Leaning over the little table, golden lights playing in her reddish hair, Lilith was listening as intently as if those queer asteroids were somehow as supremely important to her as they had become to me.
“How many are there?”
“That’s part of the puzzle,” I told her.
“Even the number is anomalous.
The Legion survey ship that made the first chart found five iron asteroids and three snowballs like this one.
When the miners got here, four years later, they found only two snowballs, but six iron asteroids.”
“So the survey team had made a mistake?”
“Not likely.
The miners had simply found the anomaly.
They didn’t stay to watch it.
The iron alloys were too tough for their drills —and then something happened to a loaded ore barge.”
Giles Habibula started.
“What’s that?”
His mud-colored eyes rolled toward me.
“What happened to the blessed barge?”
“That’s part of the problem.
It was a powerless ship, launched from one of those rocks with its load of metal and a miner’s family aboard.
It sent back a queer laserphone message—something about the stars turning red.
It never got to port, and no trace was found.”
“Mortal me—”
His gasping voice was interrupted by the arrival of three steaming cups of algae broth and three hot brown yeastcakes.
He fell to eating, as eagerly as if the machines had served his own costly caviar.
“Captain, please go on.” Lilith was oddly intense.
“About the number of these asteroids—”
“Five more years had passed before another colony of miners settled here,” I said.
“They found only one ice asteroid—the one we’re on.
But, at the time of their arrival, they charted nine iron asteroids.”
Giles Habibula peered anxiously up at me, and hungrily back at his food.
“These miners had brought improved atomic drills.
They carved into those hard alloys and some of them struck rich pockets of platinum and gold.
Space traders came.
Even the men on this ice asteroid made fortunes selling water and rocket fuel and synthetic food.
They built the original station.
A roaring little metropolis—while it lasted.”
Giles Habibula had stopped eating.
He sat staring at me, a sick pallor on his round baby-face and a gray glaze dulling his rust-colored eyes.
“So?” Lilith whispered quickly.
“And—?”
“They were building an industrial complex on Lodestone—as they called the largest iron asteroid. A barge terminal.
A big atomic smelter.
Shops for building and repairing mining machinery.
A laserphone center for the whole swarm of rocks.
“Then something happened.”
“Whup?”
Old Habibula spoke thickly around the unchewed yeast-cake in his mouth, spraying crumbs.
“Gulp?”
“The laser beams were broken.
All communication with the asteroid was cut off.
An oxygen tanker had been dropping to land at the smelter.
Its crew reported that the asteroid had reddened, flickered, and disappeared.”