The Precipice (Asteroid Wars)

by Ben Bova

  “Drink?” Dan asked, without getting to his feet. A half-empty tumbler of something bubbly sat on the table before him.

  “What are you having?” Freiberg asked, sliding into the couch where it angled around the table’s end. The table was already set for two.

  “Ginger beer,” said Dan. “George turned me on to it. Nonalcoholic and it’s even good for the digestion.”

  Freiberg shrugged his rounded shoulders. “Okay, I’ll have the same.”

  George quickly pulled a brown bottle from the refrigerator, opened it, and poured Freiberg a glass of ginger beer.

  “Goes good with brandy, y’know,” he said as he handed the glass to Freiberg.

  The scientist accepted the glass wordlessly and George went back to his post by the door, folding his heavy arms over his massive chest like a professional bouncer.

  After a sip of his drink, Dan asked, “Might have known what?”

  Freiberg waved a hand around the compartment. “That you’d be living in the lap of luxury, even out here.”

  Dan laughed. “If you’ve got to go out into the wilderness, you might as well bring a few creature comforts with you.”

  “Kind of warm in here, though,” Freiberg complained mildly.

  Dan smiled gauntly at him. “You’re accustomed to living in the wild, Zack. I’m not.”

  “Yeah, guess so.” Freiberg glanced at the painting above Dan’s head: a little girl standing by a banyan tree. “Is that real?”

  “Holoprint,” said Dan. “A Vickrey.”

  “Nice.”

  “What’re you living in, out here?”

  “A tent,” said Freiberg.

  Nodding, Dan said, ‘That’s what I thought.”

  “It’s a pretty good tent, as tents go, but it’s nothing like this.” His eyes swept the dining area appreciatively. “How many other rooms in here?”

  “Just two: office and bedroom. King-sized bed, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “You like it, it’s yours.”

  “The holoprint?”

  “The van. The whole shebang. I’ll be leaving later this afternoon. If you can find somebody to drive George and me to the airstrip you can keep this for yourself.”

  Surprised, Freiberg blurted, “Can you afford to give it away? From what I’ve heard—”

  “For you, Zack,” Dan interrupted, “my last penny. If it comes to that.”

  Freiberg made a wry face. “You’re trying to bribe me.”

  “Yep. Why not?”

  With a resigned sigh, the scientist said, “All right, let me see this proposal you want me to look at”

  “Hey George,” Dan called, “bring me the notebook, will you?”

  Almost an hour later, Freiberg looked up from the notebook’s screen and said, “Well, I’m no rocket engineer, and what I know about fusion reactors you could put into a thimble, but I can’t find anything obviously wrong with this.”

  “Do you think it’ll work?” Dan asked earnestly.

  “How the hell should I know?” Freiberg snapped irritably. “Why in hell did you come all the way out here to ask my opinion on something you know is outside my expertise?”

  Dan hesitated for several heartbeats, then answered, “Because I can trust you, Zack. This guy Humphries is too slick for me to believe. All the experts I’ve contacted claim that this fusion rocket is workable, but how do I know that he hasn’t bought them off? He’s got something up his sleeve, some hidden agenda, and this fusion rocket idea is just the tip of the iceberg. I think he wants to get his paws on Astro.”

  “That’s a helluva mixture of metaphors,” Freiberg said, grinning despite himself.

  “Never mind the syntax. I don’t trust Humphries. I do trust you.”

  “Dan, my opinion doesn’t mean a damned thing here. You might as well ask George, or your cook.”

  Hunching forward over the table, Dan said, “You can talk the talk, Zack. You can contact the experts that Humphries has used and sound them out. You can talk to other people, the real specialists in these areas, and see what they think. They’d talk to you, Zack, and you’d understand what they’re saying. You can—”

  “Dan,” Freiberg said icily, “I’m working twenty-six hours a day already.”

  “I know,” Dan said. “I know.”

  Freiberg had thrown himself totally into the global effort to cut down on the greenhouse gas emissions given off by the world’s fossil-fueled power-generating stations, factories, and vehicles.

