Mining the Oort

by Frederik Pohl

  Dekker nodded, reminded to notice that he was.

  "So let's get some sleep. You'll need all the rest you can get, Dek. There's a good prep school here in Nairobi. I know some of the teachers. The school isn't particularly aimed at the Oort, but they can brush you up on the theoretical stuff." He paused to sip from his drink. "The school isn't cheap, Dek, and I don't have much money. Do you have any cues?"

  "Earth cues? No. You sent the money for the fare, but there wasn't anything left over."

  "I didn't think there would be. Well, I'll get you an amulet—that's what you need to pay for things—and I'll transfer a hundred cues or so to your account, just for walking-around money. There won't be much, though, and I can't afford to keep you in the school forever. But you don't have forever, anyway. In about seven weeks you're going to have to take the tests for Oort training, and they're a bitch."

  "I've already taken all the preparatory courses," Dekker said proudly.

  "Sure you have. On Mars, a long time ago. Anyway, it's going to be harder here; just physically, you're not used to the gravity. It wears you. down. I hear you can work hard when you want to, is that right?"

  "I guess so."

  "Then want to, Dek. It's important. All I can give you is the one chance."

  After a week Dekker decided the school was just as hard as Boldon DeWoe had predicted, and that was a surprise to him. In spite of what his father said, he hadn't expected it. He had been of the comforting Martians' opinion that, since everything on Mars was naturally better than anything on Earth—physical-environmental problems notwithstanding—anybody who could get along well in a Martian deme school would naturally jump right to the head of the class in any school Earth had.

  He didn't, quite. The other students turned out to be damnably quick and smart. They were almost all black, too, a fact that surprised Dekker at first. To be sure, the existence of black people was no surprise to him; there were plenty of black people on Mars. But nowhere on Mars was there any place that was so overwhelmingly all black—or all white or all anything else—as this.

  The major visible exception was the teacher, Mr. Cummings. He was a good deal paler than anyone else in the classroom, but his skin was still milk chocolate rather than cocoa powder, and a good many shades darker than Dekker's own. So Dekker stood out. Not only for his skin. Not only for his height, either, though he towered above the rest of the class. The other conspicuous difference was in the way they were dressed. Male and female alike they wore brightly colored tailored shorts and tailored shirts—both of which always seemed to stay neatly pressed no matter what sports their owner was in—as against Dekker's own scuffed poly-denims, and they all wore shoes made out of what Dekker was astonished to find was leather. It wasn't just a single kind of killed-animal skins, either, for some of them wore pigskin on their feet and some wore cow, and there was even a couple whose shoes were made from ostrich hide. It had never occurred to Dekker that anyone would ever wear anything that had been taken from a killed-animal.

  There were other surprises, too. Not so much in the curriculum, though Dekker was dismayed to find that he was required to memorize a good many dates from histories that had never received much attention in Sagdayev. Still, most courses were easy enough for Dekker DeWoe to deal with. Mathematics was mathematics, no matter what planet you were on, and so were physics, chemistry, and astronomy. The biggest surprise was in the fact that Nairobi's students did not have compulsory docility Masses. What they had, instead, were the perplexing twice-a-week sessions they called shove-and-grunt. They were, the teacher explained when he saw the bafflement on Dekker's face, designed to reduce tensions so that people could get along with each other better, and the shoving and grunting were real—and very physical.

  It was also, for a Martian newly arrived on Earth with his bones and sinews still making the adjustment, fairly dangerous. The first exercise they did was called "breaking in." All but one of the students formed themselves into a tight ring, arms locked around each other's bodies, pressed hard against each other, while the one student left out was charged with getting inside the ring. At first Dekker thought he might actually enjoy it, because the student next to him was an unusually tall young woman named Sally Moi. Holding her warm body pressed against his own was interesting in ways that were by no means unpleasant. But then Mr. Cummings signaled to begin, and the left-out student selected Dekker as the weakest link. He put his head down and came butting against Dekker's kidneys, hard and serious, and the wind went out of Dekker with a whoosh.

