Asteroid Man (16 page)

"Yes, but magnetism and electricity are pretty closely tied in together, aren't they?" said the radio man.

"I see what Krull is driving at," broke in Jonga, butting in on the conversation. "What it boils down to is this: gravity is a force of very powerful attraction."

"Yes, but gravity isn't powerful enough to suck in a space sip with rockets capable of reaching escape velocity." Krull had drifted away from the group and was examining what remained of the rocket-firing mechanism. "How about this?" his voice cut in suddenly. The others turned to look in his direction.

"There's something here that is decidedly odd. The firing button on the control panel is jammed over in the 'on' position. But these tubes weren't firing when the ship crashed."

Rotherson joined him and began examining the tube itself, then drifted over to look into the firing mechanism.

"You're right," he said. "They weren't. Something, somehow, somewhere, had the power of preventing the rockets from firing, even though the button had been pressed. So that creature, or creatures, appear to have the deadly, fiendish power of being able not only to prevent the rockets from firing and cutting off the escape of any ships that came near it, but also of attracting them downwards with some kind of super-gravity of its own. Perhaps—and again I'm in the field of pure speculation—that thing on the asteroid has the power of amplifying its own gravity, magnifying it, sending out as concentrated beam or wavicle…"

"Yes, that would make sense," said Krull. "It would make horrible, fatal sense, at least as far as those poor devils were concerned." He looked again at the identification of tabs they had collected from the bodies. "What a waste, what a horrible waste, men and ship! How pathetic, how tragic, how futile!" He heaved a great sigh that was audible over the radio. "Let's get back to the ship, chief; this thing depresses me."

"Me too," said Rotherson. "O.K."

They left the pathetic pile of wreckage, a wandering, metallic corpse in the vastness of space, and moved back through the airlock into the confines of their own ship. A few seconds later they had blasted off, and the wreckage had disappeared—was no longer even a blip on the radar screen.

They coasted on, and then the observation indicator tinkled a sudden warning.

Rotherson switched on the repeller field. His hand had hardly left the switch when Sparks said, with dull, toneless edge to his voice:

"Radio seems to be showing up another wreck, sir."

"Darn," said Rotherson. "We came out here to verify things and effect a rescue if possible. I don't like coming out here on a postmortem mission."

It was another wreck, very much the same as the first.

They examined it. It was not Greg Masterson's ship. Less than an hour later they encountered the third, and half an hour after that, the fourth.

It was three hours after sighting the first wreck that they came across the fifth. This time it was Masterson's.

Krull could feel a great lump in his throat. They gathered round the airlock for what would be the last of their wreckage examinations.

"Think there's any chance of anybody being alive?"

"No. Let's not build up any false hopes," said Rotherson. "If he did survive the crash, what chance would he have had? What suit would have stood up to that impact?"

The radio operator's voice suddenly broke in on the conversation: "I've thought of something, sir," he said. "Why did the ships break free of the asteroid again?"

"Good grief," answered Rotherson. "That's a point."

"Certainly is," chimed in Jonga. "If they'd been dragged in there by some kind of super-gravity, smashed into the surface to embed those pebbles, or whatever they are, into the very fabric of the ships, wouldn't they have been inclined to stay put? What drove them off again?"

"The beam must have been switched off, I suppose," volunteered Krull. "Wonder what kind of time interval there was between the impact and jettisoning of the wreckage into space."

Jonga was looking very thoughtful. "And why crash them only to jettison them again? It doesn't make sense to me."

"It does to me," said Rotherson. "It's the perfect weapon. If you can switch off your enemies' engines, and switch on a super gravity at the same time, if you can crash him into the surface of our planet and then repel him again, you're going to save an awful lot of ammunition. It's the most effective thing there is."

"Didn't they carry a bomb load?" chimed in Dolores with feminine intuition.

"Yes, of course they did," replied the general. "They carried one or two of the three-megaton type—mainly used for experimental survey blasting… but highly effective weapons! For an emergency!"

