Chapter III

Jean Harlon leaned back from the table, sighed blissfully.

"I never knew," she said, "that such wonderful food existed. Why, that watermelon was the most delicious thing I've eaten in my life."

Curt Varga smiled, shoved back his chair. "Let's take a quick look at the gardens before getting some sleep," he said. "I'll show you such things as the ordinary person has not seen in more than a century."

"Swell!" Jean Harlon nodded.

They walked from the dining hall, entered a side tunnel, followed a winding ramp toward the center of the asteroid. They chatted aimlessly, speaking of nothing in particular; and Curt felt a vague pleasure in him when her eyes reflected her astonishment when she found that he was educated beyond the average of most men. There was a tang to living at the moment, and his lithe body felt good and strength-filled, ready to follow any dictate of his mind.

They turned right, stepped through a side door, and Jean's tiny gasp of awe was ample reward for all that Curt had done.

The air was warm and moist, heady with the oxygen of growing plants. Great tiers of water tanks rose along the walls, their surfaces thick with the green and yellow and bright colors of fruits and vegetables growing in the vitamin-charged hydroponic baths. They seemed to grow visibly, even as the Earthpeople watched.

Pipes as thick as a man's arm, bank upon bank, were braced in rows through the center of the immense room, and thousands of clear bubbles of water clung to them. The light of gravitic-stasis bulbs glowed deep in each bubble, and the surfaces of all were threaded with the tender shoots of growing seedling plants.

"How utterly incredibly marvelous!" Jean whispered.

The Falcon nodded proudly. "Ten thousand tons of food go out of this cavern every day, taken to the starving people of a dozen worlds. It is not a one man job; it is a tremendous task for hundreds of thousands of men and women." He pointed to the workers between the rows. "Those are the ones who are doing the job; those are my people, my friends. They and all people like them are what I fight for."

"It's gallant," Jean admitted slowly. "But it's also so incredibly foolish. A few hundred thousand, or even millions, cannot change the world we live in. It is far better to take things as they are." She shuddered involuntarily, as a snake-man glided effortlessly across the path. "After all, creatures like that shouldn't be permitted to live like Earthmen."

The Falcon shrugged, some of the good feeling going from his mind. Then he plucked a handful of rich dark grapes.

"Try these," he said. "We've still a lot of sightseeing to do."

For another hour they walked and talked, meeting the men and women with whom the Falcon worked. Nowhere was there a fawning attitude because he was the one whose word was law. There was a tangible feeling of equality among all the people, a feeling that the girl had never seen anywhere before.

She spoke but little, until she saw the great storeroom where the wealth of a hundred nations was piled in orderly stacks. She saw that the door had neither lock nor bolt, and her eyes were startled when she glanced at the tall man at her side.

"There's no need," he said, understandingly. "This is communal property. And there are no thieves in the Base. Anyway, if a thief did appear, he could not escape--an inertia-tractor beam would bring any ship back before it could get away."

Jean nodded, and they strolled toward the exit that led to their apartments. Neither spoke now; both were silent with their thoughts. A vocoder light was on at a corner box, and the Falcon flicked the switch.

"Yes?" he said quietly.

"A report has just come in, sir," the mechanical voice said evenly. "The girl whose ship you stole is--"

The Falcon whirled, feeling the ripping of his dis-gun from his holster. He whirled in a sudden spin that almost caught Jean Harlon; and then he came to a sudden halt, the last words of the vocoder ringing in his mind.

"--Jean Vandor, the daughter of Jason Vandor, the Food Administrator. She was attending a dance given by--"

The Falcon moved with a desperate tigerish speed, his hand lancing out to snatch the menacing gun. Then the softened ray caught him squarely in the chest, and the world blanked out.

* * * * *

He came to slowly, then with a rush of surging emotions that were like icewater to his brain. He rolled to his feet, wobbled unsteadily for a moment, then darted down the tunnel, running toward the comptroller's office. Tunnel after tunnel passed behind him, and he could feel the ragged pounding of his heart, as he raced across the last few yards of the entrance room.

