Ben Trefon gave her a long look. “It’s terrible to think about, all right,” he said. “But I think you’ve got it back-wards.”
“Backwards?”
“Mars was one thing. Asteroid Central is something else altogether. On Mars it was your kind of war on the surface of a planet with a thick blanket of atmosphere. This round has gone to you, but when you stir up a nest of hornets, you’d better be able to run. In battle in open space your ships won’t stand a chance of beating us. You’ll be wiped out of the sky.”
Tom Barron looked skeptical. “Maybe,” he said.
“You don’t believe me?”
“I think I would, except for one thing that you aren’t considering,” Tom said. “Remember that your own ships are fighting to stay alive. Ours aren’t. As far as they know, the men in our fleet believe they are already contaminated beyond help by radiation. They have no hope of ever coming home again. And that means that your men are going to be fighting a suicide fleet.” Tom looked up at Ben Trefon. “They may not be so easy to wipe out of the sky as you think.”
With the rusty disk of Mars far behind them and the sun a small gleaming beacon in the blackness, the two Earth prisoners and their Spacer captor set their ship’s course for the long pull outward toward the Rings.
If the ruined houses and plantations on Mars were Spacer outposts in the solar system, the asteroid belt was their heart-land, the vast and mysterious spaces where only Spacers were equipped to survive.
With the nose of the ship pointed away from the sun, Ben Trefon began plotting their course, his heart growing lighter by the minute.
It was true, of course, that the first battle of this war had gone to the Earthmen. It might also be true that the pilots of the Earth fleet would be desperate men, ready to fight to the bitter end in their quest to stamp out every vestige of Spacer culture in the solar system. But every Spacer knew that nature had no feelings or emotions, no respect for human valiance, or courage, or even desperation. Any ships in space, no matter how determined their crews, would face the cold equations of celestial physics; the prize would go to the experienced and skillful, not to the brave or the desperate. And this meant that no fleet of Earth ships could hope to excel the long training and familiarity with space, the enormous skill in navigation and space maneuver that the Spacers possessed.
The Spacers’ major problem would be mobilization of their forces into an effective force to oppose the Earth fleet, and then to drive it into battle in the depths of space. This would take organization and planning. In the meantime, Ben thought coldly, the more confident the Earthmen became, the harder their fall when the awakening came. The annihilation on Mars was dreadful, but it was also futile, for it would be repaid a thousand times over in the great empty spaces of the asteroids. For Ben, the problem now was to reach the vicinity of Asteroid Central without encounter with any of the Earth fleet, and then establish contact with the Spacer command trying to organize defending forces. He knew that the great Spacer stronghold was in opposition to Mars at this time of year, so that the course was outward from Mars’s orbit to that of the asteroid. A few moments’ work with the computer set the basic course. As the Barrons watched the panorama of stars through the view screen Ben settled down to the job of calculating a fast, precise route of approach.
His prisoners seemed fascinated by the panoply of stars, far more numerous than those visible through Earth’s atmosphere blanket, and by the sun which appeared much smaller here than on Earth. But something else seemed to be puzzling them as the ship’s course was set and acceleration began. They seemed to be searching the blackness, looking for something.
“What’s the matter?” Ben said. “What are you looking for?”
“The Rings, of course,” Tom Barron said.
“We’ve been in the Rings for three hours,” Ben said. “Ever since we left Mars. We’re approaching the first concentration ring of asteroids in another hour or so.”
“Then where are the asteroids?” Tom wanted to know.
Ben grinned and scratched his jaw. “Well, let’s take a look.” He whirled the dial of the radar scanner through all quadrants, watching for the characteristic light spot that would signal one of the flecks of interplanetary debris. From time to time in the view screen the Barrons could see brief flickers of light, almost like lightning, around the ship. “Of course, those are asteroids too,” Ben said, “dust-particle size, or sand-grain size. The ship has a force screen to atomize them as we go; if it didn’t they’d just punch holes through one side of the ship and out the other as well as through anybody that happened to be in the way. But let’s find you a big one.”
After ten minutes of scanning, a characteristic blip appeared on the radar screen in the segment of space they were approaching. On the tracking screen a red line appeared, showing the gentle arc the contacted object was following in relation to the ship’s course since the moment of contact. Ben uncapped the eyepieces of the coordinated telescope, picked up the object itself outlined in the eerie shadow of the distant sun. As it came closer, it resolved into a solid-appearing mass, and Ben moved aside so that the Barrons could peer through the ‘scope.
The asteroid was a ragged, irregular chunk of rock, perhaps forty feet in diameter, rolling crazily end-over-end as it moved in its orbit. Small as it was, it carried with it a fuzzy halo of reflected light around it, the collection of satellite asteroid particles that accompanied it in its course around the sun. As the Barrons watched, Ben adjusted the course a fraction of a degree to stay clear of the rock, until it had passed and vanished from the range of the telescope.
Ben laughed at Tom’s crestfallen expression as he recapped the eyepieces. “Not very impressive, eh?”
“Not only that,” Tom said. “You had to hunt so long for it. I thought the Asteroid Belt was full of them.”
“It is, compared to the rest of interplanetary space,” Ben said. “There are millions and millions of those little rocks floating around the sun with their orbits in this general area. But there’s also a whale of a lot of space between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter for the asteroids to fill. There’s so much space that a ship moving through the Rings rarely encounters anything much larger than a sand grain, unless he goes looking for it. You’ll only find one rock of significant size in every four hundred square miles in the plane we’re moving in, and you’d have to search about thirty-five thousand square miles to find a rock big enough to make a landing on.”
Tom had been watching the radar screen as they talked. Now he scratched his head. “Maybe so,” he said. “But then you’re beating the statistics already. Look at that.” Another blip had appeared on the radar screen. The contact lay off the starboard bow of the ship, at the outer limits of the radar’s range. As they watched a bright red line began to appear again on the tracking screen.
Ben crossed the hairlines on the tracking screen, punched a stopwatch, recrossed them ten seconds later, and frowned. “Sure looks like another rock,” he said. “And a big one, too. Pretty close to collision course with us.” He punched figures into the computer, adjusted the ship’s course a hair. “This one should be easy to pick up with the ‘scope.”
He swung the ‘scope into coordination with the radar beam and peered through the eyepiece. For a moment he just sat looking, moving the ‘scope controls from time to time. “Hm,” he said finally.
“Something’s out of whack here.”
“What’s the matter?” Tom Barron wanted to know.