Robert Chilson - Truck Driver [ss]

A functional spacecraft by its nature has some powerful - though not obvious - weapons to use!

Ynga Lancaster hobbled awkwardly in her skintight pressure suit. It was inflated, so it didn't as yet grip her any more tightly than a stretch coverall, but the pads that filled out the concavities of her figure hampered her motion. Worse, they rounded her excellent figure out into that of a clumsily-carved doll, one with features barely suggested.

Carrying her helmet under one arm and her flight orders and purse in the other hand, Ynga pushed open the door onto the ready line. It was chilly outside, with a hint of snow from a lowering sky. As a veteran pilot, her bird had been moved up near the building. She hurried toward it. Her pressure suit was permeable, designed to permit her to lose heat; and it wasn't designed for such extreme conditions as this. Though only a little below freezing - hot by the standards of shadows in space - the dense air carried her body heat away fast enough to make her shiver as she hobbled over the tarmac.

By earlier standards, the bird was a big one. It was a nuclear-electric aerospace plane capable of putting a hundred tons, not into Earth orbit, but into escape trajectory. In shape it was an arrowhead, with the trailing points extending somewhat behind the tail of the "fuselage". The main body, or fuselage, of the plane was perhaps half the wingspan; from there the wings thinned toward the tips. At the tip of each wing was a double electrojet, one above the other. These ramjets were each big enough for a man to take a running dive through without touching - and electrojets are vastly more efficient than thermal jets.

Along the leading edge of the wings were smaller jet intakes; the little electrojets that sucked air in to lift the wing. They could support the plane on hover with small or no load, or on air cushion near the ground with full load. Aft, on the trailing edges of the wings and body, were the exhausts of the turboelectric jets that were used near the ground.

Paul Sitwell swung down from the flight deck and extended a clipboard. "Looks O.K., Ynga," he said with an attempt at heartiness.

She took the board, clumsy in her gauntlets, frowned at it. "What's wrong, then?" she barked.

"Wrong? Uh ... nothing. I was just, uh, making sure. I mean, Mannie found a couple reds and he kind of, uh ... and then I got behind - "

She ran her eye hastily down the checksheet, noting that everything had been marked if not checked. "O.K., O.K., don't tell me your troubles. Let me get out of this wind." She signed it clumsily. The flight techs supposedly checked everything after every flight, and there weren't many things that could go wrong with a nuclear-electric bird. Paul's job was merely to eliminate the waste of pilot hours in final checkout.

She swung gratefully into the warm bird.

The name of her plane was Rival. She looked around, soaking up the warmth for a moment, the comfort of her homey touches as warming as the plane's air-conditioning. Bill, her husband, bless him, was not disturbed by the place of her birds in her life. She had added her own decorator scheme to the switches and buttons - in nail polish. The go-stick wore ruffled skirts, and a pair of Pete's baby shoes, gold-plated, hung from it where it extended from the board. She'd have had a picture of the two of them if there'd been room.

Activating the board, she gave the bird a spot-check, checked communications, told the voice in the tower that, yes, she had clipped her purse under the seat, made him admit that he had neglected to clock the fact that she was flying alone as usual, and switched on the visiplates. These birds, like all modern planes, had no ports; her view came from numerous thimble-sized ikons scattered over the hull in strategic places.

"Rival ready for the flight line," she informed the tower.

"So O.K., get that female kite out of the way and let a man through," Ernie Katz insisted.

Ynga grinned, seating her helmet and checking it. Ernie's bird was dubbed the Manpower; he even had a big UP sign painted on it.

Rival lifted a little as the jets along the leading edge pulled air in from above and blew it out below. In moments it was on air cushion. She halted its drift on the wind with the turboelectrics, turned it toward the flight line and wafted it along as gently as a leaf. Receiving final clearance, she tipped over the edge of the gentle ski-jump slope and blasted all the secondary jets at full.

By the time she had reached the bottom of this slope, Rival was airborne, definitely off air cushion, winging uncertainly over the east Texas flatlands like some misplaced condor. Its sharp nose and edges and extreme lines marked it as no sub-mach barge, but a true eagle of the ionosphere, and it looked oddly out of place so near the ground.

The ground fell rapidly away, however, and by the time she crossed the Gulf Coast into cold winter sunshine, Ynga was ambling southeast at a leisurely 600. She concentrated on building up altitude. Rival had automatically throttled back on the jets that supplied lift to the flying wing, and they were now off.

