Mining the Oort

by Frederik Pohl

  But when Earth sneezed, Mars got pneumonia. The break came at a bad time. A new issue of the Bonds was just due out, and in the temporarily queasy market climate they were under subscribed. Earthie cues had always been sparse; now they had all but dried up entirely. Imports were slashed, luxuries disappeared from the Martians' own market—though the Earth colonists still did themselves as well as ever—and that one most valued luxury, the scholarship program, was abolished.

  What Dekker was good at—what all Martians were good at, because how else could anyone survive on Mars?—was making the best of what he had and not spending a lot of time grieving over what he didn't.

  Losing the hope of the Oort had been a blow, but Dekker had a whole other life to live, and he spent his efforts on living it. By the time he was eleven—nineteen or so, by Earth standards—he not only had a promotion to second pilot, he had a medal. At least as close to a medal as Martians ever gave each other. It was a little green rosette, and it was for courage.

  There weren't many medals for courage on Mars, for two reasons. The first was that it took so much courage to get by there that there was hardly any point in making a fuss about a little extra bravery. The other reason was that any time someone was called on to display that little extra bit of courage, it was generally because someone else had done something particularly dangerous and dumb. Such as failing to secure the LH2 valve on Dekker's dirigible before takeoff. So there they were, sailing along at three thousand meters above the Valles Marineris, with their precious reserve hydrogen bubbling away. Apart from the possible danger to the ship, there was the hydrogen itself: hydrogen was too hard to come by on Mars to waste.

  So what else was a third pilot, desirous of making second pilot, to do? It cost him an ear, while he was clinging to the outside of the bag and the damn freezing-cold stuff was seeping out right past his vulnerable head, but the ear could be replaced. It got him the promotion and the rosette—a reasonably good trade.

  But the Oort was still far away.

  Sometimes on night flights, when the passengers were quiet and the captain was letting another pilot take a turn at the wheel, Dekker would crawl up into the skyside bubble and just look at the comets, the dozens and dozens of comets that had begun to fill the heavens and blur the stars. He didn't feel sorry for himself, he didn't brood about his missed chances; he just looked at the comets and wondered what it would be like to be out there, capturing some prize ones and sending them falling in toward Mars.

  There were plenty of comets landing on Mars every week now, sometimes twice a week. There wasn't any real atmosphere on Mars to show for it yet, though the dust storms were certainly denser and a lot more frequent, but every once in a while Dekker's blimp would pass over a recently comet-struck area and he could see the great craters the impacts had gouged out. More than once he was able to persuade himself that, yes, there really was a kind of a faint haze that was visible, or almost visible, at the crater bottoms. The pilots claimed the blimp rode higher these days, too. The worldwide pressure was certainly up a millibar or two.

  Then one day, while Dekker was talking to a pretty passenger in the lounge at a little Ulysses Patera deme called Collins, he got the call from his mother. "I need to talk to you," she said. "Come on home."

  And would say no more.

  So Dekker took a five-day leave and headed for Sagdayev. He hadn't seen his mother very often recently, because she had been stuck with the job of representing Sagdayev in the Commons—dull work, and hard work, too, trying to keep the planet's affairs running smoothly—and that meant she was never home. He hoped she would meet him, but the first person Dekker saw at the passenger lock as he came out was Tinker Gorshak. Old linker was looking worried, but as soon as he saw Dekker he broke into a welcoming grin. "Hello, boy," he said. "Your mother wants to talk to you."

  "I know that. What about?"

  Tinker looked mysterious. "She's got a right to tell you herself. Listen, what I wanted to ask you, Tsumi isn't on your ship, is he?"

  "Tsumi? No. I haven't seen him for months. Isn't he here?"

  "If he was here, would I be asking you? The little bastard's supposed to be in school in Sunpoint, but the school called the other day to say he was missing his classes. He's hanging around with a bunch of people I don't like, Dek. I called all his friends—all the ones I knew about, anyway—and told them to tell him to get his ass back here so I could straighten him out, but—"

  The old man sighed. Then he brightened. "But go see your mother, Dek. She's waiting for you."

