Mining the Oort

by Frederik Pohl

  Dekker, who had never once thought of being ashamed of anything connected with being a Martian, and was not pleased at having been rated by Jay-John Belster, said only, "No, it isn't."

  "The other thing Belster says about you is that your mother's a big shot on Mars."

  Her tone had changed, and it made him uncomfortable. "She's a senator, yes. I suppose that's about as big as you get on Mars, but of course Mars isn't that big a place—yet."

  "But you'd like it to be big, wouldn't you?"

  "Well, hell, Ven! Of course I would! Why do you think I'm here?"

  She didn't answer that. "I guess," she said, "it's tough being a Marian—I mean, when you're so poor, and most people here are so rich. I mean—" She gestured around her condo. "—I'm a pauper, the way people like your buddy Tanabe think of it, and yet I've got a lot more than you do. Do you ever resent all that?"

  The woman asked odd questions, he thought. He tried to find an answer that wouldn't hurt her feelings and settled on "It doesn't seem fair, I guess. Martians work a lot harder than you people do, and we don't have as much to show for it."

  That seemed to satisfy her. She changed the subject. "Why does your ear look that way?"

  "It's a transplant. My original one got frostbitten."

  She reached out dreamily to touch it. Her touch felt good. "But you do have all your other parts?" she asked. When he nodded, she lifted her glass in salute. And a moment later, to Dekker DeWoe's astonishment, she stood up, lifted her skirt and pulled it off over her head.

  What she wore underneath was a different version of what he had seen when they tried on skinsuits, skimpy and almost transparent and prettily ornamented with hearts and flowers. "Well?" she asked, gazing at him in a businesslike way. "Are you going to show me how your parts work?"

  "Well, sure," DeWoe said, because that was obviously the answer she expected, and not at all unlike what he had been thinking of himself. It took him by surprise, that was all. And then very quickly both of them were naked and in each other's arms in Ven Kupferfeld's soft, springy bed, the warm strength of her solid little body astonishing him all over again, before they got around to kissing each other for the first time.

  The copulation was like all other copulations, infinitely different and always the same. As far as DeWoe's experience could let him judge, their intercourse was successful. Certainly it lasted adequately long, by any reasonable standard. Certainly it relieved all those tensions and cured all those aches for him, and the sleepy way she hugged him when they had spent all they had to spend indicated satisfaction on her part, too.

  They didn't talk much afterward. She was actually asleep when, not much later, DeWoe got up, dressed, and quietly let himself out.

  In the parking lot he looked wistfully at her little hydrocar, but of course he would have to get back without it. No matter. The exercise would probably be good for him. He paused before beginning the long climb to look up at the sky. It was a clear night on the slope of the mountain, with Earth's few stars almost washed out by the quarter moon, but it was bright with streaks of light from the comets on their way to rejuvenate Mars. They were a pleasing sight to Dekker DeWoe, who was well pleased with the world in general just then. One huge comet spread like a splash of liquid silver across half the sky, and there were a dozen more distant ones, but mostly fully tailed, plainly visible.

  "And that," said Dekker to himself, "is what it's all about." And hardly minded the long, uphill climb back to the dormitories.

  By the time he had reached the cluster of dormitory buildings his Martian muscles and Martian bones had seriously begun to mind, though.

  Not that it wasn't worth it. Satisfaction long delayed was satisfaction enhanced; the copulation had only confirmed, not dulled, the notion that had been growing in Dekker's mind that copulating with Ven Kupferfeld was perhaps something that would be worth doing over and over again.

  Perhaps even for the rest of his life.

  What Dekker was beginning to wonder was whether he could possibly be "in love." It was an interesting question. It—almost—made the long walk home go quickly.

