He didn't take the belt to the hotel. He walked, big hands deep in his pockets, thinking, thinking things he hardly dared think of.
That ship had been pirated close by. Its route in from Venus was from the south-east. That cargo of tungsoid had been pirated over the Jersey Ruins. He was on the right track and it was a hurry-up job. There was little reason to believe The Bear had gotten interested in electrotubes....
Next morning when the first yellow rays of the sun's dying ember slanted across the ice, Steel's ski plane circled up from the Terminal and headed south-east.
Crossing the sub-zero ice crevices on foot would have taken months but it was just a short hop by plane. It was a hop, however, that few planes took. Freight and liner traffic from the Terminal immediately headed for the stratosphere. Near the surface, the glacier's fangs probed every cloud and blizzards of liquid air roamed the uncharted chasms. Only an occasional prospector or hunter attempted low-altitude flying here and often these never returned.
This morning, however, Steel was lucky. The weather was clear and ceiling unusually high, the peaks rearing from the shadow-filled valleys like glittering icicles in the pale yellow light. When he checked his instruments by the chart and headed the plane down over the ice field that choked the Jersey Ruins, he grinned silently behind the control lever. Now, if the blizzard would only hold off for an hour or so....
The crumbling ruins of ancient buildings jutted up from the snow, monuments of a long-departed civilization. Although never actually explored, the Ruins were thought to extend for miles south of the comet crater. More was known about the crater itself since it was only a few centuries old. Its gigantic explosion had knifed a deep valley in the ice mountains that was still relatively warm. Lichen grew on the snow here, bats hung in the caves, and ice-bears had a shorter hibernation. And The Bear? Any crevice, any ruined building here might be his lair.
Scanning the drifts below through his windows, Steel looked for tracks, melting snow or rocket stains. As he looked, he kept an eye on his auto-sextant. As it clicked off the changing coordinates of his location, he marked his position on the chart. Vanish he might like those other five cops who'd gone after The Bear, Steel thought, but not without a trace—not as long as the little microphone in his helmet was ready for an instant S.O.S. He'd tested it at the Terminal; Stahl's man was on the job.
On a little plateau below, he saw a herd of bluish white snow-deer. They looked up and then stampeded in all directions as he passed over. Odd he hadn't seen any bears yet.
He was banking low over the half-buried top of a building, squinting down at the white drifts, when he saw the ball.