Mining the Oort

by Frederik Pohl

  As he passed the kitchens a face he did know popped out, peered at him, then pulled quickly back inside.

  "Tanabe!" he called. The face cautiously reappeared as Dekker moved closer.

  Tanabe looked worriedly up and down the hall. "Come inside quickly, DeWoe," he begged. "I don't want anyone else coming here."

  Dekker did. As Tanabe was closing the door, he demanded: "Why aren't you in the flare shelter?"

  "I will be," Tanabe said, "oh, yes, believe me; I will be there. But there is something I must do first. Can you help me?"

  "Help you do what?"

  "Open this freezer." Tanabe was tugging him over to the food-storage bins. One hatch had a seal on it, the kind that was used to protect valuable supplies; but it was strangely battered and scratched. "I want to see what's inside there. That asshole Belster came in with Chief Parker a while ago and chased everyone out of the kitchens; then when they let us back in my main freezer was sealed. I want to know what they put in it, so take that cleaver and help me get it open."

  "Hold it! That's the station chiefs seal!"

  "I do not care whose seal it is. If you won't help me, then just go on to the shelter."

  Dekker looked at the man, then at his watch. It was really about time to do that. And he certainly had more important things on his mind than Tanabe's curiosity. But still—

  He surrendered. "I didn't say I wouldn't help you. You don't need to break it open, anyway—unless you've wrecked the lock already."

  He was pulling his emergency override key out. "Ah, so," Tanabe said, thawing. "Yes, please, DeWoe, that would be much better! Then we can get out of here. Is the key working?"

  It was—just barely. Tanabe's assaults had cracked the edge of the slot, but Dekker managed to slide his key in. On the third try the magnetic code caught and the seal opened.

  Tanabe pulled it off, and grasped the freezer door handle. It slid wide. A dozen meal packets came floating out, evidently thrust in loose instead of being properly stored. And behind them was something that didn't belong there.

  It was a human body, small, curled upon itself. Dead.

  "Jesus," Tanabe breathed, appalled. "That's Shiaopin Ye!"

  From the door Jay-John Belster's voice said, sharp and nasty, "What the hell are you doing here?" He was holding himself by the door frame, Ven Kupferfeld looking hostile beside him. He glanced at her. "I thought everybody would be in the shelter," he complained.

  Dekker straightened to confront them. "What happened to Ye?" he demanded, a moment before he observed that Belster was holding in his hand something that appeared to be—yes, definitely, incredibly, was—a gun.

  Dekker faced an unbelievable fact. "You killed her," he said.

  "No!" Ven cried. "Not on purpose; it was an accident."

  "But," said Belster, grinning, "There may have to be a couple more accidents."

  Ven turned and put her hand on his arm. "Damn you, no. We'll put them away somewhere—maybe up by the boards, so somebody can keep an eye on them."

  "Why go to that trouble?" Belster asked in a reasonable tone. "Everybody else is safely tucked away in the shelter by now, so nobody's going to interfere. And we've already got one death."

  "Because I say so!" Ven said harshly. They were paying more attention to each other than to their prisoners. Beside him Dekker heard a quick intake of breath from Toro Tanabe, and then the Japanese had launched himself, fast and hard, at Belster. The onetime Martian looked around a moment too late; Tanabe's head had driven into his belly. The gun went flying; Belster's knee came up as he squawked in surprise, and it caught Tanabe under the chin. The Japanese was knocked against the wall. He gasped once, and then floated limply away, unmoving.

  The gun was drifting toward Dekker DeWoe.

  Dekker didn't think about it. He simply pushed himself toward it, grabbed it, held it in his hand, loosely pointed toward Belster and the woman. He had never held a killing weapon before. It felt cold, hard, and unpleasant; the idea of touching it, much less using it, disgusted him.

  Belster was slowly untangling himself, clutching his groin. Then he managed a wheezing laugh. "Hey, DeWoe," he said, sounding almost playful, "what the hell do you think you're going to do with that?"

  "Stay away from me," Dekker said warningly.

