Asimov, Isaac - Lucky Starr 02 - Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids

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THE LUCKY STARR SERIES by Isaac Asimov
David Starr: Space Ranger
Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids
Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus
Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury
Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter
Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn
Lucky Starr
and the
Pirates of the Asteroids
by Isaac Asimov
Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids
Copyright 1953 by Doubleday & Co., Inc.
All rights reserved.
This edition published in 1978 by Gregg Press
A Division of G. K. Hall & Co.
by arrangement with Doubleday & Co., Inc.
and with the cooperation of Isaac Asimov
Jacket and frontmatter art by Wayne Barlowe Jacket and frontmatter design by John
Balta
Printed on permanent/durable acid-free paper and bound in the United States of
America
First Printing, October 197H
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Asimov, Isaac, 1920-
Lucky Starr and the pirates of the asteroids.
(The Lucky Starr series)
Reprint of the 1st ed. published by Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y.
I. Title. II. Series.
PZ3.A8316Lu 1978 [PS3551.S5] 813'.5'4 78-13135 ISBN 0-8398-2487-4
PREFACE
Back in the 1950s, I wrote a series of six derring-do novels about David "Lucky" Starr
and his battles against malefactors within the Solar System. Each of the six took place in a
different region of the system and in each case I made use of the astonomical facts-as they
were then known.
Now, a quarter-century later, Gregg Press is bringing out the novels in new hardcover
editions; but what a quarter-century it has been! More has been learned about the worlds of
our Solar System in this last quarter-century than in all the thousands of years of earlier
observations.
Prior to the 1950s, you see, we could only look from Earth's surface; since then, we
have been able to send out rocket probes to take photographs and make studies at close
range.
The only one of the six Lucky Starr novels that has remained untouched by this-at least
so far-is LUCKY STARR AND THE PIRATES OF THE ASTEROIDS, which was written in
1953. There is evidence that many of the asteroids may be a little darker and just a little
larger than had been thought earlier, but that makes very little difference.
Therefore, Lucky can fight the pirates and engage in his deadly
VI
Preface
duels right now just as he did a quarter-century ago, when this book was written. It I had
to write the novel today, I would hardly have to change a word.
isaac asimov
DEDICATION
To Frederik Pohl,
That contradiction in terms-
A lovable agent.
CONTENTS
chapter 1 The Doomed Ship
chapter 2 Vermin of Space
chapter 3 Duel in Word
chapter 4 Duel in Deed
chapter 5 The Hermit on the Rock
chapter 6 What the Hermit Knew
chapter 7 To Ceres
chapter 8 Bigman Takes Over
chapter 9 The Asteroid That Wasn't
chapter 10 The Asteroid That Was
chapter 11 At Close Quarters
chapter 12 Ship versus Ship
chapter 13 Raid!
chapter 14 To Ganymede via the Sun
chapter 15 Part of the Answer
chapter 16 All of the Answer
CHAPTER 1
THE DOOMED SHIP
Fifteen minutes to zero time! The Atlas waited to take off. The sleek, burnished lines of
the space-ship glittered in the bright Earthlight that filled the Moon's night sky. Its blunt prow
pointed upward into empty space. Vacuum surrounded it and the dead pumice of the
Moon's surface was under it. The number of its crew was zero. There wasn't a living person
aboard. * * *
Dr. Hector Conway, Chief Councilor of Science, said, "What time is it, Gus?"
He felt uncomfortable in the Moon offices of the Council. On Earth he would have been
at the very top of the stone and steel needle they called Science Tower. He would have been
able to look out the window toward International City.
Here on the Moon they did their best. The offices had mock windows with brilliantly
designed Earth scenes behind them. They were colored naturally, and lights within them
brightened and softened during the day, simulating morning, noon, and evening. During the
sleep periods they even shone a dim, dark blue.
It wasn't enough, though, for an Earthman like Con-way. He knew that if he broke
through the glass of the windows there would be only painted miniatures before
14 LUCKY STARR
his eyes, and if he got behind that, then there would be just another room, or maybe the
solid rock of the Moon.
Dr. Augustus Henree, whom Conway had addressed, looked at his wrist. He said,
between puffs at his pipe, "There's still fifteen minutes. There's no point in worrying. The
Atlas is in perfect shape. I checked it myself yesterday."
