We found a lot of things that looked like food. Howard and Sato, our biophysicist and our physiologist, checked them out with beakers and computers and lab mice and found that half of them were indeed edible. Protein, carbohydrates, fats. Just like Earth. My yellow pods had little orange peas in them that tasted like almonds. Howard’s stalk was as crisp as celery but tasted like fish. And someone had picked mushrooms that looked suspiciously like Earth mushrooms and in fact tasted like mushrooms. Sato muttered something about “interstellar spores” and I shrugged. I didn’t really care if they were fungoid cousins of what grew on Earth, carried here by astral winds or by the hand of God; they were nearly as good as morels and they would be splendid on steaks or in an omelet. The big orbiculate leaves of the orange-trunked trees were edible but tasted like kerosene. There was a plant that was like wheat, and I later got some kernels from it and ground them up and made a few passable loaves of bread. I had learned to bake during those morose days at the Pierre. The flavor was slightly acid but it worked out fine with the mushrooms when you fried them and made a mushroom sandwich.
I was really beginning to feel good with the crew. The picnic had begun it, and finding new foods and sharing them cemented it; we had become a family. When I saw Sato walking hand in hand with Mimi, I felt a warmth in me that I had never felt, even for my daughter Myra with her unlucky body and her doleful eyes.
I went to bed early that night and dreamed for a while of Myra.
The next morning everyone was a bit tired at breakfast. But by the second cup of coffee we were all charged up again. Within a half hour our chief engineer, Annie, was outside in her overalls supervising the unloading of the two nuclear jeeps and then having a plant wipe installed on the front of the bigger one. Mimi and Sato left their breakfasts half finished and went off to the equipment lockers to break out the uranium detection and sampling gear. The geologists started a discussion of three possible mining sites that our computers had picked from the infrared photos, taken while the ship was in orbit. The nearest site was seventeen miles away, but the likeliest was six miles farther. The basic problem was ground transportation. You could hardly use the Isabel for short hops.
I finished off my pancakes and bacon and stayed out of it for a bit. But when I’d had my second cup of coffee I spoke up. “Let’s go for the big one first,” I said. “Annie can go in front with the wipe and we’ll follow with the gear.”
Arturo looked up from his charts. “What about the seismics?” Arturo was chief geologist and looked testy.
“We won’t do seismics. I have a hunch we won’t need them here. This first time out I’m going to put my faith in a shovel.”
Arturo looked at me with dismay for a moment. Then he said, “Captain, with all respect, we have to zero in on a thing like this. You can’t just start digging…”
He was sitting across the table from me. I stood up with a cigar in one hand, reached the other hand out to his chart, and pointed to a spot where a group of computer-drawn lines converged. “We’re looking for a mineral with an atomic weight of two thirty-five,” I said. “And there is something very heavy right there—twenty-three miles from here.”
“Captain, the photo equipment isn’t capable of that kind of discrimination. It could be thorium or actinium. It could be lead.”
“We’ll see what it is,” I said.
In an hour we had our two-jeep caravan set up. I sat with my Sears, Roebuck shovel in the driver’s seat of Annie’s jeep, and the other one followed with three geologists and their equipment. Annie had a wipe cylinder installed on each of the front fenders and she blasted while I drove at a steady five miles an hour. At first she was very careful and businesslike with the big silver tubes, but after a bit she started getting into it and operated the controls as though she were firing six-guns: Zip! Trees and bushes puffed away in pink bursts of cloud. Zap! Great lavender flowers vanished as we humped and rocked our way along the denuded ground, and stands of leaves the size of rowboats fell into dust.
I had fed Arturo’s chart into the jeep’s readout machine; my navigating behind all this molecular devastation consisted of keeping two little green lights on the dash superimposed. More accurately, bringing them back together every time I hit a big hump and they veered apart.
It took four and a half hours to get there and I suspected the three behind us wanted a break. But I didn’t want to stop and we pushed on until the beeps of the homing device on the dash got loud enough to let me know we were very near our destination. I pulled up, turned off the ignition and got out. I was shaky from the ride but excited. I could smell uranium. Or, more precisely, money.
The other three came dragging up in a minute, looking dusty and weary, and I handed out beers from the back seat. Then I took my shovel and pointed toward a rise just ahead. It was a kind of grassy hillock about the height of my mansion in New York. We all took long swigs of beer and then I said, “I think that’s an outcropping and I think it’s what we’re looking for.” I looked at Arturo, who had been in the second jeep. “What do you think?”
He nodded a bit coldly. “That’s where the lines on the chart converge,” he said. “But there’s nothing radioactive around here. It’s probably lead.” He was holding a Geiger counter.
“If it’s safe uranium it won’t affect a counter,” I said.
“Don’t be sure,” Arturo said. “Nobody’s ever seen safe uranium. It’s only an educated guess.” He looked skeptically toward my hill. “Maybe a hopeful guess.”
“This is one hell of a time for that kind of talk,” I said. “I’m going up.”
Before anyone could say anything, I had started up the hill. It was overgrown with some kind of matted, pinkish vegetation, with no handholds; but in the light gravity and the good shape I was in I managed to scramble my way up. I looked back and saw the rest of them beginning to climb. I turned back to the summit I stood on. It was a flat place, a bit larger than a pool table. I took a firm grip on my shovel and started digging.
By the time the others were on top and were standing, sweating and a bit annoyed, looking at me, I had dug through the topsoil. I raised a shovel load now of a mustard-colored mass and held it out toward them. It was very heavy stuff, whatever it was. “I’m no geologist,” I said. “Can somebody tell me what this is?”
Annie was the first to reach for it. She took a pinch between her fingers and sniffed it. Then she took the equipment case from her shoulder and got some little electronic machines out. Arturo did the same. When he felt the stuff and its heaviness and then rubbed some in the palm of one hand, he showed surprise but said nothing. The four of them worked on the samples for several minutes in increasing but silent agitation. I felt excitement growing in me. It was like the feeling you get when a stock begins to move up and you sense that it’s going to go through the roof.
Annie spoke first. “My God!” she said, “I read uranyl nitrate at eight-six percent.”
“Unstable but not radioactive,” Arturo said in a hushed voice.
“I cannot believe this,” Mimi said, with a thrill in her voice. Suddenly she stood up. My heart had begun pounding like a triphammer. She threw her thin arms around me and hugged me with astonishing strength.
I hugged her back, and then the others piled around us in a big huddle of arms and bodies. “I believe it,” I said. It turned out the whole hill and the ground for acres around it were 86 percent uranyl nitrate—a U236 compound and yet as safe as buttercups. The other 14 percent would be no trouble for the Isabel’s refining equipment. The only problem was getting it to the ship; we had a hold capacity of sixty tons. Hauling that much ore twenty-three miles in jeeps would be a pisser. The best idea was to take the Isabel up into orbit and bring her back down again as close to the hill as possible.