Part 2

The air was a bit musty, but otherwise good, and I judged the temperature to be about fifty degrees now. Ever strip in mid air? I peeled off my spacesuit and watched it float down too, agonizingly slow, and finally I alighted in my leather jumper.

Clair said, "It's a--"

* * * * *

She never finished the sentence. Something jarred the ground under me like a miniature earthquake, and I sat down hard.

"A ship," Gramps said. "Clair saw a ship coming in on the other side!"

"Now it's landed," Clair told us. It wasn't necessary. That jar could only have been produced by a ship or a man-sized meteor.

"So what?" I wanted to know. "So someone made a mistake and landed here. Our claim's already in. When their claim goes through, Vesta'll tell them."

"Sure," Gramps brightened.

Clair smiled too, as if to say, you're right, so what are we worrying about?

Only my enthusiasm didn't last long. My reasoning was tilted. It was warped. Crazy. "Uh-uh," I shook my head. "It isn't as simple as that. First place, Vesta was supposed to beam a broadcast all over the Belt, telling who landed where."

"Hmm-m," Gramps mumbled.

"Maybe," Clair said. "Maybe. And that ship, Jerry, it was too big. Much too big to be one of the family ships. One of those long, tapering, narrow-finned cruisers, brand new."

I was trying to digest this latest bit of information, when Clair popped her helmet back on her head and ran for the airlock. I called to her, but she couldn't hear me--she was going to see just who our visitors were.

"Fiery young thing!" Gramps snorted, but I hardly heard him. I zipped myself inside my suit as fast as I could and started to run for the lock. Only I didn't. I flew. I had forgotten to snap on the grav-plates, and once again I had that agonizing sensation of floating groundward.

I made it, cursing, then I tore through the lock, in record time. When I reached the Karden, Clair came darting around its other side and ran toward me, out of breath, half stumbling. We got back inside the dome, and I said:

"Well?"

"Oh, Jerry. Jerry!"

"What is it, hon?" Clair got excited easily, but not this way.

"Some men were out of the ship and I hailed them. Someone shot at me--"

"_What?_"

"Yes! He didn't say a word. He just lifted an ugly-looking gun and fired. A big column of rock disappeared right next to me, Jerry. Just like this." She snapped her fingers. "He shot at me with a disintegrator. A _disintegrator_, Jerry...."

I gulped. How would you feel being trapped on a rock less than half a mile across, without any weapons, with your radio shot to hell, without enough fuel in your ship to get you half way to any other asteroid, when you knew that around on the night side were maybe a dozen armed men, claim jumpers, ready to kill you on sight?

I gulped again.

* * * * *

"Take it easy," Gramps advised us. "Now, just you both relax. There has to be a way outa this, only we ain't found it yet."

The only part of his statement I could agree with was the very last, only I had to admit he had a point there. Just wasn't any use, as Gramps would say, for Clair and me to go running around like a couple of chickens without their heads, the way we'd been doing for the past few hours.

"Okay," I said. "Let's look at this thing. Let's see exactly where we stand."

"More like it," Gramps nodded his head.

Clair said, "Whoever they are, they landed here illegally. And they want our copper...."

I brightened, but only for a moment. "No. I think you're off the beam, honey. If it's our claim alone they're after, why just this stinking little asteroid? There are lots bigger and lots richer, yet they chose this one. They want something else. But what?"

Clair said we'd come back to that later. "First," she said, "just what can we expect them to do? I mean now, or in the immediate future."

I considered. "Well, temporarily at least, they probably won't do a thing. Or will they?"

"You're durned right they won't," Gramps said. "They won't bust this dome up right away to get at us, nossir. First they'll see if they can get us without doing that."

It made good sense. Whatever their purpose, both domes could be a valuable asset, and maybe they'd play with us, cat and mouse, before they applied the disintegrators to our dome.

"Sure," said Gramps. "Just like the old days of the East-West war when it spread out to the planets. An army can't be everyplace at once, 'specially not all over the System. Right?"

"Right," Clair said, and I nodded.

"Hey," Gramps suggested, "you don't suppose they are Ruskies, do you?"

"No," I said, smiling. I reminded him that the war had been over before I was born.

