CHAPTER FIVE

THE GLORY HUNTERS

 

 

He took the capsule as soon as the alarm buzzer awakened him, half an hour before he was to report for duty. It was the one thing he'd smuggled in with him, perfectly hidden in a box of apparently identical capsules containing neobenzedrine, the standard preventive of Martian amoebic fever. All Earthmen on Mars took neobenzedrine.

One of the capsules in Crag's box, though, contained a powder of similar color but of almost opposite effect. It wouldn^'t give him amoebic fever, but it would produce perfectly counterfeited symptoms.

He could, of course, simply have quit, but that might just possibly have aroused suspicion; it might have led to a thorough check-up of the laboratory and the contents of the safe. And he couldn't suddenly become disobedient in order to get himself fired. Psyched men didn^'t act that way.

The capsule took care of it perfectly. He started to get sick at his stomach. Knutson came by and found Crag retching out a window. As soon as Crag pulled his head back in, Knutson took a look at Crag's eyes; the pupils were contracted almost to pinpoints. He touched Crag's forehead and found it hot. And Crag admitted, when asked, that he'd probably forgotten to take his neobenzedrine for a few days.

That was that. There's no known cure for Martian amoebic fever except to get away from Mars at the first opportunity. He neither quit nor was fired. Knutson took him to the office and got his pay for him and then asked him whether he could make it back to Marsport by himself or if he wanted help. Crag said he could make it.

The search of his person and effects was perfunctory; he could probably have smuggled the tiny gadget and the single piece of paper out in his luggage, but the arrow had been safer.

Outside, as soon as jungle screened him from view, he took another capsule, one that looked just like the first but that counteracted it. He waited until the worst of the nausea from the first capsule had passed and then hid his luggage while he hunted for the arrow and found it.

Olliver had told him not to try it, but he tried it anyway. It wasn^'t exactly that he didn^'t trust Olliver-after all, if he got paid off, and he'd make sure of that, nothing else mattered-it was just that he was curious whether Olliver had told him the truth about the disintegrator^'s limitations.

He waited until he^'d put a little more distance between himself and Eisen's place and then aimed the , gadget at a bush and tripped the thumb catch. He held it about four feet from the bush the first time and nothing happened. He moved it to about two feet from the bush and tripped the catch again. He thought for a while that nothing was going to happen, but after a few seconds the bush took on a misty look, and then, quite abruptly, it wasn^'t there any more.

Olliver had told the truth, then. The thing had an effective range of only about three feet, and there was a definite time lag.

The rest of the way into Marsport-afoot as far as the edge of town and by atocab the rest of the way-he tried to figure out what Olliver^'s use for neutronium might be. He couldn't. In the first place he couldn't see how Olliver could get the collapsed matter, the tons-to-a-square-inch stuff, once he^'d disintegrated objects into it. The bush he'd tried it on hadn't seemed to collapse inward on itself; it had simply disintegrated all at once and the dead atoms of it had probably fallen through the crust of Mars as easily as rain falls through air.

He still hadn^'t figured an answer when he reached the swanky Marsport hotel where Olliver and Evadne were staying.

He had himself announced from the desk and then went up to Oliver's suite. Olliver, his face both eager and tense, let him in. He didn't ask the question, but Crag nodded.

Evadne, he saw as he walked past Olliver, was there. She was sitting on the sofa looking at him, her eyes enigmatic. Crag tried not to look at her. It was difficult. She was dressed even more revealingly than she had been dressed the first night he had seen her at Olliver's house in Albuquerque, back on Earth. And she looked even more beautiful.

Crag decided he wanted to get away from there, quick. He took the disintegrator and the folded plans from his pocket and put them on the table.

Olliver picked them up with unconcealed eagerness.

Crag said, ^"One million credits. Then we're through.^"

Olliver put gadget and paper in one pocket and took out a wallet from another. He said drily, ^"I don^'t carry a million in ready change, Crag. The bulk of it is back on Earth; I'Il have to give it to you there. But so you won't worry or think I'm stalling, I did bring two hundred thousand credits with me. Eight hundred thousand^'s waiting for you back home."