  Faced with disastrous shifts in climate due to the greenhouse warming, the nations of the world were belatedly, begrudgingly, attempting to remedy the cataclysm. Led by the Global Economic Council, manufacturers around the world were desperately trying to convert automobiles and other vehicles to electrical motors. But that meant trebling the global electricity-generating capacity, and fossil-fueled power plants were faster and cheaper to build than nuclear plants. There was still plenty of petroleum available, and the world’s resources of coal dwarfed the petroleum reserves. Fission-based power plants were still anathema because of the public’s fear of nuclear power. The new fusion generators were costly, complex, and also hindered by stubborn public resistance to anything nuclear.

  So more and more fossil-fueled power plants were being built, especially in the rising industrial nations such as China and South Africa. The GEC insisted that new plants sequester their carbon dioxide emissions, capture the dangerous greenhouse gas and pump it safely deep underground.

  Zachary Freiberg had devoted his life to the effort to mitigate the greenhouse disaster. He had taken an indefinite leave of absence from his position as chief scientist of Astro Manufacturing and criss-crossed the world, directing massive construction projects. His wife had left him, he had not seen his children in more than a year, his personal life was in tatters, but he was driven to do what he could, what he had to do, to help slow the greenhouse warming.

  “So how’s it going?” Dan asked him.

  Freiberg shook his head. “We’re shoveling shit against the tide. There’s just no way we can reduce greenhouse emissions enough to make a difference.”

  “But I thought—”

  “We’ve been working our butts off for… how long has it been? Ten years? Not even a dent. When we started, fossil fuel burning pumped six billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air every year. Know how much we’re putting out now?”

  Dan shook his head.

  “Five point three billion tons,” Freiberg said, almost angrily.

  Dan grunted.

  Pointing through the van’s window to the massive trucks rumbling by, Freiberg grumbled, “Yamagata’s trying to convert their whole fleet of trucks to electricity, but the Chinese are still using diesels. Some people just don’t give a damn! The Russians are starting to talk about cultivating what they call the ‘virgin lands’ in Siberia, where the permafrost is melting. They think they can turn the region into a new grain belt, like the Ukraine.”

  “So something good might come out of all this,” Dan murmured.

  “My ass,” Freiberg snapped. “The oceans are still warming up, Dan. The clathrates are going to break down if we can’t stop the ocean temperature rise. Once they start releasing the methane that’s frozen in them…”

  Dan opened his mouth to reply, but Freiberg kept right on agonizing. “You know how much methane is locked up in the clathrates? Two times ten to the sixteenth tons. Twenty quadrillion tons! Enough to produce a greenhouse that’ll melt all the ice in Greenland and Antarctica. Every glacier in the world. We’ll all drown.”

  “All the more reason,” Dan said, “for pushing out to the Asteroid Belt. We can bring in all the metals and minerals the Earth needs, Zack! We can move the world’s industrial operations into space, where they won’t screw up the Earth’s environment.”

  Freiberg gave Dan a disbelieving look.

  “We can do it!” Dan insisted. “If this fusion rocket can be made to work. That’s the key to the
whole damned thing: efficient propulsion can bring the cost of asteroid mining down to where it’s economically viable.”

  For a long moment Freiberg said nothing. He merely glared at Dan, half angry, half sullen.

  At last he mumbled, “I’ll make a few calls for you, Dan. That’s all I can do.”

  “That’s all I ask,” Dan replied, forcing a smile. Then he added, “Plus a ride to the airstrip for George and me.”

  “What about your cook?”

  With a laugh, Dan said, “She goes with the van, old buddy. She only speaks Japanese, but she’s terrific in the kitchen. And the bedroom.”

  Freiberg flushed deep red. But he did not refuse Dan’s gift.

  SELENE CITY

  The customs inspector looked startled when he saw the plastic cage and the four live mice huddled in it among the loose food pellets.

  He set his face into a scowl as he looked up at Pancho. “You can’t bring pets into Selene.”

