men came to sluggishly, their reactions pathetic and confused. Thefirst thing they appeared to notice when their conscious minds tookhold of their environment was the empty circle of terrain where thespace yacht had formerly stood.
"Dollard took off," Garth explained. "He drugged us all, after we'dgotten the vessel in shape for him."
"The dirty swine--he promised he'd take us!" the men protested.
"Like so many other promises he never intended to keep," said Garth."He told you men--for instance--the ship was headed for Luna. Me, hetold, he was bound for Venus. I think his destination is Venus, buthe'll never get there."
"Not get there--why?"
"Because of a little secret I never let him know," Garth replied,rubbing his nose and grinning wryly. "My wife is on Venus, where theplague can't reach her. And I promised myself days ago that Dollardshould never be given the opportunity to infect that planet. That'sone promise that has been kept. At least, I know now that Ellen willbe safe--for a while longer."
"But, sir, the big boss has gone! What can you do--with him flown thecoop?"
"Do now? I've already done it. Dollard thought of me as a fool, butinstead--I've shown him up as the real fool. A simpleton, tricked bycarelessness. There's a damned big surprise waiting for him in space."
Garth looked up into the twilight sky where a few brilliant stars werenow shining. His face bore an expression of exultant triumph. "Yes,"he said softly, "a real surprise is just around the next curve foryou, Edwin Dollard. I hope you enjoy it as well as you've enjoyedbuying and selling men's souls...."
* * * * *
Five hundred miles above the sun-mirroring Pacific Ocean, Dollardwiped great beads of perspiration from his shiny jowls. His thickhands tugged and wrestled with stubborn knobs that finally yielded,enabling him to apply greater thrust to his stern rockets.
From the moment of take-off, it had seemed to him that the grim bowlof Terra below him was taking a bigger bite out of his accelerationthan it should. Naturally, he hadn't expected his craft to operatewith one hundred per cent efficiency, considering the caliber of thetechnical help employed on its refitting; but still, his _tau_ curveshould have brought him to his first coasting point four or fiveminutes earlier.
By virtue of being his own pilot, he was obliged to astrogate byrule-of-thumb and occasional directive spurts from the course-calculator.If mechanical troubles piled on top of him now, he'd have to surrendercontrol to his gyromatic pilot, while he moved aft to track down thepower-robbing malfunction. No mean task, armed in this case only with aslide rule and what engineering knowledge remained to him after thirtyyears of high finance.
Whatever the gremlin was, it wasn't exactly an auspicious start for afifty million-mile hop. He grunted and pressed his secondary firingbuttons, boosting space velocity by a percentage that should shake thekinks out.
At the four thousand-mile mark, the earth had retreated to a greenball that floated atop a stream of unbearably bright stars. From thisheight above the planet's surface, not even the most powerfultelescope would have revealed the scenes of rampant disease andflaming destruction being enacted on the broad continents below.
The entire vessel shook in a kind of bone-cracking vibration, lurchingand lumbering as if some malign influence had tampered with everyrivet and seam-weld in her plates.
More apprehensive than ever, Dollard finally yielded to his fears andsurrendered his controls to the robot pilot. His huge body renderedalmost weightless, he pulled himself along the rail guards of acatwalk that led to the unmanned engine room. Here he inspected everyinstrument dial to be found although the readings on many of them wererepeated on duplicates in the bow.
It was then, while the ship was still a thousand miles from theno-pull point where free-wheeling alone had been known to carryvessels out of Terra's gravitational range and into Venus' orbit, thatdisaster struck. The fuel being fed to exactly half of the rockettubes choked out, and the blast from the remaining tubes increasedproportionately.
Under this new impetus, the vessel's frame shuddered. Its nosesuddenly described a wild arc among the gyrating stars. The diversionof inertia was a more severe blow than a meteor collision would havebeen. Thrust was an exceedingly difficult thing to plot in free space.Dollard, screaming in panic, was flung against a network of metalbraces; despite his weightlessness, his mass was great as ever and asharp steel corner gouged a deep bleeding slash in his puffy cheek.Sickened, he crawled forward through the spinning ship until he wasonce more able to pull himself up into the pilot's chair.
