Authors: Mike Jurist
You don't know Mr. Kerry Dale," smiled Sally.
The Kentons went back to their hotel—the single good one in
the rushing, roaring, enclosed city of Planets.
"Har-rumph!" observed old Simeon. "We seem to have come on a wild-goose chase. Salvage, indeed! Piracy, more likely. He'll starve to death trying to find salvage work from here to Jupiter. There ain't many ships out and most o' them's mine. And my captains just don't let their ships break down. They know better. Oh, well, a fool and his ill-gotten gains 're soon parted. We might as well go home, child."
Sally's eyes felt queer and blurry. What was the matter with her? Here she was acting like any silly schoolgirl; literally throwing herself at the head of a young man whom she had seen only once and who didn't care a hoot about her. She had sent him a spacegram and he hadn't even the decency to acknowledge it. She had tossed decorum to the winds and rocketed to Planets, and be was gone. Her father was right! He was a fool; an egotistic, self-centered fool. She'd show him! She'd go right back and forget
"I'm staying here, dad," she said aloud, miserably aware of leer
illogic.
"You're a rubble-dyed idiot, daughter," snorted Simeon.
"And if you want to make a blasted show of yourself, go ahead. As for me, I'm going—"
They were moving across the soft-padded lobby of the hotel. A man was registering at the scanning booth. The scanner printed his picture and other pertinent data and transferred it to the photoelectric cells guarding the panel of the room to which he had been assigned.
He turned as they came up. His eyes wavered on the Kentons, smiled palely and slid past them.
Simeon stopped short. "Jericho Foote!"
Explosive contempt seared his voice. "What the devil is a slimy Venusian swamp snake like yourself doing out here in Planets?"
Jericho Foote, President of Mammoth Exploitations and old Simeon's chief rival, blinked at him sideways. He never looked any man straight in the face. His black hair was smoothed sleekly over a low forehead. His nose was pinched and brief, his lips bloodless and thin. His smile went underground and his face darkened.
"Someday I'll have the law on you for your slanderous tongue, Kenton," he said with a scowl.
"Run to the law and be damned! I asked you a question." "It's none of your business," snapped Foote and went hastily past them.
Sally stared thoughtfully after him. "He must have come on the
Erebus
with us. In secret, too. His name wasn't on the passenger list and he kept to his quarters. Maybe my hunch was right, dad. When you turned Kerry Dale down, perhaps he teamed up with Foote."
"Then he teamed up with a skulking leohippus," growled Simeon. He began to walk quickly toward the scanning booth. "What are you going to do?"
"Har-rumph! Register, of course. When skullduggery's afoot, Simeon Kenton's not the man to run away. Come on, Sally."
"The misnamed
Flash
rolled and wallowed in space and made loud, complaining noises every time the rockets jetted. It was a tub, rusty and dingy with long years of service, and the odors of suspicious freights clung to the interior in spite of thorough scrubbings. The tubes were out of line and gave a wobbling motion. The struts quivered and groaned. The motors
pounded and clanked unceasingly. The heavens gyrated in sympathy and the stars danced little, erratic jigs every time Kerry Dale glued his eyes to the observation telescope.
Yet he was inordinately proud of his craft; as proud as if she had been a swift, sleek racer capable of a thousand miles a second. He
owned her—every rusted bolt of her; every squeak and rattle. He was no longer a penniless young lawyer out of a job; he was a man with vested property rights; President and total Board of Directors of Space Salvage, Inc. True, he had sunk practically every cent he had in this old scow, and business so far had been exactly nil. That didn't matter. Something was bound to turn up. His nimble wits would see to that. Good Lord—the Asteroid Belt was full of opportunities. If it wouldn't be one thing, it would be another. He had drawn his charter with infinite care. There were dozens of vague, rambling clauses in it that had meant nothing to the law experts of the Ceres Filing Bureau; but which in a pinch could cover any contingency. He could conduct salvage operations, own and operate mines, take title to stray asteroids, barter, trade with and sell to any natives he might find on the various planets and satellites; and in general, as he had thoughtfully inserted, "do any and all things which a natural person might do, not contrary to law."
