The Precipice gt-8

by Ben Bova

  “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 coalblack 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. “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, Marry, 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 locks 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 t
hey 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? Does Humphries have anything to do with this? He wants me to spy on Astro, which means he prob’ly wants me to spy on Randolph himself. So maybe he’s worked things out so’s I get to see Randolph face-to-face. Is Humphries pulling strings inside Randolph’s own company?

  It never occurred to Pancho that Dan Randolph wanted to see her for reasons of his own.

  The Clippership rode smoothly through re-entry, with only a few moments of turbulence as it plunged into the Earth’s atmosphere like a squat, cone-shaped meteor, plummeting so fast that the very air outside the craft heated to incandescence. We’re a falling star, Pancho told herself as she sat tightly buckled into her seat while the ship shuddered and jounced. She could hear the muted howl of the tortured air on the other side of the hull, mere centimeters from her seat. A falling star. Some kid down there’s prob’ly making a wish on our trail. The shaking and banshee wail of re-entry ended swiftly and the flight smoothed out.

  “We’ll be landing in four minutes,” the captain’s rich baritone voice announced over the intercom. “Don’t be alarmed by all the banging and roaring. It’s just the retrorockets and the landing struts deploying.”

  Pancho smiled. That’s what we need the crew for: reassuring announcements. It felt as if they were falling until the retros fired briefly, pushing Pancho deep into her seat. Another drop, so short she barely had time to feel it before the retros roared out a longer blast. Then everything went silent and still. “We’re on the ground,” the captain said, sounding relieved. Pancho had expected that she and Amanda would be sent directly to Randolph’s office for their interview with the CEO, or at least to the personnel department for a briefing on what they should expect. Instead, once they cleared the access tunnel they were met in the terminal by a good-looking young Latino in a business suit who led them out to the garage and a sleek-looking sedan. “Your luggage is being picked up and will be waiting for you in your quarters at the corporate housing center,” he said in impeccable American English, opening the car’s rear door for the two women.

  As she and Amanda got into the back seat, Pancho saw there was a driver sitting behind the wheel. The young man slid in beside him.

  She grinned. “What, no limo?”

  The young man half-turned in his seat and said quite seriously, “Mr. Randolph doesn’t believe in unnecessary frills. This is comfortable enough, isn’t it?”

  “Quite,” said Amanda.

  By the time they got to the test site Amanda had set up a dinner date for herself with their handsome young escort.

  The test site was on the shoulder of a green hillside that sloped down into the warm Caribbean. Late afternoon sunshine slanted down from between massive cumulus clouds that were visibly growing, boiling up into towering thunderheads, getting darker and more menacing by the minute. Pancho smelled the salt tang in the air, heard the surf rolling in gently below, felt the warm steady breeze on her face. A tropical paradise, she thought.

  Or it would be, if it weren’t for all that danged hardware squatting in the middle of the field.

  Following their Latino escort, they walked from the car to the small knot of people standing around what looked like a set of man-tall dewar flasks crusted with frost, a small crane, lots of plumbing and tubing, a medium-sized truck carrying what looked like a pair of major-league fuel cells on its bed, a smaller truck loaded with a bank of capacitors, and a corrugated-metal shed off to one side. Several automobiles and semivans were parked on the other side of the shed. As they got closer, Pancho saw that the people were gathered around a small swept-winged aircraft that was resting on a pair of skids. It was an ancient cruise missile; she saw, an unmanned jet airplane. She knew they’d been outlawed by the disarmament treaties. Only the Peacekeepers had such weapons, and this one looked too old to be a Peacekeeper missile. The markings on it were faded, the serial number stenciled on its tail barely legible.

  Before she could ask a question, a trim-looking man with silver hair and a rugged fighter’s face stepped out of the crowd around the missile. He wore a light tan wind breaker zippered to the throat despite the warm sunshine, a baseball cap perched jauntily on his head, well-faded jeans, and cowboy boots. Their escort stiffened almost like a soldier coming to attention.

  “Senor Randolph,” he said, “may I introduce—”

  “You must be Amanda Cunningham,” said Dan Randolph, with a crooked smile.

  He put his hand out and Amanda took it briefly. “I’m Dan Randolph.”

  Then he turned to Pancho. “And you�
�ve got to be Priscilla Lane.”

  “Pancho,” she corrected, taking his extended hand. His grip was firm, friendly.

  “Priscilla’s too fussy, and anybody calls me Pru or Prissy, I’ll belt him.”

  “Pancho,” Randolph said, his smile widening. “I’ll remember that.”

  “What’s this all about?” Pancho asked. “Why’ve you brought us here?” Randolph’s eyes showed momentary surprise at her bluntness, but then he shrugged and said, “You’re going to see some history being made… if this doubledamned jury-rigged kludge works right.”

  He introduced Amanda and Pancho to Lyall Duncan and the others gathered around the missile. Almost all of them were male, engineers or technicians. One of the women was a tall blonde; competition for Amanda, Pancho thought. Duncan looked like a fierce little gnome, or maybe a troll, even when he smiled. Puzzled, intrigued, Pancho allowed Randolph to usher her and Amanda to the shed. It was packed with instruments and consoles and one rickety-looking desk with a lopsided chair in front of it.

  “You just stay here and watch,” he said, with a curious grin. “If it works, you’ll be witnesses. If it blows up, this ought to be far enough away to keep you from getting hurt.”

  The dark-haired troll called Duncan chuckled. “Experimental physics, you know.

  Always the chance of an explosion.”

  The crane was on its own caterpillar tractor. A pair of technicians used it to hoist the missile off the ground and trundle it out almost half a kilometer. They put the missile gently onto the grassy ground, pointing into the wind blowing steadily in from the sea.

  Consoles were coming to life in the shed. Engineers were speaking to each other in their clipped jargon. Pancho watched Randolph. The man seemed outwardly relaxed as he stood with both hands jammed into his windbreaker pockets, watching the missile while the crane waddled back toward them. Duncan buzzed around the shed like a bee in a flower bed. The tension built up;