Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids

by Isaac Asimov

  The second largest airless object was the Moon. Here again circumstances dictated specialization. Weather forecasts on Earth, for instance, had become an accurate, long-range science, since the appearance of Earth's atmosphere could be viewed as a whole from a distance of a quarter of a million miles.

  And the third largest airless object was Ceres, and that was the best of the three. Its almost nonexistent gravity allowed huge lenses and mirrors to be poured without the danger of breakage, without even the question of sag, due to its own weight. The structure of the telescope tube itself needed no particular strength. Ceres was nearly three times as far from the Sun as was the Moon and sunlight was only one eighth as strong. Its rapid revolution kept Ceres' temperature almost constant. In short, Ceres was ideal for observation of the stars and of the outer planets.

  Only the day before Bigman had seen Saturn through the thousand-inch reflecting telescope, the grinding of the huge mirror having consumed twenty years of painstaking and continuous labor.

  "What do I look through?" he had asked.

  They laughed at him. "You don't look through anything," they said.

  They worked the controls carefully, three of them, each doing something that co-ordinated with the other two, until all were satisfied. The dim red lights dimmed further and in the pit of black emptiness about which they sat a blob of light sprang into being. A touch at the controls and it focused sharply.

  Bigman whistled his astonishment. It was Saturn!

  It was Saturn, three feet wide, exactly as he had seen it from space half a dozen times. Its triple rings were bright and he could see three marble-like moons. Behind it was a numerous dusting of stars. Bigman wanted to walk about it to see how it looked with the night shadow cutting it, but the picture didn't change as he moved.

  "It's just an image," they told him, "an illusion. You see the same thing no matter where you stand."

  Now, from the asteroid's surface, Bigman could spot Saturn with the naked eye. It was just a white dot, but brighter than the other white dots that were the stars. It was twice as bright as it appeared from Earth, since it was two hundred million miles closer here. Earth itself was on the other side of Ceres near the pea-size Sun. Earth wasn't a very impressive sight, since the Sun invariably dwarfed it.

  Bigman's helmet suddenly rang with sound as the call flooded his left-open radio receiver.

  "Hey, Shortie, get moving. There's a ship coming in."

  Bigman jumped at the noise and moved straight upward, limbs flailing. He yelled, "Who're you calling Shortie?"

  But the other was laughing. "Hey, how much do you charge for flying lessons, little boy?"

  "I'll little boy you," screamed Bigman furiously. He had reached the peak of his parabola and was slowly and hesitatingly beginning to settle downward once more. "What's your name, wise guy? Say your name, and I'll crack your gizzard as soon as I get back and peel the suit.

  "Think you can reach my gizzard?" came the mocking rejoinder, and Bigman would have exploded into tiny pieces if he had not caught sight of a ship slanting down from the horizon.

  He loped in giant, clumsy strides about the leveled square mile of ground that was the asteroid's space-port, trying to judge the exact spot on which the ship would land.

  It dropped down its steaming jets to a feather-touch planetary contact and when the air-locks opened and Lucky's tall, suited figure emerged, Bigman, yelling his joy, made one long leap of it, and they were together.

  * * *

  Conway and Henree were less effusive in their welcome, but no less joyful. Each wrung Lucky's hand as though to confirm, by sheer muscular pressure, the reality of the flesh and blood they beheld.

  Lucky laughed. "Whoa, will you? Give me a chance to breathe. What's the matter? Didn't you think I was coming back?"

  "Look here," said Conway, "you'd better consult us before you take off on just any old fool notion."

  "Well, now, not if it's too much of a fool notion, please, or you won't let me."

  "Never mind that. I can ground you for what you've done. I can have you put under detention right now. I can suspend you. I can throw you off the Council," said Conway.

  "Which of them are you going to do?"

  "None of them, you darned overgrown young fool. But I may beat your brains out one of these days."

  Lucky turned to Augustus Henree. "You won't let him, will you?"

  "Frankly, I'll help him."

  "Then I give up in advance. Look, there's a gentleman here I'd like to have you meet."

