The Precipice (Asteroid Wars)

by Ben Bova

  Her eyes went wide. Her mouth opened, but she said nothing. Dan snapped his fingers and the screen went blank. Another snap and it folded back into its niche in the desk’s gleaming rosewood top.

  Leaning back in his chair, Dan closed his eyes. He tried to close his mind against the memories, but that was impossible.

  It was all going to be so damned great Okay, a century or two of global warming would lead to a greenhouse cliff. Not a gradual warmup but a sudden, abrupt change in the world’s climate. All that latent heat stored in the oceans would pour into the atmosphere. Ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica melting away. Sea levels shooting up over a decade or two. Big storms and lots of them. Climate shifts turning croplands into deserts.

  So what? We’ll use the resources of space to solve all those problems. Energy? We’ll build solar power satellites, beam energy from space to wherever it’s needed. Raw materials? We’ll mine the Moon and the asteroids; there’s more natural resources in space than the whole Earth can provide. Food production?

  Well, that would be a tough one. We all knew that But with enough energy and enough raw materials we could irrigate the croplands that were being desiccated by the climate shift.

  Yeah, sure. And when half the world’s major cities got flooded out, what did we do? What could we do? When the electrical power grid got shattered, what did we do? When earthquakes and tsunamis wiped out the heart of Japan’s industrial capacity, what did we do? Diddley-squat. When this quake flattened the midwest, what did we do? We tried to help the survivors and Jane got herself killed in the attempt.

  The office door banged open and a huge, red-bearded man pushed in, carrying an ornately-carved teak tray laden with steaming dishes. In his massive hands the tray looked like a little child’s toy.

  “Teresa says you’ve got to eat,” he announced in a high, sweet tenor as he set the tray on Dan’s desk.

  “I told her I’m not hungry.”

  “You can’t fookin’ starve yourself. Eat something.”

  Dan glanced at the tray. A steaming bowl of soup, a salad, a main course hidden under a stainless steel dome, a carafe of coffee. No wine. Nothing alcoholic.

  He pushed the tray toward the red-haired giant. “You eat it, George.”

  Pulling one of the upholstered chairs up close to the desk, Big George looked his boss in the eye and pushed the tray back toward Randolph.

  “Eat,” he said. “It’s good for ya.”

  Dan stared back at George Ambrose. He’d known Big George since he’d been a fugitive on the Moon, hiding out from the Selene City authorities with a handful of other free souls who styled themselves the Lunar Underground. Big George was Dan’s personal bodyguard now; he wore custom-tailored suits instead of patched coveralls. But he still looked like a barely-tamed frontiersman: big, shaggy, the kind of man who could gleefully pound your head down into your ribcage with no personal malice at all.

  “Tell you what,” Dan said, feeling a reluctant smile bend his lips a little. “I’ll split it with you.”

  George grinned back at him. “Good thinking, boss.”

  They ate in silence for several minutes, George gobbling the entire main course, which turned out to be a thick slab of prime rib. Dan took a few spoonfuls of soup and nibbled at the salad.

  “Better than the old days, huh?” George said, still chewing prime rib. “Fookin’ soyburgers and recycled piss for water.”

  Dan ignored the younger man’s attempt to jolly him. “Has Teresa gone home?” he asked.

  “Nope.”

  Nettled, Dan glanced at his wristwatch. “She’s not my nursemaid, double-damn it. I don’t want her hovering over me like—”

  “That Humphries bloke is still waitin’ to see you,” George said.

  “Now? He’s out there now? It’s almost nine o’clock, for chrissakes. What’s wrong with him? Is he stuck here because of the storm? Doesn’t Teresa have the smarts to put him up in one of the guest suites?”

  George shook his shaggy head. “He said he’ll wait until you’re ready to see ‘im. He did have an appointment, y’know.”

  Dan let his breath out in a weary sigh. I just got back from the funeral and they expect me to stick to a schedule made out weeks ago.

  “Teresa says he’s makin’ her nervous.”

  “Nervous?”

  “He’s comin’ on to her. I can see it meself.”

