our third quadrant—distance about five hundred kilos. Deflect into first …back on course.
'Cloud of aerolites ahead. Carry through.' Ahead loomed a blotch of darkness. 'Unknown particle in second quadrant. Our coordinates, helmsman.'
Sven, at the tiller, read off, 'Alpha—point oh oh four; beta—seven point four oh oh; gamma—point oh oh two.'
'Hulk Argol ahead. Carry through into gamma—zero.' The big man wet his lips and deflected the steering bar. 'Carried through, sir,' he said.
Jerry, his eyes never leaving the plate, whispered tensely, 'Cut steering to master's board.' Sven snapped a switch. 'Cut, sir.' Delicately Jerry fingered the firing switch. A blocky black mass boomed down on the ship from the east; violently the little scow looped over and down, clearing the path of the particle. This was just one of the reasons that men were prejudiced against gamma—zero. Too much loose junk zipping around for comfort.
The Argol was squarely on the cross-hairs of the vision plate. Captain Jerry studied the battered piece of wreckage. It had been a supertransport once—loaded to the observation blister with para-morphium from Venus to Earth. She had encountered an unexpected cloud of meteorites, probably too big to run away from, and so had been riddled and gone under. From then on her career had been a terrible one of shooting wildly through space on almost full fuel tanks; demolishing a refueling station a million kilos off Mars; smashing into a squadron of police rockets and shattering them into bits—and finding rest at last in the meteor zone to upset orbits and hurl cosmic rubbish into the trade lanes. He examined this corpse of a ship, estimating its size and Martian weight. He thought he could handle it. Through the annunciator he said, 'Make fast with magnet plates.' And to Sven,
'Take the master's board for emergencies. I'm going over to supervise.'
Jerry crawled into his spacesuit, a terrible cumbersome thing of steel alloy and artificial membrane, and dropped lightly down the shaft of the ship to the big space lock that characterizes the salvage vessel.
'Wylie,' he ordered, 'take Martin and Dooley with a cutting torch to open their sides and then look at their fuel tanks. If they have any left we can use it. I don't believe they're empty, from the lie of her.
'Macy, take Collins and Pearl. Secure grapples, and allow as much slack for towage as you can get. If you allow too little, you'll never know it, by the way—we'd be smashed like an eggshell on the first turn bigger than thirty degrees.
'Dehring and Hiller, come with me. You need supervision. Take cameras and film.'
The boarding parry bolted their helmets on and swung open the space lock. Wylie, unrecognizable in his swathing overall, braced the cutting torch against his middle and turned on the juice. The powerful arc bit through the wall of the Argol as if it had been cheese, and the men filed through. They had cut one of the cargo rooms, piled high with metal cylinders of para-morphium, the priceless Venerian drug of sleep and healing. A few of the containers were sprung open and the contents spoiled; still, seventy percent of the remaining cargo went to the salvager, and eighty percent of the hulk.
Jerry took his crew of two to the steering blister that bulged from the top of the ship, picking his way between damaged bodies. In the blister he found the captain, staring permanently at a hole in the observation plate where a meteorite—one of many—had pierced the armor of his vessel. With a crowbar Jerry pried off the top of the recorder and photographed the tracing needles on the graph that charted the course of the ship with all its crazy tacks and swerves through space.
'Dehring,' he ordered, 'take up that corpse. We're going to stack them and see that they get decent burial when we reach a planet.' And with the callousness of years of space travel and the coldness that the hard life of the salvager instills, the man obeyed.
Jerry wandered at random through the ship. It had carried some passengers. One of the cabin doors was open, and the figure of an old woman, face mercifully down, was sprawled over the threshold. She had heard the alarm in her little room as the air drained out of the ship; unthinkingly she had flung open her door—gasped for breath when there was nothing to breathe—and fallen as she was.
He picked up her tiny frame, and carried it to the stern of the ship. He wondered who she was why she was returning to Earth from Venus at her age. Perhaps she had wanted to pass her last years among the green and brown fields and again see a mountain. Perhaps—he thought he knew how she felt, for he, too, had once been homesick.
