Noted for his wild-goose chases and wilder ideas, Flip Miller was always running into trouble. In fact it was just two months ago that the Space Patrol found him marooned on Pallas. He had one pint of air left when they found him, said he fell out of his plane while looking for diamonds. The Patrol took him to Mars. There, he immediately got in a poker game and made a fortune—and immediately got in another and lost it all. That is, all except a doubtful map of a Venusian xanite mine which nobody else would accept as stakes. Which was his reason for being here, if Flip ever needed a sane reason for being anywhere.
For once however his screwball ventures panned out.
"And I've been here all these years without knowing a billion dollars was in my back yard," said Charlie who considered the matter very funny. "Leastwise it was a billion till—"
"Shut up, you blinking old veedle-chaser," said Flip. People always laughed at his misfortunes. Maybe it was because he did too....
Charlie's island was in the middle of the Black Swamp. The mine was a few hundred miles east. Fused with asphalt and deep in the mire, thousands of miles from nowhere, it was small wonder it had lain there unvisited since its original discovery. The map had passed through the hands of sundry dissolute, short-lived sourdoughs till the location became as dubious as other bar-room talk. It was Flip's luck that the map eventually got around to him. He was probably the only man in the system who would have believed in it.
Filled with quick visions, he'd figured his treasure up on the spot. It would cost about fifty dollars a ton to get it out of the swamp, smelt the asphalt and ship the ore to Earth. On Earth xanite ore was worth over a thousand dollars a ton.
Then the fates ran amuck.
His plane's fuel tank sprang a leak. Flip lost every drop of the reserve that was to carry him back to the mainland. The mainland was 25,000 miles away. Then his sending set blew a transformer and he couldn't radio for help. Last, while trying to ascertain his position on the receiving set, he heard that I.M.C.—Interstellar Metallurgical Company—had just opened a gigantic xanite deposit on Mars. The Market quoted xanite now at twenty dollars a ton. Venusian xanite suddenly wasn't worth swamp water.
"It shore is too bad," continued Charlie with smiling sympathy.