Lester del Rey - The Mysterious Planet

A warning gong sounded, and Bob braced himself as Hoeck began twisting the Lance to come up against the pirate. Commander Griffith was calling men on the intercom. Now he looked up at Anderson.

“This is emergency enough,” he stated. “We’re breaking out our own secret weapon. And let’s hope it works… Hey!”

Hoeck had cut the deceleration and was accelerating again. In the screen, Bob saw the reason. The black ship had pulled away as calmly as if it had been alone in space and was now heading outward toward Neptune. Again, there was no sign of rocket blast. It simply moved, with no sign of how.

“Hold it, Hoeck!” The Commander reached for the” emergency controls, again restoring deceleration. “We’ve got to worry about the people on the Ionian first. We can’t leave people dying, however much I’d like to catch that pirate!”

Bob groaned, though he knew his father was right.

Half a minute later they had matched speeds with the crippled ship. Men already had the connecting tube ready to snap from the Lance to the open lock of the Ionian, and Hoeck gentled the cruiser in against the freighter.

“No air inside,” the exploring party reported back in a couple of minutes.

That meant that anyone inside who hadn’t been able to get into a space suit almost at once would be dead. It usually took several minutes to don the bulky suits, too—longer than life was possible without air.

Griffith nodded as Bob reached into a locker for one of the emergency suits. “Go along, if you like. But stay behind Anderson.”

They went down, once the suits were on. Men were waiting in the lock, equipped with cutting tools to free anyone aboard the Ionian who might be trapped, or fastened behind airtight bulkheads. They all swung into line behind Anderson, going down the rubbery tunnel and into the air lock of the Ionian. There the inner lock was stuck, open a crack, but not enough for entrance; some of the crew were just cutting it free as they went in.

Nobody was on the other side to greet them, and that was a bad sign. Anyone trapped on the vessel should have been waiting eagerly for the rescue party. They went up the catwalk toward the control room. Everything was in fair order, but nobody was there.

“Nothing, Commander,” Anderson was reporting back. “No sign of bodies, either. We’re going to spread out and go through the ship.”

He detailed men off in pairs, to begin at the ruined nose and work back to the engine room.

Bob went with Anderson. There was still no sign of bodies. That was stranger than anything else. They hadn’t expected too much chance of finding men alive, but the dead should have been scattered around. They worked their way back slowly, opening every door, but nothing showed up.

Anderson cracked open a big hatch and cast the light on his helmet down it. “Storage cargo—completely empty. Bob, can you make out that label on the floor?”

Bob stared at the torn strip of paper, and strained his eyes. “Looks like Biotics—With Care” he finally decided.

“Must be right,” Commander Griffith’s voice came over the radio. “The Ionian came from Io, where they raise most of our drugs; and from her rate, she must have been coming straight across from Jupiter to Neptune—probably bringing valuable drugs to Outpost to take care of the possible dangers from Planet X there. Maybe you can’t find anyone yet because there were no passengers.”

They went on, finding all the freight holds emptied. Finally they reached the engine-room entrance, and waited for the others to catch up.

“Better pray,” Anderson advised. “Men might just manage to get back here and seal up. If that hatch is locked, we may find them. If it isn’t, then nobody’s on board.”

One of the men threw himself against the door, and it opened quietly. There was no blast of air. The engine hold was as empty as the rest of the ship, and there were still no bodies lying about. They hunted through the ship again, without finding anyone.

In the control room, Anderson and Bob went through the ship’s papers, but those had also been rifled. There was a passenger list, but there was no way of knowing for what trip it was meant. From it, though, they discovered that the Ionian normally shipped between Io and Earth, and carried a crew of seventeen, with as many as thirty-five passengers. Her maximum acceleration was listed as just under two gravities of thrust—but that would be enough to build up her present speed if she had come all the way from Jupiter, around the sun, and back through Jupiter’s orbit, heading for Neptune.

Anderson found another book, listing equipment. “They carried sixty suits,” he reported.

“Enough for all the passengers and crew, with a few spares.” His young face was sweating, and the blond hair that showed through his helmet was matted down against his forehead.

Even at best, the space suits were uncomfortable for long wearing, though men could live in them for days.

At Griffith’s suggestion, they went down to search all the lockers for space suits. When they had finished counting, all sixty were still on board.

“All right,” the Commander ordered finally. “Come on back, and make it fast. We’ll abandon the Ionian until a tug came out and salvage her.”

They went back silently. It was completely impossible for the pirates to have taken all the freight and every man on board the ship off in no more than the single minute they had been locked together. Yet it had happened. Everything was beginning to come out the same—the events were impossible, but the black ship had done them, all the same.

Bob’s eyes jumped to the radar screen as soon as he was back in the control room of the Lance of Deimos and climbing out of bis suit. He sighed with relief. The pip on the screen showed that the pirate ship was still within radar range. “Not that we can do much against them,” he muttered glumly to himself.

Griffith looked up from the calculations Hoeck was making. “Don’t be too sure of that, son,” he said. “We’ve got a few tricks up our own sleeves. The Navy’s been secretly testing a proton cannon for years, and we have one of the first working models. Ever hear of it?”

Bob nodded doubtfully. The Sunday Supplements and science fiction magazines had been speculating on it for years, but it had finally been put down as a failure. The idea was that hydrogen should be broken down to electrons and protons. The electrons were to be sent out in one stream, and the protons in another, so that the ship using the weapon wouldn’t become electrically charged, as it would have done if either had been ejected alone. The trouble had been that the guns previously made could just blast through a thin sheet of paper.

“You’ll see it in action soon,” Griffith promised. “And it works. Just a matter of getting the speed of the protons high enough. This will cut through ten feet of steel in less than a second. It’s still under security wraps, so keep mum about it, after we hit Outpost. Ready yet, Hoeck?”

The navigator nodded, and indicated the control setup. Griffith pressed the general alert for acceleration and gave the crew ten seconds to strap down for it, after the automatic second warning went off. Bob had just succeeded in getting into his harness when the ship blasted off again.

Either his first dose of high drive had given him more power to stand it or the rest while exploring the Ionian had restored him more than he had thought. This time he took it without blacking out and without completely losing the power to focus his eyes. He set his gaze on the radar screen, and waited.

The outline of the black ship on the screen began to grow. At this rate, they’d be up to it in a matter of minutes. Then Bob was going to find out what a real space battle was like.