And that was when his luck ran out.
“Peter—” the captain began.
IV
But a sound from outside halted him. Together the two men stared at the viewplates. A siren had begun to shriek in the distance, the siren of a racing ground car. Through the gates it plunged, scattering the light wooden barrier. It spun crazily around on two wheels and came roaring for the ship.
Andrias was in it.
Peter turned on the captain, and the gun was rigidly outthrust in his hand.
“Close your ports!” he snarled. “Up rockets—in a hurry!”
“Listen, Peter,” the captain began.
“I said, hurry!” The car’s brakes shrieked outside, and it disappeared from the view of the men. There was an abrupt babble of voices.
“Close your ports!” Peter shouted savagely. “Now!”
The captain opened his mouth to speak, then snapped it shut. He touched the stud of a communications set, said into it, “Close ports. Snap to it. Engine room—up rockets in ten seconds. All crew—stand by for lift!”
The ship’s own takeoff siren howled shrilly, drowning out the angry voices from below. Peter felt the whine of the electrics that dogged shut the heavy pressure doors. He stepped to the pilot’s chair, slid into it, buckled the compression straps around him.
The instruments—he recognized them all, knew how to use them! Had he been a rocket pilot before his mind had blanked—before embarking on the more lucrative profession of gun smuggler? He wondered. …
But it was the captain who took the ship off. “Ten seconds,” Peter said. “Get moving!”
The captain hesitated the barest fraction, but his eyes were on the heat gun and he knew that Duane was capable of using it. “The men—” he said. “If they’re underneath when the jets go, they’ll burn!”
“That’s the chance they take,” said Duane. “They heard the siren!”
The captain turned his head quickly, and his fingers flashed out. He was in his own acceleration seat too, laced down by heavy canvas webbing. His hands reached out to the controls before him, and his fingers took on a life of their own as they wove dexterously across the keys, setting up fire-patterns, charting a course of takeoff. Then the heel of his hand settled on the firing stop. …
The acceleration was worse than Peter’s clouded mind had expected, but no more than he could stand. In his frame of mind, he could stand almost anything, he thought—short of instant annihilation!
The thin air of Callisto howled past them, forming a high obligato to the thunder of the jets. Then the air-howl faded sharply to silence, and the booming of the rockets became less a thing of sound than a rumble in the framework of the Cameroon. They were in space.
The captain’s foot kicked the pedal that shut off the overdrive jets, reducing the thrust to a mere one-gravity acceleration. He turned to Duane.
“What now?” he asked.
Duane, busy unstrapping himself from the restraining belts, shook his head without answering. What now? “A damn good question!
” he thought.
The captain, with the ease of long practice, was already out of his own pressure straps. He stood there by his chair, watching Duane closely. But the gun was still in Duane’s hand, despite his preoccupation.
Duane cocked an ear as he threw off the last strap. Did he hear voices in the corridor, a distance away but coming.
The captain, looking out the port with considerable interest, interrupted his train of thought. “What,” he asked, “for instance, are you going to do about—those?”
His arm was outstretched, pointing outward and down. Duane looked in that direction—
The two patrol rockets were streaking up after his commandeered ship. Fairy-like in their pastel shades, with the delicate tracery of girders over their fighting noses, they nevertheless represented grim menace to Duane!
He swore under his breath. The Cameroon, huge and lumbering, was helpless as a sitting bird before those lithe hawks of prey. If only he knew which side the ships were on. If only he knew—anything!
He couldn’t afford to take a chance. “Stand back!” he ordered the captain. The man in blue gave ground before him, staring wonderingly as Duane advanced. Duane took a quick look at the control setup, tried to remember how to work it.
It was so tantalizingly close to his memory! He cursed again; then stabbed down on a dozen keys at random, heeled the main control down, jumped back, even as the ship careened madly about in its flight, and blasted the delicate controls to shattered ashes with a bolt from his heat gun. Now the ship was crippled, for the time being at least. Short of a nigh-impossible boarding in space, the two patrol cruisers could do nothing with it till the controls were repaired. The Cameroon, and its cargo of political dynamite, would circle through space for hours or days.
It wasn’t much—but it was the best he could do. At least it would give him time to think things over.
No. He heard the voices of the men in the corridor again, tumbled about by the abrupt course change—luckily, it had been only a mild thing compared to the one that had killed Stevens and caused his own present dilemma—but regaining their feet and coming on. And one of the voices, loud and harsh, was Andrias! Somehow, before the ports closed, he’d managed to board the Cameroon!
Duane stood erect, whirled to face the door. The captain stood by it. Duane thrust his heat gun at him.
“The door!” he commanded. “Lock it!”
Urged by the menace of the heat gun, the captain hurriedly put out a hand to the lock of the door—
And jerked it back, nursing smashed knuckles, as Andrias and four men burst in, hurling the door open before them. They came to a sliding, tumbling halt, though, as they faced grim Duane and his ready heat pistol.
“Hold it!” he ordered. “That’s right. … Stay that way while I figure things out. The first man that moves, dies for it.”
Dark blood
