Space Lash

He wondered just what the searchers would do. They must have trailed him directly to this system, as he had expected. They might try to find an inactive ship in space, but La Roque doubted that such a search would be practical unless there existed detection instruments unknown to the general public.

He wondered if the system contained any planets, to add to the searchers' difficulties. He himself had seen none, and none was listed on the chart; but they would have been nearly invisible in the dim light of the twin suns, and La Roque's faith in the chart had dropped a long way. If there were any, they would be a real help; they would have to be searched mile by square mile.

But the question of prime importance was, how long would the pursuers stay? Certainly, if they had the patience they could outwait him, for their food supply would outlast his; but for all they knew he might have met with a fatal accident, or encountered an organized outlaw base — either could easily happen. If he refrained from radiating long enough, they might decide further search futile. He could do that; the darkness didn't bother him particularly, and the ship was warm enough — a little too warm, in fact. Evidently his figures had not been exact.

Eventually the detectors stopped reacting, and La Roque started waiting. He was still perspiring, less from worry now than from actual warmth. The ship was becoming uncomfortable. He removed his outer clothing and felt better for a while.

Time crawled on — rapidly decelerating, in La Roque's opinion. He had nothing to do except notice his own discomfort, which was on the increase. He cursed the ship's builders for failure to insulate it properly, and the men who had computed the tables he had used to obtain the probable temperature at this distance from the suns. He didn't bother to curse his own arithmetic.

Once he was almost on the point of driving farther out, hoping the pursuing ship had gone; but a flicker from one of the detectors made him change his mind. He hung and sweated; and the temperature mounted.

It must have been a hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit when he finally gave in. He could have stood more in the open — anyone could — but the air-conditioning apparatus had been stopped along with everything else, and the air in the ship was approaching saturation. With that fact considered, he held out remarkably well; but eventually his will power gave out. He kicked his way feebly back to the board and snapped on the vision plates.

He lacked the energy to curse. For moments he could only stare in shocked horror at the plates — and realize how misdirected his previous denunciations had been. There was nothing wrong with his ship's insulation; the wonder was that it had held out so well. One of the suns — he never knew which — completely filled the front, top, and port plates with a blaze of sooty crimson; he must have been within thirty or forty thousand miles of its surface. His hand darted toward the activating switch of the second-order drivers, and was as quickly checked. They would only send him straight forward, into the inferno revealed by the front plate. The ship must be turned.

He started the gyros, careless now of any radiation that might result. The control knobs were hot to the touch; and a smell of burning oil reached his nostrils as the gyros wound up to speed. The ship abruptly shuddered and began to gyrate slowly, as one of them seized in its bearings. He watched tensely as the vessel went through a full rotation, his hand hovering over the board; but not once was the glow in the forward plate replaced by the friendly darkness of space. The ship was spinning on its longitudinal axis.

The other gyros were working. He tried to turn the vessel with them. The result was to shift the axis of spin about thirty degrees — and increase its rate tenfold as another of the heavy wheels, spinning at full speed, jammed abruptly. Centrifugal force snatched him away from the board and against one wall; he shrieked as his flesh touched hot metal, and kicked violently. His body shot across the room, reaching the other side at about the same time his previous point of contact was carried around by the ship's rotation.

The specks of carbon cirrus on the front plate were describing circles now — circles whose size was visibly increasing. For part of each turn the nose was now pointing into space; La Roque tried to fight his way back to the board to take advantage of one of those moments.

He might have made it, in spite of the agony of his burns, but the overstrained insulation had done its best. It failed; and failed, of all places, over the water tanks that lined part of the hull. The tanks themselves offered only token resistance as steam pressure suddenly built up in them. La Roque never knew when scalding water shorted the control board, for a jet of superheated steam had caught him just before he reached it.

On the enforcement cruiser, a man straightened up from a plotting board.

“That does it, I think,” he said. “He was using heavy current for a while, probably trying to turn out with his gyros; then there was a flash of S.H.F., and everything stopped. That must have taken out his second-order, and he'd have had to use about sixty gravities of first-order to pull out of that spot. I wonder what he was doing so close to those suns.”

“Could have been hiding,” suggested a second pilot. “He might have thought the suns would mask most of his radiation. I wonder how he expected to stay there any length of time, though.”

“I know what I'd have done in his place,” replied the first man. “I'd have put my ship into a Trojan position and waited the business out. He could have lasted indefinitely there. I wonder why he didn't try that.”

“He probably did.” The speaker was a navigator, who had kept silent up to this point. “If a smart man like you would do it, a fellow like that couldn't be expected to know any better. Have you ever seen a planet in the Trojan points of any double sun? I'll bet you haven't. That Trojan solution works fine for Sol and Jupiter — Sol is a thousand times the more massive. It would work for Earth and Luna, since one has about eighty times the mass of the other. But I have never seen a binary star where the mass ratio was anywhere near twenty-five to one; and if it's less, the Trojan solution to the three-body problem doesn't work. Don't ask me why; I couldn't show you the math; but I know it's true — the stability function breaks, with surprising sharpness, right about the twenty-five-to-one mass ratio. Our elusive friend didn't know that, any more than you did, and parked — his ship right in the path of a rapidly moving sun.” He shrugged his shoulders, and turned away. “Live and learn, they say,” he finished, “but the difficulty seems to lie in living while you learn.”

Fireproof

Hart waited a full hour after the last sounds had died away before cautiously opening the cover of his refuge. Even then he did not feel secure for some minutes, until he had made a thorough search of the storage chamber; then a smile of contempt curled his lips.

“The fools!” he muttered. “They do not examine their shipments at all. How do they expect to maintain their zone controls with such incompetents in charge?” He glanced at the analyzers in the forearm of his spacesuit, and revised his opinion a trifle — the air in the chamber was pure carbon dioxide; any man attempting to come as Hart had, but without his own air supply, would not have survived the experiment. Still, the agent felt, they should have searched.

There was, however, no real time for analyzing the actions of others. He had a job to do, and not too long in which to do it. However slack the organization of this launching station might be, there was no chance whatever of reaching any of its vital parts unchallenged; and after the first challenge, success and death would be running a frightfully close race.

He glided back to the crate which had barely contained his doubled-up body, carefully replaced and resealed the cover, and then rearranged the contents of the chamber to minimize the chance of that crate's being opened first. The containers were bulky, but nothing in the free-falling station had any weight, and the job-did not take long even for a man unaccustomed to a total lack of apparent gravity. Satisfied with these precautions, Hart approached the door of the storeroom; but before opening it, he stopped to review his plan.

He must, of course, be near the outer shell of the station. Central Intelligence had been unable to obtain plans of this launcher — a fact which should have given him food for thought — but there was no doubt about its general design. Storage and living quarters would be just inside the surface of the sphere; then would come a level of machine shops and control systems; and at the heart, within the shielding that represented most of the station's mass, would be the “hot” section — the chambers containing the fission piles and power plants, the extractors and the remote-controlled machinery that loaded the war heads of the torpedoes which were the main reason for the station's existence.