by Unknown
“Because of the nature of the problem,” said Cruz. “Sloppy programming.”
Stith eyed her. “You can say that—”
“NASA pays my employer for me to say things like that, sir.”
He grunted, dismissing her. “It took you people, what, two days to find that glitch? Which in itself would have been insignificant without a fortuitous…well, that’s not the right word…but an accidental correspondence with a hardware hang-up. You want to roam through a few million lines of code looking for other things that might conceivably go wrong.” He unknitted his fingers and straightened himself. “In four days Starfire burns for Venus. You want me to assign some people to sift through six or eight million lines of code hoping to find some more little fuck-ups? Okay, sure, I’ll do that. Maybe you’ll be lucky and get another chance to say nyah-nyah before they get back to Earth.”
“Our sense is that the mission should return to Earth with the minimum exercise of the program,” said Giles.
“Leave the asteroid now,” Cruz emphasized. “Before getting closer to the sun.”
Stith ignored her. “Your ex-companions will love you for that, Colonel.”
“For the record.”
“Oh yes indeed. It’s on the record. And for the record, you’ll get your team of programmers. And for the record, if they come up with anything valid, it will be implemented at a moment’s notice.”
“Well thank you very much, Taylor.” It was not a polite remark.
“Get lost.”
16
“Mission control, Houston. Elapsed time six days twenty hours. An early start for the Starfire crew. After yesterday’s extensive exploration of the surface and deployment of surface instrumentation, crew will bore a shaft in the asteroid preparatory to implanting of subsurface instrumentation…”
Travis and Melinda were on the surface again; the stars arced in complex curves above their heads, too slowly for them to follow, and the bulging sun described barely perceptible wobbles on the horizon. They had spent much of the previous day deploying solar power arrays, unfolding the flimsy metal panels like giant paper fans. Three of the huge sun-catching arrays now bracketed the waist of Everest.
The solar panels produced much more power than required for the instruments and antennas Starfire would leave behind. Indeed, the panels themselves would perish, flaring like wisps of paper, if left to the mercy of the sun anywhere within Mercury’s orbit. Their power was needed for a more immediate task.
In the days before perigee, all sides of the asteroid would receive a thorough roasting. But as Everest turned lazily about its own axis, one side would lean over the imaginary curve that was its orbit around the sun, and for some hours before and after the asteroid passed closest to the boiling photosphere, that side would take the heat, while the side opposite would be effectively shielded.
The astronauts worked half a day to lay cables from the solar arrays to a wide crater on the asteroid’s rugged, irregular equator, for calculations indicated that this was the spot most likely to be facing away from the sun at perigee.
In the crater sat a strange device: a wide flat metal cone like a Chinese hat tipped awry, perched on a wide tripod—the whole resembling a cartoon flying saucer that had just suffered an outer-space fender bender and had made a forced landing on the nearest asteroid. A squat cylinder projected downward through the center of the cone.
Travis leaned over the tripod base and fired a recoilless gun with a silent, sharp thump, driving a steel bolt into the friable rock, fixing the tripod leg. The gun wasn’t entirely recoilless. Travis bounced off the surface but didn’t travel far; to save propellant in the MMUs, he and Melinda had pinned themselves to the rock at the ends of yellow tethers.
“We should have power,” said Travis. “Let’s set coordinates.”
Melinda floated above the shield, reaching to flip the cover on the side of the barrel-shaped device; she queried its computer. She punched keys and the massive barrel rocked in its cradle, adjusting itself. “Okay.”
“Starfire, we’re ready to drill,” said Travis.
“Copy,” said Robin’s voice.
“You pull the trigger. I’ll take your picture.” Travis held out a remote switch, and Melissa traded him her video camera.
They stood back a good thirty meters, to the length of their tethers. Melissa pushed a button on the remote control and a beam of white light issued from the tripod-mounted barrel, aimed straight at the ground. A centimeter-wide hole immediately opened in the rusty black ground, and the surrounding rock began to flow like lava, cherry red.
