A small mining spaceship is floating around the Oort cloud, when it detects an asteroid that could contain valuable minerals. But when they haul it in, the math doesn’t add up with its total mass and it is messing up their Newtonian physics calculations for the spacecraft.

Analog January 1991

It is an intriguing setup for a story, where a small crew tries to deal with something that is beyond their scientific capabilities, but they know they have something special on their hands. The story follows a familiar plot with sort of a cat-and-mouse game through the solar system, as a pirate ship has gotten a scent of them and their special cargo.

This novelette is reasonably well written and the crew members have well defined personalities and character development. But it isn’t more than that, a tad too long and I wished the strange material and its odd physics was used for something a little more interesting than hide and seek.

Read in Analog January 1991
Rating: 2