“Lars,” he said patiently, “can’t you give me some idea of this lump’s mass?”
Fuchs spread his hands. In the spacesuit, he looked like a bubble-topped fireplug with arms.
“A back-of-the-envelope guesstimate?” Dan coaxed.
“Oh… considering its dimensions… nickel-iron asteroids are typically no more than ten percent nickel… it must be somewhere in the neighborhood of seven or eight billion tons of iron and eighty million tons or so of nickel.”
Dan’s eyes went wide. “That’s five or six times the world’s steel production in its best year! Before the floods and all!”
“There are impurities, of course,” Fuchs warned. “Platinum, gold and silver, other heavy metals.”
“Impurities, right,” Dan agreed, cackling. His mind was spinning. One asteroid is enough to supply the world’s steel industry for years and years! And there are thousands of these chunks out here! It’s all true! Everything I hoped for, all those wild promises I made—they’re all going to come true!
Fuchs seemed oblivious to it all. “I want to look at those striations,” he said, turning toward the far end of the asteroid. His effort made him rise off the surface and Dan had to yank him down again.
“Take a sample here, first,” Dan said. “Then we can claim it.”
The light was so dim that Dan could see Fuchs’s head outlined inside his bubble helmet. He nodded and slowly, very slowly, got down into a kneeling position. Then he pulled a rock hammer from his equipment belt and chipped off a bit of the asteroid. The effort raised more dust and lifted him off the surface again, but this time he clawed at the ground with one gloved hand and pulled himself back down.
“Anchor yourself, Lars,” Dan said. “Hammer a piton in and tether it to your belt.”
“Yes, of course,” Fuchs answered, fumbling with the equipment clipped to his waist.
Dan said, “Record this, Amanda, and mark the time. Starpower Limited has begun taking samples of asteroid 41-014 Fuchs. Under the terms of the International Astronautical Authority protocol of 2021, Star-power Limited, claims exclusive use of the resources of this asteroid.”
“I’ve got it,” Amanda’s voice replied. “Your statement is being beamed to IAA headquarters on Earth.”
“Good,” Dan said, satisfied. He recalled from his school days the story of the Spanish explorer Balboa first sighting the Pacific Ocean. From what he remembered of the tale, Balboa waded out into the surf and claimed the whole bloody ocean and all the lands bordering on it for Spain. They thought big in those days, Dan said to himself. No pissant IAA to worry about.
Fuchs got the knack of shuffling along the surface of the asteroid, and started chipping out samples and making stereo videos. Dan worried about the dust they were kicking up. It could get into the joints of our suits, he thought. Damned stuff just hangs there; must take a year for it to settle back again.
He saw a bulge off to his right, like a small knoll or a rounded hill. That must be the tail end of this rock, Dan told himself. Looking back at Fuchs, he saw that the scientist had finally anchored himself to the ground and was busily chipping away, raising lingering clouds of dust.
“I’m going to go up to that ridge,” he told Fuchs, pointing, “and see what’s on the other side.”
“Very well,” said Fuchs, still bent over his sampling.
Dan shuffled carefully along, worrying about the dust. On the Moon, dust raised from the ground was electrostatically charged; it clung stubbornly to the suits and helmet visors. Probably the same thing here.
He started up the slight rise. Something didn’t feel right. Suddenly his boots slid out from under him and he tumbled, in dreamlike slow motion, face forward. His fall was so gentle that he could put out his hands and stop himself, but he bounced off the dusty ground and found himself floating up the rise like a hot-air balloon gliding up the side of a mountain.
Dan’s old astronaut training took over his reflexes. In his mind he saw clearly what was happening. The gravity on this double-damned rock is so low that I’m floating off it! He saw the bulbous end of the asteroid sliding slowly beneath him and, beyond it, the star-strewn infinity of space.