The Precipice gt-8

by Ben Bova

  Dan Randolph: Paper shufflers tend to be conservative souls. There’s always a risk in allowing somebody to do something new, and bureaucrats hate risk-taking. Much safer for them to say no, you need more testing or another round of approvals. Buck the responsibility upstairs and don’t stick your own neck out. If the IAA had been running America’s expansion westward back in the nineteenth century, they’d still be trying to decide whether to build Chicago or St. Louis. Nippon News Agency: What do you hope to achieve by this flight? Dan Randolph: Ah, a substantive question for a change. We intend to stake out a claim to one or more asteroids. Our goal is to open up the vast resources of the Asteroid Belt for the human race.

  Nippon News Agency: Have you determined which asteroids you will investigate? Dan Randolph: Yes, but I’m not at liberty to reveal which they are. I don’t want anyone or anything to cloud our claim.

  Several questioners simultaneously: What do you mean by that? What are you afraid of? Who would make a rival claim?

  Dan Randolph: Whoa! Hey, one at a time. Basically, I fear that if I announce that we’re aiming for a certain asteroid, the IAA will find a reason to declare it offlimits to development, just as they’ve declared the Near-Earth Asteroids and the moons of Mars closed to development.

  Network Iberia: But the NEAs have been closed to development because there is the chance that their orbits could be perturbed and they would crash into the Earth, isn’t that so?

  Dan Randolph: That’s the IAA’s excuse for keeping the NEAs off-limits, right.

  Bureaucrats can always find a good excuse to prevent progress. Network Iberia: Are you saying, then, that the IAA has other motives in this? A hidden agenda?

  Dan Randolph: If they do, their agenda isn’t hidden terribly well. They’ve denied the resources of the NEAs to the needy people of Earth. If they could, they’d deny the resources of the Belt, as well. Why? Ask them, not me. Lunar News: You seem to be implying that the IAA is working against the best interests of Earth.

  Dan Randolph: I’m not implying it, I’m saying it loud and clear: The IAA is working against the best interests of Earth.

  Lunar News: If that’s the case, who do you think they are working for?

  Dan Randolph: The status quo, of course. That’s what bureaucrats always support. Their goal is to keep tomorrow exactly like today, or yesterday, even — no matter how lousy today or yesterday may have been.

  Pan Asia Information: You cast yourself in the position of helping the needy people of Earth. Yet isn’t your true goal to make billions in profits for your corporation?

  Dan Randolph: My true goal is to open up the resources of the Asteroid Belt. We are running this mission on a shoestring; we don’t intend to make a profit from this flight.

  Pan Asia Information: But you hope to make profits from future missions, don’t you?

  Dan Randolph: Certainly! But more important than that, we’ll have shown that the people of Earth can tap the enormous treasures of resources waiting for us in the Belt. We’ll be glad to see other companies coming out to the Belt to find and develop those resources.

  Columbia Broadcasting: You’d be glad to see competitors going to the Belt, but only after you yourself have claimed the best asteroids. Dan Randolph: That’s real flatland thinking. There are millions of asteroids in the Belt. Hundreds of millions, if you count the boulder-sized ones. We could claim a thousand of them and that wouldn’t even begin to put a dent into the total number available.

  Columbia Broadcasting: You say “claim” an asteroid. But isn’t it illegal to claim any object in space?

  Dan Randolph: It’s been illegal since 1967 to claim sovereignty over any body in space. But since the founding of Selene, it has been perfectly legal to claim use of the natural resources of a celestial body.

  Euronews: Weren’t you accused of piracy at one time? Didn’t you hijack shipments of ore on their way from the Moon to factories in Earth orbit? Dan Randolph: That was a long time ago, and all those legal issues have been resolved.

  Euronews: But aren’t you doing the same thing now? Stealing a ship and going out to claim resources that rightfully belong to the entire human race? Dan Randolph: Look, pal, I own this ship, One-third of it, at least. And those resources out in the Belt won’t do the entire human race one diddley-squat [DELETED] iota’s worth of good if somebody doesn’t go out there and start developing them.