  That was enough for Mr. Cummings. He excused Dekker from the exercise and in the next session, a kind of wrestling, paired him with the young man named Walter Ngemba, who promised to go easy. Going easy wasn't easy enough. Walter Ngemba was as careful as he had promised, but still when he flopped Dekker over onto his back and pinned his shoulders to the mat Dekker winced from the impact. Mr. Cummings intervened again. Dekker was retired to the side of the room, glad enough to save his Martian bones from splintering, but sorry to be found unfit to participate—and regretful to be giving up the chance to wrestle with Sally Moi. Women had no great place in his immediate plans, not when they might interfere with the prospect of getting into the academy, but her warm body had felt interestingly good within his arm.

  Then Mr. Cummings blew his whistle. He gave Dekker a good-natured glance, and said, "I think we'll move along to the verbal phase a little early today. Dekker, since you didn't get much out of the physical part, this is your chance to get a bit of your own back with Walter. Perhaps you'd care to start by calling him some names."

  "Why?" Dekker said.

  "Why, in order to offend him. Don't you have hostility management on Mars? All the bad things you've ever thought, this is a chance to get them out of your system. Call him race names. Say something like, 'You stupid kaffirs aren't even human,' for instance."

  Dekker looked at Walter Ngemba, who was waiting with an expectant grin, then back at the teacher. "What's a kaffir?" he asked.

  "Call him a jungle bunny if you prefer. Or a wog, perhaps? Really, Dekker, you must have heard some ethnic slurs at some time in your life, haven't you?"

  Dekker thought for a second, then remembered. "Dirtsucker," he said experimentally. "Walter, you're a dirtsucker, aren't you?" And was astonished when the whole class, Walter Ngemba included, broke out in laughter; and more astonished still when Mr. Cummings, to show Dekker how the process worked, allowed the whole class to insult Dekker himself at once, and he found out just how many scurrilous terms Earthies knew to express the simple concept of "Martian."

  It was a long way, he thought, from the Law of the Raft.

  After two full weeks on Earth, Dekker's body had begun to accept the fact that extra efforts were required of it on this planet. It still hurt to walk, or even to stand up; it just didn't hurt quite as much. Earth, Dekker DeWoe decided, wasn't really a bad place. It might actually be a good one if it were just a little less noisy and crowded . . . and if the Earthies had ever learned the Law of the Raft.

  But, he concluded, they hadn't. Earthies didn't try to make each other comfortable and happy and satisfied with the world. They didn't even like each other, and the best they could do in their hostility-management sessions was to find ways to keep from showing it.

  It was, Dekker thought, pretty childish of them.

  It seemed to Dekker that his fellow students acted like children because they were treated like children. The worst part was that he felt as though the same thing was happening to him. For instance, every afternoon when Dekker got out of school there was his father waiting in his dumb little three-wheeled car to drive him home. The other students came hurrying purposefully out of the schoolyard, with the old Peacekeeper lady at the corner vainly trying to keep them from dodging traffic as they crossed the busy street, and Dekker was being met like some five-year-old. He wasn't the only one. Walter Ngemba, too, was picked up every day at the school—though in a pale blue limousine six meters long instead
of a trike—but Dekker DeWoe, a full adult with a medal for heroism, resented it.

  When Dekker was inside the wobbly little car, climbing in clumsily of his leg braces, his father reached over him to snap the door and stared at him for a moment before he started the car. "Didn't your mother teach you to say thanks?" he asked. There was whiskey on his breath.

  "Thanks," Dekker said, to save time, but then he said, "I wish you wouldn't come for me, though."

  "Bullshit. It's Thursday, did you forget? Anyway, you're not strong enough to walk all the way home."

  "I want to get strong enough," Dekker said. He nodded toward the Peacekeeper, who was squinting at them under her sun hat. "She wants you to move on, Dad."

