“Against an, an attempt . . . at sabotage . . . that only exists in your imagination!”

  Blades shrugged. “That argument isn’t relevant any longer. I do believe the missile was released deliberately. We wouldn’t have done what we did otherwise. But there’s no longer any point in making charges and denials. You’d just better retrieve the thing.”

  Hulse squared his shoulders. “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

  “Well, you can send a man to the Station. He’ll find the scooters lying gutted. Send another man over here to the Pallas. He’ll find the scoopships gone. I also took a few photographs of the autopilots being installed and the ships being cast adrift. Go right ahead. However, may I remind you that the fewer people who have an inkling of this little intrigue, the better for all concerned.”

  Hulse opened his mouth, shut it again, stared from side to side, and finally slumped the barest bit. “Very well,” he said, biting off the words syllable by syllable. “I can’t risk a ship of the line. Of course, since the rogue is still farther away than your deterrent allows the Altair to go, we shall have to wait in space a while.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “I shall report the full story to my superiors at home . . . but unofficially.”

  “Good. I’d like them to know that we asterites have teeth.”

  “Signing off, then.”

  Chung stirred. “Wait a bit,” he said. “We have one of your people aboard, Lieutenant Ziska. Can you send a gig for her?”

  “She didn’t collaborate with us,” Blades added. “You can see the evidence of her loyalty, all over my mug.”

  “Good girl!” Hulse exclaimed savagely. “Yes, I’ll send a boat. Signing off.”

  The screen blanked. Chung and Blades let out a long, ragged breath. They sat a while trembling before Chung muttered, “That skunk as good as admitted everything.”

  “Sure,” said Blades, “But we won’t have any more trouble from him.”

  Chung stubbed out his cigarette. Poise was returning to both men. “There could be other attempts, though, in the next few years.” He scowled. “I think we should arm the Station. A couple of laser guns, if nothing else. We can say it’s for protection in case of war. But it’ll make our own government handle us more carefully, too.”

  “Well, you can approach the Commission about it.” Blades yawned and stretched, trying to loosen his muscles. “Better get a lot of other owners and supervisors to sign your petition, though.” The next order of business came to his mind. He rose. “Why don’t you go tell Adam the good news?”

  “Where are you bound?”

  “To let Ellen know the fight is over.”

  “Is it, as far as she’s concerned?”

  “That’s what I’m about to find out. Hope I won’t need an armored escort.” Blades went from the cubicle, past the watchful radioman, and down the deserted passageway beyond.

  The cabin given her lay at the end, locked from outside. The key hung magnetically on the bulkhead. Blades unlocked the door and tapped it with his knuckles.

  “Who’s there?” she called.

  “Me,” he said. “May I come in?”

  “If you must,” she said freezingly.

  He opened the door and stepped through. The overhead light shimmered off her hair and limned her figure with shadows. His heart bumped. “You, uh, you can come out now,” he faltered. “Everything’s O.K.”

  She said nothing, only regarded him from glacier-blue eyes.

  “No harm’s been done, except to me and Sparks, and we’re not mad,” he groped. “Shall we forget the whole episode?”

  “If you wish.”

  “Ellen,” he pleaded, “I had to do what seemed right to me.”

  “So did I.”

  He couldn’t find any more words.

  “I assume that I’ll be returned to my own ship,” she said. He nodded. “Then, if you will excuse me, I had best make myself as presentable as I can. Good day, Mr. Blades.”

  “What’s good about it?” he snarled, and slammed the door on his way out.

  Avis stood outside the jampacked saloon. She saw him coming and ran to meet him. He made swab-O with his fingers and joy blazed from her. “Mike,” she cried, “I’m so happy!”

  The only gentlemanly thing to do was hug her. His spirits lifted a bit as he did. She made a nice armful. Not bad looking, either.

  “Well,” said Amspaugh. “So that’s the inside story. How very interesting. I never heard it before.”

  “No, obviously it never got into any official record,” Missy said. “The only announcement made was that there’d been a near accident, that the Station tried to make counter-missiles out of scoopships, but that the quick action of NASS Altair was what saved the situation. Her captain was commended. I don’t believe he ever got a further promotion, though.”

