Mining the Oort

by Frederik Pohl

  It was possible, Dekker thought glumly, turning off the screen, that that particular Earthie was simply smarter than he was.

  He didn't like that thought. He didn't have much time to brood over the question, though. The class had already moved on to the subjects of maintenance on the spotter ships themselves and the care of the suit insert that an Oort miner had to live in for twenty or thirty days at a time.

  When the survivors moved into the suit-insert shop they found six actual spotter-ship suits propped up around the room, waiting for them and looking like half a dozen headless store-window dummies from a fat-men's shop. The suits came in six different sizes, all of them too short for any full-grown Martian, and so the old partnerships were dissolved as the class arranged itself by size.

  "Fucking Earthies," Jay-John Belster grumbled in Dekker's ear as they sorted themselves out into teams—both the surviving Martians in the team with the longest and skinniest suit, of course, along with three of the tallest and leanest Earthies. "They could have got us one decent suit, but they just don't give a damn for Martians here."

  Dekker didn't answer, because the suit-insert instructor had climbed on a chair to address them. She was a new face to Dekker, a "European" Earthie named Liselotte Durch, and a good deal older than anyone else in the room. Her hair was white, her face was lined, and her voice was strident. "Don't touch the suits until I tell you," she ordered. "Don't complain if they don't fit when you try them on, either. I already know they aren't going to fit. If you ever actually make it out into the Oort, which I also know damn few of you will, you'll get one that's custom made to your own body. That's not because they want it to look nice. It's because you have to live in your suit for weeks at a time. When you're out in your spotter ship you'll piss in your suit and crap in it, and some of you guys will probably want to try to jerk off in it, but I warn you now that that isn't going to work. You'll be catheterized before you leave the base ship, and if you let your glands run away with you and get an erection while you're in the suit, it's going to hurt."

  The sole function of the suit, she went on, telling them what they already knew, was to act as an interface between the tiny, stripped-down, one-man spotter ship and the human body within it. The suit would keep them alive. It would feed them, give them air, and remove their wastes; and the auxiliaries would evaporate the water out of those wastes and give it back to them to drink. Just to drink.

  "Drinking is all you'll need water for," she said, "because you aren't going to be able to wash or anything like that. Naturally by the time you get back to base you're going to stink, but, hey, that's what you're signing up for." She gave them a challenging look, as though seeking protests. There weren't any, so she moved on. "Now, one of you in each group, strip down and climb into the suit. The controls are all depowered, but don't touch them anyway, and don't put the helmets on. DeWoe? Which one of you is DeWoe? All right, DeWoe, leave your team and come over here a minute."

  Surprised, Dekker did as he was told. Durch didn't look at him at first; she was watching the teams as they wrangled among themselves to see who would go first. When one member of each team had finally begun to undress she took time to look down at Dekker. "Your name's DeWoe. Are you any relation to Boldon DeWoe?" she asked.

  "My father," he said. "He just died."

  She nodded as though the news didn't surprise her. "I heard something about that. Too bad. You know he really messed himself up," she said, as though Dekker could possibly have been unaware of his father's condition. "I knew him in the Oort. Smart man; I liked him. Good pilot, too, but he couldn't leave the dope alone. I hope you don't take after him."

  When you were spotting comets out in the Oort, Liselotte Durch had told them, you would be put into your suit by trained professionals, and they would take care of threading the tubes into your personal parts, and checking for wrinkles in the fabric and adjusting the fit to your body before each mission.

  That was what it would be like out in the Oort. In training it was different. In training you just stripped down to your skivvies and stood still while your teammates pulled the suit up around you and did their best to get it all zipped up. "Actually," the instructor said, "you want to remember that when you put this on you're not just wearing the liner suit. You're wearing the whole ship."

  It felt like wearing a whole ship, as a matter of fact. When Dekker was sealed inside, trying to hunch his tall frame down to fit into a space at least half a dozen centimeters too short, he felt like a mummy. Nothing moved easily, but then, in a real spotter ship, hardly any parts of his body would be moving at all. The spiky invigilation tubes that would be inside him in actual use were now pressing painfully against sensitive parts of his body. The whole thing seemed to weigh a ton—did weigh a hundred kilograms or more, and Dekker had to strain to stand up in it.

