_[11]_
The two massive objects floating in space looked very much like deeplypitted pieces of rock. The larger one, roughly pear-shaped and about aquarter of a mile in its greatest dimension, was actually that--a hugehunk of rock. The smaller--_much_ smaller--of the two was not what itappeared to be. It was a phony. Anyone who had been able to conduct avery close personal inspection of it would have recognized it for whatit was--a camouflaged spaceboat.
The camouflaged spaceboat was on a near-collision course with referenceto the larger mass, although their relative velocities were not great.
At precisely the right time, the smaller drifted by the larger, only afew hundred yards away. The weakness of the gravitational fieldsgenerated between the two caused only a slight change of orbit on thepart of both bodies. Then they began to separate.
But, during the few seconds of their closest approach, a third bodydetached itself from the camouflaged spaceboat and shot rapidly acrossthe intervening distance to land on the surface of the floatingmountain.
The third body was a man in a spacesuit. As soon as he landed, he satdown, 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 onthis small planetoid could not use their detection equipment while theplanetoid itself was within detection range of Beacon 971, only twohundred and eighty miles away. Not if they wanted to keep from beingfound. Radar pulses emanating from a presumably lifeless planetoid wouldbe a dead giveaway.
Other than that, they were mathematically safe. Mathematically safe theywould be if--and only if--they depended upon the laws of chance. No shipmoving through the Asteroid Belt would dare to move at any decentvelocity without using radar, so the people on this particular lump ofplanetary flotsam would be able to spot a ship's approach easily, longbefore their own weak detection system would register on the pickups ofan approaching ship.
The power and range needed by a given detector depends on the relativevelocity--the greater that velocity becomes, the more power, the greaterrange needed. At one mile per second, a ship needs a range of onlythirty miles to spot an obstacle thirty seconds away; at ten miles persecond, it needs a range of three hundred miles.
The man who called himself Stanley Martin had carefully plotted theorbit of this particular planetoid and had let his spaceboat coast inwithout using any detection equipment except the visual. It had beennecessary, but very risky.
The Asteroid Belt, that magnificently useful collection of stone andmetal lumps revolving about the sun between the orbits of Mars andJupiter, is somewhat like the old-fashioned merry-go-round. If everyorbit in the Belt were perfectly circular, the analogy would be moreexact. If they were, then every rock in the Belt would follow everyother in almost exactly the way every merry-go-round horse follows everyother. (The gravitational attraction between the various bodies in theBelt can be neglected. It is much less, on the average, than thegravitational pull between any two horses on a carousel.) If every orbitof those millions upon millions of pieces of rock and metal wereprecisely circular, then they would constitute the grandest, biggestmerry-go-round in the universe.
But those orbits are not circular. And even if they were, they would notremain so long. The great mass of Jupiter would soon pull them out ofsuch perfect orbits and force them to travel about the sun in ellipticalpaths. And therein lies the trouble.
If their paths were exactly circular, then no two of that vast number ofplanetoids would ever collide. They would march about the sun in preciseorder, like the soldiers in a military parade, except that they wouldretain their spacing much longer than any group of soldiers couldpossibly manage to do.
But the orbits are elliptical. There is a chance that any two givenbodies _might_ collide, although the chance is small. The onecompensation is that if they do collide they won't strike each othervery hard.
The detective was not worried about collision; he was worried aboutobservation. Had the people here seen his boat? If so, had theyrecognized it in spite of the heavy camouflage? And, even if they onlysuspected, what would be their reaction?
He waited.
It takes nerve and patience to wait for thirteen solid hours withoutmaking any motion other than an occasional flexing of muscles, but hemanaged that long before the instrument case that he held waggled ameter needle at him. The one tension-relieving factor was the lowgravity; the problem of sleeping on a bed of nails is caused by thelikelihood of the sleeper accidentally throwing himself off the bed. Theprobability of puncture or discomfort from the points is almostnegligible.
When the needle on the instrument panel flickered, he got to his feetand 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 anickel-iron one. The group of people that occupied it had deliberatelychosen it that way, so that there would be no chance of its being pickedout for slicing by one of the mining teams in the Asteroid Belt.Granted, the chance of any given metallic planetoid's being selected wasvery small--but they had not wanted to take even that chance.
Therefore, without any magnetic field to hold him down, and with only avery tiny gravitic field, the detective had to use different tactics.
It was more like mountain climbing than anything else, except that therewas no danger of falling. He crawled over the surface in the same waythat an Alpine climber might crawl up the side of a steep slope--seekinghandholds and toeholds and using them to propel himself onward. The onlydifference was that he covered distance a great deal more rapidly than amountain climber could.
When he reached the spot he wanted, he carefully concealed himselfbeneath a craggy overhang. It took a little searching to find exactlythe right spot, but when he did, he settled himself into place in asmall pit and began more elaborate preparations.
