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The opening · free to read
What was Sam Knox up to now--drifting helplessly in a tiny eggshell across black oceans of space with two weeks' grub? Was this the way the great man-hunter deftly snagged his prey?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1947. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Sam Knox touched a button in the control room of the Wanderer, and the draperies slid back from her transparent nose. He stood a moment, a sturdy compact figure, gazing into the dark.
"Look at them!" he said bitterly. "They hang there like stars."
Before the Wanderer he could see the mining fleet at the edge of the Asteroid Belt, their identification lights twinkling out from the enshrouding ebon mantle of space.
They might as well be stars, for all the progress he had made with them. He had been here a week, spreading his nets for asteroid fragments like the rest of them, and never a sign of his presence had they shown. They hung there, cold and aloof--almost suspicious, he would have thought, had they any reason to be suspicious.
Not that they were unfriendly by nature, these men who spread their nets to trap the errant meteors; but they were a clannish tribe, known to one another from season to season, more snobbish than any social ruling class. They were close-knit, bound together by bonds of danger and hazard, and the dream of sudden wealth.
Perhaps it is only a matter of time, he thought. Perhaps time will make me one of them. He must win their friendship soon, if he were to find Pell.
And that was his job, to find Pell. His was not the hunt for wealth in the heart of some fragment of asteroid. Yet the excitement of the search had long been a part of his life. What Sam Knox hunted he found. Sam Knox hunted men.
He had two bosses. The most lenient of these was the Department of Terran Justice. His other boss lay deep inside himself, demanding much--expecting everything.
Through the left lower quadrant of the transparent nose he saw one of the nets flare into quick acceleration. It was too far away to be his own, and he watched it, each corner of the net a flaming ribbon of rocket fire in the velvet black of space.
A moment later he knew whose net it was, for the mining ship Fleetblast slid by him in pursuit, controlling the rocket-powered net from the remote controls in her maw. The Fleetblast sped on, unable to equal the instant acceleration that the touch of the meteor sent into the rockets of the net.
But she was soon catching up. With her remote controls she was slowing the rockets of the net, as she increased her own speed. In a few minutes both ship and netted meteor would be hanging motionless alongside, the meteor caught and halted just as a small boy catches a swift ball in his cap.
Sam grimaced. What would it contain when they melted it open with the heat rod? Probably nothing. Possibly mineral ore, to be refined into metal for new heat rod tips, for from this the miner fishers of the Asteroid Belt eked out their precarious existence.
But perhaps--PERHAPS--there was wealth and fortune. Here might be the dream come true. Here by the luck of space, might lie one of the rare jewels of the asteroids, spawned in some once-fiery sun, and flung into space in the heart of a fragment. For this the eternal hope of man yearned, and men spent their lives fishing and mining here. For this they risked the swift and horrible infections of life in the Asteroid Belt.
The Fleetblast lay some fifty miles ahead, a speck of light, where the chase of her net had led her. Just to her right, closer, lay the only near ship, the Aeries.
"_Aeries speaking--go ahead...._"
Before the Aeries her net spurted four ribbons of flame. In a surge of power the Aeries was off, acceleration full, straining like a hound after a rabbit. There would be no more conversation from the Aeries, Sam knew, until the catch was landed.
The woman was unaware of this development, unaware that the Aeries' flaming jets were bearing her far away.
"... father is hurt ... an open wound and we have no more penicillin X...."
No penicillin X! No ship took to ether for the "Belt" without a supply of that important penicillin derivative.
Sam touched the controls. This was the break, this was the luck of Sam Knox. The jets responded with a trail of flame. He pulled alongside the Fleetblast in a few minutes.
He could spare a hundred thousand units of the drug, he figured. He got it from the storeroom. He was quite close to the other ship, so decided against using the ship's lifeboat, a tiny space-dory, and simply donned his space-suit. He then yelled into the visaphone, "_Fleetblast_--open your port ... I'm bringing the drug." He saw the lock open on the Fleetblast and opened his own, propelling himself into space and across the void. A few guiding blasts of his hand rocket and he was inside the lock of the other ship.
A woman helped him out of the space-suit. "Come quickly," she urged. Sam had time to note that she was young and had red hair as he followed her to the living quarters.
An old man lay there on a bed. His trouser had been cut away from his right leg, revealing a crushed and bleeding condition below the knee. Already the leg was beginning to show the faint greyness that indicated the start of the quick infection.
The miner's name, Sam found as he treated the leg, was Timas Rorke. There was a faint trace of Irish blood in him, responsible perhaps for the red hair of his daughter. He lay back in the bed, complaining at the foolishness that had put him there.
"That damned meteor! I was in too big a hurry to load it, and it slipped and crushed my leg." Timas looked at his daughter. "What do you say, Nancy, shall we call it a season and run back to Terra?"
"There are a few more weeks of good fishing. I can make out."
Sam looked at her, this slip of a girl who was undertaking a man's work. For all her courage she was still a woman, slim and lissome. She was not too tall, rounded sweetly, and well-formed. Under Sam's gaze she lifted her eyes to his, eyes as brown as new-plowed soil.
He had been long away from women, and the sight of her set a wildness coursing in his blood. Strong as she was he could crush her in his arms. He had strength to take care of both of them.
She might have let him too, in other circumstances. Her eyes had already noted the compact sturdiness of his body, noted and approved. But he was Sam Knox, and in his hunt for men a hundred women had tried to deceive him, so that he set his mind against this weakness, and looked away across the room.
Fool! He was a fool to have not seen it sooner. The photograph of a white-haired man stared from a lucite frame. It was Pell.
The report was true. Here was Pell, inventor of the heat rod, hiding where the metal was mined. If he were here, he must be found, and returned to Terra to finish the sentence he had escaped three years before.
He might not have to finish that prison sentence. Only one thing was certain now. In the investigation of the illegal operations of Terran Metals Corporation, the truth had been concealed by the fact that a way had been found to deceive the mind-probe.
When that shattering fact was discovered, that the basis of justice was not dependable, action was swift. The mind-probe was analyzed, and the defect removed. But the truth of the facts in the Terran Metals Trial was now uncertain. Guilty or not, the Department of Terran Justice wanted Pell.
Sam took a step toward the picture. The girl's voice shocked him from these thoughts. "I don't know how to thank you, Mister--?" She paused expectantly.
"Knox, Sam Knox."
She held out her hand. "We are so glad to know you."
"You are the first one to want to know me. I've been here a week, and everyone seems to think I have a plague."
Timas Rorke spoke from the bed. "You must forgive us. We are a hard people to get acquainted with, especially now."
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