Treasure Asteroid by Manly Wade Wellman (Astounding, September 1938) is, unlike his notable Pithecanthropus Rejectus in the January issue, standard pulp fare that begins with the hero of the story, Captain Drury Banion, slugging a guy in a club when they make a pass at one of the singing-girls. When Banion subsequently finds out the man is the Martian traffic boss of Spaceways, Inc., he loses his job as a spaceship pilot. However, it isn’t long before a shady Martian character called Guxl approaches him to do an (illegal) flight and, after initially rebuffing the offer, Banion ends up taking it when the girl from the club slugs a cop outside the door to his room.
Banion soon finds himself flying Guxl and two shady Earthmen to an asteroid where there is “proto”, an illicit substance that is the lost—and, according to legend, guarded—treasure of a long-dead pirate called Corsair Mell. During the journey the singing-girl, Cassa Fabia, turns up as a stowaway, and is put to work as the ship’s domestic—and it isn’t long before Banion is boxing the ears of one of the Earthmen for making a pass at her (that woman is nothing but trouble, as they would say in the less enlightened thirties).
When the ship arrives at Asteroid 1204, Guxl and the two Earthmen set off to retrieve the proto—first wrecking the fuel lines to make sure Banion can’t leave without them, and to give him something to do while they are gone. Tarsus, one of the Earthmen, returns on his own and tries to make a deal with Banion, but they are interrupted when the other two arrive followed by a large black shape that attacks the ship. It stops its assault when night falls.
At sunrise the next day the (obviously solar-powered) guard starts attacking the ship once more, and Guxl and the two Earthmen (spoiler) go out to destroy it. They are unsuccessful however, and Hommoday, the other Earthman, gets ripped to pieces when he can’t get back into the ship fast enough. Guxl and Tarsus later die when the attacker punches through the hull, but Banion and Fabia get to an airtight part of the ship. Fabia improvises a spacesuit and, when it gets dark again, goes and retrieves Tarsus’s body so Banion has a spacesuit to finish his repairs (the improvised one wouldn’t have fitted him). However, the guard returns to attack the ship again before Banion is finished—so Fabia goes out and sprays it with the same fast setting enamel that she used to make her suit airtight: the guard grinds to a halt. Fabia later explains to Banion that it was obviously solar powered and, by the way, she is a Terrestrial League Policeman who organised his sacking and stowed away to recover the proto.
This is a formulaic pulp tale, and all a bit unlikely, but it’s fast paced, the solar-powered guard (and way it is incapacitated) is a neat enough idea, and it is notable and atypical for the period that Fabia (the “girl”) is ultimately the story’s brains and hero.
** (Average). 6,100 words. Story link.