Adventure stories; Asteroids -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space pirates -- Fiction; Space ships -- Fiction
For a moment more I crouched in the shelter of the little loading
engine; I caught a few more fragments, but they were not important.
* * * * *
A wallet in young Carson's cubby, with a map in it? I shifted silently
backward, reached the side deck and padded aft. The smoking lounge was
empty now. The little interior cross corridor of the superstructure
was dim and silent. Carson and his sister had connecting rooms, with
corridor doors side by side. Cautiously I tried them. They were locked.
In a moment I was out to the side deck. Carson's window was closed;
I pulled at the vertical sash and it yielded, slid outward. The room
was dim, with just a faint glow of the corridor light coming over the
lattice-grille above the door.
I jumped over the sill; landed silently in the room. No need for any
lengthy search; his jacket was here, folded on a chair. The wallet was
in a pocket. Swiftly I riffled through it, came upon a folded square
of notepaper. The map? I was opening it. By the dim sheen of reflected
light I could see its penciled scrawl. And suddenly I was stricken
by the sound of footsteps in the corridor outside. Someone coming. I
jumped on the chair. Through the grille I could catch a glimpse of a
cloaked figure coming along the corridor. Carson or the girl--in that
second I could not tell which.
But at all events I had no desire to get caught here by either of them.
I got back out the window just in time. Aft down the side deck there
was the blob of a loitering figure, a big, bulky silhouette. It was
Walter Livingston, the Earth-Mars Ambassador. The tip of his cigarette
glowed in the dimness as he stood by one of the side bull's-eyes. Was
he watching these windows of Carson and the girl? Did he see me? I had
no way of telling. I ran forward, ducked around the superstructure
corner. The bow-peak triangle was empty; the chairs where the group of
us had been sitting were still here.
There was enough light for me to examine the folded sheet of paper I
had purloined. It seemed a crude map. A rough, penciled sketch. But a
map of what? There were the ragged outlines of what might be intended
to represent mountains. The scribbled word: "Andros." A dotted line
through what might be a mountain pass. And then a tiny X.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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