 Why were Parker and Queazy voyaging on the trip looking for an asteroid?
Interplanetary Hauling Company. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Bob Parker, looking through the photo-amplifiers at the wedge-shaped asteroid, was plainly flabbergasted. Not in his wildest imaginings had he thought they would actually find what they were looking for. Queazy, my boy, can you imagine it? Not only that, we're rich! Queazy discharged their tremendous inertia into the motive-tubes in such a manner that the big, powerful ship was moving at the same rate as the asteroid below—47.05 miles per second. "She checks down to the last dimension," Bob chortled, working with slide-rule and logarithm tables. "Now all we have to do is find out if she's made of tungsten, iron, quartz crystals, and cinnabar! Mr. Andrew S. Burnside, you owe us five hundred and fifty thousand dollars!" "Better take it easy," he advised, "until I land the ship and we use the atomic whirl spectroscope to determine the composition of the asteroid." While Queazy—so called because his full name was Quentin Zuyler—dropped the ship straight down to the smooth surface of the asteroid, and clamped it tight with magnetic grapples, Bob flung open the lazarette, brought out two space-suits. Moments later, they were outside the ship, with star-powdered infinity spread to all sides. In the ship, the ethergram from Andrew S. Burnside, of Philadelphia, one of the richest men in the world, still lay on the deck-plates. Bob Parker had received that ethergram three weeks ago. And if The Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co., hadn't been about to go on the rocks (chiefly due to the activities of Saylor & Saylor, a rival firm) neither Bob nor Queazy would have thought of sending an answering ethergram to Burnside stating that they would fill the order. And yet, if by some chance there was such a rigidly specified asteroid, their financial worries would be over.
 From the request of Andrew Burnside to purchase it
 The Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co. was in difficult competition with Saylor & Saylor to get to it first.  The Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co. had to have it to prove their business was legitimate.  From the request of Andrew Burnside to purchase it  From the request of Andrew Burnside to destroy it