Dr. Henree dropped his pipe and it bounced on the linolite flooring. He paid it no attention.
"What!"
Conway reddened and his face stood out, plumply pink, against his snowy hair. "Is this a joke?"
"No. He got on five minutes before it blasted. I talked to the sentry, guy called Wilson, and kept him from interfering. I had to pick a fight with the fellow and I would have given him the old bingo-bango," he demonstrated the one-two punch with quick, hard blows at the atmosphere, "but he backed off."
"You let him? You didn't warn us?"
"How could I? I've got to do what Lucky says. He said he had to get on at the last minute and without anyone knowing, or you and Dr. Henree would have stopped him."
Conway groaned. "He did it. By space, Gus, I should have known better than to trust that pint-sized Martian. Bigman, you fool! You know that ship's a booby trap."
"Sure. Lucky knows it too. He says not to send out ships after him or things will be ruined."
"They will, will they? There'll be men after him within the hour just the same."
Henree clutched his friend's sleeve. "Maybe not,Hector. We don't know what he's planning to do, but we can trust him to scramble out safely whatever it is. Let's not interfere."
Conway fell back, trembling with anger and anxiety.
Bigman said, "He says we're to meet him on Ceres, and also, Dr. Conway, he says you're to control your temper."
"You-" began Conway, and Bigman left the room in a hurry.
The orbit of Mars lay behind and the sun was a shrunken thing.
Lucky Starr loved the silence of space. Since he had graduated and joined the Council of Science, space had been his home, rather than any planetary surface. And the Atlas was a comfortable ship. It had been provisioned for a full crew with only so much omitted as might be explained by consumption before reaching the asteroids. In every way the Atlas was intended to look as though, until the moment of the pirates' appearance, it had been fully manned.
So Lucky ate Syntho-steak from the yeast beds of Venus, Martian pastry, and boneless chicken from Earth.
I'll get fat, he thought, and watched the skies.
He was close enough to make out the larger asteroids. There was Ceres, the largest of all, nearly five hundred miles in diameter. Vesta was on the other side of the sun, but Juno and Pallas were in sight.
If he were to use the ship's telescope, he would have found more, thousands more, maybe tens of thousands. There was no end to them.
Once it had been thought that there had been a planet between Mars and Jupiter and that geologic ages earlier it had exploded into fragments, but that wasn't so. It was Jupiter that was the villain. Its giant gravitational influence had disrupted space for hundreds of millions of miles about it in the eons when the Solar System was being formed. The cosmic gravel between itself and Mars could never coalesce into a single planet with Jupiter pulling and pulling. Instead it coalesced into myriads of little worlds.
There were the four largest, each a hundred or more miles in diameter. There were fifteen hundred more that were ten and a hundred miles in diameter. After that there were thousands (no one knew exactly how many) that were between one and ten miles in diameter and tens of thousands that were less than a mile in diameter but still as large or larger than the Great Pyramid.
They were so plentiful that astronomers called them "the vermin of space."
The asteroids were scattered over the entire region between Mars and Jupiter, each whirling in its own orbit. No other planetary system known to man in all the Galaxy had such an asteroid belt.
In a sense it was good. The asteroids had formed steppingstones out toward the major planets. In a sense it was bad. Any criminal who could escape to the asteroids was safe from capture by all but the most improbable chance. No police force could search every one of those flying mountains.
The smaller asteroids were no man's land. There were well-manned astronomical observatories on the largest, notably on Ceres. There were beryllium mines on Pallas, while Vesta and Juno were important fueling stations. But that still left fifty thousand sizable asteroids over which the Terrestrial Empire had no control whatever. A few were large enough to harbor fleets. Some were too small for more than a single speed-cruiser with additional space, perhaps, for a six-month supply of fuel, food, and water.
And it was impossible to map them. Even in the ancient, preatomic times, before space travel, when only fifteen hundred or so were known, and those the largest, mapping had been impossible. Their orbits had been carefully calculated via telescopic observation and still asteroids were forever being "lost," then "found" again.
