Mining the Oort

by Frederik Pohl

  "Police? With guns?"

  "Oh, no, nobody said anything about guns. Why would they need guns with us? They probably wouldn't even need those Peacekeepers of theirs, because Martians always keep their promises. All they want is to own us."

  "You can't let them do that," he said positively.

  "I'm afraid we can't not let them do it, if they insist. They're the ones with the money." Then she shook her head in annoyance at herself. "Anyway, that's what I'm here for, to try to get them to act decently; maybe I'll succeed. God knows I'll give it a good try. Earthies are human beings, too, and they're not all wicked exploiters. If I can just get them to remember that we're all part of the same human race—" She shook her head. "Change the subject; how are you doing?"

  Dekker couldn't make the transition quite that fast—apart from the fact that he didn't really want to answer that question, or at least not all of it. "Fine," he said, getting up and wandering over to the window.

  His mother turned painfully to look with him. "I was sitting here looking at the snow before you came," she said wistfully. "It's pretty."

  "It is," he agreed, glancing at his watch. His mother didn't miss it.

  "Should you be getting ready for your graduation?"

  "Pretty soon. Not right this minute. It won't be much of a ceremony, you know," he added. "They don't make a big deal of graduating here. We just sign the articles of employment, and one of the instructors makes a little speech to congratulate us and wish us well, and that's it."

  "It'll be a big deal for me, Dek," his mother said. She hesitated, then said, "You know, I was going to bring Tsumi with me as my assistant"

  "Tsumi?"

  "Well, I would rather have had you, but what you're doing is more important. Tsumi wanted desperately to go. I wish I did have somebody to help out. Somebody with younger legs than mine."

  "But Tsumi!" Dekker said, unable to keep himself from remembering that it had been so very difficult to scrape up the fare to Earth for him—and so evidently easy to do it for Tsumi Gorshak.

  "I know you don't like him, Dek. All the same, I felt I owed it to Tinker. But it didn't work out. Tsumi was going for a piloting license, and he failed the test, and—and he tried to bribe the instructor, Dekker. I didn't have any choice. I fired him."

  "I see," Dekker said, seeing much more than she had said. She was looking at him curiously.

  "Is something on your mind, Dek?" she asked.

  He hesitated. But what was there to tell her? That he was a cheat, and covering up for other cheats, and, really, not that much better than Tsumi Gorshak?

  He shook his head and looked again at his watch. "It's just that I'd better get on down there. We have to read the articles and get a blood test before the ceremony."

  "A blood test? For narcotics?" And when he nodded she said sorrowfully, "Maybe I was wrong about the Earthies. Maybe we're not part of the same race after all."

  And ten hours later they were on their way: Dekker's graduating class, the bunch from the Oort, and Annetta Bancroft.

  There was only one surprise, and it was Toro Tanabe.

  At the last moment, shamefaced and not looking at Dekker, Tanabe had stepped forward and signed the articles of employment with everybody else. It was only when they had broken ranks and were getting ready to leave that Tanabe saw Dekker's eyes on him. The Japanese grinned in embarrassment. "After all," he said, "it would be a pity to come this far and not go the rest of the way, would it not? And at least if I am to do the cooking, I may even be able to enjoy the food.

  36

  Co-Mars Two was in the same orbit as the planet Mars—that was why it was called Co-Mars—but it trailed Mars by a sixth of a Martian year, in what is called a "Trojan" point. There was another control station just like it at the orbit's other Trojan point, the same sixty degrees away but in the other direction. These two Co-Mars stations commanded the entire sky. The stations in orbit around Mars itself could help if necessary, but that seldom happened. Actually any of the stations could, in a pinch, handle all the comets at once, at least all the ones not blocked by the Sun. The reason they divided the work was for safety's sake. Co-Mars Two was the one that vectored the incoming comets on the final legs of their approach to Mars and thus it was the most important of all . . . or at least its personnel liked to think so.

