Mining the Oort

by Frederik Pohl

  "I think he should have something solid," Annetta said. He hadn't noticed that she had returned. "What have you been eating, Dekker?"

  He tried to remember. "I had some of the killed-meat things, I think."

  There was a quick, hushed titter around the group, and Evan laughed. "Oh, Dekker! You're just too precious. Why do you say 'killed-meat'? Do you think we'd be likely to eat it while it was still alive?"

  Dekker concentrated for a moment until he remembered the answer to that—it had come from so many docility classes, so long ago, that it was buried in his subconscious now. "Because we always say that. It's to, you know, remind us that in order for us to eat ki—to eat meat, something has to be slaughtered."

  Evan opened his eyes wide in an imitation of surprise. "But that's what they're for; boy. No, don't worry about things like that. Here, give me your glass."

  The thing about wine was that it made you feel nice and warm and rather cheerful, although it also seemed to make you feel as though your skin were tightening up on your face, and the floor didn't seem as solid as it ought.

  Dekker decided, though, that he was conducting himself rather well. Evan had finally left him alone—Dekker saw him off in a corner with Annetta Cauchy, looking tolerant as the girl scolded him about something—and Dekker just wandered about, talking to whoever seemed to want to talk to him. Not everyone did. Some of the people, especially one of the sallow-skinned women with the straight, jet-black hair, didn't seem to understand him very well, and when she spoke to him he was startled to find that he was being addressed in some other language.

  But others were quite nice. Annetta's mother, for instance. He didn't quite understand the worried look in her eyes as she spoke to him, but when she asked him about his home he was glad to tell her all about Sagdayev deme. He described the landscape, and the rooms, and the copper mine; he told her how they concentrated solar heat so that the molten copper flowed out of the ore, and how the oxygen that had bound it was usefully added to the deme's supply. He was going on to explain some of the differences between Sagdayev and Sunpoint City when he discovered that she was no longer listening. That surprised him, because he didn't remember her turning away. Nor did he remember how he came to have a filled glass in his hand again, but he cheerfully lifted it to his lips. It was astonishing how the taste had improved.

  He was, he felt confident, holding his own in this strange party, where people kept trying to impress other people rather than make them feel partyishly happy. The most striking thing was the established pecking order: the richest deferred to by the not-quite-as-rich, and the one Martian couple among the guests condescended to by all. That bothered Dekker. Yet even the Martians were smiling as though they were enjoying all this opulence and laughter.

  And the blocky young Earthie, Evan, kept refilling Dekker's glass, and everything around him seemed even brighter and more beautiful and exciting . . . right up to the time he felt himself being picked up and carried.

  "Where'd you come from?" he croaked, twisting around to stare into the face of Tinker Gorshak.

  "Came to get you, you idiot," Gorshak snarled. "I knew you'd make a fool of yourself. Shut up. What you need is a good night's sleep.

  11

  No matter how badly you want water and air, there are limits. You certainly don't want a hundred billion tons of anything crashing into your planet in one lump. That would cloud the skies with more dust than even Mars has seen for a very long time, not to mention shaking up everything around.

  So you have to take some precautions. Before your approaching comet gets that far, you site demolition charges in its core, carefully placed to shatter it into the tiniest pieces you can manage. (The pieces won't be all that tiny, anyway, but still.) Most of the fragments will burn up or at least volatilize from air friction—even Mars's thin air is enough to do that—and the seismic impacts of the residues as they strike will be, you hope, tolerable.

  You don't want them crashing into the surface at an excessively high velocity, either. So you navigate your comet to come up on the planet from behind, so that both are going in the same orbital direction around the Sun and the combined speeds are minimized. Then, at that last moment, you fire the deceleration jets from the Augenstein drives you have forethoughtfully already installed in the comet in order to slow it still more—so that your impact velocity isn't much more than one or two kilometers a second. Then you jettison the Augensteins, cross your fingers, and hope.

