The Edmond Hamilton MEGAPACK ®. Edmond Hamilton
Читать онлайн книгу.
was Christina, and there was Shearing, and there were two more he did not know, leaning over him. The drug was wearing off a little, and Hyrst could see them more clearly, see the bitter disappointment in their eyes.
“Is that all?” Christina said. “Are you sure? Go back again—”
They took him back again, and it was the same.
“That’s all MacDonald said? Then we’re no closer to the Titanite than we were before.”
Hyrst was not interested in the Titanite. “Vernon,” he said. Something red and wild rose up in him, and he tried to tear away the straps that held him. “Vernon. I’ll get him—”
“Later, Hyrst,” said Shearing, and sighed. “Lie still a bit. He’s on Bellaver’s yacht, remember? Quite out of reach. Now think. MacDonald said, You won’t get it, it’s where nobody will ever get it—”
“What’s the use?” said Christina, turning away. “It was a faint hope anyway. Dying men don’t draw obliging maps for you.” She sat down on the edge of a bunk and put her head in her hands. “We might as well give up. You know that.”
One of the two Lazarites who had done the latent probe on Hyrst said with hollow hopefulness, “Perhaps if we let him rest a while and then go over it again—”
“Let me up out of here,” said Hyrst, still groggy with the drug. “I want Vernon.”
“I’ll help you get him,” said Shearing, “if you’ll tell me what MacDonald meant when he said nobody will ever get it unless I show them how.”
“How the devil do I know?” Hyrst tugged at the straps, raging. “Let me up.”
“But you knew MacDonald well. You worked with him and beside him for years.”
“Does that tell me where he hid the Titanite? Don’t be an ass, Shearing. Let me up.”
“But,” said Shearing equably, “he didn’t say where. He said how.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“Is it? Listen. Nobody will ever get it unless I show them where. Nobody will ever get it unless I show them how.”
Hyrst stopped fighting the straps. He began to frown. Christina lifted her head again. She did not say anything. The two Lazarites who had done the probe stood still and held their breath.
Shearing’s mind touched Hyrst’s stroking it as with soothing fingers. “Let’s think about that for a minute. Let your thoughts move freely. MacDonald was an engineer. The engineer. Of the four, he alone knew every inch of the physical set-up of the refinery. So?”
“Yes. That’s right. But that doesn’t say where—Wait a minute, though. If he’d just shoved it in a crack somewhere in the mountains, he’d know a detector might find it, more easily than before it was dug. He’d have put it some where deep, deeper than he could possibly dig. Maybe in an abandoned mine?”
“No place,” said Shearing, “is too deep for us to probe. We’ve examined every abandoned mine on that side of Titan. And it doesn’t fit, anyway. No. Try again.”
“He wouldn’t have brought it back to the refinery. One of us would be sure to find it. Unless, of course—”
Hyrst stopped, and the tension in the sick-bay tightened another notch. The ship lurched sharply, swerved, and shot upward with a deafening thunder of rocket-blasts. Hyrst shut his eyes, thinking hard.
“Unless he put it in some place so dangerous that nobody ever went there. A place where even he didn’t go, but which he would know about being the engineer.”
“Can you think of any place that would answer that description?”
“Yes,” said Hyrst slowly. “The underground storage bins. They’re always hot, even when they’re empty. Anything hidden near them would be blanketed by radiation. No detector would see anything but uranium. Probably even you wouldn’t.”
“No,” said Shearing, looking amazed. “Probably we wouldn’t. The radioactive disturbance would be too strong to get through, even if we were looking for something beyond it, which we weren’t.”
* * * *
Christina had sprung up. Now she bent over Hyrst and said, “But is there a way it could have been done? Obviously, the Titanite couldn’t have been put directly into the bin with the uranium—if nothing else, it would have been shipped out in the next tanker.”
“Oh, yes,” said Hyrst. “There would be several ways. I can think of a couple myself, and I’ve never even see the layout. The repair-lift shaft, I know, goes clear down to the feeder mechanism, and there’s some kind of a system of dispersal tunnels and an emergency gadget that trips automatically to release a liquid-graphite damping material into them in case the radiation level gets too high. I don’t remember that it ever did, but it’s a safeguard. There’d be plenty of places to hide a lead box full of Titanite.”
“Unless I show them how,” repeated Shearing slowly, and began to undo the straps that held Hyrst to the table. “It has an ominous sound. I’ll bet you that locating the Titanite will be child’s play compared to getting it out. Well, we’ll do what we can.”
“The first thing,” said Christina grimly, “is to get rid of Bellaver. If he has the slightest suspicion where we’re headed he’ll radio ahead and have all Titan alerted.”
Hyrst, sitting up now on the edge of the table, hanging on against the lurching of the ship, said, “That’s right—he owns the refinery now, doesn’t he? Is it still working?”
“No. The mines around there played out, oh, ten, fifteen years ago. The activity’s shifted to the north and east on the other side of the range. That is what may possibly give us a chance.” Shearing staggered with Hyrst across the bucking deck and sat tailor-fashion in the bunk, his eyes intent. “Hyrst, I want you to remember everything you can about the refinery. The ground plan, exactly where the buildings are, the hoists, the landing field. Everything.”
Hyrst said, showing the edges of his teeth, “When do I get Vernon?”
“You’ll get him. I promise you.”
“What about Bellaver? He’s still behind us.”
Shearing smiled. “That’s Christina’s job! Let her worry.”
Hyrst nodded. He began to remember the refinery. Christina and the other two went out.
A short while later a number of things happened, violently, and in quick succession. The ship of the Lazarites, pursuing its wild and headlong course through the swarming debris of the Belt, was far ahead of Bellaver’s yacht but still within instrument range. Apparently in desperation it plunged suddenly on a tangential course into a cluster of great jagged rocks all travelling together at a furious rate of speed. The cluster was perhaps two hundred miles across. The Lazarite ship twisted and turned, and then there was a swift bright flowering of flame, and then nothing.
“She’s blown her tubes,” said Bellaver exultantly, on the bridge of his yacht. The instruments had lost contact, chiefly because the cluster was so thick that it was impossible to separate one body from another.
Vernon said, “They’re not blanking my mind any more. It stopped, like that.”
But he was still doubtful.
“Can you locate the ship?” asked Bellaver.
“I’m trying.”
Bellaver caught his arm. “Look there!”
There was a second, larger and more brilliant, flash of flame.
“They’ve hit an asteroid,” he said. “They’re done for.”
“I can’t locate them,” Vernon said. “No ship, no wreckage. It could be a trick. They could