"Randy," said McCauley vexedly, "I've lost my watch."
"I lost mine a week ago," said Randy. He caught a handhold and pulled himself to a sitting position, resting on nothing whatever. "Hathaway lost his the week we started out. Fallon told me privately that somebody'd swiped his wallet only a day or so after we started out."
McCauley swung around to face him.
"That's nonsense!" he said angrily. "It's lunacy! Who'd want to steal in a space ship?"
"I thought it was lunacy, too," said Randy, "until a few minutes ago. Now I'm more credulous. From checking supplies outside, it appears that some very fancy small instruments are missing. A case was broken open. Since we tied up here."
McCauley stared at him. On the face of it, Randy's statement was flatly impossible. Personal character aside, it was unthinkable that a member of the Expedition should steal from another member or from its stores. Nobody could use a stolen article in a ship containing exactly five other men. Nobody could sell stolen goods to his fellow crewmen. And nobody could hope to take any loot back to Earth. If all went well, the men themselves might hope to get back to Earth at some problematic future time. But every ounce of Earth-bound cargo would be scientific material, mostly microfilm. Stolen goods couldn't be used or sold or taken back to Earth. Money itself wasn't worth stealing. Nothing was. Many millions of dollars' worth of equipment now outside the ship had lain unguarded and untouched for two years in empty space. Nobody had stolen any of it before. There was no sense in stealing it now.
But somebody was.
It was a serious matter because of its implications rather than the facts themselves. The First Martian Expedition needed everything its members could give it for the safety of them all. If somebody considered himself apart from the rest, if one member of the crew was willing to injure the others by stealing from them, the situation was very, very bad. In fact, having a thief among the six was like a serious accident occurring to the Expedition's equipment. It would be comparable to a vital defect in the miniature atom-pile which was to supply energy for them to live by when they reached Mars' surface.
In a sense, though, the Expedition itself was the result of an accident of a different sort. The first part of this coincidence was the fact that some two years earlier the asteroid Eros had passed close to Earth on its elongated elliptical orbit around the sun. Eros is one of those rock and metal fragments which are found most often in orbits between Mars and Jupiter. Some people maintain that they are fragments of a planet which exploded some hundreds of millions of years ago, and there is some evidence to back this view. For one thing, some circle the sun in extremely eccentric paths. Eros swings out at its farthest between Mars and Jupiter, but when nearest the sun it dives in between Earth and Venus. Sometimes—rarely—it comes close to Earth in its passage across Earth's orbit. This had happened two years ago.
The second part of the coincidence was the purely fortuitous fact that only two Earth-years later Eros would pass even closer to the planet Mars. The two accidents added up to an opportunity, when McCauley added rockets and other resources of the Space Service. And the Service seized it.