The Precipice gt-8

by Ben Bova

  Surprised, George thanked him and headed for the console that the chief controller had indicated. Blyleven went to the last row of consoles and sat down at the one closest to the door. Surreptitiously, he tapped the keyboard a few times. When George finished his message and erased it from the comm system’s memory core, Blyleven had a copy that he could pawn to Humphries. Dan felt nervous as he watched Pancho and Amanda shut down the radiation shield. Dumping all that electromagnetic energy didn’t bother him; it was the idea that now they had no protection against another solar storm except the thin hull of the ship itself.

  “… shutdown complete,” Pancho announced. “Magnetic field zeroed out.”

  “Zero field,” Amanda confirmed.

  “Naked to mine enemies,” Dan murmured.

  “How’s that, boss?” Pancho asked, looking up over her shoulder toward him.

  “I feel naked,” Dan said.

  “Don’t worry. Sun looks calm enough for the time being. Even if it shoots out a flare, we can always get into our suits and go for a swim in one of the fuel tanks.”

  “That wouldn’t be very helpful,” Amanda pointed out, not realizing that Pancho was joking. “The high-energy protons would set off all sorts of secondary particles from the fuel’s atoms.”

  Pancho frowned at her. Amanda looked from her to Dan and then back to her control panel.

  “I think I’ll go back and see how Lars is doing,” she said, getting up from her chair.

  “Have fun,” Pancho said.

  Dan watched her step through the hatch, then slid into her vacated chair. “Don’t look so glum, boss. We’re battin’ along at one-third g with no sweat. Be back in lunar orbit in less’n four days.”

  “I had wanted to stop to sample those other two rocks,” Dan said.

  “Can’t take the chance. Better to — hold on. Incoming message from Selene.

  George Ambrose.”

  “I’ll take it here,” said Dan. “By the way, have you told mission control that we’ve shut down the shield?”

  “Not yet, but they’ll see it on the telemetering. It’s recorded automatically.” Dan nodded as George’s bushy red-maned face appeared on the screen. Quickly, in a worried whisper, George explained how he’d located Cardenas and spirited her off to the temporary shelter.

  “She wants t’see Stavenger,” George concluded. “I told her I’d talk to you first. She’ll be perfectly okay in the tempo for a coupla weeks, if we need to keep her stashed there. So… what d’you want me to do, Dan?”

  George’s image on the screen froze. Dan could see that he must have been at the mission control center when he’d sent the message. Good. He must’ve cleared out the place to make sure nobody could eavesdrop.

  Now I’ve got to send him a reply that just about anybody can listen to, Dan thought. This is going to be like an old-time mafioso speaking into a tapped telephone.

  “George, I think she’s right. Do as she asks… as carefully as you can. She’s important to us; there’s a lot she and I have to talk about when I get back. We’ve got some problems here on the ship and we’re heading back home. If all goes well, we should be back in lunar orbit in less than four days. I’ll keep you informed, and you let me know how things are going there.”

  Dan reviewed his own message, decided there was nothing he needed to add to it, then touched the send button on the comm panel.

  He started to get up from the co-pilot’s seat when the comm unit pinged.

  “ ’Nother message comin’ in,” Pancho said needlessly. A young man’s face appeared on the screen. He looked annoyed. “General notice to all spacecraft and surface vehicles. A class-four solar flare has been observed by the early-warning sensors in Mercury orbit. Preliminary calculations of the interplanetary field indicate the resulting radiation storm has a ninety percent chance of reaching the Earth — Moon system within the next twelve hours. All spacecraft in cislunar space are advised to return to the nearest safe docking facility. All activities on the lunar surface will be suspended in six hours. Anyone on the surface is advised to seek shelter within six hours.” Dan sagged back into the chair.

  Pancho tried to smile. “You called it, boss: Murphy’s Law.”

  STORM SHELTER

  Four worried people clustered around the table in Starpower 1’s wardroom. The wallscreen showed a chart of the solar system, with the radiation cloud that the solar flare had belched out appearing as a shapeless gray blob twisted by the interplanetary magnetic field. It was approaching Earth and the Moon rapidly. Deep in the Asteroid Belt a single pulsating yellow dot showed where their ship was.