He slammed through the door of the office, felt dismay and anger fill his mind when he saw the dissed wreck of the tractor beam board. Then he knelt, helped the comptroller to a chair, where the man sagged groggily.

The man shook his head. "The girl you came with burst in, demanded to know which were the tractor controls. I wouldn't tell, but she must have known, for she rayed them, and then blanked me out."

The Falcon snarled a curse. "She's a _telepath_," he said. "She read your mind." He whirled to a window, peered at the rocket runway that led into the escape tube. "One ship is gone," he finished harshly. "Without a tractor to bring her back, she'll take the news straight to her father. We can't fight the IP with half-gunned ships. I'll have to run her down."

"Your ship's been refueled and is ready to go. New radi-batteries are in the tractor gear." The comptroller roused himself with an effort.

"You sure you're all right?" Curt asked anxiously.

"I'm fine."

"Then tell Schutler and Crandal where I've gone. Tell them my orders are to triple the men outfitting the ships. I'll be back as soon as I can--but no move is to be made without my okay. Understand?"

"Yes, sir."

The Falcon whipped about, darted from the office. He ran at top speed, fitting the dis-gun he had grabbed from a wall rack into his belt holster. He raced to the conveyor belt, slipped into a seat, flipped the control to high speed. An instant later, he was hurtling toward his cradled ship, wind sighing past his face.

"Damn all women!" he thought. "Especially this one!"

The walls whizzed by in a grey blur, and thirty seconds later the conveyor jarred to a bone-shaking stop. Curt flipped the safety belt aside, dashed for the small cruiser resting in the cradle. He impatiently brushed aside a slow-moving workman, stepped through the port. He closed the port entrance, screwed it shut with powerful heavings of his shoulders, then darted to the control cabin. Sinking into the seat, he automatically checked the controls.

"Clear ways," he snapped into the vizi-screen, waited for the "all clear" signal. A green light flashed to his right, and he closed five stud switches in close succession. The ship lurched slightly, steadied, then fled with a rush of displaced air.

The inertia gate closed behind the ship, and the entrance hole flowed open. Ahead was the empty blackness of space. The next instant, the planetoid was far behind, and speed was piling at a terrific rate. Curt was grateful then to the man who had invented the stasis force-screen, for at the initial acceleration he had achieved, he should have been dead. But with all atoms of the ship and its contents building speed at the same rate, he felt no discomfort.

He bent toward the vision-port, scanned the Void with slitted eyes. Stars gleamed with a cold brightness far away. The Sun was at his back, and far to his right whirled Earth and Mars. Venus and Mercury fled their celestial ways far below and behind him.

He swore lightly, built up power in the vision-port, sent a scanner beam whirling. He missed the stolen ship on the first round of the beam, caught it on the second try. It was nothing but a tiny spearhead of yellow flame far ahead.

The rockets drummed with an increasing roar and muted vibration, as his fingers flicked the switches and studs before him. And despite the stasis-field, he felt the slightest sensation of travelling at an incredible rate of speed.

The freight ship was obviously moving at top speed, and was fully eighty thousand miles away. It fled in a parabola, travelling above the plane of the ecliptic, its speed now so great that it could not make a sharp turn so as to double back to Earth at Jean Vandor's touch on the controls.

Curt grinned. His ship was a cruiser, built for speed, a model that could outrace the other within a few minutes. He flicked close the last switch, sank back in his seat, watching the freight ship gradually drawing closer. He lit a _pulnik_ cigarette, waited, knowing there was nothing else that he could do for moments.

Then he frowned, leaned forward. His hands grew white on the control board from the stress of his emotions, and he felt dull panic striking at his heart. For the freight ship had swerved, had swung about in an abnormal way, its rocket flow spinning in a flaming arc.