  "Screw her." But the old man stepped on the speed pedal and the trike pulled away. The Peacekeeper, Dekker saw as they went through the intersection, had a funnily mixed expression on her face. Half of it was a smile, for Dekker himself—she always had a cheerful hello for him—and the other half was not smiling at all. Dekker was pretty sure that part was for his father. Dekker was pretty sure that all the Earthies had that kind of not-very-admiring feeling about his father, even the neighbors who greeted him so warmly from the stoop—because none of them spent all their time drinking beer and sitting around the stoop, since they had jobs to go to.

  Boldon DeWoe didn't have one, and he never would.

  Because it was Thursday, which was shots day and exercise-machine day, Dekker's father didn't make the right turn toward home but scooted right through the intersection, faster than the Peacekeeper lady would have preferred, and headed for the clinic. Dekker didn't like any of the shots, not even the fairly painless polysteroids, but he purely hated the calcium boosters, which left his thighs bruised and painful all day. When that nastiness was over, the two of them took the elevator up to the next ordeal in physical-therapy rooms on the top floor. There Boldon DeWoe limbered up his text screen while Dekker fitted himself into the whole-body exercise machines. The old man waved the attendant away, because he didn't trust anybody but himself to run the machine slow enough for his son, and while Dekker's Martian muscles were getting flexed and stretched in the iron grip of the machine, his father, with one hand on the speed controls, was reading study guides to the next day's lessons aloud for his son. "There'll be a history test tomorrow," he said. "You'll need to know about the Wars of the Roses, so let's review."

  "Ouch," Dekker said, as the machine twisted his knee. "Dad? How come you know what's going to happen tomorrow?"

  "I have friends, how do you think?" his father said, turning back the speed control a hair. "Here, is that better?"

  Dekker didn't answer, partly because the slower speed wasn't any "better"—just a little less likely to crack his fragile Martian bones—and partly because he didn't want to admit that he needed any special care. "What kind of friends?"

  "Good friends. Now shut up. Now, let's hear what you remember about the Wars of the Roses. That was York against Lancaster—?"

  Dekker rebelled. "That's all old stuff from the crazy times, Dad. Why do I have to learn about wars?"

  "Because the school requires it, and that's all the reason you need. Now what about it?"

  Dekker gave in to logic. "It was in England," he said, panting. "Both sides wanted one of their people to be king, and the reason the wars were called that was that emblems for both sides were roses, white on one side and red on the other. They fought over it for a hundred years, and—" And so on, until they came to the time of the battle that killed King Richard and brought on the Tudors. Then, satisfied, or as nearly satisfied as Boldon DeWoe was likely to get, his father turned off the text machine and began to get that faraway, absentminded, thirsty look that Dekker had begun to recognize. He didn't cut the exercise session short, though. He let it go to the tick of the sixtieth second of the sixtieth minute of the hour, and then he released Dekker, limp, rubbing his sore limbs, and hurried him down and into the trike again.

  Dekker noticed that his father drove even faster than usual on the way home. He didn't comment on it. He didn't say anything at all, much, until they were already in the apartment again and his father had pulled a beer out of the little refrigerator and, glancing at his watch, sat himself down in front of the old flat-plate video.

  Dekker knew the routine by then. There was an hour's study time before his father would start assembling dinner, so Dekker said, "I'll get on with it," and started to sit down before his own screen without being told.

  "No, not this time," his father said. "You can do that later, Dek. There's a special on Mars starting in a minute. You'd probably like to watch it."

  "All right," Dekker agreed. He got up to stand behind his father's chair, but busied himself with picking things up around the room while the opening credits for the program rolled. That was a duty Dekker had taken on himself. Sacrificing sleep to make time for it, he had long since put away everything he could find a place for and scrubbed everything that could be scrubbed. The place was nowhere near Martian standards, of course, but at least it had become less offensive. His father had not seemed to notice, and every day there was a new fallout of socks, bottles, and dirty dishes to greet him when he came home.

