Fuchs, once a planetary geochemist, used Nautilus’s electron guns to charge up his craft’s skin, then covered the spacecraft with pebbles and dust from a loosely aggregated chondritic asteroid. A radar probe of his spacecraft gave a return that looked like the pebbly surface of a small “beanbag” type of chondritic asteroid. Moreover, the dust and pebbles would scatter a laser beam and absorb its energy even better than the copper shields he had affixed earlier to Nautilus’s hull.
If he let his ship drift in a Sun-centered orbit, Fuchs felt confident that Nautilus would look to a casual probe just like a small, dumbbell-shaped asteroid. He felt less confident, though, about responding to Big George’s latest message.
Pancho wants to meet me face to face, he mused. Why? What’s so important that she’s coming out here into the Belt to find me?
“I don’t like it,” he muttered to himself.
Sanja, on duty in the pilot’s chair, the son of a former Mongol tribesman, turned his shaved head toward Fuchs and asked, “Sir?”
“Nothing, Sanja,” said Fuchs. “Nothing. Once you’ve reached orbital velocity, cut power and let the ship coast.”
MATHILDA II
“We have arrived at the designated position,” said the pilot.
Pancho was sitting in the copilot’s chair of Mathilda II’s snug, efficiently laid-out bridge. The pilot, seated on her left, was a youngster she had met when she’d come aboard for this flight. He looked like a kid to Pancho, blond and soft-cheeked and scrubbed pink, but he ran the vessel well enough. Good square shoulders, she noticed. Pancho’s piloting skills were rusty, she knew, but inwardly she longed for a chance to fly this bucket, just for a little larking around. She couldn’t ask, of course. The chairman of the board of Astro Corporation isn’t supposed to be a fly-girl. One of the epithets that Humphries often threw at her was “greasemonkey.” Pancho had no intention of giving the Humper any ammunition.
Still, she thought as she watched the young man play his fingers over the control panel’s keyboard, it’d be fun to goose up the engines and see what this flying machine can do.
“This is the spot, is it?” George asked. Standing behind the pilot’s seat, he bent forward slightly to peer out the forward window. Nothing visible except the desert of dark empty space spangled with solemn, unblinking stars.
The pilot’s name was Oskar Johannson. Despite his youthful appearance, he was stiffly formal with George and Pancho.
“Yes, sir,” he said, pointing to the control panel’s main display screen. “These are the coordinates, in yellow, and this is our position, the blinking red cursor. As you can see, sir, they overlap. We are at the proper position.”
George nodded. Pancho admired Johannson’s strong jaw and gleaming white teeth. Wish he’d smile, she thought. I wonder what it’d take to ruffle his composure a bit.
“No ships in sight?”
“Nothing in view, sir, except a small asteroid about five hundred klicks off, in about the four o’clock position.” He tapped the keyboard once. “Five hundred seventeen kilometers, one hundred twenty-two degrees relative to our position, eight degrees elevation.”
Pancho grinned at the kid’s earnestness. “I thought this position was clear of rocks for at least a thousand klicks all round,” she said.
George scratched at his beard, answering, “Rocks get kicked into new orbits all the time, Pancho. Gravity resonances from Jupiter and the other planets are always scrambling the smaller chunks.”
Resisting the urge to run the display herself, she said, “An unnumbered rock. Might’s well claim it.”
“To do that one of us would hafta suit up and go out there and plant a marker on it.”
“Why not?” Pancho said, pushing herself up from her seat. “I’ll do it. Claim it for Astro.”
“Gimme a closer look at it, Oskar,” George said.
The radar image showed a dumbbell-shaped chondritic asteroid, slowly tumbling end over end.
“A peanut,” George said. “Just like what’s-‘is-name.”
“Ida,” said Johannson. “Asteroid number 243.”
“Showin’ off your college education, Ossie?” asked George.
Johannson actually blushed.
Pushing past George, Pancho said, “I’ll go out and claim it. Give me something to do while we’re waiting for Lars to show up.”