by Jerry
Grace tossed her lovely brown head. Without gravity her hair assumed a hundred weird positions. In spite of himself, John laughed.
“All right,” he went on, we’ll keep probing with a beam as well as visually, but I hope something shows up on the radar-scope. I know we’ll never see it.”
“Don’t be to sure of that,” Grace shot back, “four hundred thousand tons of metal is a pretty big chunk. And remember, Dad said it was pocked and ashed too. There are probably half a dozen different things there besides tantalum.”
Both Grace and John settled back in the cushioned air-rubber acceleration seats and resumed peering through the large port of the rocket. John reached over to the control panel and flipped the switch on the radar’s automatic sweep. Invisibly, pulses of high frequency radiation sped from the nose antenna which oscillated and reciprocated, sweeping a large volume of space before it. Anything it encountered appeared as a blob on the fluourescent line.
Grace tightened the seat belt to present her from floating about the control room of the “free” rocket and did things with a pair of binoculars.
As space rockets go, the Tellus-243 was not big. Thirty meters long and seven meters in diameter, the major portion of its bulk was fuel, food, and machinery. Practically automatic, indeed completely so at times, it could have been handled by a baby.
John and Grace Compton had been married a year before, shortly before Grace’s father had died. John had been attending the technical school at Luna City where the greatest work was to be done on sub-atomics. It was here that he met the grizzled space prospector and his daughter. It hadn’t been long before he had married Grace who was more experienced in practical rocketry than he had ever dreamed of being Knowing that he was going to pass beyond this veil soon, Grace’s father had given the two of them the only legacy he possessed besides his battered rocket—the chart to an asteroid full of tantalum, a metal in high demand for surgery—a metal for which there was no substitute for flesh and bone do not knit to other metals.
In an effort to secure complete financial security for both of them John agreed to spend a year on the hunt for the asteroid which in the grinding Belt, was proving to be still unknown.
For better than six months they had plied the belt spending most of the time “out of grav”, gradually becoming real prospectors, but almost breaking their hearts with the apparent futility of the thing.
The radar screens showed nothing. Visual observation showed nothing. Where the asteroid was supposed to be, was empty space. But this didn’t necessarily mean too much. It is almost impossible to orient a position with respect to another object so small and in such a huge volume of space. Consequently, only tedious and patient search could locate the ’roid. Grace’s father had pulled a spectrogram on some ore samples, but not until he had returned to Earth. It was too late then to go back and collect.
John’s rausings on the events that led him from the Labs of Luna to the ’roid Belt were suddenly interrupted.
Grace flipped her belt loose and with a flick of her toe shot ceilingward. She stopped herself with her fingertip.
“John! John!” she squealed jubiliantly, “Look at it! Oh darling, we’ve found it.” Her arms found his neck and he was almost smothered.
WHEN he managed to free himself enough to see, he peered to where her arm pointed. He put the binoculars to his eyes, and squinted. Involuntarily he gave a gasp of pain as the reflected sunlight caught his eyes, from sunward. But there it was!
“Grace,” he said, “you were right. I should have had as much faith as you. Look at that beauty.”
Both of them stared for several minutes at the spectacle they wanted to see so much and for so long. The lump of rock and metal reflected the light brilliantly and showed the irregular outline of itself to them. John let go of the binoculars and they floated away. He turned to Grace, holding her close, feeling her warmth against him.
“Sweetheart,” he breathed against her ear, “this is ours. Think what this’ll mean on Luna. I can study now and we can have the place we want under the Dome.”
His voice changed abruptly to a note of teasing. “Of course you’re going to blister those hands and then some!” Her voice was serious. “I don’t mind, John. It’s the end of a lot of worry and trouble for both of us. Should I dump fuel now?” She quickly became practical.
“No,” he said, “not yet. Wait until we land. We can always get rid of the nitro compounds. I’d sooner have too much fuel than too little.”
“Right, captain—darling,” Grace retorted, “I know who’s boss.”
“You sure do,” John grinned back. Both went back to their seats and locked their belts. A little acceleration couldn’t be fought without an anchor.
John started to punch keys on the bank before him. Very gently the Tellus-243 eased forward and the bulk of the asteroid started to loom up alarmingly. Ragged and irregular in outline, it offered a provocative and dangerous view. John cut the power.
“Take over, darling,” he said, “this calls for a rocketeeer, not an amateur. You’ve got the jets, not me.”
“O.K.” Grace played with the keyboard like a virtuoso toying with a piano. The fore and after jets alternately spouted under her skilled touch. In minutes the rocket was a few hundred meters from the ’roid. Gently, ever so carefully, Grace slipped power to its bulk until it was ready to ride on the underjets. Slowly she lowered the ponderouness of the rocket to grayinsh surface, the blackness of space around the atmosphereless object unchanged.
With a light bump, the rocket hit the ground as Grace cut the jets completely. Through the port of the motionless rocket, Grace and John studied the terrain of their long-sought objective. Having landed near one end of the planetoid, they could see that it was perhaps two kilometers long by one in diameter if such terms could be used to describe the weird cigar-shape that made up the little world. The touch of the rocket had stirred up little whiffs and puffs of the vaporous dust-like soil that formed the surface.
