Destination: Saturn

XII

Before very long, they had the robot ready to go. It was considerably smaller than the Alcmenian monster who had gazed in the port and then stalked away, but only a little taller than Ajax. He settled himself down in a reclining chair, and slid the visor-cowl down until it enveloped his face. The robot’s control panel rested on Ajax’s stomach. He fiddled with the controls a bit, warming up, then rapidly punched a series of keys. The robot walked into the airlock, cycled, and went out onto the surface.

It was a weird sensation… for with the visor-cowl covering his face, and the wide-angle television lenses in the robot’s head operating, Ajax had the definitely peculiar feeling of being “in” the robot. He “turned” his head (that is, revolved the TV segment of the robot’s upper thorax), and took a good long look around the landscape. Then, not spotting anything that looked particularly interesting, suspicious or odd, he bent down and scooped up a bucketful of loose debris, and, turning about, stumped back into the ship.

Ajax lifted the cowl and put the robot on stand-by while they fed the mineral samples into a chemical bath and then a centrifuge. The computer ran a fast analysis, and with a slight burp! ejected the results from a small slot. Ajax read the tape, and sat down with a thump.

“What’s the bad news?” Emily asked, resigned for the worst.

“Bad news—hah! This kind of news makes me wish I wasn’t a multibillionaire. Wish I was a penniless prospector instead,” he gulped.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means, my dear Miss Hackenwhammer, that this whole blinking moon we are sitting on is one big chunk of green cheese… I mean, uranium.”

“Really…?” she asked in a faint little voice.

“Really! So high-grade, that this ore is like money in the bank. Offhand, I’d say everything you can see out there is worth in the neighborhood of… well, let’s see… how much would you say the combined total wealth of Europe, Asia, North and South America would be?”

“But… maybe it’s just those particular rocks you picked up? I mean, is there any reason to suppose the whole flacking landscape is the same ore?”

“Ah, you do not use your eyes, my dear! Those rock samples were marked with a very characteristic striation… analysis shows it to be high-grade uraninite, containing lead, helium, radium and a whopping percentage of uranium trioxide. And,” he said with emphasis, relishing every word, “the whole bunking landscape out there shows the same very characteristic striation, bless its little heart! Emily, we’re sitting on top of a gold mine… I mean, uranium mine… the likes of which beggar the imagination!”

“Oh, my,” she said faintly.

“Quite. No wonder there’s such a gravity field! The entire asteroid must have been a chunk of core-material from the lost planet!”

“Come at me again with that last one, Ajax?”

“I mean,” he said patiently, “it is well known that heavy metals, such as radioactive ores, tend to form the core of planets, rather than floating around on top of the soil, so to speak. Now, when the lost Fifth Planet blew up millions of years ago, this asteroid must have been one great big fourteen solid miles of radioactive matter from the core! It got blown out as far as Jupiter, got entangled in the gravity-field, and settled down to spend the rest of Eternity as a moon. Why… no wonder it’s the only moon that revolves around Jupiter backwards! The others are real moons, but this one was zipping past in the opposite direction, blown out there in the explosion when the Asteroidal planet broke up, and was just roaring along in its merry way when the Jovian gravity slowed it down and bent its straight-line flight into a closed-circle orbit.”

This was all a bit much for Emily, but Ajax was obviously in his element and seemed to know what he was talking about. (The fact of the matter was that Ajax was a modern, enlightened monarch, and in preparation for his royal career, had studied the physical sciences very deeply, firm in his belief that a king nowadays should be up on his “hard” science.)

“Well… that’s all very well, Ajax, I’m sure… but the immediate problem is getting the drive fixed and fueling up. Can your engines take uranium? I thought your pile was designed for plutonium ingots.”

He nodded. “That’s right, but don’t worry. All we have to do is just dig up enough of this stuff and get it down to purified form. Plutonium is made out of uranium, you know—manufactured—it doesn’t exist naturally. If we can extract enough Uranium-238, and, with the whole blinking landscape out there to use, I’m sure we can, then we just bombard the stuff with neutrons and it’ll decay into neptunium.”

“Neptunium? What about plutonium?”

“Tut, child’s play, m’dear. Deuteron bombardment of neptunium will give us plutonium aplenty… then to get the isotope we need, Pu-239, sufficient neutron-capture, followed by a spot of spontaneous emission of two jolly old beta particles…” He broke off humming happily, sketching out the process on a scratchpad.

“Oh… uh… Ajax.”

“Hmm—?”

“Ajax. If you plan to have Fido here do any digging, you’d better have him hop to it spit-spot.”

“Umm? Why’s that, my dear?”

“Because that tin-plated Frankenstein Monster is back, along with about two dozen of his pals. And he looks like he means business…”

Startled, Ajax looked up. Sure enough… coming over the so-close horizon of tiny Alcmene was the inquisitive giant robot, accompanied by a veritable clanking horde of his compatriots. The avalanche of robots converged upon the crippled Destiny with fire in their eyes…