Analog SFF, July-August 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “But a trial is how you determine the truth! You can't automatically believe accusations!"

  “I think they know they made a mistake. That's why they're holding him in hypersleep. If he was conscious, he could make legal appeals."

  “Well, they can't keep him in hypersleep forever. There's risk of brain damage."

  “I know. Five percent after five years, ten after six. It goes up fast.” Her voice lowered. “This is year five."

  “I'm ... sorry.” Roger felt his cheeks redden at the inadequacy of his words.

  She raised moist-rimmed eyes. “I can't afford attorney fees. That's why I need this mine. But all I have is the text message he smuggled over the nurse's phone, just before they put him in. I thought it would be easy. Just, ‘Go to Ceres, meet Tom.’”

  His earphones transmitted her sniffing.

  “Come here,” he said. “Please."

  When she had hobbled over, he pointed to the rocks edging the clearing.

  “See?” he said. “The dust shook off your father's boots as he walked here."

  Tracing the faint trickle, Roger pointed toward the central peaks.

  For an hour they circuited the peaks. Roger thought of the walls of Jericho.

  Above the cliffs, the pinnacles resembled minarets and accusing fingers. Earth gravity and weather erosion would not have tolerated such ungainly formations, but here they might endure eternally. They almost had, except over one pile of rubble on the far side. Which was where the dust path terminated.

  “This isn't natural,” Roger said.

  Together, they heaved rocks off the pile. After minutes of mutual huffing, he realized it was too deep.

  A hippopotamus-sized boulder occupied the center of the landslide. Climbing behind, Roger pushed with his legs. Rebecca helped. But even in Ceres gravity, some things are beyond human strength.

  “We'll need explosives,” Rebecca said.

  “I've got better than explosives. I've got rocket fuel."

  He soon had the flivver hovering over the landslide. The winches unwound and Rebecca wrapped the cables around the boulder, fastening the hooks tight. She retreated with a thumbs-up. He pushed the thrust lever to one ton, two tons ... high enough to buck him unconscious should the cables snap.

  The flivver's main thruster flame licked the rocks. Silently, the boulder levitated. With fuel critical, Roger dragged the boulder only a meter. He released the cables, relanded the flivver, and trotted back to the peak.

  It took a moment for Roger's eyes to readjust from a scene lit by rocket glare to one lit by starlight and helmet lamps. Then he, too, saw the dark mouth, a gash barely wide enough for a grown man. He certainly wouldn't be flying the flivver through that.

  Large white letters were scrawled above the entrance, in what Roger assumed was synthetic chalk. They read, simply: MCDOUGAL'S.

  “Who's ‘McDougal?'” Roger asked. “Should we be looking for him, too?"

  “No,” Rebecca said. “There's a cave in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It's owned by a man named McDougal."

  Roger tilted his helmet. “So ... you think this is your father's whimsy?"

  “See how the letters lean? That's how he always wrote on my birthday cards."

  “All right. Great. Then this it. Guess we'd better start, huh?"

  He took a step. Rebecca, fixed in place, stared at the entrance. As the seconds stretched, Roger realized her lack of reply was a reply.

  “You should stay outside,” he said. “You can call for help if there's trouble."

  “No, I'll come.” Her breath was deep and fast, almost hyperventilating. “It's just that ... nothing's ever affected me like that. Dozens of horror movies, and nothing's ever scared me as much as that."

  “What are you talking about?"

  The labored sound of her breathing made him wonder if her suit was leaking.

  “I told you,” she said. “When I was five years old, my dad read Tom Sawyer to me. At the end, Tom and Becky are touring this cave—I mean, McDougal's cave—when they get lost. They wander for days and days and can't find the opening. Their candles go out and they almost die in the darkness. It's ... the thing that scares me the most."

  Roger shone the beam deep inside the hole. He didn't feel terrified, but he did feel enough unease to appreciate Rebecca's trepidation.

