Rocket from Infinity (3 page)

“I got a complaint, blast it! That bushy-face there is one of the three bleeders that stole my ore!”

The reaction of the men was instantaneous.

A sudden question came into Pete's mind. The man that the complaining Blaney pointed to was Homer Deeds. Could he also have been responsible for the load of shale dropped on Pete's father? An ugly roar went up and chairs were tipped over. Nearby miners moved toward the male member of the Barry trio and he took a slow, backward step.

Without thinking, Pete was up and out of his chair. The danger here was potent. The mood of the miners was such that violence could flare instantly. In fact it
was
flaring, and Pete's instincts threw him into action.

He leaped forward and grabbed the bearded man by the arm, putting himself in the way of the advancing miners. His quick movement threw them slightly off-balance and they hesitated.

“Out! Quick!” Pete snapped. He pushed the man toward the door.

Rachel Barry, not able to react quickly, had looked around, confused, and been pushed down into a chair. Thus, she was out of harm's way.

But Jane had turned and was on the other side of the bearded man, helping Pete push him toward the door.

“Hurry, Uncle Homer!”

They went through the door and Pete slammed it behind him and turned the key that had been left in the lock when the meeting opened.

They were in the anteroom now. The anteroom was a feature of practically all buildings in the Belt, public or private; the place where magnetic boots, an absolute requirement for outdoor movement, were left; they resembled rubbers used on the bigger planets during rainy weather.

“Grab a pair!” Pete directed as he dived toward the pile.

The man Jane had called Uncle Homer seized a pair of the boots and started toward the door.

“No,” Pete said. “Put them on. Well have time. It's worth it.”

He picked up a pair and handed them to Jane, but she pushed them away, her eyes snapping. “I'll get my own, thank you!”

Pete's anger flared. “All right, you little spitfire. But do it! Don't just stand there. Those men mean business.”

Someone hit the door now and Pete knew the next battering effort would be greater and the door would soon give. He regretted that the magnetic unit switch was not in the anteroom. Had that been the case he could have switched it off and degravitized the hall, leaving the miners to flounder helplessly.

“All right,” he said, “let's go!”

Uncle Homer was already pulling his boots toward the outer door. It was like a man walking in deep mud, with the double pull of the boots and the hall's gravity unit.

Jane was straining at her boots, lifting them with great difficulty. Pete seized her arm to help. Angrily, she shook it off.

“All right,” he snapped. “Stay here, then. They won't hurt you or your mother.”

Jane reversed quickly. “No! I want to go too. Please help me.”

Pulling his extra burden toward the already opened door, Pete pushed Jane through after Uncle Homer, who had helped no one but himself. Instantly the double gravity pressure abated and the three were able to run along the surface of the asteroid against the adjusted gravity pull of the boots.

“My car's right over there. Hurry. It will carry three in an emergency.”

The door had smashed open inside, and now Pete's wisdom in stopping to don the boots became apparent.

The pursuing miners didn't take the time. They snatched up boots in both hands and rushed through the outer door. The result would have been funny if the situation hadn't been so fraught with ugly danger.

A skilled acrobat could carry a pair of boots on a low-gravity surface and do very well, but it took practice that the miners didn't have. The trick of moving against a gravity that pushed downward from their hands, rather than pulling against the asteroid surface from their feet, was too much for most of them. Fine balancing abilities lacking, their hands and feet changed places and the dozen or so who had emerged presented the grotesque picture of a pursuit group walking on their hands.

Thus, pursued only by the yells of rage from the comparatively helpless miners, Pete was able to cram his companions into his monocar and take off in safety.

He lifted the car some hundred feet and arced around until he found the beep and then straightened away on the three-second beam.

“Where are we going?” Jane Barry asked.

“I'm pointed toward Juno, but we can't go too far with this load. Where is your ship?”

“We're cabled down on Pallas, but I can't leave Parma now. I've got to wait for Mother.”

The little black-haired vixen was beginning to really annoy Pete. “Then why didn't you stay with her?”

“You said they wouldn't hurt her—and they won't.”

“Of course they won't. They'll see that she gets back to her ship, too.”

In truth—as Pete well knew—the miners of the Brotherhood had a sort of grudging regard for Rachel Barry. While rough and uncultured, they were nonetheless chivalrous. Their complaints against Rachel were mainly from frustration. They saw her as a zany addlepate more than an enemy; an annoyance more than a menace.

