Chapter 11

The two massive objects floating in space looked very much like deeply pitted pieces of rock. The larger one, roughly pear-shaped and about a quarter of a mile in its greatest dimension, was actually that--a huge hunk of rock. The smaller--much smaller--of the two was not what it appeared to be. It was a phony. Anyone who had been able to conduct a very close personal inspection of it would have recognized it for what it was--a camouflaged spaceboat.

The camouflaged spaceboat was on a near-collision course with reference to the larger mass, although their relative velocities were not great.

At precisely the right time, the smaller drifted by the larger, only a few hundred yards away. The weakness of the gravitational fields generated between the two caused only a slight change of orbit on the part of both bodies. Then they began to separate.

But, during the few seconds of their closest approach, a third body detached itself from the camouflaged spaceboat and shot rapidly across the intervening distance to land on the surface of the floating mountain.

The third body was a man in a spacesuit. As soon as he landed, he sat down, stock-still, and checked the instrument case he held in his hands.

No response. Thus far, then, he had succeeded.

He had had to pick his time precisely. The people who were already on this small planetoid could not use their detection equipment while the planetoid itself was within detection range of Beacon 971, only two hundred and eighty miles away. Not if they wanted to keep from being found. Radar pulses emanating from a presumably lifeless planetoid would be a dead giveaway.

Other than that, they were mathematically safe. Mathematically safe they would be if--and only if--they depended upon the laws of chance. No ship moving through the Asteroid Belt would dare to move at any decent velocity without using radar, so the people on this particular lump of planetary flotsam would be able to spot a ship’s approach easily, long before their own weak detection system would register on the pickups of an approaching ship.

The power and range needed by a given detector depends on the relative velocity--the greater that velocity becomes, the more power, the greater range needed. At one mile per second, a ship needs a range of only thirty miles to spot an obstacle thirty seconds away; at ten miles per second, it needs a range of three hundred miles.

The man who called himself Stanley Martin had carefully plotted the orbit of this particular planetoid and had let his spaceboat coast in without using any detection equipment except the visual. It had been necessary, but very risky.

The Asteroid Belt, that magnificently useful collection of stone and metal lumps revolving about the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, is somewhat like the old-fashioned merry-go-round. If every orbit in the Belt were perfectly circular, the analogy would be more exact. If they were, then every rock in the Belt would follow every other in almost exactly the way every merry-go-round horse follows every other. (The gravitational attraction between the various bodies in the Belt can be neglected. It is much less, on the average, than the gravitational pull between any two horses on a carousel.) If every orbit of those millions upon millions of pieces of rock and metal were precisely circular, then they would constitute the grandest, biggest merry-go-round in the universe.

But those orbits are not circular. And even if they were, they would not remain so long. The great mass of Jupiter would soon pull them out of such perfect orbits and force them to travel about the sun in elliptical paths. And therein lies the trouble.

If their paths were exactly circular, then no two of that vast number of planetoids would ever collide. They would march about the sun in precise order, like the soldiers in a military parade, except that they would retain their spacing much longer than any group of soldiers could possibly manage to do.

But the orbits are elliptical. There is a chance that any two given bodies might collide, although the chance is small. The one compensation is that if they do collide they won’t strike each other very hard.

The detective was not worried about collision; he was worried about observation. Had the people here seen his boat? If so, had they recognized it in spite of the heavy camouflage? And, even if they only suspected, what would be their reaction?

He waited.

It takes nerve and patience to wait for thirteen solid hours without making any motion other than an occasional flexing of muscles, but he managed that long before the instrument case that he held waggled a meter needle at him. The one tension-relieving factor was the low gravity; the problem of sleeping on a bed of nails is caused by the likelihood of the sleeper accidentally throwing himself off the bed. The probability of puncture or discomfort from the points is almost negligible.

When the needle on the instrument panel flickered, he got to his feet and began moving. He was almost certain that he had not been detected.

Walking was out of the question. This was a silicate-alumina rock, not a nickel-iron one. The group of people that occupied it had deliberately chosen it that way, so that there would be no chance of its being picked out for slicing by one of the mining teams in the Asteroid Belt. Granted, the chance of any given metallic planetoid’s being selected was very small--but they had not wanted to take even that chance.

Therefore, without any magnetic field to hold him down, and with only a very tiny gravitic field, the detective had to use different tactics.

It was more like mountain climbing than anything else, except that there was no danger of falling. He crawled over the surface in the same way that an Alpine climber might crawl up the side of a steep slope--seeking handholds and toeholds and using them to propel himself onward. The only difference was that he covered distance a great deal more rapidly than a mountain climber could.

When he reached the spot he wanted, he carefully concealed himself beneath a craggy overhang. It took a little searching to find exactly the right spot, but when he did, he settled himself into place in a small pit and began more elaborate preparations.

Self-hypnosis required nearly ten minutes. The first five or six minutes were taken up in relaxing from his exertions. Gravity notwithstanding, he had had to push his hundred and eighty pounds over a considerable distance. When he was completely relaxed and completely hypnotized, he reached up and cut down the valve that fed oxygen into his suit.