Self-hypnosis required nearly ten minutes. The first five or six minuteswere taken up in relaxing from his exertions. Gravity notwithstanding,he had had to push his hundred and eighty pounds over a considerabledistance. When he was completely relaxed and completely hypnotized, hereached 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, wokehim instantly. He came fully awake, as he had commanded himself to do.
Immediately he turned up his oxygen intake, at the same time glancing atthe 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, allthings considered.
He consulted his instruments again. The supply ship was ten minutesaway. 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 slowdown 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 andmoved toward the spot where he knew the airlock to the cavernsunderneath the planetoid's surface was hidden.
Then again he concealed himself and waited, while he continued tobreathe deeply of the highly oxygenated air in his suit. Five minutesbefore the ship landed, he swallowed eight ounces of the nutrientsolution from the tank in the back of his helmet. The solution of aminoacids, vitamins, and honey sugar also contained a small amount ofstimulant of the dexedrine type and one percent ethanol.
He waited for another minute for the solution to take effect, then heunholstered his gun.
The supply ship wasn't a big one. He had known it wouldn't be. It wasonly a little larger than the one he had used to come out here. Itdropped down to the surface of the small planetoid only ten meters fromthe hidden trapdoor that led to the airlock beneath the surface.
Suddenl
y 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 goodnews._
The airlock trapdoor opened, and a spacesuited figure came out. _Howabout the deal?_
_That's the good news_, said the second suited figure as it came fromthe airlock of the grounded spaceboat. _Another five million._
The detective, hidden behind the nearby crag of rock, listened andwatched for a minute or so while the two men began unloading cases offoodstuffs from the spaceboat. Then, satisfied that it was perfectlysafe, he aimed his gun and shot twice in rapid succession.
The range was almost point-blank, and there was, of course, no need totake either gravity or air resistance into account.
The pellets of the shotgun-like charge that blasted out from the gunwere small, needle-shaped, and massive. They were oriented point-forwardby the magnetic field along the barrel of the weapon. Of the hundreds ofcharges fired, only a few penetrated the spacesuits of the targets, butthose few were enough. The powerful drug in the needle-pointed head ofeach tiny crystal went directly into the bloodstream of each target.
Each man felt an itching sensation. He had less than two seconds tothink about it before unconsciousness overtook him and he slumpednervelessly.
Gun in hand, the detective ran across the intervening space quickly, hisbody only a few degrees from the horizontal, and his toes paddlingrapidly to propel him over the rough rock.
He braked himself to a halt and slapped air patches over the areas wherehis 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 severalminutes under this low gravity. He left them to drop and headed towardthe open airlock.
This was what he had been waiting for all those nineteen days incataleptic hypnosis. He couldn't have cut his way into the hideout fromthe outside; he had had to wait until it was opened, and that time hadcome only with the supply ship.
Once in the airlock, he touched the control stud that would close theouter door, pump air into the waiting room, and open the inner door.Here was his greatest point of danger--greater, even, than the danger ofcoming to the planetoid itself, or the danger of waiting nineteen daysin a cataleptic trance for the coming of the supply ship. If the oneswho remained within suspected anything--anything at all!--then hischances of coming out of this alive were practically nil.
But there was no reason why they should suspect. They should think thatthe man coming in was one of their own. The radio contact between themen outside had been limited to a few micromilliwatts ofpower--necessarily, since radio waves of very small wattage can bedecoded at tremendous distances in open space. The men inside theplanetoid certainly should not have been able to pick up any more thanthe beginning of the early conversation before it had been cutcompletely off by the intervening layers of solid rock.
The chamber he entered was a high-speed airlock. Unlike the soundlessdischarge of his special gun in the outer airlessness, the blast of airthat came into the waiting chamber was like a hurricane in noise andforce. The room filled with air in a very few seconds.
The detective held on to the handholds tightly while the brief butviolent winds buffeted him. He turned as the inner door opened.
His eyes took in the picture in a fraction of a second. In an evensmaller fraction, his mind assimilated the picture.
The woman was dark-haired, dark-eyed, and muscular. Her mouth was wideand thick-lipped beneath a large nose.
The man was leaner and lighter, bony-faced, and beady-eyed.
The woman said: "Fritz, what--?"
And then he shot them both with gun number two.
No needle charges this time. Such shots would have blown them both intwo, unprotected as they were by spacesuits. The small handgun merelyjangled their nerves with a high-powered blast of accurately beamedsupersonics. While they were still twitching, he went over and jabbedthem with a drug needle.
Then he went on into the hideout.
He had to knock out one more man, whom he found asleep in a small roomoff the short corridor.
It took a gas bomb to get the two women who were guarding the kid.
He made sure that the BenChaim boy was all right, then he went to thelittle communications room and called for help.