Chapter VII

There were hard, stinging sensations in his face. They pierced the infinity of darkness until somewhere in it they touched his naked nerves and the darkness receded, slowly and became a blinding light.

A space-suited figure was standing over him, and it held the limp form of an empty suit in one hand, and a hand-weapon in the other, and the weapon was extended toward him, butt first!

He could see the hard, beetle-browed face behind the sealed face piece of the helmet. The mouth was moving rapidly, but he could not hear.

Jon's head hurt, and the pain spread throughout his body when he moved to get his feet beneath him, stood up. Subconsciously he knew he was aboard a ship in Space; there was the subtle, rippling vibration so familiar to any man with Spacelegs, and there was the smell of pumped atmosphere and the curious feeling of artificial gravity.

He tried to think even as he took the suit shoved into his arms by the man who had brought him back to consciousness, and began climbing dazedly into it. A suit, inside a ship in which the atmosphere was perfectly breathable? A _ship_! Tinker? No--no ITA craft, even the newest, had such thick-looking bulkheads, or was equipped with suits of such peculiar design--hard to get into the thing, nothing was in its right place. But if not an ITA craft, then--but that was not possible!

He had no sooner gotten the helmet adjusted than the radiophones in it crackled.

"Snap it up, get that face plate sealed! Here, you may need this--" He had taken care of the face plate, and now the curiously fashioned hand weapon was pushed into his right hand.

"What--"

"There's half a hundred Tinkers out fumbling around with a Project AA. Things are letting up on the planets, but they still haven't got the damn thing fixed the way it should be ... found us, though...."

"Us?" His tongue was still thick in his mouth and it was difficult to talk, or even think of words to say.

"You'll find out about us later. But in about a minute more they'll be in range, and those Space cannons of theirs'll be whaling away at us for all they're worth. They'd be dead ducks if this bucket was equipped the way it should be...." The man cursed. "... but there's not enough E-blasters to go around yet, or I-drives either, and that's why we're going to be a big sieve in less time than it takes to tell it. I suppose it ain't your fault--"

"My fault? Last I knew--"

"Sorry if I slugged you too hard, but the boss said to be sure. Be sure, he says, and he sends us out in one of the first tanks we made instead of one of the new jobs! Sometimes, I--"

"No escape craft? No--"

"You kidding? We sit here and take it! We could take to the ports, but the power packs on these suits are no match for those space tenders of theirs. They'd pick us up sure. Me, I'd die ten times first!"

Jon tried to assimilate the information, tried to take it all in even as he struggled to gain back his full consciousness.

"Mind telling me where we are? Where we're headed? Why in hell I was shanghaied?"

"Right now, about two points spherical north-northwest of Jupiter, minus about twelve to the ecliptic. Where we're headed you'll find out, if we live through this. And you weren't shanghaied. Not all the way, anyway. You didn't think that alarm system stayed quiet all by itself, did you? Or that the jetgiro flew itself to where you found it? The boss is still going to be sore. We were supposed to put the net over two of you--"

So it _had_ been too easy! Of course the 'quake hadn't been counted on and that had disrupted the plan, but at least there had been a plan, and that meant that there was someone who wanted him away from the ITA.

"You weren't on Titan five minutes before we knew."

"But what about the girl? The Lenantech arrested with me?" Something cold was suddenly eating away inside him, and the memory of the awful quakes came back to him in a rush, and he could visualize Deanne, lying lifeless somewhere.

"Don't know. As it was, we almost missed you after the quake started. Plans went completely haywire as far as she was concerned. But no more damn fool questions. I was supposed to get you oriented before they were on top of us and you've got it all, except for--"

There was a sudden lurch and Jon was thrown sprawling, was suddenly picked up as though by some gigantic hand and thrown bodily toward a self-sealing hatch that closed just as he crashed heavily into it. The chamber was now all but airless. They'd been hit by a Tinker missile, and there was a gaping, ragged hole somewhere in this ship's hide.

He struggled to his feet. Then saw the other man, not moving, crumpled to the deck. A jagged fragment of metal was embedded in his chest. There was another sickening lurch and another. They were being clobbered with everything the Tinker-ship had.

