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Do you want to walk eight hundred miles to a Tovie station? On the Moon it is difficult to keep hired help. So one must rely on practical counter-circumstances. Besides, I wouldn't want you to be at Serenitatis Base, or anywhere else, talking about my discovery, Nelsen. I'm afraid you're stuck." Now Nelsen had the result of his perhaps incautious test statement.
"You gotta know where you're going, first!" "Make up your mind, Nelsen," said the job scout, getting impatient. "We handle just about everything lunar except in the Tovie areas. Without us, you're just a lost, fresh punk!" But another man had approached from another lunar GO rocket, which had just appeared.
Treachery, or, perhaps worse, a kind of poised and poisonous mental judo? Nelsen looked at the other man, who wore a Tovie armor. Tall, starvation-lean. Horse-faced, with a lugubrious, bumpkinish smile that almost had a whimsical appeal. "Honest I just picked up Igor which ain't his real name in the course of my travels," Tiflin offered lightly. "He used to be a comic back in Eurasia.
Asteroid miners who had had poor luck, or who had been forced to kill to win even the breath of life; colonists who had left Mars after terrible misfortunes, there; adventurers soured and maddened by months in a vacuum armor, smelling the stench of their own unwashed bodies; men flush with gains, and seeking merely to relieve the tensions of their restrained, artificial existences in a wild spree; refugees from rigid Tovie conformism all these composed the membership of the wandering, robbing, hijacking bands, which, though not numerous, were significant.
So it was, until, near the end of a long ride, a cluster of bubbs was in view in the near distance, and Ramos and Nelsen could contact Art Kuzak themselves. "We've got Tiflin and his Tovie pal with us, Art," Frank Nelsen said. "They showed us the way, more or less because we made them. But Tif did give us the right position at the start. A favor, maybe. I don't know.
When he was out alone, exploring a new post site on a small asteroid, a starved Tovie runaway had jumped him. Maybe he should regret the end of that incident. Trips to Pallastown were increasingly infrequent. But there was one time when he almost had come specially to see Ramos' new bubb, still under wraps, supposedly. Well that erratic character had it out on a long test run. Damn him!
They had been followed, even before the various late-coming space forces could get into action. Nelsen overheard words that helped complete the pictures: "I'll get them... They had my wife..." "This was planned you know where..." It was planned, all right. But if Ceres, the Tovie colony, had actually been the instigator, there was evidence that the scheme had gotten out of hand.
He could choose and stick to a purpose for even longer than it seemed right for him. Mostly, now, during the long grind of expansion, he was afield. Disturbances on Earth quieted for a while, as had always happened, so far. The Belt responded with relative peace. Tovie Ceres, the Big Asteroid, which, like the others, should have been open to all nations, but wasn't, kept mostly to its own affairs.
Frank got to them just as it was over except for the cursing, the masculine tears of grief and rage, the promises of revenge. Luckily, none of the women had been captured. Joe Kuzak, full of new antibiotics and coagulants, was still up and around. "So we knocked off a few of them, Frank," he said ruefully in his office bubb. "Several were in Tovie armor. Runaways, or agents?
They hurtled on, certainly decelerating considerably, for days, yet, before they were in the Belt. Even that looked like enormous emptiness. And the brightened speck of Pallas was too far to one side. Tovie Ceres was too near on the other side left, it would be, if they considered the familiar northern hemisphere stars of Earth as showing "up" position. The old instruments had put them off-course.
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