Bugsy cried fiercely, “Now get goin’! Get goin’ away from them comets! There’s the marker! Get movin’! Away from it! We got to leave it!”
Beads of sweat stood out on the face of the engineer. He’d kept himself in a drunken stupor from the time of the murders to the time a little while since when he’d been roused forcibly to have a miracle demanded of him. Maybe he’d wanted to forget what he’d seen when the buoy was taken over. Maybe he’d wanted to forget what he’d done. He’d been sobered, but it could only be temporary. Any spaceman knew something about handling a ship, but when a man has been frightened sober, his sobriety doesn’t last.
He wobbled at the control board. He lurched. With an enormous drunken deliberation he put his hand on the solar system drive control.
“This-sh,” he pronounced drunkenly, “is the drive. The only drive we got. But it’ll take ush away—”
He threw over the control.
And nothing happened. The engineer beamed triumphantly around him, waving a hand as though acknowledging applause. Then he collapsed. He lay on the floor and snored.
The marker buoy continued to float in emptiness nearby. The Lambda certainly wasn’t towing it. It wasn’t leaving it. It wasn’t doing anything at all. Nothing was doing anything. Even the solar system drive—which in any case couldn’t have built up counter-orbital velocity in time to keep the buoy from destruction,—even the solar-system drive wasn’t even trying.
Chenery said anxiously, “Lieutenant! The engines ain’t doing anything!”
“I’d suggest,” said Scott in a reasonable tone, “that you take this man down to the engine room, try to rouse him again and see if he can find out what’s wrong. He’s an engineer. He’s your man!”
Then Bugsy found a use for violence. His eyes glittered. His teeth showed.
“Where’s the girl?” he demanded abruptly.
“Asleep, I hope,” said Scott. “She needs it. I found her a place where she won’t be disturbed.”
“How long have we got?” Bugsy demanded ferociously. “How long have we got?”
“We’re reasonably safe for an hour,” Scott told him. “With luck. But we’ll be where we can look for punctures of the hull in an hour and-a-half. In two hours there shouldn’t be any compartment in Lambda that hasn’t been riddled and the air lost. In three hours there shouldn’t be any Lambda. It’ll be part vapor and part scrap-metal and most of it will be going with the comets around the sun.”
“An’ y’ won’t,” panted Bugsy, “y’ won’t make a deal?”
“You haven’t offered me anything I can take seriously,” said Scott.
Bugsy spat at him. He went out of the control room, staggering as he walked. He made jerky, uncoordinated gestures, then he disappeared from sight.
Chenery wrung his hands. There were tears in his eyes. Scott regarded him curiously. It was Chenery who’d contrived the enterprise which now was falling apart all around him. He was breaking up with it.
Chenery had wanted to be smart and to be clever, and he’d possessed a cunning which he considered genius. He had a gift for trickery and the devising of pitfalls, and for the victimizing of his fellows. He’d planned thefts that were clever and unique and he’d prospered. He’d risen to the masterminding of robberies, and he had put a smooth and brilliant polish on their details, In certain quarters he became famous. And he’d developed an impassioned ambition to pull off the biggest and cleverest robbery of all time.
Now he was to die of it. He’d contrived the seizure of the Golconda Ship from information he’d gotten by pure accident. He’d drawn Bugsy into the scheme to get the extra needed manpower for his masterpiece. He’d worked out in detail how the crewmen of the Lambda were to be seized one-by-one, to bear witness later to the superlative brilliance of his planning.
And if Bugsy had remained subordinate, he might have brought it off, even considering the Five Comets. Because crewmen who were prisoners instead of corpses would have warned him of the need to leave the Lambda’s normal orbit and the asteroid which was the buoy’s orbit-companion. But Bugsy had taken over, and now Chenery wanted to cry because his pride was gone and his vanity shattered. What should have been the most brilliant and spectacular robbery since men had possessions to be robbed of, was now turned into a mere brutal, sordid, murder-filled fiasco. The brilliance and the genius were drained away. If the galaxy ever did learn what had happened here, it wouldn’t be a romantic Robin Hood-like tale of wit and daring, but one of footpads and killers who’d murdered their way into a space buoy to wait for a treasure ship and by sheer stupidity rode it into the Five Comets. Which riddled it, shattered it, vaporized it, and left all the killers astonished corpses in emptiness.
So Chenery wept. Something on the control room wall made a distinctive clicking noise. And another. And another. Scott’s jaws tensed.
“Take him down to the engine room, Chenery,” he commanded. “I don’t think it will do any good, but try it.”
Chenery said thinly, catching his breath, “Lieutenant—”
“Here,” said Scott. “I’ll help you get him on your back. Like this! Hold that arm and get your other arm under his leg, like this! That’s right! You can carry him now.”
Chenery swallowed. He was a small man, and the helpless and sodden engineer was not. Chenery was almost hidden under his burden. But he said unsteadily, “Lieutenant, I’m sorry! I’m sorry you came—and Janet. But I didn’t mean to get everybody killed! It was going to be a swell—a swell job! Only I needed some extra men. And it’s turned out like this!”
Scott said nothing as Chenery went down the stairs, one foot and leg of the engineer bumping on each step, then across the floor-space below, with the engineer’s foot and leg still dragging.
Scott closed the control room door. He locked it. Swiftly he went to the place from which a clicking had come. It came again. It was a tape reel which should be spinning quickly receiving the ultra-fast broadcast of a ship’s log which would sound like a rather shrill whine. But this one wasn’t. There was another ship out yonder, far from the path of the Five Comets. It had picked up the monotonous checkpoint signal which never ceased to be broadcast. “Checkpoint Lambda,” it said tinnily. “Checkpoint Lambda. Report. Report.”
On any ship but one, that signal would actuate the log broadcast. But not on the Golconda Ship. It would send a signal composed of a thousand makings and breakings of the log broadcast frequency. It would make clickings instead of whines come from the recorder reel. They would mean nothing to anybody, anywhere, except the Patrol officer in command of Lambda. He’d know they signaled the arrival of the Golconda Ship.
The clicks continued. They said—unintelligibly to anyone but Scott—that the Golconda Ship was ready to make port on Lambda. Actually, it was ahead of schedule because of unusual good fortune in locating itself in the enormous void between the stars. It had fabulous treasure aboard. It had a crew of no-longer-young multi-multi-millionaires, grown bored with riches and finding adventure only in their quadrennial voyages to grow richer still. And now, after six months of this one, they were bored with it.
Scott threw a switch, built into the automatic checkpoint equipment for emergencies. No emergency like this had happened before, but the switch was ready. It cut off the checkpoint taping of its call for ships to send their logs. It substituted Scott’s voice on the call frequency.