And it would have the value of a completely unexpected innovation. Earthplanet hadn’t yet heard of the Rilfs. Hiskey had contacts who knew how to handle this kind of thing to best advantage all around. Everyone involved would share in the cut, and the cut was going to be a very large one. Of course, after the first dozen miniwars came to an abrupt end, that part of it would be over. McNulty would be in general demand and could get along without middlemen. There’d be no further payoffs to the crew of the Prideful Sue. But down to the last man on board, they’d be more than wealthy enough to retire.
It was, Jake Hiskey pointed out, no more of a dirty business, if one wanted to call it that, than other operations they’d carried out. The Earth gangs periodically slaughtered one another, and there was very little to choose between them. What great difference did it make to hand some of them a new weapon?
It wasn’t much of an argument, but what decided Harold was that this was Jake Hiskey’s last chance and that Jake knew it and was desperate. He was fifteen years older than Harold and looked a decade older than that. The outsystems had leached his nerve from him at last. If Harold pulled out, Hiskey wouldn’t be able to handle the deal with the Rilfs, wouldn’t be able to work a troop of them back to Earthsystem. He was no longer capable of it. And when one had flown and fought a ship for eight years with a man, had backed him and been backed by him in tight spots enough to do for a lifetime, it was difficult to turn away from him when he was finished. So all right, Harold had thought finally, one more play, dirty as it might be. Then he and Jake could split. There was nothing really left of their friendship; that had eroded along the line. If the SP didn’t manage to block them, they’d get the Rilfs to Earth. Afterwards they couldn’t be touched by Earthsystem, even if it became known what role they’d played. They’d have done nothing illegal.
And he could hope the role they’d played wouldn’t become known. He’d told Elisabeth the Prideful Sue had returned to Earthsystem on very big and very hush-hush business, something he wasn’t free to talk about, and that if the deal was concluded successfully he might be taking a long vacation from spacefaring. She seemed delighted with that and didn’t ask for details, and Harold inquired what she’d been doing these eight years, because none of the message-packs she’d sent ever had caught up with him, and soon Elisabeth was talking and laughing freely and easily. For a short while, the past years seemed almost to fade, as if they were strolling about a park in Mars Underground rather than on this fabulous garden asteroid where handsome horned beasts stepped out now and then from among the trees to gaze placidly at them as they went by. . . .
* * *
“Mr. Gage! Elisabeth!”
He stopped, blinking. It was like an optical illusion. There was a steep smooth cliff of rock to the left of the path they were following; and in it, suddenly, an opening had appeared, a doorway, and Sally Alston had stepped out of it and was coming towards them, smiling. “I looked for you in the scanners,” she told Elisabeth. Then she turned to Harold. “Mr. Gage, why didn’t you let us know you had this extraordinary alien person on board? If Captain Hiskey hadn’t mentioned—”
“Alien person?” Elisabeth interrupted.
“Why, yes! Somebody called a Rilf. Derek is certain Solar U has no record of the species, and Captain Hiskey and Mr. Gage are taking him to Earthplanet on a commercial mission for his people. It’s really an historical event!”
Harold stared at her, completely dumbfounded. Had Jake gone out of his mind to mention McNulty and the Rilfs to the Alstons? Elisabeth gave him a quick glance which asked whether this was the big hush-hush business he’d been talking about.
“He’s even given himself a human name,” Sally told Elisabeth. “McNulty!” She smiled at Harold. “I must admit I find him a little shivery!”
“He’s here?” Harold heard himself saying. “McNulty’s here, on the asteroid?”
“Of course! We invited him down. When Captain Hiskey—”
“How long’s he been here?”
She looked at him, startled by his tone. “Why, about twenty minutes. Why?”
“No,” Harold said. “Don’t ask questions.” He took each of them by an arm, began to walk them quickly towards the opening in the cliff. “Do you know exactly where McNulty is at the moment?”
“Well, they—my husband and Captain Hiskey and McNulty probably are in the control room now. McNulty was saying how interested he’d be in seeing how the asteroid was operated.”
That tied it. “You didn’t send up for him?” Harold asked. “The ship’s skiff brought him down?”
“Yes, it did. But what is the matter, Mr. Gage? Is—”
“And the skiff’s still here?” Harold said. “It’s inside the field lock?”
“I suppose so. I don’t know.”
“All right,” Harold said. He stopped before the opening. “Now listen carefully because we’re not likely to have much time!” He drew a quick deep breath. “First, where is the control room?”
“In the building in the space lock section,” Sally said. “The administration building. You saw it when you came down.” They were watching him, expressions puzzled and alarmed.
Harold nodded. “Yes, I remember. Now—you and everyone else on the asteroid is in very serious danger. McNulty is a real horror. He has a special weapon. The only way you can stay reasonably safe from it is to hide out behind good solid locked doors. I hope you’ll have some way of warning Professor Alston and whoever else is around to do the same thing. Anyone who’s in the open, isn’t behind walls, when McNulty cuts loose won’t have a chance. Not for a moment! Unless he belongs to the Prideful Sue’s crew. If you can get to a transmitter in the next few minutes, call the SP and tell them to come here and get in any way they can—in space armor. But transmitters aren’t going to stay operable very long. You’ll have to hurry.” He looked at their whitened faces. “Don’t think I’m crazy! The only reason Hiskey would have told you about McNulty, and the only reason McNulty would have showed himself, is that they’ve decided between them to take over the place.”
“But why?” cried Sally.
“Because we’re the next thing to lousy pirates. Because they think they can use this asteroid.” Harold started to turn away. “Now get inside, seal that door tight, move fast, and with luck you’ll stay alive.”
So this was one place guns wouldn’t be needed! In mentioning that, Jake Hiskey had made sure his navigator wouldn’t—quite out of habit and absentmindedly—be going down armed to the peaceful Alston asteroid and to the reunion with his sister. He knew this was a job I couldn’t buy, Harold thought. Even if Elisabeth hadn’t been involved.
He’d set off at a long lope as soon as the camouflaged door in the cliff snapped shut. The asteroid surface in this area was simulated hilly ground, slopes rising and dipping, occasional smooth slabs of meteorite rock showing through. Clusters of trees, shrubbery, cultivated grassy ground . . . The space lock section couldn’t be more than a few hundred yards away, but he couldn’t see it from here. Neither could anyone in the open see him approaching. Sally Alston had said she’d located them by using scanners. Hiskey and McNulty could spot him by the same means, but they wouldn’t be looking for him before they’d secured the control room. Standard raiding procedure . . . hit the nerve center of an installation as quickly as possible; take it, and the rest is paralyzed, helpless, silenced.
He checked an instant. A curious sensation, like a vibrating pressure on his eardrums, a tingling all through his nerves; it continued a few seconds, faded, returned, faded again . . . and the herd came suddenly around the side of the hill ahead of him. Some fifteen large gray-brown animals, a kind of antelope with thick corkscrew horns, running hard and fast. In the moment he saw them, startled, he took it for an indication that McNulty had released the toziens—and knew immediately it wasn’t that. Nothing ran from toziens; there was no time. The herd crossed his path with a rapid drumming of hoofs, pounded through thickets, wheeled and appeared about to slam head-on into a vertical cliff wall. At the last moment an opening was there in the rock, similar to the one out of which Sally Alston had stepped, five or six times as wide. The beasts plunged through it, shouldering and jostling one another, and the opening vanished behind the last of them.