Which, as Jem admiringly observed, practically gave Kerry the right to commit murder—in his corporate entity, of course.
Jem was his second in command. He had a last name—it appeared on articled indentures, on certain police records scattered over space—but none of his intimates knew what it was. Everyone called him Jem and nothing else. When Kerry had quit his menial labors as cargo wrestler on the
Flying Meteor,
a Kenton freighter, because of a certain general release he bad cannily extracted from Old Fireball, Jem, who had been his foreman and superior, had quit with him. Even in the hold of the
Flying Meteor,
Jem had humbly admitted Kerry's superiority, and he had jumped at the chance to throw in his fortunes with the brilliant, resourceful young lawyer.
Right now, however, Jem was a bit doubtful of the wisdom of his course. He bad dropped a good job, with a steady, assured income and prospects of promotion, for a harebrained, crazy adventure. He wasn't accustomed to spaceships that rolled as though they were old-fashioned watercraft plunging through stormy seas. It made him space-sick. And every time the rusted plates squeaked and complained, he involuntarily looked around for the nearest safety boat.
"Besides," he told Kerry, continuing his growling monologue, "where 're we getting at? Nowhere, says I" He stared resentfully out at the wobbly heavens. "We've scooted out o' the reg'lar lanes o' the Belt. We ain't even headin' toward Jupiter. If you could hold this blamed tub steady for half a minute, you'd see Jupiter way the hell an' gone over to the right."
"Right!" Kerry agreed cheerfully. "If we're looking for salvage, we've got to keep away from the regular space lanes. The big outfits have their own patrol boats there. Kenton and Mammoth and Interworld and the rest. There 're no pickings for us on the lanes. But out here, if a ship gets into trouble, it would take weeks to raise up help, and that's where we come in."
"Yeah!" grumbled Jem, squinting at the solitudes that surrounded them outside the glassite observation port. "
If
there was a ship, and
if
she was in trouble. We ain't seen or raised another boat in these god-forsaken wastes for over a week."
The
Flash
shifted course and drove forward like a slightly indecisive corkscrew. The starboard rockets thundered and drew protesting cries from the very bowels of the craft.
Jem winced and a terrible thought grew on him. "Say-y-y! That there thing works both ways."
"What do you mean?"
"About this here salvage business. S'pose
we
bust down. And I ain't saying it ain't mighty likely. Who's gonna save us?"
Kerry grinned. "Let's not worry about that until it happens. The
Flash
is fundamentally sound. Underneath her rust and creaky joints she's got a heart of gold. She'll outlive a hundred fancier, shinier ships."
But as the
Flash
drove on and on, far beyond the usual lanes,
Kerry began to grow anxious. The hurtling, crisscrossing asteroids became fewer and fewer. Mars was a tiny point of light behind and Jupiter itself lost magnitude on the right. They were driving at an angle of sixty degrees to that giant planet. Space enfolded them, huge, unfathomable, frightening.
Sparks sat patiently at the open visiscreen, waiting for messages that never came. The limited range of their apparatus forbade the reception of signals from the distant traveled courses; and not even a stutter came in from the fifty-million mile radius of effective reach. They had this sector of space, seemingly, all to themselves.
For the hundredth time Kerry took out a well-thumbed sheaf of three spacegrams, reread them. He always read them in
the same order. It was something of a ritual.
The first was the offer from Simeon Kenton to rehire him, with the tempting bait of eventual Chief of Legal Department hinted at. It was a most satisfying spacegram, even though he had turned down the offer. So Old Fireball, who hadn't even known of his existence while he had slaved loyally as an obscure member of the legal staff of Kenton Space Enterprises, now was sufficiently aware of his worth to make him a flattering proposal. And all because he had hornswoggled the old man with his tricky knowledge of the law.
The second spacegram was also from old Simeon. This was the yelping insult to his own refusal. He grinned over it. He could read the wounded, incredulous vanity under the violent phrases. The man of power had called him impudent. Well, he
had
been impudent. Deliberately so. The memory of that year of unrewarded toil still rankled, and the cavalier treatment he had received when he asked for a raise. He'd never be subordinate again; to Kenton or to anyone else. They'd treat him as an equal or he'd go on his own. A lone wolf, pitting his wits and skill against the men of power and money. They had sought to use his wits and skill at law for their own benefit. They had thought to suck him dry and then cast him aside. Well, he'd show them. He'd—
He paused over the third spacegram. Slowly he read it, though he knew every letter of it by heart. "Kerry Dale, Planets, Ceres," it read. "Congratulations. Keep up the good work!" And the signature was Sally Kenton!