  “We'll have to go a ways,” he said. “Ceres is a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid. The metal deposits come from meteor impacts. They're buried deep, like raisins in pudding. If you've got claustrophobia—"

  “I don't. I'm fine in buildings, spaceships, everything else. Even the Rift didn't bother me that much. But this..."

  * * * *

  He groped for encouraging words, but then she stiffened.

  “Well,” she said huskily. “It's not as if we'll run into Injun Joe, is it? Let me get my handbag."

  She returned from the flivver, bearing her handbag. His mouth was still open as she brushed him aside.

  * * * *

  When he had squeezed meters within the gap, the telecom status bar on his helmet heads-up display vanished, signifying loss of contact with humanity. To Roger, it was more disconcerting than the silence of the vacuum or the darkness of the passage.

  He took the lead. Stepping over boulders, they bent low as the roof and floor closed together. At the passage's neck, they got on their knees. Then it became even tighter, and they pulled their bodies with their hands. The constant flexing against suit linings made hard work.

  After the bottleneck came a large cavern. Finger-thin stalactites and stalagmites jutted everywhere, many white as fangs from the frost. The needles were bent at midpoint, all at the same angle. Roger surmised that the floor and roof had drastically tilted over the eons. And for mineralized water to drip, the cavern must have been pressurized and warmer, once.

  The ice-free wall ahead proclaimed: ALADDIN'S PALACE. Roger raised an eyebrow.

  “It's definitely dad's writing,” Rebecca said. “And the over descriptive, tourist-trappy name is right out of the cave in Tom Sawyer."

  Additional scrawlings designated the branches into other chambers: AREA 1,AREA 2, and Crystalarium/FAC.

  “No crosses,” Rebecca murmured.

  “What?"

  “Nothing."

  Trying to make conversation: “Was there a ‘Crystalarium’ in Tom Sawyer's cave?"

  “No. What does ‘Fac’ mean?"

  “Facility. Ceres Mining-speak."

  “So you worked at Ceres Mining, too."

  “For a while."

  “You don't strike me as the miner type."

  “Which is?"

  “Not that they're stupid. Just that they must have a high tolerance for boredom."

  “And you think my tolerance is low?"

  “The way you drive..."

  “Let's keep moving. We've only got a couple hours of suit power."

  They took the branch marked for the facility. Soon the passage widened into another cavern, where flakes of dust were drifting from the roof.

  “Cave dandruff,” she said.

  Roger brushed a chip off a sleeve. “Probably a small tremor."

  “Ceres is geologically active?"

  “No. But it's in the middle of the Asteroid Belt, and it's always colliding with something. Settling aftershocks last decades, sometimes. The ice deposits have a high plasticity under pressure, too. So the ground is always shifting."

  “That doesn't sound safe."

  “Yes and no. I've flown through a cave-in, relatively unbruised."

  “Low gravity makes it seem like slow motion."

  “Yeah. Course, you can still get crushed, if you just sit and watch."

  The drizzle of dust continued. Ahead, across their path, the rocky floor had vanished beneath a carpet of dust. Roger extrapolated the roof-fall for millennia, perhaps eons.

  “Stay here,” he said. “Please."

  He unzipped his pocket and extracted a spool. He wrapped the end of the line around a b
oulder, and unspooled the rest as he slowly trod over the dust. His footing felt firm—and then it didn't.

  Roger saw her eyes widen. Then his helmet slipped beneath the surface of the dust pool. All became darkness.

  He clutched the line and jerked to a halt. He started to pull, but then felt himself rising. His helmet broke surface.

  Rebecca hoisted the line, hand over hand. She helped him onto solid ground.

  “I think I saw an arrow pointing to a side path,” she said.

  “Let's try that."

  He brushed himself off, and took the lead so that she wouldn't see the redness of his cheeks.

  * * * *

  A few caverns farther came a pit. As Roger peered over the ledge, his helmet lamp beam flickered against vertical, smooth walls. He saw an opening about fifty meters below, but the beam faded before reaching the bottom of the pit. A deadly fall, even in Ceres gravity.

