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Updated: May 26, 2025
"Our own rockets are after us," Trudeau gasped. There hadn't been time to collect them all after Rip's unwilling attack on the Frenchman had scattered them. Now the sun was setting them off. Another flashed past, fortunately over their heads. The sun's heat was causing them to fire unevenly. "Three more to go," Koa called. "Watch out!"
He handed Rip the shoulder case that contained the plotting board. Santos had taken charge of Rip's astrogation instruments. A spaceman was waiting with Rip's bubble. At a nod, the spaceman slipped it on his head. Rip reached up and gave it a quarter turn. The locking mechanism clamped into place. He turned his belt ventilator control on full, and the space suit puffed out.
Would that scrap of information send some Patrolmen hurtling off to the Tower in search of the caged creature? The thought of such an expedition was, in a small way, comforting to the captives. An hour or so later they were fed, noiselessly and without visible attendants, when three trays slid through a slit in the wall at floor level. Rip's nose wrinkled. "Now I get the vector!
But while he thought another acted. Weeks leaned over and twitched the lancet out of Ali's fingers. Then, before any of them could move, he thrust its contaminated point into the back of his hand. "Don't!" Both Dane's cry and Rip's hand came too late. It had been done. And Weeks sat there, looking alone and frightened, studying the drop of blood which marked the dig of the surgeon's keen knife.
Commander O'Brine will never have time to get off a message, because he'll be dead before he knows there is danger." The logic of it sent a chill down Rip's spine. The Connie could get the Scorpius with one nuclear blast and then clean up the asteroid at leisure. The Federation would suspect, but it would be unable to prove anything, because there would be no witnesses.
He hoped the sergeant major had sense enough to be waiting at some reasonable place. He went up the ladder hand over hand and sped down the corridor to the supply room. The spaceman first class in charge of supplies was turning an audio-mag through a hand viewer, chuckling at the cartoons. At the sight of Rip's flushed, anxious face he dropped the machine. "Yessir?" "I need a spack.
He flashed into space headfirst, at an angle that took him over the crater's rim and fifty feet above the ground. He caught a glimpse of Santos' helmet, glowing like a pink balloon, and of the three Connies facing it. Rip's arms flashed above his head. His thumbs compressed. Air spurted from the two bottles, driving him downward feetfirst, directly at the heads of the Connies! Get the Scorpion!
They were looked upon as simply "hangers on," or in other words, as yellow sheep-killing dogs, that if you would say "booh" at, would yelp and get under their master's heels. Mike Snyder was General George Maney's "yaller dog," and I believe here is where Joe Jefferson, in Rip Van Winkle, got the name of Rip's dog Snyder.
"Use one long-range screen for scanning high space toward Mars. Let me know the minute you get a blip, because it probably will be that Consops cruiser. Have the missile ports cleared for action." Rip's eyes opened. Clear the missile ports? That meant getting the cruiser in fighting shape, ready for instant action. "You wouldn't fire on that Consops cruiser, would you, sir?"
That comment was so far from what he had been expecting that Dane was startled out of his own gloomy thoughts. Rip's brown face was one wide smile, his black eyes danced it was plain he was honestly elated. "Get a move on, fire rockets," he urged, "or Van will blast you for fair!" Dane did move, up the ladder to the next level and out on the port ramp. What he saw below brought him up short.
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