  Co-Mars Two wasn't small. It was about the size of a seagoing cargo vessel of Earth, and it would weigh around fifteen thousand tons if it weighed anything at all. Being in orbit, it didn't. Nothing inside it weighed anything, either, because there was no spin on Co-Mars Two. Therefore there was no centrifugal pseudogravity to hold the objects inside to the shells as there was in, say, the stations in the Oort cloud itself. Co-Mars Two couldn't afford the luxury of spin. Its myriad antennae were all aimed with great precision at particular points in the sky, and they couldn't be allowed to wander.

  Nor did the people who manned it experience even the tiny micro-gravity that was found in the transfer stations at the top of a Skyhook. They didn't experience any gravity at all, which caused a lot of queasy stomachs. Co-Mars Two's corridors went in all three of the directions of three-dimensional space, and there was no such thing in it as a stairway. For the convenience of its crew the corridors were colored red, green, and yellow, corresponding, but in no particular order, to left-right, front-back, and up-down.

  Once they got used to its little eccentricities, the crews of Co-Mars Two found that it wasn't a bad place to be. There was plenty of power from their Augenstein-powered MHD electricity generators for civilized comforts. They needed a lot of power. The station's sensors, after all, had to reach out past the orbit of Neptune to keep in touch with their quarry.

  Those sensors were powerful, and before the supply ship came within ten thousand kilometers of Co-Mars Two whole banks of them had to be turned off, because otherwise the radio energy the sensors emitted would quickly fry everybody aboard.

  37

  They were docked, they were actually on the station; Dekker DeWoe was now a part of Co-Mars Two and thus of the whole Oort project! He could not repress that wonderful glow of Being There. He couldn't really take time to enjoy it, either, because first things had to come first, and before Dekker DeWoe or any of his shipmates had the chance to look around their wonderful new surroundings, the supply ship they had come in had first to be unloaded.

  That was hard work. Awkward work, too; there Dekker was, sweating like a pig, weightless, unskilled at being weightless, doing his best. "Coming through," Jay-John Belster would yell from inside the hatch, and Dekker, or somebody else, would have to dive and scramble for the carton or sack or machine part as it came floating through the ship's hatch and try to slow it and guide it to the handiest wall. That was their whole job. Once there, it would stay there, because there were stick-to-me patches on every piece of the cargo and the walls of the hold were covered with the stuff. The flow of cargo kept coming, though. By the time you got one thing firmly secured, another was already floating through right at you, and you had to try to flounder back into position in time to catch it.

  It was dumb, difficult grunt work. Dekker bashed himself a dozen times against ungiving wall or sharp-cornered machine part, but he didn't care, not as long as he could feel that glow building up inside him anyway. Dekker DeWoe was home. He was well aware that he was a tiny cog in a machine as big as the solar system itself. Yet, as he flung himself at a bale of something as big as himself and scrabbled for a handhold to help him slow it down, he felt fully satisfied. He was there. He was at last taking a real part in the rebirth of his planet. When, weeks or months later, the shattered fragments of some arriving comet crashed down onto the Martian plains and left their increment of life-promising gases, it would be because Dekker DeWoe was part of the team that had made it fly there straight and true.

  It was a pity that his stomach didn't enjoy it as much as he did. His first experience of weightlessness was taking its predictable toll. The saliva glands under his tongu
e were fountaining, and Dekker was not at all sure that his unease would stop there. Already two of his classmates had surrendered to motion sickness and gone off for shots, but he wasn't ready to give up.

  He envied the easy maneuvering of the station personnel who had drifted by to share the work. He watched them when he could take a second off his own efforts, because they were the ones who knew what they were doing. They swam nonchalantly into the room, one hand on a holdtight and the other for work; sometimes, he saw, they could even use two hands to work, because they would brace themselves with no more than the toe of a foot while they tugged some item from the wall where it had just been put. They didn't bother with the toss-and-catch of the actual unloading. Their job was to tow the things to wherever they belonged in the recesses of the station itself.

  One thing puzzled Dekker. For some reason, before any of them left the entrance hold, each one had to stop at the exit. There a woman went over each item with an instrument that looked like a funnel stabbed into a metal box.