  Anzac Supernet: Is it true that Starpower 1 runs on fusion rockets? Dan Randolph: Yes. For more about the Duncan Drive you should talk to Lyle Duncan, who headed the team that built this propulsion system. He’s at the university in Glasgow.

  Anzac Supernet: Are you really going to be able to reach the Asteroid Belt in two weeks?

  Dan Randolph: If we accelerate at one-sixth g halfway and then decelerate to our destination, yes, two weeks.

  Global News: Do you think this stunt will help the price of Astro Manufacturing stock?

  Dan Randolph [grinning]: You must be a stockholder. Yes, if we’re successful I think Astro’s price should climb considerably. But that’s just my guess. I’m in enough trouble with the IAA; I wouldn’t want the GEC’s regulators on my back, too.

  Global News: How many people are on the ship with you? Could you introduce them?

  Leaning back in his reclining chair as he watched the interview, Martin Humphries felt whipsawed by emotions. Try as he might to remain calm, he seethed inwardly with cold fury at Dan Randolph and Amanda Cunningham. Yet when Amanda appeared on the wallscreen, sitting at the ship’s control panel alongside Pancho Lane, looking properly businesslike in her flight coveralls and her hair pinned up, his anger melted in the light from her eyes. How could you? He silently asked Amanda. I offered you everything and you turned your back on me. How could you?

  After hardly a minute of seeing her on-screen he abruptly snapped the broadcast off. The wallscreen went blank.

  It’s over and done with, he told himself as he called up his appointments calendar on his desk screen. Put it behind you. Grimly he searched for the date of the next quarterly meeting of Astro Manufacturing’s board of directors. He marked the date in red. Randolph will be dead by then. I’ll be able to pick his bones and snap up Astro for a song. They’ll all be dead by then. Her too.

  Furious at the way his hands trembled, Humphries called up his most reliable dating service and began scrolling through the videos of the women who were available and ready to please him.

  None of them were as desirable as Amanda, he realized. But he began making his choices anyway.

  OUTWARD BOUND

  An adenoidal woman lamented lost love as country music twanged softly in the bridge of Starpower 1. “That was some performance you put on,” said Pancho. She was sitting in the command-pilot’s seat at the instrument panel. Dan was in the right-hand seat, beside her, separated by a bank of control knobs and rocker switches. He saw that half the touchscreens on the panel had been personalized by Pancho: they showed data against backgrounds of the Grand Canyon, sleek acrobatic aircraft, even muscular male models smilingly reclining on sunny beaches.

  “The interview?” Dan laughed softly. “I could’ve predicted three-quarters of the questions they asked. Maybe more.”

  He stared out at the view through the wide glassteel port that ran the length of the instrument panel and wrapped around its sides. To his left, behind Pancho, was the Sun, its brilliance toned down by the port’s heavy tinting but still bright enough to dominate the sky. It made Pancho look as if she had a halo ringing her closecropped hair. The zodiacal light stretched out from the Sun’s middle clear across the width of the port; dust motes scattered the sunlight, leftovers from the solar system’s early days of creation. Beyond was darkness, the deep black infinity of space. Only a few of the brightest stars shone through the port’s tinting. “You really think the stock price’ll go up?” Pancho asked, her eyes shifting back and forth among the displays on the panel.

  “Already has, a couple of points,” Dan said. “That’
s one of the reasons I did the interview.”

  She nodded. “From what I heard afterward, the IAA wants to slap your butt in jail the instant you get back into their jurisdiction.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been in jail,” Dan muttered. “Yeah, but that wouldn’t do the stock any good, would it?”

  “Pancho, you talk like a worried stockholder.”

  “I’m a stockholder.”

  “Are you worried?”

  “What, me worry?” she joked. “I got no time for worryin’. But I would like to know exactly where we’re heading.”

  “Would you?”

  “Come on, boss, you can razzle-dazzle the reporters but I know you got an asteroid all picked out. Maybe a couple of ’em.”

  “I want to get to three of them.”

  “Three?”

  “Yep. One of each type: stony, metallic, and carbonaceous.”

  “How deep into the Belt will we hafta go?”

  “We’d better bring Fuchs into this; he’s the expert.”