"I know that." Conway's hair was pure white and he looked older than the lank,
thin-faced Henree, though they were the same age. He said, "It's Lucky I'm worried about."
"Lucky?"
Conway smiled sheepishly. "I'm catching the habit, I'm afraid. I'm talking about David
Starr. It's just that everyone calls him Lucky these days. Haven't you heard them?"
"Lucky Starr, eh? The name suits him. But what about him? This is all his idea, after all."
"Exactly. It's the sort of idea he gets. I think he'll tackle the Sirian Consulate on the Moon
next."
"I wish he would."
"Don't joke. Sometimes I think you encourage him in his idea that he ought to do
everything as a one-man job. It's why I came here to the Moon, to keep an eye on him, not to
watch the ship."
"If that's what you came here for, Hector, you're not on the job."
"Oh well, I can't follow him about like a mother hen. But Bigman is with him. I told the little
fellow I would skin him alive if Lucky decided to invade the Sirian Consulate singlehanded."
THE DOOMED SHIP 15
Henree laughed.
"I tell you he'd do it," grumbled Conway. "What's worse, he'd get away with it, of course."
"Well, then."
"It would just encourage him, and then someday he'll take one risk too many, and he's
too valuable a man to lose!" * * *
John Bigman Jones teetered across the packed clay flooring, carrying his stein of beer
with the utmost care. They didn't extend the pseudo-gravity fields outside the city itself, so
that out here at the space-port you had to do the best you could under the Moon's own
gravity field. Fortunately John Bigman Jones had been born and bred on Mars, where the
gravity was only two fifths normal anyway, so it wasn't too bad. Bight now he weighed twenty
pounds. On Mars he would have weighed fifty, and on the Earth one hundred and twenty.
He got to the sentry, who had been watching him with amused eyes. The sentry was
dressed in the uniform of the Lunar National Guard, and he was used to the gravity.
John Bigman Jones said, "Hey. Don't stand there so gloomylike. I brought you a beer.
Have it on me."
The sentry looked surprised, then said regretfully, "I can't. Not when I'm on duty, you
know."
"Oh well. I can handle it myself, I guess. I'm John Bigman Jones. Call me Bigman." He
only came up to the sentry's chin and the sentry wasn't particularly tall, but Bigman held out
his hand as though he were reaching down with it.
16 LUCKY STARR
"I'm Bert Wilson. You from Mars?" The sentry looked at Bigman's scarlet and vermilion
hip boots. Nobody but a Martian farm boy would let himself be caught dead in space with
them.
Bigman looked down at them proudly. "You bet. I'm stuck here for about a week. Great
space, what a rock the Moon is. Don't any of you guys ever go out on the surface?"
"Sometimes. When we have to. There isn't much to see there."
"I sure wish I could go. I hate being cooped up."
"There's a surface lock back there."
Bigman followed the thumb that had been jerked back across the sergeant's shoulder.
The corridor (rather poorly lit at this distance from Luna City) narrowed into a recess in the
wall.Bigman said, "I don't have a suit."
"You couldn't go out even if you had one. No one's allowed out without a special pass for
a while."
"How come?"
Wilson yawned. "They've got a ship out there that's getting set to go," he looked at his
watch, "in about twelve minutes. Maybe the heat will be off after it's gone. I don't know the
story on it."
The sentry rocked on the balls of his feet and watched the last of the beer drain down
Bigman's throat. He said, "Say, did you get the beer at Patsy's Port Bar? Is it crowded?"
"It's empty. Listen, tell you what. It'll take you fifteen seconds to get in there and have
one. I've got nothing to
THE DOOMED SHIP 17
do. I'll stay right here and make sure nothing happens while you're gone."
Wilson looked longingly in the direction of the Port Bar. "I better not."
"It's up to you."
Neither one of them, apparently, was conscious of the figure that drifted past behind
them along the corridor and into the recess where the space-locks huge door barred the
way to the surface.
Wilson's feet took him a few steps toward the Bar, as though they were dragging the
rest of him. Then he said, "Nah! I better not." * * *
Ten minutes to zero time.
