“This is little, compared to any regular planet or satellite, or even the asteroids.
There’s only a few cubic kilometers of material there, and, as I said before, it’s a
decidedly unusual comet. You know the game ?”
“I’ve got it—and believe me, I’ll yank you back here a lot faster than you can jump
over there if any one of those lumps starts to fall on you! Is this drag line long enough ?”
“Yes, I’ve got a hundred meters here, and it’s only fifty meters over there to
where I’m going. So-long,” and with a light thrust of his feet he .dove head-foremost
across the intervening space, a heavy pike held out ahead of him. Straight as a bullet
he floated toward his objective, a jagged chunk many yards in diameter, taking the
shock of his landing by sliding along the pike-handle as its head struck the mass.
Then, bracing his feet against one lump, he pushed against its neighbor, and
under that steady pressure the enormous masses moved apart and kept on moving,
grinding among their fellows. Over and around them Stevens sprang, always watching
his line of retreat as well as that of his advance, until his exploring pike struck a lump of
apparently solid metal. Hooking the fragment toward him, he thrust savagely with his
weapon and was reassured—that object was not only metal, but it was metal so hard
that his pike-head of space-tempered alloy had not made an impression upon its
surface. Turning on his helmet light, he swung his heavy hammer repeatedly, but could
not break off even a small fragment.
“Found something, Steve?” Nadia’s voice came clearly in his ears.
“I’ll say I have! A hunk of solid, non-magnetic metal about the size of an office
desk. I can’t break off any of it, so guess we’ll have to grab the whole chunk.”
He hitched the end of his cable around the nugget, made sure that the loops
would not slip, and then, as Nadia tightened the line, he shoved mightily.
“All x, Nadia, she’s coming! Pull in my drag line as I sail over there, and I’ll help
you land her.”
Inside the Forlorn Hope the mass of metal was urged into the shop, where
Stevens clamped it immovably to the steel floor before he took off his space-suit.
“Why, it’s getting covered with snow, and the whole room is getting positively
cold!” Nadia exclaimed.
“Sure. Anything that comes in from space is cold, even if it’s been out only a few
minutes, and that hunk of stuff has been out for nobody knows how many million years.
It didn’t get much heat from the sun except at perihelion, you know, so it’s probably
somewhere around minus two hundred and sixty degrees now. I’ll have to throw a
heater on it for half an hour before we can touch it. And since this is more or less new
stuff to you, I’ll caution you—don’t try to touch anything that has just come in. That
hammer or pike would freeze your hand instantly, even though they’ve been out only a
little while. Before you touch anything, blow on it, like this, see ? If your breath freezes
solid on it, like that, don’t touch it—it’s cold.”
Under the infra-beams of the heater the mass of metal was brought to room
temperature and Stevens attacked it with his machine tools. Bit by bit the stubborn
material was torn from the lump. Through heavy goggles he watched the incandescent
mass in a refractory crucible, in the heart of the induction furnace.
“What do you think you’ve got—what you want?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t iron—it wouldn’t hold a magnet. It’s royal metal of some
kind. Base metals mostly melt at around fifteen hundred, and that crucible is still dry as
a bone at better than seventeen.”
“How are you going to separate out the tantalum and the others you want from
the ones that you don’t want ?”
“I’m afraid that I’m not going to, very well,” replied Stevens, with a wry grimace.
“What I don’t know about metallurgy would fill a library, and I’m probably the world’s
worst chemist. However, by a series of successive liquations I hope to separate out
fractions that I can use. Platinum melts somewhere around seventeen fifty, tantalum
about twenty-eight hundred, and tungsten not until ‘way up around thirty-three or four
hundred—and that, by the way, means lots of grief. Of course each fraction will
probably be an alloy of one kind or another, but I think maybe I’ll be able to make them
do.”
“But mayn’t that whole chunk be a pure metal ?”
“It’s conceivable, but not probable. There, she’s beginning to separate at just
below eighteen hundred! Platinum group coming out now, I think—platinum, rhodium,
iridium, and that gang, you know. While I’m doing this you might be getting those five
coils into exact resonance, if you want to.”
“Sure I want to,” and Nadia made her way across to the short-wave oscillator and
set to work.
After an hour or so, bent over her delicate task, she began to twitch uneasily,
then shrugged her shoulders impatiently.
“What’s the idea of staring at me so?” she broke out suddenly. “How do you
expect me to tune these things up if you . . .” She stopped abruptly, mouth open in
amazement as she turned toward Stevens. He had not been even looking at her, but
had turned a surprised face from his own task at the sound of her voice. “Excuse it,
please, Steve. I don’t know what’s the matter with me—getting jumpy, I guess.”
“I wish that was it, but I’m guessing it isn’t.” Face suddenly grim and hard,
Stevens leaped to the communicator plate and shot the beam out into space.
“You’re a fine-tuned instrument yourself, ace, and I’ll bet you’ve detected
something . . . I thought so! There’s the answer—the guy that was looking at you!”
Plainly there was revealed upon the plate a small, spherical space-ship, very like
the one that had attacked and destroyed the Arcturus. After Nadia had taken one glance
at it Stevens shut off the power and leaped out into the shop. He closed all the bulkhead
doors and airbreak openings, then closed and secured the massive insulating door of
the lifeboat in which they had made their headquarters. Then, after they had again put
on the space-suits they had taken off such a short time before, he extinguished all the
lights and hooded the communicator screen before he ventured again to glance out into
the void.
“If I had a brain in my head, instead of the pint of bean soup I’ve got up there,
we’d have worn these when they cut up the Arcturus, and saved us a lot of mental wear
and tear,” he remarked. “They were right there in the lockers all the time, and I knew it.”
“Well, we got away, anyway. You can’t be blamed for that—you couldn’t be
expected to think of everything at once. I think you did wonderfully well as it was—we
didn’t have much time, you know.”
“No, but I should have thought of anything as obvious as that, anyway. Wonder
how they found us? Whether they detected us, or came out to this comet after metal,
same as we did, and found us accidentally? However, it works out to the same
endpoint—they’re apparently out to get us. I’m afraid this is going to be a whole lot like a
rabbit righting back at a man with a gun; but we’ll sure try to nibble us off a lunch while
they’re getting a square meal . . . here they come!”
The enemy sphere launched its flaming plane of force, and the Forlorn Hope
shuddered in every plate and member as its apex was severed cleanly under the
impact. Instantly Stevens hurled his only weapons. Flaming ultraviolet and dully glowing
infra-red, the twin beams lashed out; but their utmost force was of slight moment to the
enormous power driving the enemy screens. Two circular spots of cherry red in space
were the only results of Stevens’ attack, and the next fierce cut sheared away the two
projectors and, incidentally, a full half of the fifty-inch armor of the leading edge.
“Then we’re checking out now?” Nadia asked quietly, as the man’s hands
dropped from his useless controls. “I’m sorrier than I can say, lover. Oh, sweetheart,
how I want to live with you! But at least, I’m glad that I can go out with you,” and her
glorious eyes were shining with unshed tears as she pressed as close to his side as the
cumbersome suits would permit.
“Don’t throw in the towel yet. Perhaps they want to capture us alive, like they did
before; and if so, we may be able to hide out on them somewhere and pull off another
escape. Things don’t look any too bright, perhaps, but I don’t quit until my number is