Scavengers in Space Page 14

  The other message was addressed to Greg, from the Commanding Officer of Project Star-Jump. The message was very polite and regretful; it was also very firm. The pressure of the work there, in his absence, made it necessary for the project to suspend Greg on an indefinite leave of absence. Application for reinstatement could be made at a later date, but acceptance could not be guaranteed.

  “Well, I might have expected it,” Greg said, “after what the major told us. The money for Star-Jump must have been coming from somewhere, and now we know where. The company probably figures to lay claim on any star drive that’s ever developed.” He dropped the notice down the chute, and laughed. “I guess I really asked for it.”

  “You mean I pushed you into it,” Tom said bitterly. “If I’d kept my big mouth shut at the very start of this thing, you’d have gone back to the project and that would have been the end of it.”

  Greg looked at him. “You big bum, do you think I really care?” He grinned. “Don’t feel too guilty, Twin. We’ve been back to back on this one.”

  He pulled off his shirt and walked into the shower room. Johnny Coombs was already stretched out on the sofa, snoring softly. Tom sprawled in the big chair. He was tired; every muscle seemed to ache, but he was not sleepy. After a bit the shower went off and Greg stuck his head in the door. “You coming to bed?”

  “Right away,” Tom said, but he didn’t move. The room light was dim, and his mind was back in the major’s office, thinking about the strange gun, the questions without any answers, and the unpleasant prospects of the day ahead.

  A hearing, maybe the first of many. Charges and countercharges. Three men, two of them the sons of a miner who had been killed in a mining accident, all three possessed by the insane idea that an organization with the spotless reputation of Jupiter Equilateral Mining Industries, Inc., had caused that miner’s death. Three men determined to revenge that death. A foolish decision, of course, but not unbelievable. Grief-stricken men had done things far more foolish in the past.

  And the story the three men had to tell? A fantastic tale of a bonanza that disappeared, of a man who was murdered for something—nobody knew what, that he was supposed to have discovered—nobody knew where, and then concealed so well that nobody could find it again, not even his own sons and heirs.

  Sitting there, Tom realized how perfectly incredible the story sounded. Unsubstantiated ideas, claims with no evidence to back them up—it would be bad. And with the power and funds that the company had to press the thing through—

  It could be very bad.

  But there must be an answer, if they could only see it.

  Suddenly the room seemed hot and stuffy, oppressive. He couldn’t think straight. Perhaps there had been too much thinking, too much speculation. Tom stood up and slipped on his jacket. He had to walk, to move about, to try to think clearly. He slipped open the door, and started for the ramp leading to the main concourse.

  There had to be an answer, somewhere.

  It was almost two o’clock, and the dim night lights had gone on in the concourse, replacing the bright daytime lights. He met occasional groups of miners heading home after a late night; otherwise the concourse was deserted.

  He took the up ramp, emerged at ground level, and walked along the streets under the plastic bubble. These were the oldest streets in Sun Lake City. Some of the original buildings were still here. In the dark sky he could see a vast powdering of stars, far more than anyone could ever see on Earth. He paused tq watch the two brighter dots of light, Mars’ tiny moons, making their way across the sky.

  He went on along the steel walkways, trying to clear his mind of the doubts and questions that were plaguing him. At first he just wandered, but presently he realized that he had a destination in mind.

  He went up a ramp and across the lobby of the United Nations Administration Building. He took a spur off the main corridor and came to a doorway with a small circular staircase beyond it. At the bottom of the stairs he opened a steel door and stepped into the map room.

  It was a small darkened amphitheater, with a curving row of seats along one wall. On either side were film viewers and micro-readers. Curving around on the far wall, like a huge parabolic mirror, was the map.

