A small one, he told himself. You don’t want to damage the ship too much.
A minigrenade, hardly larger than his thumbnail. Enough explosive in it, however, to blast open an airlock hatch. Or something else.
“Hey, what’re you doing?”
Harbin whirled to see one of his crewmen coming down the passageway.
“Oh, it’s you, Captain.” The man looked suddenly embarrassed. “Sir, eh—you’re supposed to be confined to your quarters.”
“It’s all right, trooper,” Harbin said reassuringly. “Nothing to worry about. For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man is blackened…”
“Sir?” the crewman asked, puzzled. Then he saw the minigrenade in Harbin’s hand. His eyes went wide.
“Nothing,” Harbin muttered. He flicked the grenade’s fuse with his thumbnail as he spun around to place his body between the crewman and the blast. The explosion nearly tore him in half.
ASTEROID 67-046
“What do you mean, Dorn’s not available?” Humphries shouted at the blank phone screen. “Get me the officer on watch aboard the Humphries Eagle.”
“All exterior communications are inoperable at the present time,” replied the phone.
“That’s impossible!”
“All exterior communications are inoperable at the present time,” the phone repeated, unperturbed.
Humphries stared at the empty screen, then turned slowly toward Elverda Apacheta. “He’s cut us off. We’re trapped in here.”
Elverda felt the chill of cold metal clutching at her. Perhaps Dorn is a madman, she thought. Perhaps he is my death, personified.
“We’ve got to do something!” Humphries nearly shouted.
Elverda rose shakily to her feet. “There is nothing that we can do, for the moment. I am going to my quarters and take a nap. I believe that Dorn, or Harbin or whatever his identity is, will call on us when he is ready to.”
“And do what?”
“Show us the artifact,” she replied, silently adding, I hope.
Legally, the artifact and the entire asteroid belonged to Humphries Space Systems. It had been discovered by a family—husband, wife, and two sons, ages five and three—that made a living from searching out iron-nickel asteroids and selling the mining rights to the big corporations. They filed their claim to this unnamed asteroid, together with a preliminary description of its ten-kilometer-wide shape, its orbit within the asteroid belt, and a sample analysis of its surface composition.
Six hours after their original transmission reached the commodities market computer network on Earth—while a fairly spirited bidding was going on among four major corporations for the asteroid’s mineral rights—a new message arrived at the headquarters of the International Astronautical Authority, in London. The message was garbled, fragmentary, obviously made in great haste and at fever excitement. There was an artifact of some sort in a cavern deep inside the asteroid.
One of the faceless bureaucrats buried deep within the IAA’s multi-layered organization sent an immediate message to an employee of Humphries Space Systems. The bureaucrat retired hours later, richer than he had any right to expect, while Martin Humphries personally contacted the prospectors and bought the asteroid outright for enough money to end their prospecting days forever. By the time the decision-makers in the IAA realized that an alien artifact had been discovered they were faced with a fait accompli: the artifact, and the asteroid in which it resided, were the personal property of the richest man in the solar system.
Martin Humphries was something of an egomaniac. But he was no fool. Graciously he allowed the IAA to organize a team of scientists who would inspect this first specimen of alien intelligence. Even more graciously, Humphries offered to ferry the scientific investigators all the long way to the asteroid at his own expense. He made only one demand, and the IAA could hardly refuse him. He insisted that he see this artifact himself before the scientists were allowed to view it.
And he brought along the solar system’s most honored and famous artist To appraise the artifact’s worth as an art object, he claimed. To determine how much he could deduct from his corporate taxes by donating the thing to the IAA, said his enemies. But over the days of their voyage to the asteroid, Elverda came to the conclusion that buried deep beneath his ruthless business persona was an eager little boy who was tremendously excited at having found a new toy. A toy he intended to possess for himself. An art object, created by alien hands.