"Sure."
Anderson moved in. When he finished, the ship balanced nose down, one thousand miles above the surface, driving straight at the planet with a force of more or less one gee. The "more or less" came from Anderson's constant read justments.
"Now don't worry," Anderson told him. "I'm trying keep us out of the atmosphere, but if we do happen to land in the soup all I have to do is turn off the motor. The motor is all that's holding us in this tight orbit. We'd fall straight up into outer space."
"So that's what a forced orbit is. How are you working the search?"
"Well, on a map it would look like I'm following lines of longitude. I'll turn the ship sideways for a few minutes every time we cross a pole, so we can keep changing our line of search. We can't just let the planet turn under us. It would take almost sixteen hours."
The world rolled beneath them, one thousand miles below- more or less. There was faint banding of the atmosphere, but the predominant color was bluish white. Anderson kept the radar sweeping at and below the ward horizon, which on the radar screen looked like stratified air. It was solid rock.
"Understand, this is just to find out if it's there," Anderson said an hour later. "If we see a blob, we'll have pinned within five hundred miles. That's all."
"That's all we need."
At nine hours Anderson turned the ship around, facing outward. He ached from shoulders to fingertips. "It's not there," he said wearily. "Now what?"
"Now we get ready for a fight. Get us headed toward Nereid and turn off the drive."
The bright stars that were two fusion-drive spacecraft were too close to the tiny Sun to be easily seen. Anderson couldn't even find the Golden Circle. But Greenberg's ship came steadily on, blue and brightening at the edge of the Sun's golden corona. Garner and Anderson were on a ten-hour path to Nereid, Neptune's outermost moon. They watched as Greenberg's light grew brighter.
At nine thirty the light began to wiggle. Greenberg was maneuvering. "Do we start shooting?" Anderson wanted to know.
"I think not. Let's see where he's going."
They were on the night side of the planet. Greenberg was diving toward Neptune at a point near the twilight line. He was clearly visible.
"He's not coming toward Nereid," said Anderson. They were both whispering, for some reason.
"Right. Either he left it on Triton, or it's in orbit. Could it be in orbit after that long?"
"Missile's tracking," Anderson whispered.
Greenberg was past Triton before he started to declarate.
"In orbit?" wondered Garner. "He must have nuts."
Twenty minutes later Greenberg's ship was a wiggling between the horns of Neptune's cold blue crescent. They watched its slow crawl toward one of the horns. He was in a forced orbit, covering a search pattern of surface. "Now what?" Anderson asked.
"We wait and see. I give up, Anderson. I can't understand it."
"I swear it's not on Neptune."
"Uh, oh." Garner pointed. "Hail, hail, the gang's all here." A tiny spear of light was going by the lighted edge of the planet.
The blue-green ball was larger than he had anticipated. For the first time Kzanol regretted his carelessness in not finding out more about the eighth planet when he had the chance, some two billion years ago. He asked the pilot and copilot, who remembered that Neptune had 1.23 gee at surface. Earth gee, of course. For Kzanol it would be about two and a half.
Kzanol stood at one of the small windows, his jaw just above the lower edge, his leathery lips drawn back in a snarl of worry. Not long now! One way or another. For the pilot was nudging the ship into a search orbit.
Someone was already there.
It was the half-asleep free slave he'd passed at the halfway point. He was almost around the curve of the world, but he would be back in eighteen diltun or so. Kzanol had the pilot put the Golden Circle in orbit and turn off the motor. Let the slave do the searching.
The ship went by underneath, spitting fire at the stars. The slave was indeed marking out a search pattern. Kzanol let him go on.
And he wondered. How was he going to get down, on a motor which simply didn't have the power?
He let the pilot think about it, and the pilot told him. On rockets, wings, and rams, all going at once. But even the pilot couldn't think of a way back up.
Kzanol/Greenberg, of course, had no warning at all. At its present setting his radar would have shown Kzanol's ship as more transparent than air. Even the planet itself was translucent. Kzanol/Greenberg kept watch over the radar screen, sure that if Masney missed the suit, he wouldn't.
