Part 2

Black Morgan owned a large spacecraft of marked design. No spacecraft construction company had made it, and the construction of spacecraft is not a small project. This eliminates the possibility of small-yard construction and definitely removes the possibility of self-construction. Men have made boats in their basements, and automobiles in their attics, but no man has ever built a battleship or a spacecraft without owning a huge construction company.

The construction companies had all been investigated thoroughly. Black Morgan was not operating one on the side. He had no connection large enough to get a craft built and forgotten about. Besides, there was a fantastic reward for information of that nature, enough that any workman would be a fool to ignore it, and deliberately forget that he had once driven a rivet into the spacecraft now known as the _Black Morgan_.

Then Jeffries reread his statements. They added up to one thing: Black Morgan did not exist! Black Morgan was the Impossible Pirate.

_So_, he thought, _if Morgan does not exist, then he is a fantasy, a myth. The only evidence that is not strictly negative is the fact that an armed man enters the spacecraft in a standard spacesuit and holds up the passengers._

_Instruments do not lie, but it is possible to fudge up a detector. Either from the inside or externally. As for items A, B, C, and the rest, well--_

_Maybe Black Morgan didn't exist!_

_And if Black Morgan did not exist, ex-Lieutenant Jeffries knew how to catch him!_

* * * * *

Black Morgan felt good. He permitted a single pang of sorrow for the hapless Lieutenant Jeffries, and then discarded the unlucky man. He looked to his gear, checked his instruments, and then inspected the big ship on the spaceport outside. Take-off was about ready, he knew, and they were carrying plenty. Life was less easy since Jeffries had gone; while the lieutenant was there, he was a fair weathervane, save for twice. But Jeffries as an indirect source of information was not destined to last forever, and now Black Morgan was reduced to bribing lower employees, watching the markets, and tapping the communications' beams.

He watched, making certain of his plans, until the ship's ports closed. Then he poised and made ready himself. Then from the ship's drivers came that giveaway glare of violet-actinic light that seared the eyeballs of he who looked. The ship trembled slightly, and lifted at 3-Gs--its acceleration with respect to Mars was three Terran G minus the surface gravity of the Red Planet. It went up, gaining speed. The actinic glow increased as the distance from ground increased, and it cast its glare over the entire spaceport.

Then, unseen against the glare--he was but a small mote against a sea of blinding violet--Black Morgan took off.

A-space, the glare died out. It was an atmosphere-ionization, and by the time there was no atmosphere, Black Morgan was safe.

At turnover, the ship was hailed, as before. Black Morgan entered the ship as he had done many times, looted the passengers and the vault, made mocking jokes, and left. The ship went on, its passengers and crew cowed and beaten.

Black Morgan laughed uproariously.

Again!

He exulted, and feeling certain of his future, Black Morgan waited patiently. An hour--two--and then he was off toward Terra, laughing and plotting more piracy.

Then his alarm rang. Morgan blinked. A meteor--but no meteor ever rang the drive detector. That took energy output!

Morgan snarled and looked out of his port.

And there he saw a sight that terrified him. Through his mind passed the recollection of all the thousands that had seen a similar sight, though the markings were different. Instead of the chromium and black pirate craft, there rode a quiet Guardship, big and potent. Morgan was outgunned, for three solid turrets of three rifles each covered his smaller ship in an inevadable bracket of heavy fire. Resistance was impossible; he could not even fight like a cornered rat. He was forced, if anything, to suicide. Ignominious suicide, for there would not even be the chance to go out fighting.

The space door opened to admit a single man, clad in the uniform of the Solar Guard.

Morgan gulped and swore. "Jeffries!"

"Right," snapped the Guardsman.

Morgan grabbed for his guns and the cabin of the small craft was filled with the _crack-crack_ of swift gun fire. Morgan fired once; Jeffries twice. Black Morgan missed, but Jeffries' first shot shattered the pirate's right wrist. The other gun dropped out of his hand from shock, and Jeffries strode up and covered the beaten pirate.

Jeffries did not return to his ship, but he took over the pirate's small craft and drove it to Terra. He handed the pirate over to Captain Edwards with a smile.

"This is he," he grunted. "And now what?"

"You've won," smiled Edwards. His pleasure was honest. "If he's Black Morgan, you've won, and we can easily hush up any trouble. But can you prove it?"

"Sure," grinned Jeffries. "Cell him, and then come up to training school on the roof. This takes demonstration."

"O.K.," smiled Edwards. "It's your show."

* * * * *

Jeffries faced the group of experts, scientists, and police officials. At one side of him was the mock-up of the celestial globe used in training rookie spacemen. On the table beside him was a pile of equipment.

"This," he said, holding up the equipment, "is familiar. It is a small detector-pulse receiver. It is coupled with an attenuator and a variable delay line, and a minute re-transmitter. The celestial globe will show a target approaching the ship at a velocity exceeding the speed of light, and will match the ship's acceleration, velocity, and course in microseconds."

He started his equipment, and across the celestial globe in three distant flashes came a flitting target, to stop short of the ship's spotter in the center of the globe. From the other detecting equipment came indications and presentations as to type of drive, size of ship, and wave bands of the other ship's radiation.

Jeffries laughed, turning off his equipment. "When equipment is very sensitive, in order to collect information from great distances, a rather minute transmitter can produce a heavy target," he said. "Now, above the dome of the building--watch!"

He turned a square box at the sky and set it going. Black Morgan's ship came swooping down, to stand above the observation dome of the building, its rifles trained on the men inside. Jeffries turned dials and the turret turned slowly. He manipulated another dial and the big ship turned to face away. Then it receded and was gone in a twinkling of an eye.

"Three-dimensional projector," he growled. "Just what they were using for moving pictures for a hundred years. And there's your answer!"

Captain Edwards stood up and nodded. "But look," he said. "How did the contact come?"

"Contact?" gritted Jeffries angrily. "The louse! He took off in a suit as the ship lifted from the port, and clung to it with his magnetics like a flea on a dog until he had a chance to do his job at high velocity. Then he would drop off and radio-control his own ship which was running free a few million miles behind, and destined to come within a few million miles of his position. It was set to about match his speed, and then at that velocity, to circle and spiral until it was within his range. There was no one aboard it, and so he could cram on gravities until it creaked. I swear it had on sixty gravities."

"But you--?"

"Remember, my hobby is photography. Photography itself is a matter of fantastic illusion. Your eyes, fallible as any sense, view a collection of light rays in a certain pattern and your brain says it is Uncle Julius. Iconography, when enlarged to life-size, can produce a solid image that from a distance can be mistaken. Iconocinematography does not produce a solid image but establishes a radiating point for heterodyned light, producing an apparent image that the real thing can go up and shake hands with--providing his timing is good, for the image is unreal.

"So there's Black Morgan. Since he could not exist in fact, he did exist in the interpretation of incomplete data. Any man can fudge a detector by supplying false echoes from a delayed transponder. Anybody can project a super image of a spacecraft by iconocinematography. And a spacesuit is capable of considerable motion of its own, plus the ability to cling like a leech to the hull of a ship under acceleration.

"At first I was a bit concerned about the effect of attacking an armed ship with an icono image--but I discovered that Black Morgan's real ship was as unarmed as any commerce vessel. He was the real fantasy!"

Captain Edwards smiled. "A good man, Jeffries," he said to his superiors. "And a good big man can still take a good little man's tricks and turn them against him!"

And Lieutenant Jeffries took a deep breath. "Now, sir," he said. "About that vacation--?"

THE END.