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When you talked to him you'd almost think he wasn't too bright. You'd never think that after you'd seen him 'faced with a 'puter though. Even back then it was pretty commonly accepted that high intelligence was necessary to interface well, though you could be plenty smart and still not be able to 'face. Believe me though, when
Sander
was 'faced, the 'puters and their 'bots performed flawlessly.

You can imagine what happened. Me a lonely 12 year old; not much personal contact with other people; suddenly confronted with a quiet unassuming fellow who could perform miracles with ‘puters and ‘bots.

I got a bad case of hero worship.

In my book, one of his most amazing feats was the ability to set himself spinning in space with such a perfect twist that he could do several hundred revolutions without drifting far enough to bump into anything. He claimed it put his mind at rest like yoga (whatever that is). The few times I tried it, it made me want to barf.

Sander brewed a serious microgravity beer. Had a little spinner-vat and special yeast. He'd spend hours tinkering with "The System" as he called it. Dad said it was the finest beer he'd ever had.

Best was just watching him work the 'bots with one of the 'puters. They would work in perfect unison performing tasks so smoothly that it was like a ballet. You'd never see a 'bot he was controlling in standby, waiting for its portion of a task to come up. No, it would be doing something useful while waiting. It seemed to be a point of pride with him. Once when he had a 'bot doing an intermittent task that had a measly thirty second wait period during which it really couldn't accomplish anything else useful, he had the ‘bot spin during the breaks. The ‘bot would spin free, then suddenly break spin, perform its task and spin up again. He'd only done it a few times though, when a laser came sailing over, apparently pitched by one of the other 'bots while I wasn't paying attention. The previously spinning 'bot started using that laser to punch holes that were needed in a piece of work across the room. It'd task, pivot, fire the laser a few times and then turn back to its original task. I hated to even think about the kind of control it would take to have a 'bot perform close tolerance laser punches from across the room like that.

The guy was so talented that I wasn’t surprised to hear Mom and Dad talking about him one night, almost as if they were suspicious. Dad was saying, “I don’t know why a guy as talented as he is would need to take a job with us. He could get a better paying job anywhere from low Earth orbit to Ganymede.”

There was a little silence, then Mom said slowly, “I don’t know. He seems kinda sad. As if something
terrible
happened in his life. I asked him once, but he said he didn’t want to talk about it… He didn’t deny something bad happening though. Maybe his wife or even his whole family died or something like that? Maybe he’s just looking for a quiet place to recover.”

Sander'd been with us about two, maybe three months when the other 'roid happened by. Now I know
everyone
has already heard all about that other 'roid, but I've got to tell the story my way.

We first picked it up with our collision screens. Not that it was going to collide, which is an incredibly rare event in the belt, but our screen had been set up to warn us of anything even coming close. We’d been hoping to find a carbonaceous chunk of rock which might provide us with some of the raw material for Mom's alloys. They were costing a fortune to import and she was having to avoid certain kinds of jobs because the price of alloying ingredients kept her from being cost competitive. So we analyzed images of this one and decided it must be carbonaceous from its low albedo. We hadn't had much hope of finding such a thing since they’re usually farther out, but there’re a lot of freaky orbits in the belt.

A lot of talk ensued, weighing the pros and cons of trying to warp part of it into
our
orbit. The obvious thing was for Sander to take our boat over to it, blow it apart and bring in the most appropriate chunk. That way Mom and Dad could pretty much keep on schedule. Some of it might take an extra hand, but I could go along and help. This led to some heated discussions between my parents about whether I was old enough, whether Sander could be trusted with me, whether Sander could be trusted with the boat and so on.

I pointed out that my folks would still have Sander's boat and he'd been trustworthy so far. After
way
too much discussion, to my delight he and I loaded up and started out.

On the way over we talked about orbital mechanics. He taught me a lot by taking me through those calculations. How long it would take to accelerate how big a chunk of the 'roid sufficiently to match its orbit to the Rock. It already matched our orbit fairly well or it would have been impossible to take any more than a small chunk. Mom and Dad had decided that we could spend up to two weeks pushing on our selected piece. We ran some trial solutions on the 'puter and decided that if it massed more than 5x10
⁵
kilograms, establishing a transfer orbit would take too long. We also discussed how we might place our charge in the hopes of blowing a chunk
bigger
than 5x10
⁵
in the right direction so that we’d be able to move it with less push.

Those were glory days for me since my hero worship of Sander was in full flower. Havin' him spend all that time talkin' to me really made me feel important, even though I knew deep inside that he really didn't have anything better to do.

I got the feeling he
liked
talking to me and felt quite proud of it.

When we got to the ‘roid, we nudged up against it, gave it a push, read our accelerometers, and calculated its mass at 4x10
¹⁰
kilos. It was mostly black indicating a lot of carbon and its low density suggested the same. It was really rough and irregular and didn't have much spin. It shouldn't be too hard to break a few big chunks off it with properly placed charges. Sander pointed out that the deeper we were inside it when we started lasering the holes for the charges, the less time it would take to place deep charges. So we took a pass around it looking for a crack of some kind we could get down into. We found a crevice on the far side big enough to drive the boat into, which we did.

Of course, you know that's where we found the alien craft.

I didn't know what the hell was goin' on at first. Just that Sander had stopped us cold and was hangin' there in his acceleration web with a blank look on his face. So I looked where he was lookin’.

There on one roughhewn black face of the crevice, fixed in the center of the sharply outlined area lit by our work lights, I saw the aliens’ boat. Now, you know it didn't look much like one of the little craft that traveled the belt. I don’t even think I recognized it as a boat right away.

But I could tell it was something manufactured.

It didn’t take long for me to figure out it hadn’t been made by humans.