A hundred miles or so south of New Orleans - half an hour from Galveston - Ynga had made 50,000 feet of altitude. She hauled Rival around to the south and glanced back in the side-mounted jet-view plates as the shock-diffusion pods were retracted from in front of the giant ramjets. They had been fully extended and the jets blocked off to reduce drag. Now, for submach speeds, they were fully retracted.

A good six hundred miles per hour was more than fast enough to fire the big jets, even in air this dense. She hit the igniters and tensed involuntarily. The gale of dense, cold air howling through them had to be ionized and utilized in the split fraction of a second it was passing through.

The multiple electron-beams, wrapped in concentric circles around the throats of the jets, started it. Their beams only penetrated air for a fraction of an inch - but that fraction was heated hotter than the solar surface. Air at that temperature is ionized, a plasma - and plasmas are electrical conductors. Behind the electron-beams was a magnetic pinch. When a conductor enters a magnetic field, it is constrained to move, and this field was circular. The thin circle of plasma was forced inward, compressing the cold air within it to 15,000 degrees Fahrenheit. It came out of the exhaust much faster than it went in the intake, and the thrust was unidirectional; no nozzle was needed.

Rival vibrated to the four-fold kick of the big rams and Ynga relaxed; all had fired in the same quarter-second. She pulled the go-stick definitely back and headed for the high side of the atmosphere. At this level, there was no small danger that the dense air would blow out the jets. But by the time she had put another fifteen thousand feet beneath her, it was safe to go super.

Ynga clamped down on the throttle and grinned inside her helmet as the monster rams thundered.

Pressure built up on her chest, and, flying by feel, she pulled back more on the go-stick.

Rival vibrated faintly and the thunder abruptly dropped to a murmur, almost a purr. Ynga held the stick back for a long time, topping out at 100,000 feet and 5,000 miles per hour. Very little sound was transmitted to sea level from this altitude, even at this speed and with this mass of plane. She held her speed down to a conservative level, though, until she had passed the tip of Florida.

Here she was treated to a real sight. Many big birds congregated here, thousand-ton aerospace planes, that took but an hour from takeoff to touchdown on an antipodal flight. They only went suborbital, and their ammonia tanks were frequently untouched on landing. But they could, with effort, put their full load in low orbit. At her speed she saw only those going her way at near her speed. She was on the Gulf leg of the equatorial flyway, and quite a few were going her way: trucks taking up raw materials to the factories in orbit.

They were slower on the start than Rival, however. She walked away from them, doubled her speed, added another 25,000 feet of altitude. Over the equator, she pulled back again. Climbing no faster than she had to to keep her jets firing, she racked up speed. At 15,000 miles per hour, she was unable to hold Rival down. The eagle had its eye set on near space. Centrifugal force alone threw her out. She fired her jets until they began to heat up from lack of working fluid; at the end they were firing at near 25,000 degrees.

The whole plane seemed to go limp when the big rams finally shut down. The Indian Ocean was just coming in sight past Africa. Ynga stretched, trying to relax. She checked a number of trouble spots, verified her course on the flight orders, reported again to flight control, settled back to wait.

It didn't take long. She was in suborbital flight, but there was no point in burning fuel near Earth. By the time she had half circumnavigated the planet she'd be at apogee. She'd "burn" enough of the ammonia in her wing tanks to round out her orbit, wait half an orbit, and fire again to escape velocity and over. That would put her in Earth's orbit at less than orbital velocity - falling inward toward the sun. It'd take quite a while to impact on it, but she only intended to stay in that trajectory long enough to dump her load and pull out.

She'd been flying these radioisotope disposal drops for almost a year now. On the whole, she liked them, though they put her on overtime. Since they had been allowed to switch to one driver per bird, she only had to work the usual four-day week.

Being alone thus, Ynga was understandably startled when a hand reached past her to switch off the radio. She twisted around and had her eyes caught by a black hole in a very businesslike pistol.

The man behind it was in bulky space armor, not a skintight pressure suit. He grinned past a mustard-yellow moustache, his helmet transparent.

"Sit easy, Ynga femm," he said.

Motion caused her to twist in the other direction. Another man, smaller, also armed, was coolly seating himself in the copilot's chair. Mustard-moustache took the astrogator's seat on her right.

"Hot jets," he said sardonically. "Very. But we'll take it from here. You just have to follow orders and leave the worrying to us. Oke?"

She stared steely-eyed at him.

