Checkpoint Lambda

CHAPTER 8

The space buoy had one completely unimportant ability left to it. When it was a liner, it was able to travel in overdrive at a high multiple of the speed of light, a hundred and eighty-odd thousand miles per second. As a buoy, Lambda had retained its solar system drive which could, in time, build up to a speed of some hundreds of miles per second. But now, using its singular resource for movement, it had achieved an enormous speed, and it was now necessary to check that headlong pace.

Lambda, though, showed no outward sign of life. Its clusters of communicator-antennae, the radar-bowls, and the eccentric radiation-receivers, which constituted the meteor-watch system—all these looked to be without purpose. It was pure irony, apparently, that Lambda’s mechanical space-call continued to go out. By microwave the buoy repeated endlessly: “Checkpoint Lambda. Checkpoint Lambda. Report. Report.” And it happened that at just this moment, somewhere in the Canis Lambda solar system a ship broke out of overdrive. Its control room screens showed the enormous filmy luminosity which was the Five Comets congregated almost into one, in the act of crossing Lambda’s orbit to destroy it.

Nobody noticed that detail. The log tape whirred, and the recorded log covering weeks of journeying along a space lane was broadcast into emptiness. In half an hour or so the broadcast would reach Lambda. It would be recorded there for such use as the Space Patrol might later determine.

If Lambda still survived.

In its control room Scott paced back and forth. He was ashamed. Chenery had gone proudly down toward the stern of the ship with a blaster which was almost useless. He intended to throw certain small grenades that had been designed to be frightening rather than lethal, though they did enough destruction when they went off. He expected to be killed. But Scott was still in the control room, watching the changing distance between asteroid and buoy. He was operating the steering units with meticulous care. It had been their function when Lambda was a liner to move the bow to right or left or up or down, and the stern to the left or right or down or up. They’d pointed the former liner where it was supposed to go.

But now, since Lambda was a checkpoint and a freight station and a place where passengers changed ships, the steering drive units had another function. Now, when ships had passengers to put off or freight to take on, these drive units made the exchanges possible. They oriented the buoy so that Lambda and the visiting ship were strictly parallel, bow to bow and stern to stern. But they might still be separated by distances from yards to quarters of a mile.

When the port-side bow steering unit pushed to the right and the starboard-side stern unit did the same, the whole ship moved to the right. Sideways, to be sure, and at no high speed, but under perfect control. If both bow and stern steering units thrust to the left, the ship moved that way too. Excess momentum could be checked by reversing the steering-thrust. So ships and buoys came together, these days, by using their steering units to move them as a crab walks.

And that was the only ability left to Lambda of which Scott was making use. He was moving Lambda closer to its marker-asteroid, which was like a mountain of steel.

There was a tapping on the buoy’s hull. It was something meteoric. Scott made an impatient gesture with his space-gloved hand.

“Cherney’s an idiot!” he said bitterly. “He fought by accident, he won by accident, and now he’s gone down to take care of all of Bugsy’s blaster-men—and he thinks he’ll make it! By accident! And I let him! I let him! Because I have to run these infernal steering units!”

“Couldn’t you explain—?”

“Explain? No! It’s past the time I told Bugsy we’d smash into the comets. He doesn’t believe in them any more. He thought I was a liar before. He’s sure I’m a liar now!”

“Explain to me?” repeated Janet. “Couldn’t you tell me what needs to be done? Let me do it? Can’t we get into a space boat?”

“And let Lambda go smash? There’d be no space call to contact a passing ship. A space boat’s communicator won’t carry more than a few light-minutes! We’d never be heard! We’d die in the boat!”

There were other reasons. Scott’s previous plan for Janet now seemed impractical. He’d meant for her to drive her boat to the sunward side of the asteroid while he’d moor the checkpoint nearby. No matter what happened to him after that, with Lambda helpless to move any distance, Bugsy would have to keep the buoy’s space call going out, so sooner or later some other ship would approach—like the liner that had brought Scott—or possibly a Patrol ship. Or, least likely but most to be desired, even the Golconda Ship. And when that happened, Janet could intervene and ask for help via the space boat communicator, and Bugsy and his companions would only be taken off Lambda with suitable precautions. And Janet would be truly safe.

But without Janet in a space boat outside Lambda, Scott faced total frustration. His plans hadn’t included anything specific for his own safety. He wasn’t making such plans now. But as a Patrol officer he was enraged at the idea that Bugsy and his followers might get off scot-free, possibly even rich by their enterprise.

