The Precipice

by Ben Bova

  “Anchor yourself, Lars,” Dan said. “Hammer a piton in and tether it to your belt.”

  “Yes, of course,” Fuchs answered, fumbling with the equipment clipped to his waist.

  Dan said, “Record this, Amanda, and mark the time. Star-power Limited has begun taking samples of asteroid 41-014 Fuchs. Under the terms of the International Astronautical Authority protocol of 2021, Starpower Limited, claims exclusive use of the resources of this asteroid.”

  “I’ve got it,” Amanda’s voice replied. “Your statement is being beamed to IAA headquarters on Earth.”

  “Good,” Dan said, satisfied. He recalled from his school days the story of the Spanish explorer Balboa first sighting the Pacific Ocean. From what he remembered of the tale, Balboa waded out into the surf and claimed the whole bloody ocean and all the lands bordering on it for Spain. They thought big in those days, Dan said to himself. No pissant IAA to worry about.

  Fuchs got the knack of shuffling along the surface of the asteroid, and started chipping out samples and making stereo videos. Dan worried about the dust they were kicking up. It could get into the joints of our suits, he thought Damned stuff just hangs there; must take a year for it to settle back again.

  He saw a bulge off to his right,, like a small knoll or a rounded hill. That must be the tail end of this rock, Dan told himself. Looking back at Fuchs, he saw that the scientist had finally anchored himself to the ground and was busily chipping away, raising lingering clouds of dust.

  “I’m going to go up to that ridge,” he told Fuchs, pointing, “and see what’s on the other side.”

  “Very well,” said Fuchs, still bent over his sampling.

  Dan shuffled carefully along, worrying about the dust. On the Moon, dust raised from the ground was electrostatically charged; it clung stubbornly to the suits and helmet visors. Probably the same thing here.

  He started up the slight rise. Something didn’t feel right. Suddenly his boots slid out from under him and he tumbled, in dreamlike slow motion, face forward. His fall was so gentle that he could put out his hands and stop himself, but he bounced off the dusty ground and found himself floating up the rise like a hot-air balloon gliding up the side of a mountain.

  Dan’s old astronaut training took over his reflexes. In his mind he saw clearly what was happening. The gravity on this double-damned rock is so low that I’m floating off it! He saw the bulbous end of the asteroid sliding slowly beneath him and, beyond it, the star-strewn infinity of space.

  Twisting his body so that he pointed himself back toward the asteroid’s bulk, Dan squirted his maneuvering jets and lurched back to the asteroid. Gently, tenderly, he touched down again on its surface. Fuchs was still tapping away with his sampling hammer, rising off the ground with every blow, his anchored tether pulling him back again for another crack.

  Dan was breathing hard, but otherwise no worse the wear for his little excursion. With even greater care than before he shuffled back to stand beside Fuchs and help bag the samples he’d chipped out.

  At last Pancho said sternly, “Time to come in, guys.”

  “Just one more sample,” Fuchs replied.

  “Now” Pancho commanded.

  “Aye-aye, cap’n,” said Dan. He rapped his gloved knuckles on Fuchs’s helmet. “Come on, Lars. You’ve done enough for one day. This rock isn’t going to go away; you can come back another time.”

  Amanda was at the airlock to help them take off their backpacks and dust-spattered spacesuits. Dan caught a strange, pungent smell once he removed his helmet. Not like the sharp firecracker odor of the lunar dust; this was something new, different.

  Before he had time to puzzle out the dust’s odor, Pancho came down to the airlock area, looking so somber that Dan asked her what was the matter.

  While Fuchs chattered happily with Amanda, Pancho said, “Bad news, boss. Another section of the superconductor is heating up. If it goes critical it could blow out the whole magnetic shield.”

  Dan felt his jaw drop open. Without the shield they’d be cooked by the next solar radiation storm.

  “We’ve gotta get back to Selene pronto,” Pancho said. “Before another flare breaks out.”

  “What’re our chances?” Dan asked, his throat dry.

  She waggled a hand. “Fifty-fifty… if we’re lucky.”