"Don't try anything funny, Lancaster," said the smaller man sourly. "We weren't born yesterday. Your husband, Bill, and the boy will answer if you do."

Ynga had to fight emotion for several seconds, was unable to speak - though not unable to note that the man was ignorant of the finer details. It suggested that he'd merely been briefed - and that there were a number of men in the gang. It was a well-laid plan

"That's the trick, femm," said mustard-moustache, grinning confidently at her. He had rugged good looks, was too aware of it, too happy to have her at a disadvantage. Probably he even had one of those lapel pins under his sparmor: UP with Manpower.

The smaller man was the head, and the more sinister. Of course they were professionals, for hire. International business was a violent game. Though what corporation would want to steal a small aerospace truck like this was more than she could guess, or why. But she couldn't risk anything. These were pros. They'd keep their word.

"Give 'er the course, Joel," said the small man.

Joel tore her flight orders out of the holder and inserted his own. His clumsiness in his gauntlets - which he removed - and his general air of fumbling told Ynga that he was a stranger to flight decks, though he seemed to understand astrogation.

Ynga was only a truck driver herself, and knew only the basics, but as he explained the course, she understood. They proposed to fire at apogee of the present orbit, continue to fire for a quarter-orbit at low thrust, then fire hot, to escape velocity. There they'd dump the load.

That was dangerously close to Earth, though the quarter-orbit on low thrust would take them out a bit. Point was, they'd be adding to instead of subtracting from Earth's solar orbital velocity, dumping on the wrong side of the planet. The load of radioisotopes would fall outward, not inward.

How far she had no way of knowing, or where it would wind up. But, of course, it wouldn't be permitted to go far. In fact, a ship was probably already drifting along on a course that would take it near the load's orbit at the right time. That'd have to be within reach of its lead-"burning" electrorockets; they wouldn't dare go to fusion drive so near Earth. Fusion rockets had disastrous effects on the electromagnetic atmosphere; and it was illegal to use them inside Lunar orbit.

"What about - " she had to clear her throat. "My husband - ?"

Joel laughed snickeringly.

The small man said, tonelessly, "A couple of the boys have him and the boy. They'll hold 'em until they hear from us, or until a certain time has passed. Don't worry."

Don't worry!

Joel asked her the ship's take-off weight. She told him, adding numbly that she hadn't used any ammonia yet.

They sat, or floated, while Rival climbed silently upward as on some monstrous updraft. Ynga ignored Joel's sidelong glances and tried feverishly to think. They'd have her land the plane somewhere, and hold her until the ship had time to recover the cargo.

No doubt her trajectory would be traced when she varied from her flight plan, but the officials wouldn't think of following the load. They'd be concentrating on the plane.

They might be held quite a while. The load would have to be well away from Earth before it was approached. They might well simply kill her and Bill and Pete rather than hold them so long.

Joel hadn't put his gauntlets back on. And they were wearing armor instead of pressure suits. If she could spill cabin pressure quickly enough, bends would tie them in knots. They were breathing nitrox by their voices. Her own pressure suit was molded of expansion fabric. Every fiber of it was a miniature balloon, open at one end. Under one atmosphere all were fully inflated, somewhat larger in diameter and quite a bit longer. As pressure dropped, they'd deflate, shrinking down to their normal size. At zero, they'd supply nearly an atmosphere of pressure. She'd scarcely feel a sudden drop - if it could be arranged.

"Does everything check out?" asked the small man with a hint of nervousness.

Ynga grinned inwardly; he'd been watching Earth shrink below them. Doubtless he'd been Out before, but it wasn't as immediate as this.

"Sure, weight's right on the nose, we're right on the curve they said," Joel told him absently, familiarizing himself with the astrogating instruments.

And with a sudden swoop of her stomach, Ynga had it.

Her hands were sweating in their gauntlets as they approached apogee. Her tension was not noticed by the hijackers; even Joel had finally given up his scrutiny of her for the majesty of space. They were approaching the night side of the planet, "twelve hours" from her takeoff point, but well off to oneside. The sky immediately ahead and above them was that of midnight on Earth.

"O.K.," said Joel finally. He gave her the thrust figure again, set the bird's attitude himself - he had to have help in turning the plane, but he worked the instruments fairly well. Then he checked everything between glances at the visiplates while the small man fidgeted silently.

Joel gave her the go-signal from his own chron.

