"Well, don't you see what that means? Dad must have found it somewhere. Somewhere out here in the Belt ... a gun that no man could have made...."
He took the weapon, ran his finger along the gleaming barrel. "I wonder," he said, "what else Dad might have found out there."
Somewhere below them they heard a hatch clang shut, and even deeper in the ship generator motors began throbbing in a steady even rhythm. In the silence of the lounge they could hear their own breathing, and outside a thousand tiny sounds of the ship's activity were audible.
But now they had attention only for the odd-shaped piece of metal in Greg's hand, and for the hole that gaped in the wall.
"You think that this was what Dad found?" Greg said. "The Big Strike he told Johnny about?"
"It must be part of it," Tom said.
"But what is it? And where did it come from? It doesn't make sense," Greg protested.
"It doesn't make sense the way we've been looking at it," Tom said. "All we've found was some gobbledegook in Dad's private log to tell us what he found ... but it couldn't have been a vein of ore, or Tawney's men would have unearthed it. It had to be something else. Something that was so big and important that Dad didn't even dare let Johnny in on it."
"Yes, that's been the craziest part of it, to me," Johnny said. "I've done a lot of mining with your Dad. If he'd hit rich ore, he would have taken me out there to mine it with him. But he didn't. He said it was something he had to work on alone for a while, and he sent me back."