"Hmm-m, yes. Did I ever tell you the time I was fighting near Gossena on Ganymede? I was a foot-soldier, y'know."

* * * * *

He had told us many times and I said so, but he didn't bat an eyelash. "Anyway," he said, "it was a war of nerves. We tried to scare them, and they tried to scare us, one way or another, and the side that did the most scaring won. Us."

Clair wanted to know what all that had to do with this.

"Easy, kid. Just hold your horses. These guys on the other side of 4270 will be using a war of nerves with us, a real simple one. They know it'll be maybe a month before the government ship comes--"

"What about the radio?" I said. "Won't they think we called for help?"

"Nossirree. Not if they're smart. If we did call for help they could hightail it out of here, pronto. The way Clair describes that ship, they could beat anything the Government has in the Belt, anything short of a battle-cruiser, and there ain't none out beyond Mars. No, if they're smart they'll have to figure that something went wrong with our radio, or we'd a called for help right away. It's an easy gamble for them to take--they can always zoom away."

Everything Gramps had said was beginning to make a lot of good sense, and I motioned him to continue.

"Sooo, their war of nerves is easy. They just wait for us to make the first wrong move, and then they get us. Blop! Real simple with a disintegrator."

He wasn't kidding. All you had to do was disintegrate a person, his ship, his belongings, and you'd have committed a pretty air-tight murder. Of course, the old legality about a corpse had been chucked out the window years ago when the first disintegrators were developed, but in a case like this, the only thing the government would have to go on was the fact that our landing here on 4270 had been recorded. Not much. Pitifully inadequate. And I told them that now.

"Swell," Clair said. "Only please, Jerry, cut it out. You sound like you're crying at your own funeral. I'm scared...."

"Sure," said Gramps, "we ain't licked. We'll just have to figure out a war of nerves just a bit better than theirs. War of nerves, that's it. I can remember, outside Gossena.... The Ruskies employed Martian mercenaries, y'know...."

"That won't be easy," Clair reminded him. "Especially since we don't even know why that ship came here. We can't even find out."

I grinned. "Who says we can't?" I picked up my fishbowl helmet and plopped it ungently over my head.

"What the heck are you doing?" Clair asked me.

My voice must have sounded muffled from under the helmet as I said: "Simple. Our intercom can pick up theirs. As soon as some of them pop outside their dome and start talking, we'll know."

That much was true. The intercom could pick up any similar conversation on the entire tiny planet. It could do that, but it wasn't directional. In other words, you'd hear voices, all right, only you wouldn't know where they were coming from. One trouble, however, marred the idea: you couldn't tell how long it would be before some of our visitors decided to lift themselves up and venture outside the dome. Might be any time now, or it might not be for days, or it might be just once, and then briefly, for as long as it would take them to stroll to our dome, disintegrate the lock, march through, and turn us into three specks of molecular dust.

I sat grimly with the helmet over my head, waiting. All I got was static.

* * * * *

We took turns, and our hopes for a happy home life out here on 4270 were shot to hell. One of us would sit listening, head buried in his helmet, another would bustle about, keeping the functions of the dome in order, and the third would sleep.

It was my turn to sleep, and I can remember the beginning of what would have been a corker of a dream. The visitors in the other spaceship weren't men at all, but hideous monsters from some nameless extra-Solar place, trying to decide where in the Solar System they'd like to live. They seemed ornery enough to decide on crowded Earth.

I never knew for sure. One of them was breathing down my neck, then poking me, and I sat up fast. It was Gramps, and he was scowling at me frantically inside his fishbowl helmet.

I didn't have to be told. My own helmet sat securely on my shoulders in a matter of seconds, and I listened. You could hardly tell the voices apart, but from the conversation you knew that there were two of them.

"... all over this planetoid. Aw, what's the use? The boss just had a wrong notion, that's all."

"I dunno. Can't be sure. This is a small place, yeah: but there's enough wrinkles and folds to keep you looking for months. We ain't covered nothing yet. Also, how's about inside the other dome. It could be there, eh?"

"Well, it better not be. If those guys in there find it before us...." I didn't know what "it" was but I liked this voice better. It was pessimistic, and the more pessimistic our visitors were, the better I'd like it.

