“We could go to Stavenger and ask him to take care of you.”
She shook her head. “Don’t put Doug in the middle of this. Besides, Humphries probably has his own people planted in Selene’s staff.”
“H’mm, yeah, maybe,” George said as they reached the escalator. “Inside Astro, too, for that matter.”
Suddenly frightened at the possibilities, Cardenas blurted, “Where can I go?”
George smiled. “I got the perfect hideout for ya. Long as you don’t mind sharin’ it with a corpsicle, that is.”
BONANZA
“It’s a beauty,” Dan breathed, staring at the image on the control panel’s radar screen.
“Purty ugly-lookin’ beauty,” Pancho countered. The radar image showed an elongated irregular lump of an asteroid, one end rounded and pitted, the other dented by what looked like the imprint of a giant mailed fist. “It looks rather like a potato,” said Amanda, “don’t you think?”
“An iron potato,” Dan said.
Fuchs came through the hatch, and suddenly the bridge felt crowded to Dan. Lars isn’t tall, he said to himself, but he fills up a room. “That is it?” Fuchs asked, his eyes riveted to the screen.
“That’s it,” Pancho said, over her shoulder. She tapped at the keyboard on her left and a set of alphanumerics sprang up on the small screen above it. “Fourteenth asteroid discovered this year.”
Amanda said, “Then its official name will be 41-014 Fuchs.”
“How’s it feel to have your name on an asteroid, Lars?” Pancho asked. “Very fine,” Fuchs said.
“You’re the first person to have his name attached to a newly-discovered asteroid in years,” Amanda said. She seemed almost aglow, to Dan.
“Most of the new rocks have been found by the impact searchers,” Pancho said. “Those li’l bitty probes don’t get their names into the record.”
“Asteroid 41-014 Fuchs,” Amanda breathed.
He smiled and shrugged—squirmed, almost, as if embarrassed by her enthusiasm.
“The official name’s one thing,” Dan said. “I’m calling her Bonanza.”
“Her?” Fuchs asked.
“Asteroids are feminine?” Pancho challenged.
Dan held his ground. “Hey, we speak of Mother Earth, don’t we? And they call Venus our sister planet, don’t they?”
“What about Mars?” Pancho retorted.
“Or Jupiter,” said Amanda.
Pointing to the lump imaged on the radar screen, Dan insisted, “Bonanza’s going to make us all rich. And very happy. She and her sisters are going to save the world. She’s a female.”
“Sure she’s female,” Pancho said laconically. “You want to dig into her, don’t you?”
Fuchs sputtered and Amanda said, “Pancho, really!”
Dan put on an innocent air. “What a dirty mind you have, Pancho. I admire that in a woman.”
Within three hours they were close enough to Bonanza to see it for themselves: a dark, deformed shape glinting sullenly in the wan light of the distant Sun. The asteroid blotted out the stars as it tumbled slowly end over end in the cold empty silence of space.
“… eighteen hundred and forty-four meters along its long axis,” Amanda was reading out the radar measurements. “Seven hundred and sixty-two meters at its maximum width.”
“Nearly two kilometers long,” Dan mused. He hadn’t left the bridge all during their approach to the metallic asteroid.
“Killing residual thrust,” Pancho said, her attention focused on the control displays.
“Throttling down to zero,” Amanda confirmed.
The asteroid slid out of view as the pilots established a parking orbit around it. Dan felt what little weight remaining dwindle away to nothing. He floated up off the deck, stopped himself with a hand against the overhead.
He felt Fuchs come through the hatch behind him.
“Lars, we’re going to be in zero g for a while,” Dan said.
“I know. I think I’m getting accustomed to it.”
“Good. Just don’t make any sudden head movements and you’ll be fine.”
“Yes. Thank—mein gott! There it is!”
The dark lopsided bulk of Bonanza rose in front of the bridge windows like some pitted, pockmarked monster, huge, overawing, menacing. Despite himself, Dan felt a wave of unease surge through him. It’s like confronting an ogre, he thought, a giant beast from a fairy tale.
“Look at those striations!” Fuchs said, his voice vibrant with excitement. “This must have been broken off from a much larger body, perhaps a planetesimal from the early age of the solar system! We’ve got to get outside and take samples, drill cores!”