  If others could handle it, Dekker could. There was a personal challenge involved for Dekker DeWoe, too. As the instructor had reminded him, his father had worn a suit just like this, a long time ago and those billions of kilometers away.

  So Dekker pushed the hands of his teammates away and stood erect. "Ready," he said, and when Liselotte Durch gave the order, Jay-John Belster picked the helmet up and set it on over his head. His whole team pitched in to settle it in place and snap the connections in.

  For a moment Dekker was in total blackness. This wasn't like putting on a hotsuit to roam the slopes around Sagdayev; it was heavier and more constricting, and there wasn't enough air. For a moment he almost panicked. Then the external air supply kicked in and he felt a soft, refreshing movement of air around his face.

  A moment later the taped virtuals came on.

  He was blind no longer. He was still surrounded by blackness, but the blackness, wherever he looked, was punctuated by a universe of stars—bright ones and faint, diamond white or hued in blue and yellow and pale red. It was only a partial virtual, with no sound and certainly no touch or smell—but then, in the emptiness of the Oort, there would be no external sounds to hear. It didn't matter. The vision was enough. Dekker was seeing what his ship's eyes saw—at least, what a real spotter ship would see, out in the Oort. The stars that surrounded him whichever way he turned his head weren't real, of course. They were only the spectacle that some ship had once observed, taped, and reproduced for this training session. But they were wonderful. He was there.

  Liselotte Durch's voice startled him when she whispered in his ear. "Are you all right? Are you getting your feeds?"

  "I'm fine," he said.

  "Then start your drill," she ordered, and he began the list of procedures. His fingers found the keypads that controlled the ship movements and instrument readings sprang up before his eyes: state of consumables, rate of acceleration, function checks on all the parts of his imaginary "ship." Another touch, and the radars reported distances to the nearest orbiting comets—a few million kilometers at the least, because the Oort was a very thin cloud; another touch, and the one he had selected popped closer to his eyes, a dull, lumpy potato of a thing that showed no sign of the great luminous tail it might develop if he chose to tag it and thread it with its instruments and drives and send it down to enrich the air of Mars.

  He only had ten minutes in the suit. It wasn't enough; but when Dekker got out he was grinning. The next one up was the woman in their team, that very bright—and also, in an Earthie way, very good-looking—pale-haired one named Ven Kupferfeld. She gave Dekker a curious look, then a smile as she began to disrobe. "You look pleased," she said.

  He didn't answer; the grin stayed on his face, and it was answer enough. Jay-John Belster and another man helped Dekker pull his legs out of the suit and readied it for the woman, now down to her brightly patterned and quite minimal underwear.

  "This is the best part," Belster muttered to Dekker as they watched her get ready to enter the suit. "I wouldn't mind taking a little piece of that."

  Dekker grunted without a specific reply, though he shared the notion. Ven Kupferfeld's u
nderthings were not only minute, they were just about transparent besides. She was very tall and thin for an Earthie, which made her all the better looking for Dekker DeWoe. When she was into the suit and the show was, for the moment, over, Dekker and Belster together picked up the helmet, with all its lines and cables for air supply and external feeds, and waited for their other teammates to do the tedious work of tugging and twisting and zipping the suit into some sort of fit.

  Dekker glanced to the front of the room. Liselotte Durch was at her teacher's lectern by the door, talking to another woman who looked vaguely familiar to Dekker. He couldn't pin the vagrant memory down. "Belster?" he said to the Martian. "Do you know who that woman is?"

  Belster looked, but the woman was already turning away to leave. "Can't tell," he said. "Probably she's another instructor. But, listen, DeWoe, I was meaning to ask you. Did old lady Durch just say she knew your father in the Oort?" Dekker nodded. "Well, that's a damn good break for you. I guess you might get a little help now and then."

  Dekker said, "My father gave me all the help he ever can, Belster. He got hurt in the Oort years ago, and a couple of weeks ago he died of it."