  Tom had been- here many times before, and always he gasped in wonder when he saw the awesome beauty of the thing. Stepping into the map room was like stepping into the center of a huge cathedral. Here was the glowing, moving panorama of the solar system spread out before him in a breathtaking three-dimensional image. Standing here before the map it seemed as if he had suddenly become enormous and omnipotent, hanging suspended in the blackness of space and staring down at the solar system from a vantage point a million miles away.

  Once, Dad had told him, there had been a great statue in the harbor of Old New York which had been a symbol of freedom for strangers coming to that city from across the sea, and a welcome for countrymen returning home. And someday, he knew, this view of the solar system would be waiting to greet Earthmen making their way home from distant stars. The map was only an image, a gift from the United Nations to the colonists on Mars, but it reproduced the solar system in the minutest detail that astronomers could make possible.

  In the center, glowing like a thing alive, was the sun, the hub of the magnificent wheel. Around it, moving constantly in their orbits, were the planets, bright points of light on the velvet blackness of the screen. Each orbit was computed and held on the screen by the great computer in the vault below.

  But there was more on the map than the sun and the planets, with their satellites. Tiny green lights marked the Earth-Mars and the Earth-Venus orbit ships, moving slowly across the screen. Beyond Mars, a myriad of tiny lights projected on the screen the asteroids. Without the magnifier Tom could identify the larger ones: Ceres, on the opposite side of the sun from Mars now as it moved in its orbit; smaller Juno; and Pallas; and Vesta.

  For each asteroid which had been identified, and its orbit plotted, there was a pinpoint of light on the screen. For all its beauty, the map had a very useful purpose—the registry and identification of asteroid claims among the miners of Mars. Each asteroid registered as a claim showed up as a red pinpoint; unclaimed asteroids were white. But even with the advances of modem astronomy only a small percentage of the existing asteroids were on the map, for the vast majority had never been plotted.

  Tom sank down in a seat and watched the map, just as he had when he was a little boy, spending hours gazing at the panorama. He knew now why he had come. To him the map had always seemed a place of refuge; he was alone here, his mind worked clearly. He could put aside unimportant things and probe to the depths of any problem. He remembered how he had loved to sit and watch, to use the magnifier to pick out obscure asteroids, to peer at Earth’s moon in its endless revolutions, to imagine that he was riding the orbit ships back to Earth, or out to the moons of Jupiter.

  Now he moved up to the map and activated the magnifier. Carefully he focused down on the section of the Asteroid Belt they had visited so recently. Dozens of pinpoints sprang to view, both red and white, and beneath each red light the claim number neatly registered. Tom peered at the section, searching until he found the number of Roger Hunter’s last claim.

  It was by itself, not a part of an asteroid cluster. He stepped up the magnification, peered at it closely. There were a dozen other pinpoints, all unclaimed, within a ten- thousand-mile radius.

  But near it, nothing.

  No hiding place.

  And then, suddenly, he knew the answer. He stared at the map, his heart pounding in his throat. He cut the magnification, scanning a wide area. Then he widened the lens still further, and checked the co-ordinates at the bottom of the viewer.

  He knew that he was right. He had to be right. But this was no wild dream, this was something that could be proved beyond any question of error.

  Across the room he picked up the phone to Map Control. It buzzed interminably; then a sleepy voice answered.

&nbs
p; “The map,” Tom managed to say. “It’s recorded on time- lapse film, isn’t it?”

  “ ’Course it is,” the sleepy voice said. “Observatory has to have the record. One frame every hour.”

  “I’ve got to see some of the old film,” Tom said.

  “Now? It’s three in the morning.”

  “I don’t need the film itself, just project it for me. There’s a reader here.”

  He gave the man the dates he wanted, Mars time. The man broke the contact, grumbling, but moments later one of the film viewers sprang to life. The map co-ordinates showed at the bottom of the screen.

  Tom stared at the filmed image, the image of a segment of the Asteroid Belt the day before Roger Hunter died.

  It was there. When he had looked at the map, he had seen a single red pinpoint of light, Roger Hunter’s asteroid, with nothing in the heavens anywhere near it.