Crag nodded curtly, and took the offered money. He counted it roughly and put it in his pocket. It was more money than he^'d ever had or hoped to have in one chunk. He was set for life, even if he never got the rest.

He asked, ^"At your home? Shall I look you up there?"

Olliver looked surprised. "Why not come back with us? We're leaving at once, now that I have this. As soon as we can get clearance. We're making one brief stopover-going one other place first, that is-but we'll be home within hours. You may have to wait days to get public transport, and you know all the red tape you'll have to go through."

It made sense, but Crag hesitated.

Olliver laughed. "Afraid of me, Crag? Afraid I'm going to disintegrate you en route? To get my money back?" He laughed harder; there was almost hysterical amusement in the laughter. Obviously the gadget Crag had stolen for him excited him immensely. "You needn't worry, Crag. With this-^" He slapped his pocket. ^"-a million credits is peanuts to mc."

From the sofa, Evadne's voice said with languid amusement, ^"He isn^'t afraid of you, Jon. He's afraid of me.^"

Crag didn^'t look at her. He was watching Ollivers face and he saw amusement change to jealousy and anger.

Crag hadn^'t been afraid of Olliver. It had occurred to him only as a remote possibility that Olliver might try to kill him. Now, from the look on Olliver's face, his trying to kill Crag looked like a fair bet. Not, though, to get his money^. back.

Crag said, ^"All right, Olliver. I might as well go with you.^"

Deliberately he turned away from possible danger to lock glances with Evadne.

She was smiling at him.

 

 

* * * *

 

They got to the spaceport within an hour and through the formalities of clearance before noon.

Crag didn't ask, "Well, where?^" until he was in the pilot's seat of the little cruiser.

"Asteroid belt,^" Olliver told hhn.

"Where in the belt? What asteroid?^"

^"Doesn^'t matter. Any one big enough to land on.^"

Crag had lifted the computation shelf, ready to calculate distance and direction. He folded the shelf back; a jump of a hundred million miles, straight out from the sun, would put him in the middle of the belt. He set the controls, made the jump, and put the ship hack on manual control. His detectors would show the presence of any of the asteroids within ten million miles. They showed the presence of several right now.

He turned to Olliver. He said, "We're near Ceres. Four hundred eighty mile diameter. That one do?^"

^"Too big, Crag. It^'d take days. Pick the smallest one you can land on."

Crag nodded and studied the other asteroids showing on the detector and picked the smallest of them. It wasn^'t much bigger than a fair-sized house but he could land on it. He did. Rather, he killed the inertia of the spaceship after pulling alongside the tiny asteroid and matching his speed to its. Ship and asteroid bumped together, held by not much more than a pound of gravitational pull between them. Had the asteroid had an atmosphere, the ship would have floated in it, so slight was the attraction.

Olliver clapped him on the shoulder. "Nice work, Crag. Want to put on a spacesuit and come out to watch the fun?"

Crag locked the controls. ^"Why not?"

He saw now what Olliver intended to do-try out the disintegrator on the asteroid. And he saw now how Olliver could get neutronium. Disintegrating an asteroid was different from disintegrating an object on the crust of a planet. Instead of falling through the crust, the asteroid would collapse within itself, into a tiny, compact ball of neutronium. Maybe the size of an apple or an orange. It could be loaded-

He stopped suddenly, half in and half out of the space-suit he had started to pull on. He said, ^"Olliver, you can^'t take it back with you. Sure, we can put it in the spaceship, but when we get back to Earth we can't land with it. Near Earth, it's going to weigh ten times-maybe twenty times-as much as the ship itself. It'll either tear a hole through the hull or crash us, one or the other."

Olliver laughed. He was picking up a thermoglass helmet but hadn't put it on yet. He said, ^"This is just a tryout, Crag. We^'re not taking any neutronium back with us.^"

Crag finished putting on the spacesuit. Olliver had his helmet on, and Evadne was adjusting hers. He couldn't talk to either of them, now, until he had his own helmet on. Then the suit-radios would take care of communication.

He saw now how neutronium could be obtained, all right. There were rocks a lot smaller than this one whizzing around the belt, ones that weighed only a few tons, that a spaceship could handle easily and transport back to Earth after they'd been converted into collapsed matter.

