‘I’m starting, anyway,’ said Rioz. ‘We can’t wait.’
‘I’ve got it. I’ve got it.’ Magnification was still too small to give it a defimte_ shape, but the dot Long watched was brightening and dimming rhythmically as the shell rotated and caught sunlight on cross sections of different sizes.
‘Hold on.’
The first of m ny fine spurts of steam squirted out of the proper vents, leavmg long tr Ils of micro-crystals of ice gleaming mistily in the pale beams of the distant Sun. They thinned out for a hundred miles or so. On spurt, then another, then another, as the Scavenger ship moved out of its stable traJectory and took up a course tangential to that of the shell.
‘It’s moving like a comet at perihelion!’ yelled Rioz. ‘Those damned Grounder pilots knock the shells off that way on purpose. I’d like to—’’
He swore his anger in a frustrated frenzy as he kicked steam backward and backward recklessly, till the hydraulic cushioning of his chair had soughed back a full foot and Long had found himself all but unable to maintain his grip on the guard rail.
‘Have a heart,’ he begged.
But Rioz had his eye on the pips. ‘If you can’t take it, man, stay on Mars!’ The steam spurts continued to boom distantly.
The radio came to life. Long managed to lean forward through what seemed like molasses and closed contact. It was Swenson, eyes glaring.
Swenson yelled, ‘Where the hell are you guys going? You’ll be in my sector in ten seconds.’
Rioz said, ‘I’m chasing a shell.’
‘In my sector?’
‘It started in mine and you’re not in position to get it. Shut off that radio, Ted.’
The ship thundered through space, a thunder that could be heard only within the hull. And then Rioz cut the engines in stages large enough to make Long flail forward. The sudden silence was more ear-shattering than the noise that had preceded it.
Rioz said, ‘All right. Let me have the ‘scope.’
They both watched. The shell was a definite truncated cone now, tumbling with slow solemnity as it passed along among the stars.
‘It’s a Class A shell, all right,’ said Rioz with satisfaction. A giant among shells, he thought. It would put them into the black.
Long said, ‘We’ve got another pip on the scanner. I think it’s Swenson taking after us.’
Rioz scarcely gave it a glance. ‘He won’t catch us.’
The shell grew larger still, filling the visiplate.
Rioz’s hands were on the harpoon lever. He waited, adjusted the angle microscopically twice, played out the length allotment. Then he yanked, tripping the release.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then a metal mesh cable snaked out onto the visiplate, moving toward the shell like a striking cobra. It made contact, but it did not hold. If it had, it would have snapped instantly like a cobweb strand. The shell was turning with a rotational momentum amounting to thousands of tons. What the cable did do was set up a powerful magnetic field that acted as a brake on the shell.
Another cable and another lashed out. Rioz sent them out in an almost heedless expenditure of energy.
‘I’ll get this one! By Mars, I’ll get this one!’
With some two dozen cables stretching between ship and shell he des1st d. T e shell’s rotational energy, converted by breaking into heat, had raised its temperature to a point where its radiation could be picked up by the ship’s meters.
Long said, ‘Do you want me to put our brand on?’
‘Suits me. But you don’t have to if you don’t want to. It’s my watch.’
‘I don’t mind.’
Long lambered into his suit and went out the lock It was the surest sign of his newness to the game that he could count the number of times he had been out in space in a suit. This was the fifth time.
He. went out along th nearest cable, hand over hand, feeling the Vibration of the mesh agamst the metal of his mitten.
He burned their serial number in the smooth metal of the shell. There was nothmg to o dize the steel in the emptiness of space. It simply melted an vaponzed, condensing some feet away from the energy beam, turmng the surface it touched into a gray, powdery dullness.
Long swung back toward the ship.
Inside again, he took off his helmet, white and thick with frost that collected as soon as he had entered.
The first thing he h ard was Swenson’s voice coming over the radio in this al ost unrecogmzable rage: ‘. . . straight to the Commissioner. Damn 1t, there are rules to this game!’
Rioz sat back, unbothered. ‘Look, it hit my sector. I was late spotting it andI chased it into yours. You couldn’t have gotten it with Mars fora backstop. That’s all there is to it – You back, Long?’
He cut contact.
The signal button raged at him, but he paid no attention.
‘He s gomg to the Commissioner?’ Long asked.
Not a chance. He just goes on like that because it breaks the monotony. He _doesn’t mean anything by it. He knows it’s our shell. And how do you hke that hunk of stuff, Ted?’
‘Pretty good.’
