* * * *
Victor waited impatiently for his small ship to maneuver to a gentle landing on the icy body. The magnetometer was unambiguous now. This ball of ice had an iron core, no doubt about it at all. Here, in one body, was everything needed to build a new city in space. A city? “Hell, I could build a whole bloody nation with that mutha! That thing must be as big as any core ever discovered. There must be more metal in that thing than ever was squeezed out of Earth's crust. And man, look at the ice readings. The collision must have distilled this thing like a damn refinery! Juicy, dripping, soaking damned full of deuterium and helium-3. I am so freakin’ rich I'm gonna be the damned emperor of this god-forsaken blighted wasteland. And with medical technology today, heck, they're increasing life expectancy faster than a person ages! If you've got the money, maybe you can live forever! Imagine, Victor, the Immortal Emperor of Oort! Ah, life is sweet!"
He glanced at his communications panel nervously. More chatter on the net showed on the display. With objects out in the Cloud averaging tens of millions of kilometers apart, on the order of a light-minute, voice communications were rare. Instead, most messages were text with attachments, in the form of e-mail and forum posts. The other slackers operating out here were all gaga over the beam of radio signals coming from a couple of light-decades away. Let them waste their time.
"So what if there's somebody saying ‘hi’ out there? As long as it keeps their attention off me until I can validate my claim. Dumb bastards haven't got a clue where I've snuck off to. Let's take a minute or two and keep it that way.” He sprang ever so gently over to his comm panel in the gravity that almost was not there, and settled in front of the keyboard.
Victor had scheduled the last stop of his flight plan as a visit to a rather boring little ball of ice that had drifted near Rendezvous 3 Station, a mere sixteen million kilometers away. The other net participants expected he would land his little explorer and have his robots bore into it and see if it held any worthwhile ices or rock dust. They would expect his communications to be sporadic, but would expect an occasional check-in. The last thing Victor wanted was a rescue party to come after him, so he left a communications relay and his transponder on the little comet, taking only enough ice from it that he could afford a long, hard blast of compressed gas to move him well away from the body. And then, when far enough away that nobody was likely to notice, he goosed the fusion reactors to a low burn, and fed a rich dose of reaction mass into the relativistic electron beam that generated his thrust, and snuck away to investigate the more distant object only he recognized as special.
Had anyone been deliberately monitoring, the ploy would not have worked. But there were only a handful of ships operating out of Rendezvous. No traffic control system was needed, and the ships generally stayed in touch voluntarily. The volume of space they explored was vast and lonely, and they had no one to depend on but each other.
"Yeah, like I figured. The idiots are all looking for little green men instead of exploring. Well, hell, guess I would too if I didn't have the discovery of a thousand lifetimes a few kilometers away. They'll probably think I'm a doofus if I don't chime in. Better read up. Huh? Crap! Well, no damned wonder they're so worked up."
* * * *
Rockhound: SEARCHER, WHERE YOU AT FELLA? THE SETI LEAGUE HAS INCOMING FOR YOU.
Searcher: JUST GOT IT ROCKDOG. HOLD YOUR HORSES, THIS IS A BIG MUTHA FILE, AND ENCRYPTED. SO, LET'S SEE IF I CAN TELL YOU ABOUT IT ... YEAH, IT'S NOT CLASSIFIED, THEY JUST WANT ME TO SEE IT FIRST. HEY, IT'S FROM DR. SETI HIMSELF! UH ... HOLY CRAP, DOG, THE LEAGUE'S ANALYSIS TEAM IS ACTUALLY STARTING TO MAKE A LITTLE SENSE OUT OF THAT SIGNAL. IT EVIDENTLY CONTAINS SOME KIND OF ROSETTA STONE. THE TROUBLE IS, WITH THE ROSETTA STONE WE KNEW ONE OF THE LANGUAGES. WITH THIS ONE, THEY ONLY HAVE A VAGUE IDEA OF A FEW WORDS BECAUSE THEY'RE ACCOMPANIED BY PICTURES. WTF!?? BUT HE SAYS THEY THINK THE TRANSMISSION IS—HOLD ON TO YOUR HELMET—A religious TRACT! ROFL!
Iceman: AAARGH! JUST OUR LUCK! WE GOT NEIGHBORS AND THEY'RE BLOODY DAMNED REORGANIZED BORN-AGAIN SEVENTH-DAY ALIEN EVANGELISTS!
ANYBODY HEARD FROM WIENER LATELY? THAT BOY NEEDS TO GET HIS HEAD OUT OF THE ICE MORE AND LOOK AROUND. ALL THIS GOING ON AND ALL HE CAN THINK ABOUT IS MAKING HOLES. DON'T ‘PRECIATE HOW SPECIAL THIS PLACE IS.
