Asimov's SF, April-May 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I whispered, “Tally-ho..."

  Willy said, “Time to go, boys and girls."

  I wiped the sweat from my palms on the front of my coverall, then took hold of the rotational controller on the right, throttle on the left, twist, then gentle push...

  Fafnir swung around her y-axis, there was a gentle thud-hiss as the main engine lit, and we were on our way.

  * * * *

  At a relative velocity of only one meter per second, it took us almost three hours to cross the ten kilometer gap between Excelsior and the asteroid. Always the nap girl, Sarah tucked her hands into her safety harness, and was soon asleep, gentle buzz of a girlish snore soft and serene.

  Lucky, I thought.

  But I wouldn't, or couldn't.

  I sat in my seat, hands on the armrests, staring out at a fantastically starry night, watching UB(2009)/21 materialize out of the mist. Every once in a while, I'd glance to port, where I could see the windows and running lights of Smaug twinkling fifty meters away.

  I bet Willy's heart isn't pounding.

  Willy has a hard edge to him, volatile as me, yes, but somehow far away, self contained. Probably why we'd been able to stay friends all these years, when so many other people were mad at us both, over what seemed like nothing.

  Burke the Jerk I'd been as a kid, jackass now to all those people I'd beaten in business deals, contracts I'd won when theirs were lost. Jealous? Or just me?

  You could see our little asteroid now, lit up dim gray by the sun, a deformed peanut hanging against the black, slowly growing bigger, beginning to occlude stars now. I wondered again if Quasimodo was already taken. What the hell does that name mean? I'd taken Latin in school when I was a kid, much of it long forgotten, gone along with the French and Japanese I'd learned later. I remembered quasi meant “as if” and modo was used the way we use only, merely, just ... So what the hell did Hugo mean? “Just as if ?” Just as if what?

  Probably, somewhere, there are learned articles about it, but I was never a learned man.

  The asteroid was looking big now, subtending quite a bit of sky anyway, and when Sarah's console beeped, she woke up all at once, like magic, like she'd never been asleep at all, blue eyes out the window, voice whispering, “Wow...!"

  Growing large in the deep distance, it wasn't so odd looking after all. From this perspective, coming in perpendicular to its axis of rotation, sun more or less behind us...

  Over my earphones, Minnie's voice, high, squeaky and full of tension, said, “Here comes the B segment of the contact binary. Looks like..."

  And there it was, peering over the limb, a new bulge, quite a bit darker than what was in the foreground, changing perspectives as we approached, asteroid elongating into something not quite like an egg shape, defying common sense somehow. Details without number seemed to proliferate across the surface in a maze of shifting shadow, while Minnie chattered about bright ray systems and a carbon regolith.

  Willy suddenly burst out, “Hey, that's really something, huh?” Excited now, voice thick with some unknown emotion, showing he wasn't quite the cartoon character I sometimes imagined.

  Minnie said, “I've got a fix on the density. Figuring it as if it were rough spheres of one-eighty and one-thirty meters, it comes in at around 1.03 grams per cubic centimeter. Pretty light."

  From her place beside me, Sarah, whose world was mainly abstract numbers, said, “That's a good sign, isn't it?"

  Not wanting Willy or Minnie to jump on me with a flood of corrective detail, I whispered, “If it's almost half carbon compounds, I guess so..."

  From the story. Straight from the goddam story!

  In my earphones, Willy said, “I heard that!"

  And, “Close enough,” came from Minnie.

  Close enough. I don't know if either one of them ever really believed in my story, which had been set in the Fore Trojan asteroids, but this ... This!

  Real.

  I had to readjust my idea of the thing's size continually. I'd thought of it as small, just a little bitty hill in space, but it was damned big, seen from close up, irregularities and empty outer space background screwing up my sense of scale. UB(2009)/21 continued to grow, filling the window with hundreds, then thousands of distinct features, cratered like the surface of the Moon. The true nature of the contact binary was apparent now, the slightly smaller secondary body come well out of eclipse, recreating that twisted snowman shape, Quasimodo the Snow Hunchback.