  Frowning, Dan muttered, ‘Teresa can take care of herself.”

  “The voice of experience?” George grinned.

  “He’s been hitting on her all the time he’s been waiting for me?”

  “Want me to shoo ‘im off?” George asked.

  For a moment Dan relished the image of George hustling his visitor out of the building. But then he realized that the man would simply come back tomorrow. I’ll have to get back to business, he told himself. Can’t avoid it forever.

  “Take the tray out,” he said to Big George, “and show this Humphries guy in.”

  George smacked his lips. “I can bring in dessert and coffee.”

  “Fine,” Dan said, unwilling to argue. “Do that.”

  Grinning, George scooped up the crumb-littered tray in one hand and started for the door. Dan saw that the desktop was sprinkled with crumbs, too. Annoyed, he brushed them to the carpet.

  Teresa appeared at the door. “Mr. Martin Humphries,” she announced. She looked tense, Dan thought. Humphries must have really rattled her.

  Martin Humphries looked quite young. He was on the small side, a couple of centimeters shorter than Teresa, and he seemed soft, with rounded shoulders and a waistline that was already getting thick, despite the careful drape of his burgundy blazer. He seemed to radiate energy, though, as he strode confidently across the office toward Dan’s desk.

  Dan got to his feet and extended his hand across the desk.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said, making himself smile.

  Humphries took Dan’s hand in a firm grip. “I understand,” he replied. “I’m sorry to intrude on your grief.”

  His eyes told Dan that the words were nothing more than an expected ritual. Martin Humphries’s face was round, almost boyish. But his eyes were diamond-hard, cold and gray as the storm-lashed sea outside the window.

  As they sat down, George re-entered the office bearing a tray of pastries and the same carafe of coffee, with a pair of china cups and saucers alongside it. For all his size, Big George walked with the lightfooted step of a dancer—or a cat burglar. Neither Dan nor Humphries said a word as George deftly deposited the tray on the desk and swiftly, silently left the office.

  “I hope I haven’t kept you from your dinner,” Dan said, gesturing to the pastries.

  Humphries ignored the tray. “No problem. I enjoyed chatting with your secretary.”

  “Did you?” Dan said thinly.

  “She’s quite a piece of work. I’d like to hire her away from you.”

  “Not a chance,” Dan snapped.

  With a careless shrug, Humphries said, “That’s not important. I came here to talk to you about the current situation.”

  Dan waved toward the window. “You mean the greenhouse cliff?”

  “I mean the way we can help the global economy to recover from the staggering losses it’s sustained—and make ourselves a potful of profits while we’re doing it.”

  Dan felt his brows hike up. He reached for one of the delicate little pastries, then decided to pour himself a cup of coffee first. Dan’s firm, Astro Manufacturing Inc., was close to bankruptcy and the whole financial community knew it

  “I could use a potful of profits,” he said carefully.

  Humphries smiled, but Dan saw no warmth in it.

  “What do you have in mind?” he asked.

  “The Earth is in chaos because of this sudden climate shift,” said Humphries.

  “The greenhouse cliff, yes,” Dan agreed.

  “Selene and the other lunar communities are doing rather well, though.”

&nb
sp; Dan nodded. “On the Moon there’s no shortage of energy or raw materials. They’ve got everything they need. They’re pretty much self-sufficient now.”

  “They could be helping the Earth,” said Humphries. “Building solar power satellites. Sending raw materials to Earth. Even manufacturing products that people down here need but can’t get because their own factories have been destroyed.”

  “We’ve tried to do that,” Dan said. “We’re trying it now. It’s not enough.”

  Humphries nodded. “That’s because you’ve been limiting yourself to the resources you can obtain from the Moon.”

  “And the NEAs,” Dan added.

  “The near-Earth asteroids, yes.” Humphries nodded as if he’d expected that response.

  “So what are you suggesting?”

  Humphries glanced over his shoulder, as if afraid that someone might be eavesdropping. “The Belt,” he said, almost in a whisper.

  Dan looked at Humphries for a long, silent moment. Then he leaned his bead back and laughed, long and loud and bitterly.