  "Now, why would I do that?" Belster was pulling himself along the wall, coming closer. "You know you won't shoot me, don't you? Just hand it over."

  He reached out for it

  Dekker didn't hand him the gun. But when Belster's fingers closed over the barrel he didn't pull the trigger, either. Then Belster's other fist smashed him in the face, and he tumbled away.

  Belster had the gun. "Too much docility training, DeWoe," he said sagely. "And you didn't have enough time on Earth to get over it, did you? Well, Ven, I guess we can fit a couple more in the freezer—"

  She looked up from where she was holding Tanabe. "He isn't dead," she objected. "I think he might have a fractured skull, though; he hit the wall pretty hard."

  "That's easy enough to take care of," Belster said.

  She glanced wildly at Dekker, then shook her head. "It isn't necessary. We'll tie them up somewhere. In a little while it won't matter anyway." Dekker was holding his cheek. He felt the flesh around his eye swelling up, but some things he was beginning to see clearly. "There isn't really a flare, is there?" he asked. "You just wanted to get everybody out of the way so you could do something—" He stopped in the middle of the sentence. "That comet!" he cried.

  "Intelligent man," Belster said admiringly. "Yes, we're going to do something with the comet, but there's nothing you can do about it, is there? Now move! We'll try it Ven's way, but don't try anything foolish. Do you understand me? Because the truth of the matter, DeWoe, is that I wouldn't mind killing you at all.

  41

  You could drop a comet on Mars without doing much harm, because there wasn't much on Mars to do harm to.

  The land surface of Earth, on the other hand, was vulnerable at every point. There was hardly a square kilometer of land left there that didn't have some human beings living on it, or building on it, or depending on it for something they needed for their lives, even if it was only forest cover that they needed to keep some otherwise useless mountainside from eroding down to choke their water supplies.

  The impact blasts from the comets were only fireworks on Mars. On Earth they would be Hiroshimas or Colognes if they impacted on a built-up land area . . . and even if they struck the empty sea their impact would produce the vast, spreading ripples of ocean that would overwhelm the first coast they came to in the form of tsunamis—tidal waves—bores of water that would sweep away coastal homes, and drown buildings and people. A single comet fragment striking the Earth could kill millions.

  42

  They tied Dekker's hands and blindfolded him, and then they plastered him, facedown, against a holdtight in a corner of the wall of the little air lock next to the control workstations. He didn't strive to get free. He might have done that, one way or another, but then what? He had too much to take in. He just listened to Toro Tanabe's ragged breathing, and to the conversations going on in the control chamber next to the lock, and he thought.

  He didn't like his thoughts.

  He could hear whisperings and murmurings as new people came into the room. He recognized some of the voices. Female voices. Annetta Bancroft's voice. Rima Consalvo's voice. Yen's voice. And the male voices of Jay-John Belster and Parker, the station chief.

  He was not really surprised at any of the women; he had decided long since that Earthie women were a mystery past his understanding. What really astonished Dekker—shocked him—was that a Martian, a Martian, would so much as possess, much less ever threaten anyone else with, a gun. He could account for it in the case of an Earthified Martian like Jay-John Belster, perhaps, but even the station chief, even his boss, the very decent-seeming Jared Clyne—he didn't even count the Earthies like Yen Kupferfeld and Annetta Bancroft and the others—
all of them seemed to take the use of a gun to keep Dekker DeWoe from doing anything they didn't desire as a perfectly normal exercise of authority.

  When he felt a hand pulling him free, the next step, he expected, was to remove his blindfold and let him see again. It was. He blinked at the people before him. The station chief seemed to be gone, along with most of the Earthie men, but Belster and the three women were still there. "You're a pain in the ass, DeWoe," Belster said, reproaching him. "Why didn't you stay in the flare room the way you were supposed to?"

  Dekker didn't answer that. Belster shrugged and passed the gun to Ven Kupferfeld. "He's all yours," he said. "We've got to get to the comm center."

  "You heard the man." Ven grinned, waving the gun.

