Mining the Oort

by Frederik Pohl

  He was so convinced that he had worked all his problems out that he was surprised when, back in his quarters, he found Toro Tanabe looking at him with barely hidden concern. "How did it go?" Tanabe asked.

  Dekker shrugged. "The usual stuff. Kalem's not as much of a bitch as McCune, anyway."

  "Few are," Tanabe agreed, but even the self-centered Toro Tanabe was not willing to let it go at that. He studied Dekker for a moment, then confronted his roommate. "It is obvious to me that something is really troubling you. What is it?" he asked.

  "Nothing," Dekker said. Then he changed his mind. "Well, there was something I saw the other night," he admitted. "Tanabe, have you ever heard of virtuals of wars? I mean the kind that have scenes of really bloody stuff, with people getting their guts blown out and all, right before your eyes?"

  Tanabe looked surprised, then amused. "But of course, DeWoe. I sometimes almost forget that you are a Martian and do not know what everyone knows. These are what they call 'snuff virts.' They come in many varieties. Not just wars, but stories that are filled with all kinds of torture and death, and mob violence and murders and rapes and—listen, DeWoe, I don't want you to get the wrong idea. I do not myself care for them, but unfortunately it seems that there are many who do. There is no city on Earth where they cannot be bought."

  "That's shocking! They kill people in those things!"

  Tanabe laughed out loud at that. He raised his hand to cover his mouth, and said, "Oh, DeWoe, you are priceless. Do you think all those people are actually killed? But you underestimate the virt technicians. Most of the most violent parts are merely computer simulations, of course. It is remarkable how real they can be made to seem."

  "Most of them?"

  Tanabe looked uneasy. "Well, it is of course against the law to really kill people for the sake of making a virt. Still—remember, I am only repeating gossip—they do say that sometimes some of the killings are—what should I say?—unedited. That is, perhaps some of the deaths are real—though of course I suppose the actors do not know this when they are hired for the jobs. I do not know if this is true." He hesitated. Then, delicately, "You have seen such a virt yourself?"

  Dekker nodded, and Tanabe sighed.

  "I told you that woman would eat you, DeWoe," he said.

  The trouble was that Dekker had enjoyed being with Ven Kupferfeld. He missed her. It wasn't just that he missed their very rewarding lovemaking, either, though he did miss that a lot and increasingly; he missed touching her, and talking to her, and knowing that they would meet and make love and talk again. He missed the very differences that divided them: how often did he get the chance to talk intimately with someone as unlike himself as Ven Kupferfeld? Not that she wasn't wrong. She was. But it was fascinating to see how deeply her sense of Tightness had led her into wrong channels.

  And, then, she was always there. In class he could see her at her assigned workstation, halfway around the tank from his own. The top of her fair head was always visible as she bent over her board; from his viewpoint she was out past the tank's glowing image of the planet Saturn, with eight or nine bright purple comets clustered near her. She never looked up at him—not when he saw, anyway. She was all business. Whatever else Ven Kupferfeld was, Dekker reminded himself, she was a diligent student and a hard worker. She deserved to get what she wanted—

  Though not, he thought, everything she seemed to want.

  Over his head, Annetta Bancroft's voice came from his speaker. "Your turn, DeWoe. On the mark, your board goes live. Mark."

  The keypad before him blinked at a dozen places, in different colors of light, then was still. Out in the tank the great virtual orrery that represented the solar system and all its parts was his to control. He knew that it was moving, each object in its own individual orbit, though of course he could not see any motion of the planets themselves. Even Mercury, which revolved around the Sun in only eighty-eight days, crept imperceptibly in the display. In all the huge tank there were only a few signs of movement. Dekker could see Mars's two natural moons, and its three close-orbital stations, crawling around the planet, and two of the comets close to perihelion were actually visibly in motion.

  Those comets were the first objects Dekker checked on his board. Both trajectories were optimal.