It had been Lucky Starr's idea. He had been in Con-way's home office the day the news
arrived that the T.S.S. Waltham Zachary had been gutted by pirates, its cargo gone, its
officers frozen corpses in space and most of the men captives. The ship itself had put up a
pitifully futile fight and had been too damaged to be worth the pirate's salvage. They had
taken everything movable though, the instruments, of course, and even the motors.
Lucky said, "It's the asteroid belt that's the enemy. One hundred thousand rocks."
"More than that." Conway spat out his cigarette. "But what can we do? Ever since the
Terrestrial Empire has been a going concern, the asteroids have been more than we could
handle. A dozen times we've gone in there to clean out nests of them, and each time we've
left enough to breed the troubles again. Twenty-five years ago, when----"
18 LUCKY STARR
The white-haired scientist stopped short. Twenty-five years ago Lucky's parents had
been killed in space and he himself, a little boy, had been cast adrift.
Lucky's calm brown eyes showed no emotion. He said, "The trouble is we don't even
know where all the asteroids are."
"Naturally not. It would take a hundred ships a hundred years to get the necessary
information for the sizable asteroids. And even then the pull of Jupiter would be forever
changing asteroidal orbits here and there."
"We might still try. If we sent out one ship, the pirates might not know it was an
impossible job and fear the consequences of a real mapping. If the word got out that we had
started a mapping survey, the ship would be attacked."
"And then what?"
"Suppose we sent out an automatic ship, completely equipped, but with no human
personnel."
"It would be an expensive thing to do."
"It might be worth it. Suppose we equipped it with lifeboats automatically designed to
leave the ship when its instruments recorded the energy pattern of an approaching
hyperatomic motor. What do you suppose the pirates would do?"
"Shoot the lifeboats into metal drift, board the ship, and take it to their base."
"Or one of their bases. Right. And if they see the lifeboats try to get away, they won't be
surprised at finding no crew aboard. After all, it would be an unarmed survey ship. You
wouldn't expect the crew to attempt resistance."
THE DOOMED SHIP 19
"Well, what are you getting at?"
"Suppose further that the ship is wired to explode once its temperature is raised to
more than twenty degrees absolute, as it certainly would if it were brought into an asteroid
hangar."
"You're proposing a booby trap, then?"
"A gigantic one. It would blow an asteroid apart. It might destroy dozens of pirate ships.
Furthermore, the observatories at Ceres, Vesta, Juno, or Pallas might pick up the flash.
Then, if we could locate surviving pirates, we might get information that would be very useful
indeed."
"I see."
And so they started work on the Atlas. * * *
The shadowy figure in the recess leading to the Moon's surface worked with sure
quickness. The sealed controls of the air-lock gave under the needle beam of a
micro-heatgun. The shielding metal disc swung open. Busy, black-gloved fingers flew for a
moment. Then the disc was replaced and fused tightly back by a wider and cooler beam
from the same heatgun.
The cave door of the lock yawned. The alarm that rang routinely whenever it did so was
silent this time, its circuits behind the tampered disc disarranged. The figure entered the
lock and the door closed behind him. Before he opened the surface door that faced out into
the vacuum, he unrolled the pliant plastic he carried under his arm. He scrambled into it, the
material covering him wholly and clinging to him, broken only by a strip of clear silicone
plastic across his eyes. A small cylinder of
20 LUCKY STARR
liquid oxygen was clamped to a short hose that lead to the headpiece and was hooked
on to the belt. It was a semi-space-suit, designed for the quick trip across an airless surface,
not guaranteed to be serviceable for stretches of more than half an hour.
* * *
Bert Wilson, startled, swiveled his head. "Did you hear that?"
Bigman gaped at the sentry. "I didn't hear anything."
"I could swear it was a lock door closing. There isn't any alarm, though."
"Is there supposed to be?"
"Sure. You've got to know when one door is open. It's a bell where there's air and a light
where there isn't. Otherwise someone is liable to open the other door and blow all the air out
of a ship or corridor."
"All right. If there's no alarm, there's nothing to worry about."
"I'm not so sure." With flat leaps, each one covering twenty feet in the Moon's baby
gravity, the sentry passed up the corridor to the air-lock recess. He stopped at a wall panel
on the way and activated three separate banks of ceiling Floressoes, turning the area into a
noonday of light.
