CHAPTER I
HUNT THE MAN DOWN!
The carrier came first—a flimsy two-passenger craft, unsuited for even the shortest of interplanetary jumps.
Swooping down too fast out of the eternal dust-clouds that shrouded the Venusian sky, it crested a hillock by such a narrow margin as to spray sand high into the never-ending wind, then veered right in a crazy arc.
Another hillock. The carrier struck it a glancing blow that churned up new clouds of sand and dust as it skated diagonally down the slope beyond.
Ahead, jutting from the endless waste of powdery grit that stretched as far as eye could see, loomed low outcroppings of fantastically-eroded rock.
The carrier plowed into them with a rending crash. Claw-like crags gouged at the craft's thin metal skin. A hiss of escaping air played sudden gusty counterpoint to the whistle of the wind. Line-welds popped. Seams split. Bucking and shuddering, the carrier jolted to a halt.
Before the echoes could even die, then, the cowling-seal flipped loose from its seat. The warped entrance-bubble lifted jerkily, wrenched up an inch or two at a time.
Barely half open, it halted. A man wearing a plastron breather-mask squirmed through the slot and, falling, sprawled prostrate in the shifting sands beside the tiny vessel.
But now a new sound echoed overhead—the heavy vibrance of a spaceship's ramping-drone.
Sobbing for breath, the man beside the carrier moved convulsively, then lurched to his knees. His chrysolite-green tunic was ripped wide where it had caught on the cowling. A long gash above his left temple stained dun-drab hair scarlet. His nose was bleeding, too, so that the transparent breather-mask bubbled spreading ruby streaks every time he sucked in air.
Now, clutching at the carrier's shattered hull, he dragged himself to his feet, stood swaying there.
Simultaneously, the vibrance overhead echoed louder. A sleek-lined, compact Grade IV short-range cruiser plummeted into view through the dust-clouds and hovered momentarily in ramping position—base down, tail fins parallel to the surface of the ground below.
The face of the man from the carrier contorted behind the breather-mask. Turning sharply, he lurched away from the wrecked craft, wading calf-deep through the powdery Venusian dust towards another, larger outcropping of eroded rock.
But as he did so, the cruiser dropped with swift precision. The balancing fins bit in atop a level dune near where the crippled carrier lay. Gears ground. A hatch spun swiftly outward on its screw-locks.
The man on the ground broke into a stumbling run.
From the cruiser, an amplifier blared harsh male syllables: "Halt, you chitza!" And then: "Pull up, rack you! Freeze! You know you can't get away!"
The runner scrambled over a low ledge, then on again. He gave no sign he'd even heard.
"You want a blast, huh, Thigpen? You want to go back with your legs knotted up like old Pike Mawson's!"
The runner's stride broke. Flinging himself sidewise, he rolled bodily down a short, sandy slope, then came up fast and plunged headlong into the shelter of a grotesquely-shaped rock pillar.
Aboard the cruiser, someone cursed: the amplifier picked up the echo. Voices rose angrily, only to cut off again as sharply as if slashed with a knife.
And now, a new voice. A woman's voice, ragged and not quite steady: "Don't worry, Thigpen. No one's going to hurt you. You've my word for that."
A little eddy of dust drifted out from behind the rock pillar; that was all.
Again, the woman's voice: "This is Veta Hall, Thigpen. You don't know me, but you've probably heard of the man I'm speaking for: Pike Mawson, the adjudicator on Japetus. He wants to make a deal with you."
From the rock pillar, silence only.
"You needn't play coy, Thigpen. Mawson knows all about that 'life catalyst' you helped Tornelescu work out. That's why he sent us for you. He's old and crippled; he needs that catalyst himself, so he can find youth again. He'll give anything for it—anything you name. And he doesn't care how many human guinea pigs you killed developing it, or that you cut old Tornelescu's throat. He'll even help hide you from the FedGov men, if that's worrying you."
The last eddy of dust from behind the rock faded away.
"Please, Thigpen!" the woman begged. "Please surrender! It's suicide if you don't." A pause. "Look: you've heard of Igor Cheng, haven't you? The slaver from the Belt? Well, that's who Mawson sent with me to help bring you in—Cheng and three of his pet Belt killers. Only now that the FedGov's put a price on your head...."
The woman's voice trailed off. Then, after a moment, it rose again, with such violence the amplifier screamed protest.