  SPACE STATION GALILEO

  They were gaining on her.

  Still wearing the spacesuit, Pancho Lane zipped weightlessly through the lab module, startling the Japanese technicians as she propelled herself headlong down its central aisle with a flick of her strong hands against the lab equipment every few meters. Behind her she could hear the men yelling angrily.

  If any of those dip-brains have the smarts to suit up and go EVA to head me off, she thought, I’m toast.

  It had started out as a game, a challenge. Which of the pilots aboard the station could breathe vacuum the longest? There were six Astro Corporation rocket jockeys waiting for transport back to Selene City: four guys, Pancho herself, and the new girl, Amanda Cunningham.

  Pancho had egged them on, of course. That was part of the sting. They’d all been hanging around the galley, literally floating when they didn’t anchor themselves down with the footloops fastened to the floor around the table and its single pipestem-slim leg. The conversation had gotten around to vacuum breathing: how long can you hold your breath in space without damaging yourself?

  “The record is four minutes,” one of the guys had claimed. “Harry Kirschbaum.”

  “Harry Kirschbaum? Who the hell is he? I never heard of him.”

  “He died young.”

  They all had laughed.

  Amanda, who had just joined the team fresh from tech school in London, had the face of an angelic schoolgirl with soft curly blonde hair and big innocent blue eyes; but her curvaceous figure had all the men panting. She said, “I had to readjust my helmet once, during a school exercise in the vacuum tank.”

  “How long did that take?”

  She shrugged, and even Pancho noticed the way it made her coveralls jiggle. “Ten seconds, perhaps. Fifteen.”

  Pancho didn’t like Amanda. She was a little tease who affected an upperclass British accent. One look at her and the men forgot about Pancho, which was a shame because a couple of the guys were really nice.

  Pancho was lean and stringy, with the long slim legs of her African heritage. Her skin was no darker than a good tan would produce back in west Texas, but her face was just plain ordinary, with what she considered a lantern jaw and squinty little commonplace brown eyes. She always kept her hair cut so short that the rumor had gone around that she was a lesbian. Not true. But she had a man’s strength in her long, muscled arms and legs, and she never let a man beat her in anything—unless she wanted to.

  The transfer buggy that was slated to take them all back to Selene was running late. Cracked nozzle on one of the thrusters, and the last thing the flight controllers wanted was a derelict transfer vehicle carrying six rocket jocks; they would be rebuilding the buggy forty-five ways from Sunday while they coasted Moonward.

  So the six of them waited in the galley and talked about vacuum breathing. One of the guys claimed he’d sucked vacuum for a full minute.

  “That explains your IQ,” said his buddy.

  “Nobody’s made it for a full minute.”

  “Sixty seconds,” the man maintained stubbornly.

  “Your lungs would explode.”

  “I’m telling you, sixty seconds. On the dot.”

  “No damage?”

  He hesitated, suddenly shamefaced.

  “Well?”

  With an attempt at a careless shrug, he admitted, “Left lung collapsed.”

  They snickered at him.

  “I could prob’ly do it for sixty seconds,” Pancho announced.

  “You?” The man nearest her guffawed. “Now, Mandy here, she’s got the lung capacity for it.”

  Amanda smiled shyly. But when she inhaled they all noticed it.

  Pancho hid her anger at their ape-man attitude. “Ninety seconds,” she said flatly.

  “Ninety seconds? Impossible!”

  “You willin’ to bet on that?” Pancho asked.

  “Nobody can stand vacuum for ninety seconds. It’d blow your eyeballs out.”

  Pancho smiled toothily. “How much money are you ready to put against it?”

  “How can we collect off you after you’re dead?”

  “Or brain-damaged.”

  “She’s already brain-damaged if she thinks she can suck vacuum for ninety seconds.”

  “I’ll put my money in an escrow account for the five of you to withdraw in case of my death or incapacitation,” Pancho said calmly.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Pointing to the phone on the wall, next to the sandwich dispenser, she said, “Electronic funds transfer. Takes all of two minutes to set up.”