Unless he got Janet away, there’d be only Bugsy and his followers aboard when a Patrol of any other ship appeared. They’d have had time to make things tidy; to clean up and wipe out bloodstains and to make sure that no evidence against them remained. There might be moral certainty of murders done and bodies done away with. But there might be no proof that would hold in a criminal court.

“Look!” he said, “there’s another lifeboat down three decks. I’ll take you there.”

“No!” said Janet. “You’ve got to get the buoy where it must go! You just said why! Show me how to handle that! Show me how to work it, and if Bugsy comes—”

There were more tappings. Somehow the spacing of these impacts from particles in space was different from the two previous increases in impact sounds. In a normal orbit, a space buoy like Lambda might collect many micrometeorite impacts. They were negligible. But these tappings were of sand grain volume. Since they might indicate the probable presence of larger particles, they were not to be disregarded. Scott had the feeling that from now on they’d continue to increase in number, and larger and ever larger missiles would flash past or into Lambda until the really massive objects arrived.

“What I’d like,” he said wryly, moderating his tone and his temper at the same time, “what I’d really like would be simply to have Bugsy and his blaster-men locked up somewhere where they couldn’t bother me. Then I’d begin to feel some confidence. But since I can’t—”

Then he stopped short.

“Locked up,” he said in a queer tone. “Yes … locked…”

He stared at nothing, for a moment. Then he said, “There are rations of sorts down there. Yes. Either Bugsy and his group or you and—I think—”

But he didn’t say what he thought. He went quickly to a closet in the control room. There were always space suits available in control rooms. Control rooms were the brain centers of space ships. If a compartment was punctured and one part of a ship lost its air, it was a man from the control room who put on a space suit and inspected the damage. If there was an emergency anywhere, it was the men of the control room who couldn’t waste time finding space suits so they could take care of it. They had to be right at hand. Scott brought out a space suit.

“Put this on,” he commanded.

He helped her. He checked the suit. Signs of wear. Batteries. Air.

“You fasten the helmet, so,” he told her. He demonstrated how, and then stopped to look at the screen with the asteroid on it. He changed the setting of a control. He went back.

“The air adjustment’s automatic,” he said. “You have a blaster. In emergencies it can be used to burn away debris. It can also be used for self-defense. Now, open your face-plate and listen!”

He took her to the instrument board. He showed her the controls, eight in all. Four were for the bow steering units and four for the stern. As he was explaining their use, something seemed to happen to the edge of the sunlit asteroid. There was a part cut out of it. The dark area increased. It was shape. It was a shadow. It was Lambda’s shadow. He stared at it, and drew a deep breath of relief. When he spoke, his voice was almost unsteady because this was so perfect an accident for his present purpose.

“We want that shadow in the center of the face of the asteroid,” he told her. “Remember, we can’t steer in any ordinary sense. We’re moving sidewise. We have to move one end or the other forward or back to turn. And presently we have to stow up and flop. We mustn’t crash into anything! Use both bow and stern units to stop as well as drive. We should stop dead short of our target and then ease ahead.”

Somewhere in the ship there was an explosion. A scream. Then there was the roarings of blasters.

“I’m needed below,” said Scott grimly. “Try to handle Lambda as I’ve showed you. The shadow will help a lot. Try to get it centered, and get as close as you can to the asteroid. And—you may not like the idea of using your blaster, but if you need to, do it. I’m going to need you alive, later.”

There was another explosion, not as near as the first. Scott swung his space helmet over his head and opened the face plate.

“I’ll see you presently,” he said. “I think we may make out now! I’m going to lock them up.”

He ran out of the control room door and down the steps to the lobby. He pelted across the lobby and down the grand staircase. He heard blasters going off somewhere below. Then an explosion which was not a blaster. He clattered on and came to more stairs, almost falling because these stairs were steel and his shoe-soles stuck to them.

He reached the luggage level. He saw a dead man there, and the scorched area and damage that a small grenade had done. Chenery had evidently been here. The traveling bag in which Scott had found grenades was open. Scott took what were left. Chenery had probably been filling his pockets when someone came up upon this deck. At a guess, Chenery’d thrown a grenade at random and this was the consequence. There was a blaster on the floor, which was scorched as if the weapon had been fired right there.

Another explosion and the sound of blasters pouring a deadly fire into something. Still another explosion. Scott raced on down no less than the three levels of the hydroponic gardens, of which one was dark in simulation of the night hours plants must have to thrive and prosper.

