nny said. "A planet with a race of creatures
intelligent enough and advanced enough to make a weapon like that ... it
could have been anything. But whatever it was, it must have scared him.
He must have known that a company ship might turn up any minute ... so
he hid whatever he had found, and all he dared to leave was a hint."

"And now it's vanished," the Major said. "The big flaw in the whole
idea. My Patrol ship found nothing when it searched the region. You
looked, and drew a blank. The company men scoured the area." He spread
his hands helplessly. "You see, it just won't hold up, not a bit of it.
Even with this gun, it won't hold up. We've got to find the answer."

"It's out there somewhere," Tom said doggedly. "It's got to be."

"But _where_? Don't you see that everything hangs on that one thing? If
we could prove that your father found something just before he was
killed, we could tear Jupiter Equilateral's case against you into
shreds. We could charge them with piracy and murder, and make it stick.
We could break their power once and for all ... but until we know what
Roger Hunter found, we're helpless. They'll take you three to court, and
I won't be able to stop them. And if you lose that case, it may mean the
end of U.N. authority on Mars."

"Then there's just one thing to do," Johnny Coombs said. "We've got to
find Roger Hunter's bonanza."

* * * * *

It was almost midnight when they left the Major's office, a gloomy trio,
walking silently up the ramp to the Main Concourse, heading toward the
living quarters.

They had been talking with the Major for hours, going over every facet
of the story, wracking their brains for the answer ... but the answer
had not come.

Roger Hunter had found something, and hidden it so well that three
groups of searchers had failed to discover it. After seeing the gun, the
Major was convinced that there had indeed been a discovery made. But
whatever that discovery had been, it was gone as if it had never
existed ... as if by some sort of magic it had been turned invisible,
or conjured away to another part of the Solar System.

Finally, they had given up, at least for the moment. "It has to be
there," the Major had said wearily. "It hasn't vanished, or miraculously
ceased to exist. We know he was working on one claim, one asteroid.
There were no other asteroids in the region ... and even the ones within
suicide radius have been searched."