Chapter 11: An Asteroid is Missing

THERE was a breeze. A very light breeze, a mere breath. Mark could feel it on his cheek, just a slight chill that was pleasant. He had not felt air moving since he had been on Mars.

“Surely, the air cannot move in here,” he thought to himself. He lifted his eyes upward. As he expected, the lights failed before they revealed the ceiling immensely far above. “How far?” he wondered. “A half a mile? A mile? More?” The lights looked almost like stars, placed in the strategic joints and balconied work areas of the monstrous iron latticework.

The refugees from Lurton Zimbardo’s prison had been walking through the power plant for some time-long enough to have covered at least a mile, and probably closer to two. Though the surroundings were obviously nothing more than the power station of the asteroid, the men were as hushed as if they were in a cathedral. They were small figures in an enormous place, reminded of their smallness and overwhelmed with a sense of the numinous.

Mark sifted through his memories to a time when he was a child of about six, and his parents had brought him to Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. He had stood in an immense room below ground, large enough to contain several football fields. He had exulted then, identifying for the first time his restlessness inside, his search for something larger than himself, something that could fill a universe.

He spoke aloud to no one in particular. “When I was in Carlsbad Caverns about a dozen years ago, the ranger told us that the temperature inside the caverns was constant. This is like that.”

“Sure,” responded Joe. “This is a kind of cave. Look at the floor. Perfectly smooth, like glass. Artificially shaped, of course, and sealed, but it is the substance of the asteroid-no manufactured flooring. We must be in the deepest part of the complex here. I feel almost as if we are on the bottom of an ocean.”

“Joe! Mark!” called Zip from the front of the procession. The men stopped walking and the two Starmen joined Zip. “Look at that,” said Zip, with a lift of his chin.

A computer screen about four feet square was set into the side of a huge, gray fabrication of metal, shaped like a cube at least fifteen feet on a side and made of thick plates held together with rivets. Dozens of pipes in a tremendous variety of sizes came into the cube and extended away, disappearing into the dark distance. Some were the diameter of soda straws and a few were large enough for a man to crawl through. Most were as thick as a man’s wrist.

Mark stepped up to the screen at once. Below it was a keyboard without markings. He pressed the button which was located in the same place on the board as the button he had seen the midnight visitors press to activate their screen. A few buttons lit up with tiny green lights, but the screen remained black. He tried a few more buttons, but there was no response.

“Nothing doing. If you’d like to take a break here, Zip, I’ll try a few more combinations. We’re so far away from the surface of the asteroid, I’m sure Zimbardo will never find us now.” When Mark said “Zimbardo,” the screen flashed briefly on each syllable.

“Hey!” exclaimed the Starman. The screen flashed again. “Zimbardo!” he said again, and the screen repeated its performance. “It’s voice activated! And it recognizes Zimbardo’s name!” Mark tried a series of standard commands for voice-activated computers, but got no response to any words other than “hey” and “Zimbardo.”

“Take your time, Mark; I don’t think we’re in a hurry down here,” said Zip. For half an hour, Mark tried voice commands and combinations of keyboard strokes, but made no progress.

“This place is oppressive,” said one of the miners, after a long silence. “I don’t like being closed in by darkness.”

“Right,” said another. “On the asteroids we can see for thousands of light years, but inside here it seems as if life is swallowed. I feel as if I’m in something’s stomach.”

“Starman Foster,” said George St. George. “I think we had better move on. We need to come to the end of this giant room and get back to light and living quarters of some kind. With all this excitement we’ve had, I think the men are just about completely exfluncted.”

Zip paused a moment and looked into the distance, then nodded. “Okay,” he agreed. “This room can’t go on forever. Let’s find the end of it.”

Lurton Zimbardo was in the control center of the asteroid. A small group of his most trusted assistants stood silently by. Through the wall of glass on his right he could see the cavern where the pirates’ spaceships were anchored to the landing field. Five of them were out on assignment in the Belt. As the work crew on the asteroid was able to produce sufficient sheathing, power, and propulsion units, a space crew was assigned the task of outfitting the asteroids that Lurton had previously chosen.

The first, under the leadership of Crass, had returned that morning. Another had gone out almost immediately afterward and one more would depart the next morning. By the end of the following day, the last two crews would be launched.

Crass’ assignment had included the destruction of the sats while he performed his task. Now that the pirates knew how easy and fast it was to complete the work, they did not bother to destroy the sats in the remaining four sites. Zimbardo knew that the destruction of the sats would alert Space Command, but the authorities would not be able to stop the project before his ships returned. Once they learned what he was doing they would expect that he had only one asteroid to command. The remaining four would be a shock to them and give him, Zimbardo, a powerful psychological edge. He would need it for his last demand. Even his most trusted lieutenants had no inkling of the enormity of his last ploy.