Panner passed by, just then, and looked. "How are you, Bigman?"
"Sands of Mars! Looks like everyone thinks I'm an invalid or something. There's nothing wrong with me.
Even the commander stopped by and managed to find his tongue long enough to grunt at me."
"Well," said Panner, "maybe he's getting over his mad."
"Never," said Bigman. "He just wants to make sure his first flight won't be spoiled by a casualty. He wants his record pure white, that's all."
Panner laughed. "All set for the take-off?"
Lucky said, "Are we leaving Io?"
"Any hour. The men are reloading the equipment we're taking with us and securing what we leave behind. If you two can make the pilot room once we're underway, do so. We'll get a better look at Jupiter than ever."
He tickled Mutt behind one ear and left
They radioed Jupiter Nine that they were leaving Io, as days earlier they had radioed that they had surfaced on the satellite.
Bigman said, "Why don't we call Earth? Chief Councilman Conway ought to know we've made it."
"Officially," said Lucky, "we haven't made it all the way until we've returned to Jupiter Nine."
He did not add aloud that he was not at all anxious to return to Jupiter Nine, still less anxious to talk to Conway. He had, after all, accomplished nothing on this trip,
His brown eyes surveyed the control room. The engineers and crewmen were at their stations for the takeoff. The commander, his two officers and Panner, however, were in the control room.
Lucky wondered again about the officers as time and again he had wondered about each of the ten men whom the V-frog had not had a chance to eliminate.
He had spoken to each of them on occasion, as had Panner even more frequently. He had searched thek quarters. He and Panner together had gone over thek records. Nothing had resulted.
He would be going back to Jupiter Nine with the robot unlocated, and thereafter location would be harder than ever and he might have to report back to Council headquarters with news of failure.
Once more, desperately, the thought of X rays entered his mind, or some other means of forceful inspection. As always, he thought at once of the possibility of triggering off an explosion, probably a nuclear explosion.
It would destroy the robot. It would also kill thir-teen men and blow up a priceless ship. Worst of all, it would show no safe way of detecting the humanoid robots which, Lucky felt certain, were preying in other parts of the Solar Confederation.
He was startled by Panner's sudden cry, "Here we go!"
There was the familiar distant whoosh of the initial thrust, the gathering backward press of accelerations, and Io's surface dropped away, faster and faster.
The visiplate could not center Jupiter in its entirety:" it was too large. It centered the Great Red Spot instead and followed it in its rotation about the globe.
Panner said, "We've gone into Agrav again, yes, but it's only temporary, just to let Io pull away from us."
"But we're still falling toward Jupiter," Bigman said.
"That's right, but only till the proper moment is reached. Then we go into hyperatoroic drive and plunge toward Jupiter on a hyperbolic orbit. Once that is established, we cut the drive and let Jupiter do the work. Our closest approach will be about 150,000 miles. Jupiter's gravity will zoom us around as though we were a pebble in a slingshot and shoot us out again. At the proper point our hyperatomic drive cuts in again. By taking advantage of the slingshot effect, we actually save a bit on energy over the alternative of leaving directly from Io, and we get some super close-ups of Jupiter."
He looked at his watch. "Five minutes," he said.
He was referring, as Lucky knew, to the moment when the ship would switch from Agrav to hyper-atomic drive and begin to curve off into the planned orbit about Jupiter.
Still staring at his watch, Panner said, "The time is selected so that we come out heading toward Jupiter Nine as squarely as possible. The fewer side adjustments we have to make, the more energy we save. We've got to come back to Jupiter Nine with as much of our original energy store as possible. The more we come back with, the better Agrav looks. I've set my goals at eighty-five per cent. If we can come back with ninety, that would be superlative."
Bigman said, "Suppose you come back with more energy than you had when you left? How would that be?"
"Super-superlative, Bigman, but impossible. There's something called the second law of thermodynamics that stands in the way of making a profit on the deal or, for that matter, of breaking even. We've got to take some loss." He smiled broadly and said, "One minute."
And at the appropriate second the sound of the hyperatomics filled the ship with its muted murmurings, and Panner placed his watch in his pocket with a satisfied expression.
"From here on in," he said, "until actual landing maneuvers at the Jupiter Nine approach, everything is quite automatic."
He had no sooner said that when the humming ceased again, the lights in the room flickered and went out. Almost at once they went on again, but now there was a little red sign on the control panel that said, emergency.
Panner sprang to his feet. "What in Space…?''
He left the pilot room at a run, leaving the others staring after him and at one another in various degrees of horror. The commander had gone dead-white, Ms lined face a tired mask.
Lucky, with sudden decision, followed Panner, and Bigman, of course, followed Lucky.
They came upon one of the engineers clambering out of the engine compartment. He was panting. "Sir!"
"What is it, man?" snapped Panner. "The Agrav is off, sir. It can't be activated."
"What about the hyperatomics?"
"The main reserve is shorted. We cut it just in time to keep it from blowing. If we touch it, the whole ship will go up. Every bit of the stored energy will blow."
''Then we're working on the emergency reservoir?"
''That's right."
Panner's swarthy face was congested with blood. "What good is that? We can't set up an orbit about Jupiter with the emergency reservoir. Out of the way. Let me down there."
The engineer stepped aside, and Panner swung into the shaft. Lucky and Bigman were at his heels.
Lucky and Bigman had not been in the engine compartment since that first day aboard the Jovian Moon. The scene was different now. There was no august silence, no sensation of mighty forces quietly at work.
Instead, the puny sound of men rose high about them.
Panner sprang off into the third level. "Now what's wrong?" he called. "Exactly what's wrong?"
Men parted to let him through and they all huddled over the gutted insides of a complex mechanism, pointing things out in tones of mingled despair and anger.
There were sounds of other footsteps coming down the rungs of the shaft, and then the Commander himself made his appearance.
He spoke to Lucky, who was standing gravely to one side. "What is it, Councilman?" It was the first time he had addressed Lucky since they had left Jupiter Nine.
Lucky said, "Serious damage of some sort, Commander."
"How did it happen? Panner!"
Panner looked up from the close examination of something that had been held out to him. He shouted in annoyance, "What in space do you want?"
Commander Donahue's nostrils flared. "Why has something been allowed to go wrong?"
"Nothing has been allowed to go wrong."
"Then what do you call this?"
"Sabotage, Commander. Deliberate, murdering sabotage!"
"What!"
"Five gravitic relays have been completely smashed and the necessary replacements have been removed and can't be located. The hyperatomic thrust-control has been fused and shorted beyond repair. None of it happened by accident."
The commander stared at his chief engineer. He said, hollowly, "Can anything be done?"