Analog SFF, July-August 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Smelting by concentrated sunlight?” she asked.

  “About a quarter million tons."

  Her helmet shook. “You couldn't do that scale on Earth."

  “I suppose not. Environmental impact statements and all."

  A habitat wheel revolved above the mirror's backside. The flivver's docking ring looped a rim hook. They climbed into a foyer. Cameras scanned. Grady greeted them inside.

  “A woman,” Grady said as they lifted helmets. “I thought they quit making those."

  “Cut the cute,” Roger said. “She's my client."

  “Hokay. Roger, I owe you, but be discreet. Even if you were still Company, accessing the human resources data base for personal use is verbot."

  Grady led them through a deserted office area to a cubicle. He plopped in front of the workstation. “Keep a lookout,” he said, plugging passwords into screen windows.

  Roger scanned the partition tops. Presently, Grady announced, “Forty-three employees with Thomas in their names."

  “We're assuming he worked for Ceres Mining,” Rebecca said.

  “Everyone around Ceres has,” Grady said. “No sane person pays their own way out here. They sign with CM and the company covers the ticket."

  “I paid my own way,” Rebecca said.

  Grady pretended to be fully absorbed by the screen.

  “Rebecca,” Roger said. “You recognize any names?"

  “No."

  “Would it help to view photos?"

  “No. Hmm. Instead of Tom, try Huck."

  “Huck?” Grady asked.

  “H-U-C-K. My father said if Tom didn't come, Huck would."

  Grady checked. “No Hucks."

  Huck, Roger mulled. Then inspiration: “I take it your father was out here, too, and that's how he met Tom and Huck."

  “Yes. So?"

  “What's your father's name?"

  “Alberto. Why?"

  “Grady. Try Alberto Sanchez."

  The screen reported Alberto Sanchez, Service April 16, 2037 to May 5, 2039.

  “I didn't know he worked for Ceres Mining,” Rebecca said.

  “The Assignment field says he was a mixer,” Roger said. “Unusual."

  “A mixer?"

  “Slang for nanotechnician."

  “Oh, yes. He was a nanotech."

  “Let's see if we can find any other mixers who worked with Alberto Sanchez around the same time. Maybe they know something about Tom or Huck."

  The query shuffled employees, filtering all but five. All were hired and terminated on the same dates as Alberto Sanchez. The Contact field stated EARTH RETURN for three, LOCATION-UNKNOWN for the fourth. And the fifth:

  “Melvin Barrow,” Grady read. “Ceres coordinates."

  Roger calculated. The man dwelt in the depths of Obarator Rift.

  * * * *

  The flivver dove into the main shaft. Painted numerals on the walls announced depths in hundred-meter units. At the seventy level, Roger consulted the laser-gyro and streaked into an S-curving gallery. They were so deep inside Ceres that the atmosphere had thickened enough to support pockets of mist, which reflected the headlight beam with a series of milky veils.

  “You're heading in circles,” Rebecca said after several minutes of branching tunnels.

  “More like a spiral.” He tapped a glove against the gyro. “These numbers are our three-dimensional coordinates—longitude, latitude, altitude/depth. I'm matching them to Grady's report."

  “So you don't know your way around?"

  “These tunnels closed before my time."

  “I noticed the lack of traffic.” Her hand touched the clasp on her handbag.

  The tunnel widened into a cavern whose walls vanished into the gloom beyond the headlamp beam. Light gleamed off cylinders so tall that roof stalactites had been broken off in accommodation. Roger landed in a deserted parking lot.

  “It's like a lost city,” Rebecca said, gaping at the avenues of towers.

  “A mixing facility,” Roger said. “Those are nanojuice tanks, I know that much."

  Plucking the gyro from its dashboard mount, Roger left the flivver and tracked the coordinates to a side passage, where a flatbed car rested on rail tracks. They gripped the siding and Roger pressed the panel button. The car lurched down the track, into a bend.

  “You have any idea where you're going?” Rebecca asked.

  “Not since leaving Earth.” In the silence: “Sorry. Old joke."

  The track tilted sideways. The car hit a hundred KPH, looping the curving passage. Centripetal force, Roger judged, mimicked Mars surface gee.

