voice near the door wiped out every other sound in the hall.
There were close to six hundred men in the mess hall. All of them were suddenly on their feet, snapping to, the sound of boots on rock thundering through the burrow. The men faced each other across the long tables, staring straight ahead.
The successive crashes of sound died out. I stood casually next to my place. Pat was the only seated person in the hall.
Thorsten stood where he was, his hand still on the chair, looking out over his men. The silence held.
"All right, men. Let's eat," Thorsten said casually. There was another roll of sound through the hall as six hundred men sat down and long platters of hot food were rushed out to them by table orderlies.
Thorsten and I sat down, and the three of us at the table faced each other.
"Enjoy the show?" I asked Thorsten. He came back with a peeved look.
It was my turn to chuckle, but I had enough sense to keep it inside. I was right back to not being sure of what to think, as far as Pat was concerned. How much of our affair had been pure bait, and how much of it did Harry know about?
He motioned to a waiting orderly, who stepped forward and poured wine into the crystal goblets beside our plates. Thorsten reached forward and picked his up. "A toast, Holcomb!" The black eyes bored into mine. I picked up my glass.
Thorsten turned toward Pat and raised his glass. I looked at her. Her face was pale, and her eyes were oddly urgent. She couldn't seem to take them off Thorsten's face.
"To my wife!" Thorsten said, and drained his glass.
I drank out of my own. It was good Burgundy—cold and dry in my mouth, and warm as it came down my throat. I set the glass gently down. If Thorsten was expecting me to react, he was disappointed.
But he was laughing, the sound echoing through the burrow, none of the men paying any attention to it. I looked at Pat.
"Another toast!" Thorsten's glass had been refilled.
"To Ash Holcomb—hired gun and angel of death!" He was laughing at me, and at Pat. He knew, or guessed, and death was lightly hidden by his laughter.
"Don't do it, Holcomb!"
Thorsten's voice was ice. I looked at my hands. They were hooked into talons, and I realized that there wasn't a muscle in my body that wasn't tensed and ready to cannon me across the table. I could even hear the snarl rumbling at the base of my throat.
I looked to the side. A man with an open holster flap was standing there, his eyes locked on me.
"Do what, Harry," I asked casually, "propose another toast?"
He looked uncertain for a moment. Then the smile and the laugh came on, and Thorsten was Thorsten again. He didn't know about the chained lightning that was running in my arteries instead of blood. He was a dead man as he sat there, and he didn't know it. In a way, that was funny enough to me to keep waiting.
"A toast? It certainly is a night for toasts, isn't it?" Thorsten murmured.
Pat hadn't moved, and stopped looking at him. I didn't know if she'd looked at me when I was ready to go for Thorsten's throat—but I didn't think so. Now she smiled. I wonder how much it cost her because her lower lip was gray where she'd had it between her teeth.
I had my glass refilled. I nodded toward Pat—and gave Thorsten the Academy toast. "Here's to space, and the Academy. To stars, to the men that walk them, and to the flaming ships that fly."
I looked at Thorsten for the first time since I'd raised my glass, and it was my turn to laugh.
He was gray, and somehow smaller in his thronelike chair. He stared across the table at me, and then let his eyes fall. Hesitantly, he spread the fingers of his hand, and looked at the pale circle where the ring had been.
And, incredibly, he laughed.
"Score one for the opposition," he chuckled. "Nice going, Ash."
I laughed with him, keeping it on a casual plane. I'd done what I wanted to—hit him where he lived. Now, if I could give the conversation a nudge in just the right direction, I might be able to start him talking about his plans. I was that much closer to an outside chance to do something about them.
"What happened, Harry?" I asked. "How'd you get from the TSN into being the top man in the Belt?"
He bit. While Pat and I sat there, Pat nervously shifting her glance from him to me, and me not daring to look at her because of the things I'd say to myself, he told his story. The orderlies brought our dinner, putting dishes down and taking them away as he talked between mouthfuls.
"They don't talk much about me, I guess," he began. "It's a pretty ordinary story, anyway. I was in the war, with my own squadron. We ran into some bad luck, combined with a set of orders that got mixed up. I lost my men. I lost a leg, too."