But somehow he got to the wounded man's side. The hard eyes opened for but a moment, and the lips moved. The sounds they made were but a whisper in his earphones.

"Six ... nine-X. Point ... oh one-Y. Eight six. Z--"

And then the eyes opened wide, and the lips closed, and the man was dead.

* * * * *

The ship shuddered again, and through his helmet Kane heard a dull, booming explosion, and he knew the craft had been fatally hit. Another second and it would be pulling apart at the seams. All Tinker guns were on-target and firing at will.

The locks! Where the hell would the locks be on this strangely designed ship?

He breathed again when the hatch popped open because of the dwindling air pressure. He was aware of the conglomeration of noises in his earphones. Somewhere a man was screaming. There had been men screaming for the last full minute, but only now were the sounds beginning to register on his taut brain.

"Where in hell is Zetterman?"

"Don't know--aft with the guy we were sent for I guess. Oh God."

"Then he's within twenty feet of a lock if he's still alive. But he hasn't answered us. So what d'you want to do? We're all that's left and they're almost alongside."

"They'd get us either way. If only we could get aft that lock's on the port side, away from 'em--"

Jon let the words make sense. Port side. Twenty feet away--THERE!

In seconds the inner port was open, and then he was waiting for the outer one, not even bothering to cycle the lock down. He'd be blown a little, but a running start out would help. He wanted to communicate with the men he'd heard talking, find out what the numbers meant that the dead man Zetterman had mouthed, but the Tinkers would be monitoring everything, and they'd pick up even a helmet set at this range.

The outer lock cracked slowly open, and what little pressure there still was in the lock held him gently against the widening opening as it dissipated entirely with a low howl into the black infinity of space. He popped out, and it was like stepping from an invisible mountainside into a night that was too dark, with stars that looked too close. Only crazily, you didn't fall--

He drifted on the slight momentum the spent air pressure in the lock had given him, the telltale flicker of his power pack this close to the huge gray shape that loomed less than a hundred yards to the other side of the broken ship he was leaving would mean the end of him. He thought at top speed. Of course their screens would pick him up but he gambled that he'd be discounted as simply another chunk of wreckage smashed by the Tinker guns.

Jove loomed hugely, fantastically, slightly above him. Soon his drift would become free-fall, but he must wait until the last possible moment to use the pack. Yet if he waited too long--

He clenched his teeth until they hurt, willed his arms to his sides, his hands away from the pack controls. The multi-hued bands of the great planet were alternately dark and bright, undulating slowly, as though readying to seize him, devour him, freeze him. The Gargantuan mass seemed but yards away rather than well over a million miles. Yet it was too close, and it was slowly moving in upon him.

He turned his body, tried to watch the Tinker ship. It had closed with the shattered wreck which he'd escaped, grappled to it. A port opened, and there was a pinprick of fiery light from the dark maw. Boarding in suits. But there was no orange-violet flash of a spacetender's exhausts, so perhaps, then, he had been unnoticed.

But he must still drift and he knew now that he had started to fall. Ever so slightly, but he was heading straight for the great mass of Jupiter, and his initial direction had been almost tangent to its orbit. The massive orb seemed even more flattened at its poles than usual, and its satellites were orbiting erratically, due, he knew, to the Geejay failure that had rocked the whole system.

Yet even as he watched, and as slowly as they swung, Jon Kane's practiced eye and mind detected retrograde movements, and realized that the tiny moons were slowly falling back in what he knew were approximately their former orbits. The Tinkers were somehow succeeding.

But the suit was getting cold. Its insulation was surprisingly efficient, but it was still only an emergency feature of the rig, to keep a man alive for a short period in the event of heater failure. And using the heater meant radiation, yet he'd have to risk it now. And soon, the pack itself. But it would be of little avail if he wandered aimlessly, and that, he had to gamble, was where the numbers came in. With the three letter combinations, they could be spherical co-ordinates. For his life, they would have to be.

69-X. .01-Y. 86-Z. With planes of reference calculated to the median plane of planetary ecliptics relative to the Sun. Then.

