Mining the Oort

by Frederik Pohl

  And he saw comet strikes actually happening. Well, not actually "actual." Like everything else in the training displays they were either simulated or recorded from the real events that had already taken place, but no less thrilling for that. He saw two of them close together in one session, one just inside the dawn line, the other coming down eight hundred kilometers away and half an hour later. He saw the gases boil up from each of the fifty or sixty impact points that came from the fragments of each strike.

  The gases formed instant mushroom clouds, towering into the sky . . . and, Dekker realized with a thrill, the clouds were lingering. He didn't have Ven Kupferfeld anymore, but he had something that was far more important: Mars was beginning to come to life.

  When he got back to his quarters that night there were two messages waiting for him. He played the picmail message first. Surprisingly, it was from his old Nairobi classmate, Walter Ngemba.

  It was odd, Dekker thought, that Ngemba had sent him a recorded visual message instead of just calling him up. Because of the time difference? Surely not simply to save the extra cost of a two-way. When the Kenyan's image flashed on the screen Walter didn't look any different—same smart, well-pressed shirt and shorts, same carefully coiffed hair, same friendly smile—but the smile faded as he began to speak: "Dekker, my friend, I am sorry to say that I won't be coming to join you in Denver after all. On my birthday I told my father of my plan to apply for Oort training. He asked me to wait until he could make some inquiries, and I did. When his replies came he invited me into his study and let me read the screen.

  "Dekker, I'm afraid that there would be no point in my applying for the course. I am not permitted to say what intelligence agency my father consulted, but I am convinced their report is quite reliable. It stated that there is definitely a decreasing need for the terraforming of Mars, because the farm products that would justify it can be produced more quickly and cheaply in other ways—I suppose, because of the new farm habitats that the Japanese are building—and it said that the entire project was going to be under review within the next few months. I'm afraid that means cancellation. Under the circumstances, my father said, it made no sense for me to apply. I was forced to agree. So, sadly, I will not see you there. But, Dekker, please remember that if the training center closes you are always welcome at our farm."

  When the message was over Dekker stared at the blank screen. At least, he thought, that explained Walter's using picmail; he hadn't wanted Dekker to be asking questions about these "intelligence" sources. But how reliable were they?

  Dekker glanced up as he caught a flicker of motion at the door to Toro Tanabe's room. The Japanese was standing there, looking guilty. He coughed apologetically when he saw Dekker's accusing look. "Please excuse me, DeWoe. I didn't intend to eavesdrop."

  "But you did."

  "I heard, yes." He hesitated, then added quickly, "I think it is unfair of this African person to blame the Japanese; we are not alone in this, you know."

  "But your own father put up the money for the habitats, didn't he?"

  "He invested heavily in them, yes," Tanabe admitted. "Please remember that my father is a businessman. In business it is necessary to be practical. The habitats can be producing crops in large quantity in less than ten years—and how long would it be for Mars? Another thirty or forty years at best. So I fear there may be some truth to these reports, though I would not say it is definite that the project will necessarily be canceled. . . . But, Dekker," he added pleadingly, "we Japanese are not all unwilling to help your planet. I don't want it canceled, either. After all, I'm here."

  He didn't wait for an answer, but retreated into his room and closed the door. A moment later he came out again, his coat over his arm, and left the apartment without speaking again to Dekker.

  Dekker sighed. Well, he thought, he had heard plenty of rumors already about the project being in danger. Assuming they were true, what could he do about it? No more than he was doing already: Keep on plugging away, and hope the rumors turned out to be wrong. . . . Then he remembered the other message. This one was voicemail and—he saw with a quick uplift—from his mother.

  He wished he could see her face, for Gerti DeWoe sounded tired as she spoke. "I've got good news and bad news. The good news is that maybe I'll see you soon, Dek, because I have to go to Earth for a meeting about the Bonds. The bad news is that I have to. The Commons appointed me. The Earthies are being bitchy about the next issue. They want to renegotiate the terms, and they're getting really tough about it. As long as I'm coming, though, I'm going to try to steal a little time for myself and make it to your graduation—so there's a silver lining, anyway."