Mars—red hell of sand and cloudless sky. Home of 'wanted' men and women, where the uncautious were burned in the flaming bonfires of the Martian underworld. Haven of every swindler and cutthroat in the system, it was but a dull gem in Sol's diadem. Some day they would clean it up—raid the sickening warrens that snaked through and under its cities; fill them in with dynamite. That day would be a good one …
Gently he deposited the body among others; brushed away his random thoughts and called, 'Macy! Grapples fixed?' Macy's thin voice trickled through his earphones, 'Yes, sir. I gave them twelve hundred meters.'
'OK' he snapped. 'Return to the ship, all except Wylie. You'll stay aboard, Kurt, to stow displaced cargo.'
'Yes, sir,' said Wylie, in a growl. 'And shall I comb the corpses' hair, sir?'
Jerry grinned. 'Why not? And see that it's done or I'll fire you and bust your rating on every scow out of Mars.' Discipline, after all, was the thing.
Jerry resumed his place at the firing board. 'Stations all,' he called sharply over the annunciator. 'Brace for seven Mars gravities in seventeen seconds. One—'
His hands flew over the board, setting up the combinations of rocket discharges that would be able to stir the huge Argol out of its inertia and snap it after the scow of Leigh Salvage, Incorporated, like a stone on a string, at the end of a ponderous osmiridium cable.
'Nine!' The men were strapping themselves into hammocks.
'Eleven …
'Fourteen!' He tensed himself, sucking in his stomach muscles against the terrible drag. 'Sixteen!
'Fire!'
And the ship roared sharply up and out of the asteroid belt, its powerful rocket engines—designed to move twenty times the weight of the scow alone—straining to drag the ponderous cargo hulk behind it. Soon the initial speed lessened, and they were roaring along at an easy thousand K.P.S. The captain rose and set the automatics; tried to shake some of the blood from his legs into his head. He could rest now.
Assembled, Jerry and the men drank a toast to the trade in ethyl alcohol—'To salvaging: the greatest game of all!' They drained their cups. The big Sven rose, some of his Norse reticence vanished in the universal solvent. 'My brothers in labor,' he began. 'We have gone far on this trip, and there is no one here who will not agree with me when I say that we could not have done it without Captain Jerry. I give you our boss and the best of them all, Jerry Leigh, of Leigh Salvage, Incorporated!'
The flask went the rounds, and when it was emptied there was another and yet another. In just a few hours Jerry was standing alone in the middle of the room, looking owlishly about him at the collapsed forms of the crew. There was a cup in his hands—a full cup. He spurned a nearby body with his foot.
'S-s-sissies!' he said derisively, and drained his drink. Slowly he deflated onto the floor.
An alarm bell smashed the silence into bits; men dragged themselves to their feet. 'Mars,' said one, absently.
'Don't land easy, Captain,' another urged Jerry. 'Smear us all over the field. It's about the only thing that'll do this head of mine any good.'
Jerry winced. 'That's the way I feel, but I'd like to get that hulk in before I die. Landing stations, all men.'
Their ship and its huge running mate hovered over the red planet.
Irritably Jerry dove it near the atmosphere and blearily searched its surface for the landing field. 'Damn!' he muttered. 'I'm in the wrong hemisphere.'
The ship roared over the face of Mars, and slowed above the Kalonin desert. Jerry found Salvage Field beneath him, and cut the rockets sharply to one side, swinging the Argol like the lash of a whip. They swooped down, and Jerry, drunk or sober, shifted his salvage neatly above the ponderous pneumatic cargo-table and cut it loose. It fell the thousand feet with a terrible crash, landing comparatively easy. At any rate he had not missed it. 'So much for Wylie,' he muttered.
The exhaust sputtered and died; the ship dove to within a hundred feet of the surface. On rockets! And down she drifted, landing without a jar.
Jerry held his head and groaned.
