Spacehounds of IPC by E. E. Smith (e books for reading .TXT) 📖

of individual components working and slipping past and around each other as they all rushed forward in obedience to the immutable cosmic law of gravitation.

"Oh, isn't that wonderful!" Nadia breathed. "Think of actually going to visit a comet! It sort of scares me, Steve—it's so creepy and crawly looking. We're awfully close, aren't we?"

"Not so very. We'd probably have lots of time to eat breakfast. But just to be on the safe side, maybe I'd better camp here at the board, and you bring me over something to eat."

"All x, Chief!" and Stevens ate, one eye upon the screen, watching closely the ever-increasing bulk of the comet.

For many minutes he swung the Forlorn Hope in a wide curve approaching the mountain of metal ever and ever more nearly, then turned to the girl.

"Hold everything, Nadia—power's going off in a minute!" He shut off the beam; then, noting that they were traveling a trifle faster than the comet, he applied a small voltage to one dirigible projector. Darting the beam here and there, he so corrected their flight that they were precisely stationary in relation to the comet. He then opened his switches, and the Forlorn Hope hurtled on. Apparently motionless, it was now a part of Cantrell's Comet, traveling in a stupendous, elongated ellipse about the Master of our Solar System, the Sun.

"There, ace, who said anything about weight-fiends? I was watching you, and you never turned a hair that time."

"Why, that's right—I never even thought about it—I was so busy studying that thing out there! I suppose I've got used to it already?"

"Sure—you're one of us now. I knew you would be. Well, let's go places and do things! You'd better put on a suit, too, so you can stand in the air-lock and handle the line."

They donned the heavily insulated, heated suits, and Stevens snapped the locking plugs of the drag line into their sockets upon the helmets.

"Hear me?" he asked. "Sound-disks all x?"

"All x."

"On the radio—all x?"

"All x."

"I tested your tanks and heaters—they're all x. But you'll have to test...."

"I know the ritual by heart, Steve. It's been in every show in the country for the last year, but I didn't know you had to go through it every time you went out-of-doors! Halves, number one all x, two all x, three all x...."

"Quit it!" he snapped. "You aren't testing those valves! That check-up is no joke, guy. These suits are complicated affairs, and some parts are apt to get out of order. You see, a thing to give you fresh air at normal pressure and to keep you warm in absolute space can't be either simple or fool-proof. They've worked on them for years, but they're pretty crude yet. They're tricky, and if one goes sour on you, out in space, it's just too bad—you're lucky to get back alive. A lot of men are still out there somewhere because of the sloppy check-ups."

"'Scuse it, please—I'll be good," and the careful checking and testing of every vital part of the space-suits went on.

Satisfied at last that the armor was spaceworthy, Stevens picked up the coils of drag-line, built of a non-metallic fiber which could retain its flexibility and strength in the bitter cold of outer space, and led the girl into the air-lock.

"Heavens, Steve! It's perfectly stupendous, and grinding around worse than the wreckage of the Arcturus was when I wouldn't let you climb up it—why, I thought comets were little, and hardly massive at all!" exclaimed the girl.

"This is little, compared to any regular planet or satellite or even to the asteroids. There's only a few cubic kilometers of matter there, and, as I said before, it's a decidedly unusual comet. You know the game?"

"I've got it—and believe me, I'll yank you back here a lot faster than you can jump over there if any one of those lumps starts to fall on you! Is this drag line long enough?"

"Yes, I've got a hundred meters here, and it's only fifty meters over there to where I'm going. So long," and with a light thrust of his feet, he dove head foremost across the intervening space, a heavy pike held out ahead of him. Straight as a bullet he floated toward his objective, a jagged chunk many yards in diameter, taking the shock of his landing by sliding along the pike-handle as its head struck the mass.

Then, bracing his feet against one lump, he pushed against its neighbor, and under that steady pressure the enormous masses moved apart and kept on moving, grinding among their fellows. Over and around them Stevens sprang, always watching his line of retreat as well as that of his advance, until his exploring pike struck a lump of apparently solid metal. Hooking the fragment toward him, he thrust savagely with his weapon and was reassured—that object was not only metal, but it was metal so hard that his pike-head of space-tempered alloy steel did not make an impression upon its surface. Turning on his helmet light he swung his heavy hammer repeatedly but could not break off even a small fragment.

"Found something, Steve?" Nadia's voice came clearly in his ears.

"I'll say I have! A hunk of solid, non-magnetic metal about the size of an office desk. I can't break off any of it, so I guess we'll have to grab the whole chunk."

He hitched the end of his cable around the nugget, made sure that the loops would not slip, and then, as Nadia tightened the line, he shoved mightily.

"All x, Nadia, she's coming! Pull in my drag line as I said over there, and I'll help you land her."

Inside the Forlorn Hope the mass of metal was urged into the shop, where Stevens clamped it immovably to the steel floor, before he took off his space-suit.

"Why, it's getting covered with snow, and the whole room is getting positively cold!" Nadia exclaimed.