  He wasn't entirely sure what the diagnostic signs of that condition were supposed to be. He was pretty sure he didn't have all of them, anyway. For instance, it wasn't that he thought Ven Kupferfeld was the only possible woman in all the worlds for him. It wasn't even that he thought she was perfect. Or, really, anywhere near it; for the woman certainly had some freakish attitudes toward life—generals! battlegrounds!—and Dekker had no doubt that there was a whole lot of the interior person of Ven Kupferfeld that she had not exposed to him, however entirely she had offered him her physical body.

  All the same, as he limped into the lobby of his dormitory he was joyous. Not overjoyed. Not carried away; not ready to slay dragons for the woman, or pine if she lost him, but at least joyed.

  He was surprised to find that the lobby wasn't as quiet as it usually was on a weekend night. A new class was coming in. A couple of the first-phase trainees were still shouldering their bags to their new dormitory rooms, looking around wide-eyed and curious. Dekker, as a third-phase old hand, beamed tolerantly at them and opened the door to his room.

  It was dark. Toro Tanabe was gone for his weekend in Danktown, and before Dekker was far enough into the room for the lights to come on he stumbled over a package just inside the door.

  The package was for him.

  It was from the Colorado Rehabilitation Center. A note was sealed to its outer wrappings, with his name and address on it, and what it said was that the Colorado Rehabilitation Center was pleased to forward to him, as next of kin, the effects of his late father, Boldon DeWoe. The package contained some clothing, some toilet articles, and a letter.

  There was not much imaginable else that could have driven the thought of Ven Kupferfeld out of Dekker's mind.

  He sat on the edge of the little couch in the common room for a long time, with the letter in his hand, though he wasn't really thinking about his father's letter—he was thinking about his father. He was thinking about the sad, ruined man who had chosen to live the wreck of his life where no one he cared about could see, and about the way the world could have been if Boldon DeWoe had not had his accident out in the Oort.

  Dekker didn't cry. He might have. He would not have been ashamed. He simply was feeling something deeper than he had often felt before, and, although there was sorrow, there was also peace.

  He read his father's letter one more time. It said:

  My very dear son Dekker:

  Since it looks as though I'm dying they are letting me write this. What I want to tell you is that I'm sorry I didn't come back. I wanted to. I wanted to watch you grow up, and I wanted to be with your mother. I just wasn't man enough to face pity.

  I don't have any right to give you fatherly advice, but I'm going to give you some anyway. Do your best to take care of your mother. Stay away from Marcus and all the other people like Marcus, because they are sick. Or maybe they're just evil; I can't tell the difference. And the most important thing: Please don't envy the Earthies; above all, don't try to be like them.

  I wish I'd been a better father to you, Dek. You deserved better.

  Your father

  And there was a PS that said: "Take care of Brave Bear. I'm glad you kept him. I would have given you more if I could.

  28

  It was the Oort miners—the spotters, the snake handlers, the launchers—who considered themselves the most important part of the project, because they were the ones who started each comet on its long drop from the cloud to impact. That was as far as they went, though. Their original course programming merely aimed the thing in the general direction of the Sun.

  That was close enough, for the first three or four years. Then each incoming needed to be caught and corrected, and that was even harder . . . or, at least, hard in a quite different way.

  The comets came in from the Oort on a thousand different headings, and all of them were wrong. The
right heading was the one that would take it close to the Sun at perihelion—close enough to get maximum deltas from the Sun's gravity, but not so close that the Sun's heat boiled too much of its mass away—and on just the right heading so that it would come away from the Sun on a trajectory that led to Mars. That was the tricky part.

  That was the part that was taken over by the control satellites in the co-Martian orbits. They analyzed the trajectories for each incoming comet, and they commanded the burns that would correct those trajectories. It wasn't a onetime deal. At every point along the comet's long fall it needed to be tended, and nursed ever closer to the optimal Sun-swing insertion. As many as five hundred course corrections were necessary to fine-tune that important moment when the Sun's pull would wrench the comet out of its original course and put it squarely in the plane of the ecliptic, at the same time slowing it through the right burns at the right fraction of a second so that it would creep up on Mars at just the right point in Mars's orbit.