  Dan said to the computer, “Show the projections for the next two days.” The cloud grew and thinned, but surged out past the orbit of Mars and then engulfed the inner Belt and overran the blinking dot that marked Starpower 1’s position.

  Pancho made a sound halfway between a sigh and a snort. “No way around it.

  We’re gonna get hosed.”

  Amanda looked up from her palmcomp. “If we could pump all our remaining fuel into one tank, it could serve as a shelter… of sorts.”

  “I thought the secondaries would get us,” Dan muttered. “They’d be high,” Amanda admitted, “but if we could pressurize the fuel it might absorb most of the secondary particles before they reached us.”

  “If we’re plumb in the middle of the tank,” Pancho said.

  “Yes. Inside our suits, of course.”

  “Can the suits handle the temperature? We’re talking about liquid hydrogen and helium; damned close to absolute zero.”

  “The suits are insulated well enough,” Pancho said. Then she added, “But nobody’s ever tried a dunk in liquid hydrogen with ’em.”

  “And we’d have to be dunked for god knows how many hours,” Dan muttered.

  Fuchs had not said a word. His head was bent over his own palmcomp.

  “How much protection would the fuel give us?” Dan asked glumly. Amanda hesitated, looked down at her handheld screen, then said, “We’d all need hospitalization. We’d have to set the flight controls to put us into lunar orbit on automatic.”

  “We’d all be that sick?” Pancho asked.

  Amanda nodded solemnly.

  And I’d be dead, Dan thought. I can’t take another radiation dose like that. It would kill me.

  Aloud, he tried to sound reasonably hopeful. “Well, it’s better than sitting here with our thumbs jammed. Pancho, start transferring the fuel.”

  “How high can we pressurize one of the tanks?” Amanda wondered. “I’ll check the specs,” said Pancho. “Come on, we’ve got to—”

  “Wait,” Fuchs said, looking up at them. “There is a better way.” Dan looked hard at him. Fuchs’s eyes were set so deep that it was difficult to see any expression in them. Certainly he was not smiling. His thin slash of a mouth looked tight, hard.

  “Computer,” Fuchs called, “display position of asteroid 32 — 114.”

  A yellow dot began blinking near the inner edge of the Belt.

  “That’s where we must go,” Fuchs said flatly.

  “It’s half a day off our course home,” Pancho objected.

  “Why there, Lars?” Amanda asked.

  “We can use it for a storm shelter.”

  Dan shook his head. “Once the cloud runs over us, the radiation is isotropic. It comes from all directions. You can’t hide behind a rock from it.”

  “Not behind the rock,” Fuchs said, with growing excitement. “Inside it!”

  “Inside the asteroid?”

  “Yes! We burrow into it. The body of the asteroid will shield us from the radiation!”

  “That would be great,” Dan said, “if we had some deep drilling equipment aboard and a few days to dig. We don’t have either.”

  “We don’t need them!”

  “The hell we don’t,” Dan shot back. “You think we’re going to tunnel into that rock with your little core sampler?”

  “No, no, no,” Fuchs said. “You don
’t understand. That rock is a chondritic asteroid!”

  “So what?” Pancho snapped.

  “It’s porous! It isn’t a rock, not like Bonanza. It’s an aggregate of chondrites — little stones, held together by gravity.”

  “How do you know that?” Dan demanded. “We haven’t gotten close enough to—”

  “Look at the data!” Fuchs urged, waving a thick-fingered hand at the wallscreen. “What data?” The screen still showed the chart with the radiation cloud. Fuchs pointed his palmcomp at the screen like a pistol and the wall display suddenly showed a long table of alphanumerics.

  “Look at the data for its density,” Fuchs said urgently. He jumped up from his chair and bounded to the screen. “Look! Its density isn’t much more than that of water! It can’t be a solid object! Not with such a density. It’s porous! An aggregation of stones! Like a…” he searched for a word,”… like a pile of rubble… a beanbag chair!”

  Dan stared at the numbers, then looked back at Fuchs. The man was clearly excited now.

  “You’re sure of this?” he asked.

