The Precipice (Asteroid Wars)

by Ben Bova

  Nodding, Dan said, “Four hydrogen atoms come together to form a helium atom and release energy.”

  “Nuclei,” Duncan corrected. “Not atoms, their nuclei. The plasma is completely ionized.”

  “Yep. Right.”

  “Seven-tenths of one percent of the mass of the four original protons is converted into energy. The Sun and all the stars have been running for billions of years on that seven-tenths of one percent.”

  “As long as they’re fusing hydrogen into helium,” Dan said. To show that he wasn’t entirely unlettered, he added, “Later on they start fusing helium into heavier elements.”

  Duncan gave him a sidelong glance from beneath his deep black brows, then said, “Aye, but it’s only hydrogen fusion that we’re interested in.”

  “Aye,” Dan murmured.

  The laboratory shed wasn’t large, but the equipment in it seemed up-to-date. It looked more like a monitoring station to Dan’s practiced eye than a research laboratory. Beyond it was a bigger building that couldn’t be seen from the parking lot. The group trooped through the lab with only a perfunctory glance at its equipment, then went on to the other building.

  “This is where the dirty work gets done,” Duncan said, with his devilish grin.

  Dan nodded as he looked around. It was a construction shack, all right. Machine tools and an overhead crane running on heavy steel tracks. The sharp tang of machine oil in the air, bits of wire and metal shavings littering the floor. Yes, they worked in here.

  “And out there,” Duncan said, pointing to a dust-caked window, “is the result.”

  It didn’t look terribly impressive. Even when they stepped outside and walked up to the scaffolding, all Dan could see was a two-meter-wide metal sphere with a spaghetti factory of hoses and wires leading into it. The metal looked clean and shiny, though.

  Dan rapped on it with his knuckles. “Stainless steel?”

  Nodding, Duncan said, “For the outside pressure vessel. The containment sphere is a beryllium alloy.”

  “Beryllium?”

  “The alloy is proprietary. We’ve applied for an international patent, but you know how long that takes.”

  Dan agreed glumly, then asked, “Is this all there is to it?”

  With a fierce grin, Duncan said, “The best things come in the smallest packages.”

  They went back to the lab and, without a word, the six men and women took their stations along the bank of consoles that lined two walls of the shed. There was an assortment of chairs and stools, no two of them alike, but no one sat down. Dan saw that they were nervous, intense. All except Duncan, who looked calmly confident. He cocked a brow at Dan, like a gambler about to shuffle cards from the bottom of the deck.

  “Are you ready to see wee beastie in action?” Duncan asked.

  Tired from traveling, Dan pulled a little wheeled typist’s chair to the middle of the floor and sat on it. Folding his arms across his chest, he nodded and said, “You may fire when ready, Gridley.”

  The others looked slightly puzzled, wondering who Grid-ley might be and what his significance was. Duncan, though, bobbed his head and grinned as though he understood everything.

  He turned to Vertientes and said softly, “Start it up, then.”

  Dan heard a pump begin to chug and saw the readout numbers on Vertientes’s console start to climb. The other consoles came to life, display screens flickering on to show multi-colored graphs or digital readouts.

  “Pressure approaching optimum,” sang out the blonde. “Density on the curve.”

  “Fuel cells on line.”

  “Capacitor bank ready.”

  Duncan stood beside Dan, sweeping all the consoles with his eyes.

  “Approaching ignition point,” said Vertientes.

  Leaning slightly toward Dan, Duncan said, “It’s set to ignite automatically, although we have the manual backup ready.”

  Dan got to his feet and stared out the window at the stainless steel sphere out in the scaffold. There was a crackling air of tension in the lab now; he could feel the hairs on the back of his neck rising.

  “Ignition!” Vertientes called.

  Dan saw nothing. The metal sphere outside didn’t move. There was no roar or cloud of smoke, not even a vibration. He looked at Duncan, then over to the six others, all of them standing rigidly intent at their consoles. Numbers flickered across screens, curves crawled along graphs, but as far as Dan could see or feel nothing was actually happening.