He leaned down and slapped his right thigh. It rang with metal. "I didn't enjoy that. While I was in the hospital, they brought charges against me. I wasn't given time to prepare an adequate defense, and they threw several paragraphs of the book at me. I was dropped a rank in grade, and slated for duty at a procurement office. I got my break, then. The Marties, under Kull, hit the Moon at practically that time."
I remembered that. They'd gotten a toehold and established a forward base, and Earth had started getting hit with atomic missiles.
"All of a sudden, anybody who could walk or be carried into a ship was tossed into a raggle-taggle fleet the TSN dredged up. That included me."
He grinned, "Only they made two mistakes. The first one was in thinking I still owed Earth any kind of a debt. The second was the bigger one—they gave me a crew raked out of every brig and detention barracks in the fleet. I guess they didn't think I was fit to command anything else."
He grinned. "Pat was in a Wasp unit attached to the base. I took her along."
He waved his hand at the men in the mess hall. "Some of my original crew are still with me. I simply headed for the Belt, and sat out the war. The boys didn't mind one bit. We had plenty of stores, and they knew nobody would bother us while there were more important things going on. Afterwards—well, we've done all right."
He had. Some of the freight lines bribed him. Some didn't.
Uncounted millions in rare minerals were scattered among the tumbling rocks of the Belt, but nobody dared to mine them. He'd given refuge to the stragglers from Mars' broken navies, and built a kingdom on blood and loot.
"I know what I'm called on Earth," he said. "I'm a butcher, a brigand—all the names there are. Even another fighting man, like you, Holcomb, thinks I'm a renegade and a traitor to humanity for throwing in with the Marties. Well, they're blind, Holcomb!"
His open palm came cracking down on the table. "They can't see that Earth is rotten to the very marrow in its mis-shapen bones, that any system that would do to a man what it did to me is based on stupid bungling! The war—Holcomb, you were in that, you know it was the most useless piece of imperialism the System has ever seen."
He was staring intently into my face. I did him the favor of keeping my expression blank, but if he expected me to nod, he was going to wait a long time. I couldn't help thinking of Mort Weidmann. Mort left an arm on Mars; he wasn't bitter about that, and he didn't think it had been a useless war. It had been the Marties for System bosses or us, and they wouldn't have been gentle overlords.
But Thorsten was going on, and now he'd gotten to the part I wanted to know.
"There's got to be a change, Holcomb. Humanity isn't fit to go out to the stars the way it is. It's not ready for the hyperspatial drive.
"It's not going to get it."
I was beginning to understand. Most important, I could finally understand what was wrong with Thorsten. I could see the Messiah complex building up in front of my eyes. The laugh—the easy, chuckling, self-assured laugh—the laugh of a man who was never wrong, and knew it.
"I've got the drive, Holcomb, and I'm going to use it.I'llbe the standard-bearer of the human race among the stars. There won't be any fumbling and bumbling—no bureaucrats, Holcomb, no splinter groups, no special interests, no lobbies."
The dream was like a banner in his eyes.
"Nobody but you, right?" I said.
"Right!" the palm went down on the table again. The wine was beginning to loosen him up. His voice was losing the first fine edge of control.
And I finally understood about Pat. She was looking at Thorsten, and the same dream was plain on her face. That was all she saw—that, and the man. She couldn't see the gray rockets bellowing above the burning cities.
"Haveyou got the drive?"
"Damn right! Those technicians I lifted from Titan are working on your ship now. Then a test flight, and after that, a whole fleet—my fleet, equipped with the drive and ready for the jump.
"There's a planet out there, Holcomb. The Titan Project found it. A planet, Holcomb! Earth-type! Do you think I'd let those idiots onEarthhave it!"
That locked it up. He was completely paranoid.
Pat was still looking at him, lost in the dream. She couldn't be bought, and she couldn't be taken. But she could be in love. Maybe, as a man, I stacked higher up with her than Thorsten did—but I couldn't rival the Dream.
"Seems to me a thing like that will take more supplies than generations of intercepting freight would give you. Where'll you get your equipment?" I asked.
I'd timed it right. A lot of Burgundy had gone down, followed by Sauterne and Chablis.
