They stared at the ragged surface of the planetoid. Raw veins of metallic ore cut through it with streaks of color, but most of the sun side showed only the dull gray of iron and granite. There was nothing unusual about the surface that Tom could see.
“Could there be anything on the dark side?”
“Could be,” Johnny said. “Well have to go over it foot by foot. But first, we should go through the orbit ship and the Scavenger. If the patrol ship missed anything, we want to know it.”
They waited until Greg had thrown out the magnetic cables to secure the Dutchman to the orbit ship’s hull. Then Johnny checked the airlock, and they slipped into the lightweight pressure suits. He handed each of the twins one of the heavy Markheim stunners. “Make sure the safeties are on,” he warned.
Tom fingered the safety dial and pushed the weapon into a storage slot in the suit. It took a direct hit from a stunner to paralyze a man, but the sub-sonics from an accidental discharge could be dangerous. He checked the leather case at his belt, with his father’s revolver inside, and then followed Greg and Johnny through the airlock into the orbit ship.
At first they noticed nothing wrong. The ship was dark. It spun slowly on its axis, giving them just enough weight so they would not float free whenever they moved. Their boots clanged on the metal decks as they climbed up the curving corridor toward the control cabin.
Then Johnny threw a light switch, and they stared around them in amazement.
The cabin was a shambles. Everything that was not bolted down had been ripped open and thrown aside. Cabinet doors hung gaping, the contents spilled out in heaps onto the deck. A safe hung open on one hinge, the metal door twisted, obviously opened with an explosive charge. Even the metal plates housing the computer had been torn loose, exposing the banks of tubes and colored twists of wire.
Greg whistled through his teeth. “The major said the patrol crew had gone through the ship, but he didn’t say they’d wrecked it.”
“They didn’t,” Johnny said grimly. “No patrol ship would ever do this. Somebody else has been here since.” He turned to the control panel, flipped switches, checked gauges. “Hydroponics are all right. Atmosphere’s still good, we can take off these helmets. Fuel looks all right, storage holds—” He shook his head. “They weren’t just looting, they were looking for something, all right. Let’s look around and see if they missed anythin’.”
It took them an hour to survey the wreckage. Not a compartment had been missed. Even the mattresses on the acceleration cots had been torn open, the spring stuffing tossed about helter-skelter. Tom went through the lock into the Scavenger. The scout ship too had been searched, rapidly but thoroughly.
But there was no sign of anything that Roger Hunter might have found.
Back in the control cabin Johnny was checking the ship’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 the 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 an 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 hell 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 plane- tarn 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 space 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?” 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 ship apart after the patrol ship 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 then. 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 ship.”
“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 found scooters, the little one-man propulsion units so commonly used for short-distance work in space, but decided not to use them. “They’re clumsy,” Johnny said, “and the bumper 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, anythin’.”