* * * *
"Victor, dammit. Not Winner. Not Wiener.” But Victor kept the sentiment to himself. The delight the other prospectors took in his objections to the nickname was the very reason they insisted on it.
Wiener: I'M HERE, ICE. BEEN DOWN THE BORE FREEING A STUCK ‘BOT.
Iceman: YOU MAKE US NERVOUS, KID. LEAVE IT, SEND IN ANOTHER ONE. UNLESS, OF COURSE, IT FOUND SOMETHING GOOD. YOU FIND SOME METAL?
Iceman: WIENER? WHERE'D YOU GO, BOY?
Wiener: SORRY. GOT BUSY FIXING SOMETHING AND WASN'T WATCHING THE SCREEN. ASTRONOMER METAL MAYBE, NOT ENGINEER METAL. THIS BALL OF ICE HAS ENOUGH SILICON CARBIDE IN IT TO SET UP A SANDPAPER FACTORY. IT'S EATING UP HARDWARE.
Iceman: SCREW THAT. THERE ARE A TRILLION OTHER TARGETS UP HERE, AT LEAST HALF OF THEM A BETTER BET. YOU BEEN OUT A LONG TIME. COME ON BACK TO RENDEZVOUS AND RUN SOME LAPS IN GRAVITY.
Iceman: OH WEEEE-NER? DURN, THE BOY HAS A SHORT ATTENTION SPAN.
Wiener: GOT BUSY AGAIN. I CAN'T SPARE THE ‘BOT. YOU EVER TRY GETTING WARRANTY REPAIRS DONE UP HERE? I ALMOST HAVE IT FREE, JUST CAME UP FOR SOME TOOLS. LOOK, I KNOW SOME OF YOU OLD FARTS GOT NOTHING BETTER TO DO THAN STARE AT A SCREEN WAITING FOR CHAT, BUT CUT ME SOME SLACK IF I DON'T ALWAYS GET RIGHT BACK TO YOU, OKAY?
Iceman: UNDERSTOOD. WELL, GET BACK HERE BEFORE YOUR BONES TURN TO MUSH. OF COURSE, IF THAT HAPPENS, THAT'S A SWEET LITTLE RIG YOU FLY. I'M SURE I'LL FIND A TAKER FOR HER.
Wiener: I'M GETTING MY EXERCISE POINTS. I THINK YOU JUST WANT ANOTHER STOOL KEPT WARM IN YOUR BAR.
Iceman: LOL! WELL, THAT TOO. BUT TRUST ME, TUGGING ON RUBBER BANDS HALF AN HOUR A DAY AIN'T THE SAME AS GRAVITY, EVEN THE ARTIFICIAL KIND. THAT'S HOW COME I DON'T GO OUT ANYMORE, I WAS SCREWING UP MY WHOLE MUSCULAR-SKELETAL WHO-HAH. THE CLOUD HAS BEEN HERE A THIRD THE AGE OF THE UNIVERSE. IT'LL KEEP. NO GOOD STRIKING IT RICH IF YOU'RE NOTHING BUT A SACK OF RUBBER. COME ON BACK WHEN YOU GET A CHANCE AND WE'LL ALL RAISE A TOAST TO GETTING A PHONE CALL FROM ET.
Wiener: I WILL SOON, BUT I'VE GOT BILLS TO PAY. C U LATER.
* * * *
The core made thousands of orbits before the fateful encounter. It finally came too close to Jupiter. The giant tugged on it, changing its direction. The hundreds of tiny pieces of debris orbiting the core swung off into a spiral string of pearls, but generally tagged along behind the larger body, as it made one final loop around the gas giant. The next pass was very close, nearly a plunge into the deep atmosphere and oblivion. Instead, it swung sharply around the ponderous planet, and, like a skater grabbing a handle on a moving Zamboni, changed its direction. It acquired more velocity in the direction of Jupiter's orbit, but also was pitched to an angle above the ecliptic. In this maneuver, two things happened. First, the core acquired more speed, almost enough to escape the Sun's gravity entirely. Second, the huge tidal forces tugged at the covering of debris. Some pieces came free, and the core acquired spin as the resulting imbalance swung into the steep gradient of Jupiter's gravity well. As it departed the big planet, more and more pieces of rock flew off from the equator, and other pieces tumbled to replace those lost. Some of the escapees crashed back to the surface, knocking off more pieces. Others escaped the feeble gravity of the core and began spreading out from it. All were heading in roughly the same direction, toward the cold, dark, almost empty outer reaches of the solar system.
Victor could barely contain his excitement as the ship settled the last few meters to the surface of the icy planetoid, and held his breath as he felt the soft crunch of the pads settling into the texture of old snow. While the computer ran the shutdown sequence, he turned to the robot panel and made ready to deploy a borebot.
