“Yeah. I’d have known it if you had,” nodded Gregg. “Gossip travels fast here. Don’t resent this, please, but I’m here to see that none of you boys leaves this tower till the jewels are aboard our own boat.”

“Oh, well. It’ll mean overtime pay.”

“If I want to get rich fast, I’ll stick to prospecting,” added Hollyday.

“When are you going to quit running around with that Geiger in your free time?” asked Yamagata. “Phobos is nothing but iron and granite.”

“I have my own ideas about that,” said Hollyday stoutly.

“Hell, everybody needs a hobby on this God-forsaken clod,” declared Ramanowitz. “I might try for those sparklers myself, just for the excitement—” He stopped abruptly, aware of Gregg’s eyes.

“All right,” snapped Yamagata. “Here we go. Inspector, please stand back out of the way, and for your life’s sake don’t interrupt us.”

The Jane was drifting in, her velocity on the carefully precalculated orbit almost identical with that of Phobos. Almost, but not quite—there had been the inevitable small disturbing factors, which the remote-controlled jets had to compensate, and then there was the business of landing her. The team got a fix and were frantically busy.

In free fall, the Jane approached within a thousand miles of Phobos—a spheroid 500 feet in radius, big and massive, but lost against the incredible bulk of the satellite. And yet Phobos is an insignificant airless pill, negligible even beside its seventh-rate planet. Astronomical magnitudes are simply and literally incomprehensible.

When the ship was close enough, the radio directed her gyros to rotate her, very, very gently, until her pickup antenna was pointing directly at the field. Then her jets were cut in, a mere whisper of thrust. She was nearly above the spaceport, her path tangential to the moon’s curvature. After a moment Yamagata slapped the keys hard, and the rockets blasted furiously, a visible red streak up in the sky. He cut them again, checked his data, and gave a milder blast.

“Okay,” he grunted. “Let’s bring her in.”

Her velocity relative to Phobos’s orbit and rotation was now zero, and she was falling. Yamagata slewed her around till the jets were pointing vertically down. Then he sat back and mopped his face while Ramanowitz took over; the job was too nerve-stretching for one man to perform in its entirety. Ramanowitz sweated the awkward mass to within a few yards of the cradle. Steinmann finished the task, easing her into the berth like an egg into a cup. He cut the jets and there was silence.

“Whew! Chuck, how about a drink?” Yamagata held out unsteady fingers and regarded them with an impersonal stare.

Hollyday smiled and fetched a bottle. It went happily around. Gregg declined. His eyes were locked to the field, where a technician was checking for radioactivity. The verdict was clean, and he saw his constables come soaring over the concrete, to surround the great ship with guns. One of them went up, opened the manhatch, and slipped inside.