  Surprisingly, the Martian didn't look surprised. He just said. "Well, I didn't actually mean help from your father, but now that you mention it, I guess I did hear something about it. Fucking Earthies let him just rot, didn't they?"

  Dekker shrugged, and Belster nodded sagaciously. "Fucking Earthies," he repeated. "They don't give a shit about Mars. This whole thing's just so they can bleed us dry, and now they're talking about folding the whole operation."

  "They can't do that," Dekker said with conviction.

  "They can if we let them get away with it."

  Dekker looked at him curiously. "They don't have any right," he said with conviction.

  Belster seemed to approve. "Good man," he said. "Look, Kupferfeld's ready for the helmet. Let's give her a hand—and don't mess her pretty hair."

  Dekker gave Ven Kupferfeld more than a hand, actually, at that evening's shove-and-grunt. In fact, he got the chance to give her a fairly complete massage. As he came into the room the short, sallow Fez Mehdevi came over to him. "Please," he said, "would you care to be my partner for this evening, too?" He sounded aggrieved.

  "I already have a stress-reduction partner, Mehdevi."

  "So did I, but she has decided I am not enough of a challenge for her, so she has arranged to make some changes. She—But here she is, she can tell you for herself."

  The "she" was Ven Kupferfeld. She was grinning. "Forget this one, Mehdevi," she said. "I'll try him out myself. You go find somebody else."

  Dekker never enjoyed a stress-reduction session more, though the stresses it relieved were surely overbalanced by the new stresses it brought about. Kupferfeld's exercise briefs were less transparent than her underwear had been, but they still exposed a lot of skin, and as they wrestled Dekker got the chance to touch a lot of it.

  It was a pleasure, but not without its drawbacks. It was a foregone conclusion that a Martian like Dekker, however well he had responded to shots and exercise, wasn't ever going to be strong enough to do shove-and-grunt with a male Earthie student, except perhaps a short and marshmallow-soft one like Fez Mehdevi. He began to wonder if he was strong enough to do it with Ven Kupferfeld, either. It wasn't that his polysteroided muscles were seriously less powerful than hers. The problem was skeletal. As he tried to flip her forcefully resisting frame over on the mat, he wondered if he was going to snap some flimsy Martian bone.

  But they got through it without disaster, and as they were headed for the showers she grinned at him, panting. "Good workout, DeWoe," she said. "Hey. I hear you were in Kenya before you came here."

  Dekker had given up wondering how everybody in the class seemed to know so much more about him than he knew about them. "That's right, Ven."

  "A grand place," she pronounced. "I was there myself, years ago. Did you see the game herds?"

  "Some. I had a friend who had a farm in the Mara."

  "Tanzania's better—hell, Tanzania's wonderful. My grandfather took me when I was fifteen and we saw all those giraffes and wildebeests and lions—all running free, even killing right before your eyes."

  It had not occurred to Dekker that killing was a spectator sport. He said so, and she grinned at him. "That depends a lot on who's doing the killing and who gets killed, doesn't it? Anyway, we ought to get together and talk about it sometime."

  Something inside Dekker crowed in triumph and joy, but he kept his expression cool. "I'd like that," he said. "When?"

  "Oh," she said, "some time soon. Listen, DeWoe, I heard about your father. I'm really sorry."

  "Thank you."

  She studied him for a moment. "A lot of you Martians blame us—what's that thing you call us? 'Dirtsuckers'?—blame us dirtsuckers for things like that. Like what happened to your father, I mean, and I'm glad you don't feel that way."

  Since Dekker was not in fact sure that he didn't blame the dirtsuckers, he felt a sudden tightness in his throat. Could that be anger? he wondered. Was he spending so much time with Earthies that he was beginning to react like them?

  He knew that the feeling was wrong, but he couldn't help saying sharply, "What makes you think I don't?"

  She didn't take offense. She just nodded as though the response was not only natural but, in some way, even right. As she turned away toward the women's shower stalls she said, "Don't forget, we want to talk sometime."

  Dekker's heat cooled swiftly. He called after her, "There's a weekend coming up—maybe Saturday?"

