The Planet Strappers Part 20

Soon their big hope was that some reasonable asteroid-hoppers would come within the few thousand mile range of their weakened transmitters. Then they could call, and be picked up.

Mostly to keep themselves occupied, they hunted paymetal, taking only the very best that they could find, to keep the towage ma.s.s down. Right from the start they cut their food ration--a good thing, because one month went, and then two, as near as they could figure. Cripes, how much longer could they last?

Often they actually encouraged their minds to create illusions. Frank would hold his body stiff, and look at the stars. After a while he would get the soothing impression that he was swimming on his back in a lake, and was looking up at the night sky.

Mostly, they were out of the regular radio channels. But sometimes, because of the movement of distant bubb cl.u.s.ters that must be kept in touch, they heard music and news briefly, again. They heard ominous reports from the ever more populous Earth. Now it was about areas of ocean to become boundaried and to be "farmed" for food. Territorial disputes were now extending far beyond the land. Once more, the weapons were being uncovered. Of course there were repercussions out here. Ceres Station was beaming p.r.o.nouncements, too--rattling the saber.

Nelsen and Ramos listened avidly because it was life, because it was contact with lost things, because it was not dead silence.

Their own tribulations deepened.

"Cripes but my feet stink!" Ramos once laughed. "They must be rotten.

They're sore, and they itch something awful, and I can't scratch them, or change my socks, even. The fungus, I guess. Just old athlete's foot."

"The stuff is crawling up my legs," Nelsen growled.

They knew that the Kuzaks, maybe Two-and-Two, Reynolds, Gimp, Storey, must be trying to call them. They kept listening in their helmet-phones.

But this time Frank Nelsen knew that he'd gotten himself a real haystack of enormity in which to double for a lost needle. The slender beams could comb it futilely and endlessly, in the hope of a fortunate accident. Only once they heard, "Nelsen! Ra..." The beam swept on. It could have been Joe Kuzak's voice. But inevitably, somewhere, there had to be a giving up point for the searchers.

"This is where I came in," Nelsen said bitterly. "d.a.m.n these beam systems that are so delicate and important!"

They did pick up the voices of scattered asteroid-hoppers, talking cautiously back and forth to each other, far away. "... Got me pinpointed, Ed? Coming in almost empty, this trip. Not like the last...

Stake me to a run into Pallastown...?" Most of such voices sounded regular, friendly.

Once they heard wild laughter, and what could have been a woman's scream. But it could have been other things, too.

On another occasion, they almost believed that they had their rescue made. Even their worn-out direction and distance finders could place the ten or so voices as originating not much over a hundred miles away. But they checked their trembling enthusiasm just in time. That was sheerest luck. The curses, and the savage, frightened snarls were all wrong. "If we don't catch us somebody, soon..."

Out here, the needs could get truly primitive. Oxygen, water, food, repair parts for vital equipment. Cannibalism and blood-drinking could also be part of blunt necessity.

Nelsen and Ramos were fortunate. Twenty miles off was a haze against the stars--a cl.u.s.ter of small mesoderm fragments. Drawing power for their shoulder-ionics from their almost spent nuclear batteries, they glided toward the cl.u.s.ter, and got into its midst, doubling themselves up to look as much like the other chunks as possible. They were like hiding rats for hours, until long after the distant specks moved past.

While he waited, Frank Nelsen's mind fumbled back to the lost phantom of Jarviston, Minnesota, again. To a man named Jig Hollins who had got married, stayed home. Yellow? h.e.l.l...! Nelsen imagined the comforts he might have had in the s.p.a.ce Force. He coaxed up a dream girl--blonde, dark, red-headed--with an awful wistfulness. He thought of Nance Codiss, the neighbor kid. He fumbled at the edge of a vast, foggy vision, where the wanderl.u.s.t and s.p.a.cel.u.s.t of a man, and needs of the expanding race, seemed to blend with his home-love and love-love, and to become, impossibly, a balanced unit...

Later--much later--he heard young, green asteroid-hoppers yakking happily about girls and about how magnificent it was, out here.

"Haw-haw," he heard Ramos mock.

"Yeah," Nelsen said thickly. "Lucky for them that they aren't near us--being careless with their beams, that way..."

Frank Nelsen sneered, despising these innocent novices, sure that he could have beaten and robbed them without compunction. That far he had come toward understanding the outlaws, the twisted men of the Belt.

Ramos and he seemed to go on for an indefinite period longer. In a sense, they toughened. But toward the last they seemed to blunder slowly in the mind-shadows of their weakening body forces. They had a little food left, and water from the moisture-reclaimers. At zero-gravity, where physical exertion is slight, men can get along on small quant.i.ties of food. The sweetish, starchy liquid that they could suck through a tube from the air-restorers--it was a by-product of the photosynthetic process--might even have sustained them for a considerable interval.

But the steady weakening of their nuclear batteries was another matter.

