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snapped on his radio. He checked the emergency band as every Beltman automatically did when signaling in, and then switched to the free wave length.
    A Federation ship was broadcasting news. There had been an election on Earth for a seat in the World Congress, and a man named Shakari had won. His opponent had immediately cried fraud and demanded a recount.
    Such strange goings on, Pete thought. That was how it was on Earth so far as he could see. Everybody fighting tooth and nail for things that didn’t seem worth having; at least not to a boy born and raised in the Asteroid Belt. He wondered why the affairs of Earth were of such vital interest to everyone in the System. No, he didn’t have to wonder that. It was logical. Earth was the magic center of the System. Everything originated there and everything went back. The ore he was hunting, if he found it, would without doubt find its way to Earth and the money paid for it would come from the big bank vaults down there to buy the supplies the Masons needed to support their existence. Just another circle in the millions of circles, tangible and otherwise, that went to make up the infinite universe.
    His mind wandering thus, Pete became aware of a large planetoid above him on the sunside of the Belt. He tilted the monocar’s nose and moved in that direction and in a short time he was cruising close, inspecting the planetoid’s surface from ten feet.
    The planetoid was cone-shaped, its diameter at the top approximately half a mile. That gave a good flat surface for mining operations, and when he set the monocar down and got out, he found enough iron in the rock to hold magnetic boots and grapples. That made everything ideal. Now there was the little matter of enough rich ore to make the operation worthwhile.
    Pete was not a pessimist, but he still didn’t expect to find anything of value on the planetoid. He based this on experience. There was fabulous wealth still untouched in the Belt, but one man was like an ant searching many acres of desert all alone. Thus, while the wealth was there, it took time to find it, and only sheerest luck would put a prospector on a rich planetoid so quickly.
    But it appeared Pete had that luck. Fifteen minutes with a testing kit proved out a copper content in the rock that—against the longest of odds was the strike his father had requested.
    Satisfied as to the planetoid’s mineral wealth, Pete made the first move toward staking his claim—the plotting of the orbit. This amounted to marketing the location of the asteroid, a simple operation on a major planet, but a complicated one where everything was in bits and pieces and moving in constant stream around the sun. The orbit had to be extremely accurate, a precise notation of the asteroid’s movements both within the stream and as a part of it.
    Getting his kit from the monocar, he first determined that his rich find was tilted fourteen degrees from the plane of the ecliptic. Using this as the basis of additional calculations, he went on with his work. Time passed because plotting an orbit was not something dashed off in five minutes.
    In fact, it was three hours later that Pete put down his final figures, checked them, repacked his kit, and returned to the monocar. Inside, he automatically-checked the emergency band on his radio and put down the formula that would enable him to again locate his claim. This was based on the orbital calculations and, if it became practical, the formula could be fed into the radar finder and thus become a part of the monocar’s directional equipment, translated as a blip on the screen.
    The whole job completed, he rewarded himself by getting out the provender he’d brought with him. This was a dubious reward because the food consisted of some of Betcha Jones’s less successful biscuits. Betcha’s successful biscuits were nothing to write home about, so the rock-hard consistency of the ones Pete feasted on was