The First shook his head. “That sounds like the kind of trick Parkinson would pull, all right. I’ll have to write it up and turn you both in to the authorities when we hit Earth.” He eyed Clayton. “What’s your name?”
“Cartwright. Sam Cartwright,” Clayton said without batting an eye.
“Volunteer or convicted colonist?”
“Volunteer.”
The First looked at him for a long moment, disbelief in his eyes.
It didn’t matter. Volunteer or convict, there was no place Clayton could go. From the officer’s viewpoint, he was as safely imprisoned in the spaceship as he would be on Mars or a prison on Earth.
* * * *
The First wrote in the log book, and then said: “Well, we’re one man short in the kitchen. You wanted to take Parkinson’s place; brother, you’ve got it—without pay.” He paused for a moment.
“You know, of course,” he said judiciously, “that you’ll be shipped back to Mars immediately. And you’ll have to work out your passage both ways—it will be deducted from your pay.”
Clayton nodded. “I know.”
“I don’t know what else will happen. If there’s a conviction, you may lose your volunteer status on Mars. And there may be fines taken out of your pay, too.
“Well, that’s all, Cartwright. You can report to Kissman in the kitchen.”
The First pressed a button on his desk and spoke into the intercom. “Who was on duty at the airlock when the crew came aboard last night? Send him up. I want to talk to him.”
Then the quartermaster officer led Clayton out the door and took him to the kitchen.
The ship’s driver tubes were pushing it along at a steady five hundred centimeters per second squared acceleration, pushing her steadily closer to Earth with a little more than half a gravity of drive.
* * * *
There wasn’t much for Clayton to do, really. He helped to select the foods that went into the automatics, and he cleaned them out after each meal was cooked. Once every day, he had to partially dismantle them for a really thorough going-over.
And all the time, he was thinking.
Parkinson must be dead; he knew that. That meant the Chamber. And even if he wasn’t, they’d send Clayton back to Mars. Luckily, there was no way for either planet to communicate with the ship; it was hard enough to keep a beam trained on a planet without trying to hit such a comparatively small thing as a ship.
But they would know about it on Earth by now. They would pick him up the instant the ship landed. And the best he could hope for was a return to Mars.
No, by God! He wouldn’t go back to that frozen mud-ball! He’d stay on Earth, where it was warm and comfortable and a man could live where he was meant to live. Where there was plenty of air to breathe and plenty of water to drink. Where the beer tasted like beer and not like slop. Earth. Good green hills, the like of which exists nowhere else.
Slowly, over the days, he evolved a plan. He watched and waited and checked each little detail to make sure nothing would go wrong. It couldn’t go wrong. He didn’t want to die, and he didn’t want to go back to Mars.
Nobody on the ship liked him; they couldn’t appreciate his position. He hadn’t done anything to them, but they just didn’t like him. He didn’t know why; he’d tried to get along with them. Well, if they didn’t like him, the hell with them.
If things worked out the way he figured, they’d be damned sorry.
He was very clever about the whole plan. When turn-over came, he pretended to get violently spacesick. That gave him an opportunity to steal a bottle of chloral hydrate from the medic’s locker.
And, while he worked in the kitchen, he spent a great deal of time sharpening a big carving knife.
Once, during his off time, he managed to disable one of the ship’s two lifeboats. He was saving the other for himself.
The ship was eight hours out from Earth and still decelerating when Clayton pulled his getaway.
* * * *
It was surprisingly easy. He was supposed to be asleep when he sneaked down to the drive compartment with the knife. He pushed open the door, looked in, and grinned like an ape.
The Engineer and the two jetmen were out cold from the chloral hydrate in the coffee from the kitchen.
Moving rapidly, he went to the spares locker and began methodically to smash every replacement part for the drivers. Then he took three of the signal bombs from the emergency kit, set them for five minutes, and placed them around the driver circuits.
He looked at the three sleeping men. What if they woke up before the bombs went off? He didn’t want to kill them though. He wanted them to know what had happened and who had done it.
He grinned. There was a way. He simply had to drag them outside and jam the door lock. He took the key from the Engineer, inserted it, turned it, and snapped off the head, leaving the body of the key still in the lock. Nobody would unjam it in the next four minutes.
Then he began to run up the stairwell toward the good lifeboat.
He was panting and out of breath when he arrived, but no one had stopped him. No one had even seen him.
He clambered into the lifeboat, made everything ready, and waited.
The signal bombs were not heavy charges; their main purpose was to make a flare bright enough to be seen for thousands of miles in space. Fluorine and magnesium made plenty of light—and heat.
Quite suddenly, there was no gravity. He had felt nothing, but he knew that the bombs had exploded. He punched the LAUNCH switch on the control board of the lifeboat, and the little ship leaped out from the side of the greater one.
Then he turned on the drive, set it at half gee, and watched the STS-52 drop behind him. It was no longer decelerating, so it would miss Earth and drift on into space. On the other hand, the lifeship would come down very neatly within a few hundred miles of the spaceport in Utah, the destination of the STS-52.
Landing the lifeship would be the only difficult part of the maneuver, but they were designed to be handled by beginners. Full instructions were printed on the simplified control board.
Clayton studied them for a while, then set the alarm to waken him in seven hours and dozed off to sleep.
He dreamed of Indiana. It was full of nice, green hills and leafy woods, and Parkinson was inviting him over to his mother’s house for chicken and whiskey. And all for free.
Beneath the dream was the calm assurance that they would never catch him and send him back. When the STS-52 failed to show up, they would think he had been lost with it. They would never look for him.
When the alarm rang, Earth was a mottled globe looming hugely beneath the ship. Clayton watched the dials on the board, and began to follow the instructions on the landing sheet.
He wasn’t too good at it. The accelerometer climbed higher and higher, and he felt as though he could hardly move his hands to the proper switches.
He was less than fifteen feet off the ground when his hand slipped. The ship, out of control, shifted, spun, and toppled over on its side, smashing a great hole in the cabin.
Clayton shook his head and tried to stand up in the wreckage. He got to his hands and knees, dizzy but unhurt, and took a deep breath of the fresh air that was blowing in through the hole in the cabin.
It felt just like home.
Bureau of Criminal Investigation
Regional Headquarters
Cheyenne,