"No, it ain't in the other dome." The rat, I thought. "It wouldn't be in either dome, stupid, or the miners here before the depression woulda found it. I was wrong--it's outside somewhere, all right."

Clair sat with us now, hunched over elbows on knees, listening through her own helmet.

"So we just march around this lousy rock until we find it."

"Yeah. But take it easy, stupid. It'll be worth it. A weapon like that, what power...."

"I don't know. We better find it soon. The wife's in Chawka City on Io, and there's a damn saloon-keeper there--"

"Haw, haw, haw! A family man, a regular family man, that's what we got with us. But don't worry, we'll find it. The Ruskies left that thing here someplace, and don't worry, we'll get it. The boss ain't no dodo...."

"Well, I'd feel a lot better if we got rid of those guys in the other dome. It'd be a lot safer."

"Just shut up. When the boss tells us to do something, we'll do it. Otherwise, stop yammering."

So our pessimistic friend wanted us dead too? I hoped that his wife would commit the unpardonable crime with every man-jack in Chawka City. It would serve the rat right.

Then there was a lot of garbled static and no more talking. Evidently the two men had entered their dome again and had removed their helmets. No more talking, exactly as if they had ceased to exist. And after the one way contact had been established, it was almost eerie.

* * * * *

Gramps was jubilant. "There y'are, kids. Simple as that."

"As what?" I said.

"Kid, don't you read your history?"

"He goes in for lurid novels," Clair said.

"Waal, it's like this. Right at the end of the war it was rumored the Ruskies developed a super-duper weapon. Something really hot, that would make the atom-bomb look like a kid's squirt gun. They didn't have a chance to use it, and when the war was over they hid it out here in the Belt somewheres, thinking maybe they'd get another chance. So them guys think this is the place. Hmm-m, maybe they're right, and if we could find that weapon before them.... Oh boy!"

I shook my head. It was a pretty little story, with one major flaw. "There's no such weapon," I said. "I remember the history part of it, all right. But I also remember what followed. Government sent out hundreds of ships, in ten years they combed the Belt. No secret asteroid. No Ruskie cache. No weapon. No nothing."

"Well, these guys are looking--"

I told him, "On Earth, people still look for Captain Kid's treasure, and for sea serpents, too. They just won't find either. There aren't any. Nope, Gramps--there's just a lot of copper on this asteroid, that's all. If we could convince our visitors of that, they'd get out quick."

"Well, we can't," Clair said. "You heard those two guys. Their boss is as sure of finding that weapon here as he's sure of anything."

I began to smile, and I think I even laughed a little, because they both looked at me queerly. "That's it," I said.

"That's what?" Evidently, my enthusiasm had not carried to Clair.

"The way we'll do it. We'll use Gramps' idea, the war of nerves...."

"Hot dog!" Gramps purred like an impossibly ancient kitten.

"We'll agree with them. Okay, there's a weapon here, a pretty awful thing. We'll talk over our intercom and let them know we know it too."

"Uh-uh," said Clair, definitely interested. "They'll probably be listening, just like us. Go on, Jerry, let's hear more."

"Sure. And we'll go a step further."

* * * * *

"I got you!" Gramps cried. "We'll really find the weapon." There just was no convincing a die-hard romantic who had fought in the last war.

"Yes and no," I said. "There is no weapon, none here and none anyplace else in the Belt. _Only we'll make believe that we find one._ A war of nerves, Gramps. Maybe we can scare them the hell off this planet."

"Hmm-m," said Gramps. "I knew you'd come around to my way of thinking."

Because we all liked the idea, we continued to speak of it for hours, and this is the way things boiled down.

Item. It had to be an awful weapon, something that would frighten a man and make the little hackles stand up on the back of his neck, and something which apparently could be applied most readily here on 4270. They were convinced that a weapon did exist, good: they'd believe almost anything we could concoct.

Item. This one I didn't like. Since our two talkative friends had intimated that their boss knew the weapon couldn't be within our dome, we'd have to go outside for the weapon and let them catch a glimpse or two of us prowling about. That could be dangerous, because they could pop us off with their disintegrators any time they got the urge. Which would probably be as soon as they saw something tangible at which to fire. We'd have to flit about like shadows. Less than shadows.