  Until now Hansen had remained in the background, obviously amused by the interchange of nonsense. The two older Councilmen had been too full of Lucky Starr even to be aware of his existence.

  "Dr. Conway," said Lucky, "Dr. Henree, this is Mr. Joseph P. Hansen, the man whose ship I used to come back. He has been of considerable assistance to me."

  The old hermit shook hands with the two scientists.

  "I don't suppose you can possibly know Drs. Conway and Henree," said Lucky. The hermit shook his head.

  "Well," he went on, "they're important officials in the Council of Science. After you've eaten and had a chance to rest, they'll talk to you and help you, I'm sure."

  * * *

  An hour later the two Councilmen faced Lucky with somber expressions. Dr. Henree tamped tobacco into his pipe with a little finger, and smoked quietly as he listened to Lucky's accounts of his adventures with the pirates.

  "Have you told this to Bigman?" he asked.

  "I've just spent some time talking to him," said Lucky.

  "And he didn't assault you for not taking him?"

  "He wasn't pleased," Lucky admitted.

  But Conway's mind was more seriously oriented. "A Sirian-designed ship, eh?" he mused.

  "Undoubtedly so," said Lucky. "At least we have that piece of information."

  "The information wasn't worth the risk," said Conway, dryly. "I'm much more disturbed over another piece of information we have now. It's obvious that the Sirian organization penetrates into the Council of Science itself."

  Henree nodded gravely. "Yes, I saw that, too. Very bad."

  Lucky said, "How do you make that out?"

  "Galaxy, boy, it's obvious," growled Conway. "I'll admit that we had a large construction crew working on the ship and that even with the best intentions careless slips of information can take place. It remains truth, though, that the fact of the booby-trapping and particularly the exact manner of the fusing were known only to Council members and not too many of those. Somewhere in that small group is a spy, yet I could have sworn that all were faithful." He shook his head. "I still can't believe otherwise."

  "You don't have to," said Lucky.

  "Oh? And why not?"

  "Because the Sirian contact was quite temporary. The Sirian Embassy got their information from me"

  Chapter 8

  Bigman Takes Over

  "Indirectly, of course, through one of their known spies," he amplified, as the two older men stared at him in shocked astonishment.

  "I don't understand you at all," said Henree in a low voice. Conway was obviously speechless.

  "It was necessary. I had to introduce myself to the pirates without suspicion. If they found me on what they thought was a mapping ship, they would have shot me out of hand. On the other hand, if they found me on a booby-trapped ship the secret of which they had stumbled on by what seemed a stroke of fortune, they would have taken me at face value as a stowaway. Don't you see? On a mapping ship I'm only a member of the crew that didn't get away in time. On a booby trap, I'm a poor jerk who didn't realize what he was stowing away on."

  "They might have shot you anyway. They might have seen through your double-cross and considered you a spy. In fact, they almost did."

  "True! They almost did," admitted Lucky.

  Conway finally exploded. "And what about the original plan. Were we or were we not going to explode one of their bases? When I consider the months we spent on the constructio
n of the Atlas, the money that went into it-"

  "What good would it have done to explode one of their bases? We spoke about a huge hangar of pirate ships, but actually that was only wishful thinking. An organization based upon the asteroids would have to be decentralized. The pirates probably don't have more than three or four ships in any one place. There wouldn't be room for more. Exploding three or four ships would mean very little compared with what would have been accomplished if I had succeeded in penetrating their organization."

  "But you didn't succeed," said Conway. "With all your fool risks, you didn't succeed."

  "Unfortunately the pirate captain who took the Atlas was too suspicious, or perhaps too intelligent for us. I'll try not to underestimate them again. But it's not all loss. We know for a fact that Sirius is behind them. In addition, we have my hermit friend."

  "He won't help us," said Conway. "From what you've said about him, it sounds as though he were only interested in having as little to do with the pirates as possible. So what can he know?"