Ynga obediently hit the ammonia-tank heaters, followed through with the ramjet ignition sequence, then deliberately went around the board, hitting everything that would make a display. The board lit up like a caravan of Christmas trees. Joel and the other stared, bewildered and more than a little frightened.

She grinned a little, weakly, inside her helmet. Their expressions were much like Bill's when she tried to explain the workings of the aerospace planes that were her life, except that he usually looked bored. And he taught nuclear engineering at the General Nucleonics College.

The transmitted vibrations of the big ramjets, now rockets, hummed around them. Ynga's flying fingers touched the ammonia-tank vent-alarm cutoff, her stomach a ball of tension. Would it work before the alarm sounded, prevent it from sounding?

It did. She must have hit it just before it went off. She suppressed a sigh.

The red light flashed, of course, but lo were plenty of others. She'd just have to keep them all flashing all the time the rockets were on.

Joel had given her a clear course through the Earthbelt, though they came closer than Ynga liked to half a dozen factory complexes. Space was crowded so near the planet, not merely with the factory and space city and amusement complex traffic, but with traffic from Luna and the asteroids as well.

Joel had taken possession of the radio switch, which he kept firmly off. It flashed angrily, adding its mite to the chaos of the board. Ynga's jaw set hard.

The sound of the rockets drowned out the hiss and thrum of escaping gas from the ammonia tanks.

The minutes ticked past like hours, but it was not long before Joel nodded and said, "O.K., up with her!"

Ynga pulled back and squeezed the throttles harder. Rival pulled directly away from Earth under three Gs, losing ammonia at a frightening rate. Ynga switched to space-scan radar and clidar. So far she didn't see anyone after them. But they couldn't violate all the rules, regs, laws and international agreements like this and get away with it.

Joel and his boss understood that as well as she did, and they were even more anxious to make it a quick flight. Their flight plan allowed for that. They weren't adding as much to Earth's velocity as Yngausually subtracted on these flights. The load would drift outward slowly.

Ynga's thoughts kept straying to Bill and Pete. She couldn't stand much of that. Fiercely she concentrated on her own situation. She couldn't think of a thing that would be worth all this trouble to smuggle off Earth. Furthermore, every canister was carefully checked before it was sealed, and if it wasn't radiating, it'd look odd, to say the least. So, what radioisotopes would be valuable enough to warrant so much trouble?

Most big power plants were fusion. Small power plants, such as Rival's and her car's, were charged-particle nuclear-electrics. They used lightweight isotopes such as Carbon-14 and Strontium-90, subjecting them to terrific electromagnetic stress to cause them to break down at an accelerated rate. Isotopes with half-lives in the thousands of years could be burned out in a decade.

Such power plants were very cheap, because the fuel isotopes were easily made. Her cargo was supposedly of such spent fuel sticks. The only difficulty with them was that, though isotopes varied, alphaemitters - alphagens - generally took a different excitation stress than betagens. The two couldn't be mixed in an "alphabetagen" with any degree of success. That was unfortunate, because the number of compounds that could be built could have been greatly increased. The fuel elements had to have the right electrical and mechanical properties as well as nuclear.

That left only the fissionable isotopes and gammagens. Fissionables?

But fissionable power plants were far more expensive and far less efficient. The electromagnetic excitation used on alphagens and betagens didn't work on neutrons. The only thing they could be worth stealing for was bombs.

Burnout!

Ynga took a quick look at tank pressure and saw with a catch of her breath that they barely had fuel enough to get them back - empty. She switched off the tank heaters quickly, shut down most of the other displays. Then she hit the switches that opened the hatches. The loss of ammonia stopped when the heaters went off.

The big hatches were located between the giant dorsal fins that divided the flying wing into thirds. There was a row of smaller hatches outside these fins, but she left them shut. Radioisotope disposal was a bulk job, and her hundred tons had been made up in the big holds. When all these hatches were up, the ship had two more lines of fins running down its back. Ynga checked visually to see that all were all the way up.

Nodding absently, concentrating hard on her job to still her quaking spirit, she reached for the small rocket controls. These were designed to save bird turnaround time in space when bringing up cargo to factories. Blasting these tiny rockets caused Rival to move slowly, grandly "down" from under its burden. The cargo outweighed the bird itself by a large margin.

Once away from the big canisters, which began to spread slowly apart, she rotated Rival slowly on the gyros. "Upside down" and flying backwards, she warned them and fired the big rockets again.

