He glanced across the concrete apron to the nearby launching cradle where the Space Queen II pointed its silvery nose to the twilight heavens. A sister to the original Space Queen, it was smaller than the Viking, but a thing of beauty in its own way. He smiled to himself. Tomorrow he would have Jeff prepare the auto-pilot on the Space Queen II for Mars. He would have a valid reason for the trip. Afterall, he was going to be the best man at a wedding, wasn't he? At least, that's what they would all believe. Perfect. A perfect alibi, and could he help it if the bride and groom never arrived?
Grimly, Bert strode over to the hydraulic lift and stepped into the narrow cage. He slammed over the control lever and felt the cage lurch under his feet. Then the ground fell away and he was moving smoothly, swiftly up the side of the three hundred foot tapering hull.
Moments later the cage stopped before an open airlock. Bert left it and walked into the narrow confines of the ship. He walked along the companionway to the control room. Passenger quarters on a space ship were necessarily confined to the nose of the vessel. With atomic reactors still in the lab stage, chemical propellants were still the motivating power that drove man into the void. Earlier fuel mixtures had been composed of various types: hydrazine plus nitric acid, and alcohol combined with liquid oxygen. Latest rocket fuels combined parts of both mixtures with catalytic agents to increase maximum power. Still, fuel supplies required over seventy percent of ship storage space. Thus crew or passenger quarters suffered. The auto-pilot had solved this difficulty somewhat, making a crew unnecessary. One man could safely navigate the dark reaches of interplanetary space with the auto-pilot doing the work of a five or ten man crew.
Bert made his way to the control room in the nose of the ship. He switched on the overhead light and glanced around. Everything was in order. But then, Jeff was a very thorough man. The best. Bert put the papers he carried on the forward grav bunk and strode over to the control panel.
Thoughts pounded in his head. It would be easy. So very easy. And foolproof. Jeff had said escape velocity thrust for ten minutes, space drive cut in at thirty minutes. That was the critical point. At cut in the catalytic agents joined with the rocket fuels to produce free space acceleration. A tricky business, but not for the auto-pilot. If the catalytic agents were cut in on escape velocity thrust, say between ten and twenty-five minutes after blastoff, the whole chemical firing balance would be thrown out of adjustment. That had happened before—before the days of the auto-pilot. In those days men had died in space. Their ship blown to a million pieces in the void as the unbalanced fuel mixture reacted with catalytic agents. A nasty way to die, but in a way merciful. The clumsy spaceman who miscalculated never knew what happened. The auto-pilot had taken the risk out of space flight.
It was now going to send Miles Berendt and Carol Grant to their death.
Bert went to work quickly, expertly. He snapped the latch lock of the control panel and laid bare the workings of the auto-pilot. A few simple adjustments, not discernible to anybody but an expert—if he were looking for something wrong. And then Bert was finished. He locked the control panel and smiled grimly.
Twenty minutes after blastoff the firing mixture would go out of balance as the catalysts cut in prematurely. There would be a hellish blast of flame and nothing but atoms floating in the void.
The atoms of Miles Berendt and Carol Grant.