"Sure. Anything that comes in from space is cold, even if it's been out only a few minutes, and that hunk of stuff has been out for nobody knows how many million years. It didn't get much heat from the sun except at perihelion, you know, so it's probably somewhere around minus two hundred and sixty degrees now. I'll have to throw a heater on it for half an hour before we can touch it. And since this is more or less new stuff to you, I'll caution you—don't try to touch anything that has just come in. That hammer or pike would freeze your hand instantly, even though they've been out only a little while. Before you touch anything, blow on it, like this, see? If your breath freezes solid on it, like that, don't touch it—it's cold."

Under the infra-beams of the heater, the mass of the metal was brought to room temperature and Stevens attacked it with his machine tools. Bit by bit the stubborn material was torn from the lump. Through heavy goggles he watched the incandescent mass in a refractory crucible, in the heart of the induction furnace.

"What do you think you've got—what you want?"

"I don't know. It wasn't iron—it wouldn't hold a magnet. It's royal metal of some kind, I think. Base metals mostly melt at around fifteen hundred, and that crucible is still dry as a bone at better than seventeen."

"How are you going to separate out the tantalum and the others you want from the ones that you don't want?"

"I'm afraid that I'm not going to, very well," replied Stevens, with a wry grimace. "What I don't know about metallurgy would fill a library, and I'm probably the world's worst chemist. However, by a series of successive liquations, I hope to separate out fractions that I can use. Platinum melts somewhere around seventeen-fifty, tantalum about twenty-nine hundred, and tungsten not until 'way up around thirty-three, or four hundred—and that, by the way, means lots of grief. Of course, each fraction will probably be an alloy of one kind or another, but I think maybe I'll be able to make them do."

"But mayn't that whole chunk be a pure metal?"

"It's conceivable, but not probable. There, she's beginning to separate at just below eighteen hundred! Platinum group coming out now, I think—platinum, rhodium, iridium, and that gang, you know. While I'm doing this, you might be getting those five coils into exact resonance, if you want to."

"Sure I want to," and Nadia made her way across to the short-wave oscillator and set to work.

After an hour or so, bent over her delicate task, she began to twitch uneasily, then shrugged her shoulders impatiently.

"What's the idea of staring at me so?" she broke out suddenly. "How do you expect me to tune these things up if you...." She stopped abruptly, mouth open in amazement, as she turned toward Stevens. He had not been looking at her, but he turned a surprised face from his own task at the sound of her voice. "Excuse me, please, Steve. I don't know what's the matter with me—must be getting jumpy, I guess."

"I wish that was all, but it isn't!" Face suddenly grim and hard, Stevens leaped to the communicator plate and shot the beam out into space. "There's an answer, but that isn't it. You're a fine-tuned instrument yourself, ace, and you've detected something.... I thought so! There's the answer—the guy that was looking at you!"

Plainly there was revealed upon the plate a small, spherical space-ship, very like the one that had attacked and destroyed the Arcturus. After Nadia had taken one glance at it, Stevens shut off the power and leaped out into the shop. He closed all the bulkhead doors and air-break openings, then closed and secured the massive insulating door of the lifeboat in which they had made their headquarters. Then, after they had again put on the space-suits they had taken off such a short time before, he extinguished all the lights and hooded the communicator screen before he ventured again to glance out into the void.

"If I had a brain in my head, instead of the pint of bean soup I've got up there, we'd have worn these when they cut up the Arcturus, and saved us a lot of mental wear and tear," he remarked. "They were right there in the lockers all the time, and I knew it!"

"Well, we got away, anyway. You couldn't be expected to think of everything at once. We didn't have much time, you know."

"No, but I should have thought of anything as obvious as that, anyway. Wonder how they found us? Did they detect us, or did they come out to this comet after metal, same as we did, and find us accidentally? However, it all works out the same—they're apparently out to get us. I'm afraid this is going to be a whole lot like a rabbit fighting back at a man with a gun; but we'll sure try to nibble us off a lunch while they're getting a square meal ... here they come!"

The enemy sphere launched its flaming plane of force, and the Forlorn Hope shuddered in every plate and member as its apex was severed cleanly under the impact. Instantly Stevens hurled his only weapons. Flaming ultra-violet and dully glowing infra-red, the twin beams lashed out; but their utmost force was of slight moment to the enormous power driving the enemy screens. Two circular spots of cherry red in space were the only results of Stevens' attack, and the next fierce cut sheared away the two projectors and, incidentally, a full half of the fifty-inch armor of the leading edge.

"Then we're checking out now?" Nadia asked quietly, as the man's hands dropped from his useless controls. "I'm sorrier than I can say, lover. But at least, I'm glad that I can go out with you," and her glorious eyes were shining with unshed tears.

"Maybe, but snap out of it, girl—our hearts are still beating! We're not dead yet, and maybe we won't be. Perhaps they want to capture us alive, as they did before; if so, we may be able to hide out on them somewhere and pull off another escape. Things don't look very bright, I know, but we're not checking out until our numbers are actually run up!"

He hooked a hand under her belt as the shocks came closer, and stood tense and ready. The lancing plane cut through one end of their control room, and Stevens leaped with his companion toward the new-made opening; while the air shrieked outward into space and their suits bulged suddenly with the abrupt increase in pressure differential. While they were in midflight, the frightful blade of destruction cleaved its way through the control board and through the spot upon which they had been standing a moment before. As they passed the severed edge, en route into open spare, Stevens seized a metal brace and clung