"That's where my Martian—friends come in," he said. Pat leaned forward. This was a part she'd never heard before, an answer to a question nobody but an old hand at expeditionary forces would ask.
"The Marties think they're going to get the System back, some day." He laughed. "They've been trying to persuade me to help them for a long time, now. Well, I'm going to. After my fleet has the drive. We'll invade Earth, then. The TSN won't be able to stand up to us—not when torps start coming out of nowhere. Picture it—all of Earth, busy fighting us off, all its attention on the invasion, and on nothing else. Then, when the fighting's going nicely, my men and I will raid a few choice supply dumps I've had spotted for a long time. We'll load up on equipment and supplies, and take off, leaving some badly disconcerted Marties to finish their little revolt any way they want to—with no Earth for them to conquer!"
"What?" It ripped out of me. Pat was sitting there, her mouth open too, the same stunned question written on her face.
Thorsten laughed his omnipotent laugh again.
"Certainly! Didn't you know, Holcomb? Ordinarily, of course, a hyperspatial ship will take off from a planet on standard atomic drive, and cut to her hyperspatial engines when it's out in deep space. But it's possible to take off directly into hyperspace—the only trouble being that the warp changes a hundred cubic miles of adjacent mass to C-T matter."
"Seetee! You mean contraterrene?" That was Pat, tense-faced.
I couldn't say anything. I sat there, staring at Thorsten—calm, laughing, deliberate bringer of death to a world and its billions.
Because C-T atoms, in contact with normal matter, reacted violently. A hundred cubic miles, detonating instantaneously, would leave a ring of dust where Earth and Moon now swung.
"There will be no cancer of humanity in space!" Thorsten declared.
I jumped for him.
One slug caught my shoulder. The other plowed through the muscles of my back. I lay bleeding among the broken glass and dishes on the table. Thorsten swung a rabbit punch at my head, and laughed.
VIII
The cell was small, dark, and damp. There were stitches across my back, under tape, and a traction splint and bandages on my shoulder. Let's forget pain. Pain....Let's forget it! Forget it!
I lay on my belly. I'd been on my belly for most of a week. And for most of a week, I'd thought of how it would be to dig my fingernails into my side, rip loose the phony skin over my ribs, and fire that one shot into Thorsten's guts.
All I needed was a chance. Here in the cell, in a corridor somewhere, alone with him, surrounded by his men, chance of life or no—that wasn't what counted. I wasn't sane myself, anymore. There were two people in the Universe—Thorsten and me—and room for one!
A chance. Lord God, a chance!
But all I had was dampness and darkness.
I was fed twice a day—or something like it. It was almost time for my next meal, but that wasn't the important time. It was the helpless week behind me, the week in which Thorsten's kidnaped technicians had had time to assemble the ship's engines. The test flight was due, and after that the production of engines for the other ships in Thorsten's fleet. If I was going to do anything, I had to do it now.
I dragged myself up the side of the cell, leaving meat from my fingers on the rough stone. I staggered over to the wall beside the door and waited.
Time went by—hours or minutes—and a sound of feet came down the tunnel leading to my cell.
I couldn't use my back muscles, but I tensed them now, feeling stitches give way.
Tumblers clicked, and the door was opened.
I kicked it shut and sprang, wrapping my hands around a dimly seen throat, a thin and soft neck.
"Ash!" Pat's voice was half-choked under my grip.
"Pat!" I opened my hands, and she stumbled free. But not for long, because an instant later she was pressed against me again, her mouth over mine.
We stood together in the darkness and in hunger. Finally, she moved her lips away.
"Ash, Ash, you can stand!" She was sobbing with relief.
"Yeah—I'm on my feet."
"Can you fight?"
"Nothing bigger than you," I said. "What's going on?"
"He's crazy, Ash. That plan of his—I'd never heard it before. All he told me was that he was going to take humanity out to the stars—he said he didn't trust Earth government to do it."
"Yeah. I know. For that dream, I would have done what you did, too."
"I didn't love him, Ash. He—I don't know, hewashis dream, somehow, and in spite of it all, he was a better, stronger man than anyone I ever knew. Except you, Ash."