  That was all.

  After a moment Dekker turned off the screen, stood up, washed his face, and left for the mess hall. He went alone. The fact that Toro Tanabe had left without waiting for him was all right with Dekker. He didn't much want to talk to Tanabe just then. He wanted to sort out his thoughts on his own.

  The thoughts were not joyous. It was certainly a real pleasure to think that Gerti DeWoe might be there soon—maybe even to watch him graduate?—but the rest of the thoughts that crowded through his mind were a lot less pleasing. Renegotiate the terms! But there was simply nothing more to give; the Earthies had the next six generations of Martians mortgaged already! He wished his mother were there already so he could talk them over with her. Or with his father. Or even—running through the list of people he would have liked to talk to—with Ven Kupferfeld. She probably would know no more fact than he did, but at least she might have been able to help him understand what was behind all this, even if only to tell him what the Earthies really wanted. They already had everything. Couldn't they spare a little assistance for their fellow humans on Mars?

  Just asking the question gave Dekker the answer. He knew exactly what Ven would have said, and that she would have been laughing at him as she said it. What the Earthies wanted was undoubtedly what Earthies always seemed to want. They wanted more.

  He had no appetite, but he collected a tray of food at the mess hall counter. When he sat down in the corner of the room where his class usually assembled, he wondered if he should talk to any of them about his questions.

  The opportunity for that wasn't there, though. The whole class was busy chattering to each other about something else, a new story that was flashing around. The word was that the class that had just graduated already had received their posting orders. Every one of them was going to Co-Mars Two, no matter what they had put in for.

  "It's from psych testing," Tanabe was saying emphatically, waving a fork as Dekker approached. "DeWoe, have you heard? They must have their own Rosa McCune there; Co-Mars Two has sent down half their complement for 'instability,' and so they're running shorthanded."

  "So we will go out at once," Shiaopin Ye said, looking up from her bowl of soup. "That's good."

  "But that's not what I was aiming for. I wanted to go right out to the Oort itself," another grumbled. So had Dekker DeWoe. So had most of them, because the Oort cloud was where the pay was best and the glamour most appealing.

  Then, thinking it over, Dekker decided to make the best of it. "I think," he said, "that I will request a Mars orbiter." The more he thought of it, the better he liked the idea. "Yes, definitely 1 will," he said. The Mars orbiters had one conspicuous advantage. If he were only some hundreds of kilometers away from Mars, rather than many light-days, he could even hope to get home now and then. Mars-orbiter personnel did get time off. It wouldn't take much; a week's pass would get him five days in Sagdayev.

  He saw that, across the table, Jay-John Belster was looking at him with an amused, faintly contemptuous expression. But it was Tanabe who spoke. "You weren't listening, DeWoe. I didn't say anything about the Mars orbiters. What I said was Co-Mars. That's where they have the problem so that's where everybody's going. I guess the people in Mars orbit don't crack up as fast because they aren't under as much strain."

  "But that," Ye said meditatively, "
is strange, isn't it? I don't mean the crews in Mars orbit, I mean the others. Nothing like that has happened with the crews out in the cloud, has it? I have heard nothing of large numbers of them being sent down for psychological problems. And yet the miners must be even more stressed; one would think that it is there that they would crack up."

  From across the table Jay-John Belster put in, "They will. Count on it, because it's tough out there in the Oort. Strong people can handle it, but weak ones turn into drunks and dopers. Remember DeWoe's father."

  When Dekker left the hall, Shiaopin Ye walked with him for a bit. "Forgive me, Dekker," she offered after a moment. "You're troubled."

  "It's nothing."

  She shook her head. "That man," she said. "Belster is a dishonest person, Dekker. He isn't your kind."