  “Why didn’t you publicize the facts afterwards?” Lindgren wondered. “When the revolution began, that is. It would’ve made good propaganda.”

  “Nonsense,” Missy said. “Too much else had happened since then. Besides, neither Mike nor Jimmy nor I wanted to do any cheap emotion-fanning. We knew the asterites weren’t any little pink-bottomed angels, nor the people back sunward a crew of devils. There were rights and wrongs on both sides. We did what we could in the war, and hated every minute of it, and when it was over we broke out two cases of champagne and invited as many Earthsiders as we could get to the party. They had a lot of love to carry home for us.”

  A stillness fell. She took a long swallow from her glass and sat looking out at the stars.

  “Yes,” Lindgren said finally, “I guess that was the worst, fighting against our own kin.”

  “Well, I was better off in that respect than some,” Missy conceded. “I’d made my commitment so long before the trouble that my ties were nearly all out here. Twenty years is time enough to grow new roots.”

  “Really?” Orloff was surprised. “I haven’t met you often before, Mrs. Blades, so evidently I’ve had a false impression. I thought you were a more recent immigrant than that.”

  “Shucks, no,” she laughed. “I only needed six months after the Altair incident to think things out, resign my commission and catch the next Belt-bound ship. You don’t think I’d have let a man like Mike get away, do you?”

  Sunjammer

  The difference between “nothing” and “practically nothing” can turn out to be most exceedingly practical, because anything whatever is an intolerable contaminant in nothing. And if that sounds like nonsense-read on and find out!

  “Ol’ Jonah was a transporteer, he was, he was.

  Ol’ Jonah was a transporteer, he was, he was.

  A storm at sea was getting mean,

  So he invented the submarine.

  Bravo, bravo, hurrah for the transporteers!”

  Lazing along a cometary orbit, a million-odd miles from Earth, herdship Merlin resembled nothing so much as a small bright spider which had decided to catch an elephant and had spun its web accordingly. The comparison was not too farfetched. Sometimes a crew on the Beltline found they had gotten hold of a very large beast indeed.

  Stars crowded the blackness in the control cabin viewports, unwinking wintry points of brilliance; the Milky Way cataracted around the sky, the Andromeda galaxy shimmered mysterious across a million and a half light-years. The sunward port had automatically closed off, refusing so gross an overload for itself and its men. But Earth was visible in the adjacent frame, a cabochon of clear and lovely blue, with Luna a tarnished pearl beyond.

  Sam Storrs, who was on watch, didn’t sit daydreaming over the scene as Edward West would probably have done. He admitted there were few better sights in the System, but he’d seen it before and that wasn’t his planet yonder. He was a third-generation asterite, a gaunt, crease-cheeked, prematurely balding man who remembered too well the brother he had lost in the Revolution.

  Since there was no work for him at the moment, he was trying to read Levinsohn’s “Principles of Modern Political Economy.” It took concentration, and the whanging of a guitar from the saloon didn’t help. He scowled as Andy Golescu’s voice continued to butcher the melody.

  “King Solomon was a transporteer, he was, he was.

  King Solomon was a transporteer, he was, he was.

  He shipped his wood on a boat for hire,

  ’Cuz a wheel’s no good without a Tyre

  Bravo, bravo, hurrah for the transporteers!”

  “Ye gods,” Storrs muttered, “how sophomoric is an adult allowed to get?”

  He reached for the intercom switch, with the idea of asking Golescu to stop. But his hand withdrew. Better not. It’d be a long time yet before their orbit brought them back to Pallas and the end of their patrol, even though the run would be finished under power. Crew solidarity was as important to survival as the nuclear generator.

  And Andy’s O.K., Storrs argued to himself. He just happens to be from Ceres. What do you expect of anyone growing up in that kind of hedonistic boom town atmosphere? It was different for me, out on the Trojans. His mouth bent wryly upward. There puritanism still has survival value.

  No doubt the company psychomeds had known what they were doing when they picked Storrs, West, and Golescu to operate Merlin. You needed a balance of personality types . . . Storrs wondered about asking for a transfer when they returned to base.