Bigman followed, leaping clumsily and in perpetual danger of overbalancing into a slow
nose landing.
Wilson had his blaster out. He inspected the door, then turned to look up the corridor
again. "Are you sure you didn't hear anything?"
"Nothing," said Bigman. "Of course, I wasn't listening."
THE DOOMED SHIP 21
Five minutes to zero time.
Pumice kicked up as the space-suited figure moved slow-motion toward the Atlas. The
space-ship glittered in the Earthlight, but on the Moon's airless surface the light did not carry
even an inch into the shadow of the ridge that hemmed in the port.
In three long leaps the figure moved across the lighted portion and into the pitchy
shadow of the ship itself.
He moved up the ladder hand over hand, flinging himself into an upward drift that carried
him ten rungs at a time. He came to the ship's air-lock. A moment at the controls and it
yawned open, then closed.
The Atlas had a passenger. One passenger!
* * *
The sentry stood before the corridor air-lock and considered its appearance dubiously.
Bigman was rattling on. He said, "I been here nearly a week. I'm supposed to follow my
side-kick around and make sure he doesn't get into trouble. How's that for a space wrangler
like me. I haven't had a chance to get away----"
The anguished sentry said, "Give it a rest, friend. Look, you're a nice kid and all that, but
let's have it some other
• • ?>
time.
For a moment he stared at the control seal. "That's funny," he said.
Bigman was swelling ominously. His little face had reddened. He seized the sentry by
the elbow and swung him about, almost overbalancing himself as he did so.
"Hey, bud, who're you calling a kid?"
"Look, go away!"
22 LUCKY STARR
"Just a minute. Let's get something straight. Don't think I let myself get pushed around
because I'm not as tall as the next fellow. Put 'em up. Go ahead. Get your fists up or I'll
splatter your nose all over your face."
He was sparring and slipping about.
Wilson looked at him with astonishment. "What's got into you? Stop being foolish."
"Scared?"
"I can't fight on duty. Besides, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. I've just got a job to do
and I haven't got any time for you."
Bigman lowered his fists. "Hey, I guess the ship's taking off."
There was no sound, of course, since sound would not travel through a vacuum, but the
ground under their feet vibrated softly in response to the hammer blows of a rocket exhaust
lifting a ship off a planet.
"That's it, all right." Wilson's forehead creased. "Guess there's no use making a report.
It's too late anyway." He had forgotten about the control seal.
* * *
Zero time!
The ceramic-lined exhaust pit yawned under the Atlas and the main rockets blasted
their fury into it. Slowly and majestically the ship lifted and moved upward ponderously. Its
speed increased. It pierced the black sky, shrinking until it was only a star among stars, and
then it was gone. * * *
Dr. Henree looked at his watch for the fifth time and said, "Well, it's gone. It must be
gone now." He pointed with the stem of his pipe to the dial.
THE DOOMED SHIP 23
Conway said, "Let's check with the port authorities."
Five seconds later they were looking at the empty space-port on the visiscreen. The
exhaust pit was still open. Even in the near-ultimate frigidity of the Moon's dark side it was
still steaming.
Conway shook his head. "It was a beautiful ship."
"Still is."
"I think of it in the past. In a few days it will be a rain of molten metal. It's a doomed ship."
"Let's hope that there's a pirate base somewhere that's also doomed."
Henree nodded somberly.
They both turned as the door opened. It was only Bigman.
He broke into a grin. "Oh, boy, it was sure nice coming in to Luna City. You could feel
the pounds going back on with each step you took." He stamped his feet and hopped two or
three times. "See," he said, "you try that out where I was and you hit the ceiling and look like
one big fool."
Conway frowned. "Where's Lucky?"
Bigman said, "I know where he is. I know where he is every minute. Say, the Atlas has
just taken off."
"I know that," said Conway. "And where is Lucky?"
"On the Atlas, of course. Where do you think he'd be?"
CHAPTER 2
VERMIN OF SPACE
Dr. Henree dropped his pipe and it bounced on the linolite flooring. He paid it no
attention.
"What!"
Conway reddened and his face stood out, plumply pink, against his snowy hair. "Is this a
joke?"
