Scavengers in Space

by Alan Edward Nourse

  It was a completely different world, a world within a world, a world of darkness and silence, of a thousand curving and intersecting tunnels, some large, some small. For hours it seemed to Tom that he had been wandering through a tomb, moving through the corridors of a dead ship, the lone surviving crewman. There was some contact with the other world, of course, the world of the space ship outside. Each compartment had its metal grill, and he passed many of them. But these were like doors that only he knew existed. He met no one in these corridors, there was no danger of sudden discovery and arrest in these dark alleys.

  His boots had made too much noise when he started out, so he had slipped them off, hanging them from his belt and moving on in his stocking feet. As he went from duct to duct, he had an almost ridiculous feeling of freedom and power. In every sense, he was an invisible man. Not one soul on this great ship knew he was here, or even suspected it. He had the run of the ship, complete freedom to go wherever he chose. He could move from compartment to compartment as. silently and invisibly as if he had no substance at all.

  He knew his first job was to learn the pattern of the ducts, and orientation was a problem. He had heard stories of men getting lost in the deep underground mining tunnels on Mars, wandering in circles for days until their food gave out and they starved. And there was that hazard here, for every duct looked like every other one.

  Yet there was a difference, because the ducts curved just as the main ship’s corridors did. He could always identify the center of the ship by the force of false gravity pulling the other way. Furthermore, as the ducts drew closer to the pumps and reconditioning units, they opened into larger vents, and the noise of the pumps thundered in his ears. After an hour of exploration, Tom was certain that from any place in the ship he could at least find his way to the outer layer, and from there to one of the scout ship s airlocks.

  Finding Greg and Johnny was a different matter.

  He could not see enough through the compartment grills to identify just what the compartments were; he was forced to rely on what he could hear. The engine rooms were easily identified. In one area he heard the banging of pots and pans, the steaming of kettles—obviously the galley. From the storage holds came a vast silence, broken by a rumbling crash as ore poured down the metal chutes for storage.

  He found the crew’s living quarters and paused at one compartment as voices came through the grill. A man with a squeaky voice was complaining bitterly about his turn on guard; a deeper voice was more philosophical. “Be too bad if they broke out somehow, after all this work,” he was saying.

  “You think they’re going to talk?” the squeaky voice asked.

  “Sure they’ll talk. What else can they do?”

  “Maybe they’ll just clam up and thumb their noses at the boss,” Squeaky said.

  The other laughed. “That I’d like to see, somebody thumbing his nose at the boss! Don’t worry, they’ll talk, and when they do there’ll be enough to take care of everybody.”

  “Well, maybe,” Squeaky said, not too convinced. “I still wish they hadn’t blasted that other one.”

  “You scared of ghosts or something?”

  “No, but if something went wrong, the whole crew might be held.”

  “Don’t worry. The U.N. can’t touch us. The boss has got ’em running. Why, ten years ago they’d have been out here questioning every outfit in the belt after they found the old man’s body. And what do they do now? Nothing, that’s what.”

  Tom moved on, grinning to himself. The man was right, of course. Nothing had been done about Roger Hunter’s death, nothing much, not yet.

  But the fun hadn’t even started.

  He kept moving, stopping to listen at each grill. At one point, as he moved in toward the center of the ship, his wrist Geiger began to sputter. He stopped and turned back, making a wide circle around the area. He knew that a separate system of ventilators handled the radioactive waste gases when the engines were in operation, but there was no need to venture into those regions.

  Later, he found the control area. He could hear the clatter of typing instruments, the click-click-click of the computers working out the orbits and trajectories for the scout ships as they moved out from the orbit ship or came back in. In another compartment he heard a dispatcher chattering his own special code-language into a microphone in a low-pitched voice. He passed another grill, and then stopped short as a familiar voice drifted through.

  Merrill Tawney’s voice.

