The Rock Rats gt-11

by Ben Bova

  He ducked through the hatch and into the cramped, overheated bridge. Fogerty overflowed the pilot’s seat, one hand clenching half a meat pie; most of the rest of it was spattered over his chins and his coveralls front. He was globulously lumpy, stretching the faded orange fabric of his coveralls so much that McPherson was reminded of an overripe pumpkin. He smelled overripe, too, and the additional spicy aroma from the meat pie made McPherson’s stomach churn. Reckon I don’t smell much better, McPherson told himself, trying to keep an even temper.

  Fogerty half-turned in the creaking chair and jabbed a thick finger excitedly toward the main display screen. McPherson saw the two-kilometer-long chunk of rock they had just claimed, dark and lumpy, and a silvery spacecraft that looked too sleek and new to be a prospector’s ship.

  “A mining team?” Fogerty half-suggested.

  “Out here already?” McPherson snapped. “We just sent in our claim. We haven’t contacted any miners.”

  “Well, there they are,” said Fogerty.

  “That’s not a miner’s ship.”

  Fogerty shrugged. “Shall I give ’em permission to come aboard?”

  McPherson had to squeeze past his partner’s bulk to get into the right-hand seat. “Who in blazes are they? And what are they doing here? With the whole Belt to poke into, why are they sticking their noses into our claim?”

  Fogerty grinned at his partner. “We could ask ’em.”

  Grumbling, McPherson flicked on the communications channel. “This is The Lady of the Lake. Identify yourselves, please.”

  The screen swirled with color momentarily, then a darkly bearded man’s face took form. He looked vaguely oriental to McPherson: high cheekbones, hooded eyes.

  “This is Shanidar. We have a boxful of videodisks that we’ve viewed so often we can lip-synch the dialogue. Do you have any to trade?”

  “What’ve you got?” Fogerty asked eagerly. “How recent are they?”

  “Private stuff, mostly. Muy piquante, if you know what I mean. You can’t get them through the normal channels. They were brand-new when we left Selene, six months ago.”

  Before McPherson could reply, Fogerty broke into a dimpled, many-chinned smile. “We can swap you one-for-one, but our stuff is older.”

  “That’s okay,” said the bearded man. “It’ll be new to us.”

  “What’re you doing out here?” McPherson demanded. “We claimed this rock, you know.”

  “We’re not prospecting any more,” came the reply. “We’ve hit our jackpot and made a deal with Humphries Space Systems to process the ores. Got our money in the bank. We just thought we’d unload these videodisks before we head back home.”

  “Sure,” said Fatso. “Why not?”

  McPherson felt uneasy. But he saw the eager look on his partner’s fleshy face. After fourteen months in the Belt they had barely cleared the payments on their ship. They needed another week, at least, to negotiate a mining contract with one of the corporations. McPherson had no intention of accepting the first offer they received. And the prices for ores just kept going down; they’d be lucky if they netted enough to live on for six months before they had to go out again.

  “Okay,” he said reluctantly. “Come on over and dock at our main airlock.”

  Fogerty nodded happily, like a little kid anticipating Christmas.

  CHAPTER 7

  Amanda thought again about how housekeeping on Ceres—inside Ceres, actually—was different from living on a ship. Not that their living quarters were that much more spacious: the single room that she and Lars shared was a slightly enlarged natural cave in the asteroid, its walls, floor, and ceiling smoothed and squared off. It wasn’t much bigger than the cubic volume they had aboard Starpower. And there was the dust, always the dust. In Ceres’s minuscule gravity, every time you moved, every time you took a step, you stirred up the everlasting dust. It was invisibly fine inside the living quarters, thanks to the air blowers. Once they moved up to the orbiting habitat, the dust would be a thing of the past, thank god.

  In the meantime, though, it was a constant aggravation. You couldn’t keep anything really clean: even dishes stored in closed cupboards had to be scoured under air jets before you could eat off them. The dust made you sneeze; half the time Amanda and most of the other residents wore filter masks. She worried that her face would bear permanent crease marks from the masks.

