For about ten minutes we capered around on the ice. In our big, rigid breathing-suits we were none too graceful; it was like a pas de deux for Dinamonians. Finally we sprawled out together, exhausted, laughing wildly.

“Chimpo,” she said.

“Zooby quonker!”

“Feeb!”

“You too. To the tenth power.”

“What was between you and Kelly?”

“Talk. Just talk. Nobody else was around that night, and Leroy Chang was pursuing her, and she wanted protection. She’s quite an interesting vidj. But she does nothing at all for me that way.”

“Swear?”

“Swear. Now, about you and Saul—”

“Oh, that’s old stuff,” Jan said. “Absolutely prehistoric.”

“Sure. That’s why you’ve been practically living with him for the past two weeks.”

“I’ve learned a great deal about philately,” Jan said primly.

“Of course,” I said. “He can’t find anything better to do with a beautiful girl in a locked cabin than show her his set of Marsport imperforates.”

“That’s right. That’s exactly how it is.”

“I bet.”

“I mean it, Tom! Saul has never touched me. He’s terrified of girls. I gave him all sorts of opportunities, hints… nothing. Strictly from zero.”

“Then why’d you chase him so furiously?” I asked. “As a challenge?”

“At first it was because he seemed interesting. An older man, you know, dark, handsome, romantic-looking. That was before I paid any attention to you. I guess it was a sort of crush I had on him.”

“But he wasn’t crushing back.”

“Whenever I started getting the least bit biological he’d hide behind a stamp album.”

“Poor Saul,” I said,

“Finally I saw that it was hopeless. And then I started going with you.”

“Except you went back to Saul after we left Higby V.”

“That was only to make you jealous,” Jan said. “To get even with you for fissioning around with Kelly.”

“But I wasn’t—”

“It didn’t look that way.”

“Evil’s in the eye of the beholder. Old—”

“—Paradoxian proverb. I know,” she said. “Well, you could have explained a lot earlier that there was nothing going on between you and Kelly, and saved me two weeks of stamp albums.”

“But I didn’t know that that was what you had against me. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“And look like a jealous little minx?”

“But—”

“But—”

“If you had only said—”

“If you had only said—”

“Gabbling blenker!”

“Spinless feeb!”

“!”

“!!”

We broke up in laughter. I threw some more snow at her. She threw some more at me. We raced toward the ship. The hatch of the airlock closed behind us and we got our helmets off fast.…

Why do women have to be like that, Lorie?

Why can’t they come right out and say what’s bothering them? If Jan hadn’t imagined all sorts of dire stuff going on between Kelly and me, and hadn’t staged this deal with Saul to get even with me for my imaginary sins, we wouldn’t have wasted all this time and given each other two dreary weeks.

Sometimes I think the Calamorians have the right idea. Putting both sexes in one body with a single brain eliminates these messy communications problems. If Steen Steen ever gets into a lovers’ spat with him/herself, he/she has nobody to blame for the mix-up but him/herself. I mean — oh, blot it. You know.

December 20

We have twenty-one asteroids on our list now. We blast off after lunch to begin searching them for the robot vault.

Merry Christmas

In the Asteroid Belt

Once you’ve seen one asteroid belt, you’ve seen them all. The one we’re in doesn’t differ much from that of our home system: thousands of planet-fragments moving in a maze of orbits. Most of them are irregular chunks of rock a few kilometers in diameter, or less. (We saw one of those that looked exactly like a broken-off mountaintop. Perhaps it was.) But the ones we’re exploring for the vault are much larger than that, good-sized little worlds with diameters of 100 to 180 kilometers. Gravitational stresses operating on an asteroid of such a size wear down any projecting corners and force the asteroid to assume the normal spherical shape of a heavenly body.

We’ve toured eight of our twenty-one asteroids so far. No luck.

We use a two-stage scouting technique. First we put our ship in orbit around the asteroid we’re checking; as we swing around it, we bounce a sonar probe off it to locate large cavities close to the surface. Our instruments are sensitive enough so that a cave the size of the High Ones vault would show up. If anything registers, two of us then go down in landing pods for a closer look.

Most of these asteroids, being pieces of a shattered world, are solid throughout — no underground cavities of the proper size or position. (The High Ones built their vault in the side of a hill, remember. Since there’s no erosion on a planet or asteroid that lacks an atmosphere, and no internal volcanic action on a place this small, that hill ought still to look the way it did a billion years ago.)

We’ve made three landing-pod drops so far, a false alarm each time. The very first asteroid we checked seemed to have a cave in just the right position, which we thought was too good to be true. It was. Pilazinool and Kelly made the drop, and when Kelly cored into the hillside she found that there wasn’t any cave, just a big salt deposit within the hill; we had misinterpreted our sonar data. Three asteroids later, Saul and Steen made the drop, but discovered that the cave was a natural one. And on the seventh asteroid Leroy Chang and Dr. Schein went down, only to find that we had misread our probe again; what we thought was a hole in the ground turned out to be a huge pool of mercury, no less.

That wasn’t a bad misreading. Captain Ludwig immediately hopped into a pod and went down to inspect.

“You’ve got a million credits’ worth of quicksilver out there,” he reported. “Never saw the stuff frozen solid before, but there it is. You be smart, slap a mining claim on it fast.”

We didn’t know much about mining claims, but Ludwig did, and we gleefully let him show us the procedure. Stash is stash, after all. We radioed our claim to the nearest galactic message depot, 2.8 light-years away, setting forth the coordinates of this asteroid and filing notice of discovery of the mine. It will, naturally, take close to three years for our message to reach the depot and be recorded, but at least we have established incontrovertible proof of our filing the claim on December 22, 2375. Meanwhile, as soon as we leave here and come to a planet that has a TP communications office, we’ll notify Galaxy Central by TP of the discovery, and make the claim official. It may be six months or even more before we have a chance to do that; but in the unlikely event that somebody else comes here between now and then, finds the mine, and hustles off instantly to file a claim by TP, we’ll merely have to wait until our radio message comes floating into the depot three years from now to demonstrate our prior discovery. There’s no way to fake that kind of claim: it takes 2.8 years for a radio message to travel 2.8 light-years, and once our claim is in, no one can possibly jump it.

We’re cutting Ludwig in for 10 percent of the profits, and his sidekick Webber Fileclerk for 5 percent. That’ll make them both a lot richer than they ever would have become as charter pilots. The rest of the stash goes to us, not as individuals but as an expedition; it’ll be used to pay off the monstrous deficit we’ve run up. Galaxy Central can no longer accuse us of fraud, embezzlement, exceeding of budget, or other dire things.

We’d still like to find that High Ones vault, though.