On the Trail of the Space Pirates_ A Tom Corbett Space Cadet Adventure - Carey Rockwell [469]
Tom jumped out and pulled Cag after him, taking a bottle of water from the small compartment behind the driver's seat. He splashed some on the man's face, and while Cag moaned and came to, Tom drank his fill. He hadn't realized that he was so thirsty.
"Cag," said Tom coldly, when he knew the man could understand him, "I'll beat your ears off if you don't tell me who put you up to this!"
Cag was silent. Tom stepped in and slapped the man across the face.
"Come on! Talk!" he snarled.
Dirty, his clothes ripped, his hands bloody, Cadet Tom Corbett did not look like the carefree young cadet that Cag had met a few hours ago. He was frightened and began to whine.
"Talk or I'll slap you silly!" Tom growled.
Cag saw the wild rage in Tom's eyes and began to stutter.
"The trucking outfit! Just find out who owns this trucking outfit and who would gain if the projectiles failed."
Tom was back in the cab in a flash. He started the mighty jets and began to engage the clutch.
Cag leaped up. "You can't leave me here in the desert! I'll die."
Tom looked at the man, threw out the rest of the food and water from the compartment, and gunned the huge truck down the highway.
Eight hours later Tom rolled into Marsport, stopping the big truck at the first Solar Guard substation he could find.
He raced inside without cutting the jets of the truck and reported to a sergeant seated behind the desk, reading.
"I'm Cadet Tom Corbett!" he shouted. "I've got to get in touch with Commander Walters at the Academy right away."
"Stand where you are, Corbett!" said the sergeant, jumping up and leveling a paralo-ray gun at him. "You're under arrest!"
Tom stared, and then, spinning on his heels, dashed out of the station, the guard's ray blasts spitting at his heels. Jumping into the truck, he gunned the jets and roared off into the dark Martian night.
CHAPTER 12
"Aw, shut your big Venusian mouth!"
As Roger's voice roared over the intercom loud-speaker of the speedy rocket scout, down on the power deck Astro's face turned red.
"Manning," he growled into the intercom microphone, "if I didn't need you to get me back to Mother Earth, I'd come up there and take you apart!"
For four days the two cadets had been aboard the rocket scout, circling in an orbit between Mars and Earth, conducting equipment tests for Dave Barret. They had become bored with the routine work and spent most of their time needling each other, but as Roger said, at least they were in space.
"O.K., let's knock off the space gas!" called Roger over the intercom. "It's time to run another test. Want to come up topside and take a hand?"
"Be right there, Roger!" said Astro. He set the power-deck controls on automatic, and then, with a quick look around to make sure everything was shipshape, he climbed the ladder to the control deck.
Roger was standing at the chart table, audiophones on his ears, listening for the automatic astral chronometer time-check broadcast on a suprahigh-frequency audio channel from the giant electronic clock in the Tower of Galileo. All spaceship chronometers were checked against this huge clock regularly, in order to maintain constant uniform time so necessary for the delicate art of astrogation between celestial bodies.
Astro started to speak to the blond-haired cadet, but Roger waved him off, listening for the signal. Suddenly he looked up at their own chronometer above the control board and took off the audiophones, smiling his satisfaction.
"Right on the split second, Astro," he said.
"O.K.," replied the big Venusian. "Then let's run that test and get it over with."
"Right," said Roger, turning back to the control panel. "Do