  "He may be able to tell us more than he himself thinks is possible," said Lucky coolly. "For instance, there's one piece of information he can give us that will enable me to continue efforts at working against piracy from the inside."

  "You're not going out there again," said Conway hastily.

  "I don't intend to," said Lucky.

  Conway's eyes narrowed. "Where's Bigman?"

  "On Ceres. Don't worry. In fact," and a shadow crossed Lucky's face, "he should be here by now. The delay is beginning to bother me a little."

  * * *

  John Bigman Jones used his special pass card to get past the guard at the door to the Control Tower. He was muttering to himself as he half-ran along the corridors.

  The slight flush on his pug-nosed face dimmed his freckles and his reddish hair stood up in tufts like fence pickets. Lucky had frequently told him he cultivated a vertical hair-do to make himself look taller, but he always denied that vigorously.

  The final door to the Tower swung open as he broke the photoelectric beam. He stepped inside and looked about.

  Three men were on duty. One with earphones sat at the sub-etheric receiver, another was at the calculating machine and the third was at the curved radarized visi-plate.

  Bigman said, "Which one of you knotbrains called me Shortie?"

  The three turned toward him in unison, their faces startled and scowling.

  The man with the earphones pulled one away from his left ear. "Who in space are you? How the dickens did you get in here?"

  Bigman stood erect and puffed out his small chest. "My name is John Bigman Jones. My friends call me Bigman. Everyone else calls me Mr. Jones. Nobody calls me Shortie and stays in one piece. I want to know which one of you made that mistake."

  The man with the earphones said, "My name is Lem Fisk and you can call me anything you blame please as long as you do it somewhere else. Get out of here, or I'll come down, pick you up by one leg, and toss you out."

  The fellow at the calculating machine said, "Hey, Lem, that's the crackpot who was haunting the port a while back. There's no point in wasting time on him. Get the guards to throw him out."

  "Nuts," said Lem Fisk, "we don't need guards for that

  guy." He took off his earphones altogether and set the sub-

  etherics at automatic signal. He said, "Well, son, you came in here and asked us a nice question in a nice way. I'll give you a nice answer. I called you Shortie, but wait, don't get mad. I had a reason. You see you're such a real tall fellow. You're such a long drink of water. You're such a high-pockets. It makes my friends laugh to hear me call you Shortie."

  He reached into his hip pocket and drew out a plastic container of cigarettes. The smile on his face was bland.

  "Come down here," yelled Bigman. "Come down here and back up your sense of humor with a couple of fists."

  "Temper, temper," said Fisk, clucking his tongue. "Here, boy, have a cigarette. King-size, you know. Almost as long as you are. Liable to create some confusion, though, come to think of it. We won't be able to tell whether you're smoking the cigarette or the cigarette is smoking you."

  The other two Tower men laughed vigorously.

  Bigman was a passionate red. Words came thickly to his tongue. "You won't fight?"

  "I'd rather smoke. Pity you don't join me." Fisk leaned back, chose a cigarette, and held it before his face as though admiring its slim whiteness. "After all, I can't be bothered to fight children."

  He grinned, brought his cigarette to his lips, and found them closing on nothingness.

  His thumb and first two fingers still held their positions about three eighths of an inch apart, but there was no cigarette between them.

  "Watch out, Lem," cried the man at the visiplate. "He has a needle-gun."

  "No needle-gun," snarled Bigman. "Just a buzzer."

  There was an important difference. A buzzer's projectiles, although needle-like, were fragile and nonexplo-sive. They were used for target practice and small game. Striking human skin, a buzz needle would do no serious damage, but it would smart like the devil.

  Fisk's grin disappeared completely. He yelled, "Watch that, you crazy fool. You can blind a man with that."

  Bigman's fist remained clenched at eye level. The thin snout of the buzzer projected between his two middle fingers. He said, "I won't blind you. But I can fix it so you won't sit down for a month. And as you can see, my aim isn't bad. And you," he called over his shoulder to the one at the calculator, "if you move an inch closer to the alarm circuit, you'll have a buzz needle right through your hand."

