Absorbers! What a world of myth and legend surrounds them. Are they organic or inorganic? I do not know. I only know they have been mortally feared by sailors since the first rocket blasted through Earth's orbit. They are what their name implies: devourers of life, with the peculiar, apparently meaningless power of transforming themselves into a physical facsimile of their victims.
One of them is out there now, swirling lazily like a miasmic cloud of saffron dust....
Cap handed the book to Raine who read it and handed it back without comment. And at that moment Cap saw the kid in his true light: a cold-blooded extrovert who was interested in the ship only for what he could get out of her.
Next day, without asking permission, Raine began the task of dismantling the Perseus. He knew he had a potential fortune at his fingertips, for every portable object he could transport back to Earth or Venus would bring a high price from curio-hungry antique hunters.
For a week he worked almost unceasingly at the salvage operation. He unscrewed the ship's nameplate and made a little plush box for it. He took down the dials of the cosmoscope, the astrolog and other smaller instruments and made them ready for shipment. He stripped out the entire intercom mechanism, the old-fashioned lighting fixtures, to say nothing of the furniture and personal effects which hadn't spoiled by time.
It was on a Sunday evening that matters came to a head. In the early dusk Straba's twin moons were well above the horizon, shining with a pale light. Cap was in the kitchen brewing himself a cup of coffee when through the window he saw Raine emerge from the Perseus and carry an armful of equipment across to the little lean-to shed where he stored the salvage. He came out of the shed and something prompted him to look forward. An instant later he ran to the house and took the steps three at a time to the observatory.
He was up there a quarter of an hour before he came down again, a queer look on his face.
"Mr. Barlow," he said, "what's that thing that looks like a gun emplacement on the flat on the other side of the house?"
"That's exactly what it is," Cap told him. "A Dofield atomic defender. I've had that gun here a long time. When I first set up housekeeping on Straba, this part of the System was pretty wild. Pirates weren't unusual."
"What's its range?"