close enough," Tom said. "Why not drop each of us off
to take a quarter of the bright-side and work our way in?"

The others agreed. Tom waited until the Major and Johnny had been
posted; then he hopped on the scooter behind Greg and dropped off almost
at the line of darkness, where the sheer slab began. All of them had
hoped that there might be a sign, something that Roger Hunter might have
left to mark his cache, but if there was one none of them spotted it.
Tom checked with the others by the radio in his helmet, and started
moving back toward the center of the bright side.

An hour later he was only halfway to the center, and he was nearly
exhausted. At a dozen different spots he thought he had found a
promising cleft in the rock, a place where something might have been
concealed ... but exploration of the clefts proved fruitless.

And now his confidence began to fail. Supposing he had been wrong? They
knew the rock had passed very close to Roger Hunter's asteroid, the
astronomical records proved that. But suppose Dad had not used it as his
hiding place at all? He pulled himself around another jagged rock shelf,
staring down at the rough asteroid surface beyond....

At the base of the rock shelf, something glinted in the sunlight. He
leaped down, and thrust his hand into a small crevice in the rock. His
hand closed on a small metal object.

It was a gun. It felt well balanced, familiar in his hand ... the
revolver Dad had always carried in his gun case.

He had to let them know. He was just snapping the speaker switch when he
heard a growl of static in his earphones, and then Greg's voice,
high-pitched and excited. "Over here! I think I've found something!"

It took ten minutes of scrambling over the treacherous surface to reach
Greg. Tom saw his brother tugging at a huge chunk of granite that was
wedged into a crevice in the rock. Tom got there just as the Major and
Johnny topped a rise on the other side and hurried down to them.

The rock gave way, rolling aside, and Greg reached down into the
crevice. Tom leaned over to help him. Between them they lifted out the
thing that had been wedged down beneath the boulder.

It was a metal cylinder, four feet long, two feet wide, and bluntly
tapered at either end. In the sunlight it gleamed like polished silver,
but they could see a hairline break in the metal encircling the center
portion.

They had found Roger Hunter's bonanza.

* * *