The Rock Rats gt-11

by Ben Bova

  Harbin hoped that Fuchs would come to the asteroid where he himself planned to he in wait.

  It will be good to finish this fight personally, he told himself. Once it’s over, I’ll be wealthy enough to retire. With Diane.

  Diane Verwoerd spent a sleepless night worrying about the ordeal she faced. I’ll bear Martin’s child without really being impregnated by him. I’ll be a virgin mother, almost.

  The humor of the situation failed to ease her fears. Unable to sleep, she went to her computer and searched for every scrap of information she could locate about cloning: mammals, sheep, pigs, monkeys, apes—humans. Most nations on Earth forbade human cloning. The ultraconservative religious organizations such as the New Morality and the Sword of Islam jailed and even executed scientists for merely doing research in cloning. Yet there were laboratories, private facilities protected by the very wealthy, where such experiments were done. Most attempts at cloning failed. The lucky ones suffered spontaneous abortions early. Less lucky women died in childbirth, or gave birth to stillborns.

  My chances for presenting Martin with a healthy son are about one in a hundred, Verwoerd saw. My chances for dying are better than that.

  She shuddered, but she knew she would go through with it. Because being the mother of Martin Humphries’s son was worth all the risk to her. I’ll get a seat on the board of directors for this. With Dorik to protect me, there’s no telling how far I can go.

  Humphries awoke that morning and smiled. It’s all coming together nicely, he told himself as he got out of bed and padded into his tiled lavatory. Amanda’s here without Fuchs. By the time the conference is over he’ll be totally cut off from her and everybody else. I’ll have the chance to show her what kind of life she can have with me.

  The mirror above the sink showed him a puffy-faced, bleary-eyed unshaven image. Will she want me? he asked himself. I can give her everything, everything a woman could possibly desire. But will she turn me down again? Will she stick with Fuchs?

  Not when the man is dead, he thought. Then she’ll have no choice. The competition will be over.

  His hands trembled as he reached for his electric toothbrush. Frowning at this weakness, Humphries opened his medicine cabinet and rummaged through the vials lined up there in alphabetical order. A cure for every malady, he said to himself. Most of them were recreational drugs, cooked up by some of the bright researchers he kept on his payroll. I need something to calm me down, Humphries realized. Something to get me through this conference without losing my temper, without making Amanda afraid of me.

  As he pawed through the medicine cabinet, the image of Diane Verwoerd’s troubled, frightened face flashed in his mind. I wiped her superior smile away, he thought, relishing the memory of her surprise and fear. He tried to remember how many women had carried clones of his, all to no avail. Several had died; one had produced a monstrosity that lived less than a day. Diane’s strong, he told himself. She’ll come through for me. And if she doesn’t—he shrugged. There are always other women for the job.

  He found the little blue bottle that he was looking for. Just one, he said silently; just enough to get me through the meeting on an even keel. Later on, I’ll need something else, something stimulating. But not yet. Not this morning. Later, when Amanda’s here with me.

  Pancho dressed carefully for the conference in a pumpkin orange silk blouse and slacks with a neat patchwork jacket embellished with highlights of glitter. This is an important conference and I’m representing Astro Corporation, she told herself. Better look like a major player. She thought she would be the first one to show up for the conference, but when she got there Doug Stavenger was already standing by the big window that swept along one wall of the spacious room, looking relaxed in an informal cardigan jacket of teal blue.

  “Hello,” he called cheerfully. Gesturing toward the side table laden with coffee urns and pastries, he asked, “Have you had your breakfast?”

  “I could use some coffee,” Pancho said, heading for the table.

  The conference room was part of the suite of offices that Selene maintained in one of the twin towers that supported the expansive dome of the Grand Plaza. Gazing through the window down into the Plaza itself, Pancho saw the lovingly maintained lawn and flowering shrubbery, the fully-leafed trees dotting the landscape. There was the big swimming pool, built to attract tourists, and the outdoor theater with its gracefully curved shell of lunar concrete. Not many people on the walks this early in the morning, she noticed. Nobody in the pool.