Lucky snapped out of his reverie. The sensitive Er-gometer was picking up pulsations from the outer reaches. He was at the control board in a step.
The steady energy outpourings of the sun, whether direct or by way of the relatively tiny reflected dribbles from the planets, were canceled out on the meter. What was coming in now were the characteristically intermittent energy pulses of a hyperatomic motor.
Lucky threw in the Ergograph connection and the energy pattern traced itself out in a series of lines. He followed the graphed paper as it emerged and his jaw muscles hardened.
There had always been a chance that the Atlas might meet an ordinary trading ship or passenger liner, but the energy pattern was none of that. The approaching ship had motors of advanced design, and different from any of the Terrestrial fleet.
Five minutes passed before he had enough spread of measurement to be able to calculate the distance and direction of the energy source.
He adjusted the visiplate for telescopic viewing and the star field speckled enormously. Carefully he searched among the infinitely silent, infinitely distant, infinitely motionless stars until a flicker of movement caught his eyes and the Ergometer's reading dials lined up at multiple zero.
It was a pirate. No doubt! He could make out its outlines by the half that glittered in the sun and by the port lights in the shaded half. It was a thin, graceful vessel, having the look of speed and maneuverability. It had an alien look about it, too.
Sirian design, thought Lucky.
He watched the ship grow slowly larger on the screen. Was it such a ship that his father and mother watched on the last day of their lives?
He scarcely remembered his father and mother, but he had seen pictures of them and had heard endless stories about Lawrence and Barbara Starr from Henree and Conway. They had been inseparable, the tall, grave Gus Henree, the choleric, persevering Hector Conway, and the quick, laughing Larry Starr. They had gone to school together, graduated simultaneously, entered the Council as one and done all their assignments as a team.
And then Lawrence Starr had been promoted and assigned to a tour of duty on Venus. He, his wife, and his four-year-old son were Venus-bound when the pirate ship attacked.
For years Lucky had unhappily imagined what that last hour upon the dying ship must have been like. First, the crippling of the main power drives at the stern of the ship while pirate and victim were still apart. Then the blasting of the air-locks and the boarding. The crew and passengers scrambling into space-suits against the loss of air when the air-locks caved in. The crew armed and waiting. The passengers huddling in the interior rooms without much hope. Women weeping. Children screaming.
His father wasn't among the hiders. His father was a Council member. He had been armed and fighting. Lucky^was sure of that. He had one memory, a short one that had been burned into his mind. His father, a tall, strong man, was standing with blaster raised and face set in what must have been one of the few moments of cold rage in his life, as the door of the control room crashed inward in a cloud of black smoke. And his mother, face wet and smudged but clearly seen through the space-suit face-plate, was forcing him into a small lifeboat.
"Don't cry, David, it will be all right."
Those were the only words he remembered ever having heard his mother say. Then there was thunder behind him and he was pressed back against a wall.
They found him in the lifeboat two days later, when they followed its coldly automatic radio calls for help.
The government had launched a tremendous campaign against the asteroid pirates immediately afterward and the Council had lent that drive every last ounce of their own effort. For the pirates it turned out that to attack and kill key men of the Council of Science was bad business. Such asteroid hideouts as were located were blasted into dust, and the pirate menace was reduced to the merest flicker for twenty years.
But often Lucky wondered if they had ever located the particular pirate ship that had carried the men who had killed his parents. There was no way of telling.
And now the menace had revived in a less spectacular but far more dangerous fashion. Piracy wasn't a matter of individual jabs any longer. It bore the appearance of an organized attack on Terrestrial commerce. There was more to it. From the nature of the warfare carried on Lucky felt certain that one mind, one strategic direction, lay behind it. That one mind, he knew, he would have to find.
He lifted his eyes to the Ergometer once more. The energy recordings were strong now. The other vessel was well within the distance at which space courtesy required routine messages of mutual identification. For that matter, it was well within the distance at which a pirate might have made its initial hostile move.
