Gold in the Sky by Alan Edward Nourse (short novels to read .TXT) 📖

could break their power once and for all ... but until we know what Roger Hunter found, we're helpless. They'll take you three to court, and I won't be able to stop them. And if you lose that case, it may mean the end of U.N. authority on Mars."

"Then there's just one thing to do," Johnny Coombs said. "We've got to find Roger Hunter's bonanza."

It was almost midnight when they left the Major's office, a gloomy trio, walking silently up the ramp to the Main Concourse, heading toward the living quarters.

They had been talking with the Major for hours, going over every facet of the story, wracking their brains for the answer ... but the answer had not come.

Roger Hunter had found something, and hidden it so well that three groups of searchers had failed to discover it. After seeing the gun, the Major was convinced that there had indeed been a discovery made. But whatever that discovery had been, it was gone as if it had never existed ... as if by some sort of magic it had been turned invisible, or conjured away to another part of the Solar System.

Finally, they had given up, at least for the moment. "It has to be there," the Major had said wearily. "It hasn't vanished, or miraculously ceased to exist. We know he was working on one claim, one asteroid. There were no other asteroids in the region ... and even the ones within suicide radius have been searched."

"It's there, all right," Tom said. "We're missing something, that's all."

"But what? Asteroids have stable orbits. Nobody can just make one disappear...."

They had called it a night, finally.

Once home they found more bad news waiting. There were two messages on the recordomat. The first was an official summons to appear before the United Nations Board of Investigations at 9:00 the following morning to answer "certain charges placed against the above named persons by the Governing Board of Jupiter Equilateral Mining Industries, and by one Merrill Tawney, plaintiff, representing said Governing Board." They listened to the plastic record twice. Then Greg tossed it down the waste chute.

The other message was addressed to Greg, from the Commanding Officer of Project Star-Jump. The message was very polite and regretful; it was also very firm. The pressure of the work there, in his absence, made it necessary for the Project to suspend Greg on an indefinite leave of absence. Application for reinstatement could be made at a later date, but acceptance could not be guaranteed....

"Well, I might have expected it," Greg said, "after what the Major told us. The money for Star-Jump must have been coming from somewhere, and now we know where. The company probably figures to lay claim on any star-drive that's ever developed." He dropped the notice down the chute, and laughed. "I guess I really asked for it."

"You mean I pushed you into it," Tom said bitterly. "If I'd kept my big mouth shut at the very start of this thing, you'd have gone back to the Project and that would have been the end of it...."

Greg looked at him. "You big bum, do you think I really care?" He grinned. "Don't feel too guilty, Twin. We've been back to back on this one."

He pulled off his shirt and walked into the shower room. Johnny Coombs was already stretched out on the sofa, snoring softly.

Quite suddenly the room seemed hot and stuffy, oppressive. He couldn't make his thoughts come straight. There had been too much thinking, too much speculation. Tom stood up and slipped on his jacket.

He had to walk, to move about, to try to think. He slipped open the door, and started for the ramp leading to the Main Concourse.

There was an answer, somewhere.

He walked on along the steel walkways, trying to clear his mind of the doubts and questions that were plaguing him. At first he just wandered, but presently he realized that he had a destination in mind.

He went up a ramp and across the lobby of the United Nations Administration Building. He took a spur off the main corridor, and came to a doorway with a small circular staircase beyond it. At the bottom of the stairs he opened a steel door and stepped into the Map Room.

It was a small darkened amphitheater, with a curving row of seats along one wall. On either side were film viewers and micro-readers. And curving around on the far wall, like a huge parabolic mirror, was the Map.

Tom had been here many times before, and always he gasped in wonder when he saw the awesome beauty of the thing. Stepping into the Map Room was like stepping into the center of a huge cathedral. Here was the glowing, moving panorama of the Solar System spread out before him in a breath-taking three-dimensional image. Standing here before the Map it seemed as if he had suddenly become enormous and omnipotent, hanging suspended in the blackness of space and staring down at the Solar System from a vantage point a million miles away.

