He said, ‘Where does it pick up all that stuff, Captain?’

‘There’s an old astronomy book we read to him. Real old.’

‘From before space travel was invented,’ said one of the crew members in disgust. ‘Ain’t even a fillum. Regular print.’

‘Shut up,’ said the captain.

Vernadsky checked the outflow of helium for gamma radiation and eventually it was time to end the flushing and work in the interior. It was a painstaking job, and Vernadsky interrupted it only once for coffee and a breather.

He said, with innocence beaming in his smile, ‘You know the way I figure it, Captain? That thing lives inside rock, inside some asteroid all its life. Hundreds of years, maybe. It’s a damn big thing, and it’s probably a lot smarter than the run-of-the-mill silicony. Now you pick it up and it finds out the universe isn’t rock. It finds out a trillion things it never imagined. That’s why it’s interested in astronomy. It’s this new world, all these new ideas it gets in the book and in human minds, too. Don’t you think that’s so?’

He wanted desperately to smoke the captain out, get something concrete he could hang his deductions on. For this reason he risked telling what must be half the truth, the lesser half, of course.

But the captain, leaning against a wall with his arms folded, said only, ‘When will you be through?’

It was his last comment and Vernadsky was obliged to rest content. The motor was adjusted fo .ally to Vernadsky’s satisfaction, and the captain paid the reasonable fee in cash, accepted his receipt, and left in a blaze of ship’s hyper-energy.

Vernadsky watched it go with an almost unbearable excitement. He made his way quickly to his sub-etheric sender.

‘I’ve got to be right,’ he muttered to himself. ‘I’ve got to be.’

Patrolman Milt Hawkins received the call in the privacy of his home station on Patrol Station Asteroid No. 72. He was nursing a two-day stubble, a can of iced beer, and a film viewer, and the settled melancholy on his ruddy, wide-cheeked face was as much the product of loneliness as was the forced cheerfulness in Vernadsky’s eyes.

Patrolman Hawkins found himself looking into those eyes and was glad. Even though it was only Vernadsky, company was company. He gave him the big hello and listened luxuriously to the sound of a voice without worrying too strenuously concerning the contents of the speech.

Then suddenly amusement was gone and both ears were on the job and he said, ‘Hold it. Ho – ld it. What are you talking about?’

‘Haven’t you been listening, you dumb cop? I’m talking my heart out to you.’

‘Well, deal it out in smaller pieces, will you? What’s this abouta silicony?’

‘This guy’s got one on board. He calls it a pet and feeds it greasy rocks.’

‘Huh? I swear, a miner on the asteroid run would make a pet out of a piece of cheese if he could get it to talk back to him.’

‘Not just a silicony. Not one of these httle mch Jobs. Its over a f ot across. Don’t you get it? Space, you’d think a guy would know somethmg about the asteroids, living out here.’

‘All right. Suppose you tell me.’

‘Look, greasy rocks build tissues, but where does a s1hcony that size get its energy from?’

‘I couldn’t tell you.’

‘Directly from – Have you got anyone around you right now?’

‘Right now, no. I wish there were.’

‘You won’t in a minute. Siliconies get the1r energy by the d1rect absorption of gamma rays.’

‘Says who?’

‘Says a guy called Wendell Urth. He’s a big-shot extraterrologist. What’s more, he says that’s what the silicony’s ears are for.’ Vernadsky put his two forefingers to his temples and wiggled them. ‘.’Not telepathy at all. They detect gamma radiation at levels no human mstrument can detect.’

‘Okay. Now what?’ asked Hawkins. But he was gr wi g thoughtful.

‘Now this. Urth says there isn’t enough gamma radiation on any asteroid to support siliconies more than an inch or two long. No enou ? radioactivity. So here we have one a foot long, a good fifteen mches.

‘Well—’

‘So it has to come from an asteroid just riddled with the stuff, lousy with uranium, solid with gamma rays. An asteroid with enough radioactivity to be warm to the touch and off the regular orbit patterns so that no one’s come across it. Only suppose some smart boy landed on the asteroid by happenstance and noticed the warmth of the_ roc s and got to thinking. This captain of the Robert Q. is no rock-hoppmg ignoramus.

He’s a shrewd guy.’ ‘Go on.’

‘Suppose he blasts off chunks for assay and comes across a giant silicony. Now he knows he’s got the most unbelievable strike in all history. And he doesn’t need assays. The silicony can lead him to the rich veins.’

‘Why should it?’

‘Because it wants to learn about the universe. Because it’s spent a thousand years, maybe, under rock, and it’s just discovered the stars. It can read minds and it could learn to talk. It could make a deal. Listen, the captain would jump at it. Uranium mining is a state monopoly. Unlicensed miners aren’t even allowed to carry counters. It’s a perfect setup for the captain.’

Hawkins said, ‘Maybe you’re right.’

‘No maybe at all. You should have seen them standing around me while I watched the silicony, ready to jump me if I said one funny word. You should have seen them drag me· out after two minutes.’

Hawkins brushed his unshaven chin with his hand and made a mental estimate of the time it would take him to shave. He said, ‘How long can you keep the boy at your station?’

‘Keep him! Space, he’s gone!’

‘What! Then what the devil is all this talk about? Why did you let him get away?’

‘Three guys,’ said Vernadsky patiently, ‘each one bigger than I am, each one armed, and each one ready to kill, I’ll bet. What did you want me to do?’

‘All right, but what do we do now?’

‘Come out and pick them up. That’s simple enough. I was fixing their semireflectors and I fixed them my way. Their power will shut off completely within ten thousand miles. And I installed a tracer in the Jenner manifold.’

Hawkins goggled at Vernadsky’s grinning face. ‘Holy Toledo.’

‘And don’t get anyone else in on this. Just you, me, and the police cruiser. They’ll have no energy and we’ll have a cannon or two. They’ll tell us where the uranium asteroid is. We locate it, then get in touch with Patrol Headquarters. We will deliver unto them, three, count them, three, uranium smugglers, one giant-size silicony like nobody on Earth ever saw, and one, I repeat, one great big fat chunk of uranium ore like nobody on Earth saw, either. And you make a lieutenancy and I get promoted to a permanent Earth-side job. Right?’

Hawkins was dazed. ‘Right,’ he yelled. ‘I’ll be right out there.’

They were almost upon the ship before spotting it visually by the weak glinting of reflected sunlight.

Hawkins said, ‘Didn’t you leave them enough power for ship’s lights?

You didn’t throw off their emergency generator, did you?’

Vernadsky shrugged. ‘They’re saving power, hoping they’ll get picked up. Right now, they’re putting everything they’ve got into a sub-etheric call, I’ll bet.’