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Chapter 22

The boat was spaceworthy enough and all its equipment was in good working order and it was fully stocked with emergency provisions. Grimes had no doubt of its capability to transport him and the loyalists to Mars, or to anywhere else in the Solar System. The Quest, with her main engines immobilized, could not pursue. Unfortunately, the ship's armament, both main and secondary, was still in working order.

Grimes turned to Mayhew. "Ken," he said urgently, "try to tune in to Hendriks. Get inside his mind, find out what he's doing, what he's going to do . . ."

"I . . . I'm already in touch. I'm picking up his thoughts. Dalzell is telling him to swat us out of the sky."

"Hell!" muttered the Commodore. And it would be hell, a brief, searing and spectacular inferno if one of Faraway Quest's missiles found the lifeboat. A near miss would be enough to destroy her. Her inertial drive unit was hammering flat out, but she could not hope to outrun the vicious rockets. It would be many, many minutes before she was safely out of effective range.

Grimes glanced nervously out of the viewports, saw that the others were doing the same. There was nothing to see; there would be nothing to see until the boat broke through the heavy overcast. Unless . . . Perhaps a blinding flash, and then oblivion.

Mayhew was speaking softly. "He . . . he is telling Dalzell that the self-guiding missiles are inoperable . . . But . . ." there was amazement in the telepath's voice . . . "but I think that he is lying . . ."

Grimes felt the beginning of hope. Perhaps Hendriks was not, after all, a murderer.

"Fire . . ." whispered Mayhew.

"Wait for it!" exclaimed Williams with spurious heartiness. "Wait for it!"

"We've no bloody option, Bill," remarked Grimes resignedly. He suppressed the temptation to throw the boat violently off course; to do so might convert a miss into a near-miss or even into a direct hit. He would stand on, trusting in whatever decency remained in the Gunnery Officer's makeup.

Then it happened.

Below and to starboard the clouds were rent apart by the explosion, by a brief and dreadful burgeoning of scarlet fire. The ambient mists vanished, flash-dried by the searing heat of the blast. The boat was driving upwards towards the domed ceiling of a roughly globular cavern of clear air in the center of which a man-made sun had been born, had lived briefly and had died. The first shock wave hit her and, even through the insulation, the doomsday crack of it was deafening. The first shock wave hit her, and then the secondary, and then the tertiary, slamming her to port and up. Grimes, sweating, fought the controls, somehow keeping the little craft steady on her heading. She was buffeted by the turbulence engendered by the detonation of the missile's warhead; it seemed that surely she must break up, spilling her people into the incandescent nothingness.

Up, Grimes pushed her. Up, up . . .

And she was clear of the overcast, although only those who had not been temporarily blinded by the blast could see the bright stars in the black sky overhead, the yellow moon, lopsided, in its last quarter, low on the eastern horizon.

Below them was the cloud—towering cumulus, vaporous peaks and pinnacles that grew and shifted and toppled, that swirled around and above the point where the rocket had burst.

"Fire . . ." whispered Mayhew again, echoing Hendriks' thought and spoken word.

Grimes said nothing. He knew that he must gain altitude, and yet more altitude, and even then there would be no safety. The inertial drive snarled in protest but kept going.

This time it was a salvo of three missiles, all of them well short of the target. This must have been, the Commodore realized, intentional on Hendriks' part, just as the first miss must have been intentional—although too near for comfort. The rockets burst where the boat had been, not where she was now. They flared dazzlingly beneath the surface of the cloud mass, turning the shadowy canyons into deep rivers of flame.

Mayhew started to laugh. It was not hysterical mirth. It was genuine amusement.

"Share the joke, Ken," snapped Sonya. "We need something to cheer us up."

"That last salvo," said the telepath, "consisted of four missiles . . ."

"I counted only three explosions," Carnaby told him.

"There were only three explosions, James. The fourth missile was a dud."

"So what?" demanded the navigator. "None of them came near us."

"That is so. But . . . But Hendriks is the gunnery specialist, and Dalzell is only a glorified infantryman. Hendriks told the Major that the first round was the ranging shot—which it most certainly was. Then, to the observers in the ship, the bursts of the second salvo, well in the clouds and practically simultaneous, looked like a single explosion. The radar showed something falling out of control and tracked it down to the sea. Hendriks knew that it was his dud missile. Dalzell thought, as he was meant to think, that it was us . . ."

"If Hendriks is so bloody loyal," growled Williams, "why isn't he here?"

"Because he doesn't want to be, Billy. He thinks he has a future on Earth . . ."

Grimes, who had been listening, chuckled. "And so he could have. After all his given name is Thor . . ."

"Very far-fetched," commented Sonya. "And what about the others? Do none of them go down in history? Or mythology . . ."

"Those two hulking Marine privates . . ." suggested Brenda Cole. "Those twin brothers . . . Their name is Rome . . ."

"Romulus and bloody Remus? Oh, no. No."

"And why not, Sonya?" asked Grimes. "Come to that, the Second Engineer's name is Caine. William Caine or Bill Caine . . . Tubal Cain or Vulcan?"

His wife snorted inelegantly. "At least," she said, "you will not realize your secret ambition. You will not go down in history as Zeus, father of the gods. Let us be thankful for small mercies."

The Commodore sighed. He realized wryly that his display of regret was at least half genuine. He checked the instruments, then set the controls of the boat on automatic. She would fly herself now, driving up and clear through and out of the atmosphere, until such time as course could be set. He motioned Carnaby to the seat next to his. He pointed out through the wide forward viewport to where Mars gleamed ruddily, almost a twin to the equally ruddy Antares only a few degrees to the south.

He said, "There she is, James. We've a toy computer that's little more than an electric abacus and precious little else in the way of navigational gear. We haven't even got an ephemeris. Do you think you can get us there?"

"I do, sir," replied Carnaby confidently.

"But why Mars?" demanded Sonya. "We should be safe enough from Dalzell and his mob in Earth's southern hemisphere—especially since he thinks that we've all been killed . . ."

"Hendriks knows that we haven't been. He's given us our chance, but he wouldn't welcome us back. Am I correct, Ken?"

"You are, John. I'll tell you what he was thinking. And that's the last I'll see of that cantankerous old bastard! He'll not do much good for himself among the Australian aborigines . . ."

"So Australia is definitely out," said Grimes. "And the Martians may be willing to help us."

"That'll be the sunny Friday, Skipper," said Williams. "But we'll give it a go."

"We'll give it a go," agreed Grimes.

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Framed