  “Shutdown,” Vertientes said.

  Everyone relaxed, sagged back a bit, let out their breaths.

  “Thirty seconds, on the tick,” someone said.

  “Power output?” Duncan asked.

  “Design maximum. It reached fifty megawatts after four seconds and held it there right to cutoff.”

  Vertientes was beaming. He turned and clutched Duncan by both shoulders. “Perfecto! She is a well-behaved little lady!”

  “You mean that’s it?” Dan asked, incredulous.

  Duncan was grinning too. They all were.

  “But nothing happened,” Dan insisted.

  “Oh no?” said Duncan, grasping Dan’s elbow and turning him toward the row of consoles. “Look at that power output graph.”

  Frowning, Dan remembered a scientist once telling him that all of physics boiled down to reading a bloody gauge.

  “But it didn’t go anywhere,” Dan said weakly.

  They all laughed.

  “It isn’t a rocket,” Duncan said. “Not yet. We’re only testing the fusion reactor.”

  “Only!” said the Japanese woman.

  “Thirty seconds isn’t much of a test,” Dan pointed out.

  “Nay, thirty seconds is plenty of time,” Duncan rebutted.

  “The plasma equilibrates in five seconds or less,” said Vertientes.

  “But to be useful as a rocket,” Dan insisted, “the reactor’s going to have to run for hours… even weeks or months.”

  “Si, yes, we know,” Vertientes said, tapping a finger into the palm of his other hand. “But in thirty seconds we get enough data to calculate the heat transfer and plasma flow parameters. We can extrapolate to hours and weeks and months.”

  “I don’t trust extrapolations,” Dan muttered.

  The blonde stepped between them. “Well, of course we’re going to build a full-scale model and run it for months. For sure. But what Doc Vee is saying is we’ve done enough testing to be confident that it’ll work.”

  Dan looked her over. California, he decided. Maybe Swedish ancestry, but definitely California.

  “We intend to mate the reactor with an MHD generator,” Vertientes said, earnestly trying to convince Dan. “That way the plasma exhaust from the reactor can provide electrical power as well as thrust.”

  “Magneto…” Dan stumbled over the word.

  “Magnetohydrodynamic,” Vertientes finished for him.

  The blonde added, “The interaction of electrically-conducting ionized gases with magnetic fields.”

  Dan grinned at her. “Thank you.” She’s showing off, he thought. She wants me to know that she’s a smart blonde, despite her surfer chick looks.

  Then he caught Duncan watching him with that sly look in his glittering coal-black eyes, and remembered the student from Birmingham who had convinced Humphries to pay attention to their work. He shook his head ever so slightly, to tell Duncan that he wouldn’t need to be convinced that way.

  Once he would have scooped up a young available woman and enjoyed every minute of their brief fling together. But not now. He grimaced inwardly at the weird curves fate throws. When Jane was alive I chased every woman I saw, trying to forget her. Now that she’s dead I don’t want anyone else. Not now. Maybe not ever again.

  SELENE CITY

  “Don’t you intend ever to return to Earth?”

  Martin Humphries leaned back in his exquisitely padded reclining chair and tried to hide the dread he felt as he gazed at his father’s image on the wall screen.r />
  “I’m working hard here, Dad,” he said.

  It takes almost three seconds for radio or light waves to make the round-trip between the Earth and the Moon. Martin Humphries used the time to study his father’s sallow, wrinkled, sagging face. Even though the old man had made his fortune in biotech, he still refused rejuvenation treatments as “too new, too risky, too many unknowns.” Yet he wore a snow-white toupee to hide his baldness. It made Martin think of George Washington, although George was alleged never to have told a lie and anyone who had ever dealt with W. Wilson Humphries knew that you had to count your fingers after shaking hands with the old scoundrel.

  “I need you here,” his father admitted grudgingly.

  “You need me?”

  “Those bastards from the New Morality are pushing more tax regulations through the Congress. They won’t be satisfied until they’ve bankrupted every corporation in the country.”

  “All the more reason for me to stay here,” Martin replied, “where I can protect my assets.”

