Of all the Martian cities, Sun Lake City was the biggest, the busiest, the noisiest. Already it was crowded with miners and their families, prospectors, rocket men, research men and builders, and for the third time in a decade the power machinery was at work excavating for another level of the city to make room for more.
For Tom and Greg Hunter, Sun Lake City had always been home. Now they walked along the main concourse, Tom with the aluminum box under his arm, Greg with his own spacer’s pack thrown over his shoulder. They didn’t talk; rather than being drawn closer by the news of the tragedy, it seemed that they had drawn farther apart, as though the one common link that had held them together had suddenly been broken.
They turned into the dining commissary, mingling with the crowd as people poured up from the living quarters and offices on the lower levels. They stood across from each other at the table, picking at their food and saying nothing. Finally Tom tossed down his fork. “At least there’s one thing we can do,” he said. “I’m going to call Johnny Coombs.”
He weaved through the crowd of diners to the phone booths in the rear and dialed a number. Johnny had been a friend of the family for years; he and Roger Hunter had been partners in many mining ventures in the Asteroid Belt before Hunter had taken his position with Jupiter Equilateral. If Johnny had any suspicions that Roger Hunter’s accident had been more than an accident, he certainly would not hesitate to voice them.
After a dozen rings, Tom hung up, tried another number. There was no answer there, either. Frowning, Tom rang the city’s central paging system. “Put in a personal call for Johnny Coombs,” he said when the “record” signal flashed on. “Tell him to contact the Hunters when he comes in. We’ll be at home.”
Back at the table, he finished his dinner without tasting it. Greg checked his watch, and together they started for the down ramp that led to the living quarters of the city. A jitney passed them, loaded with people bound for quarters, but neither of them made a move to hop on. When they reached H wing on the fourth level, they turned right down an apartment corridor, and stopped in front of a familiar doorway. Tom pressed his palm against the lock plate, and the door swung open.
It was home to them, the only home they had ever known. Soft lights sprang up on the walls of the apartment as the door opened. Tom saw the old bookcases lining the walls, the drafting board and light at the far end of the room, the simple chairs and dining table, the door which led into the bedroom and kitchen beyond. The room still had the slightly disheveled look it had had ever since Mom died—a slipper on the floor here, a book face down on the couch there. It looked as though Dad had just stepped out for an hour or so. . . .
Tom was three steps into the room before he saw the visitor. The man was sitting comfortably in Roger Hunter’s easy chair, a short, fat man with round pink cheeks that sagged a little and a double chin that rested on his neck scarf. There were two other men in the room, both large and broad-shouldered; one of them nodded to the fat man, and moved to stand between the twins and the door.
The fat man was out of his seat before the boys could speak, smiling at them and holding out his hand. “I wanted to be sure to see you before you left the city,” he was saying, “so we just came on in to wait. I hope you don’t mind our butting in, so to speak.” He chuckled, looking from one twin to the other. “You don’t know me, I suppose. I’m Merrill Tawney. Representing Jupiter Equilateral, you know.”
Tom took the card he was holding out, looked at the name and the tiny gold symbol in the comer, a J in the center of a triangle. He handed the card to Greg. “I’ve seen you before,” he told the fat man. “What do you want with us?”
Tawney smiled again, spreading his hands. “We’ve heard about the tragedy, of course. Shocking. . . . Roger was one of our group so recently. We wanted you to know that if there is anything at all we can do to help, we’d be only too glad”
“Thanks,” Greg said. “But we’re doing just fine.”
Tawney’s smile tightened a little, but he hung on to it. “I always felt close to your father,” he said. “All of us at Jupiter Equilateral did. We were all sorry to see him leave.”
“I bet you were,” Greg said. “He was the best mining engineer you ever had. But Dad could never stand liars, or crooked ways of doing business.”
One of the men started for Greg, but the fat man stopped him with a wave of his hand. “We had our differences of opinion,” he said. “We saw things one way, your father saw them another way. But he was a fine man, one of the finest.”
“Look, Mr. Tawney, you’d better say what you came to say and get out of here,” Greg said angrily, “before we give your friends here something to do.”
“I merely came to offer you some help,” Tawney said. He was no longer smiling. “Since your father’s death, you two have acquired certain responsibilities. I thought we might relieve you of some of them.”
“What sort of responsibilities?”
“You have an unmanned orbit ship which is now a derelict in the Asteroid Belt. You have a scout ship out there also. You can’t just leave them there as a navigation hazard to every ship traveling in the sector. There are also a few mining claims which aren’t going to be of much value to you now.”
“I see,” Greg said. “Are you offering to buy Dad’s mining rig?”
“Well, I doubt very much that we’d have any use for it, as such. But we could save you the trouble of going out there to haul it in.”
“That’s very thoughtful,” Greg said. “How much are you offering?”
Tom looked up in alarm. “Wait a minute,” he said. “That rig’s not for sale.”
“How much?” Greg repeated.
“Forty thousand dollars,” Merrill Tawney said. “Ship, rig and claims. We’ll even pay the transfer tax.”
Tom stared at the man, wondering if he had heard right. He knew what Dad had paid for the rig; he had been with him when the papers were signed. Tawney’s offer was three times as much as the rig was worth.
But Greg was shaking his head. “I don’t think we could sell at that price.”
The fat man’s hands fluttered. “You understand that those ships are hardly suited to a major mining operation like ours,” he said, “and the claims. . . .” He dismissed them with a wave of his hand. “Still, we’d want you to be happy with the price. Say, forty-five thousand?”
Greg hesitated, shook his head again. “I guess we’d better think it over, Mr. Tawney.”
“Fifty thousand is absolutely the top,” Tawney said sharply. “I have the papers right here, drawn up for your signatures, but I’m afraid we can’t hold the offer open.”
“I don’t know, we might want to do some mining ourselves,” Greg said. “For all we know, Dad might have struck some rich ore on one of those claims.”
Tawney laughed. “I hardly think so. Those claims were all Jupiter Equilateral rejects. Our own engineers found nothing but low-grade ore on any of them.”
“Still, it might be fun to look.”
“It could be very expensive fun. Asteroid mining is a dangerous business, even for experts. For amateurs—” Tawney spread his hands—“accidents occur.”
“Yes, we’ve heard about those accidents,” Greg said coldly. “I don’t think we’re quite ready to sell, Mr. Tawney. We may never be ready to sell to you, so don’t stop breathing until we call you. Now if there’s nothing more, why don’t you take your friends and go somewhere else?”