The Precipice gt-8

by Ben Bova

  Sitting behind his desk, Dan said, “I’ll get George to scratch the program. Astro can pay the storage fees for your sister.”

  Pancho shook her head. “That’ll just call attention to what I did.”

  “Not if we erase the subroutine completely. He’ll never know.”

  “No!” Pancho insisted. “Don’t go anywhere near it. It’ll tip him off for sure.” Dan could see how agitated she was. “You just want to leave it there? He might stumble across it any minute.”

  “He knows I did it,” Pancho said, crossing the room again in her long-legged strides. “I know he knows. He’s just playin’ cat-and-mouse with me.”

  “I don’t think so. He’s not the type. Humphries is more a sledge-hammer-on-thehead kind of guy.”

  She stopped and turned toward Dan, her face suddenly white, aghast. “Jesus H.

  Christ… he might turn off Sis’s life support! He might pull the plug on her!”

  Dan knew she was right. “Or threaten to.”

  “That’d give him enough leverage to get me to do whatever he wants.”

  “What does he want?”

  “He wants Mandy. He wants her scrubbed from the mission so he can talk her into marrying him.”

  Dan leaned back in his desk chair and stared at the ceiling. He’d had the office swept for bugs only an hour earlier, yet he had the uneasy feeling that Humphries knew everything that he said or did. Pancho’s not the only Astro employee he’s recruited, Dan reminded himself. My whole double-damned staff must be honeycombed with his snoops. Who can I trust?

  He snapped forward in the chair and said into the phone console, “Phone, find George Ambrose. I want him here, now.”

  In less than a minute Big George came through the doorway from the outer office.

  “George, I want this whole suite swept for bugs,” Dan commanded.

  “Again? We just did it an hour ago.”

  “I want you to do it this time. Yourself. Nobody else.”

  Scratching at his shaggy beard, George said, “Gotcha, boss.” It took a maddening half hour. Pancho forced herself to sit on the sofa while George went through the office with a tiny black box in one massive paw. “Clean in here,” he said at last.

  “Okay,” said Dan. “Close the door and sit down.”

  “You said you wanted the outer offices done, too,” George objected.

  “In a minute. Sit.”

  Obediently, George lowered his bulk into one of the cushioned chairs in front of Dan’s desk.

  “I’ve been thinking. Tonight, the three of us are going to move a dewar out of the catacombs,” Dan said.

  “Sis? Where—”

  “I’ll figure that out between now and then,” Dan said. “Maybe somewhere else on the Moon. Maybe we’ll move her to one of the space stations.”

  “You’ve gotta have the right equipment to maintain it,” George pointed out.

  Dan waved a hand in the air. “You need a cryostat to keep the nitrogen liquified.

  Not much else.”

  “Life support monitors,” Pancho pointed out.

  “Self-contained on the dewar flask,” said Dan.

  “Not the equipment,” Pancho corrected. “I mean you need some people to take a look every few days, make sure everything’s running okay.” With a shake of his head, Dan said, “That’s a frill that you pay extra for. You don’t need it. The equipment has safety alarms built in. The only time you need human intervention is when the flask starts to exceed the limits you’ve set the equipment to keep.”

  “Well, yeah… I guess,” Pancho agreed reluctantly.

  “Okay, George,” Dan said. “Go sweep the rest of the place. We can all meet here for dinner at…” he called up his appointment screen with the jab of a finger,”… nineteen-thirty.”

  “Dinner?” Pancho asked.

  “Can’t do dirty work on an empty stomach,” Dan said, grinning mischievously. “But where are we taking her?” Pancho asked as she disconnected the liquid nitrogen feed line. Despite its heavy insulation, the hose was stiff with a rime of frost. Cold white vapor hissed briefly from its open end, until she twisted the seal shut.

  “Shh!” Dan hissed, pointing to the baleful red eye of the security camera hanging some fifty meters down the corridor.