  Tom hugged the grill, straining to catch the words. The company man sounded angry; the man he was talking to sounded even angrier. “I can’t help what you want or don’t want, Merrill, I can only report what we’ve found, and that’s nothing at all. Every one of those claims has been searched twice over. Doc and his boys went over them, and we didn’t find anything they might have missed. I think you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

  “There’s got to to be something,” Tawney said, his voice tight with anger. “Hunter couldn’t have taken anything away from there, he didn’t have a chance to. You read the reports.”

  “I know,” the other said wearily, “I know what the reports said.”

  “Then what he found is still there. There’s no other possibility,” Tawney said.

  “We went over that rock with a microscope. We blew it to shreds. Assay has gone through the fragments literally piece by piece. They found low-grade iron, a trace of nickel, a little tin. And just lots and lots of granite. If we never found anything richer than that, we’d have been out of business ten years ago.”

  There was a long silence. Tom pressed closer to the grill.

  He heard Tawney slam his fist into his palm. “You know what Roger Hunter’s doing, don’t you?” he cried. “He’s making fools of us, that’s whatl The man’s dead, and he’s making us look like idiots. If we hadn’t been so sure we had the lode spotted—” He broke off. “Well, that’s done; we can’t undo it But this brat of his—”

  “Any luck there?”

  “Not a word. He’s playing hard to get.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t know anything. Doc made a bad mistake when he blasted the other one. Suppose he was the only one who knew.”

  “All right, it was a mistake,” Tawney snapped. “What was Doc supposed to do? Let the boy get back to Mars? We’ve got a good front there, but it’s not that good. If the United Nations gets a toe hold out here, the whole belt will go into their pocket; you realize that. They’re waiting for us to make one slip.” He paused, and Tom heard him pacing the compartment. “But I think we’ve got our boy. This one knows. We’ve been spoiling him so far, that’s all. Well, now we start digging. When I get through with him, he’ll be begging us to let him tell. You just watch me, as soon as the okay comes through.”

  Tom drew back from the grill, moving on in the darkness. So far he had not rushed his exploration. If there was a chance to use the ducts for escape, he wanted to know them well. But now he knew the hour was getting late. So far Greg and Johnny had been stalling Tawney, but Tawney was getting impatient.

  He moved quickly, stopping at each compartment only long enough to identify it. Crew’s quarters, the executive suite, officers’ quarters—nowhere was there a sign of the prisoners. He found himself retracing his steps, listening more closely. Unless he could locate them, he was helpless.

  But he thought again of what Tawney had said. Tawney was right about one thing. There was no way that Dad could have hidden a big strike so nobody could find it. It had to be there. ,

  And yet it wasn’t. He and Greg hadn’t found it. Tawney’s men hadn’t found it, either. Why not? There must be a reason. But he could not put his finger on it.

  Half an hour later he was seriously worried. Half the compartments in the area he was exploring were deserted, the men leaving for the cafeteria. The thought reminded Tom how hungry he was, and thirsty. His small emergency ration kit was empty. He toyed with the thought of sneaking into a food storage compartment, then thrust it out of his
mind as too risky. He had to find Greg and Johnny before doing anything else.

  He passed a grill, and heard a murmur of voices. Something in the deep bass rumble caught his ear. He stopped, listened.

  The voices stopped also.

  He waited for them to begin, pressing against the grill. Johnny Coombs was not the only man with a deep bass voice. Tom might have been mistaken. He listened, but there was no sound. He heard the whir of a fan begin. Still no sound, not even footsteps.

  And then it happened, so fast he was taken competely off guard. The grill suddenly gave way, pitching him forward into the compartment. Something struck him behind the ear as he fell; there was a grunt, a sharp command, and he was pinned to the floor in the semidarkness of the compartment.

  He heard a gasp and opened his eyes. He was staring into his brother’s unbelieving, startled face. Greg was pinning his shoulders to the carpeted deck, and behind him Johnny Coombs had a fist raised.

  But they had stopped in mid-air, like a tableau of puppets. Greg gaped, his jaw falling open, and Tom heard himself saying, “What are you trying to do, kill a guy? Seems to me one time is enough.”