  Dekker did. By the time he got to Gerti DeWoe's little room Tinker had already called her to say he was on his way, and she was waiting for him. She even had a pot of cocoa on the stove.

  He flung his arms around her and she kissed him fondly, then pushed him back to look in his eyes. "I've got some news for you, Dek," she said. "Do you still want to work in the Oort?"

  "Well," he said, "sure." Then he took it in. "Is there a chance? Have they loosened up the scholarships again?"

  "No such luck," she said, shaking her head. "Haven't you been watching the news? The Earthies are screwing up again—strikes, and banks failing, and—no, we're going to have to find some more cuts to make, in fact. No, it's something else." She hesitated, looking at him almost apologetically. "The thing is, I got in touch with your father."

  He blinked at her. "My father?"

  "Well, why shouldn't I?" she asked, sounding defensive. "I let him know about what you were doing a long time ago, as soon as they canceled the scholarship program. Dekker, I didn't beg him for anything. I couldn't. He's living on his disability pension, and he didn't have much money to spare. But he said he'd try. It took him a long time, but—"

  Dekker felt his heart suddenly pound. "You don't mean he's going to pay my way to the academy, do you?"

  "That's what I do mean, Dek. The money for your fare to Earth is here, and he'll put you up while you take some refresher courses before you take the entrance exam and—well, Dekker. That's the way it is. The rest is up to you.

  14

  The first thing a visitor to Earth discovered was that Earth didn't have just one Skyhook, like Mars. Earth had three of them. The reason was that there was a lot more ground-to-space traffic for Earth than for any other planet, and all three of its Skyhooks were kept busy.

  They all, of course, had to touch ground at Earth's equator, because it is only over the equator that a geostationary satellite can stay in position. The one in Ecuador was the busiest, although the mountains around Quito made transshipment a problem. The one at Pontianak was the newest, and maybe some day it would be the best because its location right on a coast made the transshipment of bulk goods very practicable—or at least it would do that whenever the Martians finally succeeded in growing enough produce to ship to Borneo to matter. Until then, Pontianak had so little traffic that it still used only a single cable. But the one in Kenya was in some ways the best, not least because it was handy to all the businesses and industries of that very big African city called Nairobi.

  Nairobi was so big and busy that people forgot that it was only accidentally a city. It didn't have most of the things that cities grow up around. It had no river or port or anything else to distinguish it from all the highland plains that surrounded it. It existed simply because it happened to be a convenient place for the developers to put a station stop when, long ago, the first railroad was built from the heart of Africa to the coast. Now that same place was still a station stop—though of a markedly different kind—and it was prospering therefrom.

  15

  Getting to Earth was a blast for Dekker DeWoe, all of it. It was a dream come true.

  First there was the little Skyhook capsule screaming up the cable from the Martian surface to the transfer point, with all of Sunpoint City falling away beneath him and his heart dragged down into his belly with the acceleration—but buoyant, too, because he was on his way. Then there was the ship itself and the private cubicle they had given
to him for his own—no bigger than a bathtub, maybe, but on a spaceship, with all the wonders that that entailed to thrill the heart of a quite mature twelve-year-old. No! Earth years, now! A twenty-year-old.

  Just to make it more exciting still there was even a solar flare alarm eleven days out. A solar prominence erupted, and its violent outpouring of particles radiated out from the Sun, which meant that everybody was stuck in the shielded core chamber for twenty-two hours until the ruddy loop of the prominence collapsed back on itself and the solar radiation died back down. The experience wasn't dangerous, really, but it was certainly something to tell Tinker's grandson and the other kids back in Sagdayev—if he ever got back to Sagdayev, and if, whenever that might be, the kids were still kids.

  Of course, Dekker himself wasn't really a kid anymore. But even a young adult like Dekker DeWoe could feel a special tingling in his heart when he was getting into a spaceship for the hundred-million-kilometer flight to Earth. By any standards at all, that was really special.

  But it took twenty-some days to traverse those hundred million kilometers, and with nowhere to go inside the ship and only the same eighteen people, passengers and crew, to talk to, the experience got old pretty fast.