* * * * *

Curt watched with the sickness eating at his heart, for he knew what had happened. Inexperienced as she was, Jean had permitted her ship to be caught within the conflicting tides of gravity in space, and even now was being pulled in the Sargasso of Space.

She could not escape; there was no record of anybody ever escaping the tides. Her only hope lay in Curt Varga, the tractor rays of his cruiser, and the superior power of his ship.

He watched the futile struggle of the girl to tear the freighter loose, saw the ship whip about in a series of surging dives and evolutions that finally ceased as the ship slowly but surely was dragged into the midst of the whirlpool.

And now the two ships were but a few thousands of miles apart. Already, the gravity streams were tugging at the cruiser, striving to turn its flight into a diving plunge for the maelstrom's heart. Curt worked with a desperate calculating intensity, playing the power of the ship against the tides, as a master machinist judges the power of his tools.

He sent the cruiser to the left, flicked on the tractor ray, flashed its probing beam toward the freighter. The beam caught, whipped by, then flicked back. Curt could feel the instant tugging. He increased power, felt the shrill whine of the ray-machine building icy fingers in his brain. Then the sound was past the audible.

The tides swept over the cruiser, flipped it about like a leaf in a breeze, almost caused him to lose contact with the freighter. But the shimmering thread of the tractor's light did not break; the ships were locked together.

Curt coaxed the last bit of power from his rockets, sent his ship in a spiralling drive for free space. He smiled thinly, grimly, when the tossing of the cruiser lessened. He glanced from the vision port, wondering if they would get free.

* * * * *

A smashing blow struck the ship, drove it back, set metal to singing. Curt swore harshly. Space was filled with floating debris captured by the gravitic tides. Small chunks of meteoric rock flashed by, followed by clouds of dust as fine as gravel. The bloated, ruptured body of a space-ship rushed by in the opposite direction, hurled nowhere in its constant swinging about the area of dead space. Curt winced, when he caught the starshine on the bulgered bodies that trailed in its wake like a meteor cloud. He wondered, irrelevantly, who the men were.

And then from the darkness of space came a great sweeping clot of debris, the gutter rubbish of the space lanes. Ships that had been caught in the tides, meteors, rocks, all the flotsam that had been gathered through the ages.

But Curt had no time for that. He felt his ship winning free, sent it whipping to the left again, wondering if his rockets would burn out under the stupendous strain. And relief filled him, when he realized that he was pulling the other ship from its death-bed of gravity.

And even as he laughed, he felt all power cease in his ship.

He swore brittlely, fought with the controls. All of them were dead. Panicky, he stared from the vision port, and dull wonder filled his mind.

Twin tractor-beams were lancing from the clot of space debris below the ship, each centered on a different ship. The beams were almost white in their intensity, so great was their power.

"What the hell!" Curt Varga said audibly, relaxed momentarily.

And then the cruiser was hurtling toward the clot, sucked there by the tractor beam, moved with an incredible titanic force such as was only possible from a mighty generator. Curt swerved his gaze to the freighter, saw that it, too, was trapped.

He thought then of the words that his brother had spoken to him on Mars before, of the information that had come through about the base of the drug-smuggling ring being in the Sargasso. He cursed the utter blind stupidity that had made him discount the words even as they were spoken. And then puzzlement grew within him, for it was an established fact that, once caught within the Sargasso, nothing could escape. How, then, could this be the _smothalene_ smuggling headquarters; the smuggling ships could not escape the drag of the knitted gravities?

But he had no more time for thinking. The cruiser jarred squarely into the center of the clot of debris, was sucked through it. Metal jarred and strained, and a light flickered into life on the board, indicating that a plate had been sprung in number Three hold.

Curt darted for the wall closet, unzipped it, tugged at his bulger. He slid into it, closed it, left the quartzite face-plate open until the control room was actually ruptured and the need for air from the shoulder tank was necessary.