He remembered only too clearly the stupefaction with which he had received it. He had just mulcted her father out of a cool hundred thousand. The ordinary daughter would have been furious at the man who had done it.
Yet she had sent him these extraordinary congratulations. Why? His
heart gave a great bound—and subsided. He became angry with himself. He was a fool to believe she meant it; that she had a certain personal interest in him. How could she? There was something else behind it. Something devious; something to her father's interest. Well, if they thought they could overreach him, they were both mightily mistaken.
Nevertheless he placed that particular spacegram very gently back in his pocket, taking care not to crease or dirty it in any way.
He went down into the radio room. Jem was lounging there, looking glum and talking to Sparks. All radio men ran to a pattern. They were slight and wiry and dried-out and birdlike in the brightness of their eyes and the quickness of their movements. This particular Sparks was no exception.
"How 're they coming?" asked Kerry.
Sparks shook his head with rapid denial. "Nary a thing, Mr. Dale. Not even a code message from some lovesick matey to the gal he left behind in every port of call. Not a whisper. If I didn't check the tubes regular, I'd think the blamed machine was out o' kilter."
"I say we oughta turn back," declared Jem vehemently.
"This here salvage business ain't what it's cracked up to be." "Maybe not," agreed Kerry. "But I was thinking of other fish to fry."
"What?" they chorused.
Kerry hesitated. "Well, I had wanted to keep the idea to myself until something turned up." He grinned wryly. "But nothing's turned up, so it doesn't matter now."
"We ain't even turned up a space mirage," grunted Jem.
"The regular asteroid lanes are pretty well covered by now," explained Kerry. "Even bits of debris not more than a few yards in diameter are staked out, filed and exploited. The first space rush is over. The original prospectors are drinking away their gains or they're dead; the big outfits moved in, took them over and put exploration on a systematic, fine-comb basis. But this patch of space hasn't been gone over much. I thought perhaps we'd run into a find. Something like that nickel-iron asteroid that brought Kenton almost six millions in cash."
"So that's it, huh?" snorted Jem disgustedly. "We come out here wild-goosing for treasure. That's even wuss than hunting for distressed ships to salvage where there ain't no ships. Sometimes a boat
does
go off course and gets into trouble. But y'oughta knowed there ain't any asteroids out in this part o' space. There's the reg'lar belt and there's the Trojan belt way the hell an' gone off to one side, what belongs to Jupiter. But this here place where we're now ain't neither one nor t'other."
"So I'm finding out," Kerry admitted. He shrugged his shoulders. "Well, I can't be blamed for trying. Especially when I got word there was a Kenton ship nosing around these parts looking for the same thing I was."
"What?" they both yelled. "A Kenton ship?"
"How d'you know?" demanded Sparks. "They keep those exploration boats pretty quiet."
"Oh," said Kerry airily, "a few drinks of
pulla
back on Planets and a second mate who'd never drunk it before. Just before he passed out he said something about blasting off the next day under sealed orders. Seems a half-crazed prospector had been picked up in midspace by a Kenton ship. He died before they came into port and the captain screened Old Fireball for orders. When Kenton heard what the ravings had been about, he told the captain to dump the body into space and keep quiet."
"The old man's still on his toes," Jem's tone was admiring.
"He don't let nothing slip by."
Kerry said dismally, "I gave them a day's start, thinking I could keep them in sight. But they were speedier than I thought. Oh, well, it doesn't matter. I suppose they didn't find anything, either. They must have turned back."
"Like we should."
"Might as well, Jem. We're beginning to run short on fuel and provisions. Better tell the engineer—"
"Hey, what's that?" yelled Sparks suddenly.
A faint wisp of sound wavered from the open screen; and a pale shadow danced like a quaking aspen over the white expanse.