"How's it going?" asked Trent in his space-helmet.
There was a crash, and a grunting voice said with pleasure, "Not bad! That one's out!"
There were other noises, confused ones. Trent, angry to profanity, heard the sound of running feet transmitted by the material of a spacesuit to the microphone inside its helmet. He could tell that the wearer of the spacesuit transmitting was plunging in pursuit. Another voice said zestfully, "He's mine!" Then somewhere else—he could only tell by the different timber of the voices—a man swore and panted, "Y'would, would you!" And there was a harsh noise, and after that only pantings. But somewhere a deadly weapon rasped, and there was roaring, and he knew that a compartment somewhere was flooded with fog-gas, and that a man who tried to kill with an ordinary instrument for murder was now seized by his own body and made to sneeze and sneeze as he tried with tearing eyes to find another target in the vapor all around him. And Trent heard the weapon fall as further monstrous convulsions of sneezing tore at him.
It was a singularly disappointing conflict. Trent's disappointment was marked among his followers, too. They'd trained and practiced and labored to acquire skill in combat in the steel-plate jungle of a spaceship's least-used parts. They could, they believed, fight ten times their number in this special area of battle, and come out victorious. But instead they'd used ground-police fog-gas, designed for the suppression of riots, and they felt no greater triumph than comes of using an exterminator's spray to be rid of unpleasant insects.
They brought the pirate crewmen, still suffering paroxysms of sneezing, and contemptuously piled them in a heap because they'd been so ingloriously subdued. Later they bound them, without even that unwilling respect a man will give to a sneak-thief who fights bitterly when he's seized.
"Now," said Trent precisely, "there's the pirate ship. Keep your suits on. We got these characters because they made themselves comfortable. We don't want that for ourselves. Heave them in some small compartment and weld the door shut on them. We've got to get away from their ship."
He scowled. Things hadn't gone as he planned. He'd hoped to bring his crewmen out of the bilges after the pirate and the Hecla were lashed to each other for the transfer of cargo. He'd looked for a total surprise and the possible capture of the pirate ship by boarding—a boarding-party appearing from nowhere, deadly in the sort of fighting the pirates had never bothered to learn.
One of his crewmen said ruefully by helmet-phone, "It wasn't much of a fuss, Cap'n. Shall we go back to work on the overdrive coil?"
For a long time the two ships lay in space with barely half a mile between them. Nothing visibly happened. The Hecla's nose pointed successively to an eighth-magnitude star and then to a dim red speck of light halfway to the Milky Way, and then to a fairly bright green one. The wanderings of its axis among far-away and unconcerned suns had no significance. The pirate ship accompanied it in its drifting. The men left in it waited impatiently for the prize-crew to report repairs on the way and some idea of what cargo the Hecla carried. Then it would decide whether to send the Hecla to its base with a minimum crew, or take what cargo was worth taking and leave the ship a derelict.
But the information didn't come. The pirate ship called by communicator. There was no answer. It called again. No reply. The boats had reported that all was as anticipated and their crews had entered the Hecla. There'd been a further report or two from them. But now there were no more reports. The pirate waited impatiently.
Stars looked down from overhead, and up from the immeasurable abyss below, and gazed abstractedly from every other direction. The pirate ship called yet again. And again. Two-thirds of what crew it had left was aboard the Hecla. They'd reported all well. The crewmen still aboard the pirate were now merely a skeleton crew, because they'd lost men in the ripped-open compartments from the ramming, and most of the rest had boarded the Hecla. The ship couldn't afford to send more men to find out why they didn't answer its calls. The Hecla was theirs. It was captured and occupied. But it didn't answer calls!
The reaction on the pirate ship wasn't exactly rage. It was mostly pure, stark, superstitious bewilderment. This couldn't happen! Minute after minute, quarter-hour after quarter-hour, the pirate ship called frantically to its boarding-party in the Hecla.
Then, quite suddenly, there were swirlings and clouds and jets and outpourings of vapor from the Hecla. She seemed to become the center of an utterly impossible cloud of vapor. It almost hid her. There were flashes and explosions in this starlit preposterousness.
And then the Hecla vanished.
V
In the unwritten history of the family line of Captains Trent, there was no other achievement which exactly matched this. It was because, of course, no exactly similar problem had ever turned up before. The Hecla was unarmed save for such equipment as even a small-town police department might possess. But with it Trent had managed to drive away from the repaired pirate ship with more than half its original crew in captivity aboard, without pursuit by the pirate, and without even an injury to any of his own spacemen. And he was disappointed because he'd hoped to capture the pirate ship itself.
The vapor he'd used was, of course, all the fog-gas-contaminated air in the ship, released at once with more fog-gas poured into the outgoing flood. The flashes were tear-gas bombs exploded outside the ship on the side away from the pirate. And the vanishing of the Hecla was simply her rewound overdrive coil in action, with the repaired Lawlor drive pushing at capacity to make use of it while the pirate still desperately tried to make contact with its boarding-parties.
The final element the pirate could not understand was the vapor. Gases released in space fling themselves precipitately in all directions toward nothingness. But here was a cloud in space. And the answer they didn't think of was that fog-gas was not a vapor but a suspension of ultra-microscopic particles, which do not repel each other with the vehemence of gas particles.
So the pirate ship lay stunned and bewildered, contemplating the vapor-cloud where the Hecla had been as it slowly spread and thinned and finally disappeared.
That cloud, obviously, was more stage-setting. Your normal criminal is a very practical person, but timid. He is deeply suspicious of things he does not understand, and Trent had arranged a series of events that would be wholly mystifying to anybody who hadn't seen the preparations to bring them about. Trent's stage-dressing mystified the pirate skipper, and by the time—stammering and frustrated and with his mind effectively scrambled—by the time he looked at the overdrive detector to see if the Hecla had vanished in overdrive, Trent had made a full-velocity overdrive dash while confusion in the pirate's control room could be counted on. By the time the pirate's detector was examined, he was some thousands of overdrive miles away but in normal space again, listening for a possible radar-pulse. By the time the pirate attempted that, for an explanation of no drivefield registering on his instruments, Trent was back in overdrive on an entirely new course.