  This late at night they were quite alone in the catacombs, but Dan worried about that security camera. There was one at each end of the long row of dewars, and although the area was dimly lit, the cameras fed into Selene’s security office where they were monitored twenty-four hours a day. Pancho figured that, like security guards anywhere, the men and women responsible for monitoring the cameras seldom paid them close attention, except when a warning light flashed red or a synthesized voice warned of trouble that some sensor had detected. That’s why they had hacked into the sensor controls on Sis’s dewar and cut them out of the monitoring loop.

  Dan and George were sweating with the effort of jacking up the massive dewar onto a pair of trolleys. Even in the low gravity of the Moon, the big stainless-steel cylinder was heavy.

  “Where’re we goin’?” Pancho repeated.

  “You’ll see,” Dan grunted.

  Pancho plugged the nitrogen hose into the portable cryostat they had taken from one of the Astro labs, several levels below the catacombs. “Okay, all set,” she whispered.

  “How’re you doing, George?” Dan asked.

  The shaggy Australian came around the front end of the dewar. “Ready whenever you are, boss.”

  Dan glanced once at the distant camera’s red eye, then said, “Let’s get rolling.” The caster wheels on the trolleys squeaked as the three of them pushed the dewar down the long, shadowy corridor.

  “Don’t the security cameras have a recording loop?” Pancho asked. “Once they see Sis’s dewar is missing, they’ll play it back and see us.”

  “That camera’s going to show a nice, quiet night,” Dan said, leaning hard against the big dewar as they trundled along. “Cost me a few bucks, but I think I found an honest security guard. She’ll erase our images and run a loop from earlier in the evening to cover the erasure. Everything will look peaceful and calm.”

  “That’s an honest guard?” Pancho asked.

  “An honest guard,” Dan said, panting with the strain of pushing, “is one who stays bought.”

  “And I’ll put an empty dewar in your sister’s place,” George added, “soon’s we get this one settled in.” Pancho noticed he was breathing easily, hardly exerting himself.

  “But where’re we takin’ her?” Pancho asked again. “And why’re we whisperin’ if you got the guard bought?”

  “We’re whispering because there might be other people in the catacombs,” Dan replied, sounding a bit irked. “No sense taking any chances we don’t need to take.”

  “Oh.” That made sense. But it still didn’t tell her where in the hell they were going. They passed the end of the catacombs and kept on going along the long, dimly-lit corridor until they stopped at last at what looked like an airlock hatch. Dan stood up straight and stretched his arms overhead until Pancho heard his vertebrae crack.

  “I’m getting too old for this kind of thing,” he muttered as he went to the hatch and pecked on its electronic lock. The hatch popped slightly open; Pancho caught a whiff of stale, dusty air that sighed from it.

  George pulled the hatch all the way open.

  “Okay, down the tunnel we go,” said Dan, unclipping a flashlight from the tool loop on the leg of his coveralls.

  The tunnel had been started, he explained to Pancho, back in the early days of Moonbase, when Earthbound managers had decided to ram a tunnel through the ringwall mountains to connect the floor of Alphonsus with the broad expanse of Mare Nubium.

  “I helped to dig it,” Dan said, with pride in his voice. Then he added, “What there is of it, at least.”

  The lunar rock had turned out to be much tougher than expected; the cost of digging the tunnel, even with plasma torches, had risen too
far. So the tunnel was never finished. Instead, a cable-car system had been built over the mountains. It was more expensive to operate than a tunnel would have been but far cheaper to construct.

  “I’ve ridden the cable car up to the top of Mt. Yeager,” Pancho said. “The view’s terrific.”

  “Yep,” Dan agreed. “They forgot about the tunnel. But it’s still here, even though nobody uses it. And so are the access shafts.”

  The access shafts had been drilled upward to the outside, on the side of the mountain. The first of the access shafts opened into an emergency shelter where there were pressure suits and spare oxygen bottles, in case the cable-car system overhead broke down.

  “And here we are,” Dan said.

  In the scant light from the flashlights that Dan and George played around the tunnel walls, Pancho saw a set of metal rungs leading up to another hatch. “There’s a tempo just above us,” he said as George started climbing the ladder.

