locked, we may find them. If it isn’t, then nobody’s on board.”
One of the men threw himself against the door, and it opened quietly. There was no blast of air. The engine hold was as empty as the rest of the ship, and there were still no bodies lying about. They hunted through the ship again, without finding anyone.
In the control room, Anderson and Bob went through the ship’s papers, but those had also been rifled. There was a passenger list, but there was no way of knowing for what trip it was meant. From it, though, they discovered that the Ionian normally shipped between Io and Earth, and carried a crew of seventeen, with as many as thirty-five passengers. Her maximum acceleration was listed as just under two gravities of thrust—but that would be enough to build up her present speed if she had come all the way from Jupiter, around the sun, and back through Jupiter’s orbit, heading for Neptune.
Anderson found another book, listing equipment. “They carried sixty suits,” he reported.
“Enough for all the passengers and crew, with a few spares.” His young face was sweating, and the blond hair that showed through his helmet was matted down against his forehead.
Even at best, the space suits were uncomfortable for long wearing, though men could live in them for days.
At Griffith’s suggestion, they went down to search all the lockers for space suits. When they had finished counting, all sixty were still on board.
“All right,” the Commander ordered finally. “Come on back, and make it fast. We’ll abandon the Ionian until a tug came out and salvage her.”
They went back silently. It was completely impossible for the pirates to have taken all the freight and every man on board the ship off in no more than the single minute they had been locked together. Yet it had happened. Everything was beginning to come out the same—the events were impossible, but the black ship had done them, all the same.
Bob’s eyes jumped to the radar screen as soon as he was back in the control room of the Lance of Deimos and climbing out of bis suit. He sighed with relief. The pip on the screen showed that the pirate ship was still within radar range. “Not that we can do much against them,” he muttered glumly to himself.
Griffith looked up from the calculations Hoeck was making. “Don’t be too sure of that, son,” he said. “We’ve got a few tricks up our own sleeves. The Navy’s been secretly testing a proton cannon for years, and we have one of the first working models. Ever hear of it?”
Bob nodded doubtfully. The Sunday Supplements and science fiction magazines had been speculating on it for years, but it had finally been put down as a failure. The idea was that hydrogen should be broken down to electrons and protons. The electrons were to be sent out in one stream, and the protons in another, so that the ship using the weapon wouldn’t become electrically charged, as it would have done if either had been ejected alone. The trouble had been that the guns previously made could just blast through a thin sheet of paper.
“You’ll see it in action soon,” Griffith promised. “And it works. Just a matter of getting the speed of the protons high enough. This will cut through ten feet of steel in less than a second. It’s still under security wraps, so keep mum about it, after we hit Outpost. Ready yet, Hoeck?”
The navigator nodded, and indicated the control setup. Griffith pressed the general alert for acceleration and gave the crew ten seconds to strap down for it, after the automatic second warning went off. Bob had just succeeded in getting into his harness when the ship blasted off again.
Either his first dose of high drive had given him more power to stand it or the rest while exploring the Ionian had restored him more than he had thought. This time he took it without blacking out and without completely losing the power to focus his eyes. He set his gaze on the radar screen, and waited.
The outline of the black ship on the screen began to grow. At this rate, they’d be up to it in a matter of minutes. Then Bob was going to find out what a real space battle was like.
CHAPTER 4
Distress Signal
THERE WAS NO SIGN that the black ship had seen them, though it must have had radars as sensitive as their own, judging by the other scientific marvels they had witnessed. Bob kept wondering about them. It was as if some great genius had turned to crime and put the pirates ahead of the rest of the system.
But he knew that was ridiculous. A genius would have no need to turn to crime—he could make more by remaining lawful, and with much less risk. The only reason many of the great scientists were not rich was that they preferred pure research to the type of life needed to amass a fortune. And the idea of a scientist mad enough to enjoy crime was silly; anything so warping to his thoughts would make him anything but a level-headed scientist.
Besides, great inventions were seldom the result of one man’s work. It took a genius, plus teams of trained men, plus an amazing amount of equipment.
Maybe the miracles weren’t miracles, he suddenly thought. If the Ionian had been captured before… then the “torpedoes” could have been harmless magnesium-oxygen flares. The melting nose of the ship could have been thermite placed inside and set off by radio, and the almost instantaneous removal of crew and freight would have been a pure fake.
He tried to call out the idea. Then his eyes located the telescope screen, and he relaxed. It didn’t account
for all the facts. The ship was still blasting along, without any normal trail of rocket exhaust.
That couldn’t be faked! Anyhow, what good would it be to attempt to trap the Lance of Deimos, unless the pirate ship really did have superior weapons?
He gave up the idea reluctantly, but it simply didn’t explain enough. He let his eyes stay on the screen, watching as the black ship grew. It was hard to see— but there were a lot of stars beyond it, and it blocked those off as it passed; also, even the blackest black paint couldn’t be as dark as raw space, and its outlines showed dimly.
They were within a hundred miles of the ship when it first seemed to notice them. It was Anderson who caught the trouble, and pointed it out. The black ship was no longer growing; it was actually getting smaller!
Then they all saw it. The ship ahead began to shrink rapidly. In a minute it was half the size it had been. Hoeck blinked, and punched feebly at the calculator suspended above his horizontal seat. His voice was unbelieving. “Acceleration over fifty gravities!”
Such a burst of sheer drive should have crushed flat any life inside in seconds. It would make a normal man seem to weigh over four tons! And no ship in the Solar Federation Navy could do better than ten gravities of acceleration, even for a second.
Commander Griffith cut their own acceleration to a minimum, until their weight seemed no greater than it had been on Mars. “Prepare proton rifle!” he called.
“Proton gun ready.” The reply came back at once.
Griffith called down the co-ordinates of the other ship’s location. It was a tiny thing now, but still visible in the radar screen. “Fire!” he ordered, when the co-ordinates were checked.
Almost instantaneously, a terrific burst of fire seemed to erupt in the telescope screen where the black ship had been. Then it faded, and the black ship was a tiny spot, surrounded by a blue haze that turned red and disappeared. Again the proton gun fired, and again. The results were the same.
Something seemed to kick at the Lance of Deimos. Bob suddenly was tossed back of his seat as the ship jerked sharply, its nose tilting sharply. The kicks came again, one for each blast that had been fired from the proton gun.
This time it was Bob who took a wild guess, culled out of all the fantastic stories and articles he had read. “Pressor rays!” he gasped. Nobody had ever figured out what tractor and pressor rays were, beyond the fact that they pulled or pushed, but that hadn’t stopped writers from speculating on them.
Hoeck snorted, but Commander Griffith nodded doubtfully. “It’s as good an explanation as any. Something pushed against us, anyhow—and it wasn’t an accident. I might guess some kind of rebound, but the jolts came faster than we fired the proton gun. That was a warning!”