By its streamlined shape you could tell that it was meant for atmospheric flight. On that basis alone you knew it wasn't human. No reason to have streamlined shapes out in the belt; ergo there wasn't anything human
and
streamlined in the belt.

I remember the sweat breakin' out on my forehead and the ringing in my ears. My own voice sounded real distant as it trailed off on whatever trivial question I had been jabberin' about at the time.

To some extent, I was filled with wonder and awe over the secrets that might be held by such an artifact. Partly I was considering the possibility that there might be live aliens aboard training some kind of “blaster” on us, though even at that moment, I think I knew that the artifact had been long abandoned, maybe even hundreds of millennia ago.

Mostly, though, I was terrified of Sander. Even though I'd been worshiping the air he hung in a minute ago, my mind had already snapped around 180
°
with the awful and certain realization of what this kind of discovery could do to a man. At that time, you may know, anything you found in the belt was your exclusive property unless someone could prove that they had visited it first, marked it, and laid claim to it at Ceres. It was the kind of discovery that could have had
brothers
at each other’s throats, much less a man and a kid he barely knew.

If you found it while working for someone else it belonged to them.

My sphincters were twitching. I knew
immediately
that I was the only thing that stood between Sander and unimaginable wealth, or at least probable wealth assuming that even a
few
technical secrets were hidden in yon artifact! Space me, move the alien boat, blow up the 'roid.

Come back with a sad story about how I got caught in the explosion somehow.

Then all he’d have to do is quit his job, wait a while, then come back and "find" the artifact. He’d be rich beyond anyone’s dreams.

I could hear the blood roaring in my ears and I'd been staring at Sander with eyes that hadn't blinked for a minute when he slowly turned to me. "Well kid," he said. "It looks like you and your folks have really struck it big this time."

I wanted to believe him. Make that, “I did believe him.” Yet somehow I couldn’t.

For the next six hours, while we were detaching that thing from the 'roid and loading it onto the freight boom of our boat, my heart shot up and down my throat in irregular cycles. We didn't want to damage the alien ship, but it was firmly anchored to the 'roid. We finally used some small torches to cut the rock away from the anchor points rather than cut the anchors. Seems kind of silly now, the discussion we had about whether or not to cut the anchors. Course, at the time, we had no way of knowing that there wasn't a tool in the solar system that
would
cut those damn anchors!

Anyway, we were having trouble cutting the rock away with the 'bots and so Sander suggested that we suit up and "get a closer look." A couple of dozen scenarios involving torches "accidentally" cuttin' me in half went through my mind, but I managed to follow him out there and sure enough, with the additional perspective that being there gives you, we had the alien boat loose in no time.

From pictures of the alien boat, you know that it was kind of a flattened ovoid with a fin toward one end and anchor points on the underside. There weren't any kind of regular attachment points of course. We had to use cable to lash it to the freight boom.

Then believe it or not we drilled and blew the 'roid. It seems silly in retrospect, but we figured the alien boat might not pan out and there may never be another carbonaceous 'roid this close. We picked out a likely 3X10
⁴
kg fragment already travelling somewhat our way, attached to it, stopped its rotation and started accelerating it into a transfer orbit to the Rock. 

We looked the artifact over with 'bots, but of course didn't suit up and look at it in person while under acceleration. We lost one 'bot for the duration of the trip by sending it into the alien airlock. That’s how we figured out that we couldn't communicate with a ‘bot through the walls of the artifact.

During that time all my dreams were nightmares. Sometimes about slimy aliens, but usually in those dreams I had Sander chasing me on, and on, and on... He’d be accompanied by a couple of 'bots with lasers and I wouldn’t feel like I had a chance in hell.

I wanted to radio ahead to tell my folks what we’d found, but Sander said we needed to keep radio silence about the artifact. That made me even more uneasy.

To my amazement, I was still in one piece when we arrived back at the Rock. At first I was moved to worship again by Sander's selflessness, but shortly thereafter started worrying about what he might do to my whole family.

Well when my folks saw the artifact, I got to see them go through the same kind of awe/wonder/fear/panic thing I’d gone through a few days before. Their approach to it was to immediately offer Sander a quarter share in any profits. The profits looked to be astronomical anyway so it seemed a smart thing to do.

Then they did the stupid thing.

They filed a "description of claim" with Ceres by laser. Figured that with the claim published and Sander staked to a quarter, he'd be crazy to backstab us. He'd never be able to turn in an individual claim if something bad happened to all of us. There’d be a hell of an inquiry.

I was heading to my room that night when I heard them talking. Sander said, “You filed a claim with
Ceres
?!”

My mother said, “Yes! With the claim published in all of our names, we don’t have to worry about…” here, she probably realized she was about to say,
you jumping the claim,
so she stumbled a little, “um, someone trying to jump the claim.”

“My God!” Sander said, as if he couldn’t believe his ears. “You don’t know… no, I guess you don’t,” he said sadly.

“Don’t know what.”

“The claims office at Ceres, it leaks like a sieve. There are people there who probably called their pirate contacts before they even finished filing your claim,” he said, sounding kind of sad.

As expected, we were receiving almost constant laser traffic within six hours of the filing. It took a while for word to get around the solar system, even at the speed of light, but there are a
lot
of programs out there that search message traffic for things that might be of financial/technical/scientific use and they ALL came down on an alien artifact. We were working with our lawyer, sorting offers. Let me tell you
he
was one happy son.

In all the excitement, I slacked my chores and so it was 36 hours before I checked the household 'puter and found out we had an unannounced visitor
burning
in, due in 18 hours! Whoever it was, they were pulling high Gs.

We back figured their orbit to try to find out where they were from. They hadn’t originated from any of the known belt communities. We searched our incoming message traffic and
no one
had contacted us to say they were coming.