Through the window beyond, a portion of the vast arm of the Milky Way spread out in its eternal beauty. The Starmen were silently wondering the same things: How long would it be before they met Lurton Zimbardo? Would he recognize them? Why did he want St. George alive?
6: Battle Lines
THE PIRATES’ ASTEROID swung in a smooth, private orbit about a thousand miles beyond the farthest extremity of the Asteroid Belt. Lurton Zimbardo was in his private sanctum, a well-equipped workroom with precision astronomical equipment, sky charts, and an enormous inventory of computer files. As he turned his telescanner toward the Inner Planets, he saw the spread of the Belt before him.
Countless celestial bodies moved in an incredibly slow pattern like a stately dance. Reflected sunlight glinted from oblique surfaces into the light-gathering lenses of the telescanner. When the occasional crystalline surface or frozen lake on a passing asteroid caught the radiance just right, an intense but transitory sparkling brilliance was generated, and created a pattern of astonishing beauty on the scanner’s computer screen.
Zimbardo entered a few more bits of data into the criteria of his search pattern and then said, “Enter.” Within seconds several asteroids were marked in his files. He brought their profiles up one by one.
M253.
Shape: oblong.
Maximum length: 0.683 miles.
Maximum width: 0.307 miles.
Composition: 90.568% iron, 6.443% tin, 0.752%
ice, 2.237% trace elements; click here for details.
Other information was provided, including the asteroid’s precise location and its speed of motion and rotation. Zimbardo hesitated a moment, then said, “Delete.” He went on to the next entry.
M3366.
Shape: almost perfect sphere; variation <5%.
Mean diameter, 0.057 miles.
The other information was provided. Zimbardo smiled. “Ah—nearly solid iron and about 100 yards exactly!” he thought to himself. “That makes five.” He told the computer to save that file, then opened the intercom.
“Gene,” he said.