  TEMPO 9

  “We won’t have to go outside, will we?” Cardenas asked nervously.

  She was following George through the maze of pumps and generators up on the topmost level of Selene. Color-coded pipes and electrical conduits lined the ceiling; Cardenas wondered how anyone could keep track of which was which. The air hummed with the subdued sounds of electrical equipment and hydraulic machinery. On the other side of the ceiling, she knew, was the grassy expanse of the Grand Plaza—or the bare dusty regolith of the Moon’s airless surface.

  “Outside?” George echoed. “Naw, there’s a shaft connectin’ the tempo to the tunnel… if I can find th’ fookin’ tunn—ah, there it is!”

  He pulled a small hatch open and stepped over its coaming, then reached a hand back to help Cardenas. The tunnel was dark, ht only by the hand-torch George carried. Cardenas expected to see the evil red eyes of rats in the darkness, or hear the slithering of roaches. Nothing. Selene is clean of vermin, she thought. Even the farmlands have to be pollinated artificially because there aren’t any insects here.

  Not yet, she thought. Sooner or later, though. Once we start allowing larger numbers of people up here, they’ll bring their filth and their pests with them.

  “Here we are,” George said.

  In the circle of light cast by his torch, she saw the metal rungs of a ladder leading up along the wall of the tunnel.

  “How much farther does the tunnel go?” she asked in a whisper, even though she knew there was no one else there.

  “Another klick or so,” George answered. “Yamagata people wanted to drill all the way through the ringwall and out to Mare Nubium. Got too expensive. The cable car over the top was cheaper.”

  He scampered up the ladder, light and lithe despite his size. Cardenas started to follow him.

  “Wait a bit,” George called down to her. “Got to get this hatch unstuck.”

  She heard metal groan. Then George said, “Okay, up with you, now.”

  The ladder ended in an enclosed area about the size of her apartment unit down inside Selene. It was a cylindrical shape, like a spacecraft module.

  “We’re on the surface?” Cardenas asked, trying to keep her voice from shaking.

  “Buried under a meter of dirt from the regolith,” George said happily. “Safe as in church.”

  “But we’re outside.”

  “On the slope of the ringwall. Just below the cable-line. The original idea was, if there’s an emergency with the cable-trolley, people could stay in here till help arrives.”

  She looked around the shelter warily. A pair of double-decker bunks stood at the far end, the hatch of an airlock at the other. Inbetween was a small galley with a freezer, microwave oven, and sink; some other equipment she didn’t recognize; two padded chairs; a desk with a computer atop it and a smaller chair in front of it…

  And a big metal cylinder sitting in the middle of the floor, crowding the already-cramped quarters. One end of the cylinder was attached to a large pair of tanks and a miniaturized cryostat.

  “Is that a dewar?” Cardenas asked.

  George nodded. “Had to hide the woman inside it from Humphries.”

  “She’s dead?”

  “Preserved cryonically,” George said. ‘There’s hopes of reviving her.”

  “She won’t be much company.”

  “’Fraid not. But I’ll pop back here every few days, see that you’re okay.”

  Stepping toward the desk, trying to hide her anxiety, Cardenas asked, “How long will I have to stay here?”

  “Dunno. I’ll have a chat with Dan, see what we should do.”

  “Call Doug Stavenger,” she said. �
��He’ll protect me.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to put him in the middle of this scrape.”

  She wrapped her arms around herself, trembling with cold fear. “That’s before I knew you were going to put me out here.”

  “Hey, this isn’t so bad,” George said, trying to sound reassuring. “I useta live in tempos like this for months at a time.”

  “You did?”

  “Yup. Me and my mates. This is like home-sweet-home to me.”

  She looked around the place again. It seemed smaller than her first view of it Closing in on her. Nothing between her and the deadly vacuum outside except the thin metal of the shelter’s cylinder and a heaping of dirt over it. And a corpse in the middle of the floor, taking up most of the room.

  “Call Stavenger,” she pleaded. “I don’t want to stay here any longer than I have to.”

  “Sure,” said George. “Lemme talk to Dan first.”