  “We’ll jack into its electrical power supply to run the dewar’s cryostat.”

  “Won’t that show up on the grid monitors?” Pancho asked. Shaking his head, Dan replied, “Nope. The tempos have their own solar panels and batteries. Completely independent. The panels are even up on poles to keep ’em out of the dust.”

  Pancho heard the hatch groan open. Looking up, she saw George squeeze his bulk through its narrow diameter.

  “How’re we gonna get Sis’s dewar through that hatch?” she demanded.

  “There’s a bigger hatch for equipment,” Dan said.

  As if to prove the point, a far wider hatch squealed open over their heads. Dim auxiliary lighting from the tempo filtered down to them. Even with the little winch from the tempo, it was a struggle to wrestle the bulky dewar and its equipment up through the hatch. Pancho worried that Sis would be jostled and crumpled in her liquid nitrogen bath. But at last they had Sis hooked up in the temporary shelter. The dewar rested on the floor and all the gauges were in the green.

  “You’ll have to come back here once a month or so to check up on everything.

  Maybe once every six or seven months you’ll have to top off the nitrogen supply.”

  A thought struck her. “What about when I’m on the mission?”

  “I’ll do it,” George said without hesitation. “Be glad to.”

  “How the hell can I thank you guys?”

  Dan chuckled softly. “I’m just making certain that my best pilot isn’t blackmailed by Humphries into working against me. And George…” The big Aussie looked suddenly embarrassed.

  “I used to live in one of the tempos,” he said, his tenor voice softer than usual. “Back when I was a fugitive, part of the underground. Back before Dan took me under ’is wing.”

  Dan said, “This is a sort of homecoming for George.”

  “Yeah,” George said. “Reminds me of the bad old days. Almost brings a fookin’ tear to my eye.”

  Dan laughed and the Aussie laughed with him. Pancho just stood there, feeling enormously grateful to them both.

  STARPOWER, LTD.

  Dan had offered space in Astro Corporation’s office complex for the headquarters of the fledgling Starpower, Ltd. Humphries had countered with an offer of a suite in his own Humphries Space Systems offices. Stavenger suggested a compromise, and Star-power’s meager offices opened in the other tower on the Grand Plaza, where Selene’s governmental departments were housed. Yet Stavenger had not been invited to this working meeting. Dan sat on one side of the small conference table, Martin Humphries on the other. The room’s windowless walls were bare, the furniture strictly functional.

  “I hear you’ve been having some problems with hackers,” Dan said. For just a flash of a second Martin Humphries looked startled. He quickly regained his composure.

  “Whoever told you that?” he asked calmly.

  Dan smiled knowingly. “Not much happens around here without the grapevine getting wind of it.”

  Humphries leaned back in his chair. Dan noticed that it was a personally fitted recliner, unlike the other chairs around the table, which were inexpensive padded plastic.

  “The leak’s been fixed,” Humphries said. “No damage done.”

  “That’s good,” said Dan.

  “Speaking of the grapevine,” Humphries said lightly, “I heard a funny one just this morning.”

  “Oh?”

  “There’s a story going around that you and a couple of your employees stole a dewar from the catacombs last night.”

  “Really?”

  “Sounds like something out of an old horror flick.”

  “Imagine that,” Dan said.

  “Curious. Why would you do something like that?”

  Trying to find a comfortable position on his chair, Dan replied, “Let’s not spend the morning chasing rumors. We’re here to set our budget requirements.” Humphries nodded. “I’ll get one of my people to track it down.” Or one of my people, Dan grumbled to himself. But it’ll be okay as long as he can’t find Pancho’s sister. Only she and George and I know where we stashed her. He said to Humphries, “Okay, you do that. Now about the budget…” They spent the next hour going over every item in the budget that Humphries’s staff had prepared for Starpower, Ltd. Dan saw that there were no frills: no allocations for publicity or travel or anything except building the fusion drive, testing it enough to meet the IAA’s requirements for human rating, and then flying it with a crew of four to the Asteroid Belt.

  “I’ve been thinking that it makes more sense to up the crew to six,” Dan said.