  Being on Earth, though—that was something else entirely.

  Once Dekker had come down the vastly bigger Skyhook and first stood on Earthie soil, it didn't take him long to realize just how different it was. It was not going to be all fun. Earth hurt, hurt his bones at every step with its cruel pull. Earth was dirty. Earth was hostile—or the people were; or so it seemed to a skinny Martian kid who couldn't run or jump very well, and had a loser for a father besides. All the advice and warnings, all the calcium milkshakes and polysteroid injections, all the shipboard indoctrination hadn't prepared Dekker for the many ways in which Earth was nastier than Mars, but the thing he was least prepared for of all was Dad.

  Dekker limped out of the customs hall at the base of the Nairobi Skyhook, pulling his wheeled duffel bag behind him like a puppy on a leash, he looked for his father, but didn't see him. Instead, he saw a stooped, slow-moving old man hobbling toward him, and knew before the man spoke—but only half a second before—that this wreck of a man was indeed Boldon DeWoe.

  The man stopped to regard Dekker, half a meter away. When Dekker looked at him closely he could tell that the man had been a Martian once, because he had the slender, stretched Martian physique. But now he was bent almost to Earthie height, and he was leaning on a thick cane, besides. He did not look well. His shoulders were hunched forward, but his head was bent back and his chin thrust out as he squinted at his son. They didn't kiss, hug, or even shake hands. Boldon DeWoe nodded, as though he were getting just what he had expected and hadn't expected very much, and said, "Well. You're here. What's the matter with your ear?"

  Dekker saw no reason to go into the complicated story of the hydrogen leak on the dirigible and the pain of the transplant. He just said, "Frostbite."

  His father didn't comment on that. "That's all the baggage you've got?" he said. "Then come on. We've got a train to catch." He was turning away to limp down the ramp before he thought to add, over his shoulder, "Son."

  Dekker followed, moving not very much more quickly than his father with his luggage cart to pull. They probably should have kissed, he thought, but he had been unwilling to make the first move.

  They descended a moving staircase to a platform where eighteen or twenty little cars, not joined together like a train, were waiting. Boldon DeWoe led the way to the first car in line. When he got in he punched out a code on the keypad and inserted a shiny, pencil-thick thing that he wore around his neck in a slot. He looked at his son.

  "That's how you pay for things, with your credit amulet. You have to pay for things here."

  "We pay for things on Mars, too," Dekker said. "Of course, you probably wouldn't remember."

  His father didn't comment on that. He lowered himself to a seat and, looking at Dekker, "Why is your face so red?"

  "They give you whole-blood transfusions before you land, to help build up the red cells. That's plus all the other shots and—" He held up one leg to show. "—the braces."

  "Hold on tight, then," his father said, just about in time. At that moment two or three other cars smacked into theirs, finally forming a train. When it moved off the acceleration was a good deal more violent than Dekker expected. He thought for one unhappy moment that he might get sick, but didn't. None of the other passengers seemed to be bothered. There were only four others in the little car, all apparently Earthies, and when the train stopped three of those got off.

  The other cars uncoupled themselves, too, and their car lurched away. In five minutes it stopped and Boldon DeWoe got out.

  "This is the neighborhood," he said over his shoulder.

  It wasn't much of a neighborhood: Little cars and bigger vans were whining along the streets, trailing clouds of steam from their exhausts; people, most of them black, were cluttering the sidewalks; the buildings were astonishingly tall, by Dekker's Martian standards—eight to ten stories, some of them—but they seemed old and not particularly well cared for. Even the air had a funny sort of smell—smoky, perhaps, or spoiled. Dekker sneezed as his father turned and painfully began to climb some brick steps.

  There were four or five tall black men lounging on the stoop, drinking beer. Most of them were wearing shorts and brightly—or formerly brightly—colored open-necked shirts. Some of the garments were faded, most were sweat-stained. The men themselves seemed friendly enough: they moved aside to make room, and all of them nodded amiably to Boldon as they approached.