He didn't see, as yet, what practical use neutronium could have that would make it as immensely valuable as Oliver seemed to think it would be. But that wasn't his business.

He got his helmet on, and nodded that he was ready. Evadne was standing by the air controls and she pulled a switch when he nodded. A space cruiser as small as Olliver's never had an airlock; it was simpler, if one wished to leave it in space or on an airless body, to exhaust the air from the entire ship and let the airmaker rebuild an atmosphere after one returned to the ship-and before removing one's spacesuit.

Now, in the earphones of his helmet, he heard Olliver^'s voice say, ^"Come on. Hurry up." Olliver opened the door and the last of the air whished out. But then, before stepping out, Olliver went back past Crag to the controls. He turned the lock on them and put the small but quite complicated key into one of the capacious pockets of his spacesuit. The plans for the disintegrator, Crag knew, were in the innermost pocket of his jumper.

Crag wondered which one of them he distrusted, or if it was both. Not that it mattered.

Crag shrugged and stepped out onto the tiny asteroid. Evadne followed him, and then Olliver.

He heard Oliver take a deep breath and say, "Here goes."

Olliver was pointing the little disintegrator down at the rocky surface of the asteroid, bending over so it was only a foot from the rock. Crag couldn^'t hear the click, but he saw Olliver's thumb move the catch.

Crag asked, ^"How long will it take?"

^"For something this size? I'd guess half an hour to an hour. But we won't have to wait till it's completely collapsed. When it's gone down enough that I'm sure-"

Crag looked about him, at the spaceship behind them, bumping gently against the surface of the asteroid, right at the shadow line that divided night and day. Strange that a world only twenty or thirty yards in diameter should have night and day-and yet darkness on the night side would be even denser than the darkness on the night side of Earth.

Time, Crag thought, and its relation to distance are strange on a world like this. If he walked twenty paces ahead and put himself right under distant, tiny Sol, it would be high noon. Thirty or forty more steps-held down to the light asteroid only by the gravplates on the shoes of the spacesuit-and he'd be in the middle of the night side; it would be midnight.

He chuckled at the fancy. "It's a small world," he said, remembering that Olliver had said that to him in the conversation between judge and prisoner at the end of the trial, the conversation that had led to all of this.

Olliver laughed excitedly, almost hysterically. ^"And it^'s getting smaller already-I think. Don't you, Crag, Evadne?^"

Crag looked about him and tried to judge, but if there^'d been any shrinkage as yet, he couldn't tell. He heard Evadne say, "I'm not sure yet, Jon."

Olliver said, "We can be sure in a few seconds. I've got a rule.^" He took a steel foot rule from one of the pockets of his spacesuit and laid it down on a flat expanse of rock. He picked up a loose bit of rock and made a scratch opposite each end of the rule.

Evadne walked over near Crag. Her eyes, through the plastic of the helmet, looked into his intensely, searchingly. He got the idea that she wanted to ask him a question and didn't dare-because Olliver would have heard it too-but was trying to find the answer by looking at him and reading his face. He met her gaze squarely, trying to guess what she was thinking or wondering. It hadn't anything to do, he felt sure just then, with the fact that he was a man and she a woman. It was something more important than that.

He heard Olliver^'s voice say, ^"1think so. I think it's-Wait, let's be sure."

He turned away from Evadne and watched Olliver as Olliver watched the rule and the scratches on the rock. There was tension among them, but no one spoke. A minute or two went by, and then Olliver stood up and faced them.

His eyes were shining-almost as though with madness-but his voice was calm now. He said, ^"It works." He looked from one to the other of them and then his eyes stopped on Crag. He said, ^"Crag, your million credits is waste paper. How would you like to be second in command of the Solar System?"

For the first time, Crag wondered if Olliver were mad.

The thought must have showed in his face, for Olliver shook his head. "I'm not crazy, Crag. Nor do I know any commercial use for neutronium. That was camouflage.

Listen, Crag- A few of these little gadgets set up in hidden places on each of the occupied planets, set up with radio controls so they can be triggered off from wherever I may be-that^'s all it will take. If this works on an asteroid-and it has-it^'ll work on an object of any size. A chain reaction doesn't care whether it works in a peanut or a planet."