The blaster-fire stopped. There was silence for moments, while Scott swore at his metal shoe-soles. Then he remembered and pulled the heavy slippers out of his belt pack. When a space suit was needed for emergencies inside a ship, there were times when magnetic-soled shoes would be a nuisance. As now. Impatiently, he put the slippers on, and the magnetism became merely a hindrance instead of a handicap.

He heard a voice, shrill and hysterical. It was Chenery.

“Come on!” he cried between pantings. “Come on an’ get killed! Y’played me for a fool, huh? I got more brains than all of you! Y’think you’re smart, Bugsy? I’m smarter!”

The sound of two grenades roared, close together. There was an outcry after the second. Chenery yelped in triumph. It was bad tactics for him to show his position by such a shrill clamor. But Chenery was not himself.

Scott reached the main freight hold. There was another dead man on the floor. His blaster had detonated with the grenade that had killed him. Scott couldn’t spare the time for an appropriate reaction. He heard Bugsy, farther away, screaming with rage and shouting orders so thickened by fury that no one could understand them. And then Scott came out on the stairway leading down into the engine room, and he saw the battle.

There was smoke, where blaster bolts had scorched paint, and grenades had detonated near inflammable stuff. Scott could see two men behind a set-up of machinery. They fired furiously at the edges of a massive metal mounting for the overdrive equipment left over from the buoy’s days as a liner. Chenery danced and shrilled hysterically behind the mounting. From time to time he lobbed a grenade over its top.

Scott grimly opened fire from his elevated position. The clothing of a man behind a disconnected switchboard burst into flames. He leaped convulsively and disappeared through the doorway to other stairs astern. Scott fired again, and another man’s shoe caught fire. He fled. Another man ran. Chenery howled crazily at them and plunged in pursuit.

“Chenery!” roared Scott. “Chenery!”

He fired at yet another man whom he could see and Chenery couldn’t. It was a near miss, but Chenery plunged into this formerly concealed antagonist. They went to the floor together and Scott could not fire again. A blaster went off where they struggled.

A blaster bolt missed Scott’s ear by inches.

“Chenery!” he roared. “This way!”

The two intertwined figures seemed to collapse. One lay still. The other twitched. Then blue-white, brilliant blaster bolts came streaking toward Scott. He fired savagely and drew back. Chenery had cut down the number of Bugsy’s fighting men, but there was Janet. The way to make her safe was to lock up Bugsy and his men, since he’d joined Chenery too late for total victory. So the imprisonment of the men now searching for him with blaster bolts must be his primary purpose.

He was in the level above the engine room. There was a side door, which was in one of the inter-level stairway tubes, leading from top to bottom of the buoy. He tossed a grenade. The stair appeared as the tube was ripped open. There were bales of merchandise. He flung blaster bolts into them. Dense smoke and then flames leaped up. One bale was Durlanian floss. It swelled as it burned and the reek of it was unbearable. He hastily closed his helmet face plate and went coldly about the process of imprisonment. He smashed the other stair-tubes with grenades. He scattered inflammables and shot blaster bolts into them.

Flames leaped up to the ceiling, but they’d exhaust the air of oxygen and go out before they could do any great damage. Afterward, with the air tubes shut off, the air would be unbreathable to anyone not wearing a space suit like Scott’s. And there were no more in this part of the buoy. There’d only been one in the stern lifeboat blister, and he was wearing that now.

He retreated to the next deck above, and the next and next, setting fires and jamming all air-locks, closing off all supplies of purified air and leaving behind him only compartments filled with smoke-saturated gas that no man could breathe and live.

He’d just come to the bottom one of the three passenger cabin levels when the deck shivered under his feet. There was a gigantic crashing sound. Loose objects fell.

He raced up the grand stairway. As he reached the top, there was a second monstrous crashing. Again the floor quivered underfoot. He redoubled his speed. Across the lobby. Up the last stair. He burst into the control room. Janet had her face in her hands, sobbing. The vision-screens showed what should have been impossible. The portside screen showed the scarred crystalline, utterly bright metal of the asteroid only yards away. The buoy had just rebounded from the second of two slow, ponderous, power-filled collisions with it. Janet hadn’t slowed it quite enough to prevent an impact.

Scott swiftly adjusted the steering drives. Lambda then neither drifted away nor floated back to a third contact. He ran his eyes over the air pressure repeaters, indicating what the condition of the air was in every compartment of the ship. None showed diminished pressure. Some showed an increase. That was where the fires Scott had set expanded the air. They’d cool off presently. Janet sobbed again.