  He had found them.

  Chapter Ten

  Tom Pulls The Trigger

  In the first instant of recognition Greg and Johnny were speechless. Later, Tom said it was the first time in his life that he had ever seen Greg totally without words. His brother jumped back as if he had seen a ghost. His mouth worked, but no sounds came out.

  “Don’t worry, it’s me all right,” Tom said, “and I’m mighty hungry.”

  Greg and Johnny stared at the black hole behind the grill, and then Greg was pummeling him, pounding him on the back, so excited he couldn’t get a word out. And Johnny was hovering over them, incredulous, but forced to believe his eyes, like a father overwhelmed by the impossible behavior of a pair of unpredictable children. It was a jubilant reunion all around. They ransacked the cabinets and refrigerator in the back of the lounge and pulled out surro-ham and rolls, while Johnny got some coffee going. Tom was so famished he could hardly wait to make sandwiches of the ham. Finally he slowed up and got his mouth empty enough to talk.

  “All right, let’s have the story,” Greg said, still looking as though he couldn’t believe his eyes. “The last we saw, you were blown into atoms out there in that Scavenger. You’ve got some nerve turning up now and scaring us half out of our skins.”

  “You want me to go back in my hole?”

  “Just sit still and talk!”

  Tom talked, starting from the beginning: his realization that the battle for their father’s orbit ship was a lost cause; his reasoning that if all three were captured, there would be little chance for escape; his determination to “play dead”, to make the raiders think he had been destroyed—there was nothing he left out. “I only hoped I got the autopilot set right, and the shell-evasion mechanism,” he said. “But I didn’t have much time to study up on navigation at the time.”

  “Don’t worry, it was realistic enough,” Greg said grimly. “The way that little ship went dodging those shells was enough to convince anybody.”

  “Well, then the trick was to get back here with you.” Tom told them about his terrifying ride on the hull of the Ranger, his near-encounter with the guard once he had come aboard the Jupiter Equilateral orbit ship, and his idea of using the ventilation ducts for both concealment and movement. Through it all Greg stared in admiration. “We’ve got a genius among us, that’s all,” he said finally. “And I always thought you were the timid one.”

  “But what else could I do?” Tom asked. “You know what they say about grabbing a tiger by the tail. Once you get hold, you’ve got to hold on.”

  “Okay,” Greg said, “but the next time I make a crack about your retiring nature, remind me to stick my foot in my mouth.”

  “I’ll do it for him,” Johnny Coombs rumbled.

  Tom nodded toward the open grill. “The only thing I don’t see is how you knew I was back there.”

  Johnny grinned. “We were busy taking down the grill when you came along. We’d found a microphone in this place, and figured they might have one behind the grill. And then we heard somebody breathing. We thought they’d posted a guard back there, just to snoop on us.”

  “Well, I’m glad you didn’t hit him any harder.”

  Johnny started to say something and stopped, his head cocked toward the door. Footsteps sounded in the corridor outside; they came closer, stopped by the door. “Quick,” Johnny whispered. “Back inside!”

  There was no time to look for other concealment. Tom leaped across the room, jumped up into the shaft again, and Greg slammed the grate up into place just as the hatchway door swung open.

  Merrill Tawney walked into the room, with two burly guards behind him;

  For the first few seconds, Greg was certain that they were lost. He stood with his back to the ventilator grill, frozen in his tracks as the fat little company man came into the room. He tried to keep his face blank, but he knew he wasn’t succeeding. He saw the puzzled frown on Tawney’s face.

  The company man motioned the guards into the room, peered suspiciously at Greg and Johnny. “Am I interrupting something, by any chance?”

  “Nothing at all,” Johnny blurted. “We were just talking.”

  “Talking.” Tawney repeated the word as if it were in some strange language he didn’t quite understand. He looked at the guard. “Let’s just check them.”