Once, Dad had told him, there had been a great statue in the harbor of Old New York which had been a symbol of freedom for strangers coming to that city from across the sea, and a welcome for countrymen returning home. And someday, he knew, this view of the Solar System would be waiting to greet Earthmen making their way home from distant stars. The Map was only an image, a gift from the United Nations to the colonists on Mars, but it reproduced the Solar System in the minutest detail that astronomers could make possible.

In the center, glowing like a thing alive, was the Sun, the hub of the magnificent wheel. Around it, moving constantly in their orbits, were the planets, bright points of light on the velvet blackness of the screen. Each orbit was computed and held on the screen by the great computer in the vault below.

But there was more on the Map than the Sun and the planets, with their satellites. Tiny green lights marked the Earth-Mars and the Earth-Venus orbit-ships, moving slowly across the screen. Beyond Mars, a myriad of tiny lights projected on the screen, the asteroids. Without the magnifier Tom could identify the larger ones ... Ceres, on the opposite side of the Sun from Mars now as it moved in its orbit; smaller Juno, and Pallas, and Vesta....

For each asteroid which had been identified, and its orbit plotted, there was a pinpoint of light on the screen. For all its beauty, the Map had a very useful purpose ... the registry and identification of asteroid claims among the miners of Mars. Each asteroid registered as a claim showed up as a red pinpoint; unclaimed asteroids were white. But even with the advances of modern astronomy only a small percentage of the existing asteroids were on the map, for the vast majority had never been plotted.

Tom moved up to the Map and activated the magnifier. Carefully he focussed down on the section of the Asteroid Belt they had visited so recently. Dozens of pinpoints sprang to view, both red and white, and beneath each red light the claim-number neatly registered. Tom peered at the section, searching until he found the number of Roger Hunter's last claim.

It was quite by itself, not a part of an asteroid cluster. He stepped up the magnification, peered at it closely. There were a dozen other pinpoints, all unclaimed, within a ten-thousand-mile radius....

But near it, nothing....

No hiding place.

And then, suddenly, he knew the answer. He stared at the Map, his heart pounding in his throat. He cut the magnification, scanning a wide area. Then he widened the lens still further, and checked the coordinates at the bottom of the viewer.

He knew that he was right. He had to be right. But this was no wild dream, this was something that could be proved beyond any question of error.

Across the room he picked up the phone to Map Control. It buzzed interminably; then a sleepy voice answered.

"The Map," Tom managed to say. "It's recorded on time-lapse film, isn't it?"

"'Course it is," the sleepy voice said. "Observatory has to have the record. One frame every hour...."

"I've got to see some of the old film," Tom said.

"Now? It's three in the morning."

"I don't need the film itself, just project it for me. There's a reader here."

He gave the man the dates he wanted, Mars time. The man broke the contact, grumbling, but moments later one of the film-viewers sprang to life. The Map coordinates showed at the bottom of the screen.

Tom stared at the filmed image ... the image of a segment of the Asteroid Belt the day before Roger Hunter had died.

It was there. When he had looked at the Map, he had seen a single red pinpoint of light, Roger Hunter's asteroid, with nothing in the heavens anywhere near it.

But on the film image taken weeks before there were two points of light. One was red, with Roger Hunter's claim number beneath it. The other was white, so close to the first that even at full magnification it was barely distinguishable.

But it was there.

Tom's hands were trembling with excitement; he nearly dropped the phone receiver as he punched the buttons to ring the apartment. Greg's face appeared on the screen, puffy with sleep. "What's that? Thought you were in bed...."

"You've got to get down here," Tom said.

Greg blinked, waking up. "What's the matter? Where are you?"

"In the Map Room. Wake Johnny up and get down here. And try to get hold of the Major."

"You've found something," Greg said, excited now.

"I've found something," Tom said. "I've found where Dad hid his strike ... and I know how we can find it! We've got the answer, Greg."

14. The Missing Asteroid

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