“Yes. I’ll be looking for the best site, recruiting the right people to man it, and drawing up plans for construction and the tasks it will have to perform. I don’t need to tell you that the project is highly confidential. I’m only telling you about it because you’re Starmen, and it will be a resource you’ll need to become familiar with. Of course, there will be much more information coming your way later.”
Oritz Konig spoke cleanly and clearly, but gave the [DB1]impression that his thoughts were racing faster than he could speak. He had had to discipline himself to speak so that others could follow him. There were few wasted words when he had to get a message across, but he was able to converse in a way that assured his listeners that he valued them as people and needed their cooperation. Konig manifested an extremely rare combination of being a “people person” as well as having a supremely disciplined and task-oriented mind.
“We interrogated the pirates while you were in the Asteroid Belt. We started with Troy Putnam, of course, but he won’t say a word. He’s got a strange kind of strength to him—genial in a lot of ways, but utterly inflexible and unbreakable when he doesn’t want to cooperate.
“We questioned other pirate leaders, too, of course, and a lot of the rank and file. Not all of them cooperated, but enough did that we learned that they have a base in the Belt. It’s no ordinary base. Most of the pirates don’t know its origin but they can describe what it looks like.
“It’s a fairly good-sized chunk of hard stone, mostly iron. It’s hollow, and the base is inside. The access port is concealed. More to the point, it cannot be detected by radar.
“Some of the toughest of the pirates sneered that we’d never find it—that it couldn’t be seen even if you were right on top of it.”
Joe jumped in. “But sir, this technology is not new. There have been craft since the late twentieth century that were invisible to radar. There are other ways to find them—gravitational influences, to name one.”
“Of course, Starman Taylor. This asteroid, however, appears to be the work of some advanced race, other than Earth. The pirates didn’t create it—they took it over. Its sheathing system is highly effective, highly effective indeed. The pirates could be lying, of course, but once the word got out to them that we knew about the asteroid, most of them seemed to swell with a kind of arrogant pride, even welcoming the fact that we had the information. They were confident that we couldn’t do anything about it.”
“And that explains, I’m sure, why we couldn’t find them in spite of an exceedingly thorough search of the area,” concluded David Foster, feeling somewhat vindicated.
“So are we to go find the asteroid?” put forth Joe, leaning forward in his chair.