By H. B. HICKEY
Deep in space lay a weird and threatening world. And it wasthere that Ben Sessions found the evil daughters . . .
Beyond Ventura B there was no life; there was nothing butone worn out sun after another, each with its retinue ofcold planets and its trail of dark asteroids. At least thatwas what the books showed, and the books had been written bymen who knew their business. Yet, despite the books[Pg 61]and the men who had written them, Ben Sessions went pastVentura B, deliberately and all alone and knowing that theodds were against his returning alive.
He went because of a file clerk’s error. Morecorrectly, he went as the final result of a chain of eventswhich had begun with the clerk’s mistake.
The clerk’s name was Gilbert Wayne and he worked atthe Las Vegas Interplanetary Port. It was Wayne’s jobto put through the orders for routine overhaul ofinterplanetary rockets. Usually Wayne was quite efficient,but even efficient men have bad days, and on one of thosedays Wayne had removed from the active list the name ofAstra instead of its sister ship, the Storan.
The very next morning the Astra had been turned over toMaintenance. Maintenance asked no questions.It was thatdepartment’s job to take the ship apart, fix whatneeded fixing, and put it. Ten minutes later Jacobs sawArmando[Pg 62]Gomez was the mechanic detailed to check the rocket tubes.
Gomez, who always got that job because he was small andslender, dutifully dropped his instruments into his overallpockets and crawled into the left firing tube. Half an hourlater he stuck his head out of the tube and yelled toJacobs, who was in charge of the job:
“Amigo! How many hours this ship she got?”
Jacobs ran his finger down a chart and discovered to hissurprise that the Astra had only two hundred hours on itslog since the last overhaul. Ordinarily a ship was checkedeach thousand hours. He scratched his head but decided thatif Operations wanted the Astra tuned it was none of hisbusiness. So he told Gomez not to ask useless questions andto get back in the tube.
Anyone else but Gomez would have obeyed orders and forgottenall about it. Ten minutes later Jacobs saw Armando’shead appear.
“Amigo!” Gomez shouted. “How manyhours?”
“Two hundred!” Jacobs shouted back, knowing hewould have no peace until Gomez was answered. “Now getto work! We ain’t got all year.”
But Gomez was out of the tube again in five minutes andyelling for the foreman.
“What do you want now?” Jacobs demanded. Heswung himself up on the catwalk beside Gomez.
“Something very funny in here, amigo,” Gomezreplied. “One plate she is too clean.”
“Less work for you,” Jacobs grunted. “Sowhy complain?”
Nevertheless he took a look at the plate, which was near themouth of the tube. It should have been lightly encrustedwith the oxides of rocket fuel. Instead, it was onlybeginning to dull, in strange contrast to its neighborswhich were welded to it.
“That is queer,” Jacobs muttered.
“Si. As you say,amigo. Queer.”
Once Jacobs’ interestwas aroused he was also not oneto let a matter drop; he told Gomez to work on another tubewhile he consulted the front office. The front office wasnot especially interested, but at Jacobs’ insistencethey called in a metallurgist. The metallurgist, whose namewas Britton, was fortunately a thorough young man. Heordered the plate removed and sent to his laboratory for