“Half a meter?”
“Should be enough,” said Travis.
The barrel spiraled slowly outward on an eccentric cam; the pulsing laser beam carved a widening cylindrical hole in the asteroid. The pressure of rock vaporizing at the bottom of the shaft blew molten magma back out of the hole, where it was deflected to one side by the curved shield. Some of the glowing stuff puddled in the crater bottom, some kept on flying to splatter against the far rim or to sail into space. Asteroid’s blood.
“Hey, it works,” she said, feigning surprise.
“I hold the patent, y’know.”
“Yeah, you told us. A couple of times. How many’d you say you sold?”
“Hmm. Five, at least. Including this one.”
“Terrific investment.”
“Remember Velcro! Remember Tang! Hell, when we get back to Earth, everybody’ll want one of these.”
Bursts of steam spurted from the wide shaft, and gouts of incandescent solid matter bounced off the debris shield; the beam had cut its way through a thick rind of reddish-black rock and was encountering a mix of ice-glued gravel. Almost ten minutes passed before the laser abruptly went dark and the artificial volcano fell still.
“Circuitry says we’re there,” Travis reported to Starfire. “We’ve still got a mighty hot hole here.”
Robin’s dry voice came over the static-clogged radio. “Well, don’t stick anything in there you don’t want to lose.”
Melinda burst out laughing.
“Commander, I didn’t think you cared,” Travis drawled.
Perhaps she didn’t; no emotion was detectable in her reply. “Your clocks look good if you want to set up for the second shaft.”
“Roger.”
It took them an hour to reposition the drill, for they had to fly it almost halfway around the asteroid. Their target was the largest of the hollow areas revealed in the seismographs, a dark node lying on a deep fault plane between the hemispheres.
After another hour to re-rig the cables, they drilled. It was a deeper shaft than the first, and the laser cut through ice and rock for forty minutes before blinking out.
Travis and Melinda cleared the drill rig from the mouth of the shaft and abandoned it. The consumables in their MMUs were quivering on red lines.
Linwood was eager to display his new laboratory results: the ruddy matter that coated one hemisphere of Everest was rich in primitive organics, including some amino acids found in living things on Earth; the black hemisphere, in addition to its tarry carbonaceous deposits, was a treasury of metal ores. There was no doubt that Everest was the product of an anomalously gentle collision between two quite different objects: one typical of the inner solar system, one of the outer. But the conjoining had occurred early in Everest’s history; since then it had been pounded by a great many smaller objects at much higher velocities—hammer blows against malleable metal, elemental carbon, deep-frozen ice—melting and folding and driving the gases from the raw billet.
Dinner time. By now each crew member had staked out a favorite patch of weightless turf in the wardroom; Travis’s was in a cranny farthest from the pantry. He and Melinda and Linwood had already started eating when Robin and Spin dropped in through the ceiling. They assembled their trays of corned beef and asparagus and went to their own corners, perching lightly in midair.
After a few moments of quiet slurping and crunching, Travis
said hesitantly, “Commander…Melinda and I were talking…”
When nothing more was forthcoming, she said, “Glad to hear it.”
“We think you should fly the EVA tomorrow,” Melinda briskly explained. “Instead of me.”
“That’s a guidance specialist rating,” said Robin. “I haven’t practiced it.”
“Nothing much to practice. Just take pictures and pick up rocks.”
“Thanks for the thought. Another time.”
The room was quiet a moment. Travis said, “Smell the roses, Commander.” The words hung like a challenge in the air.
She didn’t reply. Nobody talked much during the rest of dinner.
But later, before they climbed into their suits for another night of prebreathing, Robin stopped Melinda in the corridor outside the air lock. “I’ve rethought. Let’s discuss it.”
