Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids

"Indirectly, of course, through one of their known spies," he amplified, as the two older men stared at him in shocked astonishment.



"I don't understand you at all," said Henree in a low voice. Conway was obviously speechless.



"It was necessary. I had to introduce myself to the pirates without suspicion. If they found me on what they thought was a mapping ship, they would have shot me out of hand. On the other hand, if they found me on a booby-trapped ship the secret of which they had stumbled on by what seemed a stroke of fortune, they would have taken me at face value as a stowaway. Don't you see? On a mapping ship I'm only a member of the crew that didn't get away in time. On a booby trap, I'm a poor jerk who didn't realize what he was stowing away on."



"They might have shot you anyway. They might have seen through your double-cross and considered you a spy. In fact, they almost did."



"True! They almost did," admitted Lucky.



Conway finally exploded. "And what about the original plan. Were we or were we not going to explode one of their bases? When I consider the months we spent on the construction of the Atlas, the money that went into it-"



"What good would it have done to explode one of their bases? We spoke about a huge hangar of pirate ships, but actually that was only wishful thinking. An organization based upon the asteroids would have to be decentralized. The pirates probably don't have more than three or four ships in any one place. There wouldn't be room for more. Exploding three or four ships would mean very little compared with what would have been accomplished if I had succeeded in penetrating their organization."



"But you didn't succeed," said Conway. "With all your fool risks, you didn't succeed."



"Unfortunately the pirate captain who took the Atlas was too suspicious, or perhaps too intelligent for us. I'll try not to underestimate them again. But it's not all loss. We know for a fact that Sirius is behind them. In addition, we have my hermit friend."



"He won't help us," said Conway. "From what you've said about him, it sounds as though he were only interested in having as little to do with the pirates as possible. So what can he know?"



"He may be able to tell us more than he himself thinks is possible," said Lucky coolly. "For instance, there's one piece of information he can give us that will enable me to continue efforts at working against piracy from the inside."



"You're not going out there again," said Conway hastily.



"I don't intend to," said Lucky.



Conway's eyes narrowed. "Where's Bigman?"



"On Ceres. Don't worry. In fact," and a shadow crossed Lucky's face, "he should be here by now. The delay is beginning to bother me a little."



* * *



John Bigman Jones used his special pass card to get past the guard at the door to the Control Tower. He was muttering to himself as he half-ran along the corridors.



The slight flush on his pug-nosed face dimmed his freckles and his reddish hair stood up in tufts like fence pickets. Lucky had frequently told him he cultivated a vertical hair-do to make himself look taller, but he always denied that vigorously.



The final door to the Tower swung open as he broke the photoelectric beam. He stepped inside and looked about.



Three men were on duty. One with earphones sat at the sub-etheric receiver, another was at the calculating machine and the third was at the curved radarized visi-plate.



Bigman said, "Which one of you knotbrains called me Shortie?"



The three turned toward him in unison, their faces startled and scowling.



The man with the earphones pulled one away from his left ear. "Who in space are you? How the dickens did you get in here?"



Bigman stood erect and puffed out his small chest. "My name is John Bigman Jones. My friends call me Bigman. Everyone else calls me Mr. Jones. Nobody calls me Shortie and stays in one piece. I want to know which one of you made that mistake."



The man with the earphones said, "My name is Lem Fisk and you can call me anything you blame please as long as you do it somewhere else. Get out of here, or I'll come down, pick you up by one leg, and toss you out."



The fellow at the calculating machine said, "Hey, Lem, that's the crackpot who was haunting the port a while back. There's no point in wasting time on him. Get the guards to throw him out."



"Nuts," said Lem Fisk, "we don't need guards for that



guy." He took off his earphones altogether and set the sub-



etherics at automatic signal. He said, "Well, son, you came in here and asked us a nice question in a nice way. I'll give you a nice answer. I called you Shortie, but wait, don't get mad. I had a reason. You see you're such a real tall fellow. You're such a long drink of water. You're such a high-pockets. It makes my friends laugh to hear me call you Shortie."



He reached into his hip pocket and drew out a plastic container of cigarettes. The smile on his face was bland.



"Come down here," yelled Bigman. "Come down here and back up your sense of humor with a couple of fists."



"Temper, temper," said Fisk, clucking his tongue. "Here, boy, have a cigarette. King-size, you know. Almost as long as you are. Liable to create some confusion, though, come to think of it. We won't be able to tell whether you're smoking the cigarette or the cigarette is smoking you."



The other two Tower men laughed vigorously.



Bigman was a passionate red. Words came thickly to his tongue. "You won't fight?"



"I'd rather smoke. Pity you don't join me." Fisk leaned back, chose a cigarette, and held it before his face as though admiring its slim whiteness. "After all, I can't be bothered to fight children."



