“I asked around. Your mother told me over the phone back on Earth that she was pretty sure you had the scraps with you and that you treasured them as if they were gold.”
“I do,” Rock admitted, staring out one of the oblong ports of the dorm at the salt-and-pepper background of interstellar space. “They’re the last link I have with my father. I never saw him.”
Kalmus got up. “When you’re convinced I’ve got what you want and you’re ready to listen to a proposition about locating your dad’s lost ship, just let me know. I’m in Room 38, Deck B, overhead.”
When Kalmus had gone, Rock went to his dresser and began searching a drawer. “The box with the scraps is in one of these.”
“I still find all this hard to believe!” Shep said. “And I don’t see how Kalmus could have gotten hold of the missing scraps. They were supposed to have been destroyed with the Sagittarius except for the ones they salvaged for you.”
“I’m not worried about that now, Shep!” Rock told him. “The main thing is to fit the puzzle together and find the answer that I’ve wanted to know all my life—the location of the Northern Cross and its treasure ore.”
Rock’s father, Victor Merrill, had been a space surgeon accompanying a research expedition to Venus before Rock was born. Mineralogy was Dr. Merrill’s hobby, and while on the planet he had come across a curious mineral in a cave. Returning to Earth, he’d had the sample analyzed. The mineral was alconite, a very scarce and valuable component of an alloy used in the construction of radioactivity shields. Told that a space-ship load of the light mineral could bring him a fortune, Dr. Merrill set out again for Venus with his own expedition, financed from his life savings, planning to build a satellite hospital with the proceeds of the venture.
Dr. Merrill’s ship, the Northern Cross, had landed on Venus, and a load of the mineral was stocked aboard the ship. But then disaster overtook the party, the first of many tragic events that were to follow. A landslide sealed off the mine, burying most of Dr. Merrill’s crew. The four remaining, including Dr. Merrill himself, blasted off for Earth, but not having enough experienced men to adequately run the vessel, the ship was wrecked by an explosion. An SOS was radioed to a freighter bound for Venus, the Sagittarius. The radio operator made a note of the Northern Cross’s position, but shortly afterward, the Sagittarius itself, in a hurry to reach the stricken Northern Cross and with a faulty radar set, collided with an emergency fuel buoy floating in space.
When later ships salvaged the wreck of the Sagittarius, scraps of the radio operator’s note were found, but not enough of it to establish the “fix” of the still missing Northern Cross. These scraps had later been turned over to Rock and held by him ever since. He had stubbornly clung to the fragments in the wild hope that some day he might obtain some other clue to the location of his father’s ship.
The last message from the radio operator of the Northern Cross had reported that the ship had lost its power of navigation after falling into a perpetual orbit about Venus. Therefore Rock and his mother had known for years that Victor Merrill’s ghost ship had become a satellite of the planet Venus.