Gold in the Sky Part 7

Back in the control cabin Johnny was checking the s.h.i.+p's log. The old entries were on microfilm, stored on their spools near the reader. More recent entries were still recorded on tape. From the jumbled order, there was no doubt that marauders had examined them. Johnny ran through them nevertheless, but there was nothing of interest. Routine navigational data; a record of the time of contact with the asteroid; a log of preliminary observations on the rock; nothing more. The last tape recorded the call-schedule Roger Hunter had set up with the Patrol, a routine precaution used by all miners, to bring help if for some reason they should fail to check in on schedule.

There was no hint in the log of any extraordinary discovery.

"Are any tapes missing?" Greg wanted to know.

"Doesn't look like it. There's one here for each day-period."

"I wonder," Tom said. "Dad always kept a personal log. You know, a sort of a diary, on microfilm." He peered into the film storage bin, checked through the spools. Then, from down beneath the last row of spools he pulled out a slightly smaller spool. "Here's something our friends missed, I bet."

It was not really a diary, just a sequence of notes, calculations and ideas that Roger Hunter had jotted down and microfilmed from time to time. The entries on the one spool went back for several years. Tom fed the spool into the reader, and they stared eagerly at the last few entries.

A series of calculations, covering several pages, but with no notes to indicate what, exactly, Roger Hunter had been calculating. "Looks like he was plotting an orbit," Greg said. "But what orbit? And why? Nothing here to tell."

"It must have been important, though, or Dad wouldn't have filmed the pages," Tom said. "Anything else?"

Another sheet with more calculations. Then a short paragraph written in Roger Hunter's hurried scrawl. "No doubt now what it is," the words said. "Wish Johnny were here, show him a _real_ bonanza, but he'll know soon enough if...."

They stared at the scribbled, uncompleted sentence. Then Johnny Coombs let out a whoop. "I told you he found something! And he found it _here_, not somewhere else."

"Hold it," Greg said, peering at the film reader. "There's something more on the last page, but I can't read it."

Tom blinked at the entry. "'Inter Jovem et Martem planetam interposui,'"

he read. He scratched his head. "That's Latin, and it's famous, too.

Kepler wrote it, back before the asteroids were discovered. 'Between Jupiter and Mars I will put a planet.'"

Greg and Johnny looked at each other. "I don't get it," Greg said.

"Dad told me about that once," Tom said. "Kepler couldn't understand the long jump between Mars and Jupiter, when Venus and Earth and Mars were so close together. He figured there ought to be a planet out here ... and he was right, in a way. There wasn't any one planet, unless you'd call Ceres a planet, but it wasn't just empty s.p.a.ce between Mars and Jupiter either. The asteroids were here."

"But why would Dad be writing that down?" Greg asked. "And what has it got to do with what he found out here?" He snapped off the reader switch angrily. "I don't understand any of this, and I don't like it. If Dad found something out here, where is it? And who tore this s.h.i.+p apart after the Patrol s.h.i.+p left?"

"Probably the same ones that caused the 'accident' in the first place,"

Johnny said.

"But why did they come back?" Greg protested. "If they killed Dad, they must have known what he'd found before they killed him."

"You'd think so," Johnny conceded.

"Then why take the risk of coming back here again?"

"Maybe they _didn't_ know," Tom said thoughtfully.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean maybe they killed him too soon. Maybe they thought they knew what he'd found and where it was ... and then found out that they didn't, after all. Maybe Dad hid it...."

Johnny Coombs shook his head. "No way a man can hide an ore strike."

"But suppose Dad did, somehow, and whoever killed him couldn't find it?

It would be too late to make him tell them. They'd _have_ to come back and look again, wouldn't they? And from the way they went about it, it looks as though they weren't having much luck."

"Then whatever Dad found would still be here, somewhere," Greg said.

"That's right."

"But where? There's nothing on this s.h.i.+p."

"Maybe not," Tom said, "but I'd like to take a look at that asteroid before we give up."

They paused in the big ore-loading lock to reclamp their pressure suit helmets, and looked down at the jagged chunk of rock a hundred yards below them. In the lock they had found scooters ... the little one-man propulsion units so commonly used for short distance work in s.p.a.ce ... but decided not to use them. "They're clumsy," Johnny said, "and the b.u.mper units in your suits will do just as well for this distance." He looked down at the rock. "I'll take the center section.

You each take an edge and work in. Look for any signs of work on the surface ... chisel marks, Murexide charges, anything."

"What about the dark side?" Greg asked.

"If we want to see anything there, we'll either have to rig up lights or turn the rock around," Johnny said. "Let's cover this side first and see what we come up with."

He turned and leaped from the airlock, moving gracefully down toward the surface, using the b.u.mper unit to guide himself with short bursts of compressed CO_{2}, from the nozzle. Greg followed, pus.h.i.+ng off harder and pa.s.sing Johnny halfway down. Tom hesitated. It looked easy enough ... but he remembered the violent nausea of his first few hours of free fall.

Finally he gritted his teeth and jumped off after Greg. Instantly he knew that he had jumped too hard. He shot away from the orbit-s.h.i.+p like a bullet; the jagged asteroid surface leaped up at him. Frantically he grabbed for the b.u.mper nozzle and pulled the trigger, trying to break his fall.

He felt the nozzle jerk in his hand, and then, abruptly, he was spinning off at a wild tangent from the asteroid, head over heels. For a moment it seemed that asteroid, orbit-s.h.i.+p and stars were all wheeling crazily around him. Then he realized what had happened. He fired the b.u.mper again, and went spinning twice as fast. The third time he timed the blast, aiming the nozzle carefully, and the spinning almost stopped.

He fought down nausea, trying to get his bearings. He was three hundred yards out from the asteroid, almost twice as far from the orbit-s.h.i.+p. He stared down at the rock as he moved slowly away from it. Before, from the orbit-s.h.i.+p, he had been able to see only the bright side of the huge rock; now he could see the sharp line of darkness across one side.

But there was something else....

He fired the b.u.mper again to steady himself, peering into the blackness beyond the light-line on the rock. He snapped on his helmet lamp, aimed the spotlight beam down to the dark rock surface. Greg and Johnny were landing now on the bright side, with Greg almost out of sight over the "horizon" ... but Tom's attention was focussed on something he could see only now as he moved away from the asteroid surface.

His spotlight caught it ... something bright and metallic, completely hidden on the dark side, lying in close to the surface but not quite on the surface. Then suddenly Tom knew what it was ... the braking jets of a Cla.s.s I Ranger, crouching beyond the reach of sunlight in the shadow of the asteroid....

Swiftly he fired the b.u.mper again, turning back toward the orbit-s.h.i.+p.

His hand went to the speaker-switch, but he caught himself in time. Any warning shouted to Greg and Johnny would certainly be picked up by the s.h.i.+p. But he had to give warning somehow.

He tumbled into the airlock, searching for a flare in his web belt. It was a risk ... the Ranger s.h.i.+p might pick up the flash ... but he had to take it. He was uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the fuse cap from the flare when he saw Greg and Johnny leap up from the asteroid surface.

Then he saw what had alarmed them. Slowly, the Ranger was moving out from its hiding place behind the rock. Tom reached out to catch Greg as he came plummeting into the lock. There was a flash from the Ranger's side, and Johnny Coombs' voice boomed in his earphones: "Get inside! Get the lock closed, fast ... hurry up, can't waste a second."

Johnny caught the lip of the lock, dragged himself inside frantically.

They were spinning the airlock door closed when they heard the thundering explosion, felt the s.h.i.+p lurch under their feet, and all three of them went cras.h.i.+ng to the deck.

5. The Black Raider