Pop stepped backwards, retreating from the heavy figure of the wrecker. Fear was surging in waves through him--fear mixed with blind hate and contempt for himself and his senile weakness. Overhead, against the stars, the awful satellite drew nearer.
Carnavon reduced the power in his magnetic shoes and moved lightly toward Pop, the spanner raised to strike. The old man stumbled against a long shard of steel on the hull that floated upward at his touch. Fear paralyzed him, and he stood now, waiting for the blow of the spanner that would smash his helmet and leave him a distended corpse spinning through space. Above him, the satellite spun inward.
Pop glanced up--into the agonized, dead face of a twelve-year-old boy. He shrieked. The sound deafened him in the bubble of his helmet. All the fear and weakness turned to a bitter hate and surged forward in one insane motion toward his tormentor. The long shard of steel came to hand like a lance. The rusted, warped old watch spring that was Pop Wills recoiled and unwound in one raging moment. He charged Carnavon.
Carnavon evaded the clumsy charge instinctively. With an almost unconscious motion, he raised the blaster and fired point-blank.
The searing bolt caught Pop Wills in the chest and spun him around, tattered ribbons of charred flesh and melted metal from his suit intermingled. He curled inward upon himself in an awkward graceless fashion and sank to the hull plates, a nimbus of ice flowing from the gap in his suit as the water-vapor and blood spurted into the vacuum. But there was something strangely like a smile on his face as life left him. Pop had conquered his fear at last.
But Carnavon, on the other end of the bolt of fire that had ended Pop Wills' life, spun outward--away from the _Thunderbird_, away from the _Carefree_, end over end, driven by the fiery recoil of his own weapon. At a speed considerably less than the muzzle-velocity of the blast, but still much higher than the best speed of the feeble suit motor, Ron Carnavon spun into space. Out and away, the precious sapphires spilling out of his hand, glittering in the faint sunlight as they took up their orbits about him like tiny, mocking moonlets....
UWR MESSAGE PRIORITY AA HIGH SPACE GUARD CORVETTE M-233 TO EMV BASE ONE OBERON STOP IN RESPONSE TO ALARM BROADCAST BY RS CAREFREE COMMA THIS VESSEL PROCEEDED TO GRID M332254-89OK COMMA LOCATED THERE MISSING RS THUNDERBIRD STOP RADAR SEARCH LOCATED MISSING CAPTAIN RON CARNAVON WANTED FOR MURDER AND BARRATRY STOP CARNAVON UNACCOUNTABLY FOUND AT CONSIDERABLE DISTANCE FROM VESSEL DEAD OF ASPHYXIATION DUE TO EXHAUSTION OF PRESSURE SUIT SUPPLIES STOP CASE MAY BE CONSIDERED CLOSED STOP END MESSAGE