The pilot came around and turned off their transmitters. He left the receivers on. "Okay, kids," he said. "Hang on." He climbed into the saddle and ignited the rocket motor. The scooter rose swiftly from Ceres. The pilot studied the plot in his navigation screen, then made careful course corrections. They moved rapidly away from Ceres, out into the black depths of space.
Kevin leaned toward Glenda. Their helmets touched. "It looks like he's taking us up to C-4," Kevin said. "That doesn't make sense."
"Kevin, we've got to get loose—"
"Sure. How?" He strained against the wire that held him. Nothing gave. "I can't do anything. And Stoire's watching—"
"I don't know what to do either."
"I love you."
"Kevin, I'm—do you really think they meant it? Where could he be taking us? I think they're going to dump us in space."
"They want you as a hostage," Kevin said. He tried to sound more confident than he felt.
And yet, he thought, it made sense. If there was a place Stoire could keep her, it could be important to have Glenda Hansen-MacKenzie on tap. MacKenzie's reputation was known all over the world. If he made a promise—or a threat—he'd keep it. What might he do to get his daughter back? But it didn't make sense to keep Kevin Senecal alive. . . .
There was a stony rock a hundred meters in diameter just ahead. It was smaller than C-4. There were signs of mining on it, but no lights or people. It looked deserted.
Donnelly carefully maneuvered the scooter toward the rock, and finally set it down. "Well, here you are," he said. "Your new home."
"Where are we?" Kevin asked.
"C-2," Stoire said. "Abandoned three thousand hours ago. There was enough equipment left here to keep you alive. Food, oxygen, fuel cells. We will take your suits and radios—"
"Do you really want to do that, sir?" Donnelly asked. "May as well kill them and be done with it. Their radios won't reach Ceres, and they will probably have to make outside repairs. If you want them alive, you'd better leave them their suits."
"All right," Stoire said.
"Of course, there aren't any scooters here," Donnelly said. He came around with a pair of wire cutters. He clipped the wires holding Kevin's left hand to the scooter, then pulled Kevin's hands together and took a turn of wire around them. Then he did the same to Glenda before he cut them free from the scooter.
"There," he said. "I'll leave your tool kits, too. You'll get loose with a little work. The airlock's right over there. Now, off you go. Go on, jump. Move. Get going."
They jumped off the scooter.
"Careful how you wiggle around," Donnelly said. "You can jump right off this rock. Won't do you any good except to kill you, of course, but you can do it. 'Bye." He started the scooter engine.
"Au revoir," Henri Stoire said. "Actually, I expect that's a misstatement. I do not think we will meet again." The scooter moved rapidly away.
Kevin found the wire cutters in his tool kit and helped Glenda free her hands. Then she cut him loose and they went to the airlock.
"Gauges show pressure," Glenda said. "I guess we really can live here."
"Sure." Kevin cycled the lock and they went inside. "We can stay alive, but—there's just no way we're going to get off this rock. We could be here for years."
They explored their prison. There wasn't much to see. A few hundred meters of tunnels sprayed with plastic to hold air, some chambers carved out as quarters, and gear left when the mining operation was suspended.
"There's a lot of valuable stuff here," Kevin said. "Surely someone will come back for it."
"When Henri Stoire orders it done," Glenda said bitterly. "It all belongs to Interplanet."
"Yeah." Kevin continued to check the equipment available. "There's mining stuff."
"So we mine the rocks, refine steel, and build a scooter," Glenda said. "Somehow I don't think that's going to work."
"No. I guess not." Kevin continued to wander. A small kitchen. Bathroom. "Hot showers," Kevin said bitterly. "All the comforts. And they weren't lying about food. Enough to keep us going for months. Not much variety, I'm afraid. TVPs. Dehydrated stew. Well, we won't starve."
They wouldn't run out of power either. There were tanks of hydrogen and oxygen, and a dozen fuel cells to produce electricity from them.
There was even a thick window set in the outer room of the mine. It looked down on Ceres. The tiny rock was locked in rotation with Ceres so that it always faced the asteroid below.
"So near and so far," Kevin said. "It might as well be a million instead of three hundred kilometers." He watched as they moved over Ceres. It would be simple enough to jump off their moonlet prison, but it would do no good: they would still be in orbit around Ceres.