  But on the film image taken weeks before there were two points of light. One was red, with Roger Hunter’s claim number beneath it. The other was white, so close to the first that even at full magnification it was barely distinguishable.

  But it was there.

  Tom’s hands were trembling with excitement; he nearly dropped the phone receiver as he punched the buttons to ring the apartment. Greg’s face appeared on the screen, puffy with sleep. “What’s up? Thought you were in bed.”

  “You’ve got to get down here,” Tom said.

  Greg blinked, wide-awake now. “What’s the matter? Where are you?”

  “In the map room. Wake Johnny up too and get down here. And try to get hold of the major.”

  “You’ve found something?” Greg said, excited now.

  “I’ve found something,” Tom told him. “I’ve found where Dad hid his strike, and I know how we can find it!”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Missing Asteroid

  Far out in the blackness a point of light glowed, first faintly, then brighter as the ship approached.

  At that distance it could easily have been mistaken for a star, except that the ship’s contact mechanism was alert for that particular point of light. The view screen caught it, flickered past it, and then returned to center in. The computer began buzzing, comparing the co-ordinates of the point of light with the co-ordinates previously computed; automatically, new fixes were taken on the sun’s orange disc and on the dwindling red spot that was Mars.

  When the co-ordinates matched there was a signal on the control panel. A man in United Nations patrol uniform stuck his head into the after cabin and said, “I think we’ve made our contact, Major.”

  It was an asteroid. It was not large, as asteroids go, just less than a mile in diameter, a ragged mass of stone and metal, some three billion tons of it, moving swiftly in its orbit in exactly the same way it had done for uncounted centuries.

  But it was a remarkable asteroid. It even had a name. Hundreds of years before it had been spotted for the first time by Earth’s astronomers; years later, when observatories on the Moon had been built, it had been observed very closely indeed, and its orbit had been carefully tracked for many decades.

  And now Major Briarton and the Hunter twins crowded to the view screen, staring at the image of the tiny rock, as if they hoped, even at this distance, to fathom the secret they prayed it held.

  “So this is the one,” the major said finally. “How soon will we contact, Lieutenant?”

  “Twenty-three minutes,” the patrolman said. “Barring any trouble.”

  “Take your time. We want a perfect contact.”

  It was undoubtedly an asteroid. It grew swiftly larger in the screen, and soon Tom could make out details on the rocky surface. But this asteroid was not in the Asteroid Belt. Many hours before they had left Sun Lake City behind them, moving away from Mars in toward the orbit of Earth, to intercept a lone asteroid moving in an orbit far from its brothers.

  “Hermes,” the major said softly as he watched it approaching. “An eccentric. Years ago these rocks were called ‘male’ asteroids, all because the early astronomers were such romantic gentlemen. When the belt was first discovered, they started naming each new rock they spotted, giving them female names. The habit stuck, too, but then they discovered these few asteroids with wildly eccentric orbits, and gave them male names to keep them separate.”

  “But I thought it had a stable orbit,” Tom said.

  “It does, up to a point. It travels in an ellipse, like any planetary body, and it travels around the sun. Of course, it wobbles a bit, going in closer to the sun sometimes, and out farther sometimes, in a predictable cycle. But one thing is sure—Hermes doesn’t run with the pack.”

  The lieutenant came back, and a signal buzzer sounded. “Better strap down now, Major. We’ll have to maneuver a little.”

  “Any trouble?”

  “Not a bit. But I take it you want to come close enough for a landing.”

  “That’s what we want,” the major said with an edge of excitement in his voice. “We want to make a landing very much.”

  Quickly, then, they strapped down.

  It had been a wild twelve hours since Tom’s call to his brother from the map room in Sun Lake City. The major had arrived first, still buttoning his shirt and wiping sleep from his eyes. Johnny and Greg came in on his heels. They found Tom waiting for them, so excited he could hardly keep his words straight.

