The Precipice gt-8

by Ben Bova

  “Damned right. People need those resources. If we could get them without driving ourselves into bankruptcy, I’d go to double-damned Pluto if I had to!” Relaxing visibly, Humphries said, “I know how we can do it and make a healthy profit, besides.”

  Despite himself, Dan felt intrigued. “How?”

  “Fusion rockets.”

  By the seven cities of Cibola, Dan thought, this guy’s a fanatic. Worse: he’s an enthusiast.

  “Nobody’s made a fusion rocket,” he said to Humphries. “Fusion power generators are too big and heavy for flight applications. Everybody knows that.” With the grin of a cat that had just finished dining on several canaries, Humphries replied, “Everybody’s wrong.”

  Dan thought it over for all of half a second, then leaned both his hands on his desktop, palms down, and said, “Prove it to me.”

  Wordlessly, Humphries fished a data chip from his jacket pocket and handed it to Dan.

  SPACE STATION GALILEO

  Leaving her five fellow astronauts gaping dumbfounded at the airlock in the maintenance module, Pancho sailed weightlessly to the metal arm of the robotic cargo-handling crane jutting out from the space station. It was idle at the moment; with no mass of payload to steady it, the long, slim arm flexed noticeably as Pancho grasped it in both hands and swung like an acrobat up to the handgrips that studded the module’s outer skin.

  Wondering if the others had caught on to her sting, Pancho hand-walked along the module’s hull, clambering from one runglike grip to the next. To someone watching from beyond the space station it would have looked as if she were scampering along upside down, but to Pancho it seemed as if the space station was over her head and she was swinging like a kid in a zero-gee jungle gym. She laughed inside her helmet as she reached the end of the maintenance module and pushed easily across the connector section that linked to the habitation module.

  “Hey Pancho, what the hell are you doing out there?”

  They had finally gotten to a radio, she realized. But as long as they were puzzled, she was okay.

  “I’m taking a walk,” she said, a little breathless from all the exertion.

  “What about our bet?” one of the men asked.

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” she lied. “Just hang tight.”

  “What are you up to, Pancho?” asked Amanda, her voice tinged with suspicion.

  Pancho fell back on her childhood answer. “Nothin’.”

  The radio went silent. Pancho reached the airlock at the end of the lab module and tapped out the standard code. The outer hatch slid open. She ducked inside, sealed the hatch and didn’t bother to wait for the lock to fill with air. She simply pushed open the inner hatch and quickly sealed it again. A safety alarm shrilled automatically, but cut off when the module’s air pressure equilibrated again. Yanking off the space-suit’s cumbersome gloves, Pancho slid her visor up as she went to the wallphone by the airlock hatch.

  Blessed with perfect pitch and a steel-trap memory, Pancho punched out the numbers for each of the five astronauts’ banks in turn, followed by their personal identification codes. Mother always said I should have been a musician, Pancho mused as she transferred almost the total amount of each account into her own bank account. She left exactly one international dollar for each of them, so the bank’s computers would not start the complex process of closing down their accounts.

  As she finished, the hatch at the other end of the habitation module swung open and her five fellow astronauts began to push through, one at a time. “What’s going on?” demanded the first guy through.

  “Nothin’,” Pancho said again. Then she dived through the hatch at her end of the long narrow module.

  Into the Japanese lab module she swam, flicking her fingers along the equipment racks lining both sides of its central aisle, startling the technicians working there. Laughing to herself, she wondered how long it would take them to figure out that she had looted their bank accounts.

  It didn’t take very long. By the time Pancho had reached the galley once again, they were roaring after her, the men bellowing with outrage. “When I get my hands on you, I’m gonna break every bone in your scrawny body!” was one of their gentler threats.

  Even Amanda was so furious she lapsed back to her native working-class accent:

  “We’ll ’ang you up by your bloody thumbs, we will!”

  As long as I can stay ahead of them, I’m okay, Pancho told herself as she skimmed through the European lab module and into the observatory section, ducking under and around the bulky telescopes and electronics consoles. They were still yelling behind her, but she wondered if all five of them were still chasing. By now there’d been plenty of time for one or more of them to pop into a suit and cut across the top of the tee-shaped station to cut her off.