  This was not what Dekker had expected, none of it, and the man who was his father was not what he remembered. What Dekker remembered of Boldon DeWoe was a string-bean thin, smiling man, tall and skinny even for a Martian. Not this twisted, scrawny old guy, so bent that he was no taller than the black Earthies on the stoop. But when Boldon DeWoe introduced Dekker around he said, "This is my son." Then things began to look up a little for Dekker, because his father sounded actually proud when he said it.

  Then they were in the lift, which took back some of that momentary optimism, because not only did it smell of stale sweat and worse but it jolted Dekker's troubled legs so that he staggered. But he was glad the elevator was there, because the alternative would have been worse; his father's apartment was on the top floor.

  Then he saw the place where his father lived, where he would live. It wasn't just that it was small—Dekker was used to small—this place was also dirty.

  "You get the couch," his father told him, limping over to a sink and beginning to rinse out a glass. "It's short, but you're young. I'm going to have a drink."

  "No, thanks," Dekker said, though he hadn't been offered one. He picked a half-empty case of bottles off the couch and brushed the cushions off before he put his duffel bag on it. Then he began picking up dirty dishes from around the room.

  "Leave that," his father ordered, sitting down heavily with the drink in his hand. "I want to find out what you know. What's an Augenstein?"

  Dekker blinked. "What?"

  "An Augenstein drive. What is it, how does it work?"

  He was evidently serious.

  Dekker put his collection of dishware on a sideboard, pushing a stack of clean, but unsorted, laundry out of the way to make room. He sat down. "Well," he began, "an Augenstein is what drives spaceships. Basically its power chamber is a porous tungsten block in a hydrogen atmosphere. There's a pipette through the block that admits antiprotons to the central chamber; the antiprotons react with the hydrogen, blam, and the heat propels the working fluid out the rocket nozzle. Mostly they use powdered rock for the working fluid, but it could be—"

  His father stirred. "Don't say 'they,' Dekker. 'We.' Say 'we.'"

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Get in the habit of saying it. I want you to think like an Oort miner so you'll act like an Oort miner. We use powdered rock for the working fluid, only, of c
ourse, out in the Oort we don't. What do we do there?"

  "We use comet mass."

  His father nodded, swallowing a sip of his drink. "Comet mass, right. We tank up with frozen gases from a comet. What about the antiprotons that fuel the Augenstein?"

  "The antiprotons?"

  "Where do they come from? How do they make them?"

  For a moment Dekker was tempted to point out to his father that he had said "they," but it didn't seem like a good idea. This sudden pop quiz looked to be very important to the old man. Instead, Dekker said, as though called on in class, "Antimatter is made on the Moon, because of the vacuum environment, the ready availability of electric power, and the danger of accident. The photovoltaic power from the sunlight is used to run a ring accelerator that's about forty kilometers across, inside a big crater, and the accelerator produces antiparticles. Do you want me to write out the reaction?"

  "I do," Boldon DeWoe said, and pointed to a memo screen under the piled clothing on the sideboard. When Dekker retrieved it, his father watched carefully while Dekker wrote the equation out on the tiny screen. When that was finished, he wanted to know how Dekker would go about determining the deltas for an orbit from Mercury to Mars, what sort of comets were the most valuable, and how their orbits were controlled. He didn't comment on any of the answers. Finally he said, "All right, now what kind of shape are you in?" He wouldn't settle for an answer but ordered Dekker to pull out his record cartridge and display the results of the tests for his physical parameters—reaction time, depth perception, concentration factor, and the rest. Then Boldon DeWoe leaned back thoughtfully in his chair, stared at the ceiling for a moment, and sighed. He levered himself erect and stumped over to the refrigerator. "You want a beer?" he called over his shoulder.

  Dekker didn't, particularly; he'd never really enjoyed alcohol since Annetta Cauchy's party so many years before. Still, he said yes anyway, simply because drinking beer with his father seemed like a bonding kind of thing to do. He could feel the stuff bubbling ticklishly behind his nose. Then his father said, "I guess you're tired."