  12

  Dekker didn't get a good night's sleep after all, or at least not as much of it as he really wanted; it seemed only minutes had passed before his mother was shaking him awake. "Are you all right, Dekker?" she was asking anxiously. "I didn't think you'd want to miss seeing the impact."

  He fended her off, wincing. Someone was pounding nails into his head. Tinker Gorshak was standing over him with a cup of something hot. "Strong tea," Gorshak muttered. "Go ahead, drink it. You'll be all right in a while, hangovers never kill anybody."

  And after a few scalding gulps and an eternity of throbbing temples, it began to seem that Tinker Gorshak was right. When the pounding behind his eyes began to subside Dekker bundled up in a robe before the news screen and watched what was happening. The time was impact minus thirty minutes, and on the screen he could see the comet's drive jets detaching themselves and hurling themselves away, bright and tiny shooting stars, to be captured and salvaged by the workers in the tender spacecraft. There weren't any additional burns after that; now the comet was purely ballistic.

  Dekker sipped his tea and began to feel almost human again—human enough to begin replaying the scenes of the party in his mind. "You know," he announced, astonished at his discovery, "she didn't really like me. She only invited me to make that other guy jealous."

  "Earthies," Gorshak grumbled, looking at his watch. "In about two minutes now—"

  "I don't think they even like each other," Dekker went on, thinking it through. "Evan was always making jokes about the Japanese and the Brazilians, and they were mean kinds of jokes, too."

  "Of course they don't like each other. Don't you know yet what Earthies are like? They used to have wars," Gorshak informed him. "They probably still would, except nobody dares anymore. Now they just try to take each other's money."

  "Oh, yes, the money," Dekker said, remembering. "What's an 'underwriter,' Tinker?"

  "An underwriter! An underwriter is somebody who sucks your blood, and wants you to thank him for it."

  "Tinker," his mother said gently. "Dek, it's how they do things on Earth. We borrow money by selling bonds—you know what the Bonds are. But we don't sell the Bonds directly to the people who want to invest in them. That would take too long and, anyway, we don't really know how to do that sort of thing. So somebody 'underwrites' the bonds. He buys the whole lot from us, and then he sells them, a few at a time, to the people who really want them."

  "Stealing part of the money along the way," said Tinker Gorshak.

  "You know it isn't stealing, Tinker," Gerti DeWoe said crossly. "There's no Earthie law against it. Besides, we agreed to it. If the bond is supposed to sell for, say, a hundred of their cues, then the underwriter gives us, say, ninety. So every time he sells one he makes a ten-cue profit."

  Dekker puzzled that over for only a moment before he saw the flaw. "But what if he can't find anyone to buy it?"

  "Then," Tinker said, "he has our bonds at a bargain rate. But don't worry about that, Dek. They'll always find somebody to buy. Any way they can."

  The boy nodded, thinking about the glamorized pictures on the Cauchys' wall, deciding not to mention them to Tinker. He thought of something else. "Ina said . . . was saying something to Annetta. It was really quite unpleasant, about 'unloading' their bonds if the comet impact was successful—"

  "If it was successful!" Gorshak said indignantly. "What a way to talk! And if it's successful, then you know what will happen. We're going to be swamped by immigrants from Earth."

  "We're all
immigrants from Earth," Gerti DeWoe reminded him, "or our parents were."

  "But our roots are here! It isn't just money with us. It's freedom."

  Dekker refused to be distracted into that familiar argument. "But what did they mean about unloading?"

  "It's just another thing they do, Dek," his mother said. "They have a kind of saying, 'Buy on bad news, sell on good.' A successful strike tonight will be good news, so that means the price of the Bonds might go up a little."

  "But everybody already knows the comet's going to land. Why would just seeing it happen make the Bonds worth more?"

  "It wouldn't really, Dek. It might make people think they were worth more, though, and that's how Earthies act. They go by what they think things are worth. So if any of the people that owned the Bonds now wanted to get out—I don't know why; maybe because they want the money to invest in something else—I suppose this would be when they'd sell."

