“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.