The fat man's hands fluttered. "You understand that those ships are hardly suited to a major mining operation like ours," he said, "and the claims...." He dismissed them with a wave of his hand. "Still, we'd want you to be happy with the price. Say, forty-five thousand?" Greg hesitated, shook his head again. "I guess we'd better think it over, Mr. Tawney." "Fifty thousand is absolutely the top," Tawney said sharply. "I have the papers right here, drawn up for your signatures, but I'm afraid we can't hold the offer open." "I don't know, we might want to do some mining ourselves," Greg said. "For all we know, Dad might have struck some rich ore on one of those claims." Tawney laughed. "I hardly think so. Those claims were all Jupiter Equilateral rejects. Our own engineers found nothing but low grade ore on any of them." "Still, it might be fun to look." "It could be very expensive fun. Asteroid mining is a dangerous business, even for experts. For amateurs...." Tawney spread his hands. "Accidents occur...." "Yes, we've heard about those accidents," Greg said coldly. "I don't think we're quite ready to sell, Mr. Tawney. We may never be ready to sell to you, so don't stop breathing until we call you. Now if there's nothing else, why don't you take your friends and go somewhere else?" The fat man scowled; he started to say something more, then saw the look on Greg's face, and shrugged. "I'd advise you to give it some careful thought," he said as he started for the door. "It might be very foolish for you to try to use that rig." Smiling, Greg closed the door in his face. Then he turned and winked at Tom. "Great fellow, Mr. Tawney. He almost had me sold." "So I noticed," Tom said. "For a while I thought you were serious." "Well, we found out how high they'd go. That's a very generous outfit Mr. Tawney works for." "Or else a very crooked one," Tom said. "Are you wondering the same thing I'm wondering?" "Yes," Greg said slowly. "I think I am." "Then that makes three of us," a heavy voice rumbled from the bedroom door. * * * * * Johnny Coombs was a tall man, so thin he was almost gangling, with a long nose and shaggy eyebrows jutting out over his eyes. With his rudely cropped hair and his huge hands, he looked like a caricature of a frontier Mars-farmer, but the blue eyes under the eyebrows were not dull. "Johnny!" Tom cried. "We were trying to find you." "I know," Johnny said. "So have a lot of other people, includin' your friends there." "Well, did you hear what Tawney wanted?" "I'm not so quick on my feet any more," Johnny Coombs said, "but I got nothin' wrong with my ears." He scratched his jaw and looked up sharply at Greg. "Not many people nowadays get a chance to bargain with Merrill Tawney." Greg shrugged. "He named a price and I didn't like it." "Three times what the rig is worth," Coombs said.