  That was a reprieve, because it was at perihelion that the control had to be most exact and unforgiving. If the comet did not come up from its close solar pass with the right vector and velocity, it could lead to serious trouble. Then the Co-Mars Two controllers would have all they could do to correct the last leg of its flight to rendezvous with Mars. Sometimes they couldn't, and a whole expensive comet, with all its investment of time and equipment, was irretrievably lost—well, not absolutely irretrievably, maybe, because at some later time it would reach aphelion and begin to fall back again.

  But that time might not be for a century.

  When they broke for lunch, Dekker had ordered four burns, two of them on a single comet—3P-T38's damned orbital elements had still been wrong after the first burn—and confirmed, with the aid of the computers, that the other eighteen comets in his charge needed no immediate corrections. He nodded to Annetta Bancroft as he passed her at the door. "Sorry about the extra burn," he said. She shrugged.

  "You had an unstable comet," she said. "I checked against the Co-Mars controller. She had problems with 3P-T38, too."

  That was a relief. Dekker knew that sometimes the placement by the snake handlers was not exact, or the comet itself had pockets of loosely compacted material that the sensors had missed; he would have to watch that particular comet carefully in the next session.

  She held out a hand to delay him. "Dr. Kalem passed you," she told him. He nodded; of course, he had assumed that, since he was still in her class. She didn't let it go at that, though. She said, "You don't want to let your balls get in the way of your studies, DeWoe. I don't have to tell you that, do I?"

  "No."

  "But I'm telling you anyway, right?" she said. "Ven Kupferfeld's good, too. I'd like to see you both pass, because you're the kind of people we need out there. I'll be going back myself soon, they tell me, and I'd be happy to have either of you to work with. But," she said, "maybe not both of you in the same place."

  That was the end of the conversation. When Bancroft dismissed him, Dekker replayed it in his mind all the way to the dining hall, trying to figure out what hidden message the instructor had been trying to give him. And what an Earthie trick that was! On Mars people came right out and said what they had on their minds—if it wasn't offensive, anyway. Why couldn't Earthies do the same?

  By the time he got to the mess hall his classmates had filled three tables and there were no seats left at any of them. Shiaopin Ye gave him an apologetic grin, but that was more than compensated by the look of acute hostility he got from Jay-John Belster.

  He sat down by himself . . . and was surprised, a few minutes later, when someone put a tray on the table across from his own. And when he looked at the person he saw that it was Ven Kupferfeld.

  "Hi," she said brightly.

  He grunted a response. She smiled. "You're still mad at me. You really didn't like my virt, right? I guess it was pretty bloody, for a first experience. Did you think it was real?"

  He shrugged, and she went on persuasively. "But, Dek, it couldn't be, could it? They didn't have virtual-recording equipment in the 1860s. It's just a reenactment, you know? The kind they make for collectors."

  Dekker put down his fork and stared at her. "But people buy these things?"

  "Of course people buy these things! Not everybody is a weakling who can't stand—" She stopped herself. "Sorry. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. I just meant people have different tastes."

  Dekker began to eat again, thinking it over. Then he swallowed his mouthful of potatoes and killed-animal gravy and said, "Well, what we saw was real once, wasn't it? The virt people didn't make all that up. If people are sick enough to want to watch make-believe murder that's sad
; but when this actually happened it was real."

  "That's just history, Dekker!"

  "That's the kind of history we're supposed to have outgrown," he corrected.

  She shook her head. "Dekker, you just don't understand. War isn't just killing. Sure, there were a lot of casualties in the Seven Days—that's why it's a famous battle—but not every battle was that way. Some of the biggest victories in history have been won without firing a shot. Look at the way Adolf Hitler conquered Austria and Czechoslovakia. He rolled his tanks right in. Nobody got killed; there wasn't any resistance at all, because everybody knew it wouldn't do any good. Look at how the United States licked the Russians. Didn't fire a shot. Just the fact that they could do it won for them."

  Dekker considered that for a moment, then shook his head. "It doesn't make any difference. I don't know much about wars, but, statistically, how many wars would you say were won without killing people? One out of ten maybe?"

