14. The Missing Asteroid
It had been a wild twelve hours since Tom Hunter's call to his brotherfrom the Map Room in Sun Lake City. The Major had arrived first, stillbuttoning his shirt and wiping sleep from his eyes. Johnny and Greg camein on his heels. They had found Tom waiting for them, so excited hecould hardly keep his words straight.
He told them what he had found, and they wondered why they had notthought of it from the first moment. "We knew there had to be ananswer," Tom said, "some place Dad could have used for a hiding place,some place nobody would even think to look. Dad must have realized thathe didn't have much time. When he saw his chance, he took it."
And it was pure, lucky chance. Tom showed them the section of the Map hehad examined, with the pinpoint of light representing Roger Hunter'sasteroid claim. Then the Map Control officer ... much more alert when hesaw Major Briarton ... brought an armload of films up and loaded theminto the projector. They stared at the screen, and saw the two pinpointsof light where one was now.
"What was the date of this?" the Major asked sharply.
"Two days before Dad died," Tom said. "There's quite a distance betweenthem there ... but watch. One frame for every hour. Watch what happens."
He began running the film, the record taken from the Map itself,accurate as clockwork. The white dot was moving in toward the red dot ata forty-degree angle. For an instant it looked as though the two werecolliding ... and then the distance between them began to widen again.Slowly, hour by hour, the white dot was moving away, off the screenaltogether....
The Major looked up at Tom and slammed his fist on the chair-arm. "Bythe ten moons of Saturn...." he exploded, and then he was on his feet,shouting at the startled Map Control officer. "Get me Martinson downhere, and fast. Call the port on a scrambled line and tell them to standby with a ship on emergency call, with a crack interceptor pilot readyto go. Then get me the plotted orbits of every eccentric asteroid that'scrossed Mars' orbit in the last two months. And double-A security oneverything ... we don't want to let Tawney get wind of this...."
Later, while they waited, they went over it to make sure that nothingwas missing. "No wonder we couldn't spot it," the Major said. "We werelooking for an asteroid in a standard orbit in the Belt."
"But there wasn't any," Tom said. "Dad's rock was isolated, nowhere nearany others. And we were so busy thinking of the thousands of rocks innormal orbits between Mars and Jupiter that we forgot that there are afew eccentric ones that just don't travel that way."
"Like this one." The Major stared at the screen. "A long, intersectingorbit. It must swing out almost to Jupiter's orbit at one end, and comeclear in to intersect Earth's orbit at the other end...."
"Which means that it cuts right through the Asteroid Belt and on outagain." Tom grinned. "Dad must have seen it coming ... must have thoughtit was on collision course for a while. But he also must have realizedthat if he could hide something on its surface as it came near, it wouldbe carried clear out of the Belt altogether in a few days' time."
"And if we can follow it up and intercept it...." The Major was on hisfeet, talking rapidly into the telephone. Sleep was forgotten now,nothing mattered but pinpointing a tiny bit of rock speeding throughspace. Within an hour the asteroid had been identified, its eccentricorbit plotted. The coordinates were taped into the computers of thewaiting Patrol ship, as the preparations for launching were made.
It could not be coincidence. Somewhere on the surface of that tinyplanetoid racing in toward the Sun they knew they would find RogerHunter's secret.
* * * * *
Below them, as they watched, the jagged surface of the asteroid drewcloser.
It was not round ... it was far too tiny a bit of cosmic debris to havesufficient gravity to crush down rocks and round off ragged corners. Itwas roughly oblong in shape, and one side was sheer smooth rock surface.The other side was rough, bristling with jutting rock. More thananything else it looked like a ragged mountain top, broken off at thepeak and hurled into space by an all-powerful hand.
Slowly the scout-ship moved closer, braking with its forward jets. Thepilot was expert. Carefully and surely he aligned the ship with the rockin speed and direction. In the accelleration cot Tom could feel only anoccasional gentle tug as the power cut on and off.
Then the Lieutenant said, "I think we can make a landing now, Major."
"Fine. Take a scooter down first, and carry a guy line."
They unstrapped, and changed into pressure suits. In the airlock theywaited until the Lieutenant had touched the scooter down. Then MajorBriarton nodded, and they clamped their belts to the guy line.
One by one they leaped down toward the rock.
From a few miles out in space, the job of searching the surface had notappeared difficult. From the rock itself, things looked very different.There was no way, from the surface, to scan large areas, and the surfacewas so rough that they had to take constant care not to damage theirboots or rip holes in their suits. There were hundreds of crevices andcaves, half concealed by the loose rock that crumbled under their feetas they moved.
They spread out from the scooter for an hour of fruitless searching. Tomspent most of the time pulling his boots free of surface cracks andpicking his way over heaps of jagged rock. None of them got farther thana hundred yards from the starting place. None of them found anythingremarkable.
"We could spend weeks covering it this way," Greg said when they met atthe scooter again. "Why don't I take the scooter and criss-cross thewhole surface at about fifty feet? If I spot anything, I'll yell."
It seemed like a good idea. Greg strapped himself into the scooter'ssaddle, straddling the fuel tanks, using the hand jet to guide himselfas he lifted lightly off the surface. He disappeared over the horizon ofrock, then reappeared as he moved over the surface and back.
Tom and Johnny waited with the Major. Twenty minutes later Greg broughtthe tiny craft back again. "It's no good," he said. "I've scanned thewhole bright-side, came as close as I dared."
"No sign of anything?" Johnny said.
"Not a thing. The dark side looks like a sheer slab, from what my lightsshow. If we only had some idea what we were looking for...."
"Maybe you weren't close enough," Tom said. "Why not drop each of us offto take a quarter of the bright-side and work our way in?"
