The Precipice (Asteroid Wars)

by Ben Bova

  “I tell the guard. He sends for the maid.”

  “Okay. Tell the guard you’re finished and ask him to take the tray.”

  “He’ll send for the maid.”

  “Tell ‘im you don’t want to wait for her. Make some excuse.”

  Cardenas nodded, got up from the sofa, and went to the door. She could sense George’s body warmth as he padded along beside her.

  She banged on the door with the flat of her hand. “I’m finished. Could you please take the tray?”

  “I’ll call the kitchen,” came the guard’s muffled voice.

  “I can’t wait! I’ve got to get to the toilet right away! I’m sick to my stomach. Please take the tray.”

  A moment’s hesitation, then they heard the lock click. The door swung open and the guard stepped in, looking concerned.

  “What’s the matter? Something in the—”

  The punch sounded like a melon hitting the pavement from a considerable height. The guard’s head snapped back and his eyes rolled up. He crumpled to the floor. Cardenas saw his arms yanked up into the air and his body dragged into the room.

  “Come on, now,” George whispered to her.

  They stepped out into the hallway. The door shut, seemingly by itself, and locked. She felt his hand engulf half her upper arm as George let her down the hallway to the stairs. The house seemed quiet at this hour, although a glance out the windows showed that the cavern outside was still lit in daytime mode.

  The downstairs hall was empty, but Cardenas could hear the sounds of conversation floating through from somewhere. Neither of the voices sounded like Humphries’s to her. They got to the foyer just inside the front door. Two young men in gray suits looked surprised to see her approaching them.

  Frowning, the taller of the two said, “Dr. Cardenas, what are—”

  George’s punch spun him completely around. The other guard stared, frozen with surprise, until he was lifted off his feet by a blow to the midsection. Cardenas heard a bone-snapping crunch! and the guard fell limply to the tiled floor.

  The front door jerked open and George hissed, “Come on, then!”

  Cardenas ran out of the house, up the path that wound through the garden, and through the hatch that opened into Selene’s bottommost corridor. She could hear George panting and puffing alongside her. Once they were through the hatch, George’s hand on her arm brought her to a stop.

  “I don’t think anybody’s followin’ us,” he said.

  “How long do you think it will take for them to realize I’m gone?” she asked.

  She sensed him shrugging. “Not fookin’ long.”

  “What now, then?”

  “Lemme get outta this suit,” George muttered. “Hot enough inside here to cook a fella.”

  His face appeared, then his entire shaggy head. Within a minute he stood before her, sweating and grinning, a big red-haired mountain of a man in rumpled, stained olive-green coveralls.

  “That’s better,” George said, taking a deep breath. “Could hardly breathe inside that suit.”

  As they started walking swiftly along the corridor toward the escalator, Cardenas asked, “Where can I go? Where will I be safe? Humphries will turn Selene upside-down looking for me.”

  “We could go to Stavenger and ask him to take care of you.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t put Doug in the middle of this. Besides, Humphries probably has his own people planted in Selene’s staff.”

  “H’mm, yeah, maybe,” George said as they reached the escalator. “Inside Astro, too, for that matter.”

  Suddenly frightened at the possibilities, Cardenas blurted, “Where can I go?”

  George smiled. “I got the perfect hideout for ya. Long as you don’t mind sharin’ it with a corpsicle, that is.”

  BONANZA

  “It’s a beauty,” Dan breathed, staring at the image on the control panel’s radar screen.

  “Purty ugly-lookin’ beauty,” Pancho countered.

  The radar image showed an elongated irregular lump of an asteroid, one end rounded and pitted, the other dented by what looked like the imprint of a giant mailed fist.

  “It looks rather like a potato,” said Amanda, “don’t you think?”

  “An iron potato,” Dan said.

  Fuchs came through the hatch, and suddenly the bridge felt crowded to Dan. Lars isn’t tall, he said to himself, but he fills up a room.

  “That is it?” Fuchs asked, his eyes riveted to the screen.

  “That’s it,” Pancho said, over her shoulder. She tapped at the keyboard on her left and a set of alphanumerics sprang up on the small screen above it. “Fourteenth asteroid discovered this year.”

