The fat man scowled; he started to say something, then saw the look on Greg’s face, and shrugged. “I’d advise you to give my offer some careful thought,” he said as he started for the door. “It might be very foolish for you to try to use that rig.”
Smiling, Greg closed the door in his face. Then he turned and winked at Tom. “Great fellow, Mr. Tawney. He almost had me sold.”
“So I noticed,” Tom said. “For a while I thought you were serious.”
“Well, we found out how high they’d go. That’s a very generous outfit Mr. Tawney works for.”
“Or else a very crooked one,” Tom said. “Are you wondering the same thing I’m wondering?”
“Yes,” Greg said slowly. “I think I am.”
“Then that makes three of us,” a heavy voice rumbled from the bedroom door.
Johnny Coombs was a tall man, so thin he was almost gangling, with a long nose, and shaggy eyebrows jutting out over his eyes. With his rudely cropped hair and his huge hands, he looked like a caricature of a frontier Mars farmer, but the blue eyes under the eyebrows were not dull.
He grinned at the boys’ surprise, and walked into the room. “You don’t mind if I have a seat, I hope,” he said in his deep bass voice. “I been standin’ there inside that door for almost an hour, and I’m tired of standin’.”
“Johnny!” Tom cried. “We were trying to find you.”
“I know,” Johnny said. “So were a lot of other people, includin’ your friends there.”
“Well, did you hear what Tawney wanted?”
“I’m not so quick on my feet any more,” Johnny Coombs said, “but I got nothin’,wrong with my ears.” He scratched his jaw and looked up sharply at Greg. “Not many people nowadays get a chance to bargain with Merrill Tawney.”
Greg shrugged. “He named a price and I didn’t like it.”
“Three times what the rig is worth,” Coombs said.
“That’s what I didn’t like,” Greg said. “That outfit wouldn’t give us a break like that just for old times’ sake. Do you think they would?”
“Well, I don’t know,” Johnny said slowly. “Back before they built the city here, they used to have rats getting into the grub. Came right down off the ships. Got rid of most of them, finally, but it seems to me we’ve still got some around, even if they’ve got different shapes now.” He jerked his thumb toward the bedroom door. “In case you’re wondering, that’s why I was standin’ back there all this time, just to make sure you didn’t sell out to Tawney no matter what price he offered.”
Tom jumped up excitedly. “Then you know something about Dad’s accident!”
“No, I can’t say I do. I wasn’t there.”
“Do you really think it was an accident?”
“Can’t prove it wasn’t.”
“But at least you’ve got some ideas,” Tom said.
Johnny Coombs stood up and started the coffee-mix heating on the stove. “Takes more than ideas to make a case,” he said at length. “But there’s one thing I do know. I’ve got no proof, not a shred of it, but I’m sure of one thing just as sure as I’m on Mars.” He looked at the twins thoughtfully. “Your dad wasn’t just prospecting, out in the belt. He’d run onto something out there, something big.”
The twins stared at him. “Rim unto something?” Greg said. “You mean. . . .”
“I mean I think your dad hit a big strike out there, rich metal, a real bonanza lode, maybe the biggest strike that’s ever been made,” the miner said slowly. “And then somebody got to him before he could bring it in.”
Chapter Three
Too Many Warnings
For a moment, neither of the boys could say anything at all. From the time they had learned to talk, they had heard stories and tales that the miners and prospectors told about the big strike, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the wonderful, elusive goal of every man who had ever taken a ship out into the Asteroid Belt.
For almost a hundred and fifty years—since the earliest days of space exploration—there had been miners prospecting in the asteroids. Out there, beyond the orbit of Mars and inside the orbit of Jupiter, were a hundred thousand—maybe a hundred million, for all anybody knew—chunks of rock, metal and debris, spinning in silent orbit around the sun. Some few of the asteroids were big enough to be called planets—Ceres, five hundred miles in diameter; Juno, Vesta, Pallas, half a dozen more. A few thousand others, ranging in size from ten to a hundred miles in diameter, had been charted and followed in their orbits by the observatories, first from Earth’s airless Moon, then from Mars. There were tens of thousands more that had never been charted. Together they made up the Asteroid Belt, spread out in space like a broad road around the sun, echoing the age-old call of the bonanza.
For there was wealth in the asteroids, wealth beyond a man’s wildest dreams, if only he could find it.
Earth, with its depleted iron ranges, its exhausted tin and copper mines, and its burgeoning population, was hungry for metal. Earth needed steel, tin, nickel, and zinc; more than anything. Earth needed ruthenium, the rare earth catalyst that made the huge solar energy converters possible.
Mars was rich in the ores of these metals, but the ores were buried deep in the ground. The cost of mining them, and of lifting the heavy ore from Mars’ gravitational field and carrying it to Earth was prohibitive. Only the finest carbon steel, and the radioactive metals, smelted and purified on Mars and transported to Earth, could be made profitable.
But from the Asteroid Belt, it was a different story. There was no gravity to fight on the tiny asteroids. On these chunks of debris, the metals lay close to the surface, easy to mine. Ships orbiting in the belt could fill their holds with their precious metal cargoes and transfer them in space to the interplanetary orbit ships spinning back toward Earth. It was hard work, and dangerous. Most of the ore was low- grade, and brought little return. But always there was the lure of the big strike, the lode of almost pure metal that could bring a fortune to the man who found it.
A few such strikes had been made. Forty years before, a single claim had brought its owner seventeen million dollars in two years. A dozen other men had stumbled onto fortunes in the belt, but such metal-rich fragments were grains of sand in a mighty river. For every man who found one, a thousand others spent years looking and then perished in the fruitless search.
And now Johnny Coombs was telling them that their father had been one of that incredible few.
They stared at the tall, lanky miner while he poured himself a cup of coffee. Then Greg laughed. “Johnny, you’re crazy,” he said. “You were telling us tales about the big strikes when we were five years old. I didn’t believe you then, and I don’t believe you now.”
Johnny Coombs looked at him soberly. “Stories for the kiddies are one thing. This is something else. I’m speakin’ the truth, boy.”
“You think Dad hit a bonanza lode out there?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Did you see it with your own eyes?”
“No.”
“You weren’t even out there with him!”
“No.”
“Then why are you so sure he found something?”
“Because he told me so,” Johnny Coombs said quietly.
The boys looked at each other. “He actually said he’d found a rich lode?” Tom asked eagerly.
“Not exactly,” Johnny said. “Matter of fact, he never actually told me what he’d found. He needed somebody to sign aboard the Scavenger with him in order to get a clearance to blast off, but he never did plan to take me out there with him. ‘I can’t take you now, Johnny,’ he told me. ‘I’ve found something out there, but I’ve got to work it alone for a while.’ I asked him what he’d found, and he just gave me that funny little grin of his and said, ‘Never mind what it is, it’s big enough for both of us. You just keep your mouth shut, and you’ll find out soon enough.’ And then he wouldn’t say another word until we were homin’ in on the shuttle ship to drop me off.”