  Ven admitted, "Not that many. No. Usually both sides take casualties. But wars can be."

  "Supposing that's so, even then, the only reason they win is because they can kill people. Whether they actually do it doesn't matter much. Murder is wrong, Ven. Force is wrong."

  "Even to do something right?"

  It seemed to Dekker, looking across the table at her, that she was prettier than ever as she argued her case. Fairness made him give her the chance to say what was on her mind—fairness, yes, and perhaps also, to a tiny extent, the way the faint hint of her perfume crossed the table to him.

  "Who is to judge what's 'right'?" he asked.

  "Everyone has to judge that for himself, of course. Even if it's just you, and most of the world thinks you're crazy—maybe even especially if that's so. Dek, do you know what a terrorist is?"

  He looked at her with wry amusement; how the woman did switch around in arguments! "Of course I know what a terrorist is. You used to have them here. I know what a dinosaur is, too, and they're both extinct."

  She put her elbows on the table, surrounding her cooling lunch, and leaned forward to look into his face. "Maybe that doesn't appeal to me as much as it does to you. Would it be so bad to have a Tyrannosaurus rex around now and then? Can't you imagine one of those great big things crashing through a jungle somewhere?"

  Dekker laughed. "So you could shoot it, like the lion."

  She looked startled, then almost angry. "Damn it, Dekker! Watch what you say where people might be listening; that's an extraditable offense."

  "Sorry. It's just that killing seems to get into a lot of what you want to talk about."

  "Why shouldn't it? Killing's natural. We do it ourselves, or we pay butchers to do it for us—or else we wouldn't have any meat to eat. Terrorists are natural, too."

  "Oh, hell, no," he protested. "I've read enough of your history for that Terrorists set bombs and hijacked planes and killed innocent people."

  "True," she said, "but it's your history, too, isn't it? Where do Martians come from?"

  He shifted uncomfortably. "You've got a point to make, I suppose. What is it?"

  "The point is that terrorism is what you do when the odds against you are so overwhelming that you don't have any choice. Do you know where Israel is?"

  "Next to Egypt somewhere?" he guessed.

  "Close enough. It's a great little country, Dekker; Grandy Jim took me there, too, because he wanted to see what terrorists looked like after they won. The terrorists were running that country, Dek, or at least their descendants were. They didn't call them politicians anymore. They called them statesmen. But it was the terrorists—the Stern Gang, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, and so on—that set the bombs and killed the innocent people and gave them the country in the first place. You were in Kenya! So you know about the Mau Mau and Jomo Kenyatta—the father of his country, they called him later on. After they'd finished calling him a vicious murderer."

  He finished his mashed potatoes before he spoke. She waited him out. Finally he said, "I don't care what you call killers. Killers is what they still are. I'm sorry, Ven. We just don't agree."

  After a moment she said, "What a pity," and got up, leaving her meal untouched.

  31

  Phase Five was where it all paid off. By the time a comet had completed its long drop to the Sun, made its perihelion run, and been vectored to its final Mars approach, its course was set and its relative velocity down to a few kilometers per second. It was almost home . . . but that last step could be a killer.

  That was where the stations in Mars orbit came in.

  For the last few days of the comet's life they had it under their control. The control got easier as the comet caught up with the planet, because the distances diminished and the response time became shorter and shorter; burn corrections were actuated almost as soon as commanded. But at the same time the fine-tuning became more urgent. The comet couldn't splash down just anywhere on Mars's old crust. It couldn't come within five hundred kilometers of a deme or an industrial outpost. It couldn't strike the Valles Marineris or Olympus Mons or any other of a hundred Martian surface features, because they were, it had been decreed, sites of significant value. In short, the comet had to land where it was meant to land, with a circular error probability of no more than two hundred kilometers—and that included 99 percent of its fragments.

  So the last hours of a comet's life were by far its busiest. Its final impact had to be set. Its Augensteins had to be blasted loose and sent into safe orbits for retrieval—certainly no antimatter could enter the Martian atmosphere, however thin that still might be. The comet's demolition charges had to go off in just the right sequence, with just the right strength, to convert the impact into a violent shower of pieces, not one single destroyer. And there was no room at all for error.