  Amanda said, “Then its official name will be 41-014 Fuchs.”

  “How’s it feel to have your name on an asteroid, Lars?” Pancho asked.

  “Very fine,” Fuchs said.

  “You’re the first person to have his name attached to a newly-discovered asteroid in years’’ Amanda said. She seemed almost aglow, to Dan.

  “Most of the new rocks have been found by the impact searchers,” Pancho said. “Those li’l bitty probes don’t get their names into the record.”

  “Asteroid 41-014 Fuchs,” Amanda breathed.

  He smiled and shrugged—squirmed, almost, as if embarrassed by her enthusiasm.

  “The official name’s one thing,” Dan said. “I’m calling her Bonanza.”

  “Her?” Fuchs asked.

  “Asteroids are feminine?” Pancho challenged.

  Dan held his ground. “Hey, we speak of Mother Earth, don’t we? And they call Venus our sister planet, don’t they?”

  “What about Mars?” Pancho retorted.

  “Or Jupiter,” said Amanda.

  Pointing to the lump imaged on the radar screen, Dan insisted, “Bonanza’s going to make us all rich. And very happy. She and her sisters are going to save the world. She’s a female.”

  “Sure she’s female,” Pancho said laconically. “You want to dig into her, don’t you?”

  Fuchs sputtered and Amanda said, “Pancho, really!”

  Dan put on an innocent air. “What a dirty mind you have, Pancho. I admire that in a woman.”

  Within three hours they were close enough to Bonanza to see it for themselves: a dark, deformed shape glinting sullenly in the wan light of the distant Sun. The asteroid blotted out the stars as it tumbled slowly end over end in the cold empty silence of space.

  “… eighteen hundred and forty-four meters along its long axis,” Amanda was reading out the radar measurements. “Seven hundred and sixty-two meters at its maximum width.”

  “Nearly two kilometers long,” Dan mused. He hadn’t left the bridge all during their approach to the metallic asteroid.

  “Killing residual thrust,” Pancho said, her attention focused on the control displays.

  “Throttling down to zero,” Amanda confirmed.

  The asteroid slid out of view as the pilots established a parking orbit around it. Dan felt what little weight remaining dwindle away to nothing. He floated up off the deck, stopped himself with a hand against the overhead.

  He felt Fuchs come through the hatch behind him.

  “Lars, we’re going to be in zero g for a while,” Dan said.

  “I know. I think I’m getting accustomed to it.”

  “Good. Just don’t make any sudden head movements and you’ll be fine.”

  “Yes. Thank—mein gott! There it is!”

  The dark lopsided bulk of Bonanza rose in front of the bridge windows like some pitted, pockmarked monster, huge, overawing, menacing. Despite himself, Dan felt a wave of unease surge through him. It’s like confronting an ogre, he thought, a giant beast from a fairy tale.

  “Look at those striations!” Fuchs said, his voice vibrant with excitement. “This must have been broken off from a much larger body, perhaps a planetesimal from the early age of the solar system! We’ve got to get outside and take samples, drill cores!”

&nbs
p; Dan broke into laughter. Fuchs turned toward him, looking confused. Even Pancho glanced over her shoulder.

  “What so funny, boss?”

  “Nothing,” Dan said, trying to sober himself. “Nothing.” Inwardly, though, he marveled that the same sight that brought back to him memories of childhood dread stirred Fuchs into a frenzy of scientific curiosity.

  “Come on,” Fuchs said, ducking past the hatch. “We’ve got to suit up and go outside.”

  Dan nodded his agreement and followed the scientist. He’s forgotten about zero-g, Dan realized. He’s not worried about upchucking now, he’s got too much work that he wants to do.

  Amanda remained on the bridge as Pancho followed Dan down to the airlock.

  “You’re not thinkin’ of goin’ EVA, are you?” she asked Dan.

  “I’ve been a qualified astronaut since before you were born, Pancho “

  “You’ve been redlined. You can’t go outside.”

  “And rain makes applesauce.”

  “I mean it, Dan,” Pancho said, quite seriously. “Your immune system can’t take another radiation dose.”

  “Fuchs can’t go out there by himself,” he countered.