Gravity of course, was practically non-existent and everything including the ship was almost “free.” An outside touch or blow could have hurled the Tellus-243 back into space.
“Hop into the suits, hon,” John said. “Let’s make a preliminary, but first we’ll anchor ‘Telly’. I don’t want home to run away.”
In a matter of moments, the two were into their metal-fabric suits with self-contained food and air. An explosive pistol, a heat beam, a few tools—sledge, steel rod—made up their equipment.
They stepped in and out of the airlock. They were on the asteroid!
They sank to their ankles in the powdery dust, which spurted and eddied under their metal-shod feet.
John handed Grace a metal rod with a loop on the end.
“Hold this, Grace,” he said, “I’ll give it the muscle treatment.”
“Watch my head when you swing that thing you big lug,” Grace said.
HE BROUGHT down the sledge and without much trouble the rod sank into the powdery surface. John forced it into the ground for a meter.
“That ought to hold,” he grunted as he bent down and strained to pull it loose. Then he attached a cable from the metal airlock to it. Now an accidental shove wouldn’t send Tellus-243 away from the ’roid. The space-suits were not powered and it is a nasty thing to try and reach an objective free without something to work from.
“Let’s look around John.” Grace said over the transceivers. “And let’s stick together while we do it. This makes me creepy.”
The two bulky figures floated and hovered over the airless surface of the ’roid. It was obvious from the start that they needed more magnets. They were too “free.”
John went back to the rocket and brought out a couple of more powerful permanent magnets, which he fastened to the pockets in his and Grace’s leg-sections. Now they could walk with some semblance of normality.
“Oh, John, that’s better,” Grace said, “I don’t feel as if I’m going to kick myself away from he
re—what’ll we call this place?”
“You name it,” he answered. Behind the glassite helmet Grace saw his face become sober. “Your Dad needs a monument. What’s the matter with this?”
She thought a moment. “We’ll call it Bergen’s Rock. I think he’d like that, don’t you?”
“Fine. Bergen’s Rock it is. Now let’s go. I think we both can move a lot better now. Here go the tantalum hunters!”
They set off in pace-covering strides, leaving behind them a vapor trail which rose briefly under the furious poundings of their boots and then gradually subsided, softly swirling back to undisturbedness. It had been a long time since Bergen boots had disturbed its untouched dust. Because walking was not too easy, and because distances were deceptive, John and Grace spent a long time in making a journey around the minor diameter. Everywhere they saw the same thing. Apparently the surface was uniform.
Finally though they completed it. No novelty presented itself to them. Everywhere was the dust. Before they entered the ship again, Grace suggested they bring in some of the dust and try a crude spectro on it.
Scooping up a handful, John brought it “with them into the control room. It was the work of a moment to throw it into the spectrometer flick on the electric arc, and snap a photo.
Quickly, almost breathlessly Grace developed the film strip.
She looked at it for a moment. John looked at her. She looked down at the text before her.
Her face broke into a smile. She nodded. There was sparkle to her eyes. John exhaled a deep sigh.
“This is it, all right,” she said, “Pardner, we ’uns hev struck pay dirt!”
“It’s tantalum, eh? Well, all we can do is load and load. That requires muscles. Hop back into that suit, dear. I’ll supervise.” John remarked slyly.
“Ha! You will!—listen, bossman,” Grace came back, “I’m supervising this one. You get into a suit.”
“We’ll get some sack-time first.” John said seriously. “We need it. Tomorrow”—he smiled wryly at his own use of the term—“we’ll go to work, although I think it’d be a better idea if we took a look at the long end of ‘Bergen Rock’. What say?”
“All right,” Grace agreed, “we’ll sleep now and look around this chunk of metal. But let’s load up soon, dear. I still don’t like this place for some ungodly reason. Now don’t go scientific on me—I don’t like it that’s all.”
In a short while the two had retired and silence again descended on the rock. There was complete quiet . . .
THE alarm jangled. Get up, get up, get up, it seemed to shrill.
John awakened from the deep sleep of exhaustion, his mind still full of the subtle equation he had been dreaming about. Grace awakened too, more alert, her mind toying with the equation which had occupied her mind—a face in the form of John’s.
With the usual pleasantries exchanged, John and Grace were up and around. After a six months search for a minute hunk of rock in the vast ’roid Belt, they had too much to gain to waste time in endless sleep. A lot of the fuel would have to be dumped. The tanks would have to filled with dust which assayed all of ten per cent tantalum—and then to Luna City, where John and she could resume a normal life as befitted a technician and his bride.
In short order they had breakfast. Outside the port they could see that their little world was unchanged. Their footprints were still visible and would be for eons of time after they left. No breath of air disturbed this fragile world. No men assaulted it but they. The silence of the ages would endure. In a way, John mused, Bergen’s Rock was a fitting tribute to Grace’s Dad. It would long endure.
Carrying their same equipment, supplemented by a pick and shovel, Grace and John set out for the long trip, a distance of more than six kilometers. This was no simple matter. Walking and floating was weirdly enervating especially in the confinement of the suits. But their curiosity had to be assuaged. Fortunately weight was no handicap. There was only the inertia of mass to be overcome. It still takes energy to conquer inertia.
