Scavengers in Space Page 3

  “Look, Mr. Tawney, you’d better say what you came to say and get out of here,” Greg said angrily, “before we give your friends here something to do.”

  “I merely came to offer you some help,” Tawney said. He was no longer smiling. “Since your father’s death, you two have acquired certain responsibilities. I thought we might relieve you of some of them.”

  “What sort of responsibilities?”

  “You have an unmanned orbit ship which is now a derelict in the Asteroid Belt. You have a scout ship out there also. You can’t just leave them there as a navigation hazard to every ship traveling in the sector. There are also a few mining claims which aren’t going to be of much value to you now.”

  “I see,” Greg said. “Are you offering to buy Dad’s mining rig?”

  “Well, I doubt very much that we’d have any use for it, as such. But we could save you the trouble of going out there to haul it in.”

  “That’s very thoughtful,” Greg said. “How much are you offering?”

  Tom looked up in alarm. “Wait a minute,” he said. “That rig’s not for sale.”

  “How much?” Greg repeated.

  “Forty thousand dollars,” Merrill Tawney said. “Ship, rig and claims. We’ll even pay the transfer tax.”

  Tom stared at the man, wondering if he had heard right. He knew what Dad had paid for the rig; he had been with him when the papers were signed. Tawney’s offer was three times as much as the rig was worth.

  But Greg was shaking his head. “I don’t think we could sell at that price.”

  The fat man’s hands fluttered. “You understand that those ships are hardly suited to a major mining operation like ours,” he said, “and the claims. . . .” He dismissed them with a wave of his hand. “Still, we’d want you to be happy with the price. Say, forty-five thousand?”

  Greg hesitated, shook his head again. “I guess we’d better think it over, Mr. Tawney.”

  “Fifty thousand is absolutely the top,” Tawney said sharply. “I have the papers right here, drawn up for your signatures, but I’m afraid we can’t hold the offer open.”

  “I don’t know, we might want to do some mining ourselves,” Greg said. “For all we know, Dad might have struck some rich ore on one of those claims.”

  Tawney laughed. “I hardly think so. Those claims were all Jupiter Equilateral rejects. Our own engineers found nothing but low-grade ore on any of them.”

  “Still, it might be fun to look.”

  “It could be very expensive fun. Asteroid mining is a dangerous business, even for experts. For amateurs—” Tawney spread his hands—“accidents occur.”

  “Yes, we’ve heard about those accidents,” Greg said coldly. “I don’t think we’re quite ready to sell, Mr. Tawney. We may never be ready to sell to you, so don’t stop breathing until we call you. Now if there’s nothing more, why don’t you take your friends and go somewhere else?”

  The fat man scowled; he started to say something, then saw the look on Greg’s face, and shrugged. “I’d advise you to give my offer some careful thought,” he said as he started for the door. “It might be very foolish for you to try to use that rig.”

  Smiling, Greg closed the door in his face. Then he turned and winked at Tom. “Great fellow, Mr. Tawney. He almost had me sold.”

  “So I noticed,” Tom said. “For a while I thought you were serious.”

  “Well, we found out how high they’d go. That’s a very generous outfit Mr. Tawney works for.”

  “Or else a very crooked one,” Tom said. “Are you wondering the same thing I’m wondering?”

  “Yes,” Greg said slowly. “I think I am.”

  “Then that makes three of us,” a heavy voice rumbled from the bedroom door.

  Johnny Coombs was a tall man, so thin he was almost gangling, with a long nose, and shaggy eyebrows jutting out over his eyes. With his rudely cropped hair and his huge hands, he looked like a caricature of a frontier Mars farmer, but the blue eyes under the eyebrows were not dull.

  He grinned at the boys’ surprise, and walked into the room. “You don’t mind if I have a seat, I hope,” he said in his deep bass voice. “I been standin’ there inside that door for almost an hour, and I’m tired of standin’.”

  “Johnny!” Tom cried. “We were trying to find you.”

  “I know,” Johnny said. “So were a lot of other people, includin’ your friends there.”