  That was what the students learned in Phase Four. Some said it was the most important phase in the course. Others—notably the ones in the stations orbiting Mars, as well as the ones in the Oort itself—said it wasn't, but, really, they were all right. There were no parts of the hard, long job of guiding a comet from Oort to Martian impact that were not important.

  29

  Being possibly "in love" or at least "in like"—or, Dekker corrected himself, perhaps simply "in heat"—was certainly giving him a lot to think about, but not so much that he neglected his studies. Ven didn't, either. The two of them actually studied together, on those evenings she was willing to spend with him—part of the time, anyway.

  It helped his concentration that Phase Four was interesting. It wasn't just the subject matter, though that certainly did interest Dekker DeWoe. The other interesting thing about it, in more or less a personal way, was that the instructor was his old party friend from long-ago Sunpoint City, Annetta Bancroft.

  Dekker respected the woman's position of authority and did not address her by her first name, or attempt any kind of intimacy with his teacher. It wasn't hard to avoid familiarity, anyway. They were kept busy. After the first few days of lectures and testing, they went back to the simulated control chamber they had visited briefly weeks earlier.

  Dekker was pleased to find that he had a natural gift for comet handling. Ven was admiring—maybe even a little jealous, too—and Annetta Bancroft patted him on the back. "You ought to put in for one of the Co-Mars stations," she said, and when he said his real intention was the Oort itself, only looked thoughtful. But he knew she was right. He was as good as any in the class at the vital tasks of keeping the comets on course, solving orbital problems, and commanding burns. Was it because of his piloting experience? Dekker didn't think so. The general problems were the same—guidance and thinking ahead—but, of course, here most of the course planning was done by computer. It was the computers that plotted positions and trajectories for each incoming, interrogating every one of them and making a new plot every ten seconds of all the seconds in all the years each comet took to get to its destination. Still, a human being always had to verify the computer's solutions before each burn. That was gospel: computers rarely made small errors, but it took human beings to catch the big ones in time.

  And time after time in the control training center, when Dekker punched in his proposed trajectory and watched the golden prediction line extend itself from the comet to the point on the grid where it would reach perihelion, then keyed "normative" to check it against the actual controller's solution, from far out in the Mars orbit, the two lines matched perfectly. Once the rest of the class even broke into spontaneous applause as they watched. Of course, Annetta Bancroft hushed them immediately, but it occurred to Dekker that his father would have been pleased.

  He didn't think about his father all that often, though. He hadn't forgotten Boldon DeWoe; there was a sore place in his heart that contained his father's memory. But Dekker had many nearer concerns, and one that, in fact, was present with him in person much of the time, and in his thoughts most of his remaining hours: Ven Kupferfeld.

  Spending that much time thinking about Ven Kupferfeld, or indeed about any other woman, was something brand new in Dekker's experience. She wasn't the only woman he had ever bedded, not by more than a dozen. But he had never mooned so over another human being before. When they were together he was fully conscious of the differences between them: Earthie/Martian, rich/poor, sophisticated/naive—most of all, perhaps, simply female/male, because on Earth, Dekker had come to believe, the fundamental differences between men and women were considerably more marked than he had ever observed them to be on Mars.

  But when they were apart, the differences didn't seem much to matter. The thought that dominated his mind was just a wish that they were together.

  They were in practice together a lot less than Dekker would have wished. Having granted Dekker entry to her bed once, he assumed there would be repeat performances ad lib. There were, to some degree, but not as often as he would have preferred. From time to time, as he approached her at the end of a day's session, she would give him that warm but opaque smile that told him she was going to say she had something else she simply had to do that night.

