He still hadn’t figured an answer when he reached the swanky Marsport hotel where Olliver and Evadne were staying.
He had himself announced from the desk and then went up to Oliver’s suite. Olliver, his face both eager and tense, let him in. He didn’t ask the question, but Crag nodded.
Evadne, he saw as he walked past Olliver, was there. She was sitting on the sofa looking at him, her eyes enigmatic. Crag tried not to look at her. It was difficult. She was dressed even more revealingly than she had been dressed the first night he had seen her at Olliver’s house in Albuquerque, back on Earth. And she looked even more beautiful.
Crag decided he wanted to get away from there, quick. He took the disintegrator and the folded plans from his pocket and put them on the table.
Olliver picked them up with unconcealed eagerness.
Crag said, “One million credits. Then we’re through.”
Olliver put gadget and paper in one pocket and took out a wallet from another. He said drily, “I don’t carry a million in ready change, Crag. The bulk of it is back on Earth; I’Il have to give it to you there. But so you won’t worry or think I’m stalling, I did bring two hundred thousand credits with me. Eight hundred thousand’s waiting for you back home.”
Crag nodded curtly, and took the offered money. He counted it roughly and put it in his pocket. It was more money than he’d ever had or hoped to have in one chunk. He was set for life, even if he never got the rest.
He asked, “At your home? Shall I look you up there?”
Olliver looked surprised. “Why not come back with us? We’re leaving at once, now that I have this. As soon as we can get clearance. We’re making one brief stopover-going one other place first, that is-but we’ll be home within hours. You may have to wait days to get public transport, and you know all the red tape you’ll have to go through.”
It made sense, but Crag hesitated.
Olliver laughed. “Afraid of me, Crag? Afraid I’m going to disintegrate you en route? To get my money back?” He laughed harder; there was almost hysterical amusement in the laughter. Obviously the gadget Crag had stolen for him excited him immensely. “You needn’t worry, Crag. With this-” He slapped his pocket. “-a million credits is peanuts to mc.”
From the sofa, Evadne’s voice said with languid amusement, “He isn’t afraid of you, Jon. He’s afraid of me.”
Crag didn’t look at her. He was watching Ollivers face and he saw amusement change to jealousy and anger.
Crag hadn’t been afraid of Olliver. It had occurred to him only as a remote possibility that Olliver might try to kill him. Now, from the look on Olliver’s face, his trying to kill Crag looked like a fair bet. Not, though, to get his money. back.
Crag said, “All right, Olliver. I might as well go with you.”
Deliberately he turned away from possible danger to lock glances with Evadne.
She was smiling at him.
They got to the spaceport within an hour and through the formalities of clearance before noon.
Crag didn’t ask, “Well, where?” until he was in the pilot’s seat of the little cruiser.
“Asteroid belt,” Olliver told hhn.
“Where in the belt? What asteroid?”
“Doesn’t matter. Any one big enough to land on.”
Crag had lifted the computation shelf, ready to calculate distance and direction. He folded the shelf back; a jump of a hundred million miles, straight out from the sun, would put him in the middle of the belt. He set the controls, made the jump, and put the ship hack on manual control. His detectors would show the presence of any of the asteroids within ten million miles. They showed the presence of several right now.
He turned to Olliver. He said, “We’re near Ceres. Four hundred eighty mile diameter. That one do?”
“Too big, Crag. It’d take days. Pick the smallest one you can land on.”
Crag nodded and studied the other asteroids showing on the detector and picked the smallest of them. It wasn’t much bigger than a fair-sized house but he could land on it. He did. Rather, he killed the inertia of the spaceship after pulling alongside the tiny asteroid and matching his speed to its. Ship and asteroid bumped together, held by not much more than a pound of gravitational pull between them. Had the asteroid had an atmosphere, the ship would have floated in it, so slight was the attraction.
Olliver clapped him on the shoulder. “Nice work, Crag. Want to put on a spacesuit and come out to watch the fun?”
Crag locked the controls. “Why not?”
He saw now what Olliver intended to do-try out the disintegrator on the asteroid. And he saw now how Olliver could get neutronium. Disintegrating an asteroid was different from disintegrating an object on the crust of a planet. Instead of falling through the crust, the asteroid would collapse within itself, into a tiny, compact ball of neutronium. Maybe the size of an apple or an orange. It could be loaded-
He stopped suddenly, half in and half out of the space-suit he had started to pull on. He said, “Olliver, you can’t take it back with you. Sure, we can put it in the spaceship, but when we get back to Earth we can’t land with it. Near Earth, it’s going to weigh ten times-maybe twenty times-as much as the ship itself. It’ll either tear a hole through the hull or crash us, one or the other.”
Olliver laughed. He was picking up a thermoglass helmet but hadn’t put it on yet. He said, “This is just a tryout, Crag. We’re not taking any neutronium back with us.”
Crag finished putting on the spacesuit. Olliver had his helmet on, and Evadne was adjusting hers. He couldn’t talk to either of them, now, until he had his own helmet on. Then the suit-radios would take care of communication.
He saw now how neutronium could be obtained, all right. There were rocks a lot smaller than this one whizzing around the belt, ones that weighed only a few tons, that a spaceship could handle easily and transport back to Earth after they’d been converted into collapsed matter.
He didn’t see, as yet, what practical use neutronium could have that would make it as immensely valuable as Oliver seemed to think it would be. But that wasn’t his business.
He got his helmet on, and nodded that he was ready. Evadne was standing by the air controls and she pulled a switch when he nodded. A space cruiser as small as Olliver’s never had an airlock; it was simpler, if one wished to leave it in space or on an airless body, to exhaust the air from the entire ship and let the airmaker rebuild an atmosphere after one returned to the ship-and before removing one’s spacesuit.
Now, in the earphones of his helmet, he heard Olliver’s voice say, “Come on. Hurry up.” Olliver opened the door and the last of the air whished out. But then, before stepping out, Olliver went back past Crag to the controls. He turned the lock on them and put the small but quite complicated key into one of the capacious pockets of his spacesuit. The plans for the disintegrator, Crag knew, were in the innermost pocket of his jumper.
Crag wondered which one of them he distrusted, or if it was both. Not that it mattered.
Crag shrugged and stepped out onto the tiny asteroid. Evadne followed him, and then Olliver.
He heard Oliver take a deep breath and say, “Here goes.”
Olliver was pointing the little disintegrator down at the rocky surface of the asteroid, bending over so it was only a foot from the rock. Crag couldn’t hear the click, but he saw Olliver’s thumb move the catch.
Crag asked, “How long will it take?”
“For something this size? I’d guess half an hour to an hour. But we won’t have to wait till it’s completely collapsed. When it’s gone down enough that I’m sure-“