  “Well, did you hear what Tawney wanted?”

  “I’m not so quick on my feet any more,” Johnny Coombs said, “but I got nothin’,wrong with my ears.” He scratched his jaw and looked up sharply at Greg. “Not many people nowadays get a chance to bargain with Merrill Tawney.”

  Greg shrugged. “He named a price and I didn’t like it.”

  “Three times what the rig is worth,” Coombs said.

  “That’s what I didn’t like,” Greg said. “That outfit wouldn’t give us a break like that just for old times’ sake. Do you think they would?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Johnny said slowly. “Back before they built the city here, they used to have rats getting into the grub. Came right down off the ships. Got rid of most of them, finally, but it seems to me we’ve still got some around, even if they’ve got different shapes now.” He jerked his thumb toward the bedroom door. “In case you’re wondering, that’s why I was standin’ back there all this time, just to make sure you didn’t sell out to Tawney no matter what price he offered.”

  Tom jumped up excitedly. “Then you know something about Dad’s accident!”

  “No, I can’t say I do. I wasn’t there.”

  “Do you really think it was an accident?”

  “Can’t prove it wasn’t.”

  “But at least you’ve got some ideas,” Tom said.

  Johnny Coombs stood up and started the coffee-mix heating on the stove. “Takes more than ideas to make a case,” he said at length. “But there’s one thing I do know. I’ve got no proof, not a shred of it, but I’m sure of one thing just as sure as I’m on Mars.” He looked at the twins thoughtfully. “Your dad wasn’t just prospecting, out in the belt. He’d run onto something out there, something big.”

  The twins stared at him. “Rim unto something?” Greg said. “You mean. . . .”

  “I mean I think your dad hit a big strike out there, rich metal, a real bonanza lode, maybe the biggest strike that’s ever been made,” the miner said slowly. “And then somebody got to him before he could bring it in.”

  Chapter Three

  Too Many Warnings

  For a moment, neither of the boys could say anything at all. From the time they had learned to talk, they had heard stories and tales that the miners and prospectors told about the big strike, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the wonderful, elusive goal of every man who had ever taken a ship out into the Asteroid Belt.

  For almost a hundred and fifty years—since the earliest days of space exploration—there had been miners prospecting in the asteroids. Out there, beyond the orbit of Mars and inside the orbit of Jupiter, were a hundred thousand—maybe a hundred million, for all anybody knew—chunks of rock, metal and debris, spinning in silent orbit around the sun. Some few of the asteroids were big enough to be called planets—Ceres, five hundred miles in diameter; Juno, Vesta, Pallas, half a dozen more. A few thousand others, ranging in size from ten to a hundred miles in diameter, had been charted and followed in their orbits by the observatories, first from Earth’s airless Moon, then from Mars. There were tens of thousands more that had never been charted. Together they made up the Asteroid Belt, spread out in space like a broad road around the sun, echoing the age-old call of the bonanza.

  For there was wealth in the asteroids, wealth beyond a man’s wildest dreams, if only he could find it.

  Earth, with its depleted iron ranges, its exhausted tin and copper mines, and its burgeoning population, was hungry for metal. Earth needed steel, tin, nickel, and zinc; more than anything. Earth needed ruthen
ium, the rare earth catalyst that made the huge solar energy converters possible.

  Mars was rich in the ores of these metals, but the ores were buried deep in the ground. The cost of mining them, and of lifting the heavy ore from Mars’ gravitational field and carrying it to Earth was prohibitive. Only the finest carbon steel, and the radioactive metals, smelted and purified on Mars and transported to Earth, could be made profitable.

  But from the Asteroid Belt, it was a different story. There was no gravity to fight on the tiny asteroids. On these chunks of debris, the metals lay close to the surface, easy to mine. Ships orbiting in the belt could fill their holds with their precious metal cargoes and transfer them in space to the interplanetary orbit ships spinning back toward Earth. It was hard work, and dangerous. Most of the ore was low- grade, and brought little return. But always there was the lure of the big strike, the lode of almost pure metal that could bring a fortune to the man who found it.