17
“Mission control, Houston. As we head into day seven, transmissions to and from the spacecraft have been interrupted by an unusual amount of solar activity. Video from the spacecraft is of generally poor quality. Audio continues fair despite intermittent LOS. The round-trip communications lag, limited by the speed of light, is now almost three minutes and twenty seconds. As to the mission time line, there’s been some creativity on the part of the crew in redesigning their EVA…”
Melinda was a guest in the commander’s couch, watching the flight deck’s big screen, where two white MMUs descended toward the black waist of Everest like radiant angels in the sunlight. To her right, Spin did the work.
“On video again,” said Robin’s voice. “Got a picture?”
“Trying again,” said Spin. The main screen splintered into a tearing, jagged image. “We do have your feed. Quality not great—not your problem. We’re forwarding what we’ve got to Houston. Maybe they can patch it back together.”
The intermittent view from Robin’s handheld camera showed that part of the wide crater where the temporarily abandoned pulse drill stood; nearby was the opening of a shaft that reached deep into the core of the rock. Below the camera a blob of white—Travis in his MMU—spiraled steadily downward.
“Starfire, we’re about at the crater rim, so I’ll call this sea level.”
“Okay, Travis,” Melinda replied.
“Video any better?” Robin asked.
“Not much,” said Spin. “You’ll be shielded from the sun when you get in there. Maybe that’ll help. Helmet lights, please.”
“Roger.”
Pools of light illuminated the crater bottom, coming up steadily. Travis briefly hovered above the black opening of the shaft, then disappeared into it. The subjective view from Robin’s camera betrayed a moment of hesitation, adjustment to the motion of the asteroid, before she followed Travis into the hole.
Melinda and Spin stared hard at the high-resolution monitor, trying to make out a coherent image in its erratic patterns. Evidently the narrow shaft was full of dust and congealed droplets of lava which had been floating, neither sinking nor rising, since the laser had stopped drilling the day before. Occasionally, when the picture stabilized, they could make out bars of light from Travis’s and Robin’s helmets cutting through the murk at oblique angles, as if they were swimming under water in heavy silt.
Her voice revealed excitement, nervousness. “Amazing walls. We went past about two meters of reddish gunk, all melted together—looks like what comes out of your crankcase when you haven’t changed your oil for too long—and now these slick walls of ice. Perfectly smooth, like glass—which is from the laser. But right under the ice there’s black gravel. It’s like a silo full of frozen raisins. Can’t see a damn thing below me except for a big white blur that’s Travis.” She paused. “Shouldn’t complain, though. This is better than Carlsbad Caverns—not that I’ve ever been to Carlsbad Caverns.”
“There’s the bottom,” said Travis. “Maybe twenty meters.”
“For that matter, I’ve never been out of the country!” Robin said. She laughed. “My first trip away from home. Not counting orbit.”
Melinda traded glances with Spin across the firefly darkness of the flight deck. “Her biomeds are good,” he reassured her. “It’s not hypoxia, she’s just having fun.”
“I guess that’s the purpose of the exercise.”
“Can you see this, Starfire?” Travis asked on radio.
“No, EV-two,” said Spin. “Okay, now we see something. Some movement.” On the big screen, bars of light swayed, and glowing dust particles swirled. “I’m getting dizzy,” Spin complained.
Linwood had risen through the corridor opening to join Spin and Melinda on the flight deck. “Rather chaotic picture.”
“I can see the bottom now,” Travis said. “About four meters. My sweet Lord—”
Robin’s voice broke in. “What’s that? What is that?”
“This is unbeliev…” Travis’s voice was swallowed in a blast of static—the picture jerked into zebra stripes. “…confirm that, over.”
“Say again, EV-two?” Melinda’s voice was sharp, eager.
Robin again: “My God. Are those really d…” All noise.
“Dammit, you guys, talk to us. Keep talking to us.” Melinda turned to Spin, her mouth pursed with chagrin. “I think I goofed. I could be down there…”
Inside the asteroid Travis had come gently to rest in the hollow space toward which the shaft had been accurately directed. Light blazed around him as Robin slowly descended, brightening his green eyes, spotlighting the smile that stretched the lines of his face.