  32

  By Phase Five there were only twenty-one left in Dekker DeWoe's class. That was no worse than was to be expected from normal attrition, but the other new fact was a lot more unpleasant. Dekker himself had dropped to number eleven in the class standings.

  That he had not expected at all. It was Ven Kupferfeld's fault, he told himself grimly. If he hadn't wasted so much time playing lovesick Romeo to Yen's bloodthirsty Juliet, he would have been right up at the top, where he belonged. But, thank God, that was over, and now he could get back to what really mattered. . . .

  It was annoying, though, to see that Ven herself was still proudly number one.

  It was even more annoying to have to face the fact that he didn't stop thinking about her. He missed Ven Kupferfeld. He missed all of her; her talk, her touch, her pretty hair, her sweet, wet interiors, her perfume, her warmth beside him as they drowsed in her comfortable bed—yes, he even missed her startlingly rough-edged way of looking at the world, which was certainly improper and wrongheaded and even by any reasonable standard actually repulsive; but still her own. They had disagreed irreconcilably on some of the most fundamental questions of human values, of course. Yet even their disagreements had been interesting.

  Dekker felt obscurely cheated by the way the woman kept creeping into his thoughts. It didn't seem fair. It seemed to him that the fact that they weren't lovers anymore should be easy enough to take under the circumstances. After all, he was the one who had made the decision to break it off. But it wasn't.

  The good part was that Phase Five was only four weeks from Phase Six, and Phase Six would end with Dekker actually going off to tame comets for Mars—assuming he got his grades back up where they belonged, that was. He devoted himself to doing so.

  What made doing that easier was that in Phase Five he was actually seeing the greening of Mars happening. Each workstation in the training room had its own simulations, two sets of them. If the student controller selected one of them he was looking at a display of the surface of the planet Mars. If he selected the other he saw a tank, like the one for the Co-Mars stations, but much smaller in scope; it showed nothing but the region around the trailing segment of Mars's orbit. The rest of the solar system didn't m
atter. Apart from the odd ship in nearby space, the orbiter controllers only cared about Mars, its moons, the three Mars orbiters . . . and the string of trailing dots that were comets—all yellow now—that had been handed over to the orbiting stations for their final creeping approach toward impact.

  The instructor for Phase Five was a Martian named Merike Chophard. "Chop-hard," Dekker said the first time he talked to him, but the teacher corrected him amiably enough. "It's 'choe-fard,'" he said; but, however he pronounced his name, Dekker was pleased to have him there. Chophard was the first Martian Dekker had seen to occupy a position of authority in this enterprise devoted to Mars's regeneration. Well, of some authority—as much as a teacher ever had—at least it proved that Martians weren't always restricted to the very bottom of the totem pole in this Earthie-dominated place.

  At the first session Chophard started by sending all the class to workstations—"Any ones you like. Just sit down, and familiarize yourself with the controls." There wasn't much competition for seats. With the class now attrited down to the mere twenty-one survivors, they filled hardly half the available spaces.

  The most demanding part of the job was the part shown in the orbit simulation; that was where the final approach trajectory was shaped, and where the last-minute work of fracturing the huge comet body into manageable bits took place.

  It wasn't the part that most fascinated Dekker DeWoe, though. When time permitted he delighted in switching the view from the incomings to the Martian surface itself. The view was marvelous. The Mars-orbit stations were in five-hour orbits, circling even closer to the planet than the nearer of its two little moons, and in the simulation Dekker could se the Martian landscape sliding slowly by beneath him. He could identify the familiar geography easily enough, regardless of whether it was day or nigh below; the station's sensors were not limited to visible light. He was even able to pick out the sites of individual demes, though the buildings themselves were too tiny to be visible in the simulation's coarse resolution; he caught his breath when he first saw the mountain on whose slope Sagdayev rested come up over the horizon toward him.