They had not gone a hundred meters from Tellus-243 before Grace stopped John with a tug on the arm. He turned toward her.
“John,” she said in a burst of exuberance, “isn’t it wonderful! We have enough tantalum to fill us to the ears. And of course we’ll stake a claim to ‘Bergen Rock.’ I think we can get almost any company to work it for us.”
As nearly as he could, John put his arm around the bulk of Grace’s clumsy suit. He looked at the rocket and then at her.
“Dear,” he said, “I don’t care about the tantalum or the rocket. I have you. That’s enough for me—with sub-atomics.”
“Stop making love to me on a planetoid, John. You can’t kiss me, now. I’ll think about later.” Grace said.
They smiled at each other. In spite of their banter the, feeling that existed between them, accompanied by the thought of the utterly secure future that their legacy gave them, made them involuntarily more than tender to each other.
“Come on, honey, we got things to do. It was your idea to look around Bergen’s Rock. And we’ve still got a ship to lead up, remember?” John said briskly, his voice changed peculiarly by the inevitable rasp of the built-in headphones.
The two resumed their trudge through the dusty soil. It was a source of never-ending satisfaction, John thought, to see the continual flight of dust from Grace’s footsteps. If they were violent and rapid, the dust rose and hovered for a long time before it settled. This left a long snake-like trail behind them. There was enough feeble gravity to cause this.
It took them better than two hours to negotiate the length of the planetoid, before they were ready to descend into the sunless side. Perpetually presenting one face to the sun, the asteroid had eternal night and eternal day—on opposite sides.
The sunless side appeared no different than the other. It too was a comparatively plane surface with occasional ribs and hummocks visible as far as the eye could see by the little light of the stars.
Trudging along, Grace and John consumed another hour, approaching the same end of the planetoid as the ship was on, but on the opposite. Their conversation was animated because both were in good spirits, but there was little to say about the planetoid itself. Apparently it was featureless, like the countless millions of others that constitute the Asteroid Belt. From what broken planet these fragments came, man will never know, but as Bergen’s Rock proved, they often have incalculable wealth.
FOR ten minutes they had been silent, each immersed in their own thoughts, of Luna City, the Dome, of school and normal society. Grace had been more adaptable to the six months of futile prospecting than John whose mind was continually on the mathematics of involved physical problems—except when he looked at Grace. Grace had a natural bouyancy and resiliency that made even the crude hardships of rocket work pleasant. And yet nothing was subtracted from her femininity.
Abruptly, Grace halted.
Even over his phones John thought she sounded afraid, when she said softly:
“Look, John. Over there by the hummock. Isn’t that a cavern or something?” She pointed with her shovel.
It didn’t require much looking to realize it was just that.
“Why whisper, Grace?” John asked. “There’s nothing here to make it. It’s natural. You sound almost afraid. What’s the matter?”
“I am afraid. There wasn’t a thing on the other side.”
“Does that mean there’s something here? I think you’ve got the jitters, honey. Relax. We’ll take a look at it anyway.”
“No, John. Let’s not. Let’s get on on the other side as fast as we can. Let’s fill the ship and get away. Let a company explorer worry about it. Oh, John, you know I’m not a coward, but I’ve seen some funny things with Dad. I don’t want any more experiences like the one I told you about. And anyhow, Venus has people on it. This place is dead.”
John laughed. He gestured toward the opening in the hill-like bump. “Let’s take a look, just for curiosity’s sake.”
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br /> His booming laugh seemed to reassure her. She couldn’t leave him try it alone. She forced herself to smile.
“All right,” she said, “I’m game, but let’s stick together. I can’t afford to lose you.”
“Don’t think you can get rid of me so easily,” he joked. “I’m going to be around awhile.”
On the bantering note the two of them approached the opening. It was a cave-like hole about six feet in diameter and they could enter it without stooping. They paused at the entrance. John looked down.
“Nothing has gone in or come out of this place for eons,” he said. “You can see the dust is undisturbed.”
“Without air, nothing can live.” Grace said philosophically. “Forget about before. I can take it. Lead on MacDuff.”
John threw the light-beam of his hand torch on the walls as they stepped into the entrance. There was nothing unusual. The cavern apparently led downward at a gentle slope, its walls and floors composed of the same impalpable dust. It still eddied and swirled under its lack of gravity as it did on the surface.
They proceeded at a very slow pace so as to disturb a minimum amount of it. But no matter how careful they were the dust gradually increased until it was difficult to see ahead of the beams. Added to the difficulty of seeing was the discomfort of the long walk they made in the space-suits. It was hot, dirty and uncomfortable.
But they went on cautiously. John led, with Grace following closely behind periodically touching him on the bad? so as to assure contact.
They had gone on for less than two hundred meters, always moving at a gentle shop barely detectible to there. The tunnel remained unchanged in shape or size. Grace suddenly ran into John as he stopped instantly.
“Stay back,” he whispered hoarsely. “My god!”
“What is it, John?” Grace shouted.
“I don’t know,” he answered, “Come up beside me and look, but hold on to me.”