On the Trail of the Space Pirates_ A Tom Corbett Space Cadet Adventure - Carey Rockwell [142]
Tom smiled. Neither of the spacemen would give him any more trouble now. He pushed slightly to the left and shot over to the valve that Mason had unwittingly turned off. Tom turned it on and clung to an overhead pipe until he felt the reassuring grip of the synthetic gravity pull him to the deck. Loring and Mason, in the same positions they had been in when Tom fired, settled slowly to the deck. Tom walked over and looked at both of them. He knew they could hear him.
"For smart spacemen like you two," said Tom, "you sure forgot your basic physics. Newton's laws of motion, remember? Everything in motion tends to keep going at the same speed, unless influenced by an outside force. Firing the ray gun was the outside force that will land you right on a prison asteroid! And you'd better start praying that I can pull those fellows off that satellite, because if I don't, you'll wind up frying in the sun with us!"
He started to drag them to a locker and release them from the effects of the ray blast, but, remembering their cold-blooded condemnation of Connel and the others to death on the satellite, he decided to let them remain where they were.
He turned to the control board and flipped on the microphone. He was too far away to pick up an image on the teleceiver, but the others could hear him on the audio, if, thought Tom, they were still alive.
"Attention! Attention! Polaris to Major Connel! Major Connel, can you hear me? Come in, Major Connel—Astro—Roger—somebody—come in!"
He turned away from the mike and fired the starboard jets full blast, making a sweeping curve in space and heading the Polaris back to Junior.
CHAPTER 20
"There's only one answer, boys," said Connel. "Loring and Mason have escaped and taken over the ship. I can't think of any other reason Tom would abandon us like this."
The jet boat was crowded. Alfie, the smallest, was sitting on Astro's lap. For more than an hour they had circled above the copper satellite, searching the surrounding skies in vain for some sign of the Polaris.
"Major," said Roger, who was hunched over the steering wheel of the small space craft, "we're almost out of fuel. We'd better drop down on the night side of Junior, the side away from the sun. At least there we'd be out of the direct heat."
"Very well, Roger," said Connel. "In fact, we could keep shifting into the night side every hour." Then he added quietly, thoughtfully, "But we're out of fuel, you said?"
"Yes, sir," said Roger. "There's just enough to get down." Roger sent the craft in a shallow dive. Suddenly the rockets cut out. The last of the fuel was gone. Roger glided the jet boat to a smooth stop on the night side of the planetoid.
"How much longer before the reactor units go up?" asked Shinny.
Connel turned, thinking he had heard something on the communicators, then answered Shinny's question. "Only four hours," he said.
The crew of spacemen climbed out of the jet boat into the still blackness of the night side of the planet. There wasn't anything left to do.
They sat around on the hard surface of the planet, staring at the strange stars overhead.
"You know," said Astro, "I might be able to set up something to convert some of the U235 in the reactors to fuel the jet boat."
"Impossible, Astro," said Alfie. "You'd need a reduction gear. And not only that, but you haven't any tools to handle the mass. If you opened one of those boxes, you'd be fried immediately by the radiation!"
"Alfie's right," said Connel. "There's nothing to do but wait."
Major Connel turned his face up as far as he could in the huge fish-bowl helmet to stare at the sky. His eyes wandered from star cluster to star cluster, from glowing Regulus, to bright and powerful Sirius. He stifled a sigh. How much he had wanted to see more—and more—and more of the great wide, high, and deep! He remembered his early days as a youth on his first