  They fell silent.

  “How much?” Pancho said, watching their eyes.

  “A week’s pay,” snapped one of the men.

  “A month’s pay,” Pancho said.

  “A whole month?”

  “Why not? You’re so freakin’ sure I can’t do it, why not bet a month’s pay? I’ll put five months worth of mine in the escrow account, so you’ll each be covered.”

  “A month’s pay.”

  In the end they had agreed to it. Pancho knew that they figured she’d chicken out after twenty-thirty seconds and they’d have her money without her killing herself.

  She figured otherwise.

  So she used the galley phone to call her bank in Lubbock. A few taps on the phone’s touchtone keypad and she had set up a new account and dumped five months’ pay into it. All five of the other jocks watched the phone’s tiny screen to make certain Pancho wasn’t playing any tricks.

  Then each of them in turn called their banks and deposited a month’s pay into Pancho’s new account. Pancho listened to the singsong beeping of the phone as she laid her plans for the coming challenge.

  Pancho suggested they use the airlock down at the far end of the maintenance module. “We don’t want some science geek poppin’ in on us and gettin’ so torqued he punches the safety alarm,” she said.

  They all agreed easily. So they floated through two lab modules and the shabby-looking habitat module where the long-term researchers were housed and finally made it to the cavernous maintenance unit. There, by the airlock, Pancho chose a spacesuit from the half-dozen standard models lined up against the bulkhead, size large because of her height She quickly wriggled into it. They even helped her put on the boots and check out the suit’s systems.

  Pancho pulled the helmet over her head and clicked the neck seal shut.

  “Okay,” she said, through the helmet’s open visor. “Who’s gonna time me?”

  “I will,” said one of the guys, raising his forearm to show an elaborate digital wristwatch.

  “You go in the lock,” said the man beside him, “pump it down and open the outside hatch.”

  “And you watch me through the port,” Pancho said, tapping the thick round window on the airlock’s inner hatch with gloved knuckles.

  “Check. When I say go, you open your visor.”

  “And I’ll time you,” s
aid the guy with the fancy wristwatch.

  Pancho nodded inside the helmet.

  Amanda looked concerned. “Are you absolutely certain that you want to go through with this? You could kill yourself, Pancho.”

  “She can’t back out now!”

  “Not unless she wants to forfeit five months’ pay.”

  “But seriously,” Amanda said. “I’m wiling to call off the bet. After all—”

  Pancho reached out and tousled her curly blonde hair. “Don’t sweat it, Mandy.”

  With that, she stepped through the open airlock hatch and slid down her visor. She waved to them as they swung the hatch shut. She heard the pump start to clatter; the sound quickly dwindled as the air was sucked out of the metalwalled chamber. When the telltale light by the inner hatch turned red, Pancho touched the button that slid the outer hatch open.

  For a moment she forgot what she was up to as she drank in the overwhelming beauty of the Earth spread out before her dazzled eyes. Brilliantly bright, intensely blue oceans and enormous sweeps of clouds so white it almost hurt to look upon them. It was glorious, an overwhelming panorama that never failed to make her heart beat faster.

  You’ve got work to do, girl, she reminded herself sternly.

  Turning to the inner hatch, she could see all five of their faces clustered around the little circular port. None of them had the sense to find a radio, Pancho knew, so she gestured to her sealed helmet visor with a gloved finger. They all nodded vigorously and the guy with the fancy wristwatch held it up where Pancho could see it.

  The others backed away from the port while the guy stared hard at his wristwatch. He held up four fingers, then three…

  Counting down, Pancho understood.

  … two, one. He jabbed a finger like a make-believe pistol at Pancho, the signal that she was to lift her visor now.

  Instead, Pancho launched herself out the airlock, into empty space.

  LA GUAIRA

  Martin Humphries looked irked. “What’s so funny about the Asteroid Belt?”

  Dan shook his head. “Not funny, really. Just… I didn’t expect that from you. You’ve got a reputation for being a hard-headed businessman.”

  “I’d like to believe that I am,” Humphries said.