  “That’s my job. I’ll go with him.”

  “Nope. You stay here. I’ll babysit him.”

  “I’m the captain of this craft,” Pancho said firmly. “I can order you to stay inside.”

  He gave her a crooked grin. “And I’m the owner. I can fire you.”

  “Not till we get back to Selene.”

  Dan huffed out an impatient sigh. “Come on, Pancho, stop the chickenshit.”

  “Your medical records say—”

  “Dammitall to hell and back, I don’t care what the medical records say! I’m going out! I want to see this sucker! Touch her with my own hands.”

  “No gloves?”

  They had reached the airlock, where the spacesuits hung in racks like suits of armor on display. Fuchs was sitting on the bench that ran in front of the racks, already into the lower half of his suit, sealing the boots to the cuffs of his leggings. Dan reached for the suit that bore his name stenciled on its chest.

  “I thought you were scared of the radiation,” Pancho said.

  “I’ll be okay inside the suit,” Dan said. “The weather’s calm out there; no radiation storm.”

  Fuchs looked up at them, said nothing.

  “The regulations say—”

  “The regulations say you’re not supposed to bring pets aboard,” Dan said, grinning again as he pulled the lower half of his suit from its rack and sat down beside Fuchs. “But I’ve got to look into my shoes every morning to make sure your damned snake isn’t curled up inside one of them.”

  “Snake?” Fuchs yelped, looking alarmed.

  Pancho planted her fists on her hips and glared down at Dan for a long moment. Then she visibly relaxed.

  “Okay, boss,” she said at last. “I guess I can’t blame you. But I’m gonna monitor your vitals back on the bridge. If I say come in, you come in. Right then. No arguments. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” Dan replied instantly. A voice in his head was laughing mockingly. Are you satisfied? the voice asked. You’ve shown her that you’re not a sick old man. Big deal. How are you going to feel when the cold clamps down on you and your bones start hurting again?

  Doesn’t matter, Dan answered himself. I’m not going to stay cooped up in here like a cripple. To hell with it; I don’t really give a damn. If I’ve got to die, I’d rather wear out than rust out. What difference does it make?

  “Clear for EVA.” Amanda’s voice came through the speaker in Dan’s helmet.

  He was in the airlock, sealed in his suit, feeling like a robot in a metal womb.

  “Opening outer hatch,” he said, pressing a gloved finger on the red light of the control panel.

  “Copy, outer hatch.”

  The hatch slid open and Dan felt his pulse start to quicken. How long has it been since I’ve been outside? he asked himself. That sardonic voice in his head answered, Not since you got the radiation overdose, jiggering comm-sats in the Van Allen Belt.

  Ten years, Dan realized. That’s a long time to be away from all this.

  He pushed himself through the hatch and floated in emptiness. The universe hung all around him: stars solemn and unwinking, staring at him even through the heavy tinting of his fishbowl helmet. Turning slowly, he saw the Sun, strangely small and pale, with its arms of faint zodiacal light outstretched on either side of it.

  Freedom. He knew he was confined inside the spacesuit and he couldn’t survive for a minute without it. Yet hanging there weightlessly in the silent emptiness of infinity, Dan felt free of all the world, alone with the cosmos, in tune with the ethereal music of the spheres. Glorious freedom. Radiation be damned; he felt he could soar out into the universe forever and leave the petty lusts and hates of humankind far behind. It wouldn’t be a bad way to die.

  Then the asteroid slid into his view. Massive, ponderous, an enormous pitted dark looming reality hanging over him like an ominous cloud, a mountain floating free in space. Starpower 1 looked pitifully small and helpless alongside the two-kilometer-long asteroid; like a minnow next to a whale. Dan suddenly understood how Jonah must have felt.

  You can’t scare me, he said to the asteroid. You’re two kilometers of high-grade iron ore, pal. You’re going to look beautiful to a lot of people on Earth. Money in the bank, that’s what you are. Jobs and hope for millions of people. Bonanza: that’s your name and that’s just what you are.

  “Ready for EVA.” Fuchs’s voice broke into Dan’s silent monologue.

  “Clear for EVA. Lars,” he heard Amanda reply.

