“I will, I will.” Ammon mastered his emotions. “It’s a lost treasure,
that’s what it is. Listen. Five hundred years ago, the Polesotechnic
League had a base here. You’ve heard?”
Flandry, who had similarly tamed his excitement into alertness, nodded
wistfully. He would much rather have lived in the high and spacious days
of the trader princes, when no distance and no deed looked too vast for
man, than in this twilight of empire. “It got clobbered during the
Troubles, didn’t it?” he said.
“Right. However, a few underground installations survived. Not in good
shape. Not safe to go into. Tunnels apt to collapse, full of
nightskulks–you know. Now I thought those vaults might be useful
for–Never mind. I had them explored. A microfile turned up. It gave the
coordinates and galactic orbit of a planetary system out in what’s now
no-man’s-land. Martian Minerals, Inc., was mining one of the worlds.
They weren’t publicizing the fact; you remember what rivalries got to be
like toward the end of the League era. That’s the main reason why
knowledge of this system was completely lost. But it was quite a place
for a while.”
“Rich in heavy metals,” Flandry pounced.
Ammon blinked. “How did you guess?”
“Nothing else would be worth exploiting by a minerals outfit, at such a
distance from the centers of civilization. Yes.” A renewed eagerness
surged in Flandry. “A young, metal-rich star, corresponding planets, on
one of them a robotic base … It was robotic, wasn’t it? High-grade
central computer–consciousness grade, I’ll bet–directing machines that
prospected, mined, refined, stored, and loaded the ships when they
called. Probably manufactured spare parts for them too, and did needful
work on them, besides expanding its own facilities. You see, I don’t
suppose a world with that concentration of violently poisonous elements
in its ground would attract people to a manned base. Easier and cheaper
in the long run to automate everything.”
“Right. Right.” Ammon’s chins quivered with his nodding. “A moon,
actually, of a planet bigger than Jupiter. More massive, that is–a
thousand Terras–though the file does say its gravity condensed it to a
smaller size. The moon itself, Wayland they named it, Wayland has about
three percent the mass of Terra but half the surface pull. It’s that
dense.”
Mean specific gravity circa eleven, Flandry calculated. Uranium,
thorium–probably still some neptunium and plutonium–and osmium,
platinum, rare metals simply waiting to be scooped out–my God! My
greed!
From behind his hard-held coolness he drawled: “A million doesn’t seem
extravagant pay for opening that kind of opportunity to you.”
“It’s plenty for a look-see,” Ammon said. “That’s all I want of you, a
report on Wayland. I’m taking the risks, not you.
“First off, I’m risking you’ll go report our talk, trying for a reward
and a quick transfer elsewhere before my people can get to you. Well, I
don’t think that’s a very big risk. You’re too ambitious and too used to
twisting regulations around to suit yourself. And too smart, I hope. If
you think for a minute, you’ll see how I could fix it to get any
possible charges against me dropped. But maybe I’ve misjudged you.
“Then, supposing you play true, the place could turn out to be no good.
I’ll be short a million, for nothing. More than a million, actually.
There’s the hire of a partner; reliable ones don’t come cheap. And
supplies for him; and transporting them to a spot where you can pick
them and him up after you’ve taken off; and–oh, no, boy, you consider
yourself lucky I’m this generous.”
“Wait a minute,” Flandry said. “A partner?”
Ammon leered. “You don’t think I’d let you travel alone, do you? Really,
dear boy! What’d prevent your telling me Wayland’s worthless when it
isn’t, coming back later as a civilian, and ‘happening’ on it?”
“I presume if I give you a negative report, you’ll … request … I
submit to a narcoquiz. And if I didn’t report to you at all, you’d know
I had found a prize.”
“Well, what if you told them you’d gotten off course somehow and found
the system by accident? You could hope for a reward. I can tell you
you’d be disappointed. Why should the bureaucrats care, when there’d be