They had entered a giant geode, its crudely spherical walls encrusted with crystals—not, they suspected, crystals of silicon oxide, but crystals of carbon. The floating dust was diamond dust, refracting every color of the spectrum. Frosty stones tumbled around their heads, weightless and lazy: diamonds. Extravagant nodes of crystal were embedded in the walls of the chamber: knots and clusters of diamonds.
“Starfire,” he said, “we’re swimming in diamonds.”
For a moment the radio space between them was filled with a crackling nothing. Then Robin said to Travis, “You knew it. That’s why you talked me into coming.” A child given the run of a toy store would have worn Robin’s expression: her stern and touching concentration, her effort not to be overwhelmed.
“I thought we might find a little bitty industrial-grade diamond or two,” he admitted. “There’s precedent. In Meteor Crater in Arizona, on Phobos, some others. Not this, though. This must have been the face of the anvil when the two halves of Everest came together. Later the ice in these pockets escaped as gas.”
“It’s wonderful,” she whispered.
“It was Melinda’s idea, bringing you here.” His voice had changed from what it was a moment before: it was oddly drained of enthusiasm. For a time he silently inspected the walls of the geode with his hand lamp. “I’ll fill the sample bags. Make me a good record.”
She trained the video camera on him as he took a mallet and a bronze chisel from his thigh pocket, braced himself, and drove the chisel into a thick node of crystals. Gems exploded from the wall.
“The last samples.”
Four of the crew were hovering in the corridor, peering into Travis’s tiny geology laboratory, while Travis himself peered into the barrel of a microscope. “All industrial-grade, or worse,” he muttered.
“Thus, in addition to several kilos of low-grade diamonds,” Linwood said, without a hint of humor, “we have catalogued a mere hundred and twelve fine gems bigger than anything in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution.”
“This we can take with us,” said Melinda, issuing a throaty purr. “God, think of all the other hollow places in this rock. D’you think they’re all like this?”
Linwood cleared his own throat. “The rarity of diamonds on Earth has been somewhat exaggerated,” he said. “Indeed, it has been suggested that diamond prices have been maintained at an artificially high level.”
“South Africa won’t want to be our friend?” M
elinda asked.
“Breaks my heart,” muttered Spin.
“I believe Linwood means that we have accomplished our scientific objectives,” said Robin. “After Travis and Melinda have positioned the experimental packages tomorrow morning, there will be no further modifications in the flight plan—merely to stuff our pockets with trinkets.”
“I got that message,” Travis said irritably. “I already got it before the speech.”
What was bothering him suddenly became clear to them all. They had almost finished their mission on the asteroid—
—and once they left it, Travis, in his own mind, was baggage. True, there were a couple of satellites to launch. Terrific. Super. Anyone could push buttons.
“Please see me on the flight deck,” Robin said to him, turning away, pushing herself up the corridor.
He crawled out of the laboratory. The others moved aside, trying to avoid staring at his weathered face, as bleak as they had seen it.
Robin turned to face him as he rose onto the deck. Their eyes locked.
“I’m not…used to this much formality,” he said at last. “I guess I was a civilian too long.”
“That’s not your problem, Travis. You’re not a team player. You’re used to having it all your own way. Your own company. Your own senator. Your own mission. Maybe you’d like to be out here all by yourself.”
“I don’t think that way, ma’am.”
“There will be no heroics on this trip. No one-man stands. Learn to play with this team or you will go it alone, all the way.”
He was quiet. He’d heard these lyrics before; it was the theme of his life: either you’re with us or against us—hang together or hang, period. For Robin was threatening not legal action but something simpler, far more devastating—six weeks in Coventry. He would work by himself. Eat by himself. Sleep in some separate part of the ship. No one would talk to him or listen to him except in an actual emergency.