  Fisk said, "What do you want?"

  "Come down here and fight."

  "Against a buzzer?"

  "I'll put it away. Fists. Fair fight. Your buddies can see to that."

  "I can't hit a guy smaller than I am."

  "Then you shouldn't insult him, either." Bigman brought up the buzzer. "And I'm not smaller than you are. I may look that way on the outside, but inside I'm as big as you. Maybe bigger. I'm counting three." He narrowed one eye as he aimed.

  "Galaxy!" swore Fisk. "I'm coming down. Fellas, be my witness that this was forced on me. I'll try not to hurt the crazy idiot too much."

  He leaped down from his perch. The man at the calculating machine took his place at the sub-etherics.

  Fisk was five feet ten, eight inches taller than Bigman, whose slight figure was more like a boy's than a man's. But Bigman's muscles were steel springs under perfect control. He awaited the other's approach without expression.

  Fisk did not bother to put up a guard. He simply extended his right hand as though he were going to lift Bigman by the collar and toss him through the still open door.

  Bigman ducked under the arm. His left and right thudded into the larger man's solar plexus in a rapid one-two, and almost in the same instant he danced out of reach.

  Fisk turned green and sat down, holding his stomach and groaning.

  "Stand up, big boy," said Bigman. "I'll wait for you."

  The other two Tower men seemed frozen into immobility by the sudden turn of events.

  Slowly Fisk rose to his feet. His face glowed with rage, but he approached more slowly.

  Bigman drifted away.

  Fisk lunged! Bigman was not there by two inches. Fisk whipped a sharp overhand right. It's thrust ended an inch short of Bigman's jaw.

  Bigman bobbed about like a cork on rippling water. His arms lifted occasionally to deflect a blow.

  Fisk, yelling incoherently, rushed blindly at his gnat-like opponent. Bigman stepped to one side and his open hand slapped sharply at the other's smooth-shaven cheek. It hit with a sharp report, like a meteor hitting the first layers of dense air above a planet. The marks of four fingers were outlined in red on Fisk's face.

  For a moment Fisk stood there, dazed. Like a striking snake, Bigman stepped in again, his fists moving upward to crack against Fisk's jaw. Fisk went down into a half crouch.

  Distantly Bigman
was suddenly aware of the steady ringing of the alarm.

  Without a moment's hesitation he turned on his heel and was out the door. He wove through a startled trio of guards heading up the corridor at a clattering run, and was gone!

  * * *

  "And why," questioned Conway, "are we waiting for Bigman?"

  Lucky said, "Here's the way I see the situation. There is nothing we need so badly as more information about the pirates. I mean inside information. I tried to get it and things didn't quite break the way I hoped they would. I'm a marked man now. They know me. But they don't know Bigman. He has no official connection with the Council. Now it's my idea that if we can trump up a criminal charge against him, for realism, you know, he can hightail it out of Ceres in the hermit's ship-"

  "Oh, space," groaned Conway.

  "Listen, will you! He'll go back to the hermit's asteroid. If the pirates are there, good! If not, he'll leave the ship in plain view and wait for them inside. It's a very comfortable place to wait in."

  "And when they come," said Henree, "they'll shoot him."

  "They will not. That's why he's taking the hermit's ship. They'll have to know where Hansen went, to say nothing of myself, where Bigman came from, how he got hold of the ship. They'll have to know. That will give him time to talk."

  "And to explain how he picked out Hansen's asteroid out of all the rocks in creation? That would take some tall talking."

  "That won't take any talking at all. The hermit's ship was on Ceres, which it is. I've arranged to leave it out there unguarded, so he can take it. He'll find the ship's home asteroid's space-time co-ordinates in the logbook. It would just be an asteroid to him, not too far from Ceres, as good as any other, and he would make a beeline for it in order to wait for the furor on Ceres to die down."

  "It's a risk," grumbled Conway.

  "Bigman knows it. And I tell you right now, we've got to take risks. Earth is underestimating the pirate menace so badly that-"