That was good enough. That was good enough to give her everything I had or could get. And that made my spot even worse. It wasn't just she that was going to get hurt—but she was the most important one of them all.
I couldn't even stay with her, here in the cell.
But she knew that too, and there was more to her coming here than that.
"Ash—they've finished assembling the drive in your ship. They've finished repairs on her bow, too. They're going to run the tests in a few hours. Everybody's sleeping, except for the maintenance crew, and they're scattered through the base. Ash—I think we can get out of here. If we don't run into any guards, we can make it to the airlock. There'll be a few suits in a locker there. We can make a run for the ship." Her voice was urgent, and full of hope, and bitterness for the desertion of a dream—a sick, tainted dream, but her dream for so many years at Thorsten's side.
And I knew, for the first time in weeks, that Earth had a chance. I knew, too, that Pat and I....
I could have kissed her then. But I had to be a damned fool. I didn't.
The tunnels and corridors were empty. The machine shops and storage rooms were dark, and the doors to the bunkrooms were closed. We reached the airlock.
All I had to do now was to get into a spacesuit and open the lock. The ship lay beyond it.
Then I heard Harry's laugh!
He stood behind us, holding a slim handgun.
"Running out, people?" he asked. "Bribing that orderly wasn't bright, Pat. He not only gets to keep his money, but he gets a promotion from me. That's the way I operate—that's my justice."
Pat and I had turned half-way around, watching him carefully.
"Justice!" Pat flared. "Worry some more about Earth. Worry about the Universe. Teach them your justice!"
Again the laughter. "I will, Pat."
But the laughter broke.
"Pat—you're my wife. You know my dream—you shared it. Why did you do it?"
"Yes, she knows your sick dream, Harry," I said.
"Shut up, Ash;" he said quietly. "Don't die with your mouth open."
He fired, but I was on the floor of the tunnel.
"Ash!" That was Pat's voice, but I was rolling, and tearing at my side.
"Get back, Pat!" Thorsten shouted. I was up on my knees, the singleshot gun in my hand. I charged forward.
He brought up his gun. The noise had awakened everybody in hearing distance. Doors were opening, men were running.
I pointed the slim tube at his belly and jammed my thumb down on the firing stud.
He screamed, cupping his hand over the smoking hole I had punched in his stomach. His knees bent, and he sank backwards, toppling, finally, as he lost his balance. He opened his mouth, choking, and blood welled over his chin.
One last shred of laughter bubbled up through his throat.
And someone, down at the other end of the tunnel, fired at us. He missed me as I crouched over Thorsten's body.
"Ash—"
I had Thorsten's gun in my hand, but I didn't fire back. I spun around, and looked at Pat, crushed back against the tunnel wall.
"Pat!"
She slid down the wall, and huddled on the floor.
"Pat!" I bent down beside her. It was bad.
Her voice was thick. "How long have I got?"
"Five minutes—maybe ten." I knew I was lying. It was less.
"Ash ... you heard what he said. I was in a Wasp unit. Space was my dream, too. Always."
I wanted to tell her I knew, now—knew a lot of things. But there was no use in holding a dying woman, kissing her, and caressing her tumbled hair for one last time. No use at all, when a world depended on not taking time for those things.
I put Thorsten's gun in her hand. "Can you still shoot, Pat?"
Her fingers tightened on the butt, and her eyes met mine just once more before she turned her head.
She was a beauty to watch. Sprawled on the tunnel floor, not looking at anything but targets over the notch of her sights, calm and skilled while she covered my retreat as her heartbeats slowed. She cauterized the tunnel, weaving a fan of death that marched down the corridor, encompassing and moving beyond huddled and broken men.
I clamped on my suit helmet and spun the airlock controls. I snapped one quick look back at her. Then the airlock hatch thudded shut behind me. In a moment, I was on the surface of the Asteroid and running for the ship.
IX
Earth lies ahead of me, green and safe. The muted atomics behind me have brought me back from beyond Venus, where the split-second jump into hyperspace threw me.
Let Mort Weidmann have his farther stars—or anyone else who cares to try. I've had all I want from the new drive.
I gave Pat a funeral pyre. And now the lonely Asteroids have a star of their own.