She gave them ten Gs until she began to get hazy. Her captors blacked out - neither of them knew enough to have connected up the anti-G bands. The smaller man took it better; smaller people can take pounding better than big ones. One reason Ynga had made space pilot. But she was a good-sized woman, every bit as big as this small man. At a guess he could take as much as she.

He was a suspicious devil; he had a gun and a gimlet eye on her the instant his vision cleared.

When Joel awoke he turned ugly. The idea of blacking out while a woman held out didn't sit well with him. He said nothing, but he had no time to spare for the spectacle of the milk-shot blue planet swelling before them.

"Tell her where," ordered his boss. Joel sullenly told her to put them down over the South Pacific and they'd tell her where from there. Sidelong glances told her he had his own plans after that.

Now that it was done, Ynga was weak and quivery. Her mind, hazy now, was full of Bill and Pete. Their freckles, engaging grins, and that little gap between their front teeth. Would she ever see them again?

These were professional industrial goons - spies, saboteurs, guards, or musclemen, as indicated, she thought feverishly. Industrial competition was cutthroat, but person-to-person violence tended to be avoided. Reprisals were too easy. They were out of practice. But Bill was only a professor. He wouldn't stand a chance against this kind of pro.

She remembered his earnest head bent over a nuclear physics journal so intently he never noticed the blue smoke pouring up from the defective toaster and hanging under the ceiling. He even wore old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses. Said it got him half his promotions - made him look studious.

Studious!

Would they have him waiting there when she got down? There'd been time to get him and Pete halfway around the world - it would be after noon.

Maybe they were both dead.

Minutes filled with such reflections crawled with even greater deliberation. But at last they approached the planet. Ynga waited until the last minute to use her rockets. Then she barely had time to roll Rival over and set the proper altitude after she had emptied her tanks.

They were coming into the air at a pretty steep angle.

It screamed around them. The impact made Rival ring like a bell and shy madly for space. Ynga fought the bird down, drove into the air again. A raging flame built up in front of the ikons along the leading edges. Joel and the other stared in fear and gripped their seats.

After the second impact they saw through a haze. Ynga clamped her jaw hard and bent Rival's nose down steeply. Again and again the bird slammed into the upper atmosphere. Not even Joel's boss became suspicious until it was too late.

Ynga pulled back, leveled off, set the autopilot. She was gasping for breath, tasting blood, and seeing through a haze, head whirling. But she couldn't wait for her head to clear. Reaching over, she gathered up the two pistols, tucked them into the clip under her seat. The small man's helmet was ripped off first. She tapped him a couple of times above the ear to be sure, then brought his hands down and slipped the anti-G strap across between his back and his arms. His arms were free from the elbow down when the anti-G strap inflated, but caught between the arms of his chair where he couldn't switch it off - assuming he knew how.

She fixed Joel the same way. The bigger man was bleeding at the mouth. They could still kick at the control board, but she'd bet her life they wouldn't dare. The anti-G straps for the calves could have fixed that, but she didn't bother.

She also removed Joel's helmet. By the time she had reached the South Pacific, they had recovered. "Shut up!" she barked. Ynga was taut with desperate rage. At the very least she'd have revenge

Joel was frothing. The other was very alert.

"I'm making the threats," she told them. "Where are my husband and son?"

Neither responded to the question. Ynga grinned tightly and cracked the spill valves. Air fluted melodiously out through the whistles. A sound that would be recognized by anyone who watched adventure records.

They began to sweat, but the little man seemed determined to call her bluff. She grinned like a wolf. Both were singularly ignorant of aerospace flight. The air got thinner and thinner. Joel's monotonous threats grew thick.

They weren't yet gasping for breath when Ynga shut the valves.

"Tol' you," breathed the smaller man. "Jus' a bluff. Tough femm, b'not tough nuff."

"That's what I thought," said Ynga. "You'd never dare try to invade a private apartment. It was all a bluff."

She had to let out more air before they started to spill. The little man knew everything. Before he passed out he was babbling drunkenly that Bill would never see daylight again if anything went wrong. Nobody would ever find him on that seafarm. Shrewd questioning also gave her the proper code words to radio her arrival with. Some close checking of Joel's flight orders gave her the location.

She gave them more air and turned on course, ignoring the radio. Ynga was quivering with exhaustion and tension and soaked with sweat, but she held herself in taut control. She couldn't depend on the authorities to get Bill and Pete out alive. On the other hand, the gang would be expecting her to come flying tamely in any time. She teetered indecisively between alternatives.