Kevin took out his pocket computer. "C-2. We are 284 kilometers above the surface and we're moving at not quite three-tenths of a kilometer a second relative to Ceres. That's just about a thousand kilometers an hour."
"Which might as well be a million," Glenda said. "Could we send a message? There are energy sources here, we can make a spark-gap transmitter. Send an SOS."
"And who'd hear it first?" Kevin asked. "The probability is pretty good that Stoire would get it. He controls all the communications. And the computer. And I doubt that he'd like it. Donnelly would be the logical one to send up to 'rescue' us, and then—"
"Damn. I have made a rather thorough mess of things, haven't I?"
"I'm worried about Jacob."
She nodded. "So am I. I haven't even dared think about him. Do—can they make Bill Dykes tell them that Jacob was helping us?"
"Given enough time, or the right drugs, anybody can be made to tell anything."
"And then they'll kill Bill and Jacob both." Glenda's voice was bitter and full of self-accusation. "It's my fault. I wanted to be certain. I wanted to find out where they had hidden the Arthurium. Catch all the conspirators. Give the whole package to Aeneas, all wrapped up."
"You tried to get a message off. What more could you have done?" Kevin demanded.
"I don't know. I could have tried to get help. I think Dr. Vaagts would have believed me. Or Joe Harwitt. Westinghouse has a lot to lose—"
"Not if they're buying the Arthurium. And you can't know, Glenda. With this much at stake, anybody could be involved. Anybody at all."
"I know. That's what my father warned me about before I left. He didn't want me to come—"
"I don't blame him much."
"But I had to be so damned smart! And I've gotten my friends killed, and there's nothing I can do. I couldn't even get a message off!"
Kevin shrugged. "We did the best we could—"
"Did we? I didn't try everything. I could have sent something through the main computer."
Kevin frowned. "I suppose Jacob could have done that. It would have been dangerous. What we tried was better. A few more hours and we'd have done it. Or if Dykes hadn't left that marked map . . . ."
"Jacob had another plan," Glenda said. "He was working on the instructions Stoire gave the computer. Jacob thinks he can take control of the main computer away from Stoire. With just a little more work. Then we'd have been in control of the whole station."
"Yeah, but it has to work the first time," Kevin said. "All they need to do is keep Norsedal away from the control console."
"They couldn't keep me away," Glenda said. "If I knew the key commands, I could make the computer obey me. I should have waited, but no, I had to do things my way. Damn, I'm an idiot."
"Don't be so hard on yourself. How could you order their computer around?"
"Implant. I have a transceiver implant, and an acceptor was put into the Ceres main computer when it was built on Earth. It was supposed to be my secret weapon, but I never got a chance to use it."
"Implant." Kevin fell silent for a moment. "I'm told those cost half a million francs."
She didn't say anything.
"I keep forgetting. You have half a million francs. A lot more. What—how does it feel to grow up rich?" he asked.
"Confined. Filled with obligations if your father is Aeneas MacKenzie."
"Yeah, I guess it would be like that."
"I ran away from it," Glenda said. "Oh, not really. But I grew up on the Moon, and I was the little princess, and it was stifling. When I was fifteen, I convinced myself I couldn't stand it any longer. I went to Earth for an education." She shuddered. "It was terrible at first. Getting used to high gravity, to rain, and dust and storms and cars and freeways—terrible and magnificent too. Sailing. I learned to sail a boat. You can fly on the Moon, but you can't sail.
"So I went to school on Earth and I had this phony identity, and I kidded myself I was independent, but of course I wasn't. I was still taking mother's money. And I was always afraid any boys I met would find out who I was and then they'd pretend to like me because I was the little princess—I was a mess, Kevin.
"I realized that finally, that I was worse off than ever because I was taking the benefits of being a Hansen-MacKenzie and I was shucking the responsibilities. So when I went back for a visit and heard about the Ceres operation and heard mother worrying about the small yields of Arthurium, I decided it was time to try to earn my keep."
"So it was all made up, about you and the foster homes, and the Futurians?"