"That's strange," said Krull, "because the bombs are missing. We haven't found a ship yet with bombs aboard; all the racks were empty. I wonder why?"

"It looks as though they tried to fight back at this thing when they found it was dragging them down."

"They can't have been awfully successful, then, because if they'd been able to blow the asteroid to fragments before they hit, they wouldn't have hit."

It was simple straightforward logic which raised another question.

"What manner of things are we up against?" whispered the young radio operator. "A thing that can control gravity, a thing that is able to throw out some kind of nullifying ray that prevents megaton missiles from exploding?"

"What indeed?" whispered the general. "Whatever kind of creature inhabits that asteroid must belong to a technology way, way in advance of ours."

A cold shiver of apprehensive fear began running down every back. They felt like children who had gone out hunting rabbits and had suddenly stumbled across the lair of a savage bear… standing amid bones and bloody carcases.

"Still, forewarned is forearmed," said Rotherson grimly. "If we know what we're up against, we can't rush into it blindly, like those other poor devils did."

"Begging your pardon, sir, but I don't think Greg Masterson would have run into anything with his eyes closed; he was a real Boy Scout in the sense that he was always prepared. There's nothing would have caught old Greg unawares; he wasn't that type of man. He'd have rushed in—but he wouldn't have rushed in with his eyes shut; he'd have taken every possible precaution."

"Yes, I know he would," said the general. "On the other hand, we've gained by his experience." They looked from one to the other.

"Come on," said Jonga suddenly. "Let's get it over with." They opened the lock and moved out toward the fifth wreck. They found the identification plate strangely intact and readable.

"This was Masterson's ship," said the general flatly. Everyone seemed to be under a great black cloud that had mentally descended upon the whole expedition. Twenty bodies so far… would this make up the twenty-five?

They combed the wreckage from end to end. Again there were no bombs. Again there were strange smoothly granular particles embedded in the fabric, but there were not five bodies. There were only four. Hardly daring to hope at first, Krull examined each of the corpses slowly and carefully. He would not allow himself to hope until he was sure, and even then the hope was the slimmest and the faintest that any man could have had. Space was a fantastically wide area. Within that infinity of universal dimension, the body or the shattered remnants of the body of one can could be hidden and lost from the knowledge of society for ever. Yet Krull still had that feeling that Greg Masterson was not dead.

The feeling had been leaving him with every wreck they encountered, but now it suddenly came back with renewed strength. The sense of Greg's danger was brought in more strongly upon him that it had been before, and just for once he gave his instinct full reign.

He let his hunch have its head, and as they made their way back to the ship and secured the airlock behind them, he slid off his helmet and turned to speak to Rotherson.

"I've got an idea, sir, it's only the slimmest of theories and founded on supposition rather than fact. But my idea is that Masterson is alive!"

"I shouldn't build up your hopes too highly," said the general. "I hope he is—I hope he is as much as any of you. What makes you think so, Krull?"

"In the first place, the only evidence we have is that we haven't found his body—but not finding a body doesn't matter much one way or another when you have a place as big as the universe to hide it in. On the other hand, on all the other ships everyone has been together. There's no reason to believe that Greg would have been separate. He's not the kind of man to abandon ship and leave his crew to crash. I think there's only one possible explanation to fit the facts. He was in the ship, but he wasn't killed. Call it luck, chance, destiny, or anything you like, but his name wasn't written on one of those fragments of flying beryllium. His number hadn't come up on Fate's wheel. Fate missed him. His four companions were killed, but he wasn't. What would you or I do if our ship had crashed? What would be the first thing you'd do when you had recovered consciousness, when you'd checked and found that all your pals were dead?"

"Get out of the wreckage… get away from it, I suppose," said the general.

"It's my guess that's what Masterson did," went on Krull, "and if that asteroid was artificial, he probably spotted it. And if the exterior looked like a perfectly ordinary chunk of rock on the testing apparatus, then the inside of the thing would be where the creature or creatures, or whatever inhabits it, lived."

"Agreed," said Rotherson, laying his helmet aside.