  Dekker wasn't looking at the gun. He was looking at the two women he had made love with and the one he had known as a child. "You're crazy," he said. It wasn't a denunciation. It was the statement of a considered diagnosis.

  "It's not what you think, Dekker," Annetta Bancroft said.

  "I don't think it's just some simple cheating or selling test papers anymore, no," he agreed. "So what do I think, Annetta?"

  She flushed. "Some violent scheme, I guess. Dropping a comet on Sunpoint or somewhere else on Mars—"

  "No," he said positively, "I thought of that, but that couldn't be it. There are too many Martians here for that, and not even a psychotic like Jay-John Belster would do that. And it's not stealing a comet for the habitats, either, is it? So all that's left is that you're planning to bombard Earth."

  "No!" Annetta said violently. "Nobody's going to get bombarded! Tell him, Ven."

  Ven Kupferfeld shrugged. "Don't you think we've wasted enough time with this weakling?"

  "Tell him!"

  "Oh, all right. See, Dekker, I had hopes for you. You could have been useful to us," she said. "Not because of you. Because of that Queen Shit mother of yours; with you backing us up, it would have helped—afterward."

  He looked around. Rima Consalvo was simply hanging there, apparently content to let the other two do the talking; Annetta Bancroft was biting her lip. "After what?" he demanded.

  "It's the Japs," she said simply. "You know they're the ones who are making the trouble with their damn habitats. For you as much as for us. Maybe it's not too late for you to show some sense yet, quite. Don't you think you ought to help us stop them?"

  Dekker blinked at her. "Stop them," he repeated wonderingly. But in order to stop them—

  He closed his eyes, trying to shut out the images that came to him. He was remembering the way Chryse Planitia had looked when the first cometary fragments struck—empty Chryse Planitia. His stomach convulsed when he thought of such terrible violence repeated on Earth—on cities, human cities, containing the defenseless flesh of human beings—men, women, babies, everyone—smashed or incinerated as the ground itself erupted and boiled away, with molten droplets falling like hell's own rain for a hundred kilometers around. "You'll kill a billion people," he whispered, his lips dry.

  "Oh, Dekker," Annetta sobbed, almost laughing, "do you think we'd do that? We're not going to let the comet strike, are we, Ven?"

  "Of course not," Ven Kupferfeld said soothingly. "It's a bluff, Dekker."

  "A bluff?"

  "A military ruse." She smiled at him. "They'll cave in, I promise."

  "And if they don't?"

  She hesitated, looked at her watch, then said, "Dekker, do you remember the virt of the Battle of the Seven Days?"

  "You keep asking me that. I saw it."

  "I know you saw it, for God's sake. I don't know if you understood it. See, Robert E. Lee was protecting Richmond—"

  "Ven," Annetta protested.

  "Shut up, Annetta. I'm trying to explain something to our friend here. The reason McClellan didn't take Richmond was that Lee outsmarted him. And how did he do that?"

  Dekker shook his head, looking at the gun in Ven's hand. Would it be right, he wondered, to take it away from her? Would Rima or Annetta interfere? And if he did get possession of it, then what?

  "Pay attention, damn you! Lee knew McClellan would fall for his bluff, because Lee knew McClellan. They'd served together and he knew his man. He knew McClellan wasn't going to throw his main force forward when his right wing was under heavy attack, and he was right. McClellan fought it out where he was until his losses began to discourage him, and then he gave up and went back to Washington. And, see, Dekker, it's the same here. I know these people. I know they'll cave in."

  She seemed to be talking to Annetta as much as to him, Dekker thought. "And then what?" he asked.

  Annetta answered for her, "And then they sign a treaty," she said proudly. "They stop building new farm habitats; the Oort project goes on; our investments are worth something again!"

  "And if they don't?"

  Ven looked him over thoughtfully. "Why then," she said, "things get really lousy, don't they? But they will. I promise."

  He said only, "You'd better get Toro Tanabe to a doctor. I don't like the way he sounds."

  "Shit," Ven said in disgust. "All right. Rima, do you want to stay with him?"

  Rima Consalvo looked at him almost fondly. "I guess not, actually," she said.

