Aliens Alien Harvest - By Robert Sheckley Page 0,11

TV monitors can offer.

The Dolomite - a good ship with an old but reliable atomic drive, but also recently fitted with tachyonic gear for multiparsec jumps - was currently on a local run within the solar system, tooling around doing a job here, a job there, trying to pick up some money for the owners. Then they got the signal that took them to Lea II in the asteroids.

Lea was a fueling base, owned by Universal Obsidian but open to all ships. It was a refueling spot. It even had a kind of cafe, only a dozen seats and a menu like you'd expect at a place that hired their cooks by how little they would steal and cut costs by never bringing in fresh provisions. Not that fresh produce comes easy in the asteroids. It costs too much to make special runs with your iceberg lettuce.

After leaving Lea, Hoban had taken the Dolomite to Position A23 in the asteroids. That was the location for the Ayngell Works, a refinery on its own slab of rock, where a robot work crew purified metals and rare earths mined elsewhere in the asteroids. A23 was located in one of the densest parts of the cluster. You had to navigate at slow speeds and with care, but who didn't know that? And Hoban was a careful man. He didn't let his second in command do the job for him. Even though Gill was an android and a top pilot and navigator, Hoban did it himself, and he did it well. In any event, no one had any complaints about him before he came to A23.

His job on A23 was to take a big metals hopper into tow and bring it to the Luna Reclamations Facility.

Taking it up was no small job. It was a big mother, too big to fit into the Dolomite's hold. But of course the asteroid it was perched on had negligible gravity, so there was no difficulty in pulling the hopper away from the surface once the magnetic clamps that held it to its massive base plate were released. Hoban's crew, by all accounts, were trained men; it should have been a piece of cake.

The trouble was, they weren't really a trained crew. There were three Malays aboard who spoke no English and only understood the simplest commands. That usually worked out all right, but not this time. It had never been proven, but one of those Malays must have gotten confused working in the lowest bay. Somehow he or someone had missed the towline entirely and had locked a fuel line feeder into the cou pling winch. The next thing Hoban knew, the feeding mechanism had been jerked out of the atomic pile, which had shut down automatically, leaving him floating in space without main power.

This wasn't the first time a spacecraft had lost a main engine. Gill estimated six hours to repair it. Meantime the backup accumulators and the steering jets would provide enough propulsion to get back to A23 so they could pick up the five crewmen who had gone down to manhandle the cargo ties into position.

At least that's what should have happened, or so it was claimed in the court inquiry later.

Instead, Hoban had turned the ship toward Luna and got away as fast as he could. He claimed afterward that there was a lot more wrong than just losing an engine. Down on A23, an inexperienced crew member had accidentally pulled the interlocks on the atomic pile that kept A23 running. The damned thing was going critical and there was no time to do anything but run for it...

Leaving the five crewmen on A23 to their fate.

Hoban had had to make a quick decision. He calculated that the pile was going to blow up in three minutes. If he stayed around or moved in closer, the blast would take him with it. Even a class four duralloy hull wasn't built for that kind of treatment. And anyhow, nonmilitary spacecraft were usually built of lightergauge metal than the fighting ships.

It was pandemonium aboard the Dolomite. There was a crew of twenty aboard, and five of them were down at A23 with the blast coming up on them in minutes. Half of the remaining crew had wanted the captain to ignore the lapsed time indicator, ignore the risk, and go back to pick up the men; the other half wanted him to blow off what remained of battery power and get out of there as