  Humphries’s brows rose. “Six? Why do we need two extra people?”

  “We’ve got two pilots, a propulsion engineer, and a geologist. Two geologists would be better… or a geologist and some other specialist, maybe a geochemist.”

  “That makes five,” Humphries said warily.

  “I want to keep an extra slot open. Design the mission for six. As we get closer to the launch, we’ll probably find out we need another hand.” Suspicion showed clearly in Humphries’s face. “Adding two more people means extra supplies, extra mass.”

  “We can accommodate it. The fusion system’s got plenty of power.”

  “Extra cost, too.”

  “A slight increment,” Dan said easily. “Down in the noise.” Humphries looked unconvinced, but instead of arguing he asked, “Have you picked a specific asteroid yet?”

  Dan tapped at his handheld computer, and the wall screen that covered one entire side of the conference room displayed a chart of the Belt. Thousands of thin ellipsoidal lines representing orbital paths filled the screen. “It looks like the scrawling that a bunch of kindergarten brats would make,” Humphries muttered.

  “Sort of,” said Dan. “There’s a lot of rocks moving around out there.” He tapped at the handheld again and the lines winked out, leaving the screen deep black with tiny pinpoints of lights glittering here and there. “This is what it really looks like,” Dan said. “A whole lot of emptiness with a few pebbles floating around here and there.”

  “Some of those pebbles are kilometers across,” Humphries said.

  “Yep,” Dan replied. “The biggest one is—”

  “Ceres. Discovered by a priest on New Year’s Day, 1801.”

  “You’ve been doing your homework,” Dan said.

  Humphries smiled, pleased. “It’s a little over a thousand kilometers across.”

  “If that one ever hit the Earth…”

  “Goodbye to everything. Like the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.”

  “That’s just what they need down there,” Dan muttered, “an extinction-level impact.”

  “Let’s get back to work,” Humphries said crisply. “There’s no big rock heading Earth’s way.”

  “None has been found,” Dan corrected. “Yet.”

  “You know,” Humphries said, musing, “If we were really smart we’d run a demo flight to Mars and do a little prospecting on those two little moons. They’re captured asteroids, after all
.”

  “The IAA has ruled the whole Mars system off-limits for commercial development. That includes Deimos and Phobos.”

  Hunching closer to the conference table, Humphries said, “But we could just do it as a scientific mission. You know, send a couple geologists to chip off some rock samples, analyze what they’re really made of.”

  “They already have pretty good data on that,” Dan pointed out. “But it could show potential investors that the fusion drive works and there’s plenty of natural resources in the asteroids.”

  Frowning, Dan said, “Even if we could get the IAA to allow us to do it—”

  “I can,” Humphries said confidently.

  “Even so, people have been going to Mars for years now. Decades. Investors won’t be impressed by a Mars flight.”

  “Even if our fusion buggy gets there over a weekend?”

  Firmly, Dan said, “We’ve got to get to the Belt. That’s what will impress investors.

  Show them that the fusion drive changes the economic picture.”

  “I suppose,” Humphries said reluctantly.

  “And we’ve got to lay our hands on a metallic asteroid, one of the nickel-iron type. That’s where the heavy metals are, the stuff you can’t get from the Moon or even the NEAs.”

  “Gold,” Humphries said, brightening. “Silver and platinum. Do you have any idea of what this is going to do to the precious metals market?” Dan blinked at him. I’m trying to move the Earth’s industrial base into space and he’s playing games with the prices for gold. We just don’t think the same way; we don’t have the same goals or the same values, even.

  Grinning slyly, Humphries said, “We could get a lot of capital from people who’d be willing to pay us not to bring those metals to Earth.”

  “Maybe,” Dan admitted.

  “I know at least three heads of governments who would personally buy into Starpower just to keep us from dumping precious metals onto the market.”

  “And I’ll bet,” Dan growled, “that those governments rule nations where the people are poor, starving, and sinking lower every year.” Humphries shrugged. “We’re not going to solve all the world’s problems, Dan.”