There, he discovered the second battery of tubes had ceased firingabout a minute after the first. But the changed vectors had alreadydone their damage to both ship and heading.
* * * * *
A quick run-through on the course-calculator soon revealed to Dollardhow desperate his position was. Mathematically, Venus was now a goalimpossible to attain. To re-correct his altered heading would requiremore fuel than his tanks had carried at take-off, thanks to sabotage.He also had the vast gravitational field of the sun to battle--apowerful sucking force, which if left to work its will could growinsidiously from a gentle tug of a few millimeters per second to apowerful acceleration eighty times terrestrial escape velocity--andthis, without ever once relinquishing its hold on the slightestparticle of mass in its grip.
Cursing and fuming, Dollard plotted and re-plotted, some of therustiness of his brain wearing off as he matched his wits against theprospect of death by holocaust. But, all the resources of highermathematics failed to point toward a solution. An artery commenced tothrob painfully above his ear.
It was Garth who had engineered this hideous accident, he toldhimself. The faithful unsuspecting Garth had turned out to be atraitor. He was the one who had rigged the fuel lines so that at acertain predicted point along the course the flow along one set ofconduits would be shunted to the other.
He should have killed Garth instead of merely stunning him, Dollardthought angrily.
For the twentieth time, he fed three-body calculations into theastro-computer. Somehow, somewhere, in the maze of the Newtonianscience there had to be an answer. The complexities of force andheading analysis weren't so great but what machinery could eventuallysolve all the variables involved. That is, if only Sol's overwhelminggravitational attraction didn't provide a free-sliding path to hellwith no choice of alternates in the meanwhile....
The _click-click_ of the tape as it emerged from the electroniccalculator seemed to present a different rhythm to Dollard's ears onthe twenty-first try. Picking up the ribbon, he let his reddened eyesrun over the printed symbols, translating them into finishedequations. Elation suddenly sent his blood pressure soaring, as themeaning of what he read became apparent. There was a solution ... acourse he could follow! One, which while it would not guide him toVenus, would prevent him from plunging into the sun.
Eagerly, he punched the figures for the heading onto a magnetized wirethat would be fed into the gyropilot. After the heading was set, hecrawled toward the ship's stern, dragging with him a hydrojet weldingtorch, a tool that could sear metal apart or join it by causingregulation of the molten rod protruding from its spring barrel. In theabdomen of the vessel, he found the wrecked fuel lines and removed theobstruction Garth had set up, repairing the channels.
* * * * *
Returning to the pilot chamber, he pressed the firing button andacceleration returned a form of gravity to the ship's interior, givinghim weight for the first time since the freakish accident.
Sighing with relief as the heavens slowly rotated in his screen,Dollard slumped back in his chair. He punched new figures into thecomputer, thinking ... now once safely back into a no-pull zone, a manwith a little luck should be able to make--
His chunky fingers froze to the keys. There was another flaw to bedealt with. The discrepancy was one the course-calculator had clearlypointed out, but he had overlooked it in his haste to get underway.The sol
ution he had followed was the only possible one--that was stillquite true. But, use of it only plunged him into a second predicament.
This new course, said the equations, a course which would require allthe remaining fuel to maintain, would steer the ship into a permanentorbit around the earth--an ellipse with the point of apogee far beyondLuna. He now had the certainty of continued life--for a few more days,until his provisions gave out....
Again he cursed the name of Garth. But for the man's treachery hewould be well on his way to Venus. Now, he was a helpless trapped massof protoplasm, protected from his bitter airless environment only bythe same steel walls of the cage that held him....
* * * * *
Throughout the next twenty-four hours, as the nature of the ellipticalorbit he had entered became more and more apparent, Dollard fought offsleep