It seemed like a good idea. Greg strapped himself into the scooter's saddle, straddling the fuel tanks, using the hand jet to guide himself as he lifted lightly off the surface. He disappeared over the horizon of rock, then reappeared as he moved over the surface and back.
Tom and Johnny waited with the Major. Twenty minutes later Greg brought the tiny craft back again. "It's no good," he said. "I've scanned the whole bright-side, came as close as I dared."
"No sign of anything?" Johnny said.
"Not a thing. The dark side looks like a sheer slab, from what my lights show. If we only had some idea what we were looking for...."
"Maybe you weren't close enough," Tom said. "Why not drop each of us off to take a quarter of the bright-side and work our way in?"
The others agreed. Tom waited until the Major and Johnny had been posted; then he hopped on the scooter behind Greg and dropped off almost at the line of darkness, where the sheer slab began. All of them had hoped that there might be a sign, something that Roger Hunter might have left to mark his cache, but if there was one none of them spotted it. Tom checked with the others by the radio in his helmet, and started moving back toward the center of the bright side.
An hour later he was only halfway to the center, and he was nearly exhausted. At a dozen different spots he thought he had found a promising cleft in the rock, a place where something might have been concealed ... but exploration of the clefts proved fruitless.
And now his confidence began to fail. Supposing he had been wrong? They knew the rock had passed very close to Roger Hunter's asteroid, the astronomical records proved that. But suppose Dad had not used it as his hiding place at all? He pulled himself around another jagged rock shelf, staring down at the rough asteroid surface beyond....
At the base of the rock shelf, something glinted in the sunlight. He leaped down, and thrust his hand into a small crevice in the rock. His hand closed on a small metal object.
It was a gun. It felt well balanced, familiar in his hand ... the revolver Dad had always carried in his gun case.