  A few such strikes had been made. Forty years before, a single claim had brought its owner seventeen million dollars in two years. A dozen other men had stumbled onto fortunes in the belt, but such metal-rich fragments were grains of sand in a mighty river. For every man who found one, a thousand others spent years looking and then perished in the fruitless search.

  And now Johnny Coombs was telling them that their father had been one of that incredible few.

  They stared at the tall, lanky miner while he poured himself a cup of coffee. Then Greg laughed. “Johnny, you’re crazy,” he said. “You were telling us tales about the big strikes when we were five years old. I didn’t believe you then, and I don’t believe you now.”

  Johnny Coombs looked at him soberly. “Stories for the kiddies are one thing. This is something else. I’m speakin’ the truth, boy.”

  “You think Dad hit a bonanza lode out there?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Did you see it with your own eyes?”

  “No.”

  “You weren’t even out there with him!”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you so sure he found something?”

  “Because he told me so,” Johnny Coombs said quietly.

  The boys looked at each other. “He actually said he’d found a rich lode?” Tom asked eagerly.

  “Not exactly,” Johnny said. “Matter of fact, he never actually told me what he’d found. He needed somebody to sign aboard the Scavenger with him in order to get a clearance to blast off, but he never did plan to take me out there with him. ‘I can’t take you now, Johnny,’ he told me. ‘I’ve found something out there, but I’ve got to work it alone for a while.’ I asked him what he’d found, and he just gave me that funny little grin of his and said, ‘Never mind what it is, it’s big enough for both of us. You just keep your mouth shut, and you’ll find out soon enough.’ And then he wouldn’t say another word until we were homin’ in on the shuttle ship to drop me off.”

  Johnny finished his coffee and pushed the cup aside. “I knew he wasn’t jokin’. He was excited, and I think he was scared, too. Just before I left him, he said, ‘There’s one other thing, Johnny. Things might not work out quite the way I figure them, and if they don’t, make sure the twins know what I’ve told you.’ I told him I would, and headed back. That was the last I heard from him until the patrol ship found him floating in space with a torn-open suit and a ruined scooter floating a few miles away.”

  They sat in silence for a while. Then Tom said, “Do you think that Jupiter Equilateral knew Dad had found something?”

  “Who knows? I’m sure that he never told them, but it’s awful hard to keep a secret like that, and they sound mighty eager to buy that rig,” Johnny Coombs said.

  “Yes, and it doesn’t make sense. I mean, if they were responsible for Dad’s accident, why didn’t they just check in for him on schedule and then quietly bring in their rig to jump the claim?”

  “Maybe they couldn’t find it,” Johnny said. “If they’d killed your dad, they wouldn’t have dared hang around very long right then. Even if they’d kept the signal going, a patrol ship might have come into the region any time. And if a U.N. patrol ship ever caught them working a dead man’s claim without reporting the dead man, the suit would really start to leak.” Johnny shook his head. “Remember, your dad had a dozen claims out there. They might have had to scout the whole works to find the right one. Much easier to do it out in the open, with your signatures on a claim transfer. But one thing is sure—if they knew what Roger found out there, and where it was, Tawney would never be offerin’ you triple price for the rig.”

  “Then whatever Dad found is still out there,” Tom said.

  “I’d bet my last dime on it.”

  “There might even be something to show that the accident wasn’t an accident,” Tom went on. “Something even the major would have to admit was evidence.”

  Johnny Coombs pursed his lips. “Might be,” he conceded.

  “Well, what are we waiting for? We turned Tawney’s offer down; he might be sending a crew out to jump the claim right now.”

  “If he hasn’t already,” Johnny said.

  “Then we’ve got to get out there.”

  “With what?” Greg broke in. “I think we ought to get out there, too, but let’s face facts. It costs plenty to outfit a trip into the belt, and I don’t have that kind of money.”

  “Neither do I,” Johnny Coombs admitted. “Still, we might not need too much. There are a lot of miners on Mars who thought Roger Hunter was a pretty fine guy. They might just kick in to outfit us.”

