Janet said, trembling, “But you! What are you going to do?”
“What can I do?” he demanded sardonically. “Refuse to listen and let Bugsy kill Chenery as slowly as he can? Pretend it doesn’t happen because I can shut off the sound? I’m going to get Bugsy! And as many of his men after him as I can. I don’t expect to save Chenery, but I’ll make it quick for him—he had the gas-chamber waiting, anyhow. I have to do something!”
“But there’s me! And you’ll get killed! I’ll in”
“You’ll do nothing,” said Scott in a flat voice. “I’m doing this!”
He went out of the control room. It was wiser not to talk with Bugsy. It might gain time for Chenery. But it would still be wise to hurry. There were two ways by which he could reach the stern decks, where pure air still existed. He’d been seen and shot at in a space suit, so Bugsy might guess he’d come through the compartments where a man without a suit would suffocate. But Bugsy wouldn’t guess at the outer plating of the buoy.
So Scott went to the air-lock. He pulled off the slippers that partly negated the magnetism of his shoes. He twisted his helmet tight. He went through to the golden-colored outside of the hull. There the look of things was quite unlike what anyone would have imagined.
When he stood upright, the light around him was neither burning sunshine nor the abysmal black of night. Lambda hung, it seemed, beneath and very close to the tormented crystalline metal of the asteroid, whose sunward face formed a ceiling over the former space craft. Sunshine smote fiercely beyond its shadow and the incredibly brilliant surfaces of metal crystals reflected that sunlight into the shadow cast by the space buoy. The glittering specks of brilliance were reflected as if by the facets of ten thousand monstrous jewels. The effect was of fantasy, of eerie magic. In places the glittering metal was no more than thirty feet from the checkpoint’s plating. In other places it was fifty and a hundred feet above, like a gigantic dome lined with jewels which glittered.
Scott stood erect, but he couldn’t spare time for scenery. He saw to the edge of the asteroid, which on one side was relatively near. There was, of course, utter silence where he stood. But he could tell that Lambda was in the very center of a meteoric avalanche. He could see streaks—never objects—which nevertheless were solid things pouring past the edges of the buoy’s multi-million-ton protector. It was the asteroid which was taking the bombardment anticipated for Lambda. Once a portion of its edge crumbled and broke away. As its comet-ward surface separated, the kind of bombardment it was enduring and the impacts on the fragment could be seen. It went tumbling toward the sun, exploding in flaming detonations where missiles struck and turned themselves and it into incandescent vapor. It split and broke again, and its fragments flamed and spouted and went on and on out of sight.
Scott marched sturdily toward the stern. He was bitter. He’d done everything he could to make Janet safe, but he doubted that he had thought of everything. He felt the tiniest of stirrings underfoot. It seemed to him that the motion of the space buoy had changed, but he could not be sure.
Then a great section of the asteroid split. It had been struck by one of the true giants of the meteor tribe. A mass of something unnameable a full hundred feet across had crashed into the asteroid’s vulnerable surface. It traveled at thousands of miles per second. It turned to vapor more lurid than the sun, and with a shock split off a vast triangular block an eighth of a mile on a side. Such a monstrous object could not be driven rapidly sunward by impacts—and explosions—of ton and five-ton and ten-ton missiles. Slowly it separated from the asteroid’s main mass, and as slowly the side of the fragment undergoing barrage-like attack appeared. The surface toward the sun was unbearably bright. But the side that should have been in shadow was incandescent.
Scott went on, his purpose being to enter the stern-most lifeboat blister and come off it into the buoy’s stern section with his blaster going and grenades exploding ruthlessly. He was filled with fury that this course was necessary. He did not expect to rescue Chenery. He did not expect to survive himself. But he couldn’t abandon Chenery to Bugsy’s obsession with violence. Scott tried to hurry, because Bugsy might have become too impatient to wait, and might try to intoxicate himself with violence toward Chenery, before Chenery was fortunate enough to die.
But then Scott saw the edge of the asteroid very near. He saw the motion of the Lambda in relation to it. And then, ahead, he saw disaster past endurance. Ahead. He wanted to run to the spot and perform the impossible and turn aside the buoy’s stern. Because Lambda was turning slowly. Its sternmost part would swing out past the broken edge. It would reach into the hurtling masses of rock and metal which could no more be seen than the flame of an atomic torch, but would have exactly the effect of one upon a giant scale.
The hull shivered a little underfoot. If Janet, in the control room, had discovered what was about to occur and hastily and desperately applied the maximum correction of applied steering thrust—if that had happened, the feeling and the result would have been the same. But if Janet, in the control room, had seen Scott about to throw away his life for what a woman might consider the most absurd of reasons, a point of honor… If Scott saw it that way, it was quite possible that she’d desperately and defiantly let what was happening, happen.
The sternmost part of the space buoy swept slowly around. Its uttermost part reached beyond the shelter of the asteroid. Nothing was visible there except the lucent mist that blotted out the stars. Nothing was there. But things passed through that space—things that had just barely failed to detonate themselves upon the asteroid’s major bulk.
Slowly, deliberately, inexorably, the blunt stern section swept out. And there was light. Invisible particles from sand grain size on up poured past the steel edge of Lambda partner. They struck Lambda’s metal. They detonated. The result had the exact look of an atomic torch, vaporizing metal to a completely perfect line.
There was no added flare when the air in the lowest deck poured out. Anything alive in it, obviously, would be unaware of that or anything else. One fraction of a second, Bugsy would be alive and malevolent and frenzied. A minute fraction of a second later, Bugsy would be dead without having had time to experience the change. And this was true of anyone in the second deck level too.
And then the long, slender Checkpoint Lambda, pivoting, swept past the point where the core, the heart, the center of the first of the Five Comets rushed past. The last and sternmost three of her deck levels had ceased to be. They’d been amputated and vaporized and carried away by such a cautery as no man had ever witnessed before. There had been no sound. No violence. No shock or impact anywhere, because when an impact passed a certain stage of ferocity, it wasn’t an impact any longer, but an explosion.
Scott hadn’t been disturbed physically. He’d heard nothing and felt nothing. The buoy’s stern had been removed. There was nothing left for him to do.
Presently he trudged forward again. He was uncomfortable about Janet’s handling of the buoy. The proper place for it was, of course, as near as possible to the center of the asteroid’s sunward face. There was the maximum of shelter. He’d take charge and get it there, and keep it there during the rest of this meteor-storm and the ones to follow as the Five Comets vainly bombarded Lambda’s marker buoy and shield.
But there was something else. He resolved that Janet should never know of any inadequacy in her operation of the steering drive units. They were tricky. She was without previous experience. He’d never tell her she should have been quicker to correct the buoy’s course. And of course—though this didn’t occur to him—she would never defend what she had done.