The Collection (81 page)

When
he left the laboratory there was nothing to indicate that he had been
there-unless Eisen should ever again decide to try out his disintegrator. And
since he had tried it once and presumably discarded it as practically useless,
that didn
^'
t seem likely.

There
remained only the obstacle of getting it out of the grounds, and that was
simple. One large upstairs room was a museum which held Eisen's collection of
artifacts of the Martian aborigines. Crag had seen several primitive bows and
quivers of arrows. He wrapped and fastened the plans around the shaft of a
long, strong arrow and securely tied the disintegrator to its crude metal head.
He went on up to the roof and shot the arrow high into the air over the
electronic barrier and the strip of cleared ground outside it, into the thick
jungle beyond.

It
was almost dawn. He went hack to his room and got two hours of needed sleep.
The hard part was over. The little capsule he'd brought with him would take
care of the rest of it.

THE GLORY HUNTERS

He
took the capsule as soon as the alarm buzzer
awakened him, half an hour
before he was to report for duty. It was the one thing he'd smuggled in with
him, perfectly hidden in a box of apparently identical capsules containing
neobenzedrine, the standard preventive of Martian amoebic fever. All Earthmen
on Mars took neobenzedrine.

One
of the capsules in Crag's box, though, contained a powder of similar color but
of almost opposite effect. It wouldn
^'
t give him amoebic fever, but
it would produce perfectly counterfeited symptoms.

He
could, of course, simply have quit, but that might just possibly have aroused
suspicion; it might have led to a thorough check-up of the laboratory and the
contents of the safe. And he couldn't suddenly become disobedient in order to
get himself fired. Psyched men didn
^'
t act that way.

The
capsule took care of it perfectly. He started to get sick at his stomach.
Knutson came by and found Crag retching out a window. As soon as Crag pulled
his head back in, Knutson took a look at Crag's eyes; the pupils were
contracted almost to pinpoints. He touched Crag's forehead and found it hot.
And Crag admitted, when asked, that he'd probably forgotten to take his
neobenzedrine for a few days.

That
was that. There's no known cure for Martian amoebic fever except to get away
from Mars at the first opportunity. He neither quit nor was fired. Knutson took
him to the office and got his pay for him and then asked him whether he could
make it back to Marsport by himself or if he wanted help. Crag said he could
make it.

The
search of his person and effects was perfunctory; he could probably have smuggled
the tiny gadget and the single piece of paper out in his luggage, but the arrow
had been safer.

Outside,
as soon as jungle screened him from view, he took another capsule, one that
looked just like the first but that counteracted it. He waited until the worst
of the nausea from the first capsule had passed and then hid his luggage while
he hunted for the arrow and found it.

Olliver
had told him not to try it, but he tried it anyway. It wasn
^'
t
exactly that he didn
^'
t trust Olliver-after all, if he got paid off,
and he'd make sure of that, nothing else mattered-it was just that he was
curious whether Olliver had told him the truth about the disintegrator
^'
s
limitations.

He
waited until he
^'
d put a little more distance between himself and
Eisen's place and then aimed the , gadget at a bush and tripped the thumb
catch. He held it about four feet from the bush the first time and nothing
happened. He moved it to about two feet from the bush and tripped the catch
again. He thought for a while that nothing was going to happen, but after a few
seconds the bush took on a misty look, and then, quite abruptly, it wasn
^'
t
there any more.

Olliver
had told the truth, then. The thing had an effective range of only about three
feet, and there was a definite time lag.

The
rest of the way into Marsport-afoot as far as the edge of town and by atocab
the rest of the way-he tried to figure out what Olliver
^'
s use for
neutronium might be. He couldn't. In the first place he couldn't see how
Olliver could
get
the collapsed matter, the tons-to-a-square-inch
stuff, once he
^'
d disintegrated objects into it. The bush he'd tried
it on hadn't seemed to collapse inward on itself; it had simply disintegrated
all at once and the dead atoms of it had probably fallen through the crust of
Mars as easily as rain falls through air.

He
still hadn
^'
t figured an answer when he reached the swanky Marsport
hotel where Olliver and Evadne were staying.

He
had himself announced from the desk and then went up to Oliver's suite.
Olliver, his face both eager and tense, let him in. He didn't ask the question,
but Crag nodded.

Evadne,
he saw as he walked past Olliver, was there. She was sitting on the sofa
looking at him, her eyes enigmatic. Crag tried not to look at her. It was
difficult. She was dressed even more revealingly than she had been dressed the
first night he had seen her at Olliver's house in Albuquerque, back on Earth.
And she looked even more beautiful.

Crag
decided he wanted to get away from there, quick. He took the disintegrator and
the folded plans from his pocket and put them on the table.

Olliver
picked them up with unconcealed eagerness.

Crag
said,
^"
One million credits. Then we're through.
^"

Olliver
put gadget and paper in one pocket and took out a wallet from another. He said
drily,
^"
I don
^'
t carry a million in ready change,
Crag. The bulk of it is back on Earth; I'Il have to give it to you there. But
so you won't worry or think I'm stalling, I did bring two hundred thousand
credits with me. Eight hundred thousand
^'
s waiting for you back
home."

Crag
nodded curtly, and took the offered money. He counted it roughly and put it in
his pocket. It was more money than he
^'
d ever had or hoped to have in
one chunk. He was set for life, even if he never got the rest.

He
asked,
^"
At your home? Shall I look you up there?"

