her whole life, could not fully understand it. He should be big enough, she thought deep
down and a little disappointedly, not to boggle so at such an unimportant thing as money.
But that attitude was innate and so much a part of Deston’s very make=up that he could
not have changed it had he tried, and he would not try. Almost everyone who knew them
had him labelled as a fortune-hunter, and that label irked him to the core. It would
continue to irk him as long as it stuck, and the only way he could unstick it was to do
something-or make money enough -to make him as important as she was. A mountain of
uranium-even a small mountain-would do it two ways. It would make him a public
benefactor and a multimillionaire. So-by the living God!-he would find uranium before he
went back to civilization.
Adams and his scientists and engineers had developed an ultra-long-range detector for
zeta fields, and they had not been able to find any other hazards to subspace flight.
Hence they had been constantly stepping up their vessel’s speed. Originally a very fast
ship, she was now covering in hours distances that had formerly required days.
On and on, then, faster and faster, deeper and deeper into the unexplored immensities of
deep space the mighty flyer bored; and Deston finally found his uranium. They landed
upon a mountainous, barren continent of a lifeless world. They put on radiation armor and
labored busily for nineteen hours.
Then Deston told the captain, “Line out for Newmars, please, and don’t drag your feet.”
And that night, in the Destons’ cabin: “Why so glum, chum?” Barbara asked. “That’s the
best thing for civilization that ever was and the biggest bonanza there ever was. I’d think
you’d be shrieking with joy-I’ve almost been-but you look as though you’d just lost your
pet hound.”
Deston shrugged off his black mood and smiled. “The trouble is, petsy, its too big. Too
damned big altogether. And look at our planet Barbizon. Considering the size of the
deposits and what and where the planet is, nobody except Galactic Metals could handle
the project the way it should be handled.”
“Well, would that be bad? To sell it or lease it to them?”
“Not bad, honey; impossible. All those big outfits are murder in the first degree. Before I
could get anywhere with them-if they find out I found it, even-GalMet would own not only
Barbizon, but my shirt and pants, too.”
Barbara laughed gleefully. “How well I know that routine! Do you think they don’t do it in
oil, too? But WarnOil’s legal eagles know all about skulduggery and monkey business
and fine print-none better. So here’s what let’s do. File by proxy … and maybe you and I
bad better incorporate ourselves. Just us two; Deston and Deston, say. Develop it by
another proxy, making darn sure that they don’t find any uranium at all and nothing else
that’s worth more than three or four dollars a ton. .
“Huh? Why not?”
“Because GalMet’s spy system, darling, is very good indeed.”
“All right, but we’ve still got to make the approach …
dammit, I’d give it to GalMet for nothing if it’d give us a half hour face-to-face with Upton
Maynard, to show him what you and I together can do.”
Not free. Ever. Just a bargain that he can’t possibly resist. You figure out what that
would be and I’ll arrange the face-to-face with His High Mightiness Maynard.” “Oh? Could
be, at that, since you’re a Big Time Operator yourself. You could go through the massed
underlings like a snow-plow, hurling ’em kicking, far and wide.” “Oh, no, I won’t go
through channels at all with a thing as big as this is. Shock treatment-I’ll hit ’em high and
hard.”
“Fine, gal-fine! So I’ll write to Here; tell him he can start getting organized. He’ll be tickled
to death-he doesn’t like flying a desk any better than I do.”
“Write? Call him up, right now.”
“I’ll do that, at that. I’m not used yet to not caring whether a call is across the street or
across half of space.” “And I want to talk to Bun, anyway.”
The call was put through and Barbara talked to Bernice for some fifteen minutes. Then
Deston took over, finding that Jones was anything but in love with his desk job. When
Deston concluded, “. . . family quarters aboard. Full authority and full responsibility of
station. Full captain’s pay and rank plus a nice bonus in stock,” Captain Theodore Jones
was fairly drooling.