The three were packed in like sardines and now Uncle Homer writhed and spoke for the first time. “You can let me out here. It's safe now. I'll make my own way.”

Pete made no objection as he started to lower the monocar. He didn't like the man and was embarrassed at even appearing to be on his side.

“Where will you go, Uncle Homer?” Jane asked. There was concern in her voice.

He mumbled something about having friends, thus not really answering her question, and then climbed out of the monocar and moved off into the darkness without a word of thanks.

“The grateful type,” Pete murmured with sarcasm he couldn't hide.

Jane turned on him as he again lifted the car into the black space above. “You want thanks? All right. I'll thank you for him.
Thanks
.”

“I wasn't asking for gratitude.”

“Then what
were
you asking for?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The next time I'll let them take your uncle out and toss him into space.”

“And they'd do it, too. They'd throw an innocent man off an asteroid without giving him a chance to say a word in his own defense.”

Scowling, Pete pushed angrily at the headpiece of his oxygen unit. It was attached to the supply belt, a unit all Belt people wore as an article of clothing, attaching the headpiece whenever they stepped out of pressurized areas. The unit was so constructed that the headpiece was pulled down to the belt on a light spring when not in use. But the spring on Pete's unit was out of adjustment and the headpiece kept pushing back up toward his face, giving him a somewhat undignified appearance.

“Milt Blaney identified him as one of the men who robbed and shot him, didn't he?”

“He
said
Uncle Homer was one of them. But how could he be sure? Is that enough evidence to destroy a man?”

“I'm not siding with the miners. I'm not defending them. I saved your uncle from them, didn't I?”

“Good lord! Do you want a medal?”

Pete realized he'd never before known the meaning of pure frustration. How did you argue with a stubborn creature like Jane Barry? The headpiece came up and pushed against his mouth. He jerked it down.

“Why don't you get that thing fixed? You look ridiculous pushing it away all the time.”

“We were talking about your Uncle Homer, not about my oxygen unit. I've heard a few things about him.”

“You mean you've heard things about the Barrys. Everybody talks about us.”

“We were talking—”

“About the Barrys,” Jane went on furiously. “You've no doubt heard things about Mother and me and my sisters. Tell me—what have you heard about my little sister, Colleen? She's eight years old. Does she go around jumping claims, too?”

“You're—you're impossible!” Pete muttered through gritted teeth.

Jane's glowing eyes reflected pleasure in the light from the monocar's radar screen. She enjoyed the helpless anger she'd produced in Pete.

“Your headpiece is hitting you in the face again,” she said sweetly.

Pete jammed the pesky thing back into its tube and when he spoke again it was with grim relief. Gauging himself by the Juno blip on the screen, he'd angled across to nearby Pallas and was finally happy to announce, “There's the
Snapdragon
,” and almost added: I hope it collapses on the next take-off. Then he realized he was being childish and swiftly repaired his manners. “I'll drop you by the port.”

“Thank you,” Jane said icily.

And on that note, they parted, Pete breathing a deep sigh of relief as he lifted the monocar off Pallas and headed for home. The night had held more excitement than he cared for. He was an orderly, reasonable person, he told himself stoutly, and he liked orderly procedures and reasonable people.

Therefore, he would send Betcha Jones to the next Brotherhood meeting.

And he'd definitely avoid meeting Jane Barry again.

CHAPTER FOUR

CLAIM TO A WORLD

The next morning Pete slept late. His knowing this was more instinctive than anything else as there were few visible signs to indicate time in the Belt. The light from the sun was of a fairly steady density everywhere on the sunless sides of the largest planetoids. This density would have been considered little more than twilight by the natives of the great inner planets, because the reflective surfaces in the Belt were skimpy and broken—about the same as the Earth's sun, standing a foot or so above the horizon.

Chronometers measured the passing hours and days, of course, but Pete knew it was late on the basis that Belt people calculated their days and nights—by merely glancing out the heavy quartz window and thus giving his instincts some scant material to work with.

He got out of bed and indulged in the luxury of a shower, visualizing Betcha's objections, had he known. Betcha considered such ridiculous personal sanitation as completely unnecessary. “Nonsense kids learn at them fancy schools,” he'd once snorted.