  Sure enough, when she barged into the Russian lab module, two of the guys were standing at the far end in spacesuits, visors up, waiting for her like a pair of armored cops.

  Pancho glided to a halt. One of the privacy unit screens slid back and a stubbled, bleary, puffy male face peered out, then quickly popped back in again and slid the screen shut with a muttered string of what sounded like Slavic cursing. The other three — Amanda and two of the men — came through the hatch behind her. Pancho was well and truly trapped.

  “What the fuck are you trying to pull off, Pancho?”

  “You cleaned out our bank accounts!”

  “We oughtta string you up, damn you!”

  She smiled and spread her hands placatingly. “Now fellas, you can’t hang a person in microgee. You know that.”

  “This isn’t funny,” Amanda snapped, back to her faux-Oxford enunciation.

  “I’ll make restitution, okay?” Pancho offered.

  “You damned well better!”

  “And you lost the bet, too, so we each get a month’s pay from you.”

  “No,” Pancho said as reasonably as she could. “We never went through on the vacuum breathing, so the bet’s off.”

  “Then we want our money back from your goddamned escrow account!”

  “Sure. Fine.”

  Amanda pointed to the wallphone by the hatch. “You mentioned restitution,” she said.

  Meekly, Pancho floated to the phone and tapped out her number. “You’ll have to give me your account numbers,” she said. “So I can put the money back in for you.”

  “We’ll punch in the account numbers ourselves,” Amanda said firmly.

  “You don’t trust me?” Pancho managed to keep a straight face, but just barely.

  They all growled at her.

  “But it was only a joke,” she protested. “I had no intention of keeping your money.”

  “Not much you didn’t,” one of the guys snapped. “Good thing Mandy figured out what you were up to.”

  Pancho nodded in Amanda’s direction. “You’re the brightest one around, Mandy,” she said, as if she believed it.

  “Never mind that,” Amanda replied tartly. To the men she said, “Now we’ll all have to change our ID codes, since she’s obviously figured them out.”

  “I’m going to change my account number,” said one of the guys.

  “I’m gonna change my bank,” another said fervently.

  Pancho sighed and tried her best to look glum, chastised. Inwardly, she was quivering with silent laughter. What a hoot! And none of these bozos realizes that the half hour or so they’ve spent chasing me means half an hour’s worth of interest from each of their accounts into mine. It’s not all that much, but every little bit helps.

  She just hoped they wouldn’t figure it out while they were all cooped up in the transfer buggy on the way to the Moon.

  Well, she thought, if they try to get physical I’ll just have to introduce them to Elly.

  CHENGDU, SICHUAN PROVINCE

  Dan had to shout through his sanitary mask to make himself heard over the din of construction. “All I’m asking, Zack, is can he do it or can’t he?” He’d known Zack Freiberg fo
r more than twenty years, since Zack had been an earnest young planetary geochemist intent on exploring asteroids and Dan had hired him away from his university post. Freiberg had taken flak from his friends in academia for joining big, bad Dan Randolph, the greedy capitalist founder and head of Astro Manufacturing. But over the years a mutual respect had slowly developed into a trusting friendship. It had been Zack who’d first warned Dan about the looming greenhouse cliff, and what it would do to the Earth’s climate. The greenhouse cliff had arrived, and the Earth’s politicians and business leaders had sailed blindly over its edge as the planet plunged into catastrophic warming. Zack was no longer the chubby, apple-cheeked kid Dan had first met. His strawberry hair had gone iron gray, although it was still thick and tightly curled. The past few years had toughened him, made him leaner, harder, boiled away the baby fat in his body. His face had hardened, too, as he watched his equations and graphs turn into massive human suffering.

  The two men were standing on the edge of a denuded ridge, looking out across a barren coal-black valley where thousands of Chinese workers toiled unceasingly. By all the gods, Dan thought, they really do look like an army of ants scurrying around. In the middle of the valley four enormously tall smokestacks of a huge electricity-generating plant belched dark gray fumes into the hazy sky. Mountainous piles of coal lay by the railroad track that ran alongside the power plant. Off on the horizon, beyond the farther stripped-bare ridge, the Yangzi River glittered in the hazy morning sunshine like a deadly boa constrictor slowly creeping up on its prey. A sluggish warm breeze smelled of raw coal and diesel fumes.