"No. He got on five minutes before it blasted. I talked to the sentry, guy called Wilson,
and kept him from interfering. I had to pick a fight with the fellow and I would have given him
the old bingo-bango," he demonstrated the one-two punch with quick, hard blows at the
atmosphere, "but he backed off."
"You let him? You didn't warn us?"
"How could I? I've got to do what Lucky says. He said he had to get on at the last minute
and without anyone knowing, or you and Dr. Henree would have stopped him."
Conway groaned. "He did it. By space, Gus, I should have known better than to trust that
pint-sized Martian. Bigman, you fool! You know that ship's a booby trap."
"Sure. Lucky knows it too. He says not to send out ships after him or things will be
ruined."
"They will, will they? There'll be men after him within the hour just the same."
Henree clutched his friend's sleeve. "Maybe not,
26 LUCKY STARR
Hector. We don't know what he's planning to do, but we can trust him to scramble out
safely whatever it is. Let's not interfere."
Conway fell back, trembling with anger and anxiety.
Bigman said, "He says we're to meet him on Ceres, and also, Dr. Conway, he says
you're to control your temper."
"You----" began Conway, and Bigman left the room in
a hurry. * * *
The orbit of Mars lay behind and the sun was a shrunken thing.
Lucky Starr loved the silence of space. Since he had graduated and joined the Council
of Science, space had been his home, rather than any planetary surface. And the Atlas was
a comfortable ship. It had been provisioned for a full crew with only so much omitted as
might be explained by consumption before reaching the asteroids. In every way the Atlas
was intended to look as though, until the moment of the pirates' appearance, it had been
fully manned.
So Lucky ate Syntho-steak from the yeast beds of Venus, Martian pastry, and boneless
chicken from Earth.
I'll get fat, he thought, and watched the skies.
He was close enough to make out the larger asteroids. There was Ceres, the largest of
all, nearly five hundred miles in diameter. Vesta was on the other side of the sun, but Juno
and Pallas were in sight.
If he were to use the ship's telescope, he would have found more, thousands more,
maybe tens of thousands. There was no end to them.
Once it had been thought that there had been a planet
VERMIN OF SPACE 27
between Mars and Jupiter and that geologic ages earlier it had exploded into
fragments, but that wasn't so. It was Jupiter that was the villain. Its giant gravitational
influence had disrupted space for hundreds of millions of miles about it in the eons when the
Solar System was being formed. The cosmic gravel between itself and Mars could never
coalesce into a single planet with Jupiter pulling and pulling. Instead it coalesced into
myriads of little worlds.
There were the four largest, each a hundred or more miles in diameter. There were
fifteen hundred more that were ten and a hundred miles in diameter. After that there were
thousands (no one knew exactly how many) that were between one and ten miles in
diameter and tens of thousands that were less than a mile in diameter but still as large or
larger than the Great Pyramid.
They were so plentiful that astronomers called them "the vermin of space."
The asteroids were scattered over the entire region between Mars and Jupiter, each
whirling in its own orbit. No other planetary system known to man in all the Galaxy had such
an asteroid belt.
In a sense it was good. The asteroids had formed steppingstones out toward the major
planets. In a sense it was bad. Any criminal who could escape to the asteroids was safe
from capture by all but the most improbable chance. No police force could search every one
of those flying mountains.
The smaller asteroids were no man's land. There were well-manned astronomical
observatories on the largest, notably on Ceres. There were beryllium mines on Pallas,
28 LUCKY STARR
while Vesta and Juno were important fueling stations. But that still left fifty thousand
sizable asteroids over which the Terrestrial Empire had no control whatever. A few were
large enough to harbor fleets. Some were too small for more than a single speed-cruiser
with additional space, perhaps, for a six-month supply of fuel, food, and water.
And it was impossible to map them. Even in the ancient, preatomic times, before space
travel, when only fifteen hundred or so were known, and those the largest, mapping had
been impossible. Their orbits had been carefully calculated via telescopic observation and
still asteroids were forever being "lost," then "found" again.
* * *
Lucky snapped out of his reverie. The sensitive Er-gometer was picking up pulsations
from the outer reaches. He was at the control board in a step.