After a rubdown, Pete donned his heat unit, another of the personal items vitally necessary in the Belt. This consisted of a light garment worn next to the skin, a tight-fitting union suit that was battery-heated into a thermal shield against the steady zero-minus-one-hundred-degree temperature outside the enclosures. Maximum convenience was achieved by almost instantaneous heating at the simple snap of a switch. Also, the suit had specially constructed collars and cuffs that threw out quick heat to protect otherwise exposed surfaces, although helmets and gloves were not scorned.

Dressed for the day, Pete passed the kitchen where Betcha had left his breakfast on the stove and went to his father's bedroom.

Joe Mason was sleeping, and Pete tiptoed in and looked down at his father. It wasn't often that anyone caught the fiercely proud old man off guard. But this was one of the times, and Pete was a little shaken at what he saw. Stripped of its perpetual scowl of defiance and with the keen eyes closed, Joe Mason presented a different image: that of a hurt, tired man against whom stubborn, relentless time was winning its battle.

The cheeks were sunken and there was a pallid cast to the skin that had braved the harsh and frigid reaches of space for so many years. The deep lines Pete had known for so long were even deeper now, showing the extent of his father's suffering since the accident; suffering the old man would have died from rather than admit to.

After studying his father's face for awhile, Pete laid a hand on his shoulder.

“Dad…”

Joe Mason's eyes snapped open and he instantly replaced the mask that had dropped away during sleep.

“Oh—Pete. I was resting my eyes a little, waiting for you to come in.”

“I overslept, I'm afraid.”

“I told Betcha not to wake you up. You're still a growing lad and you need your rest. Here—push this blasted cast so I can sit up.”

Pete helped his father into a sitting position. He fully expected a cross-examination as to the previous night's meeting. So he was surprised when his father sat silent for a time, scowling at the wall behind the foot of the bed. Then he suddenly turned his piercing eyes on his son.

“Pete. I want you to go out prospecting.”

“Prospecting? Why, Dad, I thought we had some good claims that were just waiting—”

The old man shook his head impatiently. “Not exactly—not exactly. Oh, if we had a full crew and I was on my feet, we could pay the time and cost of working them, but the way things are, we need a richer strike.” He'd looked away, but now he glanced quickly back. “We're in no danger of violating the Brotherhood Code. The returns, even if we worked them, would be low enough to justify abandonment. So we'll hold them in reserve for a while, and I want you to go out and hit a big one for us.”

“Why, sure, Dad. I can't think of anything I'd rather do.”

“Copper prices are good. Hit a nice vein somewhere, and we'll have money to burn.”

Pete grinned and hooked his fist across his father's chin in the old man's favorite gesture of affection. “Sure, Dad. Just watch me. In a couple of days I'll come in here and report the biggest strike since Crazy Carter claimed that derelict ship filled with platinum bars.”

He was referring to a fabulous Belt incident that had long since become legendary—a miner who'd become a millionaire on a single salvage operation.

“You do that, son,” Joe Mason said.

“In the meantime, you just lie there and get well and plan what we'll do with the money.”

Pete's smile vanished as he left the bedroom. He passed up breakfast, stowing some dry provender into his monocar, and as he took off into the Belt, his spirits were low.

He moved with the stream and rode comfortably along, thoroughly at home in a world that would have terrorized the native of a solid planet.

An asteroid the size of a football floated along just ahead. Pete approached it, nuzzled it aside with the nose of his monocar, and watched it drift astern.

A larger, more jagged remnant drew alongside and turned itself over for Pete's inspection. It showed clear traces of silver, but unless Pete could discover a larger chunk—the mother asteroid off which it had been broken in collision—it was not worth bothering with.

He was approaching a cluster up ahead, so he nosed left to avoid it and came back on his arbitrary course at the cluster's forward end.

He cruised on. In the temporary lethargy of his low spirits brought on by worry over his father, he ignored the surrounding stream other than to avoid collision, and snapped on his radio. He checked the emergency band as every Beltman automatically did when signaling in, and then switched to the free wave length.

A Federation ship was broadcasting news. There had been an election on Earth for a seat in the World Congress, and a man named Shakari had won. His opponent had immediately cried fraud and demanded a recount.

