The Man Who Staked the Stars
Page 11
his pocket edge andslipped from his hand he left it on the rug where it had fallen,sitting looking at it thoughtfully for a moment. Today was the day hewould meet Orillo.
"How well can you handle a four tube cabin cruiser?"
"Line of sight only. I'm no navigator," Pierce responded.
Bryce said soberly, realizing what he had decided, "This is a good dayto have a bodyguard who's a good shot. I have an appointment to meet afriend--and I'm not sure he's a friend."
"I shoot," Pierce said, writing at one of the letters he had been setto. "Happy to oblige. Shall I wear my bulletproof clothes?"
"You could do with something like that," Bryce said soberly.
Pierce looked up from the letters. "Would this be the man behind allthese bullets, and you're meeting him in space?"
"Yes."
"In armor plated tanks with heavy artillery?"
"No."
"No light and heavy cruisers. No marines?"
"Just you." Bryce was smiling at Pierce's mock astonishment. He knewthat the kid didn't care in the slightest where Bryce led him as longas there was a fight at the end of it, and he left it to Bryce tochoose the odds.
The odds might be even enough. Orillo himself, if he came with murderas his intention, would bring no helpers for witnesses, and he wouldexpect Bryce to bring none. Or if he had hired assassins, he would notcome himself, and they would not know who had hired them, but theywould have been told to expect one man only.
* * * * *
The secrecy of any meeting in space is practically absolute. If thereis one thing which space has plenty of, it's distance--distance enoughto lose things in, distance enough to hide in, distance enough so thateven if you know where something is by all the figures of itscoordinates, if it's smaller than a planet you can't find it even whenyou are there. To put it crudely, what space has is space. And findingsomething that doesn't want to be found in space is like looking for amissing germ in the Atlantic.
He had the coordinates of the beacon he had chosen for his appointmentpoint and the robot pilot took him to that area with automaticprecision. But once there he had to cruise manually back and forththree times through the perpendicular plane of Earth's equator beforepicking up the radar pip of the buoy, which was set to broadcast itspresence by a circular sweep of radar pulses on a flat planecorresponding to the Earth equatorial average.
He found it no later than expected, which was over an hour early, onthe principle that he who arrives first finds no ambush.
He left Pierce with certain instructions and floated from the ship tothe familiar globe that spun so placidly on the anchoring rod thatattached it to the controlling buoy. The buoy was powered stronglyenough to have controlled the orbits of fifty such globes withoutstrain. Buoys of that type were just beginning to be popular in theBelt.
Once inside he opened his faceplate, looking around with the samepleasure he always felt on his visits here. It was like being back atthe Belt for a time. After the raw harshness of the moon and theartificial luxuries of its cities, after the agoraphobic vastness ofEarth's giant surface, to be within this little close-knit familiarworld was soothing and relaxing. It was a green glade of leaves andbranches, greenness underfoot and overhead, a brown metal cliff withvines and a door to his left, a larger brown metal cliff like theround head of a barrel with doors in it to his right, and a circularsilver door in the center. Behind the small right hand cliff was thesmall amount of regulating machinery required, behind the doors of thelarger cliff was a small kitchen, and convertible study-bedrooms.Behind the silver door was a corridor leading to the airlock andspace. It was forty feet from cliff to cliff, and from the growinggreenery underfoot to the growing greenery overhead, as spacious as awide glade in the woods of Earth.
He picked his way among the vines and shrubs to a carpetlike patch ofgreen moss and sat down comfortably to wait. Pierce had drawn the shipoff beyond detector range by now, and it would seem to any shipapproaching that he had not yet arrived.
It was peaceful there, no breeze stirred the leaves. Twenty feetabove, fixed in the air on clear spokes of lucite, the crystal globethat was the sun for this small world gave forth its warming flood oflight, sunlight borrowed from the sunlight outside and led in on thelucite spokes.
