But worry remained as a shadow in the back of Kenniston’s own mind. It still oppressed him hours later when the arbitrary ship’s-time had brought the ‘night.’ Sitting down in the luxurious passenger-cabin over highballs with the others, he wondered where Hugh Murdock was.
The rest of Gloria’s party were all here, listening with fascinated interest to Holk Or’s colorful yarns of adventures on the wild asteroids. But Murdock was missing. Kenniston wondered worriedly if the fellow was looking over that equipment in the hold again.
* * * *
A young Earth space-man—one of the Sunsprite’s small crew—came into the cabin and approached Kenniston.
“Captain Walls’ compliments, sir, and would you come up to the bridge? He’d like your advice about the course again.”
“I’ll go with you,” Gloria said as Kenniston rose. “I like it up in the bridge best of any place on the ship.”
As they climbed past the little telaudio transmitter-room, they saw Hugh Murdock standing in there by the operator. He smiled at Gloria.
“I’ve been trying to get some messages through to Earth, but it seems we’re almost out of range,” he said ruefully.
“Can’t you ever forget business, Hugh?” the girl said exasperatedly. “You’re about as adventurous as a fat radium-broker of fifty.”
Kenniston, however, felt relieved that Murdock had apparently forgotten about the oddness of the equipment below. His spirits were lighter when they entered the glassite-enclosed bridge.
Captain Walls turned from where he stood beside Bray, the chief pilot. The plump, cheerful master touched his cap to Gloria Loring.
“Sorry to bother you again, Mr. Kenniston,” he apologized. “But we’re getting pretty near Vesta, and you know this devilish region of space better than I do. The charts are so vague they’re useless.”
Kenniston glanced at the instrument-panel with a practiced eye and then squinted at the void ahead. The Sunsprite was now throbbing steadily through a starry immensity whose hosts of glittering points of light would have made a bewildering panorama to laymen’s eyes.
They seemed near none of those blazing sparks. Yet every few minutes, red lights blinked and buzzers sounded on the instrument panel. At each such warning of the meteorometers, the pilot glanced quickly at their direction-dials and then touched the rocket-throttles to change course slightly. The cruiser was threading a way through unseen but highly perilous swarms of rushing meteors and scores of thundering asteroids.
Vesta was now a bright, pale-green disk like a little moon. It was not directly ahead, but lay well to the left. The cruiser was following an indirect course that had been laid to detour it well around one of the bigger meteor-swarms that was spinning rapidly toward Mars.
“What about it, Mr. Kenniston—is it safe to turn toward Vesta now?” Captain Walls asked anxiously. “The chart doesn’t show any more swarms that should be in this region now, by my calculations.”
Kenniston snorted. “Charts are all made by planet-lubbers. There’s a small swarm that tags after that big No. 480 mess we just detoured around. Let me have the ’scopes and I’ll try to locate it.”
Using the meteorscopes whose sensitive electromagnetic beams could probe far out through space, to be reflected by any matter, Kenniston searched carefully. He finally straightened from the task.
“It’s all right—the tag-swarm is on the far side of No. 480,” he reported. “It should be safe to blast straight toward Vesta now.”
The captain’s anxiety was only partly assuaged. “But when we reach the asteroid, what then? How do we get through the satellite-swarm around it?”
“I can pilot you through that,” Kenniston assured him. “There’s a periodic break in that swarm, due to gravitational perturbations of the spinning meteor-moons. I know how to find it.”
“Then I’ll wake you up early tomorrow ‘morning’ before we reach Vesta,” vowed Captain Walls. “I’ve no hankering to run that swarm myself.”
“We’ll be there in the morning?” exclaimed Gloria with eager delight. “How long then will it take us to find the pirate wreck?”
Kenniston uncomfortably evaded the question. “I don’t know—it shouldn’t take long. We can land in the jungle near the wreck.”
His feeling of guilt was increased by her enthusiastic excitement. If she and the others only knew what the morrow was to bring them!
He did not feel like facing the rest of them now, and lingered on the dark deck when they went back down from the bridge. Gloria remained beside him instead of going on to the cabin.
She stood, with the starlight from the transparent deck-wall falling upon her youthful face as she looked up at him.
“You are a moody creature, you know,” she told Kenniston lightly. “Sometimes you’re almost human—then you get all dark and grim again.”
Kenniston grinned despite himself. Her voice came in mock surprise. “Why, it can actually smile! I can’t believe my eyes.”
Her clear young face was provocatively close, the faint perfume of her dark hair in his nostrils. He knew that she was deliberately flirting with him, perhaps mostly out of curiosity.
She expected him to kiss her, he knew. Damn it, he would kiss her! He did so, half ironically. But the ironic amusement faded out of his mind somehow at the oddly shy contact of her soft lips.
“Why, you’re just a kid,” he muttered. “A little kid masquerading as a bored, sophisticated young lady.”
Gloria stiffened with anger. “Don’t be silly! I’ve kissed men before. I just wanted to find out what you were really like.”
“Well, what did you find out?”
Her voice softened. “I found out that you’re not as grim as you look. I think you’re just lonely.”
The truth of that made Kenniston wince. Yes, he was lonely enough, he thought somberly. All his old space-mates, passing one by one—
“Don’t you have anyone?” Gloria was asking him wonderingly.
“No family, except my kid brother Ricky,” he answered heavily. “And most of my old space-partners are either dead or else worse—lying in the grip of gravitation-paralysis.”
Memory of those old partners re-established Kenniston’s wavering resolution. He mustn’t let them down! He must go through with delivering this cruiser’s cargo to John Dark, no matter what the consequences.
He thrust the girl almost roughly from him. “It’s getting late. You’d better turn in like the others.”
But later, in his bunk in the little cabin he shared with Holk Or, Kenniston found memory of Gloria a barrier to sleep. The shy touch of her lips refused to be forgotten. What would she think of him by tomorrow?
He slept, finally. When he awakened, it was to realization that someone had just sharply spoken his name. He knew drowsily it was ‘morning’ and thought at first that Captain Walls had sent someone to awaken him.
Then he stiffened as he saw who had awakened him. It was Hugh Murdock. The young businessman’s sober face was grim now, and he stood in the doorway of the cabin with a heavy atom-pistol in his hand.
“Get up and dress, Kenniston,” Murdock said sternly. “And wake up your fellow-pirate, too. If you make a wrong move I’ll kill you both.”
CHAPTER III
Through the Meteor-Moons
Kenniston went cold with dismay. He told himself numbly that it was impossible Hugh Murdock could have discovered