Chapter 4
ORGANIZATION OF THE LITTLE GEM
In comparison with silicon or aluminum, which together make up almost thirty six percent
of the Earth’s crust, copper is a very scarce metal indeed, amounting to only a very small
fraction of one percent. Yet it is one of the oldest-worked and most widely useful of all
metals, having been in continuous demand for well over six thousand Tellurian years.
Yet of all the skills of man, that of mining cuprous ores had perhaps advanced the least.
There had been some progress, of course. Miners of old could not go down very deep or
go in very far; there was too much water and not enough air. The steam engine helped; it
removed water and supplied air. Electricity helped still more. Tools also had improved;
instead of wooden sticks and animal-fat candles there was a complex gadgetry of air
drills and electric saws and explosives, and there was plenty of light.
Basically, however, since automation could not be economically applied to tiny, twisting,
erratic veins of ore, the situation remained unchanged. Men still crawled and wriggled to
where the copper was. Brawny men, by sheer power of muscle, still jackassed the heavy
stuff out to where the automatics could get hold of it.
And men still died, in various horrible fashions and in callously recorded numbers, in the
mines that were trying to satisfy the insatiable demand for the red metal that is one of
the prime bases upon which the technology of all civilization rests.
And the United Copper Miners, under the leadership of its president, Burley Hoadman,
refused to tolerate any advancement whatever in automation. Also, UCM was
approaching, and rapidly, its goal-the complete unionization of every copper mine of the
Western Hemisphere of Earth.
A few months before the events recorded in the preceding chapter, then, in the Little
Gem, a comparatively small copper mine in Colorado, a mile and a half down and some
six miles in, Top Miner Grant Purves half-lay – half-crouched behind a
two-hundred-fifty-pound Sullivan Slugger air-drill operating under one hundred seventy
five pounds per square inch of compressed air. He was a big man, and immensely
strong. He was six feet two inches tall; most of his two hundred thirty five pounds was
hard meat, gristle, and bone. His leather-padded right knee was jammed against the wall
of his tiny workspace; the hobnail-studded sole of his left boot was jammed even more
solidly into a foot-hole cut into the hard rock of the floor. With his right shoulder and both
huge hands he was holding the Sullivan to its work-the work of driving an
inch-and-a-quarter steel into the face. And the monstrous, bellowing, thundering,
shrieking Slugger, even though mounted upon a short and very heavy bar, sent visible
tremors through the big man’s whole body, clear down to his solidly-anchored feet.
In his shockingly cramped quarters Purves changed steel; shifted the position of his
Sullivan’s mounting bar; cut new foot-holes; kept on at his man-killing task until the set of
powder-holes was in. Then he dismounted the heavy drill and, wriggling backwards,
lugged it and its appurtenances out into the main stope to make room for the
powderman.
As he straightened up, half paralyzed by the position and the strain of his recent labors,
another big man lunged roughly against him.
“Wot tha hell-sock me, willya?” the man roared, and swung his steel-backed timberman’s
glove against Purves’ mouth and jaw.
Purves went down.
“Watcha tryin’ to pull off, Frank?” the shift-boss yelled, rushing up and jerking his thumb
toward the rise. “You know better’n that-fightin’ underground. You’re fired–go on top an’
get yer time.”
“Wha’d’ya mean, fired?” Frank growled. “He started it, the crumb. He slugged me first.”
“You’re a goddam liar,” the powderman spoke up, setting his soft-leather bag of low
explosive carefully down against the foot of the hanging wall. “I seen it. Purve didn’t do
nothin’. Not a goddam thing. Besides, he wasn’t in no shape to. He didn’t lift a finger. You
socked him fer nothin’.”
“Oh, yeah?” Frank sneered. “Stone blind all of a sudden, I guess? I leave it to tha rest of
’em= waving a massive arm at the two mockers and the electrician, now standing idly by,
“-if he didn’t sock me first. They all seen it.”
All three nodded, and the electrician said, positively, “Sure Purve socked him first. We all