  "That's foolish," Dekker pronounced.

  "That's Earthies for you," Tinker Gorshak said. "Hey, look! It's going off!"

  And indeed it was. On the screen they saw the sequenced charges inside the comet mass doing their job. A lump flaked off one side of the comet, then another. The main mass split in two, then the demolition charges in each section blew up, all at once, and the comet became a mass of rubble, all falling together toward Chryse Planitia. The scene shifted swiftly to a quick shot from the surface cameras atop Sunpoint City. The churning mass of the comet was now visible to the naked eye, moving perceptibly down and to the east. The comet didn't have a tail anymore. Rather, they were now inside the tail. All they could see was a general unnatural brightness of the sky.

  "I hope it works," Gertrud DeWoe said prayerfully.

  Tinker Gorshak grunted. "I hope we can pay for it," he grumbled. "Those bloodsuckers from Earth are charging us plenty for the capital. Do you know what it costs, Dekker? I'm not talking about the whole project. I'm just talking right now about that party you went to—who do you think is paying for it? And all they're doing is watching to see it fall—at a thousand cues a day apiece, and we have to pay—"

  "Look!" Dekker's mother cried.

  Because—back to the cameras in orbit—all those myriad chunks of rubble turned dazzlingly bright at once as they struck the thin Martian atmosphere, the heat of friction producing a thousand blinding meteors. Switch again, this time to the remote ground-based cameras in their dugouts on the slope of Olympus Mons. . . .

  And the fragments hit.

  They were not tiny. The biggest was more than ten million tons. Even some of the smaller ones were the size of a skycraper. When they struck, they made H-bomb-sized fountains of cloud, red-lit and white-lit and yellow, with all that kinetic energy transformed at once into impact heat.

  The people in Sunpoint City never did feel the shudder of that impact—they were too far away—but the needles of their seismographs jumped right off the tapes.

  When Gerti DeWoe tucked her son in bed at last he said drowsily, "I guess we won't see any difference right away?"

  His mother didn't laugh at him. She just shook her head. "Not right away, no. It'll be years before Mars has any decent atmosphere. And then we won't be able to breathe it directly, you know. There'll be too much carbon dioxide, not enough free oxygen, not much nitrogen at all. We'll have to find the nitrogen somewhere else. And then we'll need to seed the blue-green algae, and some kind of lichens, to start photosynthesis going so we'll have free oxygen, and then—But, oh, Dekker," she said, looking more excited and young than he had ever seen her, "what it's going to mean to us! Can you imagine crops growing under the naked sky? And the climate getting really warm?"

  "Like Earth," he said bitterly.

  "Better than Earth! There aren't as many of us, and we get along better!"

  "I know," Dekker said, because he did know. Everyone on Mars had been told over and over why they needed to borrow all that money to get all those comets—water for the crops, water to make oxygen for animals and themselves. Lakes. Maybe even rain. The warming greenhouse effect that the water vapor would provide. The kinetic energy of each cometary impact transformed to heat, doing its part to warm the planet up.

  He asked, "Do you think we'll live to see it?"

  His mother hesitated. "Well, no, Dekker. At least I won't, or at least not to see the best part of it, because it'll be a lot of years. But maybe you will, or your children, or your children's children. . . ."

  "Hell," Dekker said, disappointed. "I don't want to wait that long!"

  "Well, then," his mother said, grinning fondly, "then when you grow up you'd better get out there and help make it happen faster!"

  "You know," Dekker said, beginning to yawn, "I think that's what I'll do.

  13

  The funny thing was that Dekker DeWoe meant it. He did what he said he was going to do—sort of—though it didn't work out exactly the way he had planned, and it certainly didn't look as though it would work out at all for a while.

  He started out well enough. Right that very week, before the Sagdayev people went back to their quite-unharmed home, Dekker took the first step. He made a trip all by himself to the Oort Corporation headquarters in Sunpoint City; but when he told the clerk he wanted to fill out an application for training at the academy on Earth, she naturally said, "You're too young."