Item. We'd start "broadcasting" to them, and we'd pretend we didn't know we were doing it. The bigger the lie the better it would sound, and we'd have to start almost at once. This could be fun.

Item. We had nothing concretely in mind beyond that. But the important thing, as Gramps put it, was this: we'd be in the driver's seat, conducting the war exactly how we wanted, and they'd have to sit around guessing.

Gramps was chipper enough to strum a few notes on his guitar.

* * * * *

For three Earth days by the clock in our living quarters, we managed to stay out of trouble. And I think we were getting somewhere, too. Gramps would go outside with Clair, poking around amid the rubble, talking about how close they were coming. Then they'd let themselves be seen, just for the briefest moment, and they'd scoot back inside our dome, fast.

Probably, it was pretty safe at that. We could tell from what they said via intercom that our visitors were interested. And, if they thought we knew something, they'd be in no hurry to kill us. At the most, they'd want to take us alive and see what they could learn.

Gramps and Clair were outside, talking, and as I listened, I got an idea. If I went outside, too, our enemy would be confused into believing there were more of us. I could invent a few new voices and a few names and they might be led to believe we had a whole army here with us. So what if our ship was small? This could have been the last of several trips....

"Confuse 'em," Gramps had said once. "Get 'em on the ground and tramp all over 'em with a war of nerves. Bury 'em under a pack of terrible lies, that's what." I'd do it.

I stood atop a pinnacle of rock and made myself look busy. If they had any lookouts perched high within their dome, they wouldn't miss seeing me, and I was gambling everything on the fact that they wouldn't shoot because they wanted to learn something from us.

Then I popped behind my pinnacle of rock, out of their range of vision, and I hauled myself up the other side. I did this a few times, and they probably thought half a dozen of us swarmed all over the rock, exploring.

I said, "If this ain't the place, I'll eat my hat."

"Can't tell, George," I said in a higher voice. "Might be. Might not. But we're getting close, that's for sure. Good thing we found those old Ruskie charts."

Oh, I was having a glorious time. I said, for George, "We could blast those other guys out of their dome any time we want. So why are we waiting?"

I was getting cocky, and I used a deep bass this time. "You know the chief wants to have some fun with that weapon. 'No place better to try it,' he told me, 'than on our friends over there.' Just wait."

* * * * *

An inspiration hit me, all at once. I had our weapon. "Yeah," this was my George voice again, "but what an awful way to die. I wonder if those charts are really true; you press a button, and anyone around who happens to be in contact with iron or steel just gets broiled alive."

I poured it on in my middle-sized voice. "That's it, okay. The charts wouldn't lie. Can you imagine what those Ruskies could have done with that in the War?"

"Uh-huh. That woulda hit everyone. You carry a blaster, it's steel. Disintegrator, too. Wear a spacesuit, you also get broiled. Go near a radio, same thing. Man, it scares you: hope the chief knows what he's doing."

"He knows," my good new friend George said, and because I figured they had heard enough for now of my terribly selective yet horribly universal weapon, I marched off my pinnacle and made my way back over the rubble toward our dome. I chuckled softly to myself. Clair and Gramps had doubtlessly heard of my new weapon via their intercoms, and I thought they'd be mightily pleased. It had infinite possibilities in this war of nerves.

They were waiting for me outside the dome-lock, and I thought that was funny because I had expected to find them within the dome.

And then I ran. One, two, three figures stood within the dome, staring out solemnly at Gramps and Clair. I reached them and I tried the lock. I didn't have to--I don't think I could have entered with a blow torch.

I looked at Clair and Clair looked at me, and then we both looked at Gramps. He shrugged eloquently enough, and after taking one last angry look at the three men within our dome, we turned and walked away. The angry looks made them smile, as we left one of them even thumbed his nose at us. That gesture, too, was eloquent. It said, _suckers!_

We retreated to the base of my pinnacle of rock, where we couldn't be seen from either dome. What had happened was simple. In my enthusiasm I had left our dome deserted, and apparently our trio of friends back there had found it that way. The dome-locks, of course, are manipulated from within, and there's no way to secure them from the outside. So the trio had walked in, closed the lock behind them, and we were stuck out on the cold, dark, airless surface of 4270.