  They merged into a wider tunnel. A train of huts rolled on parallel tracks. Their car automatically docked with the rear porch. Roger pressed the airlock buzzer.

  “Don't often have visitors,” Melvin Barrow said after introductions had been exchanged. He wore a rumpled corduroy shirt and looked to be late middle-aged, about eighty or so. “Come on in. And call me Mel."

  Rebecca and Roger took opposite ends of the sofa. The chocolate-colored Labrador sniffed, then drooped its jowls onto the throw rug. Mel muted the TV.

  “Little Becky Sanchez,” he said. “Must have seen a dozen vids of your childhood. Now you're all grown."

  Her complexion wasn't dark enough to conceal the blush. “So, Mel, how well did you know my father?"

  “Enough to tolerate his wine. But I only met him here after the Jersey Goo, ‘course."

  “You mean the New Jersey Nanoindustrial Release Incident,” Roger said.

  “Well, the media circus called it the ‘Jersey Goo.’ God, the nonsense! A cupful of molecular-separation nanojuice leaks from one recycling plant, and there's a tri-state evacuation! And the lawsuits! Every circuit card that malfunctioned on the Eastern Seaboard was grounds for a class action settlement! Course it was overreaction, but tell that to the public."

  “My father mentioned it,” Rebecca said. “It was why he had to leave Earth."

  “The whole molecular-separation industry was driven off Earth because of liability and regulatory costs. We nanotechies had to follow."

  “But I saw that smelting mirror in orbit here. How could you compete with something that size?"

  Rebecca was taking her time, Roger noticed, in getting to the business of finding Tom or Huck.

  “Politics,” Mel replied. “The nanotech lobby demanded subsidies. They got ‘em ‘til Congress decided the cost-vote ratio was too high. Then we were shut down."

  “Then you joined Ceres Mining,” Rebecca said.

  “Yep, they had nanotech projects too. Marginal, experimental affairs. Then they let us go. And then us nanotechies learned the government had abandoned the facility here. Someone stripped the parts for black market. Me, I set up house here in the old control center. No plans to return Earthside. Got no money, no family."

  Curiosity getting the better of him, Roger asked, “And Rebecca's father?"

  “Alberto was different. His ex-wife died, and he went Earthside to care for you, Becky. But I heard he got arrested right off the shuttle."

  “For stealing public property,” she said. “From this place here, I suppose."

  “Becky, your father didn't take a gram of equipment. Only took the residual juice from the tanks. Which was about to denature soon, anyway. Hardly worth a penny. Can't see any fuss over that."

  “He took nanojuice,” Roger said, perking. And as if he didn't suspect: “What for?"

  “Alberto planned a molecular extraction operation of his own. Wasn't that crazy. The juice was already brewed. And some places on Ceres, the rock's so porous that all you have to do is sprinkle the juice and the platinum oozes right out."

  Roger asked: “How big an operation?"

  Rebecca glanced sharply. Mel shrugged.

  “Hard to say. Problem is, the process is snail-slow unless you have catalytic boosters, which we lack the infrastructure to fabricate here. Given the diffusion rates, Alberto probably went home before the first kilo was leached. S
orry, Becky."

  “But he told me,” Rebecca said, “contact Tom or Huck, and they would give me the platinum!"

  “Never heard Alberto mention any Tom or Huck, outside of his discourses on Mark Twain."

  “Twain,” Roger said, wrinkling his forehead. “What does—"

  The sentence died on his tongue. Rebecca was glaring.

  “How's your father these days?” Mel asked. “Did he ever go back to graduate school?"

  “No,” Rebecca said quietly. “He's ... okay."

  The Labrador on the rug, aware of the discomfort, did an eye-dance of darting glances. Rebecca abruptly arose, fidgeting with her helmet.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Guess I'll find the mine somehow."

  “The mine?” Mel snorted again. “That what you're looking for?"

  “You know where it is?"

  “Your father wanted me to partner, took me there once. I'll give you directions."

  * * * *

  Helmets reaffixed, they returned to the sunlit surface world. While Roger refueled at the hyox station on the threshold of the Rift, Rebecca handed over ten Bank of Ceres notes.