Such strange goings on, Pete thought. That was how it was on Earth so far as he could see. Everybody fighting tooth and nail for things that didn't seem worth having; at least not to a boy born and raised in the Asteroid Belt. He wondered why the affairs of Earth were of such vital interest to everyone in the System. No, he didn't have to wonder that. It was logical. Earth was the magic center of the System. Everything originated there and everything went back. The ore he was hunting, if he found it, would without doubt find its way to Earth and the money paid for it would come from the big bank vaults down there to buy the supplies the Masons needed to support their existence. Just another circle in the millions of circles, tangible and otherwise, that went to make up the infinite universe.

His mind wandering thus, Pete became aware of a large planetoid above him on the sunside of the Belt. He tilted the monocar's nose and moved in that direction and in a short time he was cruising close, inspecting the planetoid's surface from ten feet.

The planetoid was cone-shaped, its diameter at the top approximately half a mile. That gave a good flat surface for mining operations, and when he set the monocar down and got out, he found enough iron in the rock to hold magnetic boots and grapples. That made everything ideal. Now there was the little matter of enough rich ore to make the operation worthwhile.

Pete was not a pessimist, but he still didn't expect to find anything of value on the planetoid. He based this on experience. There was fabulous wealth still untouched in the Belt, but one man was like an ant searching many acres of desert all alone. Thus, while the wealth was there, it took time to find it, and only sheerest luck would put a prospector on a rich planetoid so quickly.

But it appeared Pete had that luck. Fifteen minutes with a testing kit proved out a copper content in the rock that—against the longest of odds was the strike his father had requested.

Satisfied as to the planetoid's mineral wealth, Pete made the first move toward staking his claim—the plotting of the orbit. This amounted to marketing the location of the asteroid, a simple operation on a major planet, but a complicated one where everything was in bits and pieces and moving in constant stream around the sun. The orbit had to be extremely accurate, a precise notation of the asteroid's movements both within the stream and as a part of it.

Getting his kit from the monocar, he first determined that his rich find was tilted fourteen degrees from the plane of the ecliptic. Using this as the basis of additional calculations, he went on with his work. Time passed because plotting an orbit was not something dashed off in five minutes.

In fact, it was three hours later that Pete put down his final figures, checked them, repacked his kit, and returned to the monocar. Inside, he automatically-checked the emergency band on his radio and put down the formula that would enable him to again locate his claim. This was based on the orbital calculations and, if it became practical, the formula could be fed into the radar finder and thus become a part of the monocar's directional equipment, translated as a blip on the screen.

The whole job completed, he rewarded himself by getting out the provender he'd brought with him. This was a dubious reward because the food consisted of some of Betcha Jones's less successful biscuits. Betcha's successful biscuits were nothing to write home about, so the rock-hard consistency of the ones Pete feasted on was easily imagined. But with the tube of jam he'd brought along the biscuits were edible, and he was lifted in spirit by the thought of the good news he would carry to his father. A strike the first time out! You couldn't do any better than that.

He finished his meal, folded the claim data he'd listed on an official blank, and put it in his wallet where it would be safe until filing time.

Then, almost as though it had waited until he was quite ready, a scream came over the emergency band still open on his radio.

“Help! Help! Please—somebody!”

It was a completely “unprofessional” call for assistance by a hysterical female who had reacted in quick terror to some menace—an appalling menace, obviously.

Pete's responses came automatically. “Keep on yelling,” he advised, and channeled the screams into his finder. There was a pause with no further screams coming over the wave.

“Are you all right?” Pete asked. “Who are you? State your name and keep repeating it. Give my finder something to work on.”

Then the screams came again. “Help! Help! Help!” repeated three times.

This was enough. The finder clicked through its electronic pattern, located the voice, and the beeper began sounding. Ready to move, Pete lifted the car and circled. He checked the beep at two points and found that it led back along the stream and at a thirty-degree tilt from the ecliptic. This pointed him toward what the miners called the Badlands, an area of the Belt where the asteroid pack was thick and jagged—a place generally avoided because it had never yielded much in the way of valuable ore.

The Badlands was a dangerous area to head into recklessly, and Pete would have preferred to stay out of it altogether. But, faced by an emergency, he raced toward the area and began taking risks, any one of which could have smashed his car like the shell of an egg.

Plunging into the dangerous section of the Belt, he noted that the target of the beam was not stationary. That meant the girl was moving; probably fleeing whatever danger menaced her. He wondered if any other cars or ships had gotten the signal.

Then the cry came again. “Help! Please help me!”

“I'm on the way,” Pete muttered, and dodged a jagged asteroid just ahead.