  Dan squeezed the right handgrip on his maneuvering controls with the lightest of touches. The cold gas jet on the backpack squirted noiselessly and he turned enough to be looking back at the ship. Starpower 1 glinted nicely in the starlight. She still looked brand-new, shining, not a pit or a scratch on her. The airlock hatch slid open and a spacesuited figure stood framed in it.

  “Exiting the airlock,” Fuchs said, his voice trembling slightly.

  “Come on, Lars,” Dan called. “Isn’t she a beauty?”

  Fuchs jetted toward him. Dan saw that his suit was bristling with hammers and drills and all sorts of equipment.

  “It’s enormous!” He sounded awestruck.

  “She’s just an average-sized chunk of metal,” Dan said. “And as soon as you chip a piece off her, we can claim her.”

  Fuchs showed no hesitation at all, although he seemed a bit clumsy working the controls of his maneuvering thrusters. For a moment Dan thought he was going to ram into the asteroid, but at the last instant Fuchs fired a braking blast and hovered a scant few meters above its pitted, pebbly surface.

  Dan jetted toward him, and with a bare touch of the handgrip controls lowered himself to the surface of the asteroid. He felt his boots make contact and then recoil slightly. Not much gravity, he thought, as he puffed down again and finally stood on the surface of Bonanza. Clouds of dust rose where his boots made contact with the surface; they just hung there, barely moving in the minuscule gravity.

  It took Fuchs three tries to get firmly onto the surface; he kept coming down too hard and bouncing off. In the end, Dan had to reach out and yank him down.

  “Don’t try to walk,” he told Fuchs. “The gravity’s so light you’ll float up and away.”

  “Then how—”

  “Slide your boots along.” Dan demonstrated a couple of steps, shuffling up even more dust “Like you’re dancing.”

  “I don’t dance very well,” Fuchs said.

  “This isn’t the smoothest dance floor in the solar system, either.”

  The asteroid’s surface was rough and uneven, covered with a powdery coating of dust, much like the surface of the Moon. Dan thought it was more like standing on the deck of a boat, though, than on solid ground. There wasn’t really a horizon; the rock just ended Pinhole craters peppered the surface,
pebbles and fist-sized rocks littered it, and out along its far end, Dan could see a more sizeable crater, a big depression with a raised rim all around it.

  “How much iron do you think we’ve got here?” Dan asked.

  “We’ll have a good measure of its mass by the time we return to the ship,” Fuchs said. “With the ship orbiting the asteroid we have a classic two-body system. It’s simple Newtonian physics.”

  Dan thought to himself, He’s a scientist, all right. Ask him a simple question and you get a dissertation. Without the answer to your question.

  “Lars,” he said patiently, “can’t you give me some idea of this lump’s mass?”

  Fuchs spread his hands. In the spacesuit, he looked like a bubble-topped fireplug with arms.

  “A back-of-the-envelope guesstimate?” Dan coaxed.

  “Oh… considering its dimensions… nickel-iron asteroids are typically no more than ten percent nickel… it must be somewhere in the neighborhood of seven or eight billion tons of iron and eighty million tons or so of nickel.”

  Dan’s eyes went wide. “That’s five or six times the world’s steel production in its best year! Before the floods and all!”

  “There are impurities, of course,” Fuchs warned. “Platinum, gold and silver, other heavy metals.”

  “Impurities, right,” Dan agreed, cackling. His mind was spinning. One asteroid is enough to supply the world’s steel industry for years and years! And there are thousands of these chunks out here! It’s all true! Everything I hoped for, all those wild promises I made—they’re all going to come true!

  Fuchs seemed oblivious to it all. “I want to look at those striations,” he said, turning toward the far end of the asteroid. His effort made him rise off the surface and Dan had to yank him down again.

  “Take a sample here, first,” Dan said. “Then we can claim it.”

  The light was so dim that Dan could see Fuchs’s head outlined inside his bubble helmet. He nodded and slowly, very slowly, got down into a kneeling position. Then he pulled a rock hammer from his equipment belt and chipped off a bit of the asteroid. The effort raised more dust and lifted him off the surface again, but this time he clawed at the ground with one gloved hand and pulled himself back down.