Rob was thoughtful as she left the compartment and he settled down into his berth. No doubt about it, Corrie had something on her mind, and it concerned Way Down. Maybe she thought it wouldn’t live up to its reputation. Well, even if that were true of most of the attractions, he’d have something special to show her that ought to make a difference. He closed his eyes.
Sleep did not come quickly. His mind was too full of random ideas. Last night, tethered to the bare face of the mountain; now, in free fall up in synchronous orbit — and a wild day between those two nights. As Rob began to drift toward unconsciousness he saw before him the knobbed, grey face of Darius Regulo, with its cap of white hair and piercing blue eyes. What was it? The toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head. But ugly Regulo seemed anything except venomous. Kindly, shrewd, vastly experienced — and the very devil of an engineer. In some ways, that fact was more important than all the others.
“So how did you sleep?” Corrie appeared from nowhere a few seconds after they touched down.
“Not too well.” Rob looked at her admiringly. She had changed into a two-piece leisure suit, with a pale-cream blouse to show off her figure and her smooth arms and shoulders. “I was all right when we were under acceleration,” he went on. “I guess I’m the opposite of you — two gee was fine, but as soon as we went into zero gee I kept waking up and grabbing at the walls. Don’t forget I spent the past week on the side of a mountain. In that situation free fall is bad news.”
He rubbed at his eyes, sat up and looked out of the port. “That doesn’t look much like Belize Spaceport to me.”
“Quite right. It isn’t.” Corrie gave a little shrug of her left shoulder. “The crew told me they couldn’t get an arrival approved there for another twenty-four hours. Rather than wait a day I told them to go ahead and get us a landing at Panama. We’ll have to go the rest of the way by air flier. I arranged to have one ready for us as soon as we want it. If we leave now we can be at Way Down in a couple of hours.”
“Fine.” Rob unstrapped himself and stood up. It was oddly reassuring to be in a one-gee environment again. “I’m glad to see that Regulo’s money can’t buy quite everything — though it does seem to buy an awful lot.”
“We don’t control the spaceport schedules, if that’s what you mean — the USF keep those under close control.” Corrie opened the sliding door and looked out at the tropical evening. The sun was not far from setting, and the air was full of dry, spicy scents. “Some day, I expect that Regulo will seek permission to build his own private spaceport — though it’s no use to him personally, because he can’t ever come here to Earth.”
Rob recalled his last thoughts, before he had sunk into sleep. “Maybe you can clear one thing up for me,” he said, “while we’re on our way over to the Yucatan. When we first went into Regulo’s office, I couldn’t see much because the lighting level was so low. My assumption was that he doesn’t want people to have a close look at his face. But after talking with him for a while, I find I can’t believe that. He doesn’t seem like the type to be worried about the way he looks. Am I reading him wrong?”
“Regulo? You thought he was vain?” Corrie burst out laughing, while Rob looked at her with irritation. “I’m sorry, but that idea’s so ludicrous if you know Regulo at all. He doesn’t give a damn what he looks like — not in the slightest. Don’t you know how he first made his money?”
“Well, I have a rough idea.” Rob was puzzled by the apparent change of subject. “He started out shipping materials into Earth orbit from the Asteroid Belt, didn’t he? What’s that got to do with his preference for the dark?”
They were outside the Tug and clearing Immigration. Rob saw more evidence of Regulo’s long arm of influence. The usual time-consuming formalities with Customs and Entry were completed in seconds, with no more than a perfunctory look at IDs and a rapid data entry through the terminal. The sun was descending rapidly as they walked through the early twilight to their waiting aircraft and climbed aboard.
“It has everything to do with it,” Corrie said at last, as she checked the controls and keyed in their destination. “It explains a number of things about Regulo. You’ll hear it sooner or later, so you may as well hear it right the first time. There are enough rumors about him without us adding to them. What you said was true enough. He and a couple of senior partners started out in the transportation business, more than fifty years ago. The development of the Belt was just getting started and there were four or five groups who handled the haulage work, moving materials around the Inner System. I gather it was pretty competitive, and cut-throat too. Regulo’s team was one of the first to get into real trouble…”
It was the big asteroids that got the publicity but the little ones that had the value. The “Big Three” of the Inner Belt, Ceres, Pallas and Vesta, were already suitable for permanent colonies. A little farther out was a good handful of others, above three hundred kilometers in diameter and all likely candidates for long-term development: Hygeia, Euphrosyne, Cybele, Davida, Interamnia. The crew of the Alberich had tracked and ignored all these, along with anything else that was more than a kilometer or two across. Finding metal-rich planetoids was one thing; moving and mining them was a different and more difficult proposition.
Darius Regulo, as junior member of the team, had been given the long and tedious job of first analysis and evaluation. He took all the observations: spectroscopic, active and passive microwave, thermal infra-red, and laser. That permitted the estimate of probable composition. Add in the data on size and orbital elements, and he had all he needed for the first recommendation. Nita Lubin and Alexis Galley would take his work, throw in Galley’s encyclopedic knowledge of metal prices F.O.B. Earth orbit, and make the final decisions.
Now Galley, grey-haired and bushy eye-browed, was sitting at the console. He looked like an old-fashioned bookkeeper, squinting his deep-set eyes at the output displays and muttering numbers beneath his breath. Every few seconds he would gaze up at the ceiling, as though reading invisible figures printed there.
“It’s the right size,” he said at last. “Not bad elements either. I wish we could get a better idea of iridium content — that and the percentage of volatiles, they’ll be the swing factors. What’s the assay look like for lead and zinc, Darius? I don’t see those anywhere.”
“They’re negligible. I decided we might as well call them zero, for estimating purposes.”
“Did you now?” Alexis Galley sniffed. “I’ll thank you to leave that decision to me, until you get a few more years on your shoulders. Now, let’s have another look at those mass figures.”
Darius Regulo stood behind Galley, watching over his shoulder as the older man worked. If a twenty-four-year-old could pick up the results of twenty years of space mining experience just by watching and listening, he would do it. Already he had learned that the actual value of the metals was no more than a small part of the final decision. It was outweighed by the availability of the volatiles used to make the orbital shift, by the asteroid position in the System, and by final mining costs.
Galley was nodding slowly. “I’m inclined to give it a try,” he conceded. “You’ve done a fair job here, Darius.” He swivelled in his chair. “What do you think, Nita? Shall we give this one a go?”