  Dekker couldn't identify the instrument, but he recognized the woman easily enough. She was Rosa McCune, the psychologist who had given him his entrance examination. He swallowed a mouthful of saliva and nudged Shiaopin Ye, by the chance of the moment next to him, though upside down. "What's she doing?" Dekker panted.

  "I think she's checking for drugs with that sniffer," Ye said, pressing something round and soft against the wall.

  "Drugs," Dekker said scornfully, and then had to pause as the muscles of his abdomen began to heave ominously. He grabbed a wall bracket and closed his eyes, to see if that would help, but it didn't. He felt as though he was falling, corkscrewing, tumbling; his inner ear squawked complaints about the signals it was getting, and the saliva glands under his tongue pumped faster.

  "Are you all right, DeWoe?" Ye asked worriedly. "Look, Dr. McCune is watching you."

  Dekker opened his eyes, and the psycher definitely was. She was hanging by one foot, the sniffer in her hand, staring at him. "You there," she called. "What's the matter?"

  "I'm fine," Dekker called back, stretching the truth.

  "You don't look it. You're DeWoe, aren't you? All right, lay off while we get that taken care of. Garalek! Take this man in and get him a shot; we don't want him puking all over our supplies."

  Dekker might not have made it to the aid room by himself, though it was only twenty meters away. He didn't have to. The man McCune had told to take him there tugged him by the collar, at high speed, and as soon as he had slapped a onetime shot into Dekker's arm Dekker began to feel better.

  The man was grinning at him. "It passes," he said. 'Your name's DeWoe? I'm Lloyd Garalek, health services."

  Dekker shook the man's hand. "I guess I'd better get back," he said.

  "No big hurry," Garalek told him. "You won't want to miss Parker's big welcome-aboard speech, but he won't even show up in the hold until all the cargo's off the ship."

  Dekker was feeling enough better to be curious. "Who's Parker? The station chief?"

  "Station chief? No. That's Pelly Marine. Simantony Parker's just the deputy; he's one of you lot, you know. Anyway, after His Lordship gives his little speech he'll probably pull a practice flare alert just to get you new guys started off right—or," he said, thinking about it, "probably not right away, I guess, because Pelly Marine's off shift now and Parker's got too much sense to wake him up."

  He stretched and yawned. Then he kicked himself gently across the room and caught himself at the door to look back at Dekker. "Give yourself another five or ten minutes, anyway," he advised. "I wish I could, but I have to get back to work, because Rosie McCune'll have her eye out for me. Can you find your way?"

  "Well, sure," Dekker said, feeling slightly insulted. "I just turn left when I come out of the door."

  The man laughed. "Turn left, huh? Which way is left when you're standing on your head? Watch the numbers, DeWoe; you want to go toward the down numbers. See you later."

  Dekker didn't take ten minutes, but he did take three or four, mostly to practice kicking against a wall to cross a room the way Lloyd Garalek had. It took a little more skill than he would have thought, but by the time he risked the green-patterned corridor that took him back to the hold he was feeling reasonably confident of making his way around without skull fractures. He didn't really need to look for the numbers on the doors, either; the hold was instantly identifiable by the noise coming out of it.

  The unloading was almost complete, and the old-timers had already hustled about half the cargo out. And Simantony Parker had arrived, identifiable by the orders he was shouting to everyone in sight.

  Dekker understood immediately what Garalek had meant by "you lot." He meant Martian, because Simantony Parker was definitely that. He was also that strange and unusual thing, a fat Martian. "You cargo stores, hold it down," he commanded. "All you new people, grab a hold over here so I can talk to you for a minute." He waved to a reasonably bare section of the storage wall, and Dekker managed to loft himself over there with his classmates. In the awkward groping for places Dekker found himself holding to the same wall loop as Ven Kupferfeld, who gave him a friendly smile.

  Dekker smiled back. It wasn't an instinctive reaction; it was the result of a conscious decision. They were going to be close together for a long time, he reminded himself, and the Law of the Raft told him what he had to do.