  "He's a Martian, isn't he?"

  "No," she said, "I don't think so. He was a Martian once, but now he's just a greedy grabber like any other. He wants more than he's entitled to, and nothing will satisfy him."

  Dekker stopped to look at the woman. Had she been reading his mind? "But that's wrong," he said, fumbling in his memory for the long-ago thing that would explain why it was wrong. Finding it. "It's the Law of the Raft," he said triumphantly.

  "What is the Law of the Raft?"

  "It just says that people shouldn't take unfair advantage of each other. Everybody has to be satisfied, or everybody will be miserable."

  "It is a reasonable law," she said. "It's a pity that Jay-John Belster doesn't understand it. Good night."

  She left him standing there, discontented, unwilling to go back to his dorm room and Toro Tanabe. He didn't particularly want to study, anyway. He had been doing enough of that since Ven Kupferfeld stopped being a distraction in his life.

  It was full dark now, and chilly. He thought for a moment, looking around. He was surprised to see Jay-John Belster standing in the door of the mess hall, looking at him; but Belster made no attempt to come over to him, and Dekker certainly didn't want to talk to Belster. On impulse, he turned around and went up the hill to the training center. If he wasn't going to study, at least he could do something useful, and the training center's library study virtuals were usually left open until late at night. It could do no harm for him to get a head start on Phase Six—particularly since checking things out in the virtuals would very likely give him pleasure.

  So half an hour later Dekker DeWoe was sitting with a virtual helmet on his head, in the otherwise empty library room. Since he might well be going to Co-Mars Two, the first virtual he ordered up was a kind of travelogue of the station. There was a voice-over to keep him company as he roamed through the station's parts. "The Co-Mars stations," the deep, rich voice in his ear was telling him, "provide a nearly zero-g environment, and the first thing for any new crew member to learn is the art of getting around without gravity to hold him down." Quick shots of obvious newcomers floundering wildly about in wide corridors, trying to grasp one of the holdtights in the brilliant red walls. "Since there is no 'up' or 'down,' all the passages are rectilinear and marked in different colors: red, green, yellow. This is a control station." Scene of a board and tank, very like the ones in the training room, with an operator running trajectory checks on a pulse of four comets. "The control station is where the real work of the Co-Mars stations is done, but there are only four of them, and usually only two of those are in operation at any time. All the rest of the Co-Mars stations, fifteen thousand tons' mass, are just support systems for the controllers on duty. But the support systems are vitally important, too, because without them the controllers couldn't function. Let's look at the crew quarters, where you will learn to sleep in microgravity when you are off shift—"

  Dekker's "virtual" self had paused in front of a sealed door—like every entranceway in the station, capable of being instantly locked airtight m the event of catastrophic loss of pressure. Willy-nilly he entered and looked around him. A young woman was asleep in a kind of infant's car seat, her knees partly drawn up, her arms folded across her waist.

  Dekker studied the room critically. It was small, certainly, but not damagingly so. It was not nearly as small as the ship's stateroom he had occupied on the way to Earth—and not, really, much smaller than the room he had shared with his mother back in Sagdayev. A Martian could be quite comfortable in a room like that, he thought—until the tour took him to another room, minutely more spacious, where there were two of the "beds" strapped side by side to a wall, and the voice explained that these were "conjugal" quarters.

  How nice it would be, Dekker thought, if he had someone to be conjugal with on the station. Not Ven Kupferfeld, of course; that was out of the question. But there surely were other women there.

  The rest of the tour was less entertaining—perhaps because the woman was hovering on the edge of his thoughts again. It was instructive, of course. He got his first real understanding of just what it took to keep a handful of controllers functioning several hundred million kilometers from the nearest other human being. What it took was everything a human being might need for survival: alarm systems, automatic safety features, communications networks to tie everything together, kitchens, toilets, "relaxation" rooms with virts and game boards and places just to sit and talk—and, of course, the juice to make it all grow: the power plant, which consisted of a pair of constantly working Augensteins that were devoted to producing heat, rather than thrust, and so generated magnetohydrodynamic electricity to run the station's systems.

