The Rock Rats

because of him. It took an effort of will for her to control her temper.

As calmly as she could manage, Pancho said, “You were pretty damn generous back there.”

“A gesture to true love,” he replied, without slowing his pace.

“Yeah. Sure.” Pancho easily matched his stride.

“What else?”

“For one thing, that spacecraft ain’t yours to give away. It belongs to—”

“Belonged,” Humphries snapped. “Past tense. We wrote it off the books.”

“Wrote it off? When? How in hell can you do that?”

Humphries actually laughed. “You see, Ms. Director? There are a few tricks to being on the board that a greasemonkey like you doesn’t know about.”

“I guess,” Pancho admitted. “But I’ll learn ’em.”

“Of course you will.”

Pancho was newly elected to the board of directors of Astro Manufacturing, over Humphries’s stern opposition. It had been Dan Randolph’s dying wish.

“So we’ve written off Starpower 1 after just one flight?”

“It’s already obsolescent,” said Humphries. “The ship proved the fusion drive technology. Now we can build better spacecraft, specifically designed for asteroid mining.”

“And you get to play Santy Claus for Amanda and Lars.”

Humphries shrugged.

The two of them walked along the nearly-empty tunnel until they came to the power stairs leading downward.

Pancho grabbed Humphries by the shoulder, stopping him at the top of the moving stairs. “I know what you’re up to,” she said.

“Do you?”

“You figger Lars’ll go battin’ out to the Belt and leave Mandy here in Selene.”

“I suppose that’s a possibility,” Humphries said, shaking free of her grip.

“Then you can move in on her.”

Humphries started to reply, then hesitated. His face grew serious. At last he said, “Pancho, has it ever occurred to you that I really love Amanda? I do, you know.”

Pancho knew Humphries’s reputation as a womanizer. She had seen plenty of evidence of it.

“You might tell yourself that you love her, Humpy, but that’s just because she’s the only woman between here and Lubbock that won’t flop inta bed with you.”

He smiled coldly. “Does that mean that you would?”

“In your dreams!”

Humphries laughed and started down the stairs. For a few moments Pancho watched him dwindling away, then she turned and headed back toward the Pelican Bar.

As Humphries rode down to Selene’s bottommost level, he thought, Fuchs is an academic, the kind who’s never had two pennies in his hands at the same time. Let him go out to the Belt. Let him see how much money he can make, and all the things that money can buy. And while he’s doing it, I’ll be here at Amanda’s side.

By the time he reached his palatial home, Humphries was almost happy.

DATA BANK: THE ASTEROID BELT

Millions of chunks of rock and metal float silently, endlessly, through the deep emptiness of interplanetary space. The largest of them, Ceres, is barely a thousand kilometers wide. Most of them are much smaller, ranging from irregular chunks a few kilometers long down to the size of pebbles. They contain more metals and minerals, more natural resources, than the entire Earth can provide.

They are the bonanza, the El Dorado, the Comstock Lode, the gold and silver and iron and everything-else mines of the twenty-first century. There are hundreds of millions of billions of tons of high grade ores in the asteroids. They hold enough real wealth to make each man, woman, and child of the entire human race into a millionaire. And then some.

The first asteroid was discovered shortly after midnight on January 1, 1801, by a Sicilian monk who happened to be an astronomer. While others were celebrating the new century, Giuseppi Piazzi was naming the tiny point of light he saw in his telescope Ceres after the pagan goddess of Sicily. Perhaps an unusual attitude for a pious monk, but Piazzi was a Sicilian, after all.

By the advent of the twenty-first century, more than fifteen thousand asteroids had been discovered by earthbound astronomers: As the human race began to expand its habitat to the Moon and to explore Mars, millions more were found.

Technically, they are planetoids, little planets, chunks of rock and metal floating in the dark void of space, leftovers from the creation of the Sun and planets some four and a half billion years ago. Piazzi correctly referred to them as planetoids, but in 1802 William Herschel (who had earlier discovered the giant planet Uranus) called them asteroids, because in the telescope their pinpoints of light looked like stars rather than the disks of planets. Piazzi was correct, but Herschel was far more famous and influential. We call them asteroids to this day.

Several hundred of the asteroids are in orbits that near the Earth, but most of them by far circle around the Sun in a broad swath in deep space between the orbits of Mars and giant Jupiter. This Asteroid Belt is centered more than six hundred million kilometers from Earth, four times farther from the Sun than our homeworld.

Although this region is called the Asteroid Belt, the asteroids are not strewn so thickly that they represent a hazard to space navigation. Far from it. The so-called Belt is a region of vast emptiness, dark and lonely and very far from human civilization.

Until the invention of the Duncan fusion drive the Asteroid Belt was too far from the Earth/Moon system to be of economic value. Once fusion propulsion became practical, however, the Belt became the region where prospectors and miners could make fortunes for themselves, or die in the effort.

Many of them died. More than a few were killed.

CHAPTER 1

THREE YEARS LATER

I said it would be simple,” Lars Fuchs repeated. “I did not say it would be easy.”

George Ambrose—Big George to everyone who knew him—scratched absently at his thick red beard as he gazed thoughtfully out through the window of Starpower 1’s bridge toward the immense looming dark bulk of the asteroid Ceres. “I di’n’t come out here to get involved in daft schemes, Lars,” he said. His voice was surprisingly high and sweet for such a shaggy mastodon of a man.

For a long moment the only sound in the compartment was the eternal hum of electrical equipment. Then Fuchs pushed between the two pilots’ seats to drift toward Big George. Stopping himself with a touch of his hand against the metal overhead, he said in an urgent whisper, “We can do it. Given time and resources.”

“It’s fookin’ insane,” George muttered. But he kept staring out at the asteroid’s rock-strewn, pockmarked surface.

They made an odd pair: the big, bulky Aussie with his shaggy brick-red mane and beard, hovering weightlessly beside the dark, intense, thickset Fuchs. Three years in the Belt had changed Fuchs somewhat: he was still burly, barrel-chested, but he had let his chestnut brown hair grow almost to his collar, and the earring he wore was now a polished chip of asteroidal copper. A slim bracelet of copper circled his left wrist. Yet in their individual