He grinned, brought his cigarette to his lips, and found them closing on nothingness.



His thumb and first two fingers still held their positions about three eighths of an inch apart, but there was no cigarette between them.



"Watch out, Lem," cried the man at the visiplate. "He has a needle-gun."



"No needle-gun," snarled Bigman. "Just a buzzer."



There was an important difference. A buzzer's projectiles, although needle-like, were fragile and nonexplo-sive. They were used for target practice and small game. Striking human skin, a buzz needle would do no serious damage, but it would smart like the devil.



Fisk's grin disappeared completely. He yelled, "Watch that, you crazy fool. You can blind a man with that."



Bigman's fist remained clenched at eye level. The thin snout of the buzzer projected between his two middle fingers. He said, "I won't blind you. But I can fix it so you won't sit down for a month. And as you can see, my aim isn't bad. And you," he called over his shoulder to the one at the calculator, "if you move an inch closer to the alarm circuit, you'll have a buzz needle right through your hand."



Fisk said, "What do you want?"



"Come down here and fight."



"Against a buzzer?"



"I'll put it away. Fists. Fair fight. Your buddies can see to that."



"I can't hit a guy smaller than I am."



"Then you shouldn't insult him, either." Bigman brought up the buzzer. "And I'm not smaller than you are. I may look that way on the outside, but inside I'm as big as you. Maybe bigger. I'm counting three." He narrowed one eye as he aimed.



"Galaxy!" swore Fisk. "I'm coming down. Fellas, be my witness that this was forced on me. I'll try not to hurt the crazy idiot too much."



He leaped down from his perch. The man at the calculating machine took his place at the sub-etherics.



Fisk was five feet ten, eight inches taller than Bigman, whose slight figure was more like a boy's than a man's. But Bigman's muscles were steel springs under perfect control. He awaited the other's approach without expression.



Fisk did not bother to put up a guard. He simply extended his right hand as though he were going to lift Bigman by the collar and toss him through the still open door.



Bigman ducked under the arm. His left and right thudded into the larger man's solar plexus in a rapid one-two, and almost in the same instant he danced out of reach.



Fisk turned green and sat down, holding his stomach and groaning.



"Stand up, big boy," said Bigman. "I'll wait for you."



The other two Tower men seemed frozen into immobility by the sudden turn of events.



Slowly Fisk rose to his feet. His face glowed with rage, but he approached more slowly.



Bigman drifted away.



Fisk lunged! Bigman was not there by two inches. Fisk whipped a sharp overhand right. It's thrust ended an inch short of Bigman's jaw.



Bigman bobbed about like a cork on rippling water. His arms lifted occasionally to deflect a blow.



Fisk, yelling incoherently, rushed blindly at his gnat-like opponent. Bigman stepped to one side and his open hand slapped sharply at the other's smooth-shaven cheek. It hit with a sharp report, like a meteor hitting the first layers of dense air above a planet. The marks of four fingers were outlined in red on Fisk's face.



For a moment Fisk stood there, dazed. Like a striking snake, Bigman stepped in again, his fists moving upward to crack against Fisk's jaw. Fisk went down into a half crouch.



Distantly Bigman was suddenly aware of the steady ringing of the alarm.



Without a moment's hesitation he turned on his heel and was out the door. He wove through a startled trio of guards heading up the corridor at a clattering run, and was gone!



* * *



"And why," questioned Conway, "are we waiting for Bigman?"



Lucky said, "Here's the way I see the situation. There is nothing we need so badly as more information about the pirates. I mean inside information. I tried to get it and things didn't quite break the way I hoped they would. I'm a marked man now. They know me. But they don't know Bigman. He has no official connection with the Council. Now it's my idea that if we can trump up a criminal charge against him, for realism, you know, he can hightail it out of Ceres in the hermit's ship-"



"Oh, space," groaned Conway.



"Listen, will you! He'll go back to the hermit's asteroid. If the pirates are there, good! If not, he'll leave the ship in plain view and wait for them inside. It's a very comfortable place to wait in."



"And when they come," said Henree, "they'll shoot him."



"They will not. That's why he's taking the hermit's ship. They'll have to know where Hansen went, to say nothing of myself, where Bigman came from, how he got hold of the ship. They'll have to know. That will give him time to talk."



"And to explain how he picked out Hansen's asteroid out of all the rocks in creation? That would take some tall talking."



"That won't take any talking at all. The hermit's ship was on Ceres, which it is. I've arranged to leave it out there unguarded, so he can take it. He'll find the ship's home asteroid's space-time co-ordinates in the logbook. It would just be an asteroid to him, not too far from Ceres, as good as any other, and he would make a beeline for it in order to wait for the furor on Ceres to die down."



