He spent the next five days learning all the ropes. He knew where the big safe was-in the laboratory. But he wanted to learn the position of every guard and every alarm between the room in which he slept and the laboratory itself. Fortunately, he was given a day shift.
On the fifth night he made his way to the laboratory and found himself facing the blank sheet of durasteel that was the door of the safe. All his information about that safe was that the lock was magnetic and that there were two alarms.
He’d brought nothing with him-all employees were searched on their way in as well as on their way out-but all the materials he needed to make anything he wanted were there at hand in the laboratory. He made himself a detector and traced two pairs of wires through the walls from the safe into adjacent rooms and found the two alarms-both hidden inside air ducts-to which they were connected. He disconnected both alarms and then went back to the safe. On Eisen’s desk near it, he’d noticed a little horseshoe magnet-a toy-that was apparently used as a paperweight. He got the hunch (which saved him much time) that, held in the proper position against that sheet of steel-six by six feet square-it would open the door.
And, unless it was exactly at one corner, there’d have to be a mark on the door to show where the magnet was to be held. The durasteel door made it easy for him; there weren’t any accidental marks or scratches on it to confuse him. Only an almost imperceptible fly-speck about a foot to the right of the center. But fly-specks scrape off and this mark didn’t-besides, there are no flies on Mars.
He tried the magnet in various positions about the speck and when he tried holding it with both poles pointing upward and the speck exactly between them, the door swung open.
The safe-it was a vault, really, almost six feet square and ten or twelve feet deep-contained so many things that it was almost harder to find what he was looking for than it had been to open the safe. But he found it. Luckily, there was a tag attached to it with a key number which made it easy to find the plans for the disintegrator in the file drawers at the back of the safe.
He took both disintegrator and plans to the workbenches of the laboratory. Eisen couldn’t possibly have provided better equipment for a burglar who wished to leave a possible duplicate of whatever object he wanted to steal. And he’d even provided a perfectly sound-proofed laboratory so even the noisier of the power-tools could be used safely. Within an hour, Crag had made what, outwardly, was a reasonably exact duplicate of the flashlight-sized object he was stealing. It didn’t have any insides in it, and it wouldn’t have disintegrated anything except the temper of a man who tried to use it, but it looked good. He put the tag from the real one on it and replaced it in the proper drawer in the safe.
He spent a little longer than that forging a duplicate of the plans. Not quite a duplicate; he purposely varied a few things so that no one except Eisen himself could make a successful disintegrator from them.
He spent another hour removing every trace of his visit. He reconnected the alarms, removed every trace-except a minute shortage of stock-of his work in the laboratory, made sure that every tool was restored to place, and put back the toy magnet on the exact spot and at the exact angle on Eisen’s desk that it had been before.
When he left the laboratory there was nothing to indicate that he had been there-unless Eisen should ever again decide to try out his disintegrator. And since he had tried it once and presumably discarded it as practically useless, that didn’t seem likely.
There remained only the obstacle of getting it out of the grounds, and that was simple. One large upstairs room was a museum which held Eisen’s collection of artifacts of the Martian aborigines. Crag had seen several primitive bows and quivers of arrows. He wrapped and fastened the plans around the shaft of a long, strong arrow and securely tied the disintegrator to its crude metal head. He went on up to the roof and shot the arrow high into the air over the electronic barrier and the strip of cleared ground outside it, into the thick jungle beyond.
It was almost dawn. He went hack to his room and got two hours of needed sleep. The hard part was over. The little capsule he’d brought with him would take care of the rest of it.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Glory Hunters
HE TOOK the capsule as soon as the alarm buzzer awakened him, half an hour before he was to report for duty. It was the one thing he’d smuggled in with him, perfectly hidden in a box of apparently identical capsules containing neobenzedrine, the standard preventive of Martian amoebic fever. All Earthmen on Mars took neobenzedrine.
One of the capsules in Crag’s box, though, contained a powder of similar color but of almost opposite effect. It wouldn’t give him amoebic fever, but it would produce perfectly counterfeited symptoms.
He could, of course, simply have quit, but that might just possibly have aroused suspicion; it might have led to a thorough check-up of the laboratory and the contents of the safe. And he couldn’t suddenly become disobedient in order to get himself fired. Psyched men didn’t act that way.
The capsule took care of it perfectly. He started to get sick at his stomach. Knutson came by and found Crag retching out a window. As soon as Crag pulled his head back in, Knutson took a look at Crag’s eyes; the pupils were contracted almost to pinpoints. He touched Crag’s forehead and found it hot. And Crag admitted, when asked, that he’d probably forgotten to take his neobenzedrine for a few days.
That was that. There’s no known cure for Martian amoebic fever except to get away from Mars at the first opportunity. He neither quit nor was fired. Knutson took him to the office and got his pay for him and then asked him whether he could make it back to Marsport by himself or if he wanted help. Crag said he could make it.
The search of his person and effects was perfunctory; he could probably have smuggled the tiny gadget and the single piece of paper out in his luggage, but the arrow had been safer.
Outside, as soon as jungle screened him from view, he took another capsule, one that looked just like the first but that counteracted it. He waited until the worst of the nausea from the first capsule had passed and then hid his luggage while he hunted for the arrow and found it.
Olliver had told him not to try it, but he tried it anyway. It wasn’t exactly that he didn’t trust Olliver-after all, if he got paid off, and he’d make sure of that, nothing else mattered-it was just that he was curious whether Olliver had told him the truth about the disintegrator’s limitations.
He waited until he’d put a little more distance between himself and Eisen’s place and then aimed the , gadget at a bush and tripped the thumb catch. He held it about four feet from the bush the first time and nothing happened. He moved it to about two feet from the bush and tripped the catch again. He thought for a while that nothing was going to happen, but after a few seconds the bush took on a misty look, and then, quite abruptly, it wasn’t there any more.
Olliver had told the truth, then. The thing had an effective range of only about three feet, and there was a definite time lag.
The rest of the way into Marsport-afoot as far as the edge of town and by atocab the rest of the way-he tried to figure out what Olliver’s use for neutronium might be. He couldn’t. In the first place he couldn’t see how Olliver could get the collapsed matter, the tons-to-a-square-inch stuff, once he’d disintegrated objects into it. The bush he’d tried it on hadn’t seemed to collapse inward on itself; it had simply disintegrated all at once and the dead atoms of it had probably fallen through the crust of Mars as easily as rain falls through air.