kitchen.
Moving rapidly, he went to the spares locker and began methodically tosmash every replacement part for the drivers. Then he took three of thesignal bombs from the emergency kit, set them for five minutes, andplaced them around the driver circuits.
He looked at the three sleeping men. What if they woke up before thebombs went off? He didn't want to kill them though. He wanted them toknow what had happened and who had done it.
He grinned. There was a way. He simply had to drag them outside and jamthe door lock. He took the key from the Engineer, inserted it, turnedit, and snapped off the head, leaving the body of the key still in thelock. Nobody would unjam it in the next four minutes.
Then he began to run up the stairwell toward the good lifeboat.
He was panting and out of breath when he arrived, but no one had stoppedhim. No one had even seen him.
He clambered into the lifeboat, made everything ready, and waited.
The signal bombs were not heavy charges; their main purposes was to makea flare bright enough to be seen for thousands of miles in space.Fluorine and magnesium made plenty of light--and heat.
Quite suddenly, there was no gravity. He had felt nothing, but he knewthat the bombs had exploded. He punched the LAUNCH switch on thecontrol board of the lifeboat, and the little ship leaped out from theside of the greater one.
Then he turned on the drive, set it at half a gee, and watched theSTS-52 drop behind him. It was no longer decelerating, so it would missEarth and drift on into space. On the other hand, the lifeship wouldcome down very neatly within a few hundred miles of the spaceport inUtah, the destination of the STS-52.
Landing the lifeship would be the only difficult part of the maneuver,but they were designed to be handled by beginners. Full instructionswere printed on the simplified control board.
* * * * *
Clayton studied them for a while, then set the alarm to waken him inseven hours and dozed off to sleep.
He dreamed of Indiana. It was full of nice, green hills and leafy woods,and Parkinson was inviting him over to his mother's house for chickenand whiskey. And all for free.
Beneath the dream was the calm assurance that they would never catch himand send him back. When the STS-52 failed to show up, they would thinkhe had been lost with it. They would never look for him.
When the alarm rang, Earth was a mottled globe looming hugely beneaththe ship. Clayton watched the dials on the board, and began to followthe instructions on the landing sheet.
He wasn't too good at it. The accelerometer climbed higher and higher,and he felt as though he could hardly move his hands to the properswitches.
He was less than fifteen feet off the ground when his hand slipped. Theship, out of control, shifted, spun, and toppled over on its side,smashing a great hole in the cabin.
Clayton shook his head and tried to stand up in the wreckage. He got tohis hands and knees, dizzy but unhurt, and took a deep breath of thefresh air that was blowing in through the hole in the cabin.
It felt just like home.
* * * * *
Bureau of Criminal Investigation Regional Headquarters Cheyenne, Wyoming 20 January 2102
To: Space Transport Service Subject: Lifeship 2, STS-52 Attention Mr. P. D. Latimer
Dear Paul,
I have on hand the copies of your reports on the rescue of the men onthe disabled STS-52. It is fortunate that the Lunar radar stations couldcompute their orbit.
The detailed official report will follow, but briefly, this is whathappened:
The lifeship landed--or, rather, crashed--several miles west ofCheyenne, as you know, but it was impossible to find the man who waspiloting it until yesterday because of the weather.
He has been identified as Ronald Watkins Clayton, exiled to Mars fifteenyears ago.
Evidently, he didn't realize that fifteen years of Martian gravity hadso weakened his muscles that he could hardly walk under the pull of afull Earth gee.
As it was, he could only crawl about a hundred yards from the wreckedlifeship before he collapsed.
Well, I hope this clears up everything.
I hope you're not getting the snow storms up there like we've beengetting them.
John B. Remley Captain, CBI
THE END
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from _Amazing Stories_ September 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.
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