I took her call in my personal quarters, just off the command center. The transmission was scrambled, of course, and it took a little coaxing of the computer before I got a clear picture on my screen. Kay had never been a great beauty: she’s got a lean, scruffy, lantern-jawed look to her. The only time I’ve ever seen her smile was when she nailed a victim who was trying to escape Disney’s clutches. Now her face in my screen was unsmiling, dead serious.
“No joy, Sam,” she said. “Far as I can tell, Darling is virginally pure, money-wise. No large sums deposited in any of his accounts. No deposits at all in the past four years. He’s been living off the income from several nice chunks of blue-chip stocks. No accounts in Liechtenstein that I could find. No Rockledge stock in his portfolio, either. He just about cleaned out his piggy bank to raise the ten mill for your wacky venture. And that’s all there is to it.”
Then she let a faint glimmer of a smile break her iron-hard facade. “That’ll be seventy-five thou pal. And dinner’s on you when you get back.”
Thanks a friggin’ lot, I said silently to her image on the screen. Por nada.
Okay, so we found a carbonaceous chondrite first.
From everything the astrogeologists had told me, metallic asteroids are much more plentiful than the carbonaceous stones. But it’s just happened that our sensors picked up a carbonaceous rock, bang! right off the bat. I fired two automated probes at it as soon as we got close enough. This morning Lonz initiated the course change we need to match orbit with the rock and rendezvous with it. We’ll catch up to it in ten days.
The passengers—partners—have finally recovered from their food orgy. For a week or so they were pretty hung over, and pretty shamefaced. It’s a pity I didn’t think to make a video of their antics. I could blackmail them for the rest of their lives if I had it all on disk.
Anyway, I called a meeting in the lounge. They all looked pretty dreary, worn out, like they were recuperating from some tropical disease. All except Darling, who seemed pink and healthy. And a lot heavier than he was before. He’s ditched his normal clothing and he’s now wearing some kind of robe that looks like he stitched it together himself. It took me a couple of minutes of staring at it before I recognized what it was: two tablecloths from the dining lounge, with some designs hand-painted on them.
Shades of the Emperor Nero! Was he wearing eye makeup, too?
“We’ve located a carbonaceous asteroid,” I announced, turning away from Darling. “We’ll make rendezvous with it in ten days.”
Hubble’s ears perked up. “I’d like to see the data, if I may.” His voice was still hoarse from all the Roman feather-throating he’d gone through. You’d think that his being an older man, a scientist and all that, he would’ve set a better example for the other bubbleheads. But no, he’d been just as wild as the rest of them.
I noticed, though, that Sheena was no longer sitting next to him. His father image had apparently gone down the toilet along with everything else.
“Sure,” I said to him. “Come on up to the command center afterward. Right now, though, I thought it’d be a good idea if we came up with a proper name for the rock.”
“You can’t claim it, can you?” Grace asked.
Bo Williams shook his bald head. “No one can claim any natural object in space. That’s international law.”
“You can use it, though,” Hubble said. “There’s no law against mining or otherwise utilizing an astronomical body, even if you can’t claim ownership.”
“First come, first served,” said Rick Darling. With a smirk.
“You’re all well-versed on interplanetary law,” I said, making myself smile at them. “But I still think we ought to give this rock a name. It’s going to make us rich; the least we can do is name it.”
“What will we get from it?” Sheena asked.
“Water,” responded five or six voices simultaneously, including mine.
“Is that all?”
“Tons of water,” I said. “Water sells for about one million U.S. dollars per ton at Lagrange One. Considering the size of this asteroid and its possible water content, we ought to clear a hundred million, easy.”
“That would pay back our investment!” Marj Dupray piped.
“With a profit,” added Jean Margaux, the first time I had seen her say something spontaneous.
“There’ll be other valuables on a carbonaceous chondrite, as well,” Hubble said, taking out his pipe for the first time. “Carbon, of course. A fair amount of nitrogen, I would suppose. It could be quite profitable.”
Not bothering to explain to them the difference between gross income and net profit, I said, “So let’s pick a name for the rock and register it with the IAA.”
They fell silent.
“I was sort of thinking we might name it Gunn One,” I suggested modestly.
They booed and hooted. Each and every one of them.
“Aphrodite,” said Sheena, once the razzing had quieted down.
Everybody turned to stare at her. Aphrodite?
She blinked those gorgeous eyes of hers; they were emerald green this morning. “I remember some painting by some old Italian of the birth of Venus, coming out of the sea. You know, like she’s the gift of the sea.”
“But what’s that got to do with …”
“And that’s Venus. There’s already a planet named Venus.”
“I know,” Sheena said. “That’s why I thought we could use her Greek name, Aphrodite.”
I had never realized she knew anything at all about anything at all. But she knew about the goddess of love’s different names. I went behind the bar to the computer terminal and checked on the names already registered for asteroids. There was a Juno and a Hera, a Helena and even a Cleopatra. But no Aphrodite.
“Aphrodite looks good,” I said.
“I still fail to see what it has to do with a lump of rock floating around in space,” Jean complained.
But we voted her down and sent a message to the IAA headquarters in Geneva: a new asteroid has been discovered and its name is Aphrodite.
A hundred and twenty-seven tons of water. Boy, do I feel good about that! A hundred and twenty-seven million bucks safely stowed in our inflatable tanks!
We’ve been working hard for a solid month, chewing up Aphrodite and baking the volatiles out of her rocks. The grinding equipment worked fine; so did the ovens. No sabotage there, thank God.
There isn’t much of old Aphrodite left. Sheena got kind of upset when she realized we were tearing up the rock and grinding it and baking the pieces. We left a small chunk so the name’s still valid, although we’ve perturbed its orbit so much that Hubble claims she’ll fall in toward the Sun and cross the orbit of Mars and maybe even Earth’s orbit.
Thirty-one thousand, seven hundred and fifty gallons of water, according to the volume of tankage we’ve filled. That masses out to one hundred and twenty-seven tons. Plus an almost equal amount of ammonia and methane. We’ve got an even dozen of our inflatable storage tanks hanging outside the ship’s hub. I’ve already made a contract with Moonbase Corporation to buy the whole kit and kaboodle at ten percent below Rockledge’s price. They’ll process the ammonia and methane for the nitrogen and carbon, then mix the leftover hydrogen with oxygen from lunar ores to make still more water.
We’re gonna drown Rockledge!
My partners have been happy and pretty well-behaved this past month. The news media back home have been interviewing them almost constantly; they’re all becoming famous. This isn’t the Ship of Fools anymore. The media’s describing us now as “the grandest entrepreneurial venture in history.”