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.”
“Ill 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.”
“But that would only take a few men,” Johnny said. “As soon as the generators went out, they’d look for us, and if we were missing, well, they’d have a whole crew beatin’ the bushes for us. It wouldn’t be long before somebody thought of the-ventilators.”
“But we’ve got to do something, and do it fast,” Tom said.
“I know.” Johnny chewed his lip. “It’s a good idea, but we need more than just the generators. We’ve got to disable the ship, throw so many things at them so fast from so many different directions that they won’t know which way to turn. That means we’ll need to split up, and we’ll need weapons.” He hefted the guard’s Markheim. “One stunner for the three of us isn’t enough.”
“Well, we have this.” Tom unbuckled the gun case from his belt. “Dad’s revolver. It’s not a stunner, but it might help.” He tossed the case to Johnny. “I can give you both a rundown on how the shafts go. We could plan to meet at a certain spot in a certain length of time — ”
He broke off, looking at Johnny. The big miner had taken Roger Hunter’s gun from the case and hefted it in his hand, starting to check it automatically as Tom talked. But now his hand froze as he stared at the weapon.
“What’s wrong?” Tom asked.
“This gun is wrong,” Johnny said. “All wrong. Where did you get this thing?”
“From Dad’s spacer pack, the one the patrol brought back. The major gave it to us in Sun Lake City.” Tom peered at the gun. “Is it broken or something? It’s just Dad’s revolver.”
“It is, eh?” Johnny turned the gun over in his hand. “Who ever told you about guns?”
“What’s wrong with it?”
There was an odd expression on Johnny’s face as he handed the weapon back to Tom. “Take a look at it,” he said. “Tell me whether it’s loaded or not.”
Tom looked at it. Except for a few hours on the firing range, he had had no experience with guns; he couldn’t have taken apart a Markheim and reassembled it if his life depended on it. But he had seen his father take the old revolver out of the leather case many times before.
Now Tom could see that this was not the same gun.
The thing in his hand was large and awkward. The handgrips didn’t fit; there was no trigger guard, and no trigger. Several inches along the gleaming metal barrel was a shiny stud, and below it a dial with notches on it.
“That’s funny,” Tom said. “I’ve never seen anything like this thing before.”
Greg took it from him, balanced it in his hand. “Doesn’t feel right,” he said. “All out of balance.”
“Look at the barrel,” Johnny said quietly.
Greg looked. There was no hole in the end of the barrel. “This thing’s crazy,” he said.
“And then some,” Johnny said. “You haven’t had this out of the case since you took it from the pack?”
“Just once,” said Tom, “and I put it right back. I hardly looked at it. Say, maybe it’s just a new model Dad got.”
“It’s no new model. I’m not even sure it’s a gun,” Johnny said. “Doesn’t feel like a gun.”
“What happens when you push the stud here?” Greg asked.
Johnny licked his lips nervously. “Try it,” he said.
Greg leveled the thing at the rear wall of the lounge and pressed the stud. There was a sharp buzzing sound, and a blinding flash of blue light against the wall. It looked for all the world like the flash of a live power line shorting out. They squinted at the flash, rubbed their eyes, and stared at the wall — or at what was left of the wall, because most of the wall was gone. The metal had bellied out in a six-foot hole into the storage hold beyond.
Johnny whistled. “This thing did that?” he whispered.
“It must have.”
“But there’s no gun ever made that could do that.” He walked over to the hole in the wall. “That’s half-inch steel plate. There’s no way to pack that kind of energy into a hand gun.”
They stared at the innocent-looking weapon in Greg’s hand. “Whatever it is, Dad must have put it in the gun case.”
“Yes, he must have,” Johnny said.
“Well, don’t you see what that means? Dad must have found it somewhere. Somewhere out here in the belt — a gun that no man could have made.”
Tom took the weapon, ran his finger along the gleaming barrel. “I wonder,” he said, “what else Dad found.”
• • •
Somewhere below them they heard a hatch clang shut, and even deeper in the ship generator motors began throbbing in a steady even rhythm. In the silence of the lounge they could hear their own breathing, and outside, a thousand tiny sounds of the ship’s activity were audible.
But now the only things that claimed their attention were the odd-shaped piece of metal in Greg’s hand and the hole that gaped in the wall.
“You think that this was what Dad found?” Greg said. “The big strike he told Johnny about?”
“It must be part of it,” Tom said.
“But what is it? And where did it come from? It doesn’t make sense,” Greg protested.
“It doesn’t make sense the way we’ve been looking at it,” Tom said. “All we’ve found was some gobbledegook in Dad’s private log to tell us what he found. But it couldn’t have been a vein of ore, or Tawney’s men would have unearthed it. It had to be something else. Something that was so big and important that Dad didn’t even dare let Johnny in on it.”
“Yes, that’s been the craziest part of it, to me,” Johnny said. “I’ve done a lot of mining with your Dad. If he’d hit rich ore, he would have taken me out there to mine it with him. But he didn’t. He said it was something he had to work alone for a while, and he sent me back.”
“As if he’d found something that scared him,” Tom said, “or something that he didn’t understand. He was afraid to tell anybody. And whatever he found, he managed to hide it somewhere, so that nobody would find it.”
“Then why didn’t he hide this part of it, too?” Greg said.
“Maybe to be sure there was some trace left, if anything happened to him,” Tom said.
They were silent for a moment. The only sound was the stertorous breathing of the unconscious guard. “Well,” Greg said finally, “I have to admit it makes sense. It makes other things add up better, too. Dad was no fool, he must have known that Tawney was onto something. And Dad would never have risked his life for an ore strike. He’d either have made a deal with Tawney or let him hijack the lode, if that was all there was to it. But there’s still one big question. Where did he hide what he found? We aren’t going to find the answer here, that’s certain.” He walked over to the hole in the wall.
“Made quite a mess of it, didn’t it?” Johnny said.
“Looks like it. I wonder what that thing would do to a ship’s generator plant.” He turned to Johnny. “We haven’t much time. With this thing, we could tear this ship apart, leave them so confused they’ll never know what broke loose. And if we could get this gun back to Major Briarton, he’d have to listen to us, and get the U.N. patrol into the search.”
They had been so intent on their conversation that they did not hear the footsteps in the corridor until the door swung open. It was another guard, the one who had departed with Tawney. He stopped short, blinking at his companion on the floor and at the gaping hole in the wall. A strangled sound came from his throat.
Johnny grabbed his arm, jerked him into the lounge, and slammed the hatch shut. Greg pulled the stunner from his holster and tossed it to Tom. The guard let out a roar, twisted free, and met Johnny’s fist as he came around. He sagged at the knees and slid to the floor beside the other guard. “All right,” Johnny said, “we’ve dealt the cards, now we’d better play the hand. Tom, you first.”
Tom pulled the ventilator grill down and climbed up into the shaft. Greg followed, with Johnny at his heels, pulling the grill back up into place from the inside. They waited for a moment, but there was no sound from the lounge.
“All right,” Johnny said breathlessly. “Let’s move.”
Swiftly they started down the dark tunnel.