Outside, rubbish flashed by the ports in a rush of whirling objects. Except for the crash and clatter of the cruiser forcing its way through the churning maelstrom, there was no sound.

The cruiser landed with a jar that threw Curt to one side, dazing him for a moment. He braced his feet, flipped a dis-gun from the wall rack, went slowly toward the port. He heard it unscrewing before he got there, and he cogged his head plate shut, switched on the flow of oxygen. The port came open, and a radio signal buzzed within Curt's helmet. He felt the rushing of air from the ship into the Void.

"Come on out, with your hands up," a heavy voice snapped authoritatively.

* * * * *

The Falcon paused irresolutely, then shrugged, shoved the dis-gun into a pocket of his bulger. Bending a bit, he stepped from the port, was menaced instantly by five dis-guns held in the hands of bulger-suited Earthmen. The leader moved forward, disarmed Curt, stared at him through the face plate of his spacesuit.

"I've been hoping we'd meet," he said in surprise. "But I never figured you'd come popping in like this!" He gestured about. "I'm Duke Ringo; these are some of my men."

Curt gazed about, recognized that he stood in the freight hold of a great liner. The metal was twisted and torn with gravitational strain, with only one wall intact. Even now, he was being herded toward that wall.

"I'm Davis, Kemp Davis," Curt said slowly. "I've been scavenging the lanes. I was trying to save that freighter, figuring salvage rates, when your ray brought me in." He affected a dead-face expression. "What are you men doing here, were you sucked in by the tides?"

Duke Ringo laughed scornfully. "To hell with that stuff, Falcon!" he said. "We know who you are; some of us have seen you. And we've got a--" He broke off, swung about to face another group clambering into the hold. "Who is it?" he snapped.

Curt's heart missed a beat; he took an instinctive step forward, stopped before the menace of a dis-gun. He heard Ringo's voice echoing tinnily in his earphones, heard another man's answer.

"It's a _girl_, Duke."

"Who, damn it!"

Jean's voice came dear and cool. "I'm Jean Vandor, daughter of Jason Vandor. If you have charge of these men, make them take their hands from me."

The second group slowly approached the first. The girl evidently recognized Curt, for her voice held a triumphant ring. "I see you've captured him," she said. "That's good. The reward for him will make all of you men rich. He's Curt Varga, Chief of the Food and Smothalene Pirates."

"Who'da thought it!" Duke Ringo said in mock amazement, turned away. "Come on, we'll get back to where it's comfortable."

"Nice going, Jean," Curt Varga said bitterly. "Because of your sheer stupidity, we're in a jam that made your former one look infantile. These boys are part of the _smothalene_ smugglers; we haven't got a chance."

"Shut up, Varga," Duke Ringo said curtly.

Curt subsided, went slowly forward. They entered a small compression compartment, and Duke cogged a door shut. Air hissed from vents in the walls, and the pressure gradually mounted. Thirty seconds later, Duke Ringo unzippered his suit, motioned for the others to do the same. He lifted a box from one corner of the chamber, handed small nitration masks about.

"Stick these on," he said to Curt and Jean. "Otherwise you may find yourself aging pretty rapidly."

Curt fitted his mask to his nose, clamped his lips, his eyes flicking over the group of men. They were tough, as tough as any men he had ever seen in space. And he felt queasiness in his stomach when he saw the sheer cold brutality in their eyes when they looked at him. His fists tightened when he saw the manner in which they regarded Jean.

"All right, Ringo," Curt said. "Now what's the play?"

Duke Ringo turned slowly. He was fully as tall as Curt, but he was bulkier, heavier. He surveyed Curt deliberately out of expressionless eyes, then turned his gaze to Jean.

"The young lady," he said, "will be confined to a cabin for a few days. You, I think, will earn your keep by working at a drier."

A smuggler laughed openly, subsided when Curt spun toward him.

"I'm making no threats," Curt said finally. "But don't go looking for trouble. My men know where I am; they'll be looking for me. You can't afford to buck them."