"Now," went on Krull very thoughtfully, ticking off the points on his fingers as he made them, "if he could once get inside it, he could probably hide. He'd have his guns, no doubt, and the asteroid, though quite small in astronomical terms, is pretty big if you think about it as a hollow vessel from inside. It might have been one enormous cavern, in which case the ship would probably have crashed right through the shell… no, that doesn't make sense. I think it must be unique, perhaps with some kind of labyrinth inside it. This is only one of the wildest of guesses." He leaned forward confidingly. "Without knowing it, and much as I hate to admit the existence of things like extra-sensory perception, or ESP, I may have gotten some queer telepathic communication with Greg. Things that I'm putting forward as wild guesses may be things that he is seeing and experiencing. There is a very slim possibility…"

"Leaving out the telepathic element, and judging your theory on its merits alone, I see quite a bit to recommend it."

There was a sudden shout from the radio operator, who had resumed his post after getting out of his suit.

"What's the matter now?" asked Rotherson. The lad beckoned him over.

"Look here, Chief!" Rotherson's heavy brows creased into a puzzled frown. The others gathered round the screen.

"It's another ship," said Sparks.

"I think it must be," said Jonga, and pressed the identification tabulator. "It records as a ship, anyway," he said slowly. "Let's see if we can match courses."

"Right," said the general. They put their computer into action and swung the steering rockets over.

"Moving pretty fast," said Jonga.

"Certainly is," commented Dolores. They increased speed.

"I've got the direction velocity matching equation," said Krull, as his hands hand over the computer again.

"Good man."

The ship suddenly took violent, evasive action.

"They must have seen us coming and swerved off course," said Rotherson. "This looks fishy. The indicators below the screen were registering all sorts of rather odd measurements." Sparks had suddenly gone very white, the others noticed.

"What's the trouble, son?" asked Krull. For answer the lad handed him the direction slip, and the identifying symbols on the sheet of plain white paper. They translated themselves almost instantaneously in Krull's intelligent, practised mind; he too caught his breath in astonishment.

"Look at this, sir," he said. "It must be an alien, an Out-worlder. It doesn't fall in with any of the system classification."

"An alien," echoed the general.

"An Out-worlder," repeated Jonga. "I wonder if it has any connection with that asteroid?"

"It'll be a pretty big coincidence if it hasn't," said Rotherson grimly. "We may not be able to fight an asteroid, but we'll fight this beggar. Right, lads; stand by for action stations."

Once clear of that central chamber in the heart of the asteroid's labyrinth, Greg raced on, yet cautiously, despite his speed, as though all the devils in hell were pursuing him. He knew that if he got into one of those nets again, he was done for. For this time, as soon as he was helpless, the knife and the hand of the asteroid man's servants would sever, not the net cords, but his throat. And suddenly the obvious solution presented itself to him. Instead of being the hunted, he would be the hunter. He would have to track down that creature with the knife and destroy it. The question was—what with?

His guns wouldn't work, and anyway, he only had one left. He had lost the axe somewhere in the labyrinth. It would be a chance in a million against his finding it again.

He was being stalked by fantastic, grotesque monsters, with the strength of bull elephants. His only weapon against them would be an axe, a spear, a sword, something of that nature. For guns or similar mechanisms wouldn't fire while the nullifying ray was on. His first job, then, was to re-equip himself with a weapon. His second task was to find the creature with the atomically condensed knife that would cut his way out of one of those nets, or any other difficulties that he might encounter. The only other possible weapons that he could use were hanging on the belt of the space suit that he had lost somewhere far, far away in the labyrinth. Because if only he could find Astra, she would probably know where he could find some sort of weapon. But the enemy had gotten Astra, and he couldn't rescue her until he could find something with which to fight the creatures. It was a vicious circle. He remembered an old adage of the blackout of the last interplanetary war—the blackout that had been largely a farce due to the fact that modern electronic detection devices made night and day practically equivalent to one another. It was only the humor that remained as a memory of that war.