Crag said slowly, ^"You mean-"

^"You might as well know all of it, Crag. There isn^'t any political party behind this. That was just talk. The only way peace can be kept in the system is by the rule of one man. But I'll need help, Crag, and you^'re the man I'd rather have, in spite of-" His voice changed. "Evadne, that^'s useless.^"

Crag looked quickly toward the woman and saw that she^'d pulled a heater from the pocket of her spacesuit and was aiming it at Olliver. Olliver laughed. He said, "I thought it was about time for you to show your colors, my dear. I expected that, really. I took the charge out of that heater.^"

Evadne pulled the trigger and nothing happened. Cragsaw her face go pale-but it seemed anger rather than fear.

She said, "All right, you beat me on that one, Jon. But someone will stop you, somehow. Do you realize that you couldn't do what you plan without destroying a planet or two-billions of lives, Jon-and that Earth itself would have to be one of the ones you destroyed? Because Earth is the-the fightingest one and wouldn't knuckle under to you, even on a threat like that? Jon, you'd kill off more than half of the human race, just to rule the ones who are left!"

She didn't drop the useless heater, but it hung at her side.

Olliver had one in his own hand now. He said, "Take it away from her, Crag."

Crag looked from one of them to the other. And he looked around him. The asteroid was shrinking. There was now a definite diminution in diameter, perhaps by a tenth.

Olliver spoke again and more sharply. "Take it away from her, Crag."

Olliver's blaster covered both of them. He could have killed Evadne where she stood; the command was meaningless, and Crag knew it was a test. Olliver was making him line up, one way or the other.

Crag thought of Earth, that he hated. And he thought of it as a dead little ball of heavy matter-and he didn't hate it that much. But to be second in command-not of a world, but of worlds—

Olliver said, ^"Your last chance, Crag. And listen-don't think I'm blind to you and Evadne. But I didn^'t care. She^'s been spying on me all along. I know the outfit she belongs to-a quixotic group that's trying to end system-wide corruption another way, a way that won't work. She's a spy, Crag, and 1 don^'t want her.

"Here are my final terms and you've got a few seconds to decide. Disarm her now, and I won't kill her. We'll take her back, and you can have her if you're silly enough to want her-out of billions of women who'll be yours for the taking.^"

Maybe that was all it took. Crag decided.

Be reached for Evadne with his good hand, seeing the look of cold contempt in her eyes-and the puzzlement in her eves as he swung her around instead of reaching for the useless gun she held. He said quickly, "Night side!" He propelled her forward ahead of him and then ran after her. He hoped Olliver's reflexes would be slow. They had to be.

On a tiny and shrinking asteroid, the horizon isn't far. It was a few steps on this one, and they were over it in less than a second. He heard Olliver curse and felt a wave of heat go past him, just too late. And then they were in the darkness.

He found Evadne by running into her and grabbed her and held on because there wasn't going to be much time. In seconds, Olliver would realize that he didn^'t have to come after them, that all he had to do was to get into the ship and warp off-or even just close the door and sit it out until they were dead. Even though Olliver wasn't a qualified pilot he could, with the help of the manual of instructions inside the ship, have a fair chance of getting it back to Earth or Mars.

So Crag said quickly, ^"I can stop him. But it^'s curtains for both of us, too. Shall I?"

She caught her breath, but there wasn^'t any hesitation in her answer. "Hurry, Crag. Hurry."

He ran on around the night side-ten steps-to the ship. He braced his feet as he lifted it and then threw it out into space-the whole pound weight of it. It seemed to go slowly, but it kept going. It would keep going for a long time, from that throw. It might come back, eventually, but not for hours-and the air in spacesuits of this type was good for only half an hour or so without processing or renewal.

Olliver would never rule a system now, only the tiniest world.

But all three of them were dead. He heard Olliver scream madly with rage and saw him come running over the horizon for a shot at him. Crag laughed and ducked back into blackness. He ran into Evadne, who had followed him. He caught her quickly as he crashed into her. He said, ^"Give me the heater, quick,^" and took it from her hand.

