Rip made a final check. He counted his men, then personally inspected their suits. The boats were next. They were typical landing craft, shaped like rectangular boxes. There was no need for streamlining in the vacuum of s.p.a.ce. They were not pressurized. Only men in s.p.a.ce suits rode in the ungainly boxes.

He checked all blast tubes to make sure they were clear. There were small single tubes on each side of the craft. A clogged one could explode and blow the boat up.

Koa, he knew, had checked everything, but the final responsibility was his. In s.p.a.ce, no officer or sergeant took anyone's word for anything that might mean lives. Each checked every detail personally.

Rip looked around and saw the Planeteers watching him. There was approval on the faces behind the clear helmets, and he knew they were satisfied with his thoroughness.

At last, certain that everything was in good order, he said quietly, "Pilots, man your boats."

Dowst got into one and a s.p.a.ceman into the other. Dowst's boat would stay with them on the asteroid. The s.p.a.ceman would bring the other to the ship.

Commander O'Brine stepped through the valve into the boat lock. A s.p.a.ceman handed him a hand communicator. He spoke into it. Rip couldn't have heard him through the helmet otherwise. "All set, Foster?"

"Ready, sir."

"Good. The long-range screen picked up a blip a few minutes ago. It's probably that Connie cruiser."

Rip swallowed. The Planeteers froze, waiting for the commander's next words.

"Our screens are a little better than theirs, so there's a slim chance they haven't picked us up yet. We'll drop you and get out of here. But don't worry. We have your orbit fixed and we'll find you when the screens are clear."

"Suppose they find us while you're gone?" Rip asked.

"It's a chance," O'Brine admitted. "You'll have to take s.p.a.ceman's luck on that one. But we won't be far away. We'll duck behind Vesta or another of the big asteroids and hide so their screens won't pick up our motion.

Every now and then we'll sneak out for a look, if the screen seems clear.

If those high-vack vermin do find you, get on the landing boat radio and yell for help. We'll come blasting."

He waved a hand, thumb and forefinger held together in the ancient symbol for "everything right," then ordered, "Get flaming." He stepped through the valve.

"Clear the lock," Rip ordered. "Open outer valve when ready."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Get Flaming, Foster!"]

"Get Flaming, Foster!"

He took a quick final look around. The pilots were in the boats. His Planeteers were standing by, safety lines already attached to the boats and their belts. He moved into position and snapped his own line to a ring on Dowst's boat. The s.p.a.cemen vanished through the valve and the ma.s.sive door slid closed. The overhead lights flicked out. Rip snapped on his belt light and the others followed suit.

In front of the boxlike landing boats a great door slid open and air from the lock rushed out. Rip knew it was only imagination, but he felt for a moment as though the bitter cold of s.p.a.ce, near absolute zero, had penetrated his suit. Beyond the lights from their belts he saw stars, and recognized the constellation for which the s.p.a.ce cruiser was named. A superst.i.tious s.p.a.ceman would have taken that as a good sign. Rip admitted that it was nice to see.

"Float 'em," he ordered.

The Planeteers gripped handholds at the entrance with one hand and launching rails on the boats with the other and heaved. The boats slid into s.p.a.ce. As the safety lines tightened, the Planeteers were pulled after the boat.

Rip left his feet with a little spring and shot through the door. Directly below him the asteroid gleamed darkly in the light of the tiny sun. His first reaction was, "Great Cosmos! What a little chunk of rock!" But that was because he was used to looking from the s.p.a.ce platform at the great curve of Terra or at the big ball of the moon. Actually the asteroid was fair-sized when compared with most of its kind.

The Planeteers hauled themselves into the boats by their safety lines. Rip waited until all were in, then pulled himself along his own line to the black square o the door. Koa was waiting to give him a hand into the craft.

The Planeteers were standing, except for Dowst. Rip had never seen an old-type railroad or he might have likened the landing boat to a railroad box car. It was about the same size and shape, but it had huge "windows"

on both sides and in front of the pilot-windows that were not enclosed.

The s.p.a.ce-suited men needed no protection.

"Blast," Rip ordered.

A pulse of fire spurted from the top of each boat, driving them bottom-first toward the asteroid.

"Land at will," Rip said.

The asteroid loomed large as he looked through an opening. It was rocky, but there were plenty of smooth places.

Dowst picked one. He was an expert pilot and Rip watched him with pleasure. The exhaust from the top lessened and fire spurted soundlessly from the bottom. Dowst balanced the opposite thrusts of the top and bottom blasts with the delicacy of a man threading a needle. In a few moments the boat was hovering a foot above the asteroid. Dowst cut the exhausts and Rip stepped out onto the tiny planet.

