them in
amazement.

The cabin was a shambles. Everything that was not bolted down had been
ripped open and thrown aside.

Greg whistled through his teeth. "The Major said the Patrol crew had
gone through the ship ... but he didn't say they'd wrecked it."

"They didn't," Johnny said grimly. "No Patrol ship would ever do this.
Somebody else has been here since." He turned to the control panel,
flipped switches, checked gauges. "Hydroponics are all right. Atmosphere
is still good; we can take off these helmets. Fuel looks all right,
storage holds ..." He shook his head. "They weren't looting, but they
were looking for something, all right. Let's look around and see if they
missed anything."

It took them an hour to survey the wreckage. Not a compartment had been
missed. Even the mattresses on the accelleration cots had been torn
open, the spring-stuffing tossed about helter-skelter. Tom went through
the lock into the _Scavenger_; the scout ship too had been searched,
rapidly but thoroughly.

But there was no sign of anything that Roger Hunter might have found.

Back in the control cabin Johnny was checking the ship's log. The old
entries were on microfilm, stored on their spools near the reader. More
recent entries were still recorded on tape. From the jumbled order,
there was no doubt that marauders had examined them. Johnny ran through
them nevertheless, but there was nothing of interest. Routine
navigational data; a record of the time of contact with the asteroid; a
log of preliminary observations on the rock; nothing more. The last tape
recorded the call-schedule Roger Hunter had set up with the Patrol, a
routine precaution used by all miners, to bring help if for some reason
they should fail to check in on schedule.

There was no hint in the log of any extraordinary discovery.

"Are any tapes missing?" Greg wanted to know.

"Doesn't look like it. There's one here for each day-period."

"I wonder," Tom said. "Dad always kept a personal log. You know, a sort
of a diary, on microfilm." He peered into the film storage bin, checked
through the spools. Then, from down beneath the last row of spools he
pulled out a slightly smaller spool. "Here's something our friends
missed, I bet."

It was not really a diary, just a sequence of notes, calculations and
ideas that Roger Hunter had jotted down and microfilmed from time to
time. The entries on the one spool went back for several years. Tom fed
the spool into the