The pumps of their air-restorers and moisture-reclaimers were dependent on current. Gradually the atmosphere they breathed was getting worse.

But from reports they had read and TV programs they had seen long ago, they found themselves another faint hope, and worked on it. With only solar power--derived through worn-out thermocouple units--to feed their uncertain ionics, they could change course only very slowly, now.

Yet maybe they had used up their bad luck. At last they came to a surface-fragment a couple of hundred yards long. They climbed over its edge. The thin suns.h.i.+ne hit dried soil, and something like corn-stubble in rows. Ahead was a solid stone structure, half flattened. Beside it a fallen trunk showed its roots. Vegetation was charred black by the absolute dryness of s.p.a.ce. There was a fragment of a road, a wall, a hillside.

Here, there must have been blue sky, thin, frosty wind. The small, Mars-sized planet had been far from the sun. Yet perhaps the greenhouse effect of a high percentage of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere and the radioactive heat of its interior had helped warm it. At least it had been warm enough to evolve life of the highest order, eons ago.

Poof had gone the blue sky and this whole world, all in a moment, the scattered pieces forming the asteroids. Accident? More likely it was a huge, interplanetary missile from competing Mars. The Martians had died, too--as surely, though less spectacularly. Radioactive poison, perhaps... Here, there had been an instant of unimaginable concussion, and of swift-pa.s.sing flame. The drying out was soon ended. Then, what was left had been preserved in a vacuum through sixty millions of years.

Frank Nelsen had glimpsed ancient Mars, preserved on the Moon. Now he glimpsed its opponent culture, about which more was generally known.

"It's real," Ramos grunted. "Hoppers find surface-fragments like this, quite often."

Nelsen hardly cared about the archeological aspects just then.

Excitement and hope that became certainty, enlivened his dulled brain.

"An energy source," he grated joyfully. "The Big Answer to Everything, out here! And it's always self-contained in their buildings..."

They pushed the collapsed and blackened thing with the slender bones, aside. They crept into the flat, horizontal s.p.a.ces of the dwelling--much more like c.h.i.n.ks than the rooms that humans would inhabit. They shoved away soft, multi-colored fabrics spun from gla.s.s-wool, a metal case with graduated dials and a lens, baubles of gold and glinting mineral.

In a recess in the masonry, ribboned with glazed copper strips that led to clear globes and curious household appliances, they found what they wanted. Six little oblong boxes bunched together. Their outsides were blue ceramic.

Frank Nelsen and Miguel Ramos began to work gingerly, though the gloves of their old Archer Threes were insulated. Here, sixty million years of stopped time had made no difference to these nuclear batteries, that, because of the universal character of physical laws, almost had to be similar in principle to their own. They had almost known that it would make no difference. There had been no drain of power through the automatic safety switches.

"DC current, huh?" Ramos said, breathing hard of the rotten air in his helmet.

"Yeah--gotta be," Frank answered quickly. "Same as from a thermocouple.

Voltage about two hundred. Lots of current, though. Hope these old ionics'll take it."

"We can tap off lower, if we have to... Here--I'll fix you, first...

Grab this end..."

They had a sweating two hours of rewiring to get done.

With power available, they might even have found a way to distill and collect the water, usually held in the form of frost, deep-buried in the soil of any large surface-fragment. They might have broken down some of the water electrolytically, to provide themselves with more oxygen to breathe. But perhaps now such efforts were not necessary.

When they switched in the new current, the pumps of their equipment worked better at once. The internal lights of their air-restorers could be used again, augmenting the action of the pale suns.h.i.+ne on the photosynthetic processes of the chlorophane. The air they breathed improved immediately. They tested the power on the shaky ionics, and got a good thrust reaction.

"We can make it--I think," Frank Nelsen said, speaking low and quick, and with the boldness of an enlivened body and brain. "We'll shoot up, out of the Belt entirely, then move parallel to it, backwards--contrary to its...o...b..tal flow, that is. But being outside of it, we won't chance getting splattered by any fragments. Probably avoid some slobs, too.

We'll decelerate, and cut back in, near Pallas. There'll be a way to find the Kuzak twins."

Ramos chuckled recklessly. "Let's not forget to pack these historical objects in our nets. Especially that camera, or whatever it is. Money in the bank at last, boy..."

But after they set out, it wasn't long before they knew that two people were following them. There was no place to hide. And a mocking voice came into their phones.

"Hey, Nelsen... Oh, Mex... Wait up... I've been looking for you for over three months..."

They tried first to ignore the hail. They tried to speed up. But their pursuers still had better propulsion. Nelsen gritted his teeth. He felt the certainty of disaster closing in.

"There's just two of them--so far," Ramos hissed. "Maybe here's our chance, Frank, to really smear that rat!" Ramos' eyes had a battlelight.

"All right, Tiflin--approach. These guns are lined up and loaded."

"Aw--is _that_ friends.h.i.+p, Mex?" the renegade seemed to wheedle. But insolently, he and his larger companion came on.