Lucky said, "What's the matter, Dingo? Afraid of me? You get afraid very quick for such a big talker."
As Lucky expected, Dingo roared incoherently and dashed heavily and directly at him. Lucky had no trouble in evading the bull rush. The side of his hand came sharply and swiftly down on the back of Dingo's neck.
Lucky had seen any number of men knocked unconscious by that particular blow; he had seen more than one killed. But Dingo merely staggered. He shook it off and turned, snarling.
He walked flat-footedly toward the dancing Lucky. Lucky lashed out with his fist, which landed sharply on Dingo's scraped cheek bone. Blood flowed, but Dingo did not so much as attempt to block the blow, nor did he blink when it landed.
Lucky squirmed away and struck sharply twice more at the pirate. Dingo paid no attention. He came forward, always forward.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, he went down, apparently as a man who had stumbled. But his arms shot out as he fell and one hand closed about Lucky's right ankle. Lucky went down too.
"I've got you now," whispered Dingo.
He reached up to catch Lucky's waist and in a moment, fast-locked, they were rolling across the floor.
Lucky felt the growing, enclosing pressure and pain washed inward like an advancing flame. Dingo's fetid panting was in his ear.
Lucky's right arm was free, but his left was enclosed in the numbing vise of the other's grip about his chest. With the last of his fading strength, Lucky brought his right fist up. The blow traveled no more than four inches, catching the point where Dingo's chin met his neck with a force that sent stabs of pain the length of Lucky's arm.
Dingo's grip loosened for a moment and Lucky, writhing, flung himself out of the deadly embrace and onto his feet.
Dingo got up more slowly. His eyes were glassy, and fresh blood was trickling out the corner of his mouth.
He muttered thickly, "The whip! The whip!"
Unexpectedly he turned upon one of the pirates who had been standing there a frozen onlooker. He wrested the weapon from the other's hand and send him sprawling.
Lucky tried to duck, but the neurom'c whip was up and flashing. It caught his right side and stimulated the nerves of the area it struck into a bath of pain. Lucky's body stiffened and went down again.
For a moment his senses recorded only confusion, and with what consciousness he possessed he expected death to be a second off. Dimly he heard a pirate's voice.
"Look, Dingo, the captain said to make it look like an accident. He's a Council of Science man and…"
It was all Lucky heard.
When he swam back to consciousness with an excruciating tingle of pins and needles down the length of his side, he found himself in a space-suit again. They were just afyout to put on his helmet. Dingo, lips puffed, cheek and jaw bruised, watched malignantly.
There was a voice in the doorway. A man was entering hurriedly, full of talk.
Lucky heard him say, "-for Post 247. It's getting so I can't keep track of all the requisitions. I can't even keep our own orbit straight enough to keep up the co-ordinate corrections of-"
The voice flickered out. Lucky twisted his head and caught sight of a small man with spectacles and gray hair. He was just inside the doorway, looking with mingled astonishment and disbelief at the disorder that met his eyes.
"Get out," roared Dingo.
"But I've got to have a requisition-"
"Later!"
The little man left and the helmet was fitted over Lucky's head.
They took him out again, through the air-lock, to a surface which was now in the feeble blaze of the distant Sun. A catapult waited on a relatively flat table of rock. Its function was no mystery to Lucky. An automatic winch was drawing back a large metal lever which bent more and more slowly till its original slant had strained back into a complete horizontal at the tip. Light straps were attached to the bent lever and then buckled about Lucky's waist.
"Lie still," said Dingo. His voice was dim and scratchy in Lucky's ear. There was something wrong with the helmet receiver, Lucky realized. "You're just wasting your oxygen. Just to make you feel better, we're sending ships up to blast your friend down before he can pick up speed, if he feels like running."
An instant after that Lucky felt the sharp tingling vibration of the lever as it was released. It sprang elas-tically back into its original position with terrific force. The buckles about him parted smoothly and he was cast off at a speed of a mile a minute or better, with no gravitational field to slow him. There was one glimpse of the asteroid with the pirates looking up at him. The whole was shrinking rapidly even as he watched.