Swiftly, his brain analyzed the values, gave him an approximation. And it would be a point--

And where he looked there was only blackness. It was the damn time factor, of course, that was lacking. Yet Zetterman would not have given him figures for yesterday or next month. They'd have to be figures for now, or for expected time of arrival at destination, but where? How far? Near Jove? The satellites? One of them? That would make the time factor next to zero. And--

Of course! The figures would no longer be completely valid; margin of error would be wide after the gravitational imbalance that was only now beginning to be righted! If he scanned several hundred thousand miles to either side of his point of dead reckoning.

And there it was! Callisto. He was almost astride its orbit, and because it was nearer to his reckoned point than any of the rest, it would have to be the most probable destination.

If, of course, he was right about the time factor. If the co-ordinates referred to the location of bodies in the ship's immediate vicinity when it was attacked.

He was numb from the cold, and to wait longer with his powerpack would mean to become ensnared in Jove's awful gravity field before he could make the necessary right angle break in direction and set course for the barren planetoid.

His arms ached as he drew them up inside his suit, and his fingers were clumsy, senseless things groping for the power and heat toggles.

Then he found them. In moments there was warmth, and then the gray satellite toward which he headed began getting larger with each passing second.

* * * * *

The ragged circle of the plain was unbroken for almost as far as he could see in the dim reflected light of the satellite's primary, save for recent fissures in its surface that had been caused by wrenching quakes during the failure of the Geejay, and occasional pockmarks left by the wandering bits of cosmic flotsam that had been ensnared by the surprisingly slight Callistan gravity. The plain on which he had touched down was ringed with low mountain chains that looked like giant dragon's teeth poised to impale him at any moment. And Jove itself looked weirdly tilted with its atmospheric bands now inclined steeply away from the horizontal. Its pale light cast eerie shadows across the plain; made the cracks in its surface and miniature craters deceptively large and small.

And there was no sign of human habitation, no artificial structure shone against the dark horizon, and it meant he would have to waste precious fuel, blasting in great leaps across the moon's not inconsiderable surface, looking. He was not even certain for what.

If Zetterman had intended to have him find this particular one of eleven satellites, then why had he not included grid co-ordinates of latitude and longitude? Or had the man been about to when death intervened?

Unless ... whatever artificial installation existed on the planet could be located with the same co-ordinates! It would be ingenious....

Rapidly, Jon envisioned a standard tri-dimensional system grid in his mind's eye; applied it to the satellite upon which he stood, substituting its ecliptic-apparent north-south axis and solar-apparent X and Y equatorial axes for the Z, X and Y axes of the standard celestial sphere. Applying Zetterman's co-ordinates, then, his direction would be generally north-northwest, to a point below the satellite's surface!

For a moment the thought sent his mind spinning back into confusion, and then he realized that by the standard spherical method of point determination, his chances would have been one in a theoretical infinity of arriving at a point exactly on the planetoid's surface.

The installation was subterranean, then, which was logical, but which made matters all the more difficult. Unless, of course, there would be some slight surface indication. God, if only Zetterman had lived an instant longer.

With a muttered prayer that his deductions and dead reckoning calculations were substantially more than empty rationalizations of desperation, Jon thumbed the power toggles of his suit pack and leapt lightly off across the planetoid's hostile surface. He would, of course, have to be right. For there was only a limited amount of oxygen left in his tanks, and his power would certainly not last forever.

He kept track of his position by the most primitive way Man knew; the orb that was the Sun. And mentally, superimposed that orb against the tri-di grid that seemed now to be stamped imperishably upon his brain, simultaneously allowing for orbital speed differential and solar parallax.

He fell back gently to the planetoid's volcanic terrain for a final time, and knew that the spot he sought, if it existed at all, was now within scant yards of him. Mighty Jupiter was now at zenith, yet even in its directly mirrored, undulating illumination it was more difficult to see than before, and each step was an experiment. Pumice spattered over his spaceboots, solid looking stuff which could be but a shifting overlay for some bottomless fissure or yawning crevasse. And above him and down to the horizon to every side, stars gleamed tauntingly, coldly in the blackness, as though to remind him that a man could not live forever.

He began walking in ever widening circles. Something would show.