“What’s the matter?” Scott demanded. “No leaks show up. Not yet, anyhow! We bumped, but there’s apparently no damage. And Bugsy and his men are locked up if ever men were!”

She tried to say, “Chenery,” but a sob cut off the word.

“He’s dead,” said Scott. “But he had the time of his life getting killed.”

“N-no!”

She pointed a shaking hand at a speaker. Scott didn’t understand. The speaker was the one belonging to that closed-circuit communicator system by which crewmen in different parts of the buoy could communicate with the control room. Then he guessed, and turned it on. Janet had evidently shut it off. He heard Bugsy’s voice, unspeakably malevolent, “Don’t rush me, Chenery! You’ll get it! Janet said he’d be back soon. Don’t be in a hurry for what’s comin’!”

Scott felt himself going pale. He heard Chenery, “To hell with you! You won’t get anything from the Lieutenant. An’ I had the gas-chamber comin’ anyways!”

Scott cut it off. His hands clenched. He said unsteadily, “I thought he was dead. It’s Chenery. And Bugsy’s got him and I—thought I saw him killed…”

Janet said in a thin, shocked voice, “Bugsy called. He said he had Chenery. He said you put something over on him. He said you lied about the comets. Comets are gas. He said he’ll do horrible things to Chenery if you don’t do as he demands. But he said he knows how to beat the fix you’ve tried to put him in. He knows how to beat it! And if you want to live—”

“He’s bluffing,” said Scott grimly. “Except about Chenery. He probably isn’t bluffing about that!”

He went to the instrument board. The vision-screens showed half the universe as a shining mist, with one angry haloed yellow sun in the center of it. The other half of the universe was the surface of the asteroid, seen from close by. It was rent and torn and irregular. It was scarred and pitted by old bombardments.

The shadow of Lambda lay long and sharp-edged over its small, steep mounts and hollow places. Lambda, though, was not in its center. It was definitely close to one edge. Scott bent close suddenly, and watched the surface of the metal mountain flow smoothly past. Lambda was not perfectly still in relation to it. It would have been remarkable if it had been. Very, very slowly the crystalline surface seemed to move. Actually it was the buoy which moved, a little way only from its scarred companion.

“He’s got Chenery,” said Scott with surpassing bitterness. “And his mind works as only his can. He knows he’s beaten. He’s imprisoned in the stern levels. He knows, now, that you’re safe, and he can’t threaten me with crimes against you. And he knows he was wrong about the comets. He knows that! He heard the impacts on the hull! So there’s only one thing left for him. He’ll demand that I fix things for him—immediately! He knows it can’t be done. But he can make threats, and then carry them out…”

Janet said desperately, “But he—but you—”

“He wins,” said Scott very grimly indeed, “You’re safe, Janet. You stay right here, and whether it’s the Golconda Ship or a Patrol vessel that gets here first, you’ll explain everything to them. Bugsy’s in the stern. You’re in the bow. There’s no breathable air between them, either inside or outside Lambda. Nobody can get at you. You’re safe. You may be lonely, but you’ll be all right.”

Janet said, trembling, “But you! What are you going to do?”

“What can I do?” he demanded sardonically. “Refuse to listen and let Bugsy kill Chenery as slowly as he can? Pretend it doesn’t happen because I can shut off the sound? I’m going to get Bugsy! And as many of his men after him as I can. I don’t expect to save Chenery, but I’ll make it quick for him—he had the gas-chamber waiting, anyhow. I have to do something!”

“But there’s me! And you’ll get killed! I’ll in”

“You’ll do nothing,” said Scott in a flat voice. “I’m doing this!”

He went out of the control room. It was wiser not to talk with Bugsy. It might gain time for Chenery. But it would still be wise to hurry. There were two ways by which he could reach the stern decks, where pure air still existed. He’d been seen and shot at in a space suit, so Bugsy might guess he’d come through the compartments where a man without a suit would suffocate. But Bugsy wouldn’t guess at the outer plating of the buoy.

So Scott went to the air-lock. He pulled off the slippers that partly negated the magnetism of his shoes. He twisted his helmet tight. He went through to the golden-colored outside of the hull. There the look of things was quite unlike what anyone would have imagined.