  While one guard patted down their clothes, the other withdrew a stunner, held it on ready. Tawney prowled the lounge. He glanced at the food on the table, then reached under the chair cushion and withdrew the disconnected microphone, looked at the loose wires, and tossed it aside.

  “They’re clean,” the guard said.

  Tawney’s face was a study of uneasiness, but he clearly could not pinpoint what the trouble was. Finally he shrugged and turned on the smile again, although his eyes remained watchful. “Well, maybe you won’t mind if I join in the talking for a while,” he said. “You’ve been comfortable? No complaints?”

  “No complaints,” Greg said.

  “Then I presume we’re ready to talk business.” He looked at Greg.

  “You said you were ready to bargain,” Greg said, “but I haven’t heard any terms yet.”

  “Terms? Very simple. You direct us to the lode, we give you half of everything we realize from it,” Tawney said, smiling.

  “You mean you’ll write us a contract? With a U.N. witness to it?”

  “Well, hardly, under the “circumstances. I’m afraid you’ll have to take our word.”

  Greg looked at the company man and shook his head. “Not that I don’t trust you,” he said, “but I’m afraid I can’t give you what you want.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t know where Dad made his strike.”

  The company man’s face darkened. “Somebody knows where it is. Your father would never have found something like that without telling his own sons.”

  “Sorry,” Greg said. “Of course, I can tell you where you might find out, if you want to go look.”

  “We’ve already searched his records.”

  “Some of his records,” Greg said. “Not all of them. There was a compartment behind the main control panel in Dad’s orbit ship. Dad used it to store deeds, claims, and other important papers. There was a packet of notes in there before your men fired on the ship. But, of course, maybe you searched more thoroughly, the second time.”

  Tawney stared at him for a moment, then turned to Johnny. Johnny shrugged his shoulders solemnly and shook his head. Without a word, the little company man walked to the intercom speaker on the wall. He spoke sharply into it, waited, then had a brief, pungent conversation with someone. Then he turned back to Greg, his face heavy with suspicion. “You saw these papers?”

  “Certainly I saw them. I didn’t have time to read them through, but what else could they be?”

  “Let me warn
you,” Tawney said coldly. “If I send a crew out there on a wild goose chase, the party will be over when they get back, do you understand? You’ve been given every consideration. If this is a fool’s errand, you’ll pay for it very dearly.” He turned on his heel, snarled at one of the guards, “I want them watched every minute. One of you stay with them constantly. It won’t take long to find out if this is a stall.”

  He stalked out, and the hatchway clanged behind him. One guard went along; the big one with the stunner stayed behind, eyeing his prisoners unpleasantly. The stunner was in his hand, the safety off.

  Johnny Coombs started across the room toward the kitchenette, passing close to the guard. Suddenly he turned, swung his fist heavily down on the guard’s neck. The stunner crackled, but Greg had jumped aside. Another blow from Johnny’s fist sent the gun flying. Another blow, and the guard’s legs slid out from under him. He fell unconscious to the floor.

  In an instant they were across the room, lifting down the grill, helping Tom out of his hiding place. “Okay, boy,” Johnny said to Greg, “I guess you pulled the trigger with that story of yours.”

  “Not me,” Greg said. “Tom did. He’s the one that showed us the way out—the same way he came in.”

  The guard would be out for a while, they made sure of that first. Then there was a hasty consultation. “The airlocks are guarded,” Johnny said, “and if they tumble on to the ventilator shafts, they can smoke us out in no time. How are we going to get a scout ship without showing ourselves? For that matter, how are we going to get a scout ship away from here without being blown up the way the Scavenger was blown up?”

  “I think I know a way,” Tom said. “We have to have something to keep a lot of the crew busy. If we could get to the ship’s generators and put them out of commission somehow, it might do it.”

  “Why?” Greg wanted to know.

  “Because of the air supply,” Tom said. “Without the generators, the fans won’t run. They’ll have to get a crew to fix them or they’ll suffocate.”