  Dan shuddered inwardly, wondering how many billions of microbes were worming their way through his sanitary mask and nose plugs, eager to chew past his weakened immune system and set up homes for themselves inside his body. “Dan, I really don’t have time for this,” Freiberg hollered over the roar of a huge truck carrying twenty tons of dirt and rubble down into the valley on wheels that dwarfed both men.

  “I just need a few hours of your time,” Dan said, feeling his throat going hoarse from his shouting. “Jeez, I came all the way out here to get your opinion on this.” It was a sign of the Chinese government’s belated realization that the greenhouse warming would decimate China as well as the rest of the world that they had asked Freiberg to personally direct their massive construction program. At one end of the valley, Chinese engineers and laborers were building a dam to protect the electrical power-generating station from the encroaching Yangzi. At the other end, a crew from Yamagata Industries was constructing a complex pumping station to remove the carbon dioxide emitted by the power station’s stacks and store it deep underground, in the played-out seams of the coal bed that provided fuel for the generators.

  With an exasperated frown, Freiberg said, “Listen, I know I still get my paycheck from Astro, but that doesn’t mean I can jump whenever you blow the whistle.” Dan looked into the other man’s light blue eyes and saw pain there, disappointment and outright fear. Zack blames himself for this catastrophe, Dan knew. He discovered the greenhouse cliff and he acts as if it’s all his fault. Instead of some fathead king shooting the messenger, the messenger wants to shoot himself.

  “Look, Zack,” he said, as reasonably as he could manage, “you have to eat a meal now and then, don’t you?”

  Freiberg nodded warily. He’d been sweet-talked by Dan into doing things he hadn’t wanted to do often enough in the past.

  “So I brought you lunch,” Dan said, waving his arm in the direction of the oversized mobile home he’d arrived in. Its roof glittered with solar panels. “When the noon whistle blows, come in and break some bread with me. That’s all I’m asking.”

  “You want me to look at this proposal over lunch? You think I can make a technical decision about this in an hour or less?”

  Dan shrugged disarmingly. “If you can’t, you can’t. All I’m asking is that you give it a look.”

  Freiberg gave Dan a look that was far from happy.

  Yet five minutes after noon he climbed up through the open door of Dan’s big mobile home.

  “I might have known,” he muttered as he stepped past Big George, standing by the doorway.

  The van was luxuriously fitted out. George was Dan’s major domo and bodyguard. An attractive young Japanese woman, petite and silent, was stirring steaming vegetables in an electric wok. Dan was sitting in the faux-leather couch that curved around the fold-down dinner table, a suede jacket draped over his shoulders even though the van felt uncomfortably warm to Freiberg. Zack could see the crease across Dan’s face that the sanitary mask had left. “Drink?” Dan asked, without getting to his feet. A half-empty tumbler of something bubbly sat on the table before him.

  “What are you having?” Freiberg asked, sliding into the couch where it angled around the table’s end. The table was already set for two. “Ginger beer,” said Dan. “George turned me on to it. Non-alcoholic and it’s even good for the digestion.”

  Freiberg shrugged his rounded shoulders. “Okay, I’ll have the same.” George quickly pulled a brown bottle from the refrigerator, opened it, and poured Freiberg a glass of ginger beer.

  “Goes good with brandy, y’know,” he said as he handed the glass to Freiberg. The scientist accepted the glass wordlessly and George went back to his post by the door, folding his heavy arms over his massive chest like a professional bouncer.

  After a sip of his drink, Dan asked, “Might have known what?” Freiberg waved a hand around the compartment. “That you’d be living in the lap of luxury, even out here.”

  Dan laughed. “If you’ve got to go out into the wilderness, you might as well bring a few creature comforts with you.”

  “Kind of warm in here, though,” Freiberg complained mildly. Dan smiled gauntly at him. “You’re accustomed to living in the wild, Zack. I’m not.”

