“Now get back to them controls, Corbett,” snarled Loring, “or I’ll give it to you right now.”
“O.K., Loring, you win,” said Tom. He sat down and faced the control panel. He tried hard not to smile. They had fallen for it. Now they were separated. Mason remained on the opposite side of the room. Tom took a deep breath, crossed his fingers, and put the next step of his plan into action. He reached out and pulled the master acceleration switch all the way back. The Polaris jumped ahead as if shot out of a cannon.
“Hey,” growled Mason, “what’re you doing?”
“You want more speed, don’t you?” demanded Tom.
“O.K.,” said Mason, “but don’t try any funny stuff!”
“I don’t see how I can. You’ve got me nailed with that paralo-ray,” Tom replied.
He got up leisurely, so as not to excite the nervous trigger finger of Loring, and turned slowly.
“What is it this time?” demanded Loring.
“I just gave you an extra burst of speed. All the Polaris will take. Now I’ve got to adjust the mixture of the fuel, otherwise she’ll kick out on you and we’ll have to clean out the tubes.”
“Yeah,” sneered Loring. “Well, I happen to know you do that right on the control board.” He motioned with the paralo-ray gun. “Get back down!”
“On regular space drive, you do,” agreed Tom. “But we’re on hyperdrive now. It has to be done there”—he pointed to a cluster of valves and wheels at one side of the control deck—“one of those valve wheels.”
“Stay where you are,” said Mason. “I’ll do it!” He moved to the corner. “Which one is it?” he asked.
Tom gulped and struggled hard to keep the terrible nervousness out of his voice. He had to sound as casual as possible. “The red one. Turn it to the right, hard!” he said.
Loring sat down and Mason bent over the valve wheel. He gave the wheel a vicious twist. Suddenly there was the sound of a motor slowing down somewhere inside the great ship. Tom gripped the edge of the control board and waited. Slowly at first, but surely, Tom felt himself beginning to float off his chair.
“Hey!” yelled Mason. “I’m—I’m floating!”
“It’s the gravity generators,” yelled Loring. “Corbett’s pulled a fast one. We’re in free fall!”
Tom lifted his feet and pushed as hard as he could against the control panel. He shot out of the chair and across the control room just as Loring fired his ray gun. There was a loud hiss as the gun was fired, and then the thud of a body against the wall, as Loring was suddenly shoved by the recoil of the charge.
Tom huddled in the upper corner of the control deck like a spider, his legs drawn up underneath him waiting for Mason to fire. But the smaller spaceman was tumbling head over heels in the center of the room. The more he exerted himself, the more helpless he became. His arms and legs splayed out in an effort to level himself, as he kept trying to fire the ray gun.
Tom saw his chance and lunged through the air again, straight at the floating spaceman. He passed him in mid-air. Mason made an attempt to grab him, but Tom wrenched his body to one side and pulled the ray gun out of the other’s hand.
He flipped over and turned his attention to Loring who was more dangerous, since he was now backed up against a bulkhead waiting for Tom to present a steady target. Loring started to fire, but Tom saw him in time and shot away from the wall toward the hatch. He twisted his body completely around, and with his shoulder hunched over, fired at Loring with his ray gun. The charge hit the target and Loring became rigid, his body slowly floating above the deck. His back to the wall, braced for the recoil, Tom brought his arm around slowly and aimed at Mason. He fired, and the spaceman stiffened.
Tom smiled. Neither of the spacemen would give him any more trouble now. He pushed slightly to the left and shot over to the valve that Mason had unwittingly turned off. Tom turned it on and clung to an overhead pipe until he felt the reassuring grip of the synthetic gravity pull him to the deck. Loring and Mason, in the same positions they had been in when Tom fired, settled slowly to the deck. Tom walked over and looked at both of them. He knew they could hear him.
“For smart spacemen like you two,” said Tom, “you sure forgot your basic physics. Newton’s laws of motion, remember? Everything in motion tends to keep going at the same speed, unless influenced by an outside force. Firing the ray gun was the outside force that will land you right on a prison asteroid! And you’d better start praying that I can pull those fellows off that satellite, because if I don’t, you’ll wind up frying in the sun with us!”
He started to drag them to a locker and release them from the effects of the ray blast, but, remembering their cold-blooded condemnation of Connel and the others to death on the satellite, he decided to let them remain where they were.
He turned to the control board and flipped on the microphone. He was too far away to pick up an image on the teleceiver, but the others could hear him on the audio, if, thought Tom, they were still alive.
“Attention! Attention! Polaris to Major Connel! Major Connel, can you hear me? Come in, Major Connel—Astro—Roger—somebody—come in!”
He turned away from the mike and fired the starboard jets full blast, making a sweeping curve in space and heading the Polaris back to Junior.
CHAPTER 20
“There’s only one answer, boys,” said Connel. “Loring and Mason have escaped and taken over the ship. I can’t think of any other reason Tom would abandon us like this.”
The jet boat was crowded. Alfie, the smallest, was sitting on Astro’s lap. For more than an hour they had circled above the copper satellite, searching the surrounding skies in vain for some sign of the Polaris.
“Major,” said Roger, who was hunched over the steering wheel of the small space craft, “we’re almost out of fuel. We’d better drop down on the night side of Junior, the side away from the sun. At least there we’d be out of the direct heat.”
“Very well, Roger,” said Connel. “In fact, we could keep shifting into the night side every hour.” Then he added quietly, thoughtfully, “But we’re out of fuel, you said?”
“Yes, sir,” said Roger. “There’s just enough to get down.” Roger sent the craft in a shallow dive. Suddenly the rockets cut out. The last of the fuel was gone. Roger glided the jet boat to a smooth stop on the night side of the planetoid.
“How much longer before the reactor units go up?” asked Shinny.
Connel turned, thinking he had heard something on the communicators, then answered Shinny’s question. “Only four hours,” he said.
The crew of spacemen climbed out of the jet boat into the still blackness of the night side of the planet. There wasn’t anything left to do.
They sat around on the hard surface of the planet, staring at the strange stars overhead.
“You know,” said Astro, “I might be able to set up something to convert some of the U235 in the reactors to fuel the jet boat.”
“Impossible, Astro,” said Alfie. “You’d need a reduction gear. And not only that, but you haven’t any tools to handle the mass. If you opened one of those boxes, you’d be fried immediately by the radiation!”
“Alfie’s right,” said Connel. “There’s nothing to do but wait.”
Major Connel turned his face up as far as he could in the huge fish-bowl helmet to stare at the sky. His eyes wandered from star cluster to star cluster, from glowing Regulus, to bright and powerful Sirius. He stifled a sigh. How much he had wanted to see more—and more—and more of the great wide, high, and deep! He remembered his early days as a youth on his first trip to Luna City; his first sensation