It had been a wild twelve hours since Tom Hunter's call to his brother
from the Map Room in Sun Lake City. The Major had arrived first, still
buttoning his shirt and wiping sleep from his eyes. Johnny and Greg came
in on his heels. They had found Tom waiting for them, so excited he
could hardly keep his words straight.
He told them what he had found, and they wondered why they had not
thought of it from the first moment. "We knew there had to be an
answer," Tom said, "some place Dad could have used for a hiding place,
some place nobody would even think to look. Dad must have realized that
he 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 he
had examined, with the pinpoint of light representing Roger Hunter's
asteroid claim. Then the Map Control officer ... much more alert when he
saw Major Briarton ... brought an armload of films up and loaded them
into the projector. They stared at the screen, and saw the two pinpoints
of 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 between
them 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 at
a forty-degree angle. For an instant it looked as though the two were
colliding ... and then the distance between them began to widen again.
Slowly, hour by hour, the white dot was moving away, off the screen
altogether....
The Major looked up at Tom and slammed his fist on the chair-arm. "By
the ten moons of Saturn...." he exploded, and then he was on his feet,
shouting at the startled Map Control officer. "Get me Martinson down
here, and fast. Call the port on a scrambled line and tell them to stand
by with a ship on emergency call, with a crack interceptor pilot ready
to go. Then get me the plotted orbits of every eccentric asteroid that's
crossed Mars' orbit in the last two months. And double-A security on
everything ... we don't want to let Tawney get wind of this...."
Later, while they waited, they went over it to make sure that nothing
was missing. "No wonder we couldn't spot it," the Major said. "We were
looking for an asteroid in a standard orbit in the Belt."
"But there wasn't any," Tom said. "Dad's rock was isolated, nowhere near
any others. And we were so busy thinking of the thousands of rocks in
normal orbits between Mars and Jupiter that we forgot that there are a
few eccentric ones that just don't travel that way."
"Like this one." The Major stared at the screen. "A long, intersecting
orbit. It must swing out almost to Jupiter's orbit at one end, and come
clear in to intersect Earth's orbit at the other end...."
"Which means that it cuts right through the Asteroid Belt and on out
again." Tom grinned. "Dad must have seen it coming ... must have thought
it was on collision course for a while. But he also must have realized
that if he could hide something on its surface as it came near, it would
be 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 his
feet, talking rapidly into the telephone. Sleep was forgotten now,
nothing mattered but pinpointing a tiny bit of rock speeding through
space. Within an hour the asteroid had been identified, its eccentric
orbit plotted. The coordinates were taped into the computers of the
waiting Patrol ship, as the preparations for launching were made.
It could not be coincidence. Somewhere on the surface of that tiny
planetoid racing in toward the Sun they knew they would find Roger
Hunter's secret.
* * * * *
Below them, as they watched, the jagged surface of the asteroid drew
closer.
It was not round ... it was far too tiny a bit of cosmic debris to have
sufficient gravity to crush down rocks and round off ragged corners. It
was roughly oblong in shape, and one side was sheer smooth rock surface.
The other side was rough, bristling with jutting rock. More than
anything else it looked like a ragged mountain top, broken off at the
peak and hurled into space by an all-powerful hand.
Slowly the scout-ship moved closer, braking with its forward jets. The
pilot was expert. Carefully and surely he aligned the ship with the rock
in speed and direction. In the accelleration cot Tom could feel only an
occasional gentle tug as the power cut on and off.