"Don't you understand, you fool?" she cried hysterically. "If you come in now, Igor's willing to live up to his bargain with Mawson. But if you give him trouble, he'll kill you for the FedGov bounty. Only if he does that, then he'll have to murder me too, so I can't give him away to Mawson when he claims pushing you off was an accident, or self-defense, or whatever other story he decides on!"
Again, silence, broken only by the whish of blowing sand and the ululations of the wind.
The woman sighed audibly. "All right, Thigpen. Don't say I didn't try to give you a chance." Emptiness, defeat, had replaced the desperation in her voice.
The amplifier clicked off. A moment later a landing ladder ratcheted into view below the cruiser's cylindrical hull. A man with radiation-pocked skin and an ugly, livid scar down his right cheek appeared in the open hatchway and, locking his legs about the ladder's uprights, slid swiftly to the ground. Another man of the same hard-faced cut followed, and then another.
For a moment, the cold-eyed trio paused beneath the ship, adjusting breather-masks and checking short-barreled blasters. Then, spreading out, they moved warily towards the rock pillar behind which their quarry had disappeared.
Still there was no visible move from the man addressed as Thigpen. Swinging wide down the slope in a crouch, the scar-faced member of the searching party circled so as to approach the pillar from the rear.
A moment later his voice rasped through a hand-amp: "Rack the dirty starbo! He isn't here!"
Instantly, the cruiser's speaker clicked on again. "What do you mean, he's not there?" A note of repressed excitement echoed in Veta Hall's words. "He's got to be there, Igor! There's no way he could have broken clear!"
The scar-faced man laughed harshly. "That's right, lover-girl. There's no way. So don't waste energy hoping we'll miss him."
Now the landing party's two other members came abreast the pillar. A second hand-amp cut in: "There's a little cover over this way, Cheng. Maybe our boy snaked on over to the next outcrop."
"How could he? We were watching!"
The third man: "Well, you can't find him, can you?"
And the second again: "If he played it right, he could have made it, Cheng. After all, he had that column between him and us."
"All right, we'll go on to the next rocks, then. And when we find that chitza—!"
The trio spread out once more—wading through swirling sand, clambering over jagged ledges. Chill menace showed in their stance and movements. They held their blasters at the ready.
Then, reaching the maze-like cluster of monoliths that was their goal, they advanced warily between its towering, weird-etched columns till, one by one, they disappeared from view.
Behind them, sand heaved at the base of the rock pillar that had been their first goal. A figure pushed up out of the drifted grit.
It was the man from the carrier. Shooting quick glances to right and left, he rose cat-like, then paused momentarily while he tapped sand from his breather-mask's filter. He looked better now than he had before his brief respite, and both his nose and the head-gash had stopped bleeding. Close-knit, of medium height, and obviously under thirty, he moved with lithe coordination. Cool intelligence glinted in the grey eyes. His face, though hardly handsome, combined an intriguingly paradoxical mixture of recklessness and control.
Now, as he tapped the filter, light flashed from his wrist. Stopping short, he fumbled off a standard doloid identification bracelet.
But though the picture was his, the name engraved beneath it was Stewart Ross, not Thigpen.
For the fraction of a second, the man hesitated, then dropped the bracelet into the sand and scraped it under with his foot.
Next, pivoting, he struck out in the same general direction his pursuers had taken, but at such an angle as would let the pillar screen him from the cruiser.
A dozen yards farther on, a low, crumbling ledge crossed his path slaunchwise. Dropping down into its shelter, the man wormed swiftly along it till it played out in a wind-furrowed, trough-like hollow.
The hollow gave him cover to a dune, and the dune hid him till he reached the first spur of the strata that formed the outcrop his pursuers now were searching.
Staying low, out of view, Ross followed the spur till he reached the upthrust columns and ledges themselves. Then, a fist-sized rock in each hand, he rose and moved cautiously on into the maze.
Ahead, scar-faced Cheng came into view around a towering escarpment.
Instantly, Ross drew back. Tight-lipped, cold-eyed, he hefted the two rocks.
Scowling under black, bushy brows as he peered this way and that, blaster at the ready, Cheng shuffled closer ... closer....
Ross drew back a step. Then, through a slot between two great stone slabs, he lobbed one of his rocks high into the air above Cheng's head. Sailing in a swift arc, it struck the face of the escarpment and rattled noisily down the steep slope behind the slaver.
