God knows how long he’s been stealing the stuff. His personal wine cooler is filled with frozen food, which the bastard must have been stealing since before the freezers went on the fritz.
Did he know the freezers were going to commit hara-kiri?
The work on Pittsburgh is going slower than I had planned. The metal’s so good that it’s tougher than we had expected. So it takes longer for the laser torches to cut through it. Once we’ve got a slice carved off, the smelting and refining equipment works fine. We’re building up a nice payload of high-quality steel for the Lagrange habitats and the steelhungry factories in Earth orbit.
To say nothing of the lovely ingots of twenty-four carat gold and pure silver that we’re cooking out of the ore. And the sheets of platinum!
Argo is starting to look like a little toy doughnut sitting alongside a cluster of shiny steel grapes. See, in zero gravity, when we melt down a slab of ore it forms itself into a very neat sphere of molten metal. Like a teeny little sun, glowing outside the ship. After we remove the impurities (the gold and silver and platinum, that is) we inject gas into the sphere to hollow it out while it’s solidifying. A hollow sphere is easier for our customers to work with than a solid ball of steel. The gas comes right from the asteroid itself, of course; a byproduct of our mining operation.
All this is done remotely, without any people outside. Lonz and Will control the operation from the command center. They only go EVA if something goes wrong, some piece of equipment breaks down. Even then, the little maintenance robots can take care of the routine repairs. They’ve only had to go EVA twice in all the weeks we’ve been working on Pittsburgh.
We’ll have to leave the asteroid soon if we want to get back to Earth on a reasonable schedule. The partners are grumbling about the recycled food—Darling’s bitching the loudest, the lying thief. He’s feasting on the real food he’s cached in his suite while the rest of us are nibbling on shitburgers. All the other partners are marveling that he’s gaining weight while the rest of us are slimming down.
Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. This evening when I came into the dining lounge there was fat-ass Darling in his homemade toga, holding a green briquette of recycled crap in one hand with his chubby pinky up in the air.
“I will never come out on a fly-by-night operation like this again,” he was saying.
Jean Margaux sniffed at the red briquette she had in front of her. They were odorless, but her face looked as if she was getting a whiff of a pigsty on a blazing afternoon in August. Marj Dupray and Bo Williams were off at a table by themselves, whispering to each other with their heads nearly touching over their table.
“I’m sorry you don’t like the food,” I said to Darling. I could feel the tightness in my face.
“It’s inedible,” he complained.
“Then you’ll just have to go back to your suite and gorge yourself on the food you’ve got hidden there,” I said.
His fleshy face turned absolute white.
Jean looked amused. “Don’t tell me you’ve got a candy bar hidden under your bed,” she said to Darling.
“I resent your implication,” the fat bastard said to me.
“Resent it all you like,” I shot back. “After you’ve taken us to your suite and opened up your wine cooler.”
He heaved himself to his dainty little feet. “I won’t stay here and be insulted.”
Jean looked kind of curious now. Bo and Marj had stopped their tete-a-tete and were staring at us.
With as much dignity as a small dirigible, Darling headed for the hatch.
I called after him, “Come on, Rick, invite us to your suite. Share the food you’ve hoarded, you puffed-up sonofabitch.”
He spun around to face me, making the fringes of his toga flap and swirl. “You retract that statement or, so help me, when we get back to Earth I’ll sue you for every penny you’ve got!”
“Sure, I’ll retract it. After you’ve invited us to your suite.”
“That’s an invasion of my privacy!” he said.
Jean drew herself up to her full height. “Richard, dear, are you actually hiding food from us?”
Bo Williams got off his chair, too. “Yeah—what’s the story, Rick? How come you’re getting fatter while we’re all getting thinner?”
Darling’s eyes swung from one of them to the other. Even Marjorie was on her feet now, scowling at him.
“Can’t you see what he’s doing?” Darling spluttered and pointed a fat finger at me. “He’s trying to make a scapegoat out of me! He’s trying to get you all to hate me and forget that he’s the one who’s gotten us into this mess!”
“There’s an easy way to prove you’re innocent,” Williams said. “Invite us in to your suite.”
Bo can look menacing in his sleep, with that burly build of his and the shaved scalp. He’s really a gentle guy, a frustrated poet who makes his living writing documentaries. But he looks like a Turkish assassin.
“I don’t have to prove anything,” Darling answered, edging back toward the hatch. “A man’s innocent until proven guilty. That’s the law.”
What little patience I have snapped right then and there. “I’m the law aboard this vessel,” I said. “And I order you to open up your suite for inspection. Now.”
He hemmed and hawed. He blubbered and spluttered. But with Bo and me pushing him, he backed all the way down the corridor to his suite. Sure enough, there was enough food cached away in there to cater a party.
Which is exactly what we had. I called Grace, Sheena, and Lowell Hubble. Even invited the crew while I went up to the command center and kept an eye on the automated equipment. They ate and drank everything Darling had squirreled away. He just sat on his own bed and cried until there was nothing left but crumbs and empty bottles.
Served him right. But I couldn’t help feeling sort of sorry for the poor jerk when they all left him in his own suite, surrounded by the mess.
I kind of hate to leave Pittsburgh. This asteroid has made me filthy rich. We can’t stay long enough to mine everything she’s got to give us; even if we did the Argo would be toting so much mass that our thrusters would never be able to get us back to Earth.
No, we’ll leave Pittsburgh with our smelting equipment and a beacon on her, to verify our claim. If the IAA works the way they should, nobody else will be able to touch her. In a few years the lawyers ought to have wrangled out this moratorium business, and I’ll be able to send out a fleet of ships to finish carving her up and carting the refined metals back Earthward.
I’ll be a billionaire!
Marooned
Those bastards at Rockledge have shown their hand at last. They’re going to kill me and my partners and steal my claim to Pittsburgh and the metals we’ve mined. As well as the water and volatiles we got from Aphrodite.
I’m beyond anger. A kind of a cold freeze has gripped me. I can’t even work up the satisfaction of screaming and swearing. They’ve marooned us on the asteroid; me and all my partners. We’ll die on Pittsburgh. I’m talking into the recording system built into my space suit. Maybe someday after we’re all dead somebody will find us and listen to this chip. If you do, take our bodies—and this chip—straight to the IAA’s law enforcement people. Murder, piracy, grand larceny, conspiracy, kidnapping—and it all goes right to the top of Rockledge. And God knows who else.
I don’t even feel scared. I’m just kind of numb. Dumbstruck. Like being paralyzed.