  Minnie said, “I see at least five distinct terrains here..."

  The asteroid was turning to “ground” now, seeming to slant away because we were going to pass just to one side of the large, grayish component.

  Sarah said, “Time on target."

  I put my hands back on my controls, yawing Fafnir around to point the main engine toward our travel vector. I said, “Ready, Willy?"

  He said, “Ready and ... three, two, one..."

  I pulsed the main engine and suddenly we were hanging over a brief little world of dark gray stone. Motionless ... no, not quite. I could see the ground moving off to one side.

  “Willy, I..."

  Sarah said, “Radial velocity there, not us."

  Right. I forgot. E pur si muove as far as the eye can see.

  Willy said, “Are we seeing gravitational acceleration?"

  “I almost can't tell. Right on the edge of the Doppler radar's sensitivity, I guess."

  I said, “Good enough, anyway."

  Willy said, “Hey, remember when people used to say, ‘Good enough for government work?’”

  “Yup. Probably why government work done by private contractors always sucked."

  Sarah said, “Guys? Not now."

  Right. Dumb. “So. Where should we land?” Since there was no way to get a telescopic view of something so small and far away, we'd never had any planning maps for UB(2009)/21. Now...

  Minnie said, “It's so strange. The albedo ranges are similar to some of the asteroids that've been investigated in main-belt Piazzi bodies. Aside from the steep upturn in the reflectance spectra above point-seven micrometers, it might as well be some old carbonaceous chondrite."

  “We'll just have to go down and see,” said Willy. “How about we pick a point near the intermediate zone on A? We can take a look at those grooves. Maybe they're the remains of that internal activity Alan had in his story!"

  I felt an odd creepy feeling come and go. Willy believed in my story that much?

  Sarah surprised me by saying, “More likely just a manifestation of broken rock from the collision that made this thing."

  I said, “What the hell. We have to start someplace."

  * * * *

  It took us about an hour to get down, accelerating into a slow arc along the gray lobe, stopping over what was technically the south pole, as defined by rotational direction, then accelerating toward the ground while Sarah unshipped the MiniCanadarm and pulled the radio-controlled dexterous manipulator system from its mount on the airlock hull.

  We'd talked about mounting landing legs on the Dragons, but it was expensive, and pretty much pointless, given the almost nonexistent gravity we were facing here. Christ, we won't even be able to walk on the surface! We'll need the compressed air maneuvering units we bought just to keep from drifting away.

  Like the cosmonauts in my novel Fellow Traveler, Willy'd said when I brought it up a few years ago.

  Yep. Like that.

  Down we went, Smaug and Fafnir side by side, MiniCanadarms, each with a big hand now, splayed out in front, slowly, slowly, ever so slowly ... I tried to hold my breath while the ground reached up and grew more or less flat in front of us, but I kept running out of air, exhaling, inhaling again noisily.

  Just before contact, Willy snickered and said, “Jeez, Alan! Don't have a heart attack on me!"

  The hand and arm flexed, cushioning our impact, which I could hardly feel at all, no more than a faint surge against my harness. I took a look at the accelerometers and popped a couple of RCS jets
very gently, while Sarah grabbed with the dexterous manipulator, digging into regolith. Maybe there was a bit of a bob, a tiny little sway, then...

  Sarah said, “That's it. Fafnir has landed."

  I heard Minnie say, “Smaug, too!"

  I said, “Where away?"

  “About fifty meters to your ... ummm ... west?"

  “Fifty meters? That's pretty close. Uh ... oh, wait. That puts you over the local horizon, doesn't it?"

  Willy said, “You know, I keep forgetting how little this place is!” I could swear he sounded dazed. There was a rustling in the earphones, then he said, “I'm up at the hatch window. I can see your main engine and a bit of propulsion module sticking up."

  I said, “Okay, I guess it's time to...” I choked suddenly, unable to speak.

  Sarah said, “Time to suit up and go outside."

  Willy yelled something that sounded like, “Yee-hah!"