  “Make it quick.”

  “The magnetic shield is going to blow up?” Dan asked, for the thirtieth time.

  Pancho sat across the table from him in Starpower i’s wardroom. Amanda was on the bridge as the ship raced at top acceleration back toward Selene. Fuchs was in the sensor bay, assaying the samples he’d chipped from Bonanza.

  “You know how superconductors work,” Pancho said, grimly. “They have to stay cooled down below their critical temperature. If they go above that temperature all the energy in the coil gets dumped into the hot spot.”

  “It’ll explode,” Dan muttered.

  “Like a bomb. Lots of energy in the superconductor, boss. It’s a dangerous situation.”

  “There’s more than one hot spot?”

  “Four of ‘em so far. Wouldn’t be surprised if more of ‘em crop up. Whoever bugged this ship didn’t want us to get back home.”

  Dan drummed his fingers on the table top. “I can’t believe Kris Cardenas would do this to me.”

  “It’s Humphries, pure and simple,” said Pancho. “He could kill you with a smile, any day.”

  “But he’d need Kris to do this.”

  “Look,” Pancho said, hunching forward in her chair. “Doesn’t matter who spit in whose eye. We got troubles and we’ve gotta figger out how to save our necks before that magnetic coil goes up like a bomb.”

  Dan had never seen her look so earnest. “Okay, right. What do you recommend?”

  “We shut down the magnetic field.”

  “Shut it down? But then we’d have no radiation shield.”

  “Don’t need it unless there’s a flare, and we can prob’ly get back to Selene before the Sun burps another one out”

  “Probably,” Dan growled.

  “That’s the chance we take. I like those odds better’n letting the coil’s hot spots build up to an explosion that’d rupture the ship’s skin.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Dan said, reluctantly.

  “Okay, then.” Pancho got up from the table. ‘I’m gonna shut it down now.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Dan, reaching for her wrist. “What about the MHD channel?”

  Pancho shrugged. “No problems so far. Prob’ly hasn’t been bugged.”

  “If it goes, we’re dead, right?”

  “Well…” She drew the word out. “We could dump the coil’s energy in a controlled shutdown. That wouldn’t affect the thrusters.”

  “But we’d lose our electrical power.”

  “We could run on the fuel cells and batteries—for a while.”

  “Long enough?’

  Pancho laughed and headed for the hatch. “Long as they last, boss,” she said over her shoulder.

  “Murphy’s Law,” Dan growled after her.

  If anything can go wrong, it will: that was Murphy’s Law. Now I can add Randolph’s corollary to it, he thought: If you turn off your radiation shield, you’re certain to be hit by a solar flare.

  MESSAGES

  George shooed everyone out of the mission control center, except for the chief who insisted hotly that the center must have at least one human controller on duty at all times.

  If he’d been a man, George would have simply picked him up and heaved him through the door out into the corridor. Instead, the chief on this shift was a rail-thin, pasty-faced, lank-haired woman with the personality of an Arkansas mule. She would not leave the center.

  Restraining the urge to lift her off her feet and carry her out to the corridor, George pleaded, “I’ve got to send a private message to Dan Randolph. I can’t have anybody listenin’ in on it.”

  “And why not?” she demanded, hands on hips, narrow nostrils flaring angrily.

  “None of your fookin’ business,” George snarled. ‘That’s why not.”

  For long moments they glared at each other, George towering over her, but the woman totally unfazed by him.

  “It’s Dan’s own orders,” George said at last, stretching the truth a little. “This is ultra-sensitive stuff.”

  The woman seemed to think that over for a second, then said more reasonably, “You take the console over there, on the end. I’ll set you up with a private channel. Nobody else in here but you and me, and I won’t eavesdrop. Okay?”

  George started to say no, but realized that this was the best he could accomplish, short of physical mayhem.

  Before he could agree, though, Frank Blyleven pushed through the double doors, his normally smiling face wrinkled into a puzzled frown.

  “What’s going on here?” the security chief demanded, walking up the aisle between the consoles. “I got a report that you’re throwing controllers out of the center.”