In minutes, the intelligent drill head was grinding its way into the ice. As it went, it hea
ted the spoil, vaporizing the most volatile gasses and using them to blast the snowy spoil out via a flexible duct. The solid portion of the spoil was ejected out over the surface of the body, and made an unusual ballistic snowstorm in that direction. Part of the snow would eventually circle the planetoid and shower the ship with a gentle dusting of white flakes. The resulting ring would eventually be visible, but by that time, Victor's claim to the object would be solid. Some of the gas was processed through a permselector. The valuable deuterium and helium-3 were saved, along with samples of the less volatile materials. Victor studied the analyses with greedy eyes.
"Good stuff. Sweet stuff. Some tar on the surface and the usual mix of dust, but so far this one is mostly ice. Easy digging, but we'll probably hit harder ice soon. Long way to go to the core. Oh, mama would have been so proud! Her boy's gonna be the richest mutha in the system."
An audio annunciator on the ‘bot panel beeped to indicate the borebot had just passed one hundred meters of depth. Victor tossed his head in mirth. “Oh yeah? Well, you're probably right, I am a potty-mouth. But you don't mind, do you? You've been with prospectors before. No, I don't always talk like this, usually just when I'm alone."
A hydraulic cylinder in the belly of the ship groaned a little as it adjusted to the increasing load. Victor grinned. “Oh, you think you count as company, do you? Now you want to be my friend, now that I'm the richest son of a bitch since this core's brother was found. Hell, probably richer'n that, because that rock was so freakin’ dry it made the Sahara look soggy. Yeah, now everybody will want to be Victor Gendeg's buddy. But you? Well, I don't even own you. You're leased. I guess that makes you a whore, doesn't it? A lousy damned painted lady whose pimp rents her out to any prospector that shows a fancy to her. You do realize the second thing I gotta do when we get back, right after I file my claim, is get my hooks in a bigger ship, don't you?"
A pressure regulator hissed back in the life support system as it replenished itself with comet gas.
"Well, don't worry, you're a pretty little thing. Maybe I'll make Ice an offer, and keep you anyway. Maybe I'll build me a palace and put you up on top as a spire, and come up here and look out the windows and survey my empire."
He glanced at the analyzer. “Mmmm, interesting little pocket. Olivine, plus some boron and aluminum. I do believe this ball of junk has got a little of everything. But we're nowhere near the good stuff."
Victor opened a drawer and extracted a cushioned sack, from which he drew a curious piece of material, half rock, half metal. “Computer, cabin video log on. Hello, little buddy, do you know where you are? I think we just found your mama. And we couldn't have done it without you!"
With his free hand, he slipped his sippy-cup into a water dispenser. “We now have fresh water from El Dorado. Time for a toast.” He removed the cup from the dispenser, tipped it, and opened the valve. A small blob of water formed, which he shook loose. It dropped gently toward the flake of asteroid. “You get the first taste.” When the drop hit the stone, he put the cup to his lips and took a sip, then grimaced a little. “Ugh, needs more dissolved oxygen, and maybe a touch of whiskey. But it is now official, little friend: We're one with El Dorado."
* * * *
The core sailed out into the dark reaches of the solar system, out into the freezing realm where ice, not rock, dominated. But the distance between the icy bodies was so great that the space might as well have been empty. The original string of tiny moons that accompanied it to Jupiter had long since drifted far away. Thousands of the pieces of rubble that had been stripped from its surface still tagged along, most no larger than a pebble. It had now lost most of its velocity, but the tug from the star that had fostered its birth was all but gone as well. Had it picked up just a little more kinetic energy from its last encounter with Jupiter, it would have sailed into interstellar space. Instead, it arched slowly amid the scattered ice, reached a near standstill, and then turned and headed back in. An invisible trace of frost covered the core and its companions on that first million-plus-year foray into the Oort Cloud.
But after two thousand passes, the frost was significant. And with each return to the inner system, the frost melted and found its way into cracks. And on each return to the icy darkness, the moisture froze again, a little deeper inside. Eventually the ice freed pieces entirely, although they lay where they were in the tenuous gravity. And once in a while, during a pass through the inner system, or after the rare impact of a tiny fragment of comet, one of those pieces would be ejected from the surface. These often joined the entourage of small bits and pieces orbiting the core. They replenished that population, as other pieces were nudged further away by continued gravitational encounters.
The core was leaving a trail of breadcrumbs to follow.
