Part 9 (1/2)

Bryce smiled. ”No, Pierce,” he said. He had turned on the two-way speaker and tuned it to the s.h.i.+p as he came in.

Immediately the voice came in the corridor behind them. ”Stand still.

You're covered.”

There was no chance that anyone could genuinely be behind them, but the rear one whirled and snapped a startled shot into the darkened corridor, and the other leaped sidewise down from the doorway, drawing his gun with blurred speed, and leveling on Bryce as his feet left contact with the sill. He was falling slowly, almost floating, and it should have been an easy shot, except for something he had obviously forgotten, or he never would have leaped.

Bryce disregarded him as a danger, and threw three shots at the other, who still stood startled and off balance in the corridor, firing three with his inexperienced right hand to make sure of placing even one.

The figure dropped out of sight in the corridor.

In the flick of time that Bryce's eyes had been away from the falling one, the path of the man's leap had begun to curve strangely, until now he seemed to be floating in a curve, flying sidewise and upward, faster and faster as he approached the hull. The rule of conservation of momentum was having its way. To the man's dizzied eyes, as he tried to keep Bryce within his sights long enough to fire, it must have seemed that the ground began inexplicably to turn and slide by, that suddenly the whole sh.e.l.l was turning around him like a big wheel, carrying his target up the wall and over his head.

He was almost to the sliding ground when a bush caught at his feet and yanked them from under him with a crackling of branches, and the bottom tread of a flight of stairs swung at his head like a gigantic club. Among the sudden splintering of branches and snapping of vines was a crunching thud which sounded final.

To anyone within a globe, it did not ordinarily appear to be spinning, the only sign it was, was the comfortable pseudo-gravity for anyone standing on hull level. But to those who approached the ground from the lighter G corridor, the stairs were necessary--stairs whose treads were oddly dipped in the middle in a shallow U. By bracing against one side of the U coming down, and on the other going up, one invisibly picked up enough speed to match the speed of the ground level. Jumping was the equivalent of jumping out of a moving car at forty feet a second, the sixteen feet a second, half of the corridor plus an extra thirty feet a second spin, the side slip speed of an eighteen foot drop where it had looked like five.

It was probably these added extra distances in the air, Bryce decided, that sometimes made the bird flights look so bewilderingly variable in speed and direction. He had not thought before how difficult it would be to plot a straight course from one side of the globe to the other.

He waited for a sign of motion, his magnomatic ready, looking up at the gunman lying overhead, forty feet away on the other side of the globe. The limp figure was unmoving, it looked badly tangled in vines, and its gun was gone. There was no need to shoot, but he wondered suddenly, if he had, what kind of a curve would the bullet have followed?

There was no sound from the other, but Bryce hesitated to climb the stairs and put his head above floor level of the corridor. A voice might give the other direction for a snap shot if that was what he was waiting for. Bryce chanced speaking.

”I've got this one, Pierce. How's the other?”

The televiewer in the entrance hall replied, ”Lying on his back with his gun five feet away. You all right?”

”Yes.” Bryce walked around the circ.u.mference of the globe and searched in the vines for the missing weapon of number one. The body in the s.p.a.cesuit nearby was quite definitely a corpse. He saw the gun glittering a little further on and picked it up, wiping off leaf pulp on a clean patch of moss. It was a heavy duty police pacifier, a distance stunner, adjusted to a narrow beam.

He climbed to the corridor and collected the other weapon. It was a police pacifier too. They had not meant direct murder then, but only to stun him and deliver him to Orillo, C. O. D.

”How are you doing with their s.h.i.+p?” Bryce asked, ”Is it armed?”

Armament for s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps was illegal, and careful official inspection made it rare.

”I didn't wait to see,” Pierce's voice came apologetically after a pause in which some background noise sounding like a crash came over the televiewer speaker. ”It started swinging around when I came in sight, so I just rammed it with that pretty ornamental nose spike. I'm backing off now with the forward braking jets.”

”Then whoever's inside is probably either s.p.a.cefrozen or cooked.

Jockey that s.h.i.+p around on the spike and give her a four minute shove toward Earth, then push that b.u.t.ton that collapses the ornamental vanes on the spike and let it pull loose when you start braking. I don't want any s.h.i.+p hulks floating around here.”

”Aye-aye, Cap.”

”Go slow on those braking jets when you pull loose. The back wash could touch your hull.”

Pierce returned and came in to help Bryce drag the corpses through the airlock and into s.p.a.ce.

They braced against the silver curve of the floating s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p and gave the body a combined strong shove towards Earth. Spinning slowly end over end it dwindled into a dark speck against the glowing orb of Earth, destined to be a meteorite and make a small bright streak in the Earth sky several days later.

_When the tubes conk out, the fuel runs down, The cold creeps in to where I lie._

Pierce was reciting as they went back into the globe for the second corpse.