"Most of it. Not the Futurians. They're real, and I am a junior member of their Fellowship. I thought Aeneas would be upset about it, but he wasn't. He supports them, and they've helped us. They're one reason you're here, Kevin."
"How's that?"
"Dr. Farrington is one of the Fellowship. One of the leaders. After—when we were on the ship, I was curious about you, so I sent for more information. One of the messages I got back was from him. He thinks highly of you."
"But—why did you want to know more about me?"
"Do I have to tell you?" She moved closer to him. "Kevin, I'm afraid I've made a thorough mess of everything. I don't feel much like Miss Supercompetent Independence just now."
"And I'm one poor excuse for a hero," Kevin said. "But I do love you—"
"And you said so before you knew who I was. That's important," she said. And then they didn't talk at all for a long time.
The scooter came back thirty hours later. It didn't land. Instead it closed to a few dozen meters from their moonlet and a suited figure leaped off. As the scooter drove away again, the newcomer landed with a suit reaction pistol and came to the airlock.
"Jacob!" They let him in eagerly. "What happened?" Kevin demanded.
"They caught me," Norsedal sighed. "And it's worse than that. They killed your friend Dykes—"
"Oh no." Tears formed in Glenda's eyes.
"And Wiley Ralston," Norsedal said.
"Wiley? How was he mixed up in this?" Kevin asked.
"He was an agent for the African bloc," Norsedal said. "Stoire had him arrested and held a trial. Accused him of murdering you two, and George Lange. He was probably guilty of killing Lange, and he confessed to trying to kill the two of you when you were leaving Earth—"
"He was the saboteur on Wayfarer?" Kevin asked. "Wiley?"
"It looks that way," Jacob said. "He was executed for it."
"Damn," Kevin muttered. "There goes that chance. I was trying to see how Stoire intended to get away with it. I mean, the Hansen-MacKenzie heir can't just vanish! Aeneas MacKenzie would be out here with a shipload of Hansen security agents and blood in his eye—"
"And now he's got a scapegoat," Glenda said. "Dad will be suspicious, but—is there any evidence left?"
"There is now," Jacob said. "The computer still has a record of what happened. But Stoire will have done something about that before Mr. MacKenzie arrives. He is coming, by the way. There was a report that Valkyrie left Luna Station seven hundred hours ago. I wouldn't be surprised if he were bringing company police. But you've been reported dead and your murderer has been caught and executed."
"Looks pretty hopeless," Kevin said. "Unless you brought along a pocket scooter."
"Alas, no," Norsedal said. "They even took my computer."
"I don't understand why you're alive," Kevin said.
Jacob grinned slightly. "They're having some problems with the main computer just now. If they ever get them fixed, I'll be expendable, but they thought it might be best to have me around just in case they don't find the bugs."
"Will that stop them?" Glenda asked.
"Alas, no. Mr. Stoire is very clever. He'll figure out what I did, just as I finally figured out what he did."
"You know, then?" Kevin asked.
"Yes. Could I have some water?"
"Sure. There's plenty. Plenty of everything. We could be here for years," Kevin said.
"Not me." Norsedal's voice didn't change. "You see, they didn't leave me any insulin."
"How—how long?" Glenda asked after a while.
"If I'm careful about what I eat, three or four hundred hours," Jacob said. "Perhaps longer."
"We've got to get out of here," Glenda said.
"I agree, but I confess I don't know how," Norsedal said. "I was telling you what Stoire did. It was very clever, really. First he programmed the computer to report a much lower percentage of Arthurium in the ore. Understand, the computer knew better, and the refinery operated just the same as it always did, but the reported recovery was low. They told the computer to forget about one storage area, and routed ninety percent of the Arthurium there. Simple, clean, and really very pretty. And once Stoire erases the real log, there'll be no record of it at all."
They had explored every tunnel in the prison a dozen times, but found nothing. A hundred hours passed.
There was nothing they could do. No laser equipment to send signals with. No electronics. Nothing but some mining gear and the basic materials for staying alive. Even that took a lot of work. The algae in the tank farms had died, and their own power source was fuel cells. There were tanks of hydrogen and oxygen for those, but the carbon dioxide scrubbers needed constant recharging. They had less time than Kevin had thought.