Finally she decided to go in. At least they'd be together.

When her captives awakened again they were grimly silent. Joel glared at her with real hatred now. She ignored that contemptuously. Approaching the seafarm at high altitude, she warned them: "You haven't seen the all nor the worst I can do while I've got you inside this bird. Try anything and you won't live to regret it - even if Rival is sitting flat on the water. Believe me." They did.

That bluff should hold them until they were down - and they couldn't fly the bird anyway. She looked the farm over as she spiraled in, giving the code words. No comment at her voice; she'd expected to have to force Joel to give the words.

Chewing her lip, Ynga spiraled in, still high, still supersonic. She had the guns but she'd have to leave Rival and go hobbling in to use them - alone and under their observation. Couldn't be done. But if she pulled out and ran now, it'd be wet curtains for Bill and Pete.

She bumped up the magnification on the forward visiplates. They had a telescopic circuit to simplify docking in space. Searching the ground, desperately looking for a way out, she coaxed the big high-speed bird in.

"Come right in beside the dome - that wing can land on water, can't it?" asked ground impatiently.

"Check," she said automatically, putting Rival into a steep dive preparatory to leveling out on hover and skimming in to the clear water beside the watch domes.

Then she caught her breath.

A seafarm is essentially a series of tanks full of plankton. The mile-square tanks were merely thin plastic sheets supported at the upper edges by floats. The water in them was brought up by solar-powered pumps from as much as half a mile down. At that depth, beyond the reach of the sunlight, there are no plants to fix organic compounds, and the water is so rich with them they precipitate out. This rich water, brought up to sunlight and fed to plants, not only supplied a third of the world with food, but also supplied a third of the world's organic raw materials.

The process lended itself well to automation. The pumps were automatic, the plants grew naturally, fish rarely got into them - and in most cases would promptly have died if they had - and even harvesting was automatic. Pumps picked up the water, centrifuged out the plankton, and sent it along for pressing and drying. Men need only come by at intervals to collect it.

This farm did no processing. Thus, no permanent buildings were needed, only a few domes for the watchmen, who also made on-the-spot repairs. Permanent buildings would have been floating, submerged jobs. But since worldwide weather-conditioning eliminated hurricanes, nothing was needed for the watchmen but inflated domes floating on pontoons.

"Forgive me, Bill - Pete," she whispered as the big bird came in, and squeezed the throttles.

For a half-second she feared the big rams would falter. The howling gale of dense wet air pouring through them at this altitude was already causing them to run hot. The electromagnetic fields weren't able to keep the plasma away from the throats. Now she dived into thicker air, still at supersonic speeds.

But all jets are overdesigned. They held, running hotter and hotter - but they held. Rival was making better than 1900 miles per hour as she pulled out over the domes. In the climb, the jets finally faltered. The pyrometers tripped, the safety switches were thrown, and the plane quivered as its driving force vanished. Rival seemed half-dead, as sluggish as she felt, as Ynga whipped it into a turn on the turbojets, nose down again.

It was a slow turn. Out of it and making for the domes again, her teeth clamped on her lip at the havoc the single pass had raised.

The domes were down. Unidentifiable bits and pieces were scattered here and there. The body of a man was floating face down in the clear water beside the floats of the domes, apparently having been knocked off the company boat at the dock. It couldn't be Bill; Bill would never wear tartan plaid pants in "incandescent" red and green.

Ynga put Rival down hard and fast, her head snapping, the arms of the men, caught behind them, straining. Ramming the nose against the dock, she scrabbled up the guns, unhooked herself, started out.

Remembering the men, she hesitated, torn. After a moment, hefting a pistol, she stepped reluctantly back. Her face reflected her strain. The shock, on top of all the day's mental and physical shocks, was too much for the half-tough Joel. To Ynga's grim and everlasting delight, the mustard-moustached muscleman fainted.

She contented herself with tapping the head of his boss. He lapsed into unconsciousness readily. Then she was out and running across the dock.

The South Pacific sun hit her through the helmet, the glare arrowing into her eyes. Water lapped, flashed; white floats glared; even the sunpower screens reflected light apologetically into her face. The heat of the tropics smote through her sweatsoaked pressure suit. The salt sweat irritated the raw spots under it. After a few moments she slowed to a rapid, stumbling walk.