  Stavenger smiled at her. “Pancho, are you seriously going to try to hammer out your differences with Humphries, or is this conference going to be a waste of time?”

  Pancho grinned back at him as she picked up a coffee cup and started to fill it with steaming black brew. “Astro is willing to agree to a reasonable division of the Belt. We never wanted a fight; it was Humphries who started the rough stuff.”

  Stavenger pursed his lips. “I guess it all depends, then, on how you define the word ’reasonable.’”

  “Hey, look,” Pancho said. “There’s enough raw materials in the Belt to satisfy ever’body. Plenty for all of us. It’s Humphries who wants to take it all.”

  “Are you talking about me, Pancho?”

  They turned and saw Humphries striding through the door, looking relaxed and confident in a dark blue business suit.

  “Nothing I haven’t said to your face, Humpy, old buddy,” Pancho replied.

  Humphries raised an eyebrow. “I’d appreciate it if you referred to me as Mr. Humphries when the other delegates get here.”

  “Sensitive?”

  “Yes. In return for your consideration I’ll try to refrain from using phrases such as ‘guttersnipe’ or ‘grease monkey.’ ”

  Stavenger put a hand to his forehead. “This is going to be a lovely morning,” he groaned.

  Actually, the conference went along much more smoothly than Stavenger had feared. The other delegates arrived, and Humphries turned his attention to Amanda, who smiled politely at him but said very little. He seemed almost to be a different person when Fuchs’s wife was near: polite, considerate, earnestly trying to win her admiration, or at least her respect.

  Stavenger called the meeting to order, and everyone took seats along the polished oblong conference table. Pancho behaved like a proper corporate executive and Humphries was affable and cooperative. Each of them made an opening statement about how they wanted nothing more than peace and harmony in the Asteroid Belt. Willi Dieterling then said a few brief words about how important the resources of the Belt were to the people of Earth.

  “With so many millions homeless and hungry, with so much of our global industrial capacity wiped out, we desperately need the resources from the Belt,” he pleaded. “This fighting is disrupting the supply of raw materials that we need to recover from the climate catastrophe that has brought civilization to its knees.”

  Stavenger pointed out, “The people of Selene are ready to help as much as we can. We have industrial capacity here on the Moon, and we can help you to build factories and power-generation stations in Earth orbit.”

  It was Big George who ended the platitudes.

  “We all want peace and brotherhood,” he began, “but the painful truth is that people are killin’ each other out in the Belt.”

  Dieterling immediately replied, “The world government is prepared to offer Peacekeeping troops to you to help you maintain order in the Belt.”

  “No thanks!” George snapped. “We can maintain order for ourselves—” he turned to look squarely at Humphries “—if the corporations’ll stop sending killers to us.”

  “Corporations, plural?” Pancho asked. “Astro hasn’t sent any killers to the Belt.”

  “You’ve sent your share of goons, Pancho,” said George.

  “To protect our property!”

  Humphries made a hushing motion with both hands. “I presume you’re both referring to certain actions taken by employees of Humphries
Space Systems.”

  “Fookin’ right,” George blurted.

  With all eyes on him, Humphries said calmly, “It’s perfectly true that some of the people my corporation sent to Ceres have been… well, roughnecks.”

  “Murderers,” George muttered.

  “One man committed a murder, true enough,” Humphries conceded. “But he acted on his own. And he was punished for it swiftly enough.”

  “By Lars Fuchs, I understand,” said Dieterling.

  Humphries nodded. “Now we’re getting down to the crux of the problem.”

  “Wait a minute,” George interjected. “Let’s not start dumpin’ on Lars. Plenty of ships have been knocked off out in the Belt, and it was HSS that started it.”

  “That’s not true,” Humphries said.

  “Isn’t it? I was fookin’ attacked by one of your butcher boys. Took me arm off. Remember?”

  “We went through an IAA hearing over that. No one was able to prove it was one of my ships that attacked you.”