  * * * *

  I'd like to say I stepped out of the airlock hatch ten minutes later, stepped out and planted my spacesuit boots firmly in the charcoal dust, first man on Quasimodo, but what I really did was float out and hang suspended. I guess if I'd waited long enough, I'd've drifted on down, but what I did was puff the compressed air jets on my backpack, once to get started down, and again to keep from bouncing off.

  Then I just stood there, silent, trying not to move a muscle, not wanting to fly away into the sky on the strength of a twitch. We'd talked about Neal-Armstrongish first words and decided against them. First on the Moon is a big damn deal. First on a little bitty rock, lost in the void between the worlds ... I dunno. Anyway, we'd decided against it.

  Time for words later, when and if we decided we really would do the flag ceremony, planting the corporate banner of Standard ARM in the black dirt of UB(2009)/21 and staking our first mining claim.

  We'd landed near the rotational pole, technically on the A lobe, so the immediate vicinity seemed level, a golden-black plain, featureless except for a random spray of little craters. In one direction, there was a nearly normal-looking moonscape, in the other, a strange, stretched-out depression, constricted in the middle, almost like a valley, but it kept going downhill, all the way to the horizon.

  There's something funny about...

  I had a sudden vivid memory of a long-gone day, back in 1985, not long after I quit the shipyard and was just getting started on my new career as a computer programmer. I'd gone to visit my high school friend Matt, who lived in a decaying old mansion his wife had inherited, sitting beside a lake outside a place called Shickshinny, Pennsylvania, somewhere near Wilkes-Barre.

  We'd gone for a walk that day, talking about old times, about his new wife, about the pretty blonde I'd recently lost to another man, about the books and stories and magazine articles I was writing, about his similar aspirations, so far unrealized, when suddenly I'd come to a stop, sniffling against my allergies, looking around.

  He'd given me a strange glance, then looked around too. Damn! he'd said, You can't see anything but the hillside and sky! Like we're on a little bitty world, somewhere out in space.

  This was like that now. It didn't really feel like the horizon was too close, or was right at our feet, the way it was portrayed in pre-Space Age science fiction stories. No, the ground just went out in a normal sort of way, and then ended against sky, like there was some kind of cliff.

  I tried to take a step forward, tipped to one side, and drifted off the ground. When I righted myself with the backpack, the ground had shifted under me, and the “cliff edge” had moved on, exposing new level ground. It really was the horizon. And it really was close.

  Sarah, floating outside the ship now, drifting toward me, looked disconcerted behind her faceplate. “Hmm. Strange,” was all she said.

  * * * *

  The four of us made rendezvous between the ships, in the confusing terrain where A and B overlapped into each other. It reminded me a little bit of the mess on Enceladus, black overlaying dark gray, rather than white, but you could see the gray was the real “bedrock” here.

  Once we'd gotten away from the immediate area of the spacecraft, going further into the tarry black surface associated with B, Minnie and Willy moved closer together, and began hooking up cables. Although it was originally intended to be carried in the field by one hopefully young and fit geologist, with the instrument package on his back, display package on his chest, holding the five-foot sensor boom in his hands, the GE GeoStrider wasn't really suited to our spacesuits, or zero gee.

  Since our Russian-made suits had life support backpacks, with used ISS maneuvering units clipped behind them, we'd split it up three ways. Willy had the instruments on his chest, Minnie the displays, I'd operate the boom, and Sarah would ride herd on the cables.

  “Okay,” said Willy. “Snakes it is."

  I said, “Snakes'd be trying to get away. These bastards seem to like us!"

  Sarah said, “Are you sure nobody else can hear us over the radio?"

  I thought of reminding her we were recording everything, both voice and through our little helmet cams, but kept my mouth shut. “Any place in particular you want me to start?"

  Minnie said, “Here is good.” I lowered the boom and started to flip the head, but Minnie said, “Don't bother with the brush or rat yet,” so I lowered the sensor face to the ground and thumbed the switch.

  Minnie said, “Um."

  There was a bit of silence, then Willy said, “So? Anything?"