  “The numbers don’t lie,” Fuchs said. “They can’t.”

  Pancho gave out a soft whistle. “Shore wish we had somethin’ more’n numbers to go on.”

  “But we do!” Fuchs said. “Mathilde in the Main Belt, and Eugenia — several C — class bodies among the Near-Earth Asteroids — they are all aggregates, not solid at all. Microprobes have examined them, even gone inside them!”

  “Porous,” Dan muttered.

  “Yes!”

  “We can dig into them without drilling equipment?”

  “They are probably highly-tunneled by nature.”

  Dan stroked his chin, trying to think, trying to decide. If he’s right, it’d be better than dunking ourselves in a pool of liquid hydrogen for hours on end. If Fuchs is right. If we can burrow into the asteroid and use it for a storm shelter. If he’s wrong, we’re all dead.

  Pancho spoke up. “I say we go for the asteroid, boss.” Dan looked into her steady light brown eyes. Is she saying this because she knows I won’t make it otherwise? Is she willing to take the chance with her own life because it’s the only chance we’ve got to save mine?

  “I agree,” Amanda said. “The asteroid is the better choice.”

  He turned back to Fuchs. “Lars, are you absolutely certain of all this?”

  “Absolutely,” Fuchs replied, without an instant’s hesitation.

  “Okay,” Dan said, feeling uneasy about it. “Change course for — which one is it?”

  “Asteroid 32-114,” Fuchs and Amanda answered in unison.

  “Point and shoot,” Dan said.

  Dan tried to sleep while Starpower 1 raced to the chondritic asteroid, but his dreams were troubled with faces and visions from the past and a vague, looming sense of dread. He awoke feeling more tired than when he’d crawled into his bunk. He felt stiff and sore, as if every muscle in his body were strained. Tension, he told himself. But that sardonic voice in his mind retorted, Age. You’re getting to be an old man.

  He nodded to his image in the lav mirror. If I live through this I’m going to start rejuve therapy.

  Then he realized what he’d said: if I live through this.

  He put on a fresh set of coveralls and grabbed a mug of coffee on his way to the bridge. Amanda was in the command chair, with Fuchs sitting at her right. “Pancho’s sleeping,” Amanda said before Dan could ask. “We’ll be making rendezvous with 114 in…” she glanced at one of the screens,”… seventy-three minutes. I’ll wake her in half an hour.”

  “Can we see the rock yet?” Dan asked, peering into the black emptiness beyond the windows.

  “Telescopic view,” said Amanda, touching a viewscreen. A lumpy, roundish shape appeared on the screen. To Dan it looked like a partiallydeflated beach ball, dark gray, almost black.

  “We’re getting excellent data on it,” Fuchs said. “Mass and density are confirmed.”

  “It’s porous, as you thought?”

  “Yes, it has to be.”

  “It’s certainly no beauty,” Amanda said.

  “I don’t know about that,” replied Dan. “It looks pretty good to me. In fact, I think I’ll call it Haven.”

  “Haven,” she echoed.

  Dan nodded. “Our haven from the storm.” Silently he added, if those numbers for its density mean what Fuchs says they do.

  SELENE

  The worst part of being alone in the temporary shelter was the waiting. There was nothing to do in the tempo except pace its length — an even dozen strides for Kris Cardenas — or watch the commercial video broadcasts that the shelter’s antenna pulled in from the relay satellites.

  Maddening. And there was the high-tech sarcophagus in the middle of the floor with the frozen woman inside its gleaming stainless steel cylinder. Not much company.

  When the hatch in the floor suddenly squeaked open, Cardenas jumped with surprise so hard she nearly banged her head on the shelter’s curving roof. For an instant she didn’t care who was coming through the hatch; even an assassin would be a welcome relief from the boredom of the past night and day. But she puffed out a big sigh of relief when she saw George Ambrose’s brick-red mane rising through the open hatch. George climbed through and grinned at her. “Dan says I should take you to Stavenger.” Cardenas nodded. “Yes. Fine.” Doug Stavenger was not happy to see her. He sat behind his desk and eyed her with raw disappointment showing in his expression. Cardenas sat in the cushioned chair before the desk like an accused criminal being interrogated. George stood by the office door, beefy arms folded across his chest.