  “But what about my assets? What about me? I need your help, Marty. I can’t fight these psalm-singing fundamentalists by myself!”

  “Oh, come on, Dad. You’ve got more lawyers than they do.”

  “They’ve got the whole damned Congress,” his father grumbled. “And the Supreme Court, too.”

  “Dad, if you’d just come up here you’d be able to get away from all that.”

  His father’s face hardened. “I’m not going to run away!”

  “It’s time to admit that the ship is sinking, Dad. Time to get out, while you can. Up here on the Moon I’m building a whole new organization. I’m creating Humphries Space Systems. You could be part of it; an important part.”

  The old man glared at him for much longer than it took his son’s words to reach him. At last he growled, “If you stay up there too long your muscles will get so deconditioned you won’t be able to come back to Earth.”

  He hasn’t heard a word I’ve said, Humphries realized. He talks and he never listens.

  “Dad, I’m in the middle of a very complicated deal here. I can’t leave. Not now.” He hesitated, then said, “I might never come back to Earth.”

  Once he heard that reply, his father’s image went from its normal unhappy scowl to a truly angry frown. “I want you here, dammit! This is where you belong and this is where you’re going to be. That’s final.”

  “Father,” said Martin, feeling all the old fear and frustration swirling inside him like a whirlpool pulling him down, drowning him. “Father, come here, come be with me. Please. Before it’s too late.”

  His father merely glowered at him.

  “Give it up, Dad,” Humphries pleaded. “Earth is finished. Everything down there is going to crash; can’t you understand that?”

  The old man sputtered, “Dammit, Marty, if you don’t listen to me…” He faltered, stopped, not knowing what to say next.

  “Why can’t you listen to me for a change?” Martin snapped. Without waiting for a response, he said, “I’m trying to build an empire up here, Dad, an empire that’s going to stretch all the way out to the Asteroid Belt and beyond. I’m putting the pieces together right now. I’m going to be the wealthiest man in the solar system, richer than you and all your brothers put together. Maybe then you’ll treat me with some respect.”

  Before his father could reply, Humphries sat up in his recliner and pressed the stud set into the armrest to terminate the videophone link. The old man’s face disappeared from the wall, revealing a holowindow that showed a realtime view of Jupiter as seen by the twenty-meter telescope at the Farside Observatory.

  For a long moment Humphries simply sat there, alone in the office he had set up for himself in the house deep below the lunar surface. Then he took a long slow breath to calm the furies that raged inside him. The old man has no understanding of the real world. He’s still living in the past He’d rather go down with the ship than admit that I’m right and he’s wrong.

  Unbidden, the memory of his drowning engulfed him again. Nine years old. His father insisting that the trimaran was in no trouble despite the dark storm winds that heaved the boat so monstrously. The wave that washed him overboard. The frothing water closing over him. Desperately clawing for the surface but sinking, sinking, can’t breathe, everything going dark.

  Martin Humphries died at the age of nine. After they revived him, he learned that it had been one of the crew who’d dived into the sound to rescue him. Watching the boy sink out of sight, his father had stayed aboard the trimaran and offered a bonus to any crewman who could rescue his son. Form that moment on, Humphries knew that there was no one in the world he could trust; he was alone, with only his inner fears and yearnings to drive him. And only his money to protect him.

  Talking with his father always brought those terrible moments back to mind. And the gasping, choking paralysis that clamped his chest like a merciless vise. He reached into the top desk drawer for his inhalator and took a desperate whiff of the cool, soothing drug.

  All right, Humphries thought, waiting for his breathing to return to normal, trying to calm himself. He’s going to stay down there and try to fight the New Morality until they burn him at the stake. Nothing I say will budge him a millimeter. Very well, then.

  I’ll stay here in Selene where it’s safe and everything’s under control. No storms, no rain; a world built to suit me in every detail. From here I can pull the strings just as effectively as if I were down in New York or London. Better, really. There’s no reason for me to go Earthside anymore.