  “That doesn’t mean it wasn’t one of ’em, does it now?”

  Stavenger broke into the budding argument. “Unless we have concrete evidence, there’s no use throwing accusations around.”

  George glowered at him, but said nothing.

  “We do have concrete evidence,” Humphries resumed, with a swift glance at Amanda, “that Lars Fuchs has attacked ships, killed men, stolen supplies, and now he’s wiped out a base we were building on Vesta in a totally unwarranted and premeditated attack. He’s killed several dozen people. He’s the reason for all this violence out in the Belt and until he’s caught and put away, the violence will continue.”

  Absolute silence. Not one of the men or women seated around the conference table said a word in Fuchs’s defense. Not even Amanda, Humphries noted with unalloyed delight.

  CHAPTER 51

  The asteroid had no name. In the catalogue files it was merely 38-4002. Barely a kilometer long and half that at its widest, it was a dark carbonaceous body, a loose aggregation of pebble-sized chondrules, more like a beanbag than a solid rock. Fuchs had left one of his transceivers there weeks earlier; now he was returning to the asteroid to retrieve it and see what information Amanda had been able to beam to him.

  She’s gone to Selene, he kept repeating in his mind. To a conference. To Humphries. Without telling me. Without mentioning a word of it. He saw St. Claire’s face again as the man told him the news, almost smirking. Your wife didn’t tell you? he heard St. Claire ask, again and again. She never even mentioned it to you? It’s probably in the messages waiting for me, Fuchs told himself. Amanda must have put it into the latest batch of messages just before she left for Selene. For Humphries’s home. His guts knotted like fists every time he thought of it.

  Why didn’t she tell me beforehand? he raged silently. Why didn’t she discuss this with me before she decided to go? The answer seemed terribly clear: Because she didn’t want me to know she was going, didn’t want me to know she would be seeing Humphries.

  He wanted to bellow his rage and frustration, wanted to order his crew to race to Selene, wanted to take Amanda off the ship that was carrying her to the Moon and keep her safely with him. Too late, he knew. Far too late. She’s gone. She’s there by now. She’s left me.

  Nautilus’s propellant tanks were full. Fuchs felt a slight pang of conscience about taking the hydrogen and helium fuels from his onetime friend St. Claire, but he had no choice. He had left St. Claire on less than friendly terms, but nevertheless the Quebecois waited six full hours before putting in an emergency call for a tanker, as Fuchs had ordered him to do.

  Shaking his head as he sat in the command chair on Nautilus’s bridge, Fuchs wondered at how the human mind works. St. Claire knew I wouldn’t harm him. Yet he waited the full six hours before calling for help, giving me plenty of time to get safely away. Is he still my friend, despite everything? Or was he afraid I’d come back and fire on him? Pondering the question, Fuchs decided, most likely St. Claire was simply playing it safe. Our friendship is dead, a casualty of this war. I have no friends.

  I have no wife, either. I’ve driven her away. Driven her into Humphries’s territory, perhaps into his arms.

  The Asian navigator seated to one side of the bridge said to the woman who was piloting the ship, “The rock is in visual range.” He spoke in their native Mongol dialect, but Fuchs understood them. It’s not a rock, he corrected silently. It’s an aggregate.

  Glad to have something else to occupy his mind, Fuchs commanded his computer to put the telescopic view of the asteroid on his console screen. It was tumbling slowly along its long axis, end over end. As they approached the ’roid, Fuchs called up the computer image that showed where they had planted the transceiver.

  He hunched forward in his chair, studying the screen, trying to drive thoughts of Amanda out of his mind. It showed the telescope’s real-time image of the asteroid with the computer’s grid map superimposed over it. Strange, he thought. The contour map doesn’t match the visual image any more. There’s a new lump on the asteroid, not more than fifty meters from where the transceiver should be sitting.

  Fuchs froze the image and peered at it. The asteroids are dynamic, he knew. They’re constantly being dinged by smaller chunks of rock. An aggregate like this ’roid wouldn’t show a crater, necessarily. It’s like punching your fist into a beanbag chair: it just gives and reforms itself.

