Koa remarked, "It must be good. The lieutenant is getting a real atomic charge out of it." "Sit down," Rip ordered. "You’d better, because you might fall over when you hear this. Listen, men. Two days ago the freighter _Altair_ passed through the asteroid belt on a run from Jupiter to Mars." He sat down, too, because deceleration was starting. As his men looked at each other in surprise at the quickness of it, he continued, "The old bucket found something we need. An asteroid of pure thorium." The enlisted Planeteers knew as well as he what that meant. There were whistles of astonishment. Koa slapped his big thigh. "By Gemini! What do we do about it, sir?" "We capture it," Rip said. "We blast it loose from its orbit and ride it back to earth." He sat back and watched their reactions. At first they were stunned. Trudeau, the Frenchman, muttered to himself in French. Dominico, the Italian, held up his hands and exclaimed, "Santa Maria!" Kemp, one of the American privates, asked, "How do we do it, sir?" Rip grinned. "That’s a good question. I don’t know." That stopped them. They stared at him. He added quickly, "Supplies came aboard at Marsport. We’ll get the clue when we open them. Headquarters must have known the method when they assigned us and ordered the equipment." Koa stood up. He was the only one who could have moved upright against the terrific deceleration. He walked to a rack at one side of the squadroom and took down a copy of "The Space Navigator." Then, resuming his seat, he looked questioningly at Rip. "Anything else, sir? I thought I’d read what there is about asteroids." "Go ahead," Rip agreed. He sat back as Koa began to recite what data there was, but he didn’t listen. His mind was going ten astro units a second. He thought he knew why he had been chosen for the job. Word of the priceless asteroid must have reached headquarters only a short time before he was scheduled to leave the space platform. He could imagine the speed with which the specialists at Terra base had acted. They had sent orders instantly to the fastest cruiser in the area, the _Scorpius_, to stand by for further instructions. Then their personnel machines must have whirred rapidly, electronic brains searching for the nearest available Planeteer officer with an astrophysics specialty and astrogation training. He could imagine the reaction when the machine turned up the name of a brand-new lieutenant. But the choice was logical enough. He knew that most, if not all, of the Planeteer astrophysicists were either in high or low space on special work. Chances are there was no astrophysicist nearer than Ganymede. So the choice had fallen to him. He had a mental image of the Terra base scientists feeding data into the electronic brain, taking the results, and writing fast orders for the men and supplies needed. If his estimate was correct, work at the Planeteer base had been finished within an hour of the time word was received.