  “I bet,” Rebecca said, nodding toward the opening below, “that you never made a delivery to a place like that."

  “You lose."

  He unspooled the line. Tying the end around a stalagmite, he rappelled until even with the lower opening. He pushed off the wall and swung, pendulumlike, to the opposing ledge.

  “You don't have to—” he started.

  But she tugged on the line until he released. A moment later, she swung alongside.

  “If you're trying to prove something,” he said, “don't."

  “I just want us to get there."

  “We need to proceed with caution.” He forced a grin. “On a frontier, a little fear can be a good thing."

  “I can't allow myself to be afraid. I don't believe in fear."

  From a height a head shorter than his own, she presented a steady gaze and a jutting chin. He almost averted his eyes, but then humiliation led to rage.

  “That's a stupid thing to say!” he blurted. “And if you want to fire me for telling you that, fine. We'll go back to Alphaville and you can hire some fool who hasn't been out here a month—and the two of you can hop and skip hand in hand over the edge of the next pit, for all I care!"

  She met his eyes with an expression that was set and firm yet somehow revealed nothing of her thoughts. She said nothing. Roger's anger, quick as it had come, mutated into shame.

  “I'm sorry,” he mumbled, lowering his gaze. “Maybe I just don't want to admit, I'm just a delivery driver. I have no experience as an explorer. Maybe you should get someone else."

  A slight smile. “You've been doing fine, so far. I feel I can trust you—and that's what's really important to me now.” She added quietly, “I think the only other man I've ever been able to trust is my father."

  Roger cut the line and wrapped the free end around a rock. Rebecca followed him into the passage.

  * * * *

  The Crystalarium needed no words in chalk.

  The walls of the huge chamber shimmered with razor sharp crystal. Formations of white gypsum loomed with the proportions of grotesquely deformed human statues. Gargantuan chunks of quartz, transparent as ice cubes, transformed their helmet lamp beams into a dazzle of rainbow-fringed, splintered reflections.

  They snapped off their lamps. Their eyes grew accustomed to the dimness. Roger felt awe. The crystals glowed and sparked with enough light to distinguish silhouettes.

  “Beautiful,” Rebecca said.

  No qualifier this time, Roger thought.

  She reached for a luminescent projection. Roger blocked.

  “Careful, there might be static build-up."

  She indicated a pair of insulated cables running along the walls. “Those look like power lines."

  “Good guess. If this vein reaches the surface, then it could receive a substantial charge from the solar wind during the day. It's far less efficient than solar cells, but the crystal is here and he didn't have to pay for it."

  The cables snaked into a narrow passage. Leaving the crystalline formations behind, they turned on their helmet lamps again and entered a realm of ordinary rock, shorn of ice or frost.

  Ahead, their beams shone on a rubble pile. Boots stuck out of the bottom.

  “The size!” Rebecca exclaimed. “It's like a child!"

  They scraped away the rocks. The body was metal encased. When Roger turned the figure over, he met camera lenses.

  “A robot,” he said.

  The chest was half missing, the abdomen computer module shredded. Roger thought of a frenzied robokiller armed with a hatchet, but what hatchet could cleave metal like that?

  Another pair of boots projected from the rubble farther down. Roger pulled the body out. The robot was identical to the first, a humanoid figure about the size of a twelve-year-old human. From rubble near the head, Roger extracted a straw hat.

  “My dad's,” Rebecca said.

  On this robot, the back was ripped open. When Roger flipped the body over, he found a label on the chest.

  TOM, it read.

  “One mystery solved,” he said. “The other must be Huck."

  “No wonder they didn't meet me when I called."

  Roger attempted to flex a broken shard of casing. “This is too much damage to have been done by a cave-in."

  “Someone attacked them? Who?"

  “Your father's coworkers were the only ones who knew about this mine."

  She hugged her handbag. “Those cables there. They go to the facility?"

  “Probably."

  “Let's go."

  “Well..."

  “You're going to say, don't get my hopes up."