  “I hope this covers it,” she said crisply. “Thanks for your help."

  The bills were about half of what he'd normally earn in an afternoon. He returned two and said, “How are you going to find the mine? By yourself?"

  She gave a nervous glance toward the other pumps. Voices carried far, over space suit transceivers.

  “I'll manage."

  She started walking toward the Ceres Transit stop.

  “I'm sorry,” he called.

  She turned back. “For what?"

  “You know. Grabbing control of the conversation with Mel. I should know better. But I'd like to help."

  She grimaced. “Lately, people have been entirely too helpful."

  “Well, I realize I'm an unknown quantity, but so is everyone else here. And you still need help."

  “I don't have money—and I don't want charity. I'm old enough to know that when a guy offers something for free in the beginning, he usually demands a certain kind of payment in the end."

  “I understand. We'll keep this professional. How about ... ten percent finder's fee?"

  “Five. And you'll do more than drive."

  Roger didn't want to seem a pushover, but her expression said not to haggle.

  The hydrogen and oxygen pumps blinked shut-off. Roger and Rebecca buckled into the flivver. As the vehicle arched over the mesas of Ferdinandea, Rebecca studied the driving directions Mel had transmitted to her computer tablet.

  “'South of the catapult,'” she read. “He means, the electromagnetic catapult that launches shipments to Earth?"

  “No doubt,” Roger replied, veering south. They overflew a straight line that ran for kilometers, its evenly spaced lights glowing bright against the low albedo of the natural rock.

  “Next. Proserpina Highlands and Palermo Crater."

  Roger knew the highlands, and soon the flivver was bounding over the spires of the Aventine Mountains. But then came the uninhabited wastes of the Ceresian Outback, mottled with ice-bottomed craters whose names had been forgotten even by the planetologists who had christened them early in the century.

  “Palermo,” Roger muttered, plugging the gyro into his computer tablet's atlas.

  “You're lost?"

  “I know where we are, give or take a hemisphere."

  “Roger ... assuming we find it, do you think I can operate my father's mine successfully?"

  Roger took a moment to absorb her first-time use of his name. “Well, for years, there's been an economic tug of war between asteroid miners and Earthside nanotechnologists. The nanotechies claimed it wasn't competitive to mine in space, because molecular separation was far less energy intensive. But energy costs are almost negligible here."

  “You get it all from solar power."

  “Yeah, even the EM catapult is solar-powered. As a result, molecular separation hasn't been competitive for a while."

  “But Mel said all you'd have to do to get platinum out of the mine was spray on the nanojuice."

  “That's cost-effective with free nanojuice. But nanojuice usually requires an army of Ph.D.s to oversee the synthesis process. It's not cheap. And the juice your father took would have spoiled years ago."

  She had faced him while he watched the horizon for signs of Palermo's rim. Now she turned forward and shifted in her seat.

  Finally, he broke the silence: “Mel mentioned your father and Mark Twain. What's that about?"

  She half smirked. “Do you know who Mark Twain is?"

  “Famous American author, twentieth century."

  “More, nineteenth. It has to do with my father wanting to teach early U.S. Literature. Nanotech was just to put food on the table."

  “I know how that works."

  “Anyway, dad was really into Mark Twain. He read Tom Sawyer to me when I was five years old. And I suspect I'm named after Becky Thatcher, Tom's girlfriend.” Her teeth flashed an unexpectedly broad grin. “Which I don't appreciate, since she's a stereotypical Southern Belle. Very emotional, very fragile.” Rebecca stared skyward. “Couldn't last long here, that's for sure."

  "Tom Sawyer. That's one of Twain's novels, right?"

  "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is his most famous."

  “Wasn't there another character, Huck Something?"

  “Huckleberry Finn. Tom's best friend."

  “Tom and Huck. Rebecca, the coincidence troubles me."

  “You mean, my father the Twain fanatic, meeting a Tom and Huck in real life."

  “Did you ask him about that?"

  “I ... wasn't able to."

  The crosshairs flashed on the computer map. Roger descended toward a rubble-strewn crater bed.