He had an interest in its manufacture, and had anchored his globe hereas a commercial sample of a spaceglobe for the viewing of likelysettlers. It was slightly better and more compact, since it was anewer model, contained in an ovoid hull that was only forty-six bysixty-six feet, but in essence it was like any of the farms and homesof the asteroid belt, and there was nothing like it on any planet inthe universe.
VII
Behind the silver door a bell rang suddenly. A spaceship wasapproaching.
It was still early. They would see the globe alone and assume thatBryce had not yet arrived. The spaceship itself might be armedillegally, but those within would not blast the globe without checkingits interior. Bryce glanced up at the silver door in the cliff andarranged his position so as to be lounging on one elbow, with his gunhand lying relaxed under a thin curtain of leaves. The magnomatic waspointing up towards the corridor door.
There were a few tall bushes between the base of the cliff andhimself, but the silver central door was five feet up a flight ofsteps and in clear view.
Four flights of steps radiated away from the circular door to thehull, like spokes from an axle, all of them leading "down" to theinside surface of the globe. As he waited he heard the faint clang ofmagnetic soles hitting the metal of the airlock, and then the doorchimes that announced that the airlock was being used. Someone wascoming in.
He could follow their actions in his mind, timing them. Now they wouldbe floating in the vestibule, facing a circular wall with a door, thewall spinning silently and rapidly, and the door in its center turningslowly end over end. The door marked the axis of rotation. There was aturning bar with handles running through the center of the airlock.They would float up to that and grip it to pick up spin, until thevestibule seemed to be rotating around them and only the circular walland the central door seemed to be steady. Beyond it would be thecorridor, and then the silver door.
The door in the cliff dilated silently. Two spacesuited men stood init.
It was incredible that he had let them come in without seeing the dooropen. In the first split second he saw that neither of them wasOrillo. In the second instant he saw that no weapons were visible, butthat one stood slightly behind the other and his right arm was hidden.
They had happened to come to the entrance at an angle to hisorientation, almost at right angles, and they would be confused for amoment, before they identified his shape, for to their orientation ifthey used Earth-thought for it, he would seem to be leaning headdownward on an almost vertical slope. He took advantage of the lag tomove his gun under its curtain of leaves and get the sights lined onthem.
They swung their eyes around the circle and saw him. "Mister Carter?"asked the foremost one. Their faceplates were still closed, and theirvoices slightly distorted by transmission through the helmet speaker,but he could hear a note of surprise. As the first one spoke thesecond one moved his hidden arm slightly, as if he were holdingsomething.
Bryce did not tighten his finger on the trigger. These could be mereinnocent sight-seers. The position of his head, almost upside downrelative to theirs, was probably confusing them, though almostcertainly they had studied trimensional photographs of him. At anyrate they probably were aware that they were standing like targets inthe corridor doorway and would be in no mood to postpone action.
"Take off your helmets, gentlemen, make yourselves at home." It was apartial admission that he was the man they wanted, but not certainenough for a decision. He saw the shoulder-twitch that meant that thesecond one's hidden hand jerked in a moment of uncertainty, and hethought he saw something glitter under the first one's arm--the oldtrick of shooting from under a friend's screening arm....
"Mr. Bryce Carter?" the for
emost one was asking again.
Bryce smiled. "No, Pierce," he said. He had turned on the two-wayspeaker and tuned it to the ship as he came in.
Immediately the voice came in the corridor behind them. "Stand still.You're covered."
There was no chance that anyone could genuinely be behind them, butthe rear one whirled and snapped a startled shot into the darkenedcorridor, and the other leaped sidewise down from the doorway, drawinghis gun with blurred speed, and leveling on Bryce as his feet leftcontact with the sill. He was falling slowly, almost floating, and itshould have been an easy shot, except for something he had obviouslyforgotten, or he never would have leaped.
Bryce disregarded him as a danger, and threw three shots at the other,who still stood startled and off balance in the corridor, firing threewith his inexperienced right hand to make sure of placing even one.The