Duke Ringo chuckled. "Don't be childish, Varga," he said. "Your men wouldn't have a chance in the tides; I only found out how to enter and get back, by accident. Play nice, and you won't get hurt. Try getting tough, and--" He spread expressive hands.

Curt took a stubborn step forward. "Listen, Ringo," he said earnestly, "my work is important; I've got to get back. I'll make a deal with you."

Jean pushed forward. "I'll _double_ any bribe he offers you," she told Ringo, "if you keep him a prisoner for the IP. And I'll _triple_ the reward, if you get me back to Earth within the next six days."

"Tsk, tsk, tsk!" Duke Ringo clucked his tongue. "Maybe I'll collect a reward bigger than you think--for turning both of you in later."

"How much ransom?" the Falcon said resignedly.

Duke Ringo pondered. "Not much," he admitted. "I just want to take over your base, your ships, your food-supply." He grinned, opened and shut his hands. "It looks as if I will."

Curt leaned forward, drove his right hand with every bit of strength in his rangy body. He forgot the issues at stake, in the blind rage of the moment; he thought only of his dreams he saw shattered beneath the grinding heel of the other's desire. He slashed with a desperate fury, and skin split on the knuckles of his hand.

* * * * *

Duke Ringo went sprawling backward upon the wall, a thin trickle of blood oozing from a swelling mouth. He swore nastily, came blasting forward, his right hand catching Curt high on the chest, his left darting in, smashing at Curt's jaw. Curt rolled with the punch, sagging backward, then side-stepping. He lashed with both hands, felt a blind gladness in him when his fists drew gasps of pain from the other. He waded forward, both hands pistoning, taking blows to his own face that sent curtains of red pain spinning through his brain.

And then a savage driving punch caught Duke Ringo squarely in the throat. He sagged, pawed with both hands at his battered larynx. He gasped, unable to speak, his face purpling from the effort to breathe.

Curt darted in, flicked out a hand, caught the exposed dis-gun at Ringo's belt. He flipped the gun free, whirled, menaced the remaining men with its flaring muzzle.

"Back," he snarled, "or I'll cut you down." He nodded at Jean. "Get behind me," he finished savagely. "This is our only chance to get free." He was the Falcon then, deadly, dangerous, a light burning in his eyes.

Jean moved hesitantly toward Curt, edged around him. The smugglers said nothing, apparently waiting for the slightest opening in Curt's offensive. Duke Ringo straightened, his face puffed, air whistling into his bruised throat.

"You'll never make it," Ringo said harshly. "Put down that gun."

Curt laughed mockingly. "I'll take my chances," he said.

And went cold with horror. For Jean lunged forward, swept the gun aside, and clung panting to his arm. The next instant, Duke leaned forward, and clubbed with his knotted fist. The blow caught Curt in the temple, hurled him to one side. He tried to turn, to spin, even as he was falling, but the girl's clutch on his arm tripped him. He went to his knees, his free hand shoving at the floor.

And then two of the smugglers had dropped on him, were smashing with heavy fists. Curt drew his legs beneath him, tore his arm free, came hurtling upward. In the midst of the movement, he saw the boot lashing at his face. He sobbed deep in his throat, knowing the blow could not miss. He tensed the muscles of his neck, rolled his head. And the boot smashed just below his right ear.

He felt the coolness of the metal flooring on his face, but there was only a grey blankness before his eyes. He tried to force his body to his feet, but there was no strength in his arms.

"Take him below," he heard Duke Ringo say. "Stick him at a drier. And because he likes to play tough, we'll see just how tough he is. _Make him work without a mask._"

The Falcon called out, but his voice was only a whisper in his mind. He felt oblivion reaching for him with talon-like fingers, felt panicky terror constricting his heart. He knew what the last order meant; and horror filled his brain. Then hands gripped his body, swung it high. He tried to fight, and the entire world collapsed in a blaze of white-hot light.