  In a few minutes the four of them were seated around the table in the ship’s wardroom: Amanda and Fuchs on one side, Pancho and Dan on the other. A computer-generated chart of the Asteroid Belt was displayed on the bulkhead screen, a ragged sprinkling of colored dots between thin yellow circles representing the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

  “So you can see that the metallic asteroids,” Fuchs was saying, in an almost pedantic drone, “lie mostly in the outer areas of the Belt. This is a region that hasn’t been explored as well as the inner zones.”

  “Which is why we haven’t picked a specific metallic rock as yet,” said Dan.

  “What’re we talkin’ here?” Pancho asked. “Three A Us? Four?”

  “Four astronomical units,” Amanda replied, “give or take a fraction.”

  “And you want to head out there and scout around?” Pancho clearly looked incredulous.

  “We have enough fuel for some maneuvering,” Dan said. Pulling her palmcomp from her coverall pocket, Pancho said, “Some maneuvering. But at that distance, not a helluva lot.”

  “I need a nice chunk of nickel-iron,” Dan said. “Doesn’t have to be big: a few hundred meters will do just fine.”

  Fuchs broke into a smile. It made his heavy-featured, normally dour face light up. “I think I understand. A nickel-iron piece a few hundred meters across would contain enough iron ore to feed the world’s steel industry for a year or more.” Dan jabbed a forefinger in his direction. “You’ve got it, Lars. That’s what I want to show them, back home.”

  Amanda spoke up. “Didn’t someone bring a nickel-iron asteroid into the Earth-Moon vicinity?”

  “Gunn did it,” Fuchs answered. “He even named the asteroid Pittsburgh, after the steel-producing center in the United States.”

  “Yeah, and the double-damned GEC tossed Gunn off the rock and damned near ruined him,” Dan recalled sourly.

  “You simply can’t have people bringing potentially dangerous objects into the Earth-Moon region,” Amanda said. “Suppose this Pittsburgh thing somehow was perturbed into an orbit that would impact Earth? It could have been devastating.” Dan scowled at her. “It’s been more than four centuries since Newton figured out the laws of motion and gravity. We can calculate orbits with some precision. Pittsburgh wasn’t going to endanger anything. It was just the double-damned GEC’s way of maintaining control.”

  Pancho looked up from her palmcomp. “We’ve got fuel enough to maneuver for three days, out at the four AU range.”

  “Good enough,” Dan said. “We’ll be scanning all the way out there. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find a nickel-iron baby right away.”

  Fuchs shook his head gloomily. “There is vast emptiness out there.” Pointing to the wallscreen display, he went on, “We think of the Belt as crowded with asteroids, but really they are nothing but infinitesimal bits of matter floating in an enormous sea of emptiness. If that chart was drawn to true scale, the asteroids would be too small to see, except in a microscope.”

  “A few needles in a tremendous haystack,” Amanda added. Dan shrugged carelessly. “That’s why we have radar and telescopes and all the other sensors.”

  Pancho brought the conversation back to practicality. “Okay, so we have to go huntin’ to find a metallic rock. What about the others you want, boss?”

  “Lars has already picked them out.”

  Tapping on his own palmcomp, lying on the table before him, Fuchs highlighted two particular asteroids on the wall display. Bright red circles flashed around them. With another touch of his stylus on the palmcomp’s tiny keyboard, the trajectory of Starpower 1 appeared on the display, with the ship’s current position outlined by a flashing yellow circle.

  “The closer object is 26 — 238, an S-type asteroid.”

  “Stony,” Amanda said.

  “Yes,” Fuchs agreed, smiling at her. “Stony asteroids are rich in silicates and light metals such as magnesium, calcium and aluminum.”

  Dan stared at the display. The dot showing Starpower 1’s position was noticeably moving. Christ, we’re going like a bat out of hell. He had known the facts and figures of the fusion-driven ship’s performance, but now, seeing the reality of it on the chart, it began to hit him viscerally.

  “Our second objective,” Fuchs was going on, “will be 32-114, a C-type, chondritic object. Chondritic asteroids contain carbon and hydrates—”

  “Water,” said Pancho, getting up from the narrow table and heading for the food freezer.

  “Yes, water, but not in the liquid form.”