The floor shuddered under Lucky. It wasn't a blaster bolt from the other ship, but rather the recoil of a departing lifeboat. The energy pulses had become strong enough to activate their automatic controls.
Another shudder. And another. Five altogether.
He watched the oncoming ship closely. Often pirates shot up such lifeboats, partly out of the perverted fun of it and partly to prevent escapees from describing the vessel, assuming they had not done so already through the sub-ether.
This time, however, the ship ignored the lifeboats altogether. It approached within locking range. Its magnetic grapples shot out, clamped on the Atlas's hull, and the two vessels were suddenly welded together, their motions through space well matched.
Lucky waited.
He heard the air-lock open, then shut. He heard the clang of feet and the sound of helmets being undipped, then the sound of voices.
He didn't move.
A figure appeared in the door. Helmet and gauntlets had been removed, but the rest of the man was still swathed in ice-coated space-suit. Space-suits had a habit of doing that when one entered from the near-absolute zero of space into the warm moist air of the interior of a ship. The ice was beginning to melt.
The pirate caught sight of Lucky only when he was two full steps into the control room. He stopped, his face frozen in an almost comical expression of surprise. Lucky had time to note the sparse black hair, the long nose, and the dead white scar that ran from nostril to canine tooth splitting the upper lip into two unequal parts.
Lucky bore the pirate's astonished scrutiny calmly. He had no fear of recognition. Councilmen on active duty always worked without publicity with the very thought that a too-well-known face would diminish their usefulness. His own father's face had appeared over the sub-ether only after his death. With fleeting bitterness Lucky thought that perhaps better publicity during life might have prevented the pirate attack. But that was silly, he knew. By the time the pirates had seen Lawrence Starr the attack had proceeded too far to be stopped.
Lucky said, "I've got a blaster. I'll use it only if you reach for yours. Don't move."
The pirate had opened his mouth. He closed it again.
Lucky said, "If you want to call the rest, go ahead."
The pirate stared suspiciously, then, eyes firmly on Lucky's blaster, yelled, "Blinking Space, there's a ripper with a gat here."
There was laughter at that, and a voice shouted, "Quiet!"
Another man stepped into the room. "Step aside, Dingo," he said.
His space-suit was off entirely and he was an incongruous sight aboard ship. His clothing might have come out of the most fashionable tailor shop in International City, and would have suited better a dinner party back on Earth. His shirt had a silken look you got only out of the best plastex. Its iridescence was subtle rather than garish, and his tight-ankled breeches blended in so well that, but for the ornamented belt, it would have seemed one garment. He wore a wristband that matched his belt and a fluffy, sky-blue neck sash. His crisp brown hair was curly and looked as though it received frequent attention.
He was half a head shorter than Lucky, but from the way he carried himself the young Councilman could see that any assumption of softness he might make on the basis of the man's dude costume would be quite wrong.
The newcomer said pleasantly, "Anton is my name. Would you put down your gun?"
Lucky said, "And be shot?"
"You may be shot eventually, but not at the moment. I would like to question you first."
Lucky held fast.
Anton said, "I keep my word." A tiny flush appeared on his cheekbones. "It is my only virtue as men count virtue, but I hold fast to it."
Lucky put down his blaster and Anton picked it up. He handed it to the other pirate.
"Put it away, Dingo, and get out of here." He turned to Lucky. "The other passengers got away in the lifeboats? Right?"
Lucky said, "That's an obvious trap, Anton-"
"Captain Anton, please." He smiled, but his nostrils flared.
"Well, then, it's a trap, Captain Anton. It was obvious that you knew there were no passengers or crew on this ship. You knew it long before you boarded."
"Indeed? How do you make that out?"
"You approached the ship without signaling and without a warning shot. You made no particular speed. You ignored the lifeboats when they shot out. Your men entered the ship carelessly, as though they expected no resistance. The man who first found me entered this room with his blaster well bolstered. The conclusion follows."
"Very good. And what are you doing on a ship without crew or passengers?"
Lucky said grimly, "I came to see you, Captain Anton."