  But living in Ceres offered something that shipboard life could not duplicate. Company. Society. Other people who could visit you or you could drop in on. Strolls through the corridors where you could see neighbors and say hello and stop for a chat. The corridors were narrow and twisting, it was true; natural lava tubes through the rock that had been smoothed off enough for people lo shuffle through in a low-gravity parody of walking. Their walls and ceilings were still curved and unfinished raw stone; it was more like walking through a tunnel than a real corridor. And there was the dust, of course. Always the dust. It was worse in the tunnels, so bad that everyone wore face masks when they went for a stroll.

  Lately, though, people’s attitudes had changed noticeably. There was an aura of expectation in the air, almost like the slowly building excitement that the year-end holiday season had brought when she’d been a child on Earth. The habitat was growing visibly, week by week. Everyone could see it swinging through the sky on their wallscreens. We’re going to live up there, everyone was saying to themselves. We’re going to move to a new, clean home.

  When Lars had first told Amanda about the orbiting habitat, she’d been worried about the radiation. One advantage of living inside a big rock was that it shielded you from the harsh radiation sleeting in from the Sun and deep space. But Lars had shown her how the habitat would use the same magnetic radiation shielding that spacecraft used, only stronger, better. She studied the numbers herself and became convinced that the habitat would be just as safe as living underground—as long as the magnetic shielding worked.

  Lars was up on the unfinished habitat again with Niles Ripley. He and the Ripper were working on a recalcitrant water recycler that refused to operate as programmed. Meanwhile, she was running the office, routing prospectors’ requests for supplies and equipment to the proper inventory system, and checking to make certain that the material actually was loaded aboard a ship and sent to the people who had requested it.

  Then there was the billing procedure. Miners were usually no problem: most of them were on corporate payrolls, so whatever they owed could be deducted automatically from their paychecks. Prospectors, though, were something else. The independents had no paychecks to deduct from. They were still searching for an asteroid to mine, waiting to find a jackpot. Yet they needed air to breathe and food to eat just as much as did miners working a claim. At Lars’s insistence, Amanda ran a tab for most of them, waiting for the moment when they struck it rich.

  Strange, Amanda thought, how the system works. The prospectors go out dreaming of making a fortune. Once they find a likely asteroid they have to make a deal to mine its ores. That’s when they realize that they’ll be lucky if they can break even. The prices for metals and minerals roller coasted up and down—mostly down—depending on the latest strikes; the commodities markets Earthside were hotbeds of frantic speculation, despite the sternest efforts of the Global Economic Council to keep things under control.

  Yet there were just enough really big finds to keep the stars in the prospectors’ eyes. They kept doggedly searching for the one asteroid that would allow them to retire in wealth and ease.

  The real way to make a fortune, Amanda had learned, was to be a supplier to the prospectors and miners who seemed to be rushing out to the Belt in steadily increasing numbers. They did the searching and the finding, the mining and refining. But the people here on Ceres were the ones who were getting rich. Lars had already amassed a small fortune with Helvetia Ltd. Humphries’s people were piling up bigger and bigger sums in their bank accounts, too. Even the twins, with their virtual reality bordello, were millionaires
several times over.

  The real profits, though, went to the corporations. Astro and Humphries Space Systems made most of the money; only a small percentage of it stays with people like Lars and me, Amanda knew.

  Amanda rubbed at the aching back of her neck. It had become stiff from staring at the wallscreen for so many hours on end. With a tired sigh, she decided to call it a day. Lars would be coming in soon. Time to scrub up and put on a clean set of coveralls for dinner and maybe take a walk to the Pub afterward. Before shutting down for the day, though, Amanda flicked through the list of incoming messages awaiting her attention. Routine. Nothing that needed immediate attention.

  Then she noticed that one of the messages had come in not from the ships plying the Belt, but from Selene. From the headquarters of Humphries Space Systems.