  Even that wasn't everything. There was the mushroom farm of antennae that sprouted from the outer skin of the station; there were the "fixbots," the little spotter-ship-like repair vessels that circumnavigate the external shell when one of those indispensable dishes developed a glitch; and there was the sick bay—almost a small-scale hospital, because some kinds of medical emergencies couldn't wait for the two-week trip to the nearest planet. Co-Mars One and Two weren't just space stations. They were miniature cities that simply happened to be nowhere near any kind of solid ground.

  They were also too complicated to take in in a single dose, and Dekker cut the feed long before the tour was finished. He didn't take the helmet off. He thought for a moment, then took a look at the base station out in the Oort—not very like the Co-Mars stations, but not very different, either, except in the fact that half the crews were going out on comet-tagging missions into the cloud itself. He sampled a Mars orbiter—almost identical to the Co-Mars stations, he thought—and then, out of nostalgia and longing, peered at a revolving virtual globe of Mars itself.

  It would be a long time before he got there again, he thought.

  He took a quick look at the repeat from the Co-Mars training tank, just to make sure nothing had changed. Nothing had, of course. Even that pesky little 67-JY was plainly in sight, now well out from its perihelion and climbing back up toward Mars. Or at least he hoped it was Mars. Could it be possible that it was going to be hijacked to the farm satellites?

  He turned the set off and removed the helmet, not much more at ease than when he had started . . . and was astonished to find that he had a visitor.

  Annetta Bancroft was watching him from her perch on the low divider that separated this workstation from the next.

  "I wondered who was in here," she said. "I had an idea it might be you, but I didn't know if you were ever going to come out of that."

  He didn't have a response for that. "Sorry if I worried you, Bancroft."

  "Oh, come on, Dekker. I'm not your instructor anymore. We've known each other a long time, haven't we? Besides, we may well be working together in another month. Try again. What's my name?"

  "Annetta. Well, Annetta, it's nice to see you," he said politely, as a prologue to saying good night.

  She stopped him as he was about to rise. "What've you got to rush off to? You know, you don't look as though you're having much fun these days, Dekker. Is it because Ven Kupferfeld has her hooks into you?"

  "Of course not!"

  "Meaning it
's none of my business? Well, maybe it isn't. Only I wonder what it's going to be like if the two of you get sent to Co-Mars Two together." He shrugged. "Because I expect to be there, too," she added, "and if there's trouble for anybody it makes trouble for everybody."

  That reminded him of his conversation with Shiaopin Ye. "Right. The Law of the Raft."

  Surprisingly, she nodded. "That's a Martian thing. You said something about it at that party, when we were kids."

  "I did?"

  She laughed. "I didn't say you were coherent, Dekker. That little rat Evan got you pretty wasted, didn't he? Serves him right; he married that stupid bitch he was showing off with, and they can't stand each other. But I looked it up afterward; it comes from a book by Mark Twain." She slipped off the low wall and took his arm, walking him toward the door. So tell me," she said, craning her neck to look up into his face, "how do you think you'll like Co-Mars Two?"

  "Is it definite I'll be going there?"

  She grimaced. "As definite as anything gets until it happens, I guess. Is that what you wanted to do?"

  "No. I wanted the cloud."

  "Well, I don't blame you—the pay's better, for one thing. If you can stand the loneliness. So will you try to get out of the Co-Mars?"

  "No," Dekker said, realizing that he had just made a decision, then impelled to supply reasons for it. "Co-Mars is the most important place. Somebody has to make sure the comets get to Mars on a trajectory that the orbiters can handle, and I'll be glad to be one of those people."

  "Spoken like a true Martian. Only," she added seriously, "it could be a mistake, you know. Martians don't usually make it in the Co-Mars stations."