  Heaving an impatient sigh, George explained all over again that he had to get a message through to Dan. “In private,” he said. “Nobody listenin’ in.”

  Blyleven crossed his arms over his chest and tried to look authoritative. It didn’t work. To George he looked like a red-faced shopping mall Santa in mufti.

  “Very well,” he said. “Send your message. I’ll sit by the corridor door and make certain nobody disturbs you.”

  Surprised, George thanked him and headed for the console that the chief controller had indicated. Blyleven went to the last row of consoles and sat down at the one closest to the door. Surreptitiously, he tapped the keyboard a few times. When George finished his message and erased it from the comm system’s memory core, Blyleven had a copy that he could pawn to Humphries.

  Dan felt nervous as he watched Pancho and Amanda shut down the radiation shield. Dumping all that electromagnetic energy didn’t bother him; it was the idea that now they had no protection against another solar storm except the thin hull of the ship itself.

  “… shutdown complete,” Pancho announced. “Magnetic field zeroed out.”

  “Zero field,” Amanda confirmed.

  “Naked to mine enemies,” Dan murmured.

  “How’s that, boss?” Pancho asked, looking up over her shoulder toward him.

  “I feel naked,” Dan said.

  “Don’t worry. Sun looks calm enough for the time being. Even if it shoots out a flare, we can always get into our suits and go for a swim in one of the fuel tanks.”

  “That wouldn’t be very helpful,” Amanda pointed out, not realizing that Pancho was joking. “The high-energy protons would set off all sorts of secondary particles from the fuel’s atoms.”

  Pancho frowned at her. Amanda looked from her to Dan and then back to her control panel.

  “I think I’ll go back and see how Lars is doing,” she said, getting up from her chair.

  “Have fun,” Pancho said.

  Dan watched her step through the hatch, then slid into her vacated chair.

  “Don’t look so glum, boss. We’re battin’ along at one-third g with no sweat. Be back in lunar orbit in less’n four days.”

  “I had wanted to stop to sample those other two rocks,” Dan said.

  “Can’t take the chance. Better to—hold on. Incoming message from Selene. George Ambrose.”

  “I�
��ll take it here,” said Dan. “By the way, have you told mission control that we’ve shut down the shield?”

  “Not yet, but they’ll see it on the telemetering. It’s recorded automatically.”

  Dan nodded as George’s bushy red-maned face appeared on the screen. Quickly, in a worried whisper, George explained how he’d located Cardenas and spirited her off to the temporary shelter.

  “She wants t’see Stavenger,” George concluded. “I told her I’d talk to you first. She’ll be perfectly okay in the tempo for a coupla weeks, if we need to keep her stashed there. So… what d’you want me to do, Dan?”

  George’s image on the screen froze. Dan could see that he must have been at the mission control center when he’d sent the message. Good. He must’ve cleared out the place to make sure nobody could eavesdrop.

  Now I’ve got to send him a reply that just about anybody can listen to, Dan thought. This is going to be like an old-time mafioso speaking into a tapped telephone.

  “George, I think she’s right. Do as she asks… as carefully as you can. She’s important to us; there’s a lot she and I have to talk about when I get back. We’ve got some problems here on the ship and we’re heading back home. If all goes well, we should be back in lunar orbit in less than four days. I’ll keep you informed, and you let me know how things are going there.”

  Dan reviewed his own message, decided there was nothing he needed to add to it, then touched the SEND button on the comm panel.

  He started to get up from the co-pilot’s seat when the comm unit pinged.

  “’Nother message comin’ in,” Pancho said needlessly.

  A young man’s face appeared on the screen. He looked annoyed. “General notice to all spacecraft and surface vehicles. A class-four solar flare has been observed by the early-warning sensors in Mercury orbit Preliminary calculations of the interplanetary field indicate the resulting radiation storm has a ninety percent chance of reaching the Earth-Moon system within the next twelve hours. All spacecraft in cislunar space are advised to return to the nearest safe docking facility. All activities on the lunar surface will be suspended in six hours. Anyone on the surface is advised to seek shelter within six hours.”