She looked at Scott. He was back at the instrument board. He looked at the screens. The marker asteroid had moved still more. It looked nearer, now. Much nearer.
She said uneasily, “Is Bugsy—?”
“He’s still with us,” said Scott. “He sent me a message. I’d been so indiscreet as to say I’d found a place where you wouldn’t be disturbed. He thought he knew where it was. He wants to have me where I can’t refuse to do anything he commands. I think he’s getting a little skeptical about the Comets. They haven’t destroyed us yet. So he began to hunt for you and sent me word to do something right away, or else. The implication was that you’d suffer for it.”
“Then what?”
“I still need fifteen minutes,” said Scott grimly. “They could be denied me by the comets. But Bugsy’s more likely to cut them short. With just fifteen minutes more—maybe twenty—I can make the buoy relatively safe. Then I can try another trick to make you safer. But I’m beginning to doubt I’ll have the time.”
Chenery drew a deep breath. Then he said, “I’ll make sure you get it.”
Scott did not turn his head. Janet continued to look at Scott.
Chenery said, “You don’t believe it? Look! I just handled two of ‘em! And what’ve I got to lose? I’m in a bad fix! Bugsy’s men did the killings, but I get part of the blame. Bugsy’s killed my men and they were good fellas. He’s goin’ to kill me, unless I kill him. And if you need fifteen minutes or the Comets’ll kill all of us—why not?”
Janet looked at him. He believed it was approvingly. And he’d protected her on the buoy until Scott arrived. He obviously felt that he was obligated to help her.
Scott made measurements on the screen. Chenery said proudly, “He don’t think much of me, Bugsy don’t. I got the two men he sent to kill me because they didn’t think much of me, either. Bugsy’ll never think I came huntin’ him!”
Scott said shortly, “Ambush is your bet.”
“Yeah,” said Chenery, nodding complacently. “They run into me here. They’ll never think I’ll go to meet them! So I meet ‘em as far down as I can, and they’ll run into me before they could imagine it. And they won’t believe its me until they start dyin’!”
Scott compressed his lips.
“Your blaster—?”
“Grenades,” said Chenery zestfully. “You know where they are! I used them for moral effect on jobs. They stop people chasin’ you. I got a reputation for plannin’ things. I got this all planned. Even if I get killed, this way I won’t look like a fool. And I got a public.”
He nodded grandly. Scott was skeptical. But Chenery walked out of the control room and down the stairs. Scott suddenly believed him. And Scott’s own expression became embittered. He had to stay here in the control room. Unless he handled certain small control levers exactly right, making them do specific things with specific energy at exactly the proper times, there was no hope for the buoy or any of its occupants. But it was humiliation to stay here, twiddling levers, while Chenery went to what certainly would be his death.
A tapping sounded somewhere on Lambda’s hull. It was an isolated meteoric particle. The noise was muffled by the pressure-foam that could seal off punctures sometimes more than an inch in diameter.
Then the meteor-watch instrument clicked. Scott glanced sharply at it. The needle seemed frozen at maximum indication. It wasn’t reporting a small and blindly rushing globular cluster of tiny missiles now. Not this time! Its sensitive point was four hundred miles away, farther from the sun, in the line of the center and the heaviest concentration of celestial debris. But by the action of the needle Scott knew that it wasn’t reacting to even close clusters of relatively small missiles, such as had passed Lambda before.
This was the main group of the main masses of the first of the Five Comets. It was more than four hundred miles away, but it was incomparably larger than anything experienced up to now. The meteor-watch instrument registered just about what about it would record if a giant planet plunged headlong to obliterate and utterly destroy the completely helpless Checkpoint Lambda.
CHAPTER 8
The space buoy had one completely unimportant ability left to it. When it was a liner, it was able to travel in overdrive at a high multiple of the speed of light, a hundred and eighty-odd thousand miles per second. As a buoy, Lambda had retained its solar system drive which could, in time, build up to a speed of some hundreds of miles per second. But now, using its singular resource for movement, it had achieved an enormous speed, and it was now necessary to check that headlong pace.
Lambda, though, showed no outward sign of life. Its clusters of communicator-antennae, the radar-bowls, and the eccentric radiation-receivers, which constituted the meteor-watch system—all these looked to be without purpose. It was pure irony, apparently, that Lambda’s mechanical space-call continued to go out. By microwave the buoy repeated endlessly: “Checkpoint Lambda. Checkpoint Lambda. Report. Report.” And it happened that at just this moment, somewhere in the Canis Lambda solar system a ship broke out of overdrive. Its control room screens showed the enormous filmy luminosity which was the Five Comets congregated almost into one, in the act of crossing Lambda’s orbit to destroy it.
Nobody noticed that detail. The log tape whirred, and the recorded log covering weeks of journeying along a space lane was broadcast into emptiness. In half an hour or so the broadcast would reach Lambda. It would be recorded there for such use as the Space Patrol might later determine.
If Lambda still survived.
In its control room Scott paced back and forth. He was ashamed. Chenery had gone proudly down toward the stern of the ship with a blaster which was almost useless. He intended to throw certain small grenades that had been designed to be frightening rather than lethal, though they did enough destruction when they went off. He expected to be killed. But Scott was still in the control room, watching the changing distance between asteroid and buoy. He was operating the steering units with meticulous care. It had been their function when Lambda was a liner to move the bow to right or left or up or down, and the stern to the left or right or down or up. They’d pointed the former liner where it was supposed to go.
But now, since Lambda was a checkpoint and a freight station and a place where passengers changed ships, the steering drive units had another function. Now, when ships had passengers to put off or freight to take on, these drive units made the exchanges possible. They oriented the buoy so that Lambda and the visiting ship were strictly parallel, bow to bow and stern to stern. But they might still be separated by distances from yards to quarters of a mile.
When the port-side bow steering unit pushed to the right and the starboard-side stern unit did the same, the whole ship moved to the right. Sideways, to be sure, and at no high speed, but under perfect control. If both bow and stern steering units thrust to the left, the ship moved that way too. Excess momentum could be checked by reversing the steering-thrust. So ships and buoys came together, these days, by using their steering units to move them as a crab walks.
And that was the only ability left to Lambda of which Scott was making use. He was moving Lambda closer to its marker-asteroid, which was like a mountain of steel.
There was a tapping on the buoy’s hull. It was something meteoric. Scott made an impatient gesture with his space-gloved hand.
“Cherney’s an idiot!” he said bitterly. “He fought by accident, he won by accident, and now he’s gone down to take care of all of Bugsy’s blaster-men—and he thinks he’ll make it! By accident! And I let him! I let him! Because I have to run these infernal steering units!”