He inspected his suit. He already knew that his helmet radio had been maltreated. Sure enough, the sensitivity knob hung loose. It meant his voice could penetrate no more than a few miles of space. They had left him his space-suit's push-gun. He tried it but nothing happened. Its gas stores had been drained.
He was quite helpless. There were only the contents of one oxygen cylinder between himself and a slow, unpleasant death.
Chapter 12
Ship Versus Ship
With a clammy constriction of his chest Lucky surveyed the situation. He thought he could guess the pirates' plans. On the one hand, they wished to get rid of him, since he obviously knew far too much. On the other hand, they must want him to be found dead in such a way that the Council of Science would be unable to prove conclusively that his death was by pirate violence.
Once before, pirates had made the mistake of killing an agent of the Council and the resultant fury had been crushing. They would be more cautious this time.
He thought, They'll rush the Shooting Starr, blanket it with interference to keep Bigman from sending out a call for help. Then they can use a cannon blast on its hull. It would make a good imitation of a meteorite collision. They can make that look better by sending their own engineers on board to hocus the shield activators. It would look as though a defect in the mechanism had prevented the shield from going up as the meteorite approached.
They would know his own course through space, Lucky knew. There would be nothing to deflect him from whatever his original angles of flight had been. Later, with him safely dead, they would pick him up and send him whirling in an orbit about the broken Shooting Starr. The discoverers (and perhaps one of their own ships would send in an anonymous report of the find) would reach an obvious conclusion. Bigman at the controls, maneuvering to the last, killed at his post. Lucky, on the other hand, scrambling into a suit, damaging the external sensitivity knob of the suit's radio in the excitement. He would have been unable to call for help. He would have expended his push-gun's gas in a desperate and futile attempt to find a place of safety. And he would have died.
It would not work. Neither Conway nor Henree could possibly believe that Lucky would be concerned only with his own safety while Bigman stuck loyally at the controls. But then, the failure of the scheme, would be small satisfaction to a dead Lucky Starr. Worse yet, it would not only be Lucky Starr who would die, but all the information now locked in Lucky Starr's head.
For a moment
he was sick with outrage at himself that he had not forced all his suspicions on Conway and Henree before leaving, that he had waited till he boarded the Shooting Starr before preparing the personal capsule. Then he gained control of himself. No one would have believed him without facts.
For that very reason he would have to get back.
Have to!
But how? What good was "have to" when one was alone and helpless in space with a few hours' worth of oxygen and nothing else?
Oxygen!
Lucky thought, there's my oxygen. Anyone but Dingo would have drained his cylinder of all but dregs, to let death come quickly. But if Lucky knew Dingo, the pirate had sent him on his way with a loaded cylinder simply to prolong the agony.
Good! Then he would reverse that. He would use the oxygen otherwise. And if he failed, death would come the sooner, despite Dingo.
Only he must not fail.
The asteroid had been crossing his line of vision periodically as he spun in space. First, it was a shrinking rock, its sunlit highlights slanting jaggedly across the blackness of space. Then it had been a bright star and a single line of light. The brightness was fading quickly now. Once the asteroid became dim enough to be simply one more in the myriad of stars, it was all over. Not many minutes were left before that would be the case.
His clumsy, metal-covered fingers were already fumbling with the flexible tube that led from the air inlet just under the face-plate to the oxygen cylinder in back. He twisted strenuously at the bolt that held the air tube tightly fixed to the cylinder.
It gave. He paused to fill his helmet and suit with oxygen. Ordinarily oxygen leaked slowly in from the cylinders at about the rate it was used up by human lungs. The carbon dioxide and water formed as the result of respiration were mostly absorbed by the chemicals contained in the valved canisters affixed to the inner surface of the suit's chest plates. The result was that oxygen was kept at a pressure one fifth that of Earth's atmosphere. This was exactly right, since four fifths of Earth's atmosphere is nitrogen anyway, which is useless for breathing.