  Mindful of fuel, Roger swooped over the plain of Palermo Crater. It was stuccoed with boulders and rocks, the debris ejected from the impacts that had formed neighboring craters. In the center, a mound rose in pinnacles like the towers of a fantasy castle.

  Passing over the cliffs of the rim, his headlight beam shifted shadows. Every cleft yielded a wall of rock and frost, but never a deeper recess.

  “Where's the mine?” Rebecca asked. “Mel said we couldn't miss it."

  Roger saw a glint as bright as Jupiter, beneath the crater rim. On approach, he realized it was his flivver's own beam, reflected by the window of a shack. Spotting a flat clearing on the crater floor, he landed.

  Rebecca bounded out. Her first jumps were unsure and wild, but she soon mastered the knack of twitching her feet to mimic a normal stride in Ceres gravity. Roger hopped over. She gazed to the east. Translucent pillars of predawn light streamed from the rim.

  “Dust,” he said. “Electrostatically levitated by solar wind."

  “It's beautiful, in its own way."

  The shack lay nestled between cliff protrusions that Roger judged, by the angle of the celestial pole, would shield from solar flares during the daytime hours.

  “The airlock is open,” she said.

  “Meaning it's abandoned."

  Their boots trod upon smooth dust. Inside the lock, their helmet beams played over a bare desk, a fold-up chair, wall hooks where a hammock might have hung—and, in the corner, a wine-press, filtration device, and fermentation vat. Boxes, mechanical parts, and electrical components lay scattered across the floor.

  Rebecca slipped around the desk. Against the far wall, the floor glittered in her helmet lamplight like a field of diamonds. She picked up a fragment of glass. It was part of a bottle, Roger saw, like the one she'd had on the table at Wink's bar.

  “He wasn't a heavy drinker,” she said. “He never smashed things."

  “Rebecca, he lost his job and was alone for a long time—"

  “He's not like that!"

  Feeling the rage in her voice, Roger looked away. His eyes rested on the smooth ground outside the shack. He frowned.

  “Maybe you're right."

  She
joined him outside and watched him scrutinize the dust.

  “Just your footprints and mine,” he said. “Yet your father must have walked here a hundred times."

  “That's right! There's no wind to blow the tracks away. So where are they?"

  “Offhand guess? Somebody came after your father left. They searched the shack, knocked everything over. Then they swept the prints to cover their tracks. Which, unfortunately, also conceals the path to the mine."

  “But it's got to be nearby."

  “Yeah."

  They bounced—three meters at a time—down the incline to the edge of the clearing where the flivver rested. While Roger examined the surrounding rocks, Rebecca held her computer tablet skyward.

  “I'm linked to the comsat, but all I get is a call tone,” she said after a few minutes. “Maybe the signal isn't penetrating the cave."

  “His TV worked. He's tapped into the Rift's communications spine."

  “Mel, answer!"

  Roger halted and crouched. A few grains of dust, barely visible—but yes!

  He straightened and saw her in profile. Unaware that he was watching, she had let her guard down. As she gazed at the untwinkling stars, she looked both lovely and bewildered.

  “Rebecca."

  She slowly faced him.

  “I realize I'm only a stranger,” he said, “but I'd like to know what I'm getting into. I saw how you reacted when Mel asked about your father. Is there a reason we can't contact your father and find out where the mine is?"

  Silence ensued. Roger feared she might demand a return to Alphaville. But then she said, “Yes, there's a reason."

  “Is he in prison?"

  She paused. “Worse than prison."

  “Is he—dead?"

  “Maybe ... worse."

  “It might help if you told me."

  “There's not much to tell.” She added quietly: “He's in hypersleep."

  "Hypersleep. Why?"

  “Because the government regards theft of nanotechnology as a national security issue. Technically, dad is charged with treason."

  “Just for taking platinum-extraction nanojuice that was past its shelf date?"

  “He was accused of stealing a lot more than that. The charges were made anonymously, and I know they're false! But he's being held without trial. A prosecutor told me that my father doesn't deserve a trial, because traitors don't deserve trials. People on Earth think that way."