  “The water molecules are linked chemically to the other molecules in the rock,” Amanda said. “You have to apply heat or some other form of energy to get the water out.”

  “But it’s water,” Dan said, watching Pancho as she pulled a foil-wrapped prepackaged meal from the freezer. “Selene needs water. So does anybody working in space.”

  “You will do your work on water,” Amanda murmured. “ ‘An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.’ ”

  “What’s that?” Dan asked, puzzled.

  She looked almost embarrassed. “Oh… Kipling. Rudyard Kipling.”

  “ ‘Gunga Din’,” Fuchs added quickly. “A very fine poem.”

  “By a white European male chauvinist,” Pancho quipped as she slid her meal into the microwave oven.

  “How can you be hungry?” Amanda asked. “You had a full meal only a few hours ago.”

  Pancho grinned at her. “I don’t have to watch my figure. I burn off the calories just like that.” She snapper her fingers.

  “But those prepackaged meals,” Amanda said. “They’re so… prepackaged.”

  “I like ’em,” said Pancho.

  “Anyway,” Dan said, raising his voice slightly to cut off any disagreements, “those are the two rocks we’re going after. We’ll take some samples to solidify our claim and then head for the outer region of the Belt and find ourselves a metallic body.”

  “I’ve been wondering,” Amanda said slowly, “about the legal status of any claims we make. If the IAA considers this flight to be illegal… I mean, if we’re deemed to be outlaws—”

  “They could disallow our claims to the asteroids,” Dan finished for her. “I’ve thought about that.”

  “And?”

  A single, sharp, clear ping sounded from the open hatch to the bridge. Pancho sprinted from the microwave oven and ducked through the hatch. She came back into the wardroom a moment later, her face taut. “Solar flare.” Amanda got to her feet and pushed past Pancho, into the bridge. Fuchs looked concerned, almost alarmed.

  Dan said, “I’ll check out the electron guns.”

  “Might not hit us,” Pancho said. “The plasma cloud’s still too far away to know if it’ll reach us or not.”

  “I’ll check out the electron guns anyway,” Dan said, getting up from his chair.

  “I’ve taken enough radiation to last me a lifetime. I don’t need any more.�
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  EARTHVIEW RESTAURANT

  The instant Martin Humphries saw Kris Cardenas, he realized that she was suffering pangs of guilt. Big time. The scientist looked as if she hadn’t slept well recently; dark circles ringed her eyes, and her face looked bleak. He rose from his chair as the maitre d’ escorted her to the table and smiled as the dark-clad man held Cardenas’s chair for her while she sat down. Cardenas was not smiling.

  Gesturing with an outstretched arm, Humphries said, “The finest restaurant within four hundred million kilometers.”

  It was an old joke in Selene. The Earthview was the only true restaurant on the Moon. The other two eateries were cafeterias. Ten years earlier, the Yamagata Corporation had opened a top-grade tourist hotel at Selene, complete with a fivestar restaurant. But Yamagata was forced to shut down their restaurant as the greenhouse warming throttled the tourist trade down to a trickle. Now they sent their few guests to the Earthview.

  At least Cardenas had dressed properly, Humphries saw. She wore a sleeveless forest-green sheath decorated tastefully with accents of gold jewelry. But she looked as if she were ready to attend a funeral, not an elegant dinner. Without preamble, she leaned across the table so intently she almost touched heads with Humphries. “You’ve got to warn them,” she whispered urgently. “There’s plenty of time for that,” he said easily. “Relax and enjoy your meal.” In truth, the Earthview was a fine restaurant by any standard. The staff were mostly young, except for the stiffly formal maitre d’, who added an air of grave dignity to the establishment. Carved out of the lunar rock four levels below the surface, the restaurant lived up to its name by having broad, sweeping windowalls that displayed the view from the lunar surface. It was almost like looking through windows at the barren, gauntly beautiful floor of the great ringwalled plain of Alphonsus. The Earth was always in the dark sky, hanging there like a splendid glowing blue and white ornament, ever changing yet always present. There were no robots in sight at the Earthview restaurant, although the menus and wine list appeared on display screens built into the table-tops. Instead of tablecloths, each place setting rested on a small mat of glittering lunar honeycomb metal, as thin and flexible as silk.