When he stood upright, the light around him was neither burning sunshine nor the abysmal black of night. Lambda hung, it seemed, beneath and very close to the tormented crystalline metal of the asteroid, whose sunward face formed a ceiling over the former space craft. Sunshine smote fiercely beyond its shadow and the incredibly brilliant surfaces of metal crystals reflected that sunlight into the shadow cast by the space buoy. The glittering specks of brilliance were reflected as if by the facets of ten thousand monstrous jewels. The effect was of fantasy, of eerie magic. In places the glittering metal was no more than thirty feet from the checkpoint’s plating. In other places it was fifty and a hundred feet above, like a gigantic dome lined with jewels which glittered.

Scott stood erect, but he couldn’t spare time for scenery. He saw to the edge of the asteroid, which on one side was relatively near. There was, of course, utter silence where he stood. But he could tell that Lambda was in the very center of a meteoric avalanche. He could see streaks—never objects—which nevertheless were solid things pouring past the edges of the buoy’s multi-million-ton protector. It was the asteroid which was taking the bombardment anticipated for Lambda. Once a portion of its edge crumbled and broke away. As its comet-ward surface separated, the kind of bombardment it was enduring and the impacts on the fragment could be seen. It went tumbling toward the sun, exploding in flaming detonations where missiles struck and turned themselves and it into incandescent vapor. It split and broke again, and its fragments flamed and spouted and went on and on out of sight.

Scott marched sturdily toward the stern. He was bitter. He’d done everything he could to make Janet safe, but he doubted that he had thought of everything. He felt the tiniest of stirrings underfoot. It seemed to him that the motion of the space buoy had changed, but he could not be sure.

Then a great section of the asteroid split. It had been struck by one of the true giants of the meteor tribe. A mass of something unnameable a full hundred feet across had crashed into the asteroid’s vulnerable surface. It traveled at thousands of miles per second. It turned to vapor more lurid than the sun, and with a shock split off a vast triangular block an eighth of a mile on a side. Such a monstrous object could not be driven rapidly sunward by impacts—and explosions—of ton and five-ton and ten-ton missiles. Slowly it separated from the asteroid’s main mass, and as slowly the side of the fragment undergoing barrage-like attack appeared. The surface toward the sun was unbearably bright. But the side that should have been in shadow was incandescent.

Scott went on, his purpose being to enter the stern-most lifeboat blister and come off it into the buoy’s stern section with his blaster going and grenades exploding ruthlessly. He was filled with fury that this course was necessary. He did not expect to rescue Chenery. He did not expect to survive himself. But he couldn’t abandon Chenery to Bugsy’s obsession with violence. Scott tried to hurry, because Bugsy might have become too impatient to wait, and might try to intoxicate himself with violence toward Chenery, before Chenery was fortunate enough to die.

But then Scott saw the edge of the asteroid very near. He saw the motion of the Lambda in relation to it. And then, ahead, he saw disaster past endurance. Ahead. He wanted to run to the spot and perform the impossible and turn aside the buoy’s stern. Because Lambda was turning slowly. Its sternmost part would swing out past the broken edge. It would reach into the hurtling masses of rock and metal which could no more be seen than the flame of an atomic torch, but would have exactly the effect of one upon a giant scale.

The hull shivered a little underfoot. If Janet, in the control room, had discovered what was about to occur and hastily and desperately applied the maximum correction of applied steering thrust—if that had happened, the feeling and the result would have been the same. But if Janet, in the control room, had seen Scott about to throw away his life for what a woman might consider the most absurd of reasons, a point of honor… If Scott saw it that way, it was quite possible that she’d desperately and defiantly let what was happening, happen.

The sternmost part of the space buoy swept slowly around. Its uttermost part reached beyond the shelter of the asteroid. Nothing was visible there except the lucent mist that blotted out the stars. Nothing was there. But things passed through that space—things that had just barely failed to detonate themselves upon the asteroid’s major bulk.

Slowly, deliberately, inexorably, the blunt stern section swept out. And there was light. Invisible particles from sand grain size on up poured past the steel edge of Lambda partner. They struck Lambda’s metal. They detonated. The result had the exact look of an atomic torch, vaporizing metal to a completely perfect line.

There was no added flare when the air in the lowest deck poured out. Anything alive in it, obviously, would be unaware of that or anything else. One fraction of a second, Bugsy would be alive and malevolent and frenzied. A minute fraction of a second later, Bugsy would be dead without having had time to experience the change. And this was true of anyone in the second deck level too.