  “Ulysses was a transporteer, he was, he was . . .

  The long-range radio receiver buzzed and flashed a

  red light. Storrs jerked in his seat. What the hell? That was no distress signal from a sunjammer. A wide-beam call on the common band—He sucked in a breath and snapped the Accept switch.

  . . . He stopped at Calypso’s isle for beers,

  And didn’t proceed for ten more years . . .”

  The loud-speaker seethed with cosmic static. A voice cut through. “International Space Control Central calling Beltline Transportation Company maintenance ship number 11, computed to be in Sector Charlie. Come in, number 11 . . . International Space Control—”

  “Here we are.” Storrs recollected his dignity. No Earthling was going to say that a citizen of the Asteroid Republic didn’t know the rituals. “Maintenance ship 11, Merlin out of Pallas, Storrs on duty, acknowledging call from International Space Control Central,” he intoned. “My precise position and orbit are—” He read the figures off the autonavigator screen.

  There was no need for him to adjust the transceiver web outside the hull. Its detector antenna had already fixed the direction of the incoming beam, and now the maser swung itself about to face squarely that way. The ship counter-rotated a trifle. Storrs touched the controls. The generator purred, power ran into the Emetts, the field drive dissipated angular momentum into the general mass-energy background of the universe.

  “Columbus was a transporteer, he was, he was.

  Columbus was a transporteer, he was, he was.

  They put the royal crown in pawn

  To shut him up and move him on.

  Bravo . . .

  Golescu must have noticed the motion all at once, to judge from how his singing cut off. Storrs flipped the intercom open. “Got a call from Earth,” he said hurriedly. “I don’t know why, but assume condition red.”

  Feet clattered on the decks. Storrs’ skin began to prickle. What the blazes was going on? Earth’s SCC knew approximately where Merlin was, of course. Every herdship’s orbit went on file in every traffic monitoring station throughout the System. If an orbit was changed, that news was also beamcast between the planets. But it was strictly an in-case precaution. The messages which drew a herdship off her path had always been automatic: beeps from a sailship whose interior sensors had registered trouble.

  Always—until now?

  His signal had leaped forth. Half a dozen seconds later it had reached the relay stations orbiting Earth. The operator stopped chanting, heard Storrs out, and began to talk back.

  “International Space Control Central acknowledging reply from maintenance ship 11. Stand by, please. I’m going to switch you over to the main office, groundside.” A low whistle drifted from the intercom. Golescu, posted at the engine, had heard. West came in the door, puffing from the climb up the companionway. He was a large man, his hair grizzled, face and stomach sagging a bit with middle age. But he was still highly able, Storrs admitted, and decent for an Earthman. To be sure, it helped that he was British. The Revolution had been fought mostly against North Americans.

  “Must be something big, eh?” West said. “Headquarters and all that.” He settled himself in the navigator’s chair.

  “Hello, Merlin,” said a new voice on the radio. It was a deep baritone, clipped but heavy with authority. “Evan Bailey speaking, assistant director of ISCC’s Bureau of Safety.” This time it was West who whistled. A message from so high an official of the World Interplanetary Commission, relayed straight from his personal desk—!

  “A serious emergency has come up,” Bailey went on. “There’s no time to lose. Calculate an interception curve for sailship number 128, that’s one-two-eight. Assume that you start acceleration at maximum thrust in, well, fifteen minutes. As soon as possible, anyhow. Is there by any chance another craft like yours reasonably near? We have no record of one ourselves, but there might have been some filing error. And you’ll want every piece of help you can get.”

  “No,” Storrs answered. “Nothing. The herdships are few and far between. You’re lucky we happen to be this close to you right now.”

  That was not entirely coincidence. The orbits of the maintenance ships were planned to keep them never too distant from the great vessels of the Beltline. Some of the best mathematicians in the Republic had worked out the formulas for optimization of paths folio wed by sail and power craft: an intricate, forever changing figure dance across half the Solar System.

  Storrs sat up straight. “So what’s the trouble?” he finished.