  “But even so, what could we do?” Greg said. “I don’t know anything about asteroid mining.”

  “I do. You could pilot us out and handle the navigation, and as for Tom—”

  “As for Tom, he could get sick all over the place and keep us busy just taking care of him,” Greg said sourly. “You and me, yes. Not Tom. You don’t know that boy in a space ship.”

  Tom started to his feet, glaring at his brother. “That’s got nothing to do with it.”

  “It’s true, isn’t it? You’d be a big help out there.”

  Johnny looked at Tom. “You always get sick in free-fall?”

  Tom nodded miserably.

  “Even with dramamine?”

  “I always have. But I can control it if I try.”

  “Look, let’s be reasonable,” Greg said. “You’d just be in the way. There are plenty of things you could do right here, and Johnny and I could handle the rig alone.”

  Tom faced his brother angrily. “If you think I’m going to stay here and keep myself company, you’re crazy,” he said. “This is one show you’re not going to run, so just quit trying. If you go out there, I go.”

  Greg shrugged. “Okay, Twin. It’s your stomach, not mine.”

  “Then let me worry about it.”

  “I hope,” Johnny said, “that that’s the worst we have to worry about. Maybe it is—but I doubt it. Merrill Tawney is fat, but he’s no fool. If we try a trip out there, he may go quite a way to stop us. And if he does, we’re goin’ to have plenty of fightin’ to do without fightin’ each other.” He looked from one to the other. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” Greg said, after a moment. Tom nodded.

  “Then let’s get started plannin’.”

  Time was the factor uppermost in their minds. They knew that even under the best of conditions, it could take weeks to outfit and prepare for a run out to the belt. A ship had to be leased and fueled; there were supplies to lay in. There was the problem of clearance to take care of, claims to be verified and spotted, orbit co-ordinates to be computed and checked—a thousand details to be dealt with, any one of which might delay embarkation from an hour to a day or more.

  It was not surprising that Tom and Greg were dubious when Johnny told them they could be ready to clear ground in less than twenty-four hours. Even knowing that Merrill Tawney might already have a mining crew at work on Roger Hunter’s claims, they could not believe that the
red tape of preparation and clearance could be cut away so swiftly.

  They underestimated Johnny Coombs.

  Six hours after he left them, he was back with a signed lease giving them the use of a scout ship and fuel to take them out to the belt and back again; the ship was in the Sun Lake City racks waiting for them whenever they were ready.

  “What kind of a ship?” Greg wanted to know.

  “A Class III Flying Dutchman with overhauled atomics and hydrazine side jets,” Johnny said, waving the transfer order. “Think you can fly it?”

  Greg whistled. “Can I! I trained in a Dutchman; just about the fastest scouter there is. What condition?”

  “Lousy. But it’s fueled, with six weeks’ supplies in the hold, and it doesn’t cost us a cent. Courtesy of a friend. It’ll do, but you’ll have to check it over.”

  They inspected the ship, a weather-beaten scouter that looked like a relic of the nineties. Inside there were signs of many refittings and overhauls, but the atomics were well shielded, and it carried a surprisingly large chemical fuel auxiliary for the size of the cabin. Greg disappeared into the engine room, and Tom and Johnny left him testing valves and circuits while they headed down to the U.N. registry office in the control tower.

  On the way Johnny outlined the remaining outfitting steps. Tom would be responsible for getting the clearance permit through registry; Johnny would check out all supplies, and then contact the observatory for the orbit co-ordinates of Roger Hunter’s claims.

  “I thought the orbits were mapped on the claim papers,” Tom said. “I mean, every time an asteroid is claimed, the orbit has to be charted.”

  “That’s right, but the orbit goes all the way around the sun. We know where the Scavenger was when the patrol ship found her, but she’s been traveling in orbit ever since. The observatory computer will pinpoint her for us and chart a collision course so we can cut out and meet her instead of trailin’ her for a week. Do you have the crew papers Greg and I signed?”