“Then I think we’ll stick to the law,” Tawney said, “and call it an accident.”
“And what about my brother? Was that an accident?”
“Ah, yes, your brother.” Tawney’s eyes hardened. “Quite a different matter, that. Sometimes Doc tends to be over- zealous in carrying out his assigned duties. I can assure you that he has been . . . disciplined.”
“That’s not going to -help Tom very much.”
“Unfortunately not,” Tawney said. “Your brother made a very foolish move, under the circumstances. But from a practical point of view, perhaps it’s not entirely a tragedy.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“From what I’ve heard,” Tawney said, “you didn’t have much use for your twin brother. So now you won’t have to share your father’s legacy—”
It was too much. With a roar Greg swung at the little fat man. The blow caught Tawney full in the jaw, jerked his head back. Greg threw his shoulder into a hard left, slamming Tawney back against the wall. The guard charged across the room, dragging them apart as Tawney blubbered and tried to cover his face. Greg dug his elbow into the guard’s stomach, twisted away and started for Tawney again. Then Johnny caught his arm and spun him around. “Stop it,” he snapped. “Use your head, boy!”
Greg stopped, glaring at Tawney and gasping for breath. The company man picked himself up, rubbing his hand across his mouth. For a moment he trembled with rage. Then he gripped the table with one hand, forcibly regaining his control. He even managed a sickly smile. “Just like your father,” he said, “too hot-headed for your own good. But well let it pass. I brought you here to make you an offer, a very generous offer, and I’ll still make it. I’m a businessman. When I want something I bargain for it. If I have to share a profit to get it, I share the profit. All right. You know where your father’s strike is. We want it. We can’t find it, so you’ve got us over a barrel. We’re ready to bargain.”
Greg started forward. “I wouldn’t bargain with you for—”
“Shut up, Greg,” Johnny said.
Greg stared at him. The big miner’s voice had cracked like a whip. He drew Merrill Tawney aside and spoke rapidly into his ear. Tawney listened, shot a venomous glance across at Greg, and finally nodded. “All right,” he said, “but I can’t wait forever.”
“You won’t have to.”
Tawney turned to the guard. “You have your orders,” he said. “They’re to have these quarters and the freedom of the ship, except for the outer level. They’re not to be harmed, and they’re not to be out of your sight except when they’re locked in here. Is that clear?”
The guard nodded. Tawney looked at Johnny, and started for the door, still rubbing his jaw. “Well talk again later,” he said, and left.
When the guard also left and the lock buzzed in the door, Johnny looked at Greg and shook his head sadly. “You just about fixed things, boy, you really did.”
“Well, what was I supposed to do, just stand there and listen to him?” Greg turned away angrily. “What did you say to him to quiet him down so fast?”
“I said I’d talk you into a deal with him, but I needed time,” Johnny said.
“You’ll need time, all right,” Greg said. “If you think I’d deal with him—”
“Of course I don’t,” Johnny said. “I just want to stay alive a while, that’s all. Look, there isn’t goin’ to be any bargainin’ with Tawney, he just doesn’t work that way. It’s heads he wins, tails we lose. Once he has what he wants we won’t last six minutes. All right. Then there’s just one thing that can keep us alive—stallin’ him. He thinks you know what he wants to know, and as long as he thinks so, he won’t touch us. We’ve got to squeeze every minute out of it that we can. We’ve got to make him think you’ll give in if he plays his cards right.”
Greg was silent for a minute. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“Well, you’d better start thinldn’, then. As soon as Tawney tumbles to what we’re doing, things are goin’ to get pretty ugly around here, and nobody’s goin’ to help us. We’ve got to use the time we have to find some way to break for it.”
Johnny stood up, staring around the luxurious lounge. “And if you want my opinion, it’s going to take some pretty fancy footwork to get out of here with our skins.”
Miles across the blackness of space there was a sudden flare of blue-white light, growing from a brilliant pinpoint into an expanding fireball that lighted up the prisoners’ faces as they watched it on the view screen.
Slowly then, the light faded. A section of the screen went telescopic, and suddenly they could see the aftermath of the explosion in sharp focus before their eyes.
They had been watching the death of an asteroid. For over an hour the final preparations had been taking place; then, minutes before the explosion, they had seen the work crews move away from the rock on scooters, to take refuge in the near-by scout ship.
“It’s pretty good-sized rock,” the guard told them as they waited for the blast. “Seven and four-tenths miles mean diameter, bigger than most of them. We’ve had crews working there for three shifts, placing the charges just right for maximum fragmentation. Of course, we’ll still have fragments too large for processing, but we can crush them up with single charges later. Now watch this.”
The tiny scout ship was moving back into view again as the fragments of the asteroid spun out in an expanding cloud. But now the ship was unfurling behind it a huge glittering net of magnetic wire that opened out like a gigantic spider web. The scout ship swung into a wide arc around the cloud of asteroid fragments, then moved slowly forward, drawing in the net.
It looked ridiculously like the old pictures of Earth-side fishermen at work. Anything other than a controlled Murexide explosion would have sent the asteroid fragments spinning away in all directions at a speed so great that they could never have been corralled and salvaged. Greg could remember his father’s stories of the early days of asteroid mining, when the old-type uranium charges were used. In those days the magnetic net was spread around the rock before it was blown up; too often the charges would be too powerful, sending huge radioactive fragments ripping through the nets, and tearing scout ships to shreds in space.
Many men had died mining in the belt in those days. Now the controlled charges exerted just the force necessary to split the rocks into fragments, and no more, but the job of netting the fragments still depended on the skill of the scout ship’s navigator-pilot team.
They were watching such a team in action now, and Greg shook his head in grudging admiration as the pilot of the little scout darted back and forth, weaving the net around the slowly escaping fragments, drawing them in, moving again, until at last all but the tiniest bits of broken rock were engulfed in the net.
Then the scout ship moved into a slow arc back toward the orbit ship, drawing its net behind it.
This was asteroid mining. The same techniques were used by the huge mining companies and the tiny independents alike, but few of the independents had the top-grade equipment, the man power or the sheer engineering skill to do the sort of slick professional job that Johnny and Greg were witnessing now.
True to his word, Tawney had given them the freedom of the ship. Greg and Johnny discovered that their guard was also an excellent guide. All day he had been leading them through the ship, chatting and answering their questions, until they almost forgot that they were prisoners here. And the guard’s obvious pride in the scope and skill of his company’s mining operations was strangely infectious.
Certainly the orbit ship was an excellent headquarters; it lacked nothing as a base for mining operations. Orbiting in an asteroid cluster chosen for the high density of asteroids in the vicinity, the ship buzzed with activity like a nest of hornets. Two dozen scout ships nestled at the side of the huge ship, shooting out to their various sites of operation, buzzing back with glittering nets in tow, pulling in asteroid fragments. Down in the storage holds crews of workmen were sorting the fragments, analyzing them in the compact assay lab, separating them into high-grade and low-grade ores for the smelters on Earth and Mars.