It took seconds of clawing at the collapsed fabric to find the door to the first dome. The plastic was set for translucence; it was light inside. She lifted it with her helmet. Three men lay sprawled unconscious, bleeding at the ears and noses, around an overturned card table. One breathed stertorously. Beyond, in another room, were two other men in bed. The plastic was dark here - the night shift. Fumbling past, she found the galley. Opposite it was an empty room with a chair and a big visiplate. The 'plate was overturned but still playing a Western record.

In the floor was an opened trapdoor.

Ynga caught her breath, almost plunged through it headfirst, trying to look. "Bill!" she called.

"Ynga! For God's sake! Do they have you? What happened?"

She could make out the sprawled body of a man - a body beyond doubt; his head was doubled under him. Fallen through the hatch, doubtless.

It was twenty feet down. After several moments of mental confusion, she placed it as a sub dock. A small sub was used to check the bottoms of the tanks for leaks or fish damage. The dock was for emergencies and doubled as a decompression chamber. Small subs are unwieldy on the surface.

"Bill! You all right? Wh-where's Pete? Bill!"

"O.K., here I am." She saw him looking up. No need to tie him up down there, there was no way out but this. "What do you mean, Pete? He's in school. Home, now," he added, looking at his chron.

"Th-they said they had you b-both. Oh, Bill! C-come on up."

"Let down the ladder. What happened up there? It sounded like a cannon down through this manhole."

Ladder, ladder. She peered under the plastic. "I-I don't see - "

"Built-in, automatic. Look at the edge of the hatch."

Ynga looked, saw a button with an L, hit it. The ladder spewed out of a mouth just under the hatch. A link ladder, with wide flat rungs but uprights of jointed links the size of matchsticks. It retracted to allow room to lower equipment down the, shaft.

Bill came up quickly, stared, his height lifting the collapsed dome off her head.

Ynga explained quickly, leading him out, leaning on him for support. Twenty feet under water, he'd merely been almost deafened by the shock. Some of the gang were stirring as they clawed their way back out from under the light plastic. She gave Bill one of the guns.

He took it casually, almost absently. Behind his heavy, horn-rimmed glasses he wore an air of almost childish wonder with a dash of disdain for his erstwhile captors. He did not seem troubled even when they saw the small man glaring at them from Rival's cabin door.

"It lacks a lot of being a competent gang," he said, ignoring her gasp. "Fanatics would be likely to hire third-raters to do their dirty work." The small man's head disappeared before she thought to raise her gun. Bill still seemed unmoved.

Rival had floated some thirty feet away from the dock.

After a moment they heard the whine of the turbines. "He must've been watching everything I did, studying the board," moaned Ynga. Bill pushed his, glasses back on his rather blunt nose, shrugged clumsy hulking shoulders in the mannerism that made him seem so ineffectual and - studious.

The rudders on the giant dorsal fins swung hard over. The jets on one side sounded louder than the others. "Going to try to fry us with the jets - the damn fool," muttered Bill.

After a moment Ynga saw what he meant. A hundred-ton aerospace transport can't be handled like an airboat, much less like a rowboat. It obediently swung to the right, but came surging forward much faster. Bill backed away, hesitated. Rival's swinging prow did not quite touch the floating dock - a great hawk moth brooding on its sins, ignoring the water creaming under its beak. She saw that it would make the turn and started to drag Bill away from the jet exhaust.

But he was off and running before she could speak. She saw his glasses bounce absurdly on his flat nose. He took off in an impossibly long leap - through the still-open door of the bird just as it began to recede from the dock.

Ynga's scream mingled with the sound of the jets.

He hit the deck in a sprawl, rolled completely over, losing his glasses. Then he was gone in the dimly-lit interior.

Ynga hobbled frantically along the dock after the receding nose of the plane. She dipped one toe in the water, hesitated, not remembering - if she knew - whether her pressure suit would buoy her up, or drag her down. The gap was much too great to leap now, even unhampered.

"Bill!" she screamed.

Then the jets died.

"Bill!"

"O.K., what do I do now?" he asked her, appearing in the doorway. In the sudden silence, her sob was as loud as a shout.

"The little guy?" she asked fearfully.

"Dead," he said, shrugging. "Brace up! It's been a rough day, and you've had the worst of it, but it'll soon be over. Just tell me how to get this bird back to the dock."

It took her a moment to catch her breath. "S-set everything on dead center," she said.

He frowned uncertainly.

"The go-stick." She could see the rudders. Below the plane, retracted on ground - she hadn't bothered - were their smaller counterparts. They had to be turned to dead center. The rudders hadn't enough bite in air to steer at low speeds like this, but those down in the water did.