  “You seeded Randolph’s ship with gobblers?” he said, his voice hollow with shocked disbelief.

  “Specifically tailored to take apart copper compounds,” Cardenas admitted, feeling shaky inside. “Nothing more.”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “It was meant to cripple the ship’s radiation shield,” she said defensively. “Once they found out about it they’d abort their mission and return here.”

  “But they didn’t find out about it until they were deep in the Belt,” Stavenger said. George added, “And now they’re sailing into a fookin’ radiation storm without a shield.”

  “This could become a murder,” Stavenger said. “Four murders.”

  Cardenas bit her lip and nodded.

  “And Humphries was behind this scheme,” Stavenger said. It was a statement, not a question.

  “He wanted Randolph’s mission to fail.”

  “Why?”

  “Ask him.”

  “He’s a major investor in the project. Why would he want it to fail?”

  “Ask him,” she repeated.

  “I intend to,” said Stavenger. “He’s already on his way here.” As if on cue, Stavenger’s phone chimed. “Mr. Humphries here to see you,” said the phone’s synthesized voice.

  “Send him in,” Stavenger said, touching the stud on the rim of his desk that opened the door.

  George stood aside, clearly glowering through his beard as Humphries walked in. Humphries looked at Cardenas, half turned in her chair, then at Stavenger. With a slight shrug he took the other chair in front of the desk. “What’s this all about?” he asked casually as he sat down. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s about attempted murder,” Stavenger said.

  “Murder?”

  “Four people are caught in a solar storm out in the Belt without a working radiation shield.”

  “Dan Randolph, you mean.” Humphries almost smiled. “That’s just like him, barging ahead like a bull in a china shop.”

  Stavenger bristled. “You didn’t get Dr. Cardenas here to seed Randolph’s ship with gobblers?”

  “Gobblers?”

  “Nanomachines. Disassemblers.”

  Humphries glanced at Cardenas, then said to Stavenger, “I asked Dr. Cardenas if there was any way that Randolph’s ship could be… er; disabled slightly. Just enough to get him to turn back an
d abort his flight to the Belt.” Cardenas started to reply, but Stavenger said heatedly, “If they die — if any one of them dies — I’ll have you arraigned for premeditated murder.” Humphries actually smiled at Stavenger. “That’s so far-fetched it’s ludicrous.”

  “Is it?”

  “I had Randolph’s ship sabotaged so he would abort his flight and come back to Selene. I admit to that. Any sane man would have turned around and headed for home as soon as he found the sabotage. But not Randolph! He pushed on anyway, knowing that his radiation shield was damaged. That’s his decision, not mine. If there’s a crime in this, it’s Randolph committing suicide and taking his crew with him.”

  Stavenger barely held on to his composure. His fists clenched, he asked through gritted teeth, “And just why did you want to sabotage his ship?”

  “So the stock in Astro Corporation would drop, why else? It was a business decision.”

  “Business.”

  “Yes, business. I want Astro; the lower its stock, the easier for me to buy it up. Dr. Cardenas here wanted her grandchildren. I offered to get her together with them in exchange for a pinch of nanomachines.”

  “Gobblers,” Stavenger said.

  “They weren’t programmed to harm anyone,” Cardenas protested. “They were specifically set to attack the copper compound of the superconductor, nothing more.”

  “My father was killed by gobblers,” Stavenger said, his voice as cold and sharp as an icepick. “Murdered.”

  “That’s ancient history,” Humphries scoffed. “Please don’t bring your family baggage into this.”

  Visibly restraining himself, Stavenger stared at Humphries for a long, silent moment. Electricity crackled through the office. George decided that if Stavenger came around the desk and started beating up on Humphries, he would keep the door closed and prevent anyone from coming to the bastard’s aid. At last Stavenger seemed to win his inner struggle. He took a shuddering breath, then said in a low, seething voice, “I’m turning this matter over to Selene’s legal department. Neither of you will be allowed to leave Selene until their investigation is finished.”

  “You’re going to put us on trial?” Cardenas asked.