Shearing, looking amazed. “Probably we wouldn’t. The radioactive disturbance would be too strong to get through, even if we were looking for something beyond it, which we weren’t.”
* * * *
Christina had sprung up. Now she bent over Hyrst and said, “But is there a way it could have been done? Obviously, the Titanite couldn’t have been put directly into the bin with the uranium—if nothing else, it would have been shipped out in the next tanker.”
“Oh, yes,” said Hyrst. “There would be several ways. I can think of a couple myself, and I’ve never even see the layout. The repair-lift shaft, I know, goes clear down to the feeder mechanism, and there’s some kind of a system of dispersal tunnels and an emergency gadget that trips automatically to release a liquid-graphite damping material into them in case the radiation level gets too high. I don’t remember that it ever did, but it’s a safeguard. There’d be plenty of places to hide a lead box full of Titanite.”
“Unless I show them how,” repeated Shearing slowly, and began to undo the straps that held Hyrst to the table. “It has an ominous sound. I’ll bet you that locating the Titanite will be child’s play compared to getting it out. Well, we’ll do what we can.”
“The first thing,” said Christina grimly, “is to get rid of Bellaver. If he has the slightest suspicion where we’re headed he’ll radio ahead and have all Titan alerted.”
Hyrst, sitting up now on the edge of the table, hanging on against the lurching of the ship, said, “That’s right—he owns the refinery now, doesn’t he? Is it still working?”
“No. The mines around there played out, oh, ten, fifteen years ago. The activity’s shifted to the north and east on the other side of the range. That is what may possibly give us a chance.” Shearing staggered with Hyrst across the bucking deck and sat tailor-fashion in the bunk, his eyes intent. “Hyrst, I want you to remember everything you can about the refinery. The ground plan, exactly where the buildings are, the hoists, the landing field. Everything.”
Hyrst said, showing the edges of his teeth, “When do I get Vernon?”
“You’ll get him. I promise you.”
“What about Bellaver? He’s still behind us.”
Shearing smiled. “That’s Christina’s job! Let her worry.”
Hyrst nodded. He began to remember the refinery. Christina and the other two went out.
A short while later a number of things happened, violently, and in quick succession. The ship of the Lazarites, pursuing its wild and headlong course through the swarming debris of the Belt, was far ahead of Bellaver’s yacht but still within instrument range. Apparently in desperation it plunged suddenly on a tangential course into a cluster of great jagged rocks all travelling together at a furious rate of speed. The cluster was perhaps two hundred miles across. The Lazarite ship twisted and turned, and then there was a swift bright flowering of flame, and then nothing.
“She’s blown her tubes,” said Bellaver exultantly, on the bridge of his yacht. The instruments had lost contact, chiefly because the cluster was so thick that it was impossible to separate one body from another.
Vernon said, “They’re not blanking my mind any more. It stopped, like that.”
But he was still doubtful.
“Can you locate the ship?” asked Bellaver.
“I’m trying.”
Bellaver caught his arm. “Look there!”
There was a second, larger and more brilliant, flash of flame.
“They’ve hit an asteroid,” he said. “They’re done for.”
“I can’t locate them,” Vernon said. “No ship, no wreckage. It could be a trick. They could be holding a cloak.”
“A trick?” said Bellaver. “I doubt it. Anyway, we’re running low on fuel, and I’m not going to go into that cluster and risk my own neck to find out. If by any chance they do come out again later on, we’ll deal with them.”
But they both watched the cluster until it had whirled on out of sight. And neither eye nor instrument nor Vernon’s probing mind could distinguish any sign of life.
CHAPTER VIII
Titan lay below them in the Saturn-glow, under the fantastic glory of the Rings. A bitter, repellent world of jagged peaks and glimmering plains of poison snow. The tiny life-raft dropped toward it, skittering nervously as it hit the thin atmosphere. Hyrst clung hard to the handholds, trying not to retch. He was not habituated to space anyway, and the skiff had been bad enough. Now, without any hull around him and nothing but a curved shield in front of him, he felt like an ant on a flying leaf.
“I don’t like it either.” Shearing said. “But it gives us a fifty-fifty chance of getting through unnoticed. Radar usually isn’t looking for anything so small.”
“I understand all the reasons,” Hyrst said. “It’s my stomach that’s obtuse.”
He could make out the pattern of the refinery now, a million miles of vertigo below him. The Lazarite ship was somewhere up and out behind them, hiding in the Rings. The trick had worked with Bellaver out there in the Belt, and they hoped now that it would work with Bellaver’s observers on Titan. There was no need for any fake explosions this time, to give the impression of destruction. Secrecy was the watch-word, all lights out and jet-blasts muffled to a spark. Later, when Hyrst and Shearing had accomplished their mission, the ship would drop down fast and take them off, with the Titanite, before any patrol craft would have time to arrive.
They hoped.
The buildings of the refinery were dark and cold, drifted out of shape by an accumulation of the thin, evil snow. The spiderweb of roads had faded from the plain, and the landing field was smooth and unmarked. Around its perimeter the six stiff towers of the hoists stood up like lonely sentinels, hooded and cloaked.
Hyrst felt a sudden tightening of his throat, and this was a thing he had not expected. A refinery on Titan was hardly a thing to be sentimental about. But it was bound up so intimately with other things, with hopes for a future that was now far behind him, with plans for Elena and the kids that were now a cruel mockery, with friendly memories of Saul and Landers, now long dead, that he could not look at it unmoved.
“Let’s try again,” said Shearing quietly. “If we could locate the Titanite definitely it might make all the difference. We’ll hardly have time to search all six of the bins.”
Glad of the distraction, Hyrst tried. He linked his mind to Shearing’s and they probed with this double probe, one after the other, the six hoists and the bins beneath them, while the raft fell whistling down the air.
It was the same as all the tries before. The bins had been empty for more than a decade, but the residual radiation was still hot enough to present a luminous haze to the eyes of the mind, fogging everything around it.
“Wait a minute,” Hyrst said. “Let’s use our wits. Look at the way those hoists are placed, in a wide crescent. Now if I was MacDonald, coming in from the mountains with a load of Titanite, and I wanted not to be seen, which one would I pick?”
“Either