Like lightning, Cheng whirled, finger already rigid on his weapon's trigger.
It put his back to his stalker. Stepping clear of his sheltering slab, Ross hurled the second rock.
It struck the base of Cheng's skull with a meaty thunk. The slaver spilled forward.
Ross came in with a rush. Snatching up his downed foe's fallen blaster, he whipped it round just in time to cover the other two members of the landing party as they waded into view through the thick-drifted sand at the cliff's base.
The pair stopped in their tracks, jaws dropping.
Ross' lips peeled back in the caricature of a grin. He didn't speak.
The two men from the cruiser hesitated, then exchanged quick, raw-nerved glances.
Still not speaking, Ross flicked his blaster's muzzle ever so slightly; triggered a bolt.
Sand spewed in a geyser bare inches from the feet of the man at the left.
Like magic, the pair dropped their weapons.
Ross stripped off his torn, chrysolite-green tunic and tossed it down beside black-browed, scar-faced Cheng, still lying limp and unconscious in the sand. "Put this on him. And give me his outfit."
The slaver's two aides didn't even argue about it.
The switch finished and a cap donned to hide his gashed scalp, Ross eyed his captives coldly. "How many aboard the cruiser?"
A moment of sullen hesitation. Then: "Just two—the girl, and one of us to keep track of her."
"For your sake, I hope you're not lying." Ross' words held a flat, deadly ring. "Now get this straight: you've finally captured me. But you had to knock me out to do it, so you're carrying me back to the ship." And then, to the nearest of the prisoners: "You! Put that on your hand-amp. Tell the woman about it, strong enough for her to believe it."
Eyes still on Ross' blaster, the man obeyed.
Ross smiled thinly. "Let's go."
Sullenly, his two prisoners heaved up their green-tunicked, still-unconscious chief between them and, shuffling and stumbling, carried him out of the outcrop's rocky maze to the dusty, windswept spread of sandy waste beyond. Ross moved with them, but with face averted. He maneuvered, too, to keep the others between him and the cruiser.
Then, at last, they were climbing the dune on which the ship stood ramped ... angling up the final slope and pausing beneath the shining metal hull, out of view of the open hatchway above.
Ross said, "Lie down, you two!"
"Lie down—?" Panic flared in the eyes of the man nearest him. "So you can blast us, you mean? No—"
He lunged as he spoke. But Ross was already moving, swinging up the blaster's butt in a hard, fast blow to the other's head.
The man dropped. Hastily, his companion stretched out as ordered.
"Stay there," Ross clipped. Then, incredibly cool, he turned to the ladder and, head tilted forward to hide his face, climbed swiftly towards the hatchway.
Above him, Veta Hall spoke, her voice no longer marred by the amplifier's distortion: "You really did get him, Igor? Alive, not dead—?" But her tone told nothing of how she felt about it.
Ross mumbled incoherently, not slowing his climb.
"Will you need a sling to lift him, Igor?"—A male voice, this one.
Another guttural mumble. Ross' chin scraped his chest, he was holding his head so far forward.
A hand touched his shoulder. "Speak up, Igor! I can't understand—"
Ross gripped the sill of the hatchway. His head came up—teeth bared, eyes blazing. In one lunge, he slammed through the open port, bowling Veta Hall aside.
The next instant he ricocheted into a gaping, goggle-eyed rowdy who held a spanner in one hand, a vortane-tube in the other.
The man swung the spanner in a wild arc.
Ross ducked under it. Savagely, he drove an elbow into the other's side, in the soft-fleshed belt between hip and ribs.
Goggle-eyes gave an anguished shallow-breathed gasp. Rising almost on tiptoe, he tottered forward three or four uncertain steps, then slumped in a heap on the floor.
When the woman tried to snatch up the fallen spanner, Ross kicked it out of her hand with such violence that she cowered back against the wall, moaning and clutching her bruised fingers.
Paying her no heed, Ross doubled back to the hatch and spun the control-wheel. The vault-like door sang on its screw-locks. In seconds, all entry was barred.
Bleakly, now, Ross glanced at his new prisoners—first the woman, then the man, then back to the woman again.
"So Pike Mawson wants to make a deal with me, does he?" His curt laugh held no mirth. "All right, I'll let him. Only the terms are going to be mine, not his—and by the time I'm through, Stera help him, he'll wish he'd never heard of me, or the catalyst, or old Tornelescu either!"