The steady energy outpourings of the sun, whether direct or by way of the relatively tiny
reflected dribbles from the planets, were canceled out on the meter. What was coming in
now were the characteristically intermittent energy pulses of a hyperatomic motor.
Lucky threw in the Ergograph connection and the energy pattern traced itself out in a
series of lines. He followed the graphed paper as it emerged and his jaw muscles
hardened.
There had always been a chance that the Atlas might meet an ordinary trading ship or
passenger liner, but the energy pattern was none of that. The approaching ship had motors
of advanced design, and different from any of the Terrestrial fleet.
VERMIN OF SPACE 29
Five minutes passed before he had enough spread of measurement to be able to
calculate the distance and direction of the energy source.
He adjusted the visiplate for telescopic viewing and the star field speckled enormously.
Carefully he searched among the infinitely silent, infinitely distant, infinitely motionless stars
until a flicker of movement caught his eyes and the Ergometer's reading dials lined up at
multiple zero.
It was a pirate. No doubt! He could make out its outlines by the half that glittered in the
sun and by the port lights in the shaded half. It was a thin, graceful vessel, having the look of
speed and maneuverability. It had an alien look about it, too.
Sirian design, thought Lucky.
He watched the ship grow slowly larger on the screen. Was it such a ship that his father
and mother watched on the last day of their lives?
* * *
He scarcely remembered his father and mother, but he had seen pictures of them and
had heard endless stories about Lawrence and Barbara Starr from Henree and Conway.
They had been inseparable, the tall, grave Gus Henree, the choleric, persevering Hector
Conway, and the quick, laughing Larry Starr. They had gone to school together, graduated
simultaneously, entered the Council as one and done all their assignments as a team.
And then Lawrence Starr had been promoted and assigned to a tour of duty on Venus.
He, his wife, and his four-year-old son were Venus-bound when the pirate ship attacked.
30 LUCKY STARR
For years Lucky had unhappily imagined what that last hour upon the dying ship must
have been like. First, the crippling of the main power drives at the stern of the ship while
pirate and victim were still apart. Then the blasting of the air-locks and the boarding. The
crew and passengers scrambling into space-suits against the loss of air when the air-locks
caved in. The crew armed and waiting. The passengers huddling in the interior rooms
without much hope. Women weeping. Children screaming.
His father wasn't among the hiders. His father was a Council member. He had been
armed and fighting. Lucky^was sure of that. He had one memory, a short one that had been
burned into his mind. His father, a tall, strong man, was standing with blaster raised and face
set in what must have been one of the few moments of cold rage in his life, as the door of
the control room crashed inward in a cloud of black smoke. And his mother, face wet and
smudged but clearly seen through the space-suit face-plate, was forcing him into a small
lifeboat.
"Don't cry, David, it will be all right."
Those were the only words he remembered ever having heard his mother say. Then
there was thunder behind him and he was pressed back against a wall.
They found him in the lifeboat two days later, when they followed its coldly automatic
radio calls for help.
The government had launched a tremendous campaign against the asteroid pirates
immediately afterward and the Council had lent that drive every last ounce of their
VERMIN OF SPACE 31
own effort. For the pirates it turned out that to attack and kill key men of the Council of
Science was bad business. Such asteroid hideouts as were located were blasted into dust,
and the pirate menace was reduced to the merest flicker for twenty years.
But often Lucky wondered if they had ever located the particular pirate ship that had
carried the men who had killed his parents. There was no way of telling.
And now the menace had revived in a less spectacular but far more dangerous fashion.
Piracy wasn't a matter of individual jabs any longer. It bore the appearance of an organized
attack on Terrestrial commerce. There was more to it. From the nature of the warfare
carried on Lucky felt certain that one mind, one strategic direction, lay behind it. That one
mind, he knew, he would have to find. * * *
He lifted his eyes to the Ergometer once more. The energy recordings were strong now.
The other vessel was well within the distance at which space courtesy required routine
messages of mutual identification. For that matter, it was well within the distance at which a
pirate might have made its initial hostile move.
The floor shuddered under Lucky. It wasn't a blaster bolt from the other ship, but rather
the recoil of a departing lifeboat. The energy pulses had become strong enough to activate
their automatic controls.
Another shudder. And another. Five altogether.
