Jupiter, or can’t you tell yet?”
“It looks more like Jupiter than any of the satellites, I think. Here’s the observation
you told me to take.”
“Looks like Jupiter,” he agreed, after he had rapidly checked her figures. “We’ll
pass very close to one of those two satellites—probably Ganymede—which is fine for
our scheme. All four of the major satellites have water and atmosphere, but Ganymede,
being largest, is best for our purposes. We’ve got a couple of days yet—just about time
to finish up. Let’s get going—you know what to do.”
“Steve, I’m afraid of it. It’s too dangerous—isn’t there some other way?”
“None that I can see. The close watch they’re keeping on every bit of this junk
makes it our only chance for a getaway. I’m pretty sure I can do it—but if I should
happen to get nipped, just use enough power to let them know you’re here, and you
won’t be any worse off than if I hadn’t tried to pull off this stunt.”
He donned a space-suit, filled a looped belt with tools, picked up a portable
power-drill, and stepped into the tiny airlock. Nadia deftly guided their segment against
one of the larger fragments and held it there with a gentle, steady pressure, while
Stevens, a light cable paying out behind him, clambered carefully over the wreckage,
brought his drill into play, and disappeared inside the huge wedge. In less than an hour
he returned without mishap and reported to the glowing girl.
“Just like shooting fish down a well! Most of the accumulator cells were tight, and
installing the relays wasn’t a bad job at all. Believe me, girl, there’ll be junk filling all the
space between here and Saturn when we touch them off!”
“Wonderful, Steve!” Nadia exclaimed. “It won’t be so bad seeing you go into the
others, now that you have this one all rigged up.”
Around and around the mass of wreckage they crept, and in each of the larger
sections Stevens connected up the enormous fixed or dirigible projectors to whatever
accumulator cells were available through sensitive relays, all of which he could close by
means of one radio impulse. The long and dangerous task done, he stood at the lookout
plate, studying the huge disk which had been the upper portion of the lower half of the
Arcturus, frowning in thought. Nadia reached over his shoulder and switched off the
plate.
“Nix on that second job, big fellow!” she declared. “They aren’t really necessary,
and you’re altogether too apt to be killed trying to get them. It’s too ghastly — I won’t
stand for your trying it, so that ends it.”
“We ought to have them, really,” he protested. “With those special tools, cutting
torches, and all that stuff, we’d be sitting pretty. We’ll lose weeks of time by not having
them.”
“We’ll just have to lose it, then. You can’t get ’em, any more than a baby can get
the moon, so stop crying about it,” she went over the familiar argument for the twentieth
time. “That stuff up there is all grinding together like cakes of ice in a floe; the particular
section you want is in plain sight of whoever is on watch; and those tools and things are
altogether too heavy to handle. You’re a husky brute, I know, but even you couldn’t
begin to handle them, even if you had good going. I couldn’t help you very much, even if
you’d let me try; and the fact that you so positively refuse to let me come along shows
how dangerous you know the attempt is bound to be. You’d probably never even get up
there alive, to say nothing of getting back here. No, Steve, that’s out like a light.”
“I sure wish they’d left us weightless for a while, sometime, if only for an hour or
two,” he mourned.
“But they didn’t!” she retorted, practically. “So we’re just out of luck to that extent.
Our time is about up, too. It’s time you worked us back to the tail end of this
procession—or rather, the head end, since we’re traveling ‘down’ now.”
Stevens took the controls and slowly worked along the outer edge of the mass,
down toward its extremity. Nadia put one hand upon his shoulder and he glanced
around.
“Thanks, Steve. We have a perfectly wonderful chance as it is, and we’ve gone
so far with our scheme together that it would be a crying shame not to be able to go
through with it. I’d hate like sin to have to surrender to them now, and that’s all I could
do if anything should become of you. Besides . . . . .” her voice died away into silence.
“Sure, you’re right,” he hastily replied, dodging the implication of that unfinished
sentence. “I couldn’t figure out anything that looked particularly feasible, anyway—that’s
why I didn’t try it. We’ll pass it up.”
Soon they arrived at their objective and maintained a position well in the van, but
not sufficiently far ahead of the rest to call forth a restraining ray from their captors.
Already strongly affected by the gravitational pull of the mass of the satellite, many of
the smaller portions of the wreck, not directly held by the tractors, began to separate
from the main mass. As each bit left its place another beam leaped out, until it became
apparent that no more were available, and Stevens strapped the girl and himself down
before two lookout plates.
“Now for it, Nadia!” he exclaimed, and simultaneously threw on the power of his
own projectors and sent out the radio impulse which closed the relays he had so
carefully set. They were thrown savagely against the restraining straps and held there
by an enormous weight as the gigantic dirigible projectors shot their fragment of the
wreck away from the comparatively slight force which had been acting upon it, but they
braced themselves and strained their muscles in order to watch what was happening.
As the relays in the various fragments closed, the massed power of the accumulators
was shorted dead across the converters and projectors instead of being fed into them
gradually through ( the controls of the pilot, with a result comparable to that of the
explosion of an ammunition dump. Most of the masses, whose projectors were fed by
comparatively few accumulator cells, darted away entire with a stupendous
acceleration. A few of them, however, received the unimpeded flow of complete
batteries. Those projectors tore loose from even their massive supports and crashed
through anything opposing them like huge, armor-piercing projectiles. It was a spectacle
to stagger the imagination, and Stevens grinned as he turned to the girl, who was
staring in wide-eyed amazement.
“Well, ace, I think they’re busy enough now so that it’ll be safe to take that long-
wanted look at their controls,” and he flashed the twin beams of his lookout light out
beyond the upper half of the Arcturus — only to see them stop abruptly in mid-space.
Even the extremely short carrier-wave of Roeser’s Rays could not go through the
invisible barrier thrown out by the tiny, but powerful globe of space.
“No penetration?” Nadia asked.
“Flattened ’em out cold. ‘However,’ as the fox once remarked about the grapes,
‘I’ll bet they’re sour, anyway.’ We’ll have some stuff of our own, one of these days. I sure
hope the fireworks we started back there keep those birds amused until we get out of
sight, because if I use much more power on these projectors we may not have juice
enough left to stop with.”
“You’re using enough now to suit me—I’m so heavy I can hardly lift a finger!”
“You’d better lift ’em, ace’! You’ve got to watch what’s going on back there while I
navigate us around this moon.”
“All x, chief . . . They’ve got their hands full, apparently. Those rays are shooting
around all over the sky. It looks as though they were trying to capture four or five things
at once with each one.”
“Good! Tell me when the moon cuts them off.”
At the awful acceleration they were using, which constantly increased the terrific
velocity with which they had been traveling when they made good their escape, it was
not long until they had placed the satellite between them and the enemy; then Stevens
cut down and reversed his power. Such was their speed, however, that a long detour
was necessary in order to reduce it to a safe landing rate. As soon as this could be
done Stevens headed for the morning zone and dropped the Hope rapidly toward the
surface of that new, strange world. Details could not be distinguished at first because of
an all-enshrouding layer of cloud, but the rising sun dispelled the mist, and when they
had descended to within a few thousand feet of the surface their vision was
unobstructed. Immediately below them the terrain was mountainous and heavily
wooded; while far to the east the rays of a small, pale sun glinted upon a vast body of