And then the long, slender Checkpoint Lambda, pivoting, swept past the point where the core, the heart, the center of the first of the Five Comets rushed past. The last and sternmost three of her deck levels had ceased to be. They’d been amputated and vaporized and carried away by such a cautery as no man had ever witnessed before. There had been no sound. No violence. No shock or impact anywhere, because when an impact passed a certain stage of ferocity, it wasn’t an impact any longer, but an explosion.

Scott hadn’t been disturbed physically. He’d heard nothing and felt nothing. The buoy’s stern had been removed. There was nothing left for him to do.

Presently he trudged forward again. He was uncomfortable about Janet’s handling of the buoy. The proper place for it was, of course, as near as possible to the center of the asteroid’s sunward face. There was the maximum of shelter. He’d take charge and get it there, and keep it there during the rest of this meteor-storm and the ones to follow as the Five Comets vainly bombarded Lambda’s marker buoy and shield.

But there was something else. He resolved that Janet should never know of any inadequacy in her operation of the steering drive units. They were tricky. She was without previous experience. He’d never tell her she should have been quicker to correct the buoy’s course. And of course—though this didn’t occur to him—she would never defend what she had done.

When he reached the control room and took over the. controls again, he treated the event as something which couldn’t possibly have been avoided, as a consequence of the two bouncing impacts of the buoy upon the asteroid. That would be a wholly legitimate explanation. The Patrol inquiry would accept it. As a matter of fact, he didn’t need to discuss it with Janet at all. He ignored it except as a narrow escape for both of them.

And Janet’s defensive, defiant expression gradually disappeared. She listened humbly to his technical discussions of the sidewise astrogation of checkpoint buoys, should she be needed for it during the rest of the emergency. The total time of passage through the Five Comets would be something like four hours fifteen minutes.

After that the checkpoint would still be in orbit, where it ought to be. It would be rather less than two miles from the glittering metal mountain that had sheltered it. And the checkpoint’s space call would continue to go out with mechanical tedium and regularity.

“Checkpoint Lambda. Checkpoint Lambda. Report. Report.”

The Golconda Ship arrived two days later. It had spent most of the interval listening suspiciously for sounds in space. When, at last, the tape-reels in the control room clicked repeatedly instead of reeling and whining as a log was recorded, Scott used the emergency switch and on space call frequency he opened communication. He reported, precisely, just what had happened and the state of things in Lambda. He and Janet were now the only living occupants of the buoy. He could, he observed, clear the air of the freight compartments so cargo could be put aboard by the Golconda Ship’s crew. He could cut off the artificial gravity to make that operation easier. But there were only the two of them aboard. Trans-shipment of the Golconda Ship’s cargo would have to wait for the coming of replacements for Lambda’s crew. He gave the impression that he didn’t particularly care whether the Golconda Ship made use of Lambda or not. He didn’t. It was available, but—.

So the Golconda ship presently appeared. Scott was not thrilled, either by the incredible wealth of its cargo, or by making the acquaintance of multi-multimillionaires.

A space boat came aboard, its occupants armed to the teeth. They found Scott’s account completely accurate. They were inclined to approve of Scott. It seemed to them that their treasure would be quite as safe under his guardianship as in a Patrol base. Some of them seemed to envy him. After all, a multi-millionaire didn’t lead a really normal life. He was hounded by people trying to get money out of him. Scott wasn’t. The Golconda Ship’s company had little or no adventure except a voyage once every four years to acquire more wealth to make their lives more unnatural still. Scott had had an adventure any one of them would have been glad to experience—if he only could be sure of living through it. They decided to land their treasure on Lambda and proceed as planned.

Their leader came to tell Scott of the decision. Scott was talking to Janet at the time. He’d been annoyed by the need to attend to the queries of the Golconda Ship’s crew. He and Janet were finding, continually, new things they wanted to talk to each other about. Janet’s expression was softer and more relaxed and very curiously wistful.

The leader of the Golconda Ship enterprise told Scott somewhat pompously of the decision they’d made. He considered that he conferred a great honor. In a way, he did. He felt that Scott would be made famous by his prowess and this expression of confidence by the richest men in the galaxy. And this was not untrue. But he wanted to go on and discuss details.

Presently Scott said impatiently, while Janet waited until they could talk uninterruptedly again, “That’s fine! That’s excellent! I’m sure we can work everything out. But I’m busy just now. I’ll be very much obliged to you if, just for a little while—just for a little while—you’ll go to hell.”