whose dazzling intellect that task had been conceived and brought to fruition. Was it—could it be—that he; Jerry, was standing in the presence of the man? But no! But yes! Then surely that was worth another drink of the so gentle ethyl. And so the great LeMouchard was in the pay of the police and one other. Might he, Jerry, be permitted to inquire as to who had availed himself of the services of so great a man?
LeMouchard looked owlishly over a drink. 'Oui,' he croaked. 'It is permitted.' His face flushed abnormally, and he shook his head like a dazed fighter. 'The English, I forget how you call him …Le bon petit roi d'Yvetot—the king with the little orchestra. It is …' he bowed forward, his eyes bulging. 'Carbon?' he said. 'Sa Majesty' Carbon.' His ratty face hit the tabletop. Out cold.
King Carbon—coal. King—Cole? Old King Cole? That seemed to be the idea. But what was a merry old soul with a small orchestra doing on Mars with a stool-pigeon? He returned to his hotel room and phoned the Interplanetary Police.
'Major? What do you know about Old King Cole?'
There was a pause. 'I believe,' said the thin grey voice of Major Skeane,
'that he died just fifteen years ago. A bit before your time.'
'As I understand it he never lived. What are you talking about?'
'Early space pirate. Good man, too. Crashed on Pluto two days after I was assigned to his case. I was a terror in those days; he must have been afraid of my rep. They all were, then. Did I ever tell you about Ironface Finkle, the Mercurian Menace? I brought him down …'
'Very interesting; very—this King Cole—I want to know more about him. I suppose you found his remains?'
'On Pluto? Don't be silly. When they crash there they stay crashed. This Ironface had had a better position than I did, naturally; I made it a point never to be unfair to the men I was assigned to, since my name alone struck terror—'
'Naturally, Major. How did King Cole work?'
'The usual way: ramming and boarding. Now Finkle had a tricky twist to his technique and had me baffled for a time—'
'That's too bad,' said Jerry tiredly. 'How old was Old King Cole when he—ah—crashed?'
'Rather young. In fact, he had just graduated from a tech school on Venus when he took up his career and ended it in about a year. But the Mercurian Menace was older and more experienced. He knew how to handle a ship. I was hard-pressed, but soon—'
Jerry hung up. It was fantastic! How many men had been to Pluto and returned? If his hunch was right—and it sometimes was—at least one more than the records showed. He phoned room service for the Marsport Herald.
'Yes, sir. Morning or afternoon edition?'
'Both. Oh, yes—I want them as of this date fifteen years ago. Better get me the year's file.'
Room service turned to linen and said, 'That man is mad as a hatter.'
Then hastened to the Herald building for the files.
In due course the files reached Jerry, who had been calculating the location of the Bluebell.
He flipped the pages to January and read a report of the King's first appearance. He had struck like a demon at an excursion ship, gassing it and gutting it with thermite bombs, leaving a message pinned on the chest of the mutilated captain:
Old King Cole was a merry old soul,
And a pirate, too was he;
He wiggled his toes, and he thumbed his nose,
And said: 'You can't catch me!'
From that and subsequent clues his identity had been traced. He had been Chester Cole, honors student at Venusport Tech and had led his class at the Academy of Astronavigationbut was just a little cracked, it seemed. He had, as a student, fought a 'duel' with another boy, crippling him. All that had saved him from prison then had been the loyal lies of his classmates. His crew, in the days of his career of crime, seemed also to have been made up of like contemporaries. It was a strange and striking picture, this mad boy roaming space in a ship of his own, striking out at will at women and children.
Now to the end of the files, to investigate his death 4 Pursuit Between the Planets
Approximately on the line which Jerry had calculated, a ship of strange design was speeding for Pluto. Like every spaceship, it was highly specialized. The super-powerful motors and grapples of the salvage scows were not hers, nor the size and luxury of the passenger liners.
This was no huge freighter, jammed to the blister and built for a maximum of space to store to a minimum of crew. Yet she had a purpose, and that purpose screamed from every line. This rocket was a killer, from bow to stern. Her prow was a great, solid mass of metal toughened and triply re-enforced for ramming; a terrible beak of death.
Above her rear rockets protruded a stern-chaser that scattered explosive pellets behind her in an open pattern of destruction.
But this very efficient machine was not entirely lacking in comfort, for Alice Adams rested easily in a chamber that might have graced—and once, perhaps did—the costliest luxury liner. She had awakened there after that peculiar odor through the Bluebell had laid her out and her crew. Then a courteous knock sounded on her door. 'Come in,' she said, baffled by the anomalous situation.
A man entered. 'I welcome you,' he said, 'to my vessel. I trust that you will find—' Alice looked at his face, and screamed.
The man recoiled and muffled his features in a scarf. 'I can hardly blame you,' he said savagely. 'It is the wind of Pluto. You will find that my entire crew is like that, I warn you. Skin grey and dead, the scars of the Plutonian sleet over all the face. For five years we lived unsheltered in that hell—five years that might have been a thousand. Can you know what that means?'
'But who are you?' asked the girl. 'And I'm—I'm sorry about …'
'I was once known,' said the man, 'as King Cole. Bright boy of the space-lanes; pirate par excellence. The whimsical butcher—that was me. Fifteen years ago I died on Pluto, they think. Maybe I did; it's hard to say for sure these days. We lived in the broken open hull of our ship where it fell, breathing in helmets, feeding from crates and cans of food. One kid thought he could melt the snow outside and drink it. He was very thirsty, and he went mad when he saw the snow boil up into yellow-green gas. It was chlorine. It's cold out there where we're going.
'Many years it was, and then another ship crashed, and we took off our helmets and lived in that and sang songs with the men of it who survived. They were technicians, and tried to fix their rocket, but one of my boys killed them. He thought he liked it there; he must have been crazy.
'A long time later a first class pirate ship landed. We crawled across the snow to her—two hundred kilos. They took us in because they hadn't a mechanic worth the name, and all of us were fine tech men. I said I could fix her, and I could. Then one night my men killed all the crew of this new ship and I patched it with stuff from the other two rockets so we took off and sneaked into Mars.
'I had been a fool once, and that was enough, so I meant to do it the right way this time. You don't strike without warning if you want to be a success; you give plenty of warning through agents and policemen you've hired, and steer them just a bit the wrong way so that they suspect nothing and honestly believe that they'll get you the next time.
'I met a lot of friends I knew on Mars, and made some new ones when I'd disposed of the ship's cargo. The boys and I have been cruising around for some time now, doing nothing spectacular—it doesn't pay.
We've been knocking off a ship here and there, laying the blame square onto a rival or somebody. Our home is still Pluto—we don't like it, in a way, for what it did to us, but in a way we do because nobody else does, and it's so damn far away from anything half the time.
'I'm sorry that you didn't get the Carpathia. I thought that with a father like yours you could fly sideways and beat any other scow in the ether to a contract.'
She stared at the madman. 'What did you know about my father?'
'He was my instructor on Venus. He got me out of a piece of trouble when I killed a man that swore at me. He was a good instructor, and I'm pleased that I have the chance to do him a favor through you. You see, I wrecked that bullion ship for you. Then I was going to pick you up and the junk, but I see I've only got you. Well—perhaps