With some fumbling, he managed to square them. "Now what?" he asked. She told him where to find the compressor turbine controls and how to turn them to start position. Hesitantly, he fired up some of the turbojets. The multiple scream pushed the plane forward slowly, slowly. It bumped the dock as she was hobbling down toward it.

Bill gave her a hand in.

He looked out at the deflated domes. Ynga followed his glance. Most of the living men seemed to be conscious. Motion was visible under the plastic. Three men sprawled across the domes' floats, holding their heads. No doubt they were all deaf - some permanently.

"No point in trying to hold them," said Bill. "They can be traced easily enough from the dead. And they're wounded. Besides, they don't know who hired them. We'll call the authorities and let them handle it. Better call someone right away or you'll lose your license."

The little man was quite dead, with a broken neck. Joel was wide-eyed and sweating, conscious but still strapped in. They ignored him. Ynga took the pilot's seat, felt relief flow upward through her from it. Here she was in her own element. The radio was blinking angrily.

She turned to the flight-control wavelengths and cut into a babel of voices, most of them angry. Some appeared to be patrolmen. Her explanation wasn't easy to make. She tried to be concise, but the incredulous interruptions slowed her. Some parts of it she held back; these wavelengths weren't secure, and flight control might talk to the press.

It was ten minutes before she got flight instructions, and they were promptly countermanded by a sharp voice which told them to sit tight. Minutes later a fast little courier screamed in - blue and green. UN Treaty Forces. They patrolled international water, air and space under the terms of the various treaties among the Blocs.

Their commander was a Japanese lieutenant with an almost British air. Joel and his boss were removed, with their guns, and their stories recorded. Ynga told them everything she had done.

"It leaves just one question," mused the patrolman, packing away his equipment. "Who's behind it all? One of the big corporations?"

"No," said Bill calmly. "The Lunar Separatists. They're the only group around that would be crazy enough to use nuclear bombs. I had plenty of time to think," he explained to Ynga. He gave the same reasons she had used in concluding that the cargo they had put in pickup orbit had to be either fissionables, or breeder isotopes.

"Wait a minute," said the patrolman, eyes narrowing. "That's not under our jurisdiction, but we know pretty much where every gram of that kind of stuff is. None of the Armed Powers would let much of that stuff get away. And you need ten kilograms just for one crude bomb."

"Not anymore," Bill assured him. "I'm a research nucleonic engineer. It's not generally known, but the alphabetagen excitation problem's been cracked. You have to mix small percentages of fissionables into the fuel sticks, though. And the result isn't a nice, gentle, controlled rate of breakdown. Instead, virtually every unstable atom in the stick lets go at once."

"Whew!" whistled the lieutenant. "An alphabetagen bomb! So they had a few kilos of breeder isotopes, thorium or U-238, in one of the canisters. That'd give 'em enough fissionables for several hundred smallish bombs for sabotage." He grinned at Ynga. "They'll hate you, pilot!"

They were not held long after that. They were ordered back to Galveston, where further questioning would await them. Ynga was relieved by a report from flight control; a call to their apartment revealed that Pete was too engrossed in homework to come to the phone.

Bill seemed to hold his breath while Rival climbed skyward. When the big rams were off and the plane in suborbital above the atmosphere, she demanded, "Now you tell me how you managed to break that professional muscleman's neck - professor!"

"The company's physical fitness program - remember?" he asked. "Calisthenics, court sports, boxing, wrestling - and karate, savate, and whatever else we require to keep us interested."

"And you never told me! I worried myself almost sick. Just like a man!"

Bill laughed, looking up at the star-spangled blackness above. "They will hate you, too, Ynga," he said, at a tangent. "Having to sit and watch their swag float by just out of reach - they'll have plenty of time to brood on the wiles of women. They won't dare use their fusion rockets - not after everybody's been alerted."

She shrugged, as he had before, at the obvious. "Boiling off ammonia to reduce the plane's mass, was obvious," she said. "Of course that puts the canisters in a faster orbit - one farther out. I'm only a truck driver, and a Terrapin at that, but that much astrogation anybody knows. It might even be a solar escape orbit."

He laughed again. "So smugly and calmly floating past, ignoring them - just out of reach. Just like a woman!"

"Serves 'em darn well right," she muttered vindictively, looking up at the sky. "Try to skyjack my truck, will they?"