The men filed into the stubby ship holding their heads. A hangover is nothing to take with you on a spaceflight. If they could have left their heads behind they would have done it. With creakings of abused muscles and battered bones, they strapped themselves into hammocks and pads.
The crew of Leigh Salvage, Incorporated was in a bad way.
The takeoff was uneventful as such things go; Jerry mentally noted that he had blown away a small corner of the salvage-table, just another item to subtract from the profit, if any.
Once again in space, the captain was at the look-out plate, eyes and hands and brain bent five hundred kilos out into the vacuum. 'Particle sighted ahead,' he droned, 'in our third quadrant. Salvage scow Bluebell. Full speed ahead to pass her.' His fingers played over the master's board, and the blunt ship roared ahead. They were near—
dangerously near—the Bluebell. A blast from the steering fins and the scow jolted into a new course. Jerry never took chances—hardly ever.
They slowed acceleration far in advance of the other vessel; that was another contract tied up and in the bag. The captain relaxed—That Adams girl …of course she couldn't handle a ship. Anybody could make a not too disastrous takeoff, but she'd smear hell for leather when she tried to land.
A signal light flashed on his board, and he snapped on his communication beam. There was a long pause while the power built up, then a voice from the grid
'Scow Bluebell calling scow Leigh Salvage, Incorporated. Give way.
We're going to pass you in your first quadrant. That's all.'
Jerry gaped. Unheard of? 'Scow Leigh to Bluebell!' he snapped. 'Listen, insane female; you're not driving a French taxi. There are ethics and rules in this game we're playing. Do you want to be blackballed and become an outlaw tug?' There was another reason than need of that cargo for his anger—maybe, just maybe, she could get back onto the field without busting herself wide open if she were alone, but with a cargo as big as the Carpathia she wouldn't have a chance in a million.
He thought of what a short towing line could do, and grimaced.
'We're passing, Scow Leigh. That's all.' The light on his board died.
That was all. Well for her sake …and for his own—
'Full speed ahead, and then some more, Sven. It's a race.'
But it wasn't much of a race; the Bluebells port fin exploded, and her acceleration stopped. Jerry grinned. 'We'll pick her up on the way back and leave her ship there. The farther apart those two are, the safer for both of them …Hey! Stations! Hulk Carpathia ahead!' And the salvage ship jockeyed for position, drew alongside of the bullion transport and clamped on with a clash of metal against metal. The crew prepared to board.
3 Crime in Space
Jerry reached for the phone, his brow grooved. 'Broadway three thousand,' he said. The voice with the smile answered, 'One moment, please,' giving him time to reflect on the superfluity of machinery. Less efficient than a dial-phone, maybe, but that touch of warmth and humanity— 'Here's your party, sir.'
'Central Office, Interplanetary Police.'
'This is Captain Leigh, of Leigh Salvage, Incorporated. I wanted to see you about—'
'About the peculiar state of the Carpathia. Come on up.'
'Yeah,' said Jerry, baffled. 'That's what I wanted to see you about.'
How did they know? And maybe they had a lead on the vanished Miss Alice Adams? He hoped so.
He was received in the offices of the Interplanetary Police by a very old man who introduced himself as Major Skeane. Jerry took a seat and opened the valise he had brought. 'I don't know how much you know about the business of the Carpathia,' he said, 'so I'll begin at the beginning. Please examine these—exhibit A.'
'These' were the contents of his valise—small, heavy chunks of metal.
Skeane grunted. 'Once spheres,' he said, 'apparently cast in a shot tower; then sandblasted to suggest natural formations. Some filed by hand, even. These, I take it, were the particles that wrecked the bullion ship?'
Jerry wet his lips. 'Yes,' he said. 'It looks like a put-up job for sure. And Alice—that's Master Adams, of the scow Bluebell—she's disappeared.
We were racing her for the Carpathia and she broke down about half a million kilos from the hulk. I meant to pick her up on the way out to Mars and maybe tow her ship in, too, but when we got grapples on her we found her scow deserted—not a man left on her! Have you people got any dope on that business?'
Major Skeane scratched his head. 'Captain,' he said, 'I'm sorry to inform you that while you do not jump to false conclusions, neither do you shine in the formulation of true ones. Do you see no logical relationship between the two events?'
Jerry considered, and paled. 'None,' he said angrily. 'And instead of antilogising, you might be out hunting down the swine that would try to profit by the deaths of two score men.'
'The rebuke is undeserved,' smiled the old man. 'We have the wrecker of the bullion ship—or a least we know who did it, and how.'
'Anybody I know?' asked Jerry.
'I believe so. The saboteur is Miss Adams, of Bluebell.'
The younger man stiffened in his chair. 'No!' he cried. And then persuasively, 'she might be crazy as a flea, but wrecking—never!'
'You do us an injustice. We were warned to watch her the moment she landed on Mars. Our agents assured us that she was a girl with ambitions; they kept track of her, reporting to us for the customary considerations. One man in particular—LeMouchard—has kept us posted, and he's as much to be trusted as anyone these days. To my mind—and I am the officer in charge of this case—the alleged disappearance of Miss Adams is conclusive proof of her guilt. She failed to cash in on the particularly rich opportunity that she created for herself and thus destroy the evidence, and so was picked up by a confederate, with her presumably equally guilty crew. I expect her now to continue her career from another base; possibly another planet, until she makes a slip. Then we shall trace her and deliver her to the execution cell.'
'I see,' said Jerry, fighting to keep calm. But he didn't see and somewhere there was a horrible mistake which had cost the lives of a score of men and would yet cost the life of that girl with the blue-grey eyes who had tried to pass him and had nearly wrecked her ship and his own, he thought.
Skeane broke in. 'Will you leave that valise of junk here? We need some material evidence. And I want you to swear to a description of the girl.'
'Sure,' said Jerry vaguely. 'Anything you say.'
'Right. Hair, blonde; shade thirty-three plus on the I.P. scale. Eyes, blue-grey—shade nine. Weight—Captain! Come—'
Jerry was walking slowly through the outer office, his mind in a state of terrible confusion. He didn't know what to do for himself or her. Attack it with logic, he decided fuzzily. For effects there are causes. Assuming flaws in the line of Skeane's logic, discover the points of specific strain and test them. Hah—he had mentioned 'agents'—those, he supposed, were informers. And—what was his name?—LeMouchard. Weak link number one: now to test it. He walked into a store. 'A bottle of olive oil, please. A big one.' That was the first step.
In Mars there are many hidden ways. For every city there is a shadow-city twisting its tunnels and warrens beneath the sunlight and air. It was through these dark passages that Jerry wandered—to check, as he thought, on official deduction, of course.
Reeking with oil and dressed in the rags of an outlaw space-tug's crew, he passed into the dismal underworld as one of its own creatures. In not many hours he was to be found in a low dive swilling the needled ethyl that passes as potable among the scum of a solar system. It was easy to make friends of a sort there—the price of a drink took care of it.
Jerry wasn't drunk, in spite of the terrible cargo of rot-gut he had been stowing away, but he was just a bit ill, for his stomach was well lined with olive oil, sovereign remedy and anti-intoxicant. He was buying liquor for a slimy little man through no altruistic motives; for this was LeMouchard, informer to the police. Gently he questioned him. Of course, he was strictly on the legit, but he hadn't always been, no? And those camels of the gendarmerie that made themselves the great ones, a good man—like our comrade here, yes?—could wrap them around his finger, no?
And surely he was not such a fool as to play with only one master when the pay from two was twice as great? He thought not. Oh, yes—that clever business of the Bluebell girl! He, Jerry, would give a pretty penny to know in