  But a lump? What would cause a lump?

  He felt an old, old fervor stirring inside him. Once he had been a planetary geochemist; he had first come out to the Belt to study the asteroids, not to mine them. A curiosity that he hadn’t felt in many years filled his mind. What could raise a blister on a carbonaceous chondritic asteroid?

  Dorik Harbin was half a day’s journey distant from the carbonaceous asteroid, even at the 0.5 g acceleration that was Shanidar’s best speed. He had dropped his ship into a grazing orbit around the jagged, striated body of nickel-iron where Fuchs had left one of his transceivers. His navigator was still sweating and wide-eyed with apprehension. His pale blond Scandinavian second-in-command had warned him several times that they were dangerously close to crashing into the rock.

  But Harbin wanted to be so close that an approaching ship would not spot him. He wished this chunk of metal was porous, like the carbonaceous rock where one of Fuchs’s other transceivers had been found. The crew there had simply detached their habitation module from the rest of their ship and buried it under a loose layer of rubble. Then the remainder of the ship, crewed only by a pilot and navigator, flew out of range. If Fuchs showed up there, all he would see would be an innocent pile of dirt. A Trojan horse, Harbin thought grimly, that would disgorge half a dozen armed troops while calling all of Harbin’s armada to close the trap.

  The Scandinavian was clearly unhappy orbiting mere meters from the scratched and pitted surface of the asteroid. “We are running the danger of having the hull abraded by the dust that hovers over the rock,” she warned Harbin.

  He looked into her wintry blue eyes. So like my own, he thought. Her Viking ancestors must have invaded my village some time in the past.

  “It’s dangerous!” she said sharply.

  Harbin made himself smile at her. “Match our orbit to the rock’s intrinsic spin. If Fuchs comes poking around here, I don’t him to see us until it’s too late for him to get away.”

  She started to protest, but Harbin cut her off with an upraised hand. “Do it,” he said.

  Clearly unhappy, she turned and relayed his order to the navigator.

  “Let’s break for lunch,” said Doug Stavenger.

  The others around the conference table nodded and pushed their chairs back. The tension in the room cracked. One by one, they got to their feet, stretched, took deep breaths. Stavenger heard vertebrae pop.

  Lunch had been laid on in another conference room, down the hall. As the delegates filed out into the corridor, Stavenger touched Dieterling’s arm, detaining him.
/>   “Have we accomplished anything?” he asked the diplomat.

  Dieterling glanced at the doorway, where his two nephews stood waiting for him. Then he turned back to Stavenger. “A little, I think.”

  “At least Humphries and Pancho are talking civilly to each other,” Stavenger said, with a rueful smile.

  “Don’t underestimate the benefits of civility,” said Dieterling. “Without it, nothing can be done.”

  “So?”

  With a heavy shrug, Dieterling answered, “It’s clear that the crux of the problem is this man Fuchs.”

  “Humphries certainly wants him out of the way.”

  “As long as he is rampaging out there in the Belt there can be no peace.”

  Stavenger shook his head. “But Fuchs started his… rampage, as you call it, in reaction to the violence that Humphries’s people began.”

  “That makes no difference now,” Dieterling said, dropping his voice almost to a whisper. “We can get Humphries and Ms. Lane to let bygones be bygones and forget the past. No recriminations, no acts of vengeance. They are willing to make a peaceful settlement.”

  “And stick to it, do you think?”

  “Yes. I’m certain of it. This war is becoming too expensive for them. They want it ended.”

  “They can end it this afternoon, if they want to.”

  “Only if Fuchs is stopped,” Dieterling said. “He is the wild card, the terrorist who is beyond ordinary political control.”

  Stavenger nodded glumly. “He’s got to be stopped, then. Dammit.”

  Humphries stepped into the washroom, relieved himself of a morning’s worth of coffee, then washed up and popped another tranquilizing pill. He thought of them as tranquilizers, even though he knew they were much more than that.