"I would say two people have a thousand hours more oxygen," Norsedal said. "I could—" He hesitated. "I can add a couple of hundred hours to that, and it won't really matter."
"I'll be damned if you will," Kevin said. "Something will turn up."
"I doubt it," Jacob said. "C-4 is scheduled to go in about nine hundred hours. Daedalus is putting in the final equipment right now."
"And then Stoire and Donnelly are gone," Kevin said. "But how does he get away with it?"
Jacob shrugged. "It would be no great trick to put the Arthurium aboard C-4. As gold, for example. The bombs go off, C-4 heads for Earth. Somewhere between here and there a ship—it wouldn't have to be a very large one—meets them and when C-4 arrives in Earth orbit, the Arthurium is gone, with nothing left aboard that's not supposed to be there."
"And it was stupid to leave us alive," Kevin said. "Once he's ready to leave, he'll come back with Donnelly and finish us. No evidence, no embarrassing bodies—"
"More likely he will take Glenda on C-4," Jacob said. "Donnelly is part of his crew."
"I'm going to go have another look around," Kevin said. "There's got to be something we can do."
"I hope you think of it," Glenda said. "I can't."
"Alas, nor I," Jacob added.
Kevin prowled through the corridors of their prison. There has to be some way, he told himself. Ceres mocked him from below, less than three hundred kilometers down. It hung huge in the night sky.
Three hundred kilometers down, and we're moving about half a kilometer a second relative to Ceres, Kevin thought. That's not very much velocity. Under a thousand miles an hour. It doesn't take much energy to get to that speed. How much gasoline does it take to accelerate a car on Earth up to a hundred miles an hour—a gallon or so? We only need ten times that, not even that much.
There's plenty of hydrogen and oxygen. Marvelous rocket fuels if we only had a rocket. More than enough to get us down, except that the temperature of hydrogen burning in oxygen is a lot hotter than anything we have to contain in it—
No. That's not right. The fuel cells do it. But they do it by slowing down the reaction, and they can't be turned into rocket engines.
He remembered the early German Rocket Society experiments described by Willy Ley. The Berliners had blown up more rockets than they flew, and they were only using gasoline, not hydrogen. Liquid-fuel rockets need big hairy pumps, and Kevin didn't have any pumps.
What did he have? Fuel cells, plenty of them, and so what? An electric-powered rocket was theoretically possible, but Kevin didn't have the faintest idea of how to build one, even if there was enough equipment around to do it with. He wasn't sure anyone had ever built one—certainly he couldn't.
Back to first principles, he thought. The only way to change velocity in space is with a rocket. What is a rocket? A machine for throwing mass overboard. The faster the mass thrown away goes in one direction, the faster the rocket will go in the other, and the less you have to throw. All rockets are no more than a means of spewing out mass in a narrow direction. A rocket could consist of a man sitting in a bucket and throwing rocks backward.
That might get a few feet per second velocity change, but so what? There simply wasn't enough power in human muscles—even if he did have a lot of rocks. Was there any other way to throw them? Not fast; and unless the thrown-away mass had a high velocity, the rocket wouldn't be any use. He went on through the tunnels, looking at each piece of equipment he found, trying to think of how it might be used.
You can throw anything overboard to make a rocket. Hydrogen, for example. That's all Wayfarer's engines did, heat up hydrogen and let it go out through the rocket nozzle. We have hydrogen under pressure—
Not enough. Nowhere near enough hydrogen and nowhere near enough pressure, not to get velocity changes of hundreds of miles an hour. Ditto for oxygen. Gas under compression just can't furnish enough energy. What would? Chemical energy; burning hydrogen in oxygen would do it, but it gave off too much; there was nothing to contain that reaction except the fuel cells and they did it by slowing the reaction way down and—
And I'm back where I started, Kevin thought. Plenty of energy in the fuel cells if I could find a way to use it. Could I heat a gas with electricity? Certainly, only how—
His eye fell on the hot-water tank in the crew quarters. An electric hot-water tank. There was a pressure gauge: forty pounds per square inch. Forty p.s.i.—He looked at the tank as if seeing it for the first time, then went running back to the others.
"Glenda, Jacob, I've got it."