  Her first instinct was to ignore it. Or perhaps delete it altogether. Then she saw that it was addressed to Lars, not her. It was not marked personal, and did not bear Martin Humphries’s signature. No harm in reading it, Amanda thought. It won’t be a two-way conversation, face-to-face. She glanced at her mirror by the bed, across the narrow room. I’m certainly not dressed to impress anyone, she thought. But even if it is from Martin, it was recorded and sent hours ago. Whoever sent it won’t see me.

  She didn’t bother to take off her filter mask as she called up the message from HSS.

  The wallscreen flickered momentarily, then showed an attractive dark-haired woman with the kind of sculpted high cheekbones that Amanda had always envied. The ID line beneath her image read diane verwoerd, special assistant to the ceo humphries space systems.

  “Mr. Fuchs,” said Verwoerd’s image, “I have been authorized by the management of Humphries Space Systems to engage in negotiations for buying out Helvetia Limited. The buyout would include your supply depot, inventory, and all the services that Helvetia performs. I’m sure you’ll find our terms very attractive. Please call me at your earliest convenience. Thank you.”

  The screen blanked to the HSS logo against a neutral gray background. Amanda stared at it, seeing the woman’s image, hearing her words. Buy us out! We could go back to Earth! We could live well and Lars could even go back to graduate school and get his doctorate!

  She was so excited that she paid no attention to the message from the supply ship that was supposed to make rendezvous with The Lady of the Lake.

  CHAPTER 8

  “Don’t you see, Lars?” Amanda said eagerly. “We could go home! To Earth! You could go back to your studies and get your doctorate.”

  Fuchs was sitting on the edge of their bed, his thin slash of a mouth turned down grimly, Amanda beside him. Together they had watched Diane Verwoerd’s full message offering him ten million international dollars for his supply service and its facilities on Ceres. “It’s a bribe,” he growled.

  “It’s the opportunity of a lifetime, darling. Ten million inter-national dollars! Think of it! Ten million, free and clear, just like that!” She snapped her fingers. “For nothing more than signing your name.”

  “And getting out of Ceres.”

  “And returning to Earth. We could go to London, or Geneva, if you prefer.”

  “It’s a bribe,” he repeated stubbornly.

  Amanda took both his big, callused hands in hers. “Lars, darling, we can go back to Earth and live comfortably wherever you choose. We can begin a new life together.”

  He said nothing, simply stared at the blanked wallscreen as if he were looking down the muzzle of a gun. “Lars, we could have children.”

  That stirred him. He turned his head to look into her eyes. “I want to have a baby, Lars. Your baby. We can’t do that here, you know that.”

  He nodded bleakly. “The gravity…” he muttered.

  “If we lived on Earth, we could lead normal lives. We could raise a family.”

  “The frozen zygotes are waiting for us at Selene,” he said.

  She slid her arms around his neck. “We won’t need them, Lars. Not if we live on Earth like normal people.”

  He started to pull her to him, but then something crossed his face. His expression changed; he looked almost as if he were in pain.

  “They want us to leave Ceres.”

  “And you want to stay?” Amanda had meant it to be joking; lighthearted. But it sounded bitter, almost like nagging, even to her.

  “The prospectors. The miners,” he said, almost whispering. “All the others rock rats out here… our friends, our neighbors.”

  “What of them?”

  “We’d have to leave them.”

  “We’ll make new friends. They’ll understand.”

  He pulled away from her and got to his feet. “But we’ll be leaving them to him, to Humphries.”

  “What of it?”

  “Once we’re out of his way, once he’s bought us out, he’ll be the only source for supplies in the entire Belt. No one else would dare to compete against him.”

  “Astro might. Pancho—”

  “He’s on Astro’s board of directors. Sooner or later he’ll take control of Astro, too. He’ll control everything! And everybody.”

  Amanda had known all along that her husband would stick on this point. She had tried to keep it out of her mind, but there it was, in the open, standing between them.