  Except for the divorce hearing, he remembered. I’m supposed to show up in the judge’s chambers for that. But I can do even that from here, get my lawyers to make the excuse that I can’t return to Earth, I’ve been on the Moon too long, it would be dangerous to my health. I can get a dozen doctors to testify to that. No sweat.

  Humphries laughed aloud. I won’t have to be in the same room with that bitch! Good! Wonderful!

  He leaned back again and stared up at the ceiling. It was set to a planetarium display, the sky as it appeared above Selene. Briefly he thought about calling up a porno video, but decided instead to put on the latest informational release from the International Astronautical Authority about the microprobes searching through the asteroids in the Belt.

  The IAA’s motivation for investigating the asteroids was to locate rocks that might one day hit the Earth. They had good tracks on all the hundreds of asteroids in orbits that brought them close. Now they were sorting through the thousands of rocks out in the Belt big enough to cause serious damage if they were ejected from the Belt and impacted Earth.

  The good news was that so far they had not found any asteroid in an orbit that threatened the homeworld—although the asteroids in the Belt were always being jostled by Jupiter and the other planets, perturbing their orbits unpredictably. A constant watch was a vital necessity.

  The better news was that, as a byproduct of the impacter watch, the IAA was getting detailed data on the composition of the larger asteroids. Iron, carbon, nickel, phosphorus, nitrogen, gold, silver, platinum, even water was out there in vast abundance. Ripe for picking. Waiting for me to turn them into money, Humphries told himself, smiling happily.

  Dan Randolph will send a team out to the Belt on a fusion rocket. The first mission will fail, of course, and then I’ll have Randolph where I want him. I’ll take control of Astro Corporation and we can put Randolph out to pasture, where he belongs.

  Then a thought clouded his satisfaction. It’s been damned near six months since I hired Pancho Lane to keep an eye on Randolph. Why haven’t I heard from her?

  LA GUAIRA

  “Aren’t you nervous?” Amanda Cunningham asked.

  Sitting beside her as the Clippership returned to Earth, Pancho shook her head. “Nope. You?”

  “A bit.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I mean… meeting the head of the corporation. It’s rather exciting, don’t you think?
”

  Pancho and Amanda had been summoned to Astro Manufacturing’s corporate headquarters in La Guaira, on an island across the strait from Caracas. Something about a new assignment that Dan Randolph himself would decide.

  “Well, meeting the big boss is important, I guess,” Pancho said as nonchalantly as she could manage.

  They were riding the Clippership down from the aging space station Nueva Venezuela to the landing field at La Guaira, riding comfortably in the nearly empty passenger cabin with a sparse handful of paying customers rather than in the cramped cockpit where the crew worked. Amanda reveled in the luxury of spacious seats and entertainment videos; Pancho figured that something important was waiting for them when they landed, something important enough for Astro to undergo the expense of letting them ride deadhead from Selene.

  Well, she said to herself, the pilots up in the cockpit are really deadheading, too. Clipperships flew under control from the ground; they didn’t need an onboard crew any more than a ballistic missile did. But even after all these years— decades, really—the politicians refused to allow spacecraft that carried passengers to fly fully automated. The pilots had to go along; there had to be a cockpit and full controls for them even though they had absolutely nothing to do.

  Don’t complain, she said to herself. If the aerospace lines didn’t need to hire pilots you wouldn’t have gotten a job in the first place. You’d still be sitting in front of a display screen in some cubicle back in Lubbock doing tech support and barely making enough money to keep Sis alive.

  Amanda was flicking through the entertainment channels, eyes locked on her little pop-up screen. Pancho eased back in the comfortable passenger’s chair and closed her eyes.

  Why me? she asked herself. Why has the CEO of Astro Manufacturing called me all the way back from Selene to see him in person? Amanda I can understand. One look at her ID vid and the Big Boss prob’ly started panting like a dog in heat. Still, in the six months since they’d first met, Pancho had acquired a healthy respect for Amanda’s piloting skills, boobs notwithstanding. This is her first job and she’s already as good as I am… well, almost. I’m the best pilot Astro’s got, flat out, but what’s that got to do with seeing the CEO? Why does he want to see me?