t they
didn't, after all. Maybe Dad hid it...."

Johnny Coombs shook his head. "No way a man can hide an ore strike."

"But suppose Dad did, somehow, and whoever killed him couldn't find it?
It would be too late to make him tell them. They'd _have_ to come back
and look again, wouldn't they? And from the way they went about it, it
looks as though they weren't having much luck."

"Then whatever Dad found would still be here, somewhere," Greg said.

"That's right."

"But where? There's nothing on this ship."

"Maybe not," Tom said, "but I'd like to take a look at that asteroid
before we give up."

* * * * *

They paused in the big ore-loading lock to reclamp their pressure
suit helmets, and looked down at the jagged chunk of rock a hundred
yards below them. In the lock they had found scooters ... the little
one-man propulsion units so commonly used for short distance work in
space ... but decided not to use them. "They're clumsy," Johnny said,
"and the bumper units in your suits will do just as well for this
distance." He looked down at the rock. "I'll take the center section.
You each take an edge and work in. Look for any signs of work on the
surface ... chisel marks, Murexide charges, anything."

"What about the dark side?" Greg asked.

"If we want to see anything there, we'll either have to rig up lights or
turn the rock around," Johnny said. "Let's cover this side first and see
what we come up with."

He turned and leaped from the airlock, moving gracefully down toward
the surface, using the bumper unit to guide himself with short bursts
of compressed CO_{2}, from the nozzle. Greg followed, pushing off
harder and passing Johnny halfway down. Tom hesitated. It looked easy
enough ... but he remembered the violent nausea of his first few hours
of free fall.

Finally he gritted his teeth and jumped off after Greg. Instantly he
knew that he had jumped too hard. He shot away from the orbit-ship like
a bullet; the jagged asteroid surface leaped up at him. Frantically he
grabbed for the bumper nozzle and pulled the trigger, trying to break
his fall.

He felt the nozzle jerk in his hand, and then, abruptly, he was spinning
off at a wild tangent from the asteroid, head over heels. For a moment
it seemed that asteroid, orbit-ship and stars were all wheeling crazily
around him. Then he realized what had happened. He fired the bumper
again, and went spinning twice as fast. The third