  “Well, if the robots worked here for years after your father left, then they probably did accumulate a supply of platinum before the nanojuice went sour. But if someone's been here, chances are they took the platinum."

  “I want to know."

  They followed the cables.

  * * * *

  The laser-ring gyro indicated that they had descended more than half a kilometer from the crater floor, and had traversed kilometers of winding, branching caverns.

  Then the passage widened and leveled into an arena-sized chamber. Roger saw footprints in the dust, matching the boot sizes of robots and full-grown men. The cables plugged into a junction box, which distributed cords to storage tanks.

  The tanks were spherical balloons suspended by threadlike cables from the roof the chamber, and utilized the environment's vacuum for thermal insulation just as did spacecraft for long-term storage of cryogenic fuel. They were small only in comparison to the towers in the cavern where Mel Barrow dwelt. Watching his distorted reflection in their mirrored surfaces, Roger felt like an ant wandering among marbles.

  “Did he build all this himself?” Rebecca asked.

  “It's actually pretty flimsy,” Roger replied. He pressed a balloon and it jostled with liquid. “N2,” he read the marking-pen scrawl. Liquid nitrogen was used extensively as a coolant and pressurizer in certain nanotech processes, he recalled.

  He traced through the hoses and valves, and located the nanojuice tanks in the rear. PRECURSOR, read one label. STAGE ONE, read another. Portable applicators and collector equipment occupied a shelf. Roger demonstrated how the robots aimed the spray wand.

  “First they foam the walls with the primary-extractor nanojuice,” he said. “The nanomolecules secrete hydrochloric acid to cut microscopic capillaries into the wall. Then components of the nanomolecular structure distinguish between platinum and nonplatinum elements, procure the platinum, and transport it back to the rock facing."

  “They sound like miniature robots."

  “That's what nanojuice is. Molecular robots. Anyhow, eventually the nanojuice seeps out of the rock and the big robots—Tom and Huck, that is—scrape it off and bring it here for extraction and recycling."

  “If the nanojuice can be recycled, then how come it goes—what did you say—sour?"

  “The more sophisticated nanomolecules are similar to the molecular machinery within living cells. In a sense, they age and die."

  �
�You know a lot about this. Did you work in nanotech?"

  “When I was studying to become a mining engineer, I took a couple semesters on molecular extraction technology. My instructor thought it would replace traditional mining, like digital electronics replaced analog."

  “Did you ever become a mining engineer?"

  “It didn't work out."

  “Why not?"

  “I wanted to be in space. But the way the industry works, only robots and miners go into space. Engineers stay home and crunch survey data in supercomputer simulations."

  “So how did you get out here?"

  “I signed with CM as a miner."

  “You gave up your career because you were bitten by the Exploration Bug."

  “Well, being a miner means being stuck in a cave, so it's hardly a cure. And my delivery service isn't making ends meet. So I guess it's back to Earth, soon."

  “You'd rather live on the frontier."

  “Yeah."

  “My father would understand."

  “And you?"

  Rebecca said nothing more as Roger groped amid the hoses. Finally he came to the last containment. Opening the side door, he frowned.

  “We're missing the Stage Six converter,” he said.

  “What does that do?"

  “At this point in the process, the platinum is in a pseudofluidic state, confined within carbon-bonded buckyballs suspended within a graphite lubricant. The converter unlocks the buckyballs and releases the platinum in particulate form."

  “In plain English...?"

  “A pseudofluid is like a very fine, slick powder that can be poured and pumped, and—well, long story short, this is where the platinum comes out.” The floor underneath glittered in his lamplight. “Platinum dust. So the system was working. For a while."

  They searched the remainder of the cavern. They found not a speckle more of platinum.

  “I'm sorry,” he said. “Whoever was here made a clean sweep."

  Her eyes were unwilling to meet his.

  “It's all been a waste,” she said, kicking the dull gray dust.

  * * * *

  Following the chalk arrows in reverse, they passed through the Crystalarium, climbed the pit, and side routed the dust pool.

  “I'm sorry,” she said at last. “I've wasted your time."