Old Habibula moved convulsively, overturning a bowl of broth.
It flooded the end of the table and dripped on his knees.
“That ended the mining,” I said.
“Half the people and most of the wealth of the colony had been lost.
The survivors scattered.
Even this ice asteroid was abandoned, until the Legion came.
Commander Ken Star set up the beacon—”
“I know Ken Star.”
A pink, slow smile warmed old Habibula’s round baby-face.
“John’s younger son—I recall how he used to bring me toys to mend, long ago, when I was on guard duty at John’s great place on Phobos.
My poor flesh freezes when I think of Ken out in the fearful anomaly now, fighting that enemy machine.
“I love Ken Star—”
“Captain, please go on,” Lilith’s anxious voice broke in.
“Tell us every fact you can about the anomaly.”
“Reports of the disappearing rocks got back to the Legion,” I said.
“Ken Star came out with a survey ship to investigate them.
A new iron asteroid popped out of Nowhere just ahead of him.
He landed on it, and found the wreck of that missing ore barge.”
Old Habibula had been mopping at the spilled broth with a fiber napkin.
He froze again, his small eyes watching me with the flat bright blankness of two wet pebbles.
“In life’s name!” he gasped.
“Where had the blessed ore boat been?”
“Nobody knows.
Ken Star landed on the asteroid—his report is in the station files, but it doesn’t solve any mysteries.
He found the bodies of the missing family, emaciated and frozen hard as iron.
He found a diary the miner’s wife had started, but it makes no sense.”
“What did she write?”
“Most of it is commonplace.
It begins with a bit of family history —she must have had forebodings of death, and she wanted her chil-dren to know who they were.
Her son had been crippled in a mining accident; she was trying to get him to a surgeon.
There’s a brief record of the flight—positions and velocities, tons of load, kilograms of water and food, tanks of oxygen full and used.
The nonsense is in the last few entries.
“Something had put out the stars—”
Old Habibula gulped and neighed.
“What mortal horror could put out the stars?”
“The miner’s wife didn’t know.
She was too busy trying to keep her family alive to write much more.
But she writes that the barge is lost, drifting in the dark.
She writes that they are searching the dark with the radar gear. She writes that they have picked up an object ahead. She writes that it’s approaching them, on a collision course.
They are trying to signal, but they get no reply.
“That’s the end of the diary.
The barge had no rockets of its own.
In his comments in the files, Ken Star concludes that the object was that iron asteroid.
The collision killed the woman and her family.
But Star doesn’t even guess where it happened—or what had put out the stars.
“His own geodesic space-drive failed, soon after he left the wrecked barge on that iron asteroid.
His landing rockets got him back to this snowball.
He named it Nowhere Near and stayed here to watch the rocks while his first officer took the damaged ship out to a point where he could signal for relief.
“When the relief ship came, Star went outside to get equipment for the beacons and the observatory.
He found it hard to interest anybody—these odd rocks were less than specks of dust in the whole universe, and people had other problems to solve.