  “Lars,” she said slowly, picking her words with care, “whatever feelings Martin may have once had for me are long gone, I’m certain. There is no need to view this as a competition between you and he.”

  He walked away from her, paced the little room in six strides and then turned back toward her, a barrel-chested bear of a man dressed in faded dark gray coveralls, his broad heavy-featured face glowering with distrust.

  “But it is a competition, Amanda. Between Humphries Space Systems and Helvetia Limited. Between him and Astro, actually. We’re caught in the middle of it, whether we like it or not.”

  “But we can get out of it,” she said. “You can take me back to Earth and we’ll be rid of Humphries and Astro and the rock rats for good.”

  He strode to the bed and dropped to his knees before her. “I want to take you back home, dearest. I know how much you want to be away from here, how brave you’ve been to stay here with me—”

  “I love you, Lars,” she said, reaching out to tousle his dark hair. “I want to be with you wherever you are.”

  He sighed heavily. “Then we must remain here. At least for a little while longer.”

  “But why…?”

  “Because of them. The rock rats. Our neighbors and friends here on Ceres. We can’t leave them to Humphries.”

  Amanda felt her eyes misting over. “We can’t let this opportunity pass us by, Lars. Please, please accept their offer.”

  He started to shake his head stubbornly, but then he noticed the tears in her eyes. He got to his feet and sat heavily beside her again on the edge of the bed.

  “Amanda, dearest, I can’t turn my back on all the people here. They trust me. They need me.”

  “I need you, too, Lars,” Amanda said. “We’ve been out here for five years. I haven’t complained once, have I?”

  “No, you haven’t,” he admitted. “You’ve been very wonderful.”

  “I’m asking you now, Lars. I’m begging you. Please accept this offer and take me back home.”

  He stared into her glistening eyes for long, silent moments.

  She could see that he was thinking, searching for some way to do what she wanted without feeling that he had betrayed the other rock rats in the Belt.

  At last he said, “Let me talk to Pancho.”

  “Pancho? Why?”

  “To see if Astro will make a similar offer.”

  “And if they won’t?”

  With obvious, painful reluctance, Fuchs said, “Then we’ll accept Humphries’s offer.”

  “You will?”

  He nodded, smiling sadly. “Yes, I’ll take his money and leave the Belt and bring you home to Earth.”

  DOSSIER: JOYCE TAKAMINE<
br />
  The name on her birth certificate read Yoshiko Takamine, but once she started at public school everyone called her Joyce. Her parents didn’t mind; they were fourth-generation Americans, with only a vague feeling of nostalgia for the family’s roots in Japan. The first time one of her schoolmates called her a “Jap,” Joyce thought she meant “Jewish American Princess. ”

  Father moved them to the hills above Sausalito, but when the greenhouse floods wiped out most of the electrical power generation plants in the Bay area, they were plunged into darkness along with everyone else. Those were desperate times, with half the county thrown out of their jobs. No electricity, no work. Joyce’s class held their senior prom by candlelight, and there was talk of bringing in drilling companies to bore wells deep enough to tap the natural gas that lay kilometers below-ground.

  All the kids had to find some kind of job to help support the family. Joyce did what her great-grandmother had done more than a century earlier: migrant stoop labor in the farms down in the rich valleys of California. The floods hadn’t reached that far inland, although prolonged drought was searing the orchards and vineyards mercilessly. It was hard, bitter work, picking fruits and vegetables beneath the hot sun while grim-faced men armed with shotguns kept on patrol against wandering bands of starving looters. They expected casual sex from the workers. Joyce quickly learned that it was better to please them than to go hungry.

  When Joyce returned home that winter, she was shocked to see how much her parents had aged. An epidemic of dengue fever had swept the coast and even reached into the hills where they lived. Her mother sobbed softly at night; her father stared into the hot cloudless sky, racked with bouts of coughing that left him gasping for breath. When he looked at his daughter he seemed ashamed, as if all this devastation, all this ruination of the family’s plans, was his fault alone.