The Planeteers knew what to do. Corporal Pederson produced hardened steel spikes with ring tops. Private Trudeau had a sledge. Driving the first spike would be the hardest, because the action of swinging the hammer would propel the Planeteer like a rocket exhaust. In s.p.a.ce, the law that every action has an equal and opposite reaction had to be remembered every moment.

Rip watched, interested in how his men would tackle the problem. He didn't know the answer himself, because he had never driven a spike on an airless, almost gravityless world and no one had ever mentioned it to him.

Pederson searched the gray metal with his torch and found a slender spur of thorium perhaps two feet high a short distance from the boat. "Here's a hold," he said. "Come on, Frenchy. You, too, Bradshaw."

Trudeau, carrying the sledge, walked up to the spur of rock and stood with his heels against it. Pederson sat down on the ground with the spur between his legs. He stretched, hooking his heels around Trudeau's ankles, anchoring him. With his gloves he grabbed the seat of the Frenchman's s.p.a.ce suit.

Bradshaw took a spike and held it against the gray metal ground. The Frenchman swung, his hammer noiseless as it drove the tough spike in. A few inches into the metal was enough. Bradshaw took a wrench from his belt, put it on the head of the spike and turned it. Below the surface, teeth on the spike bit into the metal. It would hold.

The rest was easy. The spike was used to anchor Trudeau while he drove another, at his longest reach. Then the second spike became his anchor, and so on, until enough spikes had been set to lace the boat down against any sudden shock.

The boat piloted by the s.p.a.ceman was tied to the one that would remain and the Planeteers floated its supplies through a window. It took only a few moments, with Planeteers forming a chain from inside the boat to a spot a little distance away. Even the heaviest crates weighed almost nothing.

They pa.s.sed them from one to the other like balloons.

"All clear, sir," Koa called.

Rip stepped inside and made a quick inspection. The box was empty except for the s.p.a.ceman pilot. He put a hand on the pilot's shoulder. "On your way, Rocky. Thanks."

"You're welcome, sir." The pilot added, "Watch out for high vack."

Rip and Koa stepped out and walked a little distance away. Santos and Pederson cast the landing boat adrift and shoved it away from the anch.o.r.ed boat. In a moment fire spurted from the bottom tube, spreading over the dull metal and licking at the feet of the Planeteers.

Rip watched the boat rise upward to the great, sleek, dark bulk of the _Scorpius_. The landing boat maneuvered into the air lock with brief flares from its exhausts. In a few moments the sparkling blast of auxiliary rocket tubes moved the s.p.a.ceship away. O'Brine was putting a little distance between his ship and the asteroid before turning on the nuclear drive. The ship decreased in size until Rip saw it only as a dark, oval silhouette against the Milky Way, then the exhaust of the nuclear drive grew into a mighty column of glowing blue and the ship flamed into s.p.a.ce.

For a moment Rip had a wild impulse to yell for the ship to come back. He had been in vacuum before, but only as a cadet, with an officer in charge.

Now, suddenly, he was the one responsible. The job was his. He stiffened.

Planeteer officers didn't worry about things like that. He forced his mind to the job in hand.

The next step was to establish a base. The base would have to be on the dark side of the asteroid, once it was in its new orbit. That meant a temporary base now and a better one later, when they had blasted the little planet onto its new course. He estimated roughly the approximate positions where he would place his charges, using the sun and the star Canopus as visual guides.

"This will do for a temporary base," he announced. "Rig the boat compartment. While two of you are doing that, the rest break out the rocket launcher and rocket racks and a.s.semble the cutting torch. Koa will make a.s.signments."

While the sergeant-major translated Rip's general instructions into specific orders for each man, the young lieutenant walked to the edge of the sun belt. There was no atmosphere, so the edge was a sharp line between dark and light. There wasn't much light, either. They were too far from the sun for that. But as they neared the sun, the darkness would be their protection. They would get so close to Sol that the metal on the sun side would get soft as b.u.t.ter.

He bent close to the uneven surface. It was clean metal, not oxidized at all. The thorium had never been exposed to oxygen. Here and there, pyramids of metal thrust up from the asteroid, sometimes singly, sometimes in cl.u.s.ters. They were metal crystal formations. He guessed that once, long ages ago, the asteroid had been a part of something much bigger, perhaps a planet. One theory said the asteroids were formed when a planet exploded. This asteroid might have been a pocket of pure thorium in the planet.