He watched the oncoming ship closely. Often pirates shot up such lifeboats, partly out of
the perverted fun of
32 LUCKY STARR
it and partly to prevent escapees from describing the vessel, assuming they had not
done so already through the sub-ether.
This time, however, the ship ignored the lifeboats altogether. It approached within
locking range. Its magnetic grapples shot out, clamped on the Atlas's hull, and the two
vessels were suddenly welded together, their motions through space well matched.
Lucky waited.
He heard the air-lock open, then shut. He heard the clang of feet and the sound of
helmets being undipped, then the sound of voices.
He didn't move.
A figure appeared in the door. Helmet and gauntlets had been removed, but the rest of
the man was still swathed in ice-coated space-suit. Space-suits had a habit of doing that
when one entered from the near-absolute zero of space into the warm moist air of the
interior of a ship. The ice was beginning to melt.
The pirate caught sight of Lucky only when he was two full steps into the control room.
He stopped, his face frozen in an almost comical expression of surprise. Lucky had time to
note the sparse black hair, the long nose, and the dead white scar that ran from nostril to
canine tooth splitting the upper lip into two unequal parts.
Lucky bore the pirate's astonished scrutiny calmly. He had no fear of recognition.
Councilmen on active duty always worked without publicity with the very thought that a
too-well-known face would diminish their usefulness. His own father's face had appeared
over the sub-ether only after his death. With fleeting bitterness Lucky
VERMIN OF SPACE 33
thought that perhaps better publicity during life might have prevented the pirate attack.
But that was silly, he knew. By the time the pirates had seen Lawrence Starr the attack had
proceeded too far to be stopped.
Lucky said, "I've got a blaster. I'll use it only if you reach for yours. Don't move."
The pirate had opened his mouth. He closed it again.
Lucky said, "If you want to call the rest, go ahead."
The pirate stared suspiciously, then, eyes firmly on Lucky's blaster, yelled, "Blinking
Space, there's a ripper with a gat here."
There was laughter at that, and a voice shouted, "Quiet!"
Another man stepped into the room. "Step aside, Dingo," he said.
His space-suit was off entirely and he was an incongruous sight aboard ship. His
clothing might have come out of the most fashionable tailor shop in International City, and
would have suited better a dinner party back on Earth. His shirt had a silken look you got
only out of the best plastex. Its iridescence was subtle rather than garish, and his
tight-ankled breeches blended in so well that, but for the ornamented belt, it would have
seemed one garment. He wore a wristband that matched his belt and a fluffy, sky-blue neck
sash. His crisp brown hair was curly and looked as though it received frequent attention.
He was half a head shorter than Lucky, but from the way he carried himself the young
Councilman could see that any assumption of softness he might make on the basis of the
man's dude costume would be quite wrong.
34 LUCKY STARR
The newcomer said pleasantly, "Anton is my name. Would you put down your gun?"
Lucky said, "And be shot?"
"You may be shot eventually, but not at the moment. I would like to question you first."
Lucky held fast.
Anton said, "I keep my word." A tiny flush appeared on his cheekbones. "It is my only
virtue as men count virtue, but I hold fast to it."
Lucky put down his blaster and Anton picked it up. He handed it to the other pirate.
"Put it away, Dingo, and get out of here." He turned to Lucky. "The other passengers got
away in the lifeboats? Right?"
Lucky said, "That's an obvious trap, Anton----"
"Captain Anton, please." He smiled, but his nostrils flared.
"Well, then, it's a trap, Captain Anton. It was obvious that you knew there were no
passengers or crew on this ship. You knew it long before you boarded."
"Indeed? How do you make that out?"
"You approached the ship without signaling and without a warning shot. You made no
particular speed. You ignored the lifeboats when they shot out. Your men entered the ship
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THELUCKYSTARRSERIESbyIsaacAsimovDavidStarr:SpaceRangerLuckyStarrandthePiratesoftheAsteroidsLuckyStarrandtheOceansofVenusLuckyStarrandtheBigSunofMercuryLuckyStarrandtheMoonsofJupiterLuckyStarrandtheRingsofSaturnLuckyStarrandthePiratesoftheAsteroidsbyIsaacAsimovLuckyStarrandthePiratesoftheAsteroidsCop...

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