  There were still plenty of evenings together, and after a while even Toro Tanabe noticed. It took the very self-centered Tanabe more than a week to observe that they had switched roles; now it was Dekker who was coming back to their quarters very late and very pleased with himself. Then it took Tanabe less than a second to puzzle out why. He flicked off his screen and gaped up at his roommate as Dekker entered. "For Christ's sake, it's Ven Kupferfeld, isn't it?" Tanabe said, amazed.

  "We study together sometimes, yes."

  "Oh, of course, yes, I know exactly what you study. I am sure you learn a great deal from all this studying. But that woman is out of your class entirely, DeWoe."

  Because Dekker had thought along those lines himself, his response was hotter than it might otherwise have been. "She doesn't think so. If you must know, she's almost as poor as I am."

  Tanabe shook his head. "Class is not simply a matter of money," he announced. "At least, once in a great while it may not be. Kupferfeld comes of a very important family, while you're a—"

  He recollected himself in time to keep from saying "Martian." He didn't say anything at all for a moment. Then, moved by some momentary impulse toward kindness, he changed the subject. He gestured at his lightless screen. "I am going insane with these integrals," he moaned. "I can work them out so easily here on the screen, but when we are actually trying to guide a comet it is so much more difficult."

  "Is that what you were doing?" Dekker asked, curious, because the glimpse he had caught before Tanabe turned it off had not looked like schoolwork.

  Tanabe looked sulky. "Not at this precise moment, no," he admitted. "One needs some relaxation—it was a Marsie, as a matter of fact."

  "Oh, hell," Dekker said, laughing.

  "I simply wished to understand what your world was like," Tanabe declared.

  "You won't get that from the Marsies." Dekker had seen few of those popular shows, because they offended him—highly adventurous blood-letters on Mars, impossibly evil Martian settlers kidnapping Earth women, living like animals in their crude underground shelters, fighting. Fighting!

  "I know," Tanabe said humbly. "They are of course highly exaggerated, but still . . . And the news is so bad, so I turned it off. The Tokyo indices were down a hundred and fifty last night."

  "I don't know what that means," Dekker said, polite but incurious.

  "What it means is that my father is about half a million cues poorer than he was yesterday," Tanabe said bitterly. "Oh, there's plenty left—so far. But where will it end?"

  Dekker covered a yawn. "It's only money, Tanabe. Is that why you're studying so hard now?"

  "While you are studying quite other things with that woman?" Tanabe hesitated, then said, "I know this is not my co
ncern, DeWoe, but listen to what I say. Ven Kupferfeld is not only well connected, she is far stronger than you are. She will eat you alive, man."

  "Yes, I'd like that," Dekker agreed, to make the annoying man shut up. Tanabe did. Without another word Tanabe retired to his own room, and when they both got up the next morning he was polite but did not refer to the dangerousness of Ven Kupferfeld again.

  Dekker did, though.

  The next time he was at Yen's condo, finishing the microcooked meal that they had prepared out of her larder "to save time for studying," he could not help telling her the amusing story of how Tanabe had warned him against her.

  Ven didn't seem surprised. She wasn't even offended. She simply handed Dekker her dirty plate and silverware thoughtfully. She watched him carrying them to the cleaner before she said, "What do you think, Dekker? Am I doing you any harm?"

  "Of course not," he said, meaning to reassure. "I don't even think Tanabe thought you'd actually hurt me in any way. He was just trying to say that you were very different from me."

  "Am I?"

  Dekker started to say a positive "No," then thought for a second. "Well, of course you're different. There's nothing wrong with that, though. I like you like that."

  "Different how, Dekker?" she insisted.

  He spread his hands, grinning. "Where do you want me to start?"

  "Anywhere you like. Start with the first thing that comes to your mind."

  "Well—" He thought for a moment. After rejecting the first two or three "first" things, he settled on one. "Well, just experience. You've been so many places I've just heard about. With your grandfather, I mean."

  "Which places?"

  "I suppose all of them. All those old battlegrounds, for instance. And Africa. Why did you go there, anyway? There aren't any battlegrounds in Africa."