Four men. And one was named MacDonald, an engineer, a secretive, selfish and enormously greedy man. MacDonald was the man who found a fortune, and kept it secret, and died.
Landers was one. A lean, brown, lively man, an excellent physicist with a friendly manner and no obvious ambitions.
Saul was one, and he was big and blond and quiet, a good drinking companion, a good geologist, a lover of good music. If he had any darker passions, he kept them hidden.
Hyrst was the fourth man, and the only one of the four still living....
He remembered now. He saw the black and bitter crags of Titan stark against the glory of the Rings, and he saw two figures moving across a plain of methane snow, their helmets gleaming in the Saturn-light. Behind them in the plain were the flat, half-buried concrete structures of the little refinery, and all around them were the spidery roads where the big half-tracs dragged their loads of uranium ore from the enchaining mountains.
The two men were quarrelling.
"You're angry," MacDonald was saying, "because it was I who found it."
"Listen," Hyrst said. "We're sick, all three of us, of hearing you brag about it."
"I'll bet you are," said MacDonald smugly. "The first find of a Titanite pocket for years. The rarest, costliest stuff in the System. If you know the way they've been bidding to buy it from me—"
"I do know," Hyrst said. "You've done nothing for weeks but give forth mysterious hints—"