  West’s fingers had been playing a tattoo on the keys before him. A tape popped out with the information he wanted. “One-two-eight,” he murmured. “Yes, here we are. Cargo of . . . I say, this is an odd one. She’s carrying eight hundred metric tons of isonitrate from the Sword’s Jovian-orbit plant. Right now she’s approaching Earth, only about six thousand miles away, in fact. There were no indications of trouble during her passage.”

  “Isonitrate what?” Golescu inquired over the intercom. “An important industrial chemical,” West explained. “Alkali complex of 2,4-benzoisopro—”

  “Never mind,” Golescu said. “I’m sorry I asked. Uh, everything’s O.K. with our engines, if the gauges aren’t liars.”

  Bailey had hesitated a while at the other end. Storrs could visualize the man, plump in a lounger behind several acres of mahogany desk, sweating with fear that something might happen to interrupt his placid climb through the bureaucracy. His words, when they came, wavered slightly.

  “The sun is going to flare.”

  “What?” Storrs jumped to his feet. An oath from Golescu bounced through the intercom. West paused at his work, hands frozen on the keys. After a second he grunted, like someone struck a body blow, and went back to setting up the computation of thrust vectors.

  “No!” Storrs protested. “Can’t be! This is a clear weather season.” His eyes went past the stars, sought the one blank port, and clung there.

  “My office issues more storm warnings than you perhaps realize,” Bailey told him. “The big flare cycles are predictable far in advance these days, but indications that a small, short-lived one is going to occur are often not observable more than forty-eight hours ahead.” His tone grew patronizing. “ ‘Clear weather season’ means only a period in which there will be no major flares and the probability of minor ones is low. Still finite, however. You asterites don’t have to worry about solar radiation, out where you are, so perhaps you forget these details. Around Earth, we’re highly conscious of them.”

  You smug planethugger! Storrs hung onto politeness with both hands. “I know the details well enough,” he said stiffly. “After all, Mr. Bailey, every man aboard a herdship holds a master’s certificate. I was only shocked. It seemed unbelievable that a cargo of isonitrate would be shipped, if there was any measurable chance of a flare while the vessel was inside the orbit of Mars.”

  The beam went forth. While they waited for reply, West said in a mild voice, “Call it an unmeasurable chance, then, Sam. The chap’s right, you know. Solar meteorology is still not a completed science. It’s either assume the hazard, knowing you’ll lose an occasional ship, or else have no space traffic whatsoever. A coincidence like this one was bound to happen sooner or later.”

  “But for crying in the beer!” exclaimed Golescu from aft. “Why couldn’t it have happened to a cargo of metal?”

  “It does, quite often,” Storrs reminded him. “Metal isn’t hurt by radiation. Remember?” Sarcastically: “I’ve heard you gripe so often about how dull these cruises are most of the time. Well, here’s your chance for some action.”

  Bailey had hung fire again. A rustle, penetrating die dry star-whisper, suggested he had been searching through a report prepared for him. “The flare is expected in about twelve hours,” he said. “Predicted duration is three hours. Estimated peak radiation rate in Earth’s vicinity is four thousand roentgens per hour. As you know, that will cause the isonitrate to explode.”

  Storrs exploded himself. “Twelve hours! You must’a known about it at least two days ago! Why didn’t you alert us then? It’ll take us two of those blithering hours just to make rendezvous!”

  “Take it easy there, Sam,” West said sotto voce. “Some of those high-caste officials are even touchier than that isonitrate.”

  As if in confirmation, Bailey’s words turned hard. “Kindly watch your language, captain. The delay is unfortunate, I admit, but no one is to blame. The prediction was issued in the usual way, and records were checked as per regulations. The nearness of 128 was noted. However, it is an unmanned craft. You can’t expect an ordinary clerk to know the danger involved in its particular cargo. That was only pointed out when the data reached my office for the routine double check. And then a policy decision had to be reached. We haven’t the lugger capacity to unload so much material in time. It would have been simple for us to send a crew out to bleed off the gas and thereby save the sailship from being destroyed. But a staff physicist showed that this was impossible. I was informed of the dilemma the moment I came back from lunch, and immediately ordered that contact be made with the nearest herdship. What more do you want, man?”