"Why isn't the other ship searching too?" Anderson wondered. "It's just floating."
"Ordinarily," said Garner, thinking out loud, "I'd think they were, in cahoots. There's no need for them both to search. But how? Oh. I get it. The ET has taken control of Masney and Greenberg. Either that or he's letting them do his job for him without their knowing it."
"Wouldn't the job get done quicker if they both searched?"
"I'm beginning to wonder if this alien isn't the aristocrat's aristocrat. Maybe he thinks that anyone who works is a slave. Since he's a master… But the real question is, what are they searching for, and where is it?
"Look, son, why don't you warm up the radio and point the maser at our fleet of Belters. I might as well fill them in."
One thing about the Belt ships: at least the air plant could handle pipe tobacco. The man in the third ship was the only man in the fleet who took advantage of the fact, one of exactly six in the entire Belt. He was known, not too affectionately, as Old Smoky.
Once he had been a flatlander. For nearly thirty years he had piloted a succession of circumlunar tourist boats. His nights he had spent in a small, cheap apartment a few stories above the vehicular traffic level in Los Angeles. On holidays he went to the beach, and was lucky to find enough clear sand to sit on; his vacations were spent in foreign cities, strange and novel and undeniably fascinating but generally just as crowded as Los Angeles.
Once he stayed two weeks in what was left of the Amazon jungle. He smuggled some cigarettes in with him, risking two years in prison, and ran out in five days. When he found he was telling every friend and stranger how much he wanted a smoke, he went back to the cities.
He had met Lucas Garner in the line of duty; Garner's duty. There was a massive sit-in to protest rumored corruption in the Fertility Board; and when the law hauled Smoky off the top strip he met Garner in the uniform of a police chief. Somehow they got to be friends. Their respective views on life were just close enough to make for violent, telling, fun arguments. For years they met irregularly to argue politics. Then Luke joined the Arms. Smoky never forgave him.
One day Smoky was rounding the Moon nose down with a load of tourists, when he felt a sudden, compelling urge to turn nose out and keep driving until all the stars were behind him. He fought it down, and landed in Death Valley that evening as he had landed seven-thousand-odd times before. That night, as he approached his apartment through the usual swirling mob, Smoky realized that he hated every city in the world.
He had saved enough to buy his own mining ship. Under the circumstances the Belt was glad to have him. He learned caution before the Belt killed him, and he earned enough to keep his ship in repair and himself in food and tobacco.
Now he was the only man in the fleet who could recognize Lucas Garner's voice. When the radio burst to life he listened carefully to the message, then called Lew to report that it really was Garner.
For Smoky, the broadcast removed all doubt. It was Garner himself. The old man was not above a judicious lie, but he was not prone to risk his life. If he was near Neptune in a leaky terran Navy crate, he must have an outstanding reason to be there.
Thoughtfully Old Smoky checked through his arsenal of two radar missiles, one heat seeker, and a short-range laser "cannon." The war of the worlds was here at last!
Kzanol was baffled. After six hours of searching, the slave Masney had covered the entire planet. The suit wasn't there!
He let the slave begin his second search, for the sake of thoroughness. He took his own ship to Triton. The Brain could not compute the course of moons; one of them may have gotten in the way of the ship as it speared toward Neptune. Very likely it had been Triton. That moon was not only closer than Nereid, it was far bigger: 2500 miles thick as compared to 200.
A nerve-wracking hour later, an hour of flying upside down over Triton's surface with the jet firing outward and the lightly pitted moon showing flat overhead, Kzanol admitted defeat. No white flash had shown itself on the radar screen, though Neptune itself had glowed through the transparent image of the larger moon. He turned his attention to the small moon.
"So that's it!" Anderson's face glowed. "They thought it was on the surface and it wasn't. Now they don't know where it is!" He frowned in thought. "Shouldn't we get out of here? The honeymooner's aiming itself at Nereid, and we're too close for comfort."