It was a weird sensation… for with the visor-cowl covering his face, and the wide-angle television lenses in the robot’s head operating, Ajax had the definitely peculiar feeling of being “in” the robot. He “turned” his head (that is, revolved the TV segment of the robot’s upper thorax), and took a good long look around the landscape. Then, not spotting anything that looked particularly interesting, suspicious or odd, he bent down and scooped up a bucketful of loose debris, and, turning about, stumped back into the ship.
Ajax lifted the cowl and put the robot on stand-by while they fed the mineral samples into a chemical bath and then a centrifuge. The computer ran a fast analysis, and with a slight burp! ejected the results from a small slot. Ajax read the tape, and sat down with a thump.
“What’s the bad news?” Emily asked, resigned for the worst.
“Bad news—hah! This kind of news makes me wish I wasn’t a multibillionaire. Wish I was a penniless prospector instead,” he gulped.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means, my dear Miss Hackenwhammer, that this whole blinking moon we are sitting on is one big chunk of green cheese… I mean, uranium.”
“Really…?” she asked in a faint little voice.
“Really! So high-grade, that this ore is like money in the bank. Offhand, I’d say everything you can see out there is worth in the neighborhood of… well, let’s see… how much would you say the combined total wealth of Europe, Asia, North and South America would be?”
“But… maybe it’s just those particular rocks you picked up? I mean, is there any reason to suppose the whole flacking landscape is the same ore?”
“Ah, you do not use your eyes, my dear! Those rock samples were marked with a very characteristic striation… analysis shows it to be high-grade uraninite, containing lead, helium, radium and a whopping percentage of uranium trioxide. And,” he said with emphasis, relishing every word, “the whole bunking landscape out there shows the same very characteristic striation, bless its little heart! Emily, we’re sitting on top of a gold mine… I mean, uranium mine… the likes of which beggar the imagination!”
“Oh, my,” she said faintly.
“Quite. No wonder there’s such a gravity field! The entire asteroid must have been a chunk of core-material from the lost planet!”
“Come at me again with that last one, Ajax?”
“I mean,” he said patiently, “it is well known that heavy metals, such as radioactive ores, tend to form the core of planets, rather than floating around on top of the soil, so to speak. Now, when the lost Fifth Planet blew up millions of years ago, this asteroid must have been one great big fourteen solid miles of radioactive matter from the core! It got blown out as far as Jupiter, got entangled in the gravity-field, and settled down to spend the rest of Eternity as a moon. Why… no wonder it’s the only moon that revolves around Jupiter backwards! The others are real moons, but this one was zipping past in the opposite direction, blown out there in the explosion when the Asteroidal planet broke up, and was just roaring along in its merry way when the Jovian gravity slowed it down and bent its straight-line flight into a closed-circle orbit.”
This was all a bit much for Emily, but Ajax was obviously in his element and seemed to know what he was talking about. (The fact of the matter was that Ajax was a modern, enlightened monarch, and in preparation for his royal career, had studied the physical sciences very deeply, firm in his belief that a king nowadays should be up on his “hard” science.)
“Well… that’s all very well, Ajax, I’m sure… but the immediate problem is getting the drive fixed and fueling up. Can your engines take uranium? I thought your pile was designed for plutonium ingots.”
He nodded. “That’s right, but don’t worry. All we have to do is just dig up enough of this stuff and get it down to purified form. Plutonium is made out of uranium, you know—manufactured—it doesn’t exist naturally. If we can extract enough Uranium-238, and, with the whole blinking landscape out there to use, I’m sure we can, then we just bombard the stuff with neutrons and it’ll decay into neptunium.”
“Neptunium? What about plutonium?”
“Tut, child’s play, m’dear. Deuteron bombardment of neptunium will give us plutonium aplenty… then to get the isotope we need, Pu-239, sufficient neutron-capture, followed by a spot of spontaneous emission of two jolly old beta particles…” He broke off humming happily, sketching out the process on a scratchpad.
“Oh… uh… Ajax.”
“Hmm—?”
“Ajax. If you plan to have Fido here do any digging, you’d better have him hop to it spit-spot.”
“Umm? Why’s that, my dear?”
“Because that tin-plated Frankenstein Monster is back, along with about two dozen of his pals. And he looks like he means business…”
Startled, Ajax looked up. Sure enough… coming over the so-close horizon of tiny Alcmene was the inquisitive giant robot, accompanied by a veritable clanking horde of his compatriots. The avalanche of robots converged upon the crippled Destiny with fire in their eyes…
XIII
The Wuj made his way along the catwalk and through a maze of corridors into the central control suite. This was the brain-center of the asteroid-sized supership, and a mighty complicated place it was. Walls covered with flickering lights… panel after panel of mysterious controls whose labels were in the peculiar and still undeciphered hieroglyphics of the Asteroidals. Ajax, Emily and the Wuj had only managed to figure out the functions of few—a very few—of the control systems as yet. The hundreds of others were still beyond conjecture.
The little spiderman looked around, his pugnose wrinkled with dogged determination. It was up to him and to him alone to keep the planetoid-ship out of the clutch of the ambitious Saturnians… but the question was, how?
He could, of course, turn off the drive engines and lock the control panel. But a few moments of thought persuaded him this plan would contribute but little to foiling the amoeboid spies. The drive was already off, and the planetoid-ship was on direct course for Saturn. And, unfortunately, the Wuj did not know enough about the drive-controls to be able to reverse the alignment, turn the planetoid-ship around and pilot it back to EMSA-controlled space. It was an oversight, but not his fault at all, that Ajax and Emily had taken the largest part in experimenting with the drive-controls. So much for that idea…
Another possibility occurred to the little being. Once Ajaxia arrived in Saturnian space, and was established in a permanent orbit about the ringed planet, perhaps the Wuj could somehow incapacitate the two Saturnian impostors and keep the airlocks closed so that the Saturnians could not enter. Since the airlock was controlled from here on the bridge, it seemed an idea likely to succeed. But how to lock up or knock out the two Amoeba-Men posing as Ajax Calkins and Emily Hackenschmidt? That was the question…
Until the planetoid-ship arrived at Saturn, the Wuj resolved to continue pretending that he believed the two spies were really his master and mistress.
After the close brush with the pursuit squadron, Ajaxia continued on its merry way unimpeded. It seemed that discretion overcame the natural valor of Vice Admiral Milton A. Kreplach, for the choleric commander ordered his ships not to pursue the runaway planetoid across the EMSA/Saturnian border. The phony “Ajax” and “Emily” watched the EMSA squadron turn about and head back home like a flock of cowed puppies, tails between their legs, so to speak. The Wuj observed them closely while the two spies chortled with amusement and made pointed comments on the behavior of the EMSA commander. The Wuj sighed quietly; he had hoped that perhaps Admiral Kreplach would indeed ignore the boundary and continue to attempt to overtake and capture the defecting asteroid. But no such luck… no, there was no one else who could be expected to foil the Saturnian hands (or tentacles). It was up to the Wuj.