He could sec Olliver standing there, heater in hand, just where the spaceship had been, peering into the darkness, trying to see where to shoot them. But he could sec Olliver and Olliver, on the day side, couldn't see him.

He'd rather have had his metal hand to throw-he was used to using that and could hit a man^'s head at twenty or thirty feet. But the heater-gun would serve now; Olliver wasn't even ten feet away and he couldn^'t miss.

He didn^'t miss. The missile shattered Olliver's helmet.

Crag walked forward into the light, keeping between Evadne and Olliver so she wouldn't have to see. A man whose helmet has been shattered in space isn't a pleasant sight.

He reached down and got the disintegrator out of Olliver's pocket. He used it.

Evadne came up and took his arm as he stood there, looking upward, seeing a distant gleam of sunlight on an object that was still moving away from them. He wished now he hadn^'t thrown the spaceship so hard; had he tossed it lightly it might conceivably have returned before the air in his and Evadne's spacesuits ran out. But he couldn^'t have been sure he could get Olliver before Olliver, who had a loaded heater, could get him. And when the asteroid got small enough, the night side would no longer have been a protection. You can hide on the night side of a world-but not when it gets as small as a basketball.

Evadne said, ^"Thanks, Crag. You were-Is wonderful too hackneyed a word?"

Crag grinned at her. He said, "It's a wonderful word." He put his arms around her.

And then laughed. Here he was with two hundred thousand credits-a fortune-in his pocket and the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. And her arms were around him too and-you can't even kiss a woman in a spacesuit! Any more than you can spend a fortune on an asteroid without even a single tavern on it.

An asteroid that was now less than ten yards in diameter.

Evadne laughed too, and he was glad, very glad of that.

It was funny-if you saw it that way-and it made things easier in this last moment that she could see it that way too.

He saw she was breathing with difficulty. She said, "Crag-my dear-this suit must not have had its tank fully charged with oxygen. I'm afraid I can't-stay with you much longer."

He held her tighter. He couldn^'t think of anything to say.

She said, "But we stopped him, Crag. Someday humanity will get itself out of the mess it's in now. And when it does, there'll still-be an Earth-for it to live on."

"Was he right, Evadne? I mean, about your being a member of some secret organization?^"

"No. He either made that up or imagined it. I was just his wife, Crag. But I'd stopped loving him months ago. I knew, though, he planned to buy or steal that gadget of Eisen^'s-he^'d have got it somehow, even if we hadn't helped him. And I suspected, but didn't know, that he was planning something-bad. I stayed with him so I'd have a chance to try to stop him if-I was right.^"

She was breathing harder. Her arms tightened around him. She said, "Crag, I want that gadget. I^'ll use it on myself; I won^'t ask you to. But it will be sudden and painless, not like this." She was fighting for every breath now, but she laughed again. "Guess I'm lying, Crag. I^'m not afraid to die either way. But I've seen people who died this way and they^'re-well-I don^'t want you to see me-like that. I'd-rather-^“

He pressed it into her hand. He tightened his arms one last time and then stepped quickly back because he could hear and see how much pain she was in now, how every breath was becoming agony for her. He looked away, as he knew she wanted him to.

And when he looked back, after a little while, there was nothing there to see; nothing at all.

Except the disintegrator itself, lying there on a sphere now only six feet across. He picked it up. There was still one thing to do. Someone, sometime, might find this collapsed asteroid, attracted to it by the fact that his detector showed a mass greater than the bulk shown in a visiplate. If he found the gadget clinging there beside it—

He was tempted to use it instead, to take the quicker way instead of the slower, more painful one. But he took it apart, throwing each tiny piece as far out into space as he could. Maybe some of them would form orbits out there and maybe others would fall hack. But no one would ever gather all the pieces and manage to put them together again.

He finished, and the world he lived on was less than a yard in diameter now and it was still shrinking. He disconnected his gravplates because there wasn't any use trying to stand on it. But it was as heavy as it had ever been; there was still enough gravitational pull to keep him bumping gently against it. Of course he could push himself away from it now and go sailing off into space. But he didn^'t. Somehow, it was companionship.

A small world, he thought, and getting smaller.

The size of an orange now. He laughed as he put it into his pocket.