  “Weellll ... It's what we expected. This surface is composed of kerogen-like organics. Processed CHON grains, maybe. A little methane and ammonia mixed in by meteoritic gardening, processed by larger impacts and solar flux..."

  I said, “This stuff comes off B, right? And B is some kind of processed cometary nucleus. A lot of the stuff that gets knocked off B has to wind up on A if it isn't sent off into space. Maybe we should move up toward the top of the head?"

  Willy said, “Tomorrow or the day after? We've got plenty of time. Min?"

  She said, “Sure. Let's focus on the interface zone for now."

  We moved off downslope in a bunch, following her lead. Oddly, though my eyes were telling me we were going down, some subtler clue, maybe from the tiny bit of gravity tickling my vestibular organs, seemed to say I was ascending a very shallow hill. A strange hill at that. My eyes kept wanting to see the valley as a bulbous black mountain, hanging over me like a mushroom cloud.

  Just one little shift of perspective, and we're flies climbing a vertical wall. Hmh. Scary? No. Flies can fly and so can we.

  After about twenty minutes, taking readings here and there, sometimes using the brush and rat heads on the sampler, we stopped at the terminus of a long groove, looking down into a bare and shallow depression, half filled with shadow, dark and darker. The groove dwindled quickly in the distance, climbing up onto the gray hump of B.

  Willy said, “Looks like a textbook graben, buried and softened by deep regolith."

  Minnie whispered something to herself, then said, “No signs of layering or endogenic activity. Probably just big cracks, I'm afraid."

  I said, “Crush two hard-boiled eggs together at their blunt ends and this is what you might get. Hard to say what it means for the interior.” And ever since we'd seen the reflectance spectra for UB(2009)/21, years ago now, the interior is what we'd talked about. And why the M in Standard ARM stood for Mining.

  “Why,” asked Sarah, “do the cracks line up with both bodies?"

  After a second, Minnie, voice thin and dreamlike said, “You know, that's a damn good question...."

  * * * *

  The next day, we went out with the collapsible drill rig we'd brought. It'd begun life as a quarter-scale prototype of the rig being made for Project Constellation, and the company that made it had been quite reluctant to sell it to us, having been instructed to sell it for scrap by NASA. When we found out they were planning to sell the first full-scale test rig to tSpace, which planned to file claim to pieces of the Moo
n, we talked them into selling the prototype to us as a species of hush money. Willy and I were both good with machinery, so it didn't take much customizing to make it do what we wanted.

  In between putting the damned thing together and working over all the samples and sensor data we had, we even had time for our scheduled interview with CNN. I thought it was supposed to be taped, given there was a round trip signal delay of more than a minute, but Ms. Clanton said they were going out live.

  Gives them more time for color commentary, I guess. Anyway, she told us our little trip was causing quite a flap down there, with the Japanese media calling us “space pirates,” French and Russian diplomats raising treaty issues in the UN General Assembly, and the U.S. government ominously silent.

  Didn't seem much interested in what we thought of the asteroid though. Just, show the tape of the EVA between blips of commentary, views of us floating in Excelsior's cupola. I heard later, the approach film we shot of UB(2009)/21 got shown over and over again on every news show in the world, and I even managed to slip in a reference to Quasimodo.

  When we popped the hatch on Fafnir, struggling with all our junk, it was nighttime, Quasimodo's surface a blending of gray and black shadows, low hummocky rises here and there, details hardly visible. Overhead, the stars were like tiny needles of light.

  I said, “Smauggies?"

  Minnie's voice was a bit staticky, punched through the asteroid's surface layer. “Loud and clear."

  “Starting westward along the bary-equator now, toward your anticipated position."

  “Roger. See you there."

  I still felt a little funny, using old-timey radio jargon. Roger. Over and out. Ten-four ... A coordinated puff of compressed air and we began drifting away from the ship, surface just beneath our toes, moving slowly over a world of silvery dusk, and Sarah said, “You know, despite what I know it is, it really seems like we're on a mountaintop here."