  He told them what he found, and they wondered why they had not thought of it from the first moment. “We knew there had to be an answer,” Tom said. “Some place Dad could have used for. a hiding place, some place nobody would even think to look. Dad must have realized that he didn’t have much time. When he saw his chance, he took it.”

  And .it was pure, lucky chance. Tom showed them the section of the map he had examined, with the pinpoint of light representing Roger Hunter’s asteroid claim. Then the map control officer—much more alert when he saw Major Briarton—brought an armload of films up and loaded them into the projector. They stared at the screen, and saw the two pinpoints of light where one was now.

  “What was the date of this?” the major asked sharply.

  “Two days before Dad died,” Tom said. “There’s quite a distance between them there, but watch. One frame for every hour. Watch what happens.”

  He began running the film, the record taken from the map itself, accurate as clockwork. The white dot was moving in toward the red dot, at a forty degree angle. For an instant it looked as though the two were colliding, and then the distance between them began to widen again. Slowly, hour by hour, the white dot was moving away, off the screen altogether.

  The major looked up at Tom and slammed his fist on the chair arm. “By the ten moons of Saturn,” he exploded, and then he was on his feet, shouting at the startled map control officer. “Get me Martinson down here, and fast. Call the port on a scrambled line and tell them to stand by with a ship on emergency call, with a crack interceptor pilot ready to go. Then get me the plotted orbits of every eccentric asteroid that’s crossed Mars’ orbit in the last two months. And double-A security on everything. We don’t want to let Tawney get wind of this.”

  Later, while they waited, they went over it to make sure that nothing was missing. “No wonder we couldn’t spot it,” the major said. “We were looking for an asteroid in a standard orbit in the belt.”

  “But there wasn’t any,” Tom said. “Dad’s rock was isolated, nowhere near any others. And we were so busy thinking the thousands of rocks in normal orbits between Mars and Jupiter that we forgot that there are a few that just don’t travel that way.”

  “Like this one.” The major stared at the screen. “A long, intersecting orbit. It must swing out almost to Jupiter’s orbit at one end, and come clear in to intersect Earth’s orbit at the other end.”

  “Which means that it cuts right through the Asteroid Belt and on out again.” Tom grinned. “Dad must have seen it coming, must have thought it was on collision course for a while. But he also must have realized that
if he could hide something on its surface as it came near, it would be carried clear out of the belt altogether in a few days’ time.”

  “And if we can follow it up and intercept it—” The major was on his feet, talking rapidly into the telephone. Sleep was forgotten now, nothing mattered but pinpointing a tiny bit of rock speeding through space. Within an hour the asteroid had been identified, its eccentric orbit plotted. The co-ordinates were taped into the computers of the waiting patrol ship, as the preparations for launching were made.

  It could not be coincidence. Somewhere on the surface of that tiny planetoid racing in toward the sun they knew they would find Roger Hunter’s secret.

  Below them, as they watched, the jagged surface of the asteroid drew closer.

  It was not round—it was far too tiny a bit of cosmic debris to have sufficient gravity to crush down rocks and round off ragged corners. It was roughly oblong in shape, and one side was sheer smooth rock surface. The other side was rough, bristling with jutting rock. More than anything else it looked like a ragged mountain top, broken off at the peak and hurled into space by an all-powerful hand.

  Slowly the scout ship moved closer, braking with its forward jets. The pilot was expert. Carefully and surely he aligned the ship with the rock in speed and direction. In the acceleration cot Tom could feel only an occasional gentle tug as the power cut on and off.

  Then the lieutenant said, “I think we can make a landing now, Major.”

  “Fine. Take a scooter down first, and carry a guy line.”

  They unstrapped, and changed into pressure suits. In the airlock they waited until the lieutenant touched the scooter down. Then Major Briarton nodded and they clamped their belts to the guy line.

  One by one they leaped down toward the rock.