With everything in readiness, Dan took one last look at the second planet. He set the computer to work confirming her distance from her sun and the strength of the star's radiations. He was not an astrophysicist, but he had a gut feeling that something was wrong with the figures. The second planet was roughly the same size as Tigian II. She was at an optimum distance from her sun. There were no dark and brooding clouds to shield her from the sun's life-giving emanations. When the computer confirmed once more that by all rights the water that was locked up in the vast fields of ice should have been liquid, Dan took Old Folks down toward the glittering surface for a closer look.
Fran watched nervously as the squarish Mule lowered until she was moving over the surface at a rate of speed that made her motion quite apparent. In open space one never realized that the ship was moving so fast.
"What are you doing, Papa?" she asked nervously.
"Just having a look."
He had all of the ship's sensors at work. A long, rounded ridge of ice was a range of impressive mountains. Lower, flatter areas made Dan wonder if once there had been oceans on Fran's World. He let the little ship zip around the planet in an orbit that eventually covered all of the surface. There were no spectacular readings, nothing to cause the systems to shout "Eureka!" with buzzers and flashing lights, but when Dan studied the readings after moving the ship into a higher, stable orbit he whistled.
"Have a look at this, Mama," he said.
"I see it," Fran said. "But what is it?" She was unable to make anything of the charted readings.
"Metals," Dan said. "Concentrations of them here and here." He pointed to two spots on the featureless globe. "Other places, too. This might be quite something, Mama. How'd you like to be very, very rich?"
"I would rather have been very, very rich when we were young," she said with a smile.
"But you wouldn't object to being rich now, I take it."
"Not too much."
Dan began to give the computer orders.
"You're not going down?" Fran asked in alarm.
"It's all right."
"There's nothing there but ice."
"Mama, it's colder in space than it will be on the surface. There's some solar heating."
"Why must we go down?"
"Because we want to be rich," he said. "Because I need better readings of those metal sources. I can get them by driving a heat probe through the ice."
Fran was still doubtful. She watched nervously as Old Folks lowered into a hint of atmosphere and then landed on the gleaming, icy surface.
It was not necessary for Dan to leave the ship. Old Folks was equipped with some basic exploratory tools, one of which was a probe that punched its way easily through two hundred feet of ice in less than an hour.
"Wow," Dan said, as the instruments recorded the nearness of masses of metal, ore so pure that he couldn't believe it. There was so much of it and so many metals were mixed together that all he got on the locater was a big mass of light.
He directed the probe to bend and melt its way toward the nearest metallic mass.
"I really don't understand this," he said.
The probe was within feet of something that showed on the instruments as a great heap of metals.
"Dan, I'm cold," Fran said, clasping her arms.
"Your imagination, Mama," Dan said. "The ice is outside."
Fran shivered. The probe neared the source of the fantastically high metallic readings. Dan, himself, felt a chill, looked up to see that Fran was shivering.
"Papa, let's go."
"Yes."
He reached. His hand froze. He felt a deadness creeping up his arm. He cried out. His breath made a cloud of vapor that froze instantly. Fran toppled, crashing stiffly to the deck. Dan reached for the panic button. His finger made contact, but he was so numb that he wasn't sure he actually pushed the button that would send a call for help beaming outward from Old Folks. He managed to fall beside the woman he had loved since he was sixteen, taking her into his arms with the last of his strength as the terrible cold penetrated into his stomach. He could not feel her. He wanted to weep.
The water in the tanks froze and burst the containment bulkheads.
Rime formed on the outer hull. Motion in the computer's Verbolt Cloud chambers began to slow. Metals were weakened as temperatures droppedtoward and past the cold of empty space. The hull crumbled and the air gushed out to freeze into drifting clouds that soon sank to the permanent snow cover and became a part of it. Over a period of months Old Folks collected crystals of ice from the thin atmosphere and whitened to become nothing more than a lump on the smoothness of the plain of ice. On a line toward the periphery the temporary beacons left behind by Dan Webster to guide him back to Rimfire's routes began to lose power and fail one by one. No trace of Old Folks remained. The only hint as to her final resting place was a nodule of ice protruding from the smoothness of the snows.
CHAPTER TWO
David Webster tried to get back to Tigian II once every three years. He had missed that goal by ten months when he blinked a sleek, new, Zede-built executive liner into a holding position over the T-Town Interplanetary Spaceport and contacted T-Town Control to report arrival and ask for landing instructions. He had named the multimillion credit ship the Fran Webster, for his mother, and he was looking forward to showing it to her.
Since the Fran Webster shouted money to anyone who knew ships, she attracted her share of attention. The young man who met David on the pad at the foot of the boarding ladder was full of questions, questions that David answered patiently as he was driven toward the terminal, for he could remember when he had worked at the T-Town port and when his goal had been to board a ship, any ship that was going to blink anywhere away from Tigian II.
"Yep," David said, "The Zedes build a good ship." He had sold his last cargo to a jewel broker in the Zede League and, to his own surprise, he had come away with the Zede-built Starliner. He had had no intention of buying a new ship. His Little David, a civilian conversion of an X&A scout, had been only five years old and he was very fond of it. The difference between fondness and love became apparent when he took one look at the Zede Starliner.
He didn't often do business with the Zede worlds. In spite of their having been absorbed into the United Planets Confederation well over a thousand years past, the worlds and the people of the Zede systems were vaguely, inexplicably alien. It was difficult to get anyone to talk about itopenly, but, even after a thousand years, there was still deep-seated resentment over the loss of a war that the Zedes had started and which the U.P. ended with a devastating salvo of planet busters. But, yes, indeed, they built a good ship, especially when money was no object and the buyer wanted every luxury that could be packed into a liner.
"Anything we can do, Captain Webster, in the way of servicing your ship?" the young driver asked.
"Thank you, no," David said.
"If there's anything, anything at all, just let me know. Ask for Pete."
"I'll do it, Pete," David said.
The young driver fell silent when David pulled out his communicator and punched in a call. The call went through four exchanges before David was connected with the proper department at X&A Tigian.
"My name is David Webster, pilot's license number TG2-7L90-300. I want to record ownership of a Zede Starliner, serial number 789—"