  They didn't speak, because the deputy chief was getting ready to speak. "I said quiet down, all of you," he ordered. That didn't stop the crew members from continuing to shift cargo out or Rosa McCune from searching for contraband with her sniffer probe, but the new controllers did, after a fashion, quiet down.

  "My name's Simantony Parker," the deputy chief said. "I'm sorry Pelly Marine isn't here to talk to you. Pelly's our chief of station, but he's off shift now, so it's up to me as his deputy to welcome you aboard."

  He paused to survey his audience, then granted them a smile. "We're glad you're here, because we've been pretty shorthanded. We still are; with you people we're just a little less shorthanded is all. The good part of that is that we have more living space open than usual, so you've all got single room assignments. That's just temporary. If any of you want to double up with someone else you can be accommodated. You don't have to do it now; you can change over whenever you like." He looked at his hand screen for reminders. "Oh, yes. You all have your extra-duty assignments? Good. When you get to your quarters query your screen for your department head—I assume you all know how to use a station comm system?—and contact him; he'll let you know when to report for work." He looked at the screen again, then at the audience. "Are there any questions?"

  Toro Tanabe's hand was the first up. "When will we start working at our primary jobs?"

  Parker grinned. "You mean when do you get off your extra-duty? I can't promise anything about that; you'll have to work up to it. However, we know how you feel, so we're working out a rotation. We're going to put one of you new people on a shift team every day, so each one of you will get at least one tour at a control workstation over the next—what is it?—the next twenty-six days. After that we'll see. Anybody else?—oh, wait a minute. Have you got something for us, McCune?"

  "Damn right, I do," Rosa McCune snapped from the door. She was standing by a carton, holding a probe that was beeping plaintively. "It's definitely narcotics, Parker," she said. "I've got a positive read."

  "Jesus," the deputy chief snarled. "What son of a bitch is bringing dope onto the station? If any of you new bastards—"

  But McCune was shaking her head. "It isn't any of theirs, I'm afraid. Come over here and take a look at the consignment tag."

  Parker pulled himself over to the door, squinted quickly at the suspect package, then looked up with a face of thunder. "All right," he said. "Get on with your work, all of you. Leave everything here. I'll sort this out myself."

  Dekker's room assignment was Yellow B3-43, and once he found out which of the corridors was Yellow B3 he had no tro
uble locating it. Several of his classmates were in the same area; he saw Doris Clarkson coming out of her door as he laboriously tugged his backpack to his own, and she told him that Shiaopin Ye was right across the hall.

  The room itself was exactly as he had seen it on the virtuals: larger than a closet, without chairs or beds—because what would you use them for when you never sat or lay down?—but altogether bearable. The storage space in the walls was adequate for his few personal possessions. He didn't have a private bathroom, of course, but that wasn't serious; a Martian would not even have noticed such a lack if he hadn't been spending time amid the luxuries of the Earthies. He pulled out the sleep harness, fingering it curiously, and decided that he could get into it easily enough. Whether he could then sleep comfortably in it was another matter. Still, if the two hundred others on Co-Mars Two had learned to do that, Dekker DeWoe would certainly learn, too. Sooner or later.

  The screen was easy enough to operate, and when he scrolled the menu to "emergency control" it supplied him with the call code for the head of the department, Jared Clyne.

  Clyne was a surprise, not because he was black—although he was, as deeply purple-black as Walter Ngemba had been—but because Dekker had somehow not expected him to be a Martian, too. "Oh, hi," he said, peering out from the screen. "You're Dekker DeWoe? Good. Sorry I wasn't there when your ship came in, but I didn't want to get involved in one of Parker's all-hands-to loading bees. Anyway, I'm glad to meet you. Let's see." Clyne glanced up over the camera lens—at a clock, Dekker surmised. "We ought to get together pretty soon. How are you fixed for sleep?"

  "Fine, I guess," Dekker said. With the adrenaline flow of arriving on the station the question hadn't occurred to him.