Kzanol's ship as more transparent than air. Even the planet itself was translucent. Kzanol/Greenberg kept watch over the radar screen, sure that if Masney missed the suit, he wouldn't.
'Why isn't the other ship searching too?' Anderson wondered. 'It's just floating.'
'Ordinarily,' said Garner, thinking out loud, 'I'd think they were, in cahoots. There's no need for them both to search. But how? Oh. I get it. The ET has taken control of Masney and Greenberg. Either that or he's letting them do his job for him without their knowing it.'
'Wouldn't the job get done quicker if they both searched?'
'I'm beginning to wonder if this alien isn't the aristocrat's aristocrat. Maybe he thinks that anyone who works is a slave. Since he's a master… But the real question is, what are they searching for, and where is it?
'Look, son, why don't you warm up the radio and point the maser at our fleet of Belters. I might as well fill them in.'
One thing about the Belt ships: at least the air plant could handle pipe tobacco. The man in the third ship was the only man in the fleet who took advantage of the fact, one of exactly six in the entire Belt. He was known, not too affectionately, as Old Smoky.
Once he had been a flatlander. For nearly thirty years he had piloted a succession of circumlunar tourist boats. His nights he had spent in a small, cheap apartment a few stories above the vehicular traffic level in Los Angeles. On holidays he went to the beach, and was lucky to find enough clear sand to sit on; his vacations were spent in foreign cities, strange and novel and undeniably fascinating but generally just as crowded as Los Angeles.
Once he stayed two weeks in what was left of the Amazon jungle. He smuggled some cigarettes in with him, risking two years in prison, and ran out in five days. When he found he was telling every friend and stranger how much he wanted a smoke, he went back to the cities.
He had met Lucas Garner in the line of duty; Garner's duty. There was a massive sit-in to protest rumored corruption in the Fertility Board; and when the law hauled Smoky off the top strip he met Garner in the uniform of a police chief. Somehow they got to be friends. Their respective views on life were just close enough to make for violent, telling, fun arguments. For years they met irregularly to argue politics. Then Luke joined the Arms. Smoky never forgave him.
One day Smoky was rounding the Moon nose down with a load of tourists, when he felt a sudden, compelling urge to turn nose out and keep driving until all the stars were behind him. He fought it down, and landed in Death Valley that evening as he had landed seven-thousand-odd times before. That night, as he approached his apartment through the usual swirling mob, Smoky realized that he hated every city in the world.
He had saved enough to buy his own mining ship. Under the circumstances the Belt was glad to have him. He learned caution before the Belt killed him, and he earned enough to keep his ship in repair and himself in food and tobacco.
Now he was the only man in the fleet who could recognize Lucas Garner's voice. When the radio burst to life he listened carefully to the message, then called Lew to report that it really was Garner.
For Smoky, the broadcast removed all doubt. It was Garner himself. The old man was not above a judicious lie, but he was not prone to risk his life. If he was near Neptune in a leaky terran Navy crate, he must have an outstanding reason to be there.
Thoughtfully Old Smoky checked through his arsenal of two radar missiles, one heat seeker, and a short- range laser 'cannon.' The war of the worlds was here at last!
Kzanol was baffled. After six hours of searching, the slave Masney had covered the entire planet. The suit wasn't there!
He let the slave begin his second search, for the sake of thoroughness. He took his own ship to Triton. The Brain could not compute the course of moons; one of them may have gotten in the way of the ship as it speared toward Neptune. Very likely it had been Triton. That moon was not only closer than Nereid, it was far bigger: 2500 miles thick as compared to 200.
A nerve-wracking hour later, an hour of flying upside down over Triton's surface with the jet firing outward and the lightly pitted moon showing flat overhead, Kzanol admitted defeat. No white flash had shown itself on the radar screen, though Neptune itself had glowed through the transparent image of the larger moon. He turned his attention to the small moon.
'So that's it!' Anderson's face glowed. 'They thought it was on the surface and it wasn't. Now they don't know where it is!' He frowned in thought. 'Shouldn't we get out of here? The honeymooner's aiming itself at Nereid, and we're too close for comfort.'
'Right,' said Garner. 'But first we turn the missile loose. The one that's homed on the alien. We can worry about Greenberg later.'
'I hate to do it. There're two other people on the Golden Circle.' A moment passed. Lengthened. 'I can't move,' said Anderson. 'It's that third button under the blue light.'
But Luke couldn't move either.
'Who'd have thought he could reach this far?' he wondered bitterly. Anderson couldn't help but agree. The ship continued to fall toward Nereid.
To the Power, distance was of little importance. What mattered was numbers.
Nereid was a bust. The deep radar went through it as through a warped window pane, and showed nothing. Kzanol gave it up and watched the half-asleep slave for a while. His tiny flame burned bravely against the Neptunian night.
Kzanol was in a bad state of mind. It seemed that his ship had missed not only Neptune but both its moons. What could have gone wrong with the Brain? Probably it had never been intended to last three hundred years. But deep in the bottom of his mind, he knew better. The Brain had missed deliberately. Kzanol had ordered it to commit suicide, not realizing what he asked. The Brain- which was a machine, not a slave, not subject to the Power- had disobeyed. His ship must have hurtled through the solar system and gone on into interstellar space at.97 light. By now it would be beyond the curve of the universe.
He felt the muscles pulling at his mouth, flattening the eating tendrils against his cheeks to protect them, opening his jaws as wide as they would go, and wider, pulling his lips back from the teeth until they were ready to split. It was an involuntary reaction, a reaction of fear and rage, automatically readying the thrint for a battle to the death. But there was nothing to fight. Soon Kzanol's jaws closed and his head drooped between his massive shoulders.
All in all, the only pleasure he had was to watch the last ship searching Neptune for the third time and to see its bright flame suddenly lengthen, then shorten again. The sleepy slave had given up.
Then Kzanol knew that he too was going to Triton. A feeling of noble pity stole over him, and he remembered the tradition that the family of Racarliw had never mistreated a slave. Kzanol went to meet the sleeper at Triton.
'One… two… I can't find Garner's ship. He must have landed somewhere, or turned off his drive. The others are just milling around.'
'Funny he hasn't called us. I hope nothing's happened to him.'
'We'd have seen the explosion, Smoky. Anyway, he was going for Nereid when his drive stopped. If it failed, we can find him later.'
When Kzanol was close enough, he Told the sleeper to turn ship and join him. In an hour the Navy ship and the Golden Circle were alongside.
Kzanol's pilot and copilot were worried about the fuel situation, so as soon as the sleeper's ship was close enough Kzanol Told him to transfer his fuel to the Golden Circle. He waited while various clanking and banging sounds rang through the ships. Fortunately the cards were magnetized, and there was webbing to hold him in his seat. He followed- the movements of his three personal slaves with the back of his mind: the sleeper near the tail, the pilot and copilot motionless in the cockpit. He didn't want to risk their lives by letting them help the sleeper.