  "I won't always be," he said.

  She shook her head. "But you are now. There's no point. Come back when you're—what is it?—" Because, of course, the clerk was an Earthie, too, and so she had to calculate. "—when you're twelve or thirteen, anyway."

  "I will. But I want to fill out the application now."

  "You're not supposed to do it until you're of age," she said, snapping her lips shut at the end of the sentence as though the subject were closed. It wasn't. Dekker didn't give up. He stayed there, reasoning patiently with the woman, and finally, maybe because she was just in a good mood or maybe because even an Earthie woman might have a soft spot for a determined young kid, she took his name and entered it in a "hold" file. She even gave him a study list—all the subjects he would need to know to pass the academy's entrance test—and, though she told him several times just how bad the odds against his acceptance were, she wished him luck.

  That surprised him. "Why do I need luck?" he asked. "If I pass the test, they ought to let me in."

  "But I thought you knew. They give the admission test at the academy itself. Back on Earth."

  "So?"

  She laughed, almost affectionately. "So how are you going to get there to take the test, Dekker DeWoe? Are you going to pay the fare yourself?"

  That, of course, was the question. Dekker thought about it all the way back to his room, and talked about it with his mother as soon as he saw her.

  The problem at root—like almost all Martian problems, at root—was money. The Martians didn't have it. They didn't have Earth currency units to pay for an applicant's fare to Earth except by diverting the price of the fare—the highly exorbitant price of the fare, far higher than the operating costs of a spacecraft justified—from other things that the planet needed even more.

  It wasn't that Gerti DeWoe—and Dekker himself, when he got old enough to do anything about it—couldn't save the money, it was that the money they saved wasn't worth anything for that purpose. Their money wasn't Earthie currency units. If they had been allowed to buy cues at the official exchange rate they could have managed it, but there were far more important uses for every cue Mars could get its hands on than sending one more young person out to work in the Oort.

  "But when I'm there I can pay my way!" Dekker complained. "They pay the Oort miners in cues. They even pay an allowance at the academy itself—I could even send money home!"

  "They do," his mother agreed. "You would. It's the getting you there that's hard, Dek."

  "The fare, right. But I don't understand. Look, we're supposed to pay off the Bonds by shipping food to Earth, right? So why does it cost less to ship, I don't k
now, fifty tons of wheat to Earth than to ship me?"

  She said somberly, "It's simple. The Earthies want the wheat, Dek. They don't particularly want you."

  The one loophole in that otherwise impenetrable barrier was that Mars itself did want Martians in the Oort, and not only because their earnings there would help the balance of payments. So there were scholarships available. Not many, but enough for someone who was bright enough, and willing enough to work hard enough.

  So Dekker studied twice as hard as anyone else, and his grades showed it. The scholarship that meant the Oort looked possible, and meanwhile he had his job—for even a would-be Oort miner had to work his way on Mars.

  Dekker's job was as third pilot on an interdeme blimp, though he didn't actually do much piloting at that stage. "Flight attendant" would have been a more accurate job description, because his biggest task was sure the passengers stayed in order and caused no trouble, but he was qualified to take the controls if the pilot and copilot both suddenly dropped dead in flight. Still, it was a very worthwhile job to have: it paid well, if only in Martian currency; it took him all over Mars, from the North Polar Cap to the outpost demes in the freezing southland; and it let him meet a lot of interesting people, many of them young women who were happy to get to know him better.

  That was a benefit Dekker enjoyed. He could not have been said to have a girl in every port, but he went to a lot of ports. Besides, the job was good background experience for piloting a spotter ship in the Oort.

  And then that prospect receded almost to invisibility.

  The thing that happened was a little glitch in Earth's financial markets. It wasn't anything severe, at least for most of the Earthies. A few speculators were ruined, a few others got suddenly very rich, but those things happened every now and then.