  She paused long enough to smile at him over her shoulder. "Not this Saturday, no—I'm going away for the weekend. But soon, Dekker. We have a lot to talk about.

  25

  Weekends were quiet for Dekker DeWoe. Half the students would be gone, mostly to the fleshpots of Denver, and the rest studying frantically to try to keep up. Dekker was one of the studying ones, but not particularly frantic: the next part of Phase Two was communications hardware, the sort of thing they would be using in a spotter ship, or for that matter anywhere in the Oort project's control system. Dekker did not need a great deal of study for that—after all, he'd been using very similar comm-sets on the Martian airships.

  So he allowed himself to take time off—not to do anything in particular; actually to do nothing at all, or as close to nothing as a healthy and active young Martian ever could. He watched newscasts until they got too repulsive: The Khalistan secessionists had given up, but now there was some other trouble in a place called Brazil. And the markets were unstable again. He roamed around the campus, strengthening his new legs and breathing the sweet mountain air: wonderful grass growing, wonderful flowers. Wonderful insects, even, buzzing from plant to plant; this place was so full of life. He chatted with his classmates still on campus at their leisurely weekend meals. He recorded a long, affectionate letter to his mother. He drowsed, and slept late, and listened to music, and was well content.

  For Dekker DeWoe on that weekend his worries seemed far away. Ven Kupferfeld offered the possibility of future pleasures, maybe—Dekker did not allow himself to count on anything with Earthies, especially Earthie women. The questionable way Dekker had got into the training course dwindled in his memory; surely it could not matter anymore as long as he continued to do well in the class work . . . and even his father's death became just another slowly mellowing pain.

  He went peacefully to bed on Sunday night without any hint of insomnia. He woke only partially to hear Toro Tanabe stumbling in—of course at the last possible moment after his long weekend in town—drowsed quickly back into a pleasant dream that involved someone who looked a lot like Ven Kupferfeld—

  And was suddenly jolted fully awake, startled and angry, an hour later.

  It was the middle of the night. His room lights were on. A man he had never seen before was standing over him. "Up," the man snapped, jerking the covers off Dekker's body. "No, don't try to get dressed. You've go
t no time for that. Get your ass out here! You've got work to do, and you have to do it now."

  It was an unforgivable intrusion on his personal time. He wasn't the only one who thought so, either, because furious shouting from Toro Tanabe's room told him that the Japanese was being awakened in just the same way, with even more resistance. But when Tanabe came stumbling out into the common room, wearing a silk gown of the kind he called "kimono," Dekker saw that the person with him was the psychologist woman, Rosa McCune.

  Then it all became clear.

  Tardily Dekker understood what was happening. The almost-forgotten warnings had come to pass. It was a surprise psychological check. On their study table was a tool kit and a model of the refrigeration unit that was part of an Augenstein. "Get busy," the woman commanded. "Strip it. Check the parts. Put it back together, and do it fast. You've got twelve minutes, and the clock's running."

  At that hour of the night, without warning, that was a nasty task—especially for Toro Tanabe, who was clearly still half-drunk and wholly incompetent. Dekker had never before worked with his roommate as partners, and as he grimly began twisting at the latches with the unlocking device he hoped they never would again. His biggest problem was keeping Tanabe's fumbling fingers out of the way. He almost wished for Fez Mehdevi instead. He did wish that, at least, the two psych people would shut up, but of course they didn't. They kept a running stream of distracting chatter, with uncomplimentary references to Dekker's straining efforts to wrench apart the resisting coils and Tanabe's frequent need to clutch the side of the table for support. "At least," Tanabe moaned, "let me for Christ's sake piss first."

  "You wouldn't have time to piss in the Oort, stupid," Dr. McCune snapped. "Move it! You've got seven minutes left!"

  The seven minutes went faster than Dekker would have believed possible, but somehow, with minimal help from Tanabe, he got the job done. Then the woman demanded his arm for a moment while she took some blood—for what, Dekker could not guess—and then it was over. When the psych team had taken their hardware to plague some other students, Dekker and Tanabe rubbed the pinpricks where the blood had been taken from their arms and looked at each other.