"It's a risk," grumbled Conway.



"Bigman knows it. And I tell you right now, we've got to take risks. Earth is underestimating the pirate menace so badly that-"



He interrupted himself as the signal light of the Com-mum-tube flashed on and off in rapid dots of light.



Conway, with an impatient motion of his hand, cut in the signal analyzer, then sat up straight.



He said, "It's on the Council wave length and, by Ceres, it's one of the Council scramblings."



The small visiplate above the Communi-tube was showing a characteristic rapidly shifting pattern of light and dark.



Conway inserted a sliver of metal, which he took from a group of such in his wallet, into a narrow slot in the Communi-tube. The sliver was a crystallite unscrambler, the active portion of the gadget consisting of a particular pattern of tiny crystals of tungsten embedded in an aluminum matrix. It filtered the sub-etheric signal in a specific way. Slowly Conway adjusted the unscrambler, pushing it in deeper and extracting it again until it matched exactly a scrambler, similar in nature but opposite in function, at the other end of the signal.



The moment of complete adjustment was heralded by the sudden sharp focusing of the visiplate.



Lucky half-rose to his feet. "Bigman!" he said. "Where in space are you?"



Bigman's little face was grinning puckishly out at them. "I'm in space all right. A hundred thousand miles off Ceres. I'm in the hermit's ship."



Conway whispered furiously, "Is this another of your tricks? I thought you said he was on Ceres?"



"I thought he was," Lucky said. Then, "What happened, Bigman?"



"You said we had to act quickly, so I fixed things up myself. One of the wise guys in the Control Tower was giving me the business. So I slammed him around a little and took off." He laughed. "Check the guardhouse and see if they're not on the lookout for a guy like me with a complaint of assault and battery against him."



"That wasn't the brightest thing you could have done," said Lucky gravely. "You'll have a hard time convincing the men of the asteroids that you're the type for assault. I don't want to hurt your feelings, but you look a little small for the job."



"I'll knock down a few," Bigman retorted. "They'll believe me. But that's not why I called."



"Well, why did you?"



"How do I get to this guy's asteroid?"



Lucky frowned. "Have you looked in the logbook?"



"Great Galaxy! I've looked everywhere. I've looked under the mattress even. There's no record anywhere of any kind of co-ordinates."



Lucky's look of uneasiness grew. "That's strange. In fact it's worse than strange. Look, Bigman," he spoke rapidly and incisively, "match Ceres' speed. Give me your co-ordinates with respect to Ceres right now and keep them that way, whatever you do, till I call you. You're too close to Ceres now for any pirates to bother you, but if you drift out further, you may be in a bad way. Do you hear me?"



"Check. Got you. Let me calculate my co-ordinates."



Lucky wrote them down and broke connections. He said, "Space, when will I learn not to make assumptions."



Henree said, "Hadn't you better have Bigman come back? It's a foolhardy setup at best and as long as you haven't the co-ordinates, give the whole thing up."



"Give it up?" said Lucky. "Give up the one asteroid we know to be a pirates' base? Do you know of any other? One single other? We've got to find the asteroid. It's our only clue to the inside of this knot."



Conway said, "He's got a point there, Gus. It is a base."



Lucky jiggled a switch on the intercom briskly and waited.



Hansen's voice, sleep-filled but startled, said, "Hello! Hello!"



Lucky said briskly, "This is Lucky Starr, Mr. Hansen. Sorry to disturb you, but I would like to have you come down here to Dr. Conway's room as fast as you can."



The hermit's voice answered after a pause, "Certainly, but I don't know the way."



"The guard at your door will take you. I'll contact him. Can you make it in two minutes?"



"Two and a half anyway," he said, good-humoredly. He sounded more awake.



"Good enough!"



Hansen was as good as his word. Lucky was waiting for him.



Lucky paused for a moment, holding the door open. He said to the guard, "Has there been any trouble at the base earlier this evening? An assault, perhaps?"



The guard looked surprised. "Yes, sir. The man who got hurt refused to press charges, though. Claimed it was a fair fight."



Lucky closed the door. He said, "That follows. Any normal man would hate to get up in a guardhouse and admit a fellow the size of Bigman had given him a banging. I'll call the authorities later and have them put the charge on paper anyway. For the record..,. Mr. Hansen."



"Yes, Mr. Starr?"



"I have a question the answer to which I did not want floating around the intercom system. Tell me, what are the co-ordinates of your home asteroid. Standard and temporal both, of course."



Hansen stared and his china-blue eyes grew round. "Well, you may find this hard to believe, but do you know, I really couldn't tell you."