Back in the control room, Ben and Tom held a council of war. “You’ve done splendidly,” Ben said,
“but we’re literally sitting on a powder keg. Those engines won’t hold up without a thorough overhaul.
We can fix them so we can limp along to drydock somewhere, but we don’t even dare limp very far without some work on them. We’ve just got to kill our power and improvise something before the engines go out altogether.”
Tom hesitated. “Isn’t there some place we can take cover while we’re doing that? Some place we can’t be spotted so easily as just sitting out here in the middle of nothing without any power?” Something in his voice made Ben look up. “Are you worrying about Earth ships spotting us?”
“Well, there’s that…”
“But there’s something else, too, isn’t there?”
Tom nodded. “I might have been mistaken, but there was a time a few hours ago when I was sure we’d picked up our invisible friends again.”
“You mean the phantom ship?”
“At least, something I couldn’t pick up on the ‘scope. The radar picked it up for just a minute or two, and then lost it again. Of course, the explosion might have jarred some wires loose in the radar and given me a false signal for a while. But it was just about that time that the ship began this business of drifting off course.”
Ben looked skeptical. “That’s hard to swallow,” he said. “There isn’t any known way for a ship at a distance to alter the course of another ship without having a remote control governor on the responding ship’s engines. And I know there isn’t any governor aboard this ship… I’d have seen it while we were inspecting just now.”
“There couldn’t be some kind of unit you overlooked?” Tom asked.
“I’ve been working with rocket engines since I was five,” Ben said. “I’d have noticed anything that didn’t belong there in a minute.” He laughed at Tom’s sober expression. “So you’re just chasing a red herring. The drive engines are merely out of alignment.”
“Maybe,” Tom said, obviously still unconvinced. He stared angrily at the tracer map, still showing a steady deviation of the ship from the charted course. With Ben watching he again adjusted back to the course. Within minutes the little ship had again veered off. “But I still wonder just where this ship would go if we quit adjusting back to our course.”
“Probably nowhere,” Ben said. “Eventually, of course, we’d come within contact range of some asteroid or other, but there isn’t a chance in a million that we’d actually be heading for one right now.” Tom sat silent for a moment. Then he said, “Just on a long shot, why don’t you check and see?”
“Sure, if you’re really worried.” Ben began taking coordinate readings from the control panel at one minute intervals for about ten minutes and taped them into the computer. The ship’s deviation from course wasn’t great, but it was consistent. Next Ben hauled out a tape marked “Coordinates of the Asteroids” for the current year. A few moments later he had taped the deviating course of the ship into the computer for comparison with the orbits of known asteroids in their present segment of space.
The computer clicked busily for a few moments, and dropped a card down into the slot. Ben picked it up, and stared. Then he handed it over to Tom, frowning. “Okay, there you are. If we stop correcting and let the ship follow the course it’s taking, we’ll be in contact course with a major-sized asteroid in about three hours.”
Tom whistled. “Then something is pushing us off course!”
“Either that, or it’s a million-to-one coincidence,” Ben said gloomily. “Of course, there are lots of asteroids, and it could be just happenstance.”
“But you doubt it,” Tom said.
“In space you don’t believe in coincidences. In any event, we’ll soon know. We need a landfall to allow us to repair the engines. If somebody wants us to land in a certain place, maybe we’d better let ourselves be shoved around for a while. Because if there’s a ship out there that’s trying to make us go somewhere, the sooner we call its bluff the better.”
The calculation of travel time to the asteroid was surprisingly accurate. In just a few minutes less than three hours the S-80’s radar picked up the huge rock fragment in its scanning sweep, one of the ragged chunks of cosmic debris that were to be found scattered far and wide throughout the Asteroid Belt.
Their target had no name, and according to the most recent almanacs in the ship’s tape library, it had never been landed upon nor explored. It had merely been observed from a distant scout ship at some time in the past, its orbit calculated and its position relative to Asteroid Central at that moment in time recorded. Thereafter, its position had been checked by the astronomers on Asteroid Central once every twenty years, and the minute orbital changes entered on the record of asteroid coordinates.
As asteroids went, it was neither large nor small, utterly undistinguished as it made its silent, endless passage around the sun. But now Ben Trefon scanned its surface closely, automatically checking in his mind the physical qualities necessary for a useful landfalclass="underline" the general size and shape of the rock, its stability on its axis, the nature of its surface. As the asteroid slowly rotated before them on the view screen, the entire surface was exposed to the sun’s light. It was forty miles in diameter, almost spherical except for one flattened side, and covered with small surface rubble.
Finally Ben nodded. “It’ll do, as far as a landfall is concerned. As for a reception committee—if they’re there, they’re staying well hidden.” He scanned the surface through another complete rotation.
Then he nosed the little S-80 downward. “It looks deserted. But keep your hands on the wasp controls just the same.”
Tom manned the weapons controls as Ben pulled his blouse tighter around his chest and tried to adjust his sore shoulder to ease the steady aching. Suddenly he was aware of the black belt around his waist. It seemed tighter than before, and for a moment he thought he felt an almost imperceptible vibration from the capsule lodged within it. Then he shrugged in disgust. It was only his own muscle tension as he gripped the controls. “Hold on,” he said. “We’re going down.” Slowly the little ship drifted down toward the surface of the rock. All three of them were tense now, hardly breathing as Ben brought the ship in for a smooth and graceful landing at precisely the same orbital velocity as the asteroid. There was hardly a jar as they touched down; Ben sent out the grappling plates, watched them as they slithered along the surface to lodge tightly into crevices in the iron-bearing rock.
Ben touched the ship’s power momentarily to strain at the cables, making certain that the ship was firmly secured to the surface with no possibility of settling or shift. Then he killed power and sat back, a fine line of perspiration on his forehead.
Nothing happened. The view screen showed a ragged, barren surface, the horizon unexpectedly close. Beyond the rim of rock a million stars blazed, tiny pinpoints of light, and the sun inched slowly down in the black sky to be hidden behind the rock as it rotated on its axis.
But there was no sign of life, no ship suddenly appearing in the sky…
No reception committee.
For a full hour they waited, hardly moving from their seats, as though expecting a time bomb to go off.
And then, suddenly, the tension broke and the three of them were roaring with laughter, practically hugging each other in relief. “Talk about a bunch of frightened old ladies!” Tom Barron said. “Joyce, I’m starved. Get us something to eat while I break out the pressure suits. The sun ought to be around again in another half hour. And if something jumps out of the shadows at you, be sure to scream.” They ate hungrily. Ben’s appetite had been voracious ever since he had regained consciousness, and even the dull fare of shipboard rations seemed exceedingly tasty. But both he and Tom were eager to get to work. During transit they had made a list of the major repairs necessary in order of their importance; now they spent an hour or so hauling tools from the repair locker, sharpening drills, checking the tolerances of the machining tools and getting ready for the first job.