Olliver
looked surprised. "Why not come back with us? We're leaving at once, now
that I have this. As soon as we can get clearance. We're making one brief stopover-going
one other place first, that is-but we'll be home within hours. You may have to
wait days to get public transport, and you know all the red tape you'll have to
go through."

It
made sense, but Crag hesitated.

Olliver
laughed. "Afraid of me, Crag? Afraid I'm going to disintegrate you en
route? To get my money back?" He laughed harder; there was almost
hysterical amusement in the laughter. Obviously the gadget Crag had stolen for
him excited him immensely. "You needn't worry, Crag. With this-
^"
He slapped his pocket.
^"
-a million credits is peanuts to
mc."

From
the sofa, Evadne's voice said with languid amusement,
^"
He isn
^'
t
afraid of you, Jon. He's afraid of me.
^"

Crag
didn
^'
t look at her. He was watching Ollivers face and he saw
amusement change to jealousy and anger.

Crag
hadn
^'
t been afraid of Olliver. It had occurred to him only as a
remote possibility that Olliver might try to kill him. Now, from the look on
Olliver's face, his trying to kill Crag looked like a fair bet. Not, though, to
get his money
^.
back.

Crag
said,
^"
All right, Olliver. I might as well go with you.
^"

Deliberately
he turned away from possible danger to lock glances with Evadne.

She
was smiling at him.

* * * *

They
got to the spaceport within an hour and through the formalities of clearance
before noon.

Crag
didn't ask, "Well, where?
^"
until he was in the pilot's
seat of the little cruiser.

"Asteroid
belt,
^"
Olliver told hhn.

"Where
in the belt? What asteroid?
^"

^"
Doesn
^'
t matter. Any
one big enough to land on.
^"

Crag
had lifted the computation shelf, ready to calculate distance and direction.
He folded the shelf back; a jump of a hundred million miles, straight out from
the sun, would put him in the middle of the belt. He set the controls, made the
jump, and put the ship hack on manual control. His detectors would show the
presence of any of the asteroids within ten million miles. They showed the
presence of several right now.

He
turned to Olliver. He said, "We're near Ceres. Four hundred eighty mile
diameter. That one do?
^"

^"
Too big, Crag. It
^'
d
take days. Pick the smallest one you can land on."

Crag
nodded and studied the other asteroids showing on the detector and picked the
smallest of them. It wasn
^'
t much bigger than a fair-sized house but
he could land on it. He did. Rather, he killed the inertia of the spaceship
after pulling alongside the tiny asteroid and matching his speed to its. Ship
and asteroid bumped together, held by not much more than a pound of gravitational
pull between them. Had the asteroid had an atmosphere, the ship would have
floated in it, so slight was the attraction.

Olliver
clapped him on the shoulder. "Nice work, Crag. Want to put on a spacesuit
and come out to watch the fun?"

Crag
locked the controls.
^"
Why not?"

He
saw now what Olliver intended to do-try out the disintegrator on the asteroid.
And he saw now how Olliver could get neutronium. Disintegrating an asteroid was
different from disintegrating an object on the crust of a planet. Instead of
falling through the crust, the asteroid would collapse within itself, into a
tiny, compact ball of neutronium. Maybe the size of an apple or an orange. It
could be loaded-

He
stopped suddenly, half in and half out of the space-suit he had started to pull
on. He said,
^"
Olliver, you can
^'
t take it back with
you. Sure, we can put it in the spaceship, but when we get back to Earth we
can't land with it. Near Earth, it's going to weigh ten times-maybe twenty
times-as much as the ship itself. It'll either tear a hole through the hull or
crash us, one or the other."

Olliver
laughed. He was picking up a thermoglass helmet but hadn't put it on yet. He
said,
^"
This is just a tryout, Crag. We
^'
re not taking
any neutronium back with us.
^"

Crag
finished putting on the spacesuit. Olliver had his helmet on, and Evadne was
adjusting hers. He couldn't talk to either of them, now, until he had his own
helmet on. Then the suit-radios would take care of communication.

He
saw now how neutronium could be obtained, all right. There were rocks a lot
smaller than this one whizzing around the belt, ones that weighed only a few
tons, that a spaceship could handle easily and transport back to Earth after
they'd been converted into collapsed matter.

He
didn't see, as yet, what practical use neutronium could have that would make it
as immensely valuable as Oliver seemed to think it would be. But that wasn't
his business.

He
got his helmet on, and nodded that he was ready. Evadne was standing by the air
controls and she pulled a switch when he nodded. A space cruiser as small as
Olliver's never had an airlock; it was simpler, if one wished to leave it in
space or on an airless body, to exhaust the air from the entire ship and let
the airmaker rebuild an atmosphere after one returned to the ship-and before
removing one's spacesuit.

Now,
in the earphones of his helmet, he heard Olliver
^'
s voice say,
^"
Come
on. Hurry up." Olliver opened the door and the last of the air whished
out. But then, before stepping out, Olliver went back past Crag to the controls.
He turned the lock on them and put the small but quite complicated key into one
of the capacious pockets of his spacesuit. The plans for the disintegrator,
Crag knew, were in the innermost pocket of his jumper.

Crag
wondered which one of them he distrusted, or if it was both. Not that it
mattered.

Crag
shrugged and stepped out onto the tiny asteroid. Evadne followed him, and then
Olliver.

He
heard Oliver take a deep breath and say, "Here goes."

Olliver
was pointing the little disintegrator down at the rocky surface of the
asteroid, bending over so it was only a foot from the rock. Crag couldn
^'
t
hear the click, but he saw Olliver's thumb move the catch.