The others agreed. Tom waited until the Major and Johnny had beenposted; then he hopped on the scooter behind Greg and dropped off almostat the line of darkness, where the sheer slab began. All of them hadhoped that there might be a sign, something that Roger Hunter might haveleft to mark his cache, but if there was one none of them spotted it.Tom checked with the others by the radio in his helmet, and startedmoving back toward the center of the bright side.
An hour later he was only halfway to the center, and he was nearlyexhausted. At a dozen different spots he thought he had found apromising cleft in the rock, a place where something might have beenconcealed ... but exploration of the clefts proved fruitless.
And now his confidence began to fail. Supposing he had been wrong? Theyknew the rock had passed very close to Roger Hunter's asteroid, theastronomical records proved that. But suppose Dad had not used it as hishiding place at all? He pulled himself around another jagged rock shelf,staring down at the rough asteroid surface beyond....
At the base of the rock shelf, something glinted in the sunlight. Heleaped down, and thrust his hand into a small crevice in the rock. Hishand closed on a small metal object.
It was a gun. It felt well balanced, familiar in his hand ... therevolver Dad had always carried in his gun case.
He had to let them know. He was just snapping the speaker switch when heheard a growl of static in his earphones, and then Greg's voice,high-pitched and excited. "Over here! I think I've found something!"
It took ten minutes of scrambling over the treacherous surface to reachGreg. Tom saw his brother tugging at a huge chunk of granite that waswedged into a crevice in the roc
k. Tom got there just as the Major andJohnny topped a rise on the other side and hurried down to them.
The rock gave way, rolling aside, and Greg reached down into thecrevice. Tom leaned over to help him. Between them they lifted out thething that had been wedged down beneath the boulder.
It was a metal cylinder, four feet long, two feet wide, and bluntlytapered at either end. In the sunlight it gleamed like polished silver,but they could see a hairline break in the metal encircling the centerportion.
They had found Roger Hunter's bonanza.
* * * * *
In the cabin of the scout-ship they broke the cylinder open into twoperfect halves. It came apart easily, a shell of paper-thin butremarkably strong metal, protecting the tightly packed contents.
There was no question what the cylinder was, even though there wasnothing inside that looked even slightly familiar at first examination.There were several hundred very tiny thin discs of metal that fit on thespindle of a small instrument that was packed with them. There werespools of film, thin as tissue but amazingly strong. Examined againstthe light in the cabin, the film seemed to carry no image at all ... butthere was another small machine that accepted the loose end of the film,and a series of lenses that glowed brightly with no apparent source ofpower. There was a thick block of shiny metal covered on one side withalmost invisible scratches....
A time capsule, beyond doubt. A confusing treasure, at first glance, butthe idea was perfectly clear. A hard shell of metal protecting therecords collected inside....
_Against what? A planetary explosion? Some sort of cosmic disaster thathad blown a planet and its people into the fragments that now filled theAsteroid Belt?_
At the bottom of the cylinder was a small tube of metal. They examinedit carefully, trying to guess what it was supposed to be. At the bottomwas a tiny stud. When they pressed it, the cylinder began to expand andunfold, layer upon layer of thin glistening metallic material thatspread out into a sheet that stretched halfway across the cabin.
They stared down at it. The metal seemed to have a life of its own,glowing and glinting, focussing light into pinpoints on its surface.
It was a map.
At one side, a glowing ball with a fiery corona, an unmistakeablesymbol that any intelligent creature in the universe that was able toperceive it at all would recognize as a star. Around it, in clearlymarked orbits, ten planets. The third planet had a single satellite, thefourth two tiny ones. The sixth eleven. The seventh planet had ten, andwas encircled by glowing rings.
But the fifth planet was broken into four parts.
Beyond the tenth planet there was nothing across a vast expanse of themap ... but at the far side was another star symbol, this one a doublestar with four planetary bodies.
They stared at the glowing map, speechless. There could be no mistakingthe meaning of the thing that lay before them, marked in symbols thatcould mean only one thing to any intelligence that could recognize starsand planets.
But in the center of the sheet was another symbol. It lay halfwaybetween the two Solar Systems, in the depths of interstellar space. Itwas a tiny picture, a silvery sliver of light, but it too wasunmistakeable.
It could be nothing else but a Starship.
* * * * *
Later, as they talked, they saw that the map had told each of them,individually, the same thing. "They had a star-drive," Tom said."Whatever kind of creatures they were, and whatever the disaster thatthreatened their planet, they had a star-drive to take them out of theSolar System to another star."
"But why leave a record?" Greg wanted to know. "If nobody was here touse it...."
"Maybe for the same reason that Earthmen bury time capsules with recordsof their civilization," Major Briarton said. "I'd guess that the recordshere will tell, when they have been studied and deciphered. Perhapsthere was already some sign of intelligent life developing elsewhere inthe Solar System. Perhaps they hoped that some of their own people wouldsurvive. But they had a star-drive, so some of them must have escaped.And with the record here...."
"We may be able to follow them," Greg said.
"If we can decipher the record," Johnny Coombs said. "But we don't haveany clue to their language."
"Did you have any trouble understanding what the map had to say?" theMajor said quietly.
"No...."
"I don't think the rest will be much more difficult. They wereintelligent creatures. The record will be understandable, all right." Hestarted to fold the map back into a tube again. "Maybe Roger Huntertried to use the film projector. We'll never know. But he must haverealized that he had discovered the secret of a star-drive. He realizedthat the United Nations were the ones to explore it and use it, and hegave his life to keep it out of the hands of Tawney and his men...."
"A pity," a cold voice said close behind them, "that he didn't succeed,after all."
They whirled. In the hatchway to the after-cabin, Merrill Tawney wasstanding, with a smile on his lips and a Markheim stunner traineddirectly on Major Briarton's chest.