  Then, as the program began, Dekker stopped his housework and focused his attention on the screen.

  Most of what the report had to say he already knew. Still, it was good to know that the Oort controllers could now get better than 99 percent of the fragments in a narrow ellipse no more than six or seven hundred kilometers long; there was no longer any need to evacuate whole demes. Of course, that remaining 1 percent could still do a lot of damage where it struck. But if Mars was rich in anything, it was plenty of barren space where there was no real damage to do. Not once, the program's narrator pointed out, in all the six hundred-odd strikes so far, had anyone been killed or any real damage done, and in one of the deeper parts of Valles Marineris they had actually measured a pressure of nearly forty millibars one day.

  Then Dekker made a discovery. When the screen was showing the giant craters left by comet impacts, when it switched to some of the new demes with their windmills and bubble-farms actually on the planet's surface—when it was showing Mars as it was, his father's face was drawn and weary.

  Dekker thought it over carefully, but there was really only one conclusion to be drawn. His father was homesick.

  Dekker cleared his throat and started to speak, but his father hushed him. "Hold it," he said. "They're just getting to the important part."

  "But it's over."

  "The show is over. Now we get the experts commenting on it. That's what I want you to see."

  Dekker shrugged. "All right." But his legs were protesting the long standing period, so he crossed the room for a chair, and while he was there got himself a drink of water, found a couple of overlooked dishes that needed rinsing off, and got back to the screen just in time to hear a middle-aged woman with a mop of golden hair say, "It just doesn't add up. Making Mars into a kind of national park is a sweet, do-goody kind of thing to do, but the cues aren't there. The farm habitats can deliver food faster, and in the long run cheaper."

  "What's she talking about?" Dekker asked in alarm.

  "If you listened," his father said grimly, "you'd hear."

  So Dekker did listen, in alarm, then disbelief, then anger. A pale young man in a pale pink sweater protested that it was humanity's destiny in the long run to settle every piece of real estate that could be settled, so why not Mars? Then a darker, older, bearded man scoffed, "That's the kind of airy-fairy thinking that started the Oort project going in the first place." And Boldon DeWoe, grunting irritably to himself, snapped the set off and limped to the refrigerator for another beer.

  Dekker followed him over. "What the hell was that all about?" he demanded.

  His father shrugged. "You heard. It's what I've been trying to tell you. If you're going to get into the academy, you'd better do it now, because there are a lot of people who want to cancel the whole pr
oject."

  "They can't do that!"

  Boldon DeWoe considered that proposition for the length of time it took him to get back to his chair and sit down again. "No," he said at last, "they probably can't. At least I think they can't. But not for the reasons you think, Dek. I think they'll keep it going because they just have too much invested in it already, and they won't want to write it all off. But they can cut back, slow it down—"

  "That's stupid!" Dekker flared.

  "Sure it is, boy. Did I ever say Earthies weren't stupid? But it's a real possibility, so you can't fool around. You have to take the psychological test in a few weeks, and that's in Denver, so you're going to have to get everything you can out of the school here as fast as you can. What does that mean, Dek?"

  "It means I have to study."

  "Right. Now I want to watch the ball game."

  He switched on the set again and started to put the earpiece for private listening in place, but Dekker tarried. He was remembering the expression on his father's face as he looked at the Martian scenes. He ventured, "Dad?"

  His father dislodged one earpiece to hear his son. "Is there something you don't understand?"

  "No, I just wanted to ask you. Why didn't you come back to Mars, after . . . ?"

  His father gave him a hard look. "After I got hurt, is that what you mean?"

  "Why didn't you?" Dekker persisted.

  His father made a gesture of annoyance. "Hell, Dek. What would I do on Mars?"

  "What do you do here?" Dekker asked, pressing his luck.

  This time Boldon's look was actually angry. Then slowly it evolved into a grin when he decided it was a fair question. "Since you ask, I'll tell you. Here on Earth is where I have to be. This is where I draw my pension—"