* * * *
"Look at this thing!” Victor held the odd stone up as if to show it to the ship. “You got any idea what this thing is? This, my new tin friend, is the key to a treasure chest. One of many, but an important one. That hunk of iron down in this ice ball is the largest piece left of a little planet that got smashed all to crap about four billion years ago. Folks have found pieces of this thing all the hell over the solar system. Pieces of it formed some of the craters on the Moon. They've found chunks on Mercury, Mars, and every moon of every outer planet except Pluto, which is okay since Pluto is not a planet this month. The asteroid belt is lousy with it. Lots of pieces in Jupiter's Trojan points, too. But the neat thing, the really neat thing, is that there are pieces of it zipping in and out of the Oort cloud.
"You're in the prospecting business. You've been a prospector's painted lady before. You know that everybody out here wants to find metal, the good engineering kind, and ‘tain't much to be found. No, granted, a little piece like this, with only a few hundred grams of iron globbed on one side, is not going to build many fleets. But little pieces like these are clues to where the big pieces are. They're so important, the government gives grants to guys like me to track them down and figure out their history.
"I found this little piece coming in from the cloud to the inner system. I had a pretty good idea of where to look because of where all the other pieces have been found. One look at this rock, and every expert identified it as a flake off the core/mantle interface. A little analysis of the cosmic ray damage to the faces tells us about how long ago it came off the core. That narrowed down the time when we know the core was still orbiting freely. And nobody was finding any younger pieces.
"It has been no big secret that all these pieces came from the same parent, and that it must be looping thru the Oort Cloud. People have been back-calculating the trajectories for decades, hoping to figure out exactly where it is. They've worked out just when each close star pass occurred; all the interactions with the inner planets and ice giants; they've even figured exactly when—3.748212 billion years ago—this thing crossed Jupiter's path once too often and got pitched out of the inner system. We know where it ought to be; close enough that a radar search should turn it up. But it's not there.
"So I got to asking myself, how could a big iron cannonball that ought to reflect radar like nobody's business just vanish? Everybody else was looking for missing perturbations in the orbital mechanics. Me, I realized most of those supposed perturbations were too small to matter. The orbital period of this core was a little over a million years, so it didn't have but a few thousand passes thru the inner system, and we have the perturbations in the inner system nailed down. The Oort Cloud isn't chaotic, it is wonderfully predictable. Once we got all the close star passages cataloged, and mapped all the ice giants, the chances of a missing perturbation started getting pretty small. The fragments, like this one, were all coming in where they should be. There was no missing perturbation. So I started looking for the event that was so unlikely, nobody seriously considered it. The possibility that the cannonball hit a snow bank way out here somewhere.
"There's another class of fragments folks are very interested in. The folks living down in
the asteroid belt need volatiles as badly as the folks out here need metal, only there are a whole lot more people in the belt. So what do they do? They chase down the little minor comets that scream through on a regular basis. And what do they find? Lo and behold, a lot of the little comets come from common parents, too. But, comets are a different department, and nobody seemed to make the connection.
"So all I had to do was look up the database of all the comet fragments and their extrapolated parents, compare that to the possible orbits of the core, and figure out where the collision could have taken place. And I got a match, but it was nearly a billion years ago. I couldn't know exactly what happened in the collision, but I did know what direction the core hit from. The comets had all radiated on that same heading, and that told me it was a dead-center hit. Because of that, I knew what range of changes would occur in the orbit of the object that was hit. I knew that the resulting object would be denser than in should be, a couple of oddball orbital parameters that gave me a belt in which it could reside, what class of object it was, and that it should show evidence of a particular type of hit. That narrowed the possibilities down to a few thousand known bodies. Looking at those, I could see if their masses fit the oddballness of those orbital parameters. That got me down to a few hundred candidates."
The ship's plumbing gurgled as it switched the flow of liquid gas from a full storage tank to one that was empty. Victor grinned and nodded.
"What led me to this one? Simple, really. Two of the best candidates were closest to this outpost. I could afford to reach it."
He looked at the clock. “I'd better ping the net so they know I'm still alive."
* * * *
Searcher: OKAY, GUYS, DR. SETI JUST SENT A NEW UPDATE ON THE TRANSLATION. I'M STARTING TO GET JUST A LITTLE ALARMED. THE LITTLE FERRY TEAM STILL THINKS IT IS A RELIGIOUS TRACT, BUT IT DOESN'T SOUND LIKE THEY'RE TRYING TO CONVERT US. MORE LIKE HELLFIRE AND DAMNATION. THEY'VE MANAGED TO TRANSLATE A FEW PHRASES. ONE SEEMS TO TRANSLATE ROUGHLY AS “CORRUPTION OF CREATION.” ANOTHER IS “LOOK THIS WAY” FOLLOWED BY SOMETHING THEY CAN'T MAKE OUT, THEN “SEE YOUR DAMNATION.” NEAR THE END OF THE MESSAGE THEY SAY, “CONSUMED IN FIRE."
Analog SFF, October 2007 Page 15