  "Then it's up to you, Annetta." Ven looked at her watch again. "Just keep him locked up. The other stations will start asking questions any time now, so Rima and I'd better get up there and help answer them."

  43

  His hands were still tied behind him, and the tie was strong and unyielding stickytape, but that wasn't Dekker DeWoe's real problem. From all the Earthie virts he had seen as a child he knew what you did about that; he painfully slipped his arms around his tucked legs so that his hands were in front, and when he found a reasonably sharp edge, at the neck of one of the spacesuits in the lock, he began rubbing the tape against it.

  It didn't seem to cut through very quickly, but that wasn't the problem, either. The real problems were a lot more complicated. First, Toro Tanabe's breathing had eased a little, but the man was still unconscious—tied up, too, but definitely unconscious anyway. Second, there was the fact that he was locked in a room from which he saw no good way to escape. Finally—the hard problem—what he could do about what was going on if he did get free.

  Of course, whispered a traitor voice in the back of his mind, it just might be that there was no reason for him to do anything at all. Ven had said they were fighting for the Mars project, and wasn't that what he wanted, too? And if you believed her, and believed that the bluff would work . . . why, then, you could believe almost anything.

  Dekker did not believe the traitor voice. He rubbed harder and was still rubbing when the hatch to the workstation opened.

  Annetta's face was there, looking in at him, seeing what he was doing. "You'll never get that off," she informed him.

  He didn't stop rubbing, and she sighed. "Oh, hell," she said, and pushed a meal box into the hatch, setting it on a holdtight and moving away. "They brought me some food. I thought you'd need it more than I do."

  "Tanabe needs a doctor."

  "I'll get him one as soon as I can, I promise, but you probably need to eat."

  He did. What he needed even more was something to deal with the thirst he had not been aware he had. His bound hands were of little use, but he pushed the lid up on the box and seized a bulb of liquid—it turned out to be coffee—and sucked on it thirstily.

  Then he looked at her. "Thanks," he said.

  She said doubtfully, "I don't see how you're going to manage eating this with your hands tied, but I guess you'll figure something out. I have to get back and watch the board."

  "Wait a minute. No, really," he said more urgently. "I don't think you know what's going on."

  "Oh, Dekker," she said patiently, "I've known all about this for a year. Do you think I haven't helped plan the whole thing?"

  "Like getting everybody up here at the right time, and getting everybody out who might be suspicious, right," he said. "But when did you
plan on murdering Shiaopin Ye?"

  She was ready for him. "That was purely an accident. It couldn't be helped. Toby Mory was just trying to make her go away, but she resisted."

  "Right," Dekker said, nodding. "Like Tanabe here."

  "I told you I'd make sure he got a doctor!"

  "Yes, Annetta, but he may not last that long, and anyway I don't believe what you tell me. Too much of what you people say is lies. See, I've been thinking. They're not doing this to save the Oort project, Annetta. Nobody could stop that now. There's too much invested. So it has to be for some other reason, and all I can figure is that they want to get the prices for the Bonds to go up again so they can get their money back."

  "That probably will happen, too, yes. We've all—" She hesitated, then rushed on. "All right, we've all scraped up everything we had and sold farm-habitat securities short. I'll make some money out of it, I admit. What's wrong with that?" she demanded.

  "I believe the part about the money, yes. The rest is all lies, Annetta. Either you're lying to me or they're lying to you."

  "Nobody's lying!"

  "Do you really believe that? Do you think that people who would do this would worry about a few lies?"

  "We're doing the right thing!" she snapped.

  "There isn't any real solar flare, either, is there?"

  "That was the best way of getting everybody out of the way without hurting them, wasn't it? They've got food and water and air, and they'll be all right." She hesitated. "Oh, I'd rather have gone a different way, if we could. I don't like telling lies. I'm sorry for all those people, stuck there, not knowing what's going on. I don't like a lot of the other things that have happened, either—not just Ye's accident—well, I wish they hadn't framed Pelly with those drugs. He was a good man. But he wasn't the right kind of person to do this, so they had to get him off the station."