I tried to scratch my head and nearly succeeded in cracking my helmet with a leatheroid glove. Gramps and Clair had gone out before me: they had perhaps an hour's air supply left. Maybe I had three, with luck.

The Karden didn't have enough air within its old hulk now to satisfy a lungfish in suspended animation, and by the time we could get its old generators working again, we'd be three asphyxiated corpses.

So, we could do two things. We could wait out in the open like sitting ducks and wait for the unknown enemy to take us, or we could just sit here near our pinnacle of rock and suffocate.

I cursed myself soundly, but I stopped and tried to comfort her when I saw that Clair was crying. It isn't easy, not through a spacesuit and not when you think you'll be dead in not much more than minutes.

Gramps felt the fear too, he was muttering to himself. Clair murmured. "Jerry.... Oh, Jerry ... I don't want to die!"

* * * * *

I had to think fast. I had to think faster than I ever thought in my life, and generally I like to explore my way around a problem, looking at it from all angles. But the air left for Gramps and Clair could be measured in minutes now, and mine wasn't much more.

I said, "What are you worrying about? George and Harry and the other boys will have that thing rigged up in a couple of hours, sure. We'll give those guys in both domes a little bit of hell. Won't be a one left alive." I tried to make the butterflies remain in my stomach, to have them go anyplace but in my voice. It almost didn't work.

Clair and Gramps looked at me like I might be crazy or something, and I raised a gloved finger up and tried to line it up in front of my mouth to tell them to shut up.

Gramps said, "George and Harry?"

"Of course. They found it half an hour ago, and now they're setting it up. Just a matter of time, so relax."

I squatted down on my hands and knees, making the gesture for silence again. I found a jagged little rock and started to trace lines in the powdery pumice. It was messy, but they could understand it. I wrote:

GO TO THEIR OLD DOME AND GIVE UP. YOUR AIR WONT LAST. THEY WON'T KILL. SCARED. QUESTION YOU ABOUT WEAPON. REMEMBER WHAT GEORGE & HARRY SAID ABOUT WEAPON BEFORE, BUT PLAY A LITTLE DUMB. LEAVE REST TO ME.

I waited while I saw them reading it, then I rubbed it out. Clair shook her head. Her eyes told me plainly enough that she didn't want to die, but that she'd rather die out here with me than otherwise.

Gramps looked like he would rather be sitting someplace comfortable with his guitar, but he was trying to smile a little.

I crouched and wrote again, just three words:

PLEASE GO. NOW.

I erased the line with my boots and I waited, then I turned around for a long time and didn't look back at them. When I did, they were two tiny figures on the twisted, broken landscape, walking toward the second dome.

* * * * *

For a while I waited, and then I swarmed all over my pinnacle again, like George and Harry and anyone else who might have been around. They could come and get me, of course, but I figured they wouldn't. Then they might never find the weapon. That was their dilemma, not mine. Mine was to do something along the lines of Gramps' war of nerves, and do something good, before my air ran out.

I said, "Watch it, George. Take it easy. Don't you think the chief ought to be around before you try anything?"

I climbed off the pinnacle so no one could see me. "Naw," I made George say. "I know what I'm doing. F'r gosh sakes, what could happen? I got the charts right here. I wanta hurry and get back to the wife in Canal City. Some damn bus driver...." I'd make it sound like their own story, and maybe they'd believe.

"Well, okay," my Harry said dubiously.

George sighed. "There. That does it. Now--watch."

Silence. I watched thirty seconds tick off on my suit clock, then I made Harry scream:

"George! Good God, George.... Arrgh!"

I hoped the scream was a good one. Honest, it almost scared me. Poor George and Harry: I had killed them off quick enough. Now I had to invent new characters. For a brief moment I wondered what had happened to Clair and Gramps, but then I pushed them out of my mind. I couldn't afford to think of that now.

I let six minutes pass. It was agonizing, but I did it. Then I did my best to invent two new voices.

"So, here's the spot, Mike. Funny, I don't see them."