Momentum: Betrayal In The Asteroid Belt

Two men have spent weeks installing navigational beacons across the asteroid belt. The job is dangerous, the isolation worse, and the discovery of a rare mineral called rotenite has turned partnership into suspicion.

Ballard and Walton both know what those glittering nuggets mean. Wealth beyond imagination. Enough to change the rest of their lives. But long before they return to civilization, something else begins to grow between them. Every glance feels like a test. Every silence feels like a calculation. By the time they reach their final asteroid marker, trust has already collapsed.

Then Walton makes his move.

Ballard finds himself locked outside their ship with less than two hours of oxygen and a hull designed to survive meteors. Tools scatter the rocky surface of the asteroid. Welding torches, jackhammers, cutting beams. One by one he tries them all while the clock drains away and the stars look down without mercy.

Each failure leaves him with fewer options and less air.

Momentum by Charles Dye is a tense survival story set in the cold emptiness of the asteroid belt. What begins as a quiet dispute over sudden wealth becomes a race against vacuum itself, where one man must outthink both physics and betrayal before time runs out.

Charles Dye published several science fiction stories in the early 1950s, appearing in magazines such as Fantastic Universe. “Momentum,” published in 1952, remains his best-known story. It is remembered for its tight pacing, stark setting, and a clever use of real physics at the heart of its life-or-death problem.