  “Yeah, guess so.” Freiberg glanced at the painting above Dan’s head: a little girl standing by a banyan tree. “Is that real?”

  “Holoprint,” said Dan. “A Vickrey.”

  “Nice.”

  “What’re you living in, out here?”

  “A tent,” said Freiberg.

  Nodding, Dan said, “That’s what I thought.”

  “It’s a pretty good tent, as tents go, but it’s nothing like this.” His eyes swept the dining area appreciatively. “How many other rooms in here?”

  “Just two: office and bedroom. King-sized bed, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “You like it, it’s yours.”

  “The holoprint?”

  “The van. The whole shebang. I’ll be leaving later this afternoon. If you can find somebody to drive George and me to the airstrip you can keep this for yourself.” Surprised, Freiberg blurted, “Can you afford to give it away? From what I’ve heard—”

  “For you, Zack,” Dan interrupted, “my last penny. If it comes to that.” Freiberg made a wry face. “You’re trying to bribe me.”

  “Yep. Why not?”

  With a resigned sigh, the scientist said, “All right, let me see this proposal you want me to look at.”

  “Hey George,” Dan called, “bring me the notebook, will you?” Almost an hour later, Freiberg looked up from the notebook’s screen and said, “Well, I’m no rocket engineer, and what I know about fusion reactors you could put into a thimble, but I can’t find anything obviously wrong with this.”

  “Do you think it’ll work?” Dan asked earnestly.

  “How the hell should I know?” Freiberg snapped irritably. “Why in hell did you come all the way out here to ask my opinion on something you know is outside my expertise?”

  Dan hesitated for several heartbeats, then answered, “Because I can trust you, Zack. This guy Humphries is too slick for me to believe. All the experts I’ve contacted claim that this fusion rocket is workable, but how do I know that he hasn’t bought them off? He’s got something up his sleeve, some hidden agenda, and this fusion rocket idea is just the tip of the iceberg. I th
ink he wants to get his paws on Astro.”

  “That’s a helluva mixture of metaphors,” Freiberg said, grinning despite himself.

  “Never mind the syntax. I don’t trust Humphries. I do trust you.”

  “Dan, my opinion doesn’t mean a damned thing here. You might as well ask George, or your cook.”

  Hunching forward over the table, Dan said, “You can talk the talk, Zack. You can contact the experts that Humphries has used and sound them out. You can talk to other people, the real specialists in these areas, and see what they think. They’d talk to you, Zack, and you’d understand what they’re saying. You can—”

  “Dan,” Freiberg said icily, “I’m working twenty-six hours a day already.”

  “I know,” Dan said. “I know.”

  Freiberg had thrown himself totally into the global effort to cut down on the greenhouse gas emissions given off by the world’s fossil-fueled power-generating stations, factories, and vehicles.

  Faced with disastrous shifts in climate due to the greenhouse warming, the nations of the world were belatedly, begrudgingly, attempting to remedy the cataclysm. Led by the Global Economic Council, manufacturers around the world were desperately trying to convert automobiles and other vehicles to electrical motors. But that meant trebling the global electricity-generating capacity, and fossil-fueled power plants were faster and cheaper to build than nuclear plants. There was still plenty of petroleum available, and the world’s resources of coal dwarfed the petroleum reserves. Fission-based power plants were still anathema because of the public’s fear of nuclear power. The new fusion generators were costly, complex, and also hindered by stubborn public resistance to anything nuclear. So more and more fossil-fueled power plants were being built, especially in the rising industrial nations such as China and South Africa. The GEC insisted that new plants sequester their carbon dioxide emissions, capture the dangerous greenhouse gas and pump it safely deep underground. Zachary Freiberg had devoted his life to the effort to mitigate the greenhouse disaster. He had taken an indefinite leave of absence from his position as chief scientist of Astro Manufacturing and criss-crossed the world, directing massive construction projects. His wife had left him, he had not seen his children in more than a year, his personal life was in tatters, but he was driven to do what he could, what he had to do, to help slow the greenhouse warming. “So how’s it going?” Dan asked him.