  The other astronauts had sailed through the incoming inspection without a hitch, leaving Pancho to face the grim-faced inspector alone. They had cruised to the Moon without incident, none of the others realizing that Pancho had milked each of their bank accounts for a half-hour’s interest Pancho figured that even if they eventually discovered her little scam, the amount of money involved was too small to fight over. To her, it wasn’t the amount so much as the adroitness of the sting.

  “They’re not pets,” she said coolly to the inspector. ‘They’re food.”

  “Food?” The man’s dark eyebrows hiked halfway to his scalp line.

  “Yeah, food. For my bodyguard.” Most of the customs inspectors knew her, but this guy was new; Pancho hadn’t encountered him before. Not bad-looking, she thought. His dark blue zipsuit complemented his eyes nicely. A little elderly, though. Starting to go gray at the temples. Must be working to raise enough money for a rejuve treatment.

  As if he knew he was being maneuvered into giving straight lines, the customs inspector asked, “Your bodyguard eats mice?”

  Pancho nodded. “Yes, sir, she does.”

  The inspector huffed. “And where is this bodyguard?”

  Pancho lifted a long leg and planted her softbooted foot on the inspector’s table. Tugging up the cuff of her coverall trouser, she revealed what looked like a bright metallic blue ankle bracelet.

  While the inspector gaped, Pancho coaxed Elly off her ankle and held her out in front of the man’s widening eyes. The snake was about thirty-five centimeters long from nose to tail. It lifted its head and, fixing the inspector with its beady, slitted eyes, it hissed menacingly. The man flinched back nearly half a meter.

  “Elly’s a genetically-modified krait. She’ll never get any bigger’n this. She’s very well-behaved and wicked poisonous.”

  To his credit, the inspector swiftly recovered his composure. Most of it, at least.

  “You… you can’t bring a snake in,” he said, his voice quavering only slightly. “That’s against the regulations and besides—”

  “There’s a special exception to the regulations,” Pancho said calmly. “You can look it up. Paragraph seventeen-dee, subclause eleven.”

  With a frown, the inspector punched up the relevant page on his palmcomp. Pancho knew the exception would be there; she had gone all the way up to the Selene health and safety executive board to get it written into the regs. It had cost her a small fortune in time and effort; many dinners with men old enough to be her grandfather. Funny thing was, the only overt sexual pass made at her was from the woman who chaired the executive board.

  “Well, I’ll be dipped in…” The inspector looked up from his handheld’s tiny screen. “How in hell did you get them to rewrite the regs for you?”

  Pancho smiled sweetly. “It wasn’t easy.”

  “That little fella is poisonous, you say?”

  “Her venom’s been engineered to reduce its lethality, but she’s still fatal unless you get a shot of antiserum.” Pancho pulled a slim vial from her open travelbag and wagged it in front of the inspector’s bulging eyes.

  He shook his head in wonder as Pancho coaxed the snake back around her ankle. “And he eats mice.”

  “She,” Pancho said as she straightened up again. “When I stay up here for more than a month I have to send Earthside for more mice. Costs a bundle.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “The mice never get out of their cage,” Pancho added. “Once every other week I put Elly in with them.”

  The inspector shuddered visibly. He took Pancho’s entry forms and passed them in front of the electronic reader. The machine beeped once. Pancho was cleared. The inspector put the transparent mouse cage back into her night bag and zipped it shut.

  “You’re okay to enter Selene,” he said, almost as if he didn’t believe it himself.

  “Thank you.”

  Before she could hoist her bag onto her shoulder, he asked, “Uh… what’re you doing for dinner tonight?”

  Pancho smiled her sweetest. “Gee, I’d love to have dinner with you, but I already have a date.”

  * * *

  Dressed in a crisp white pantsuit set off by the flowery scarf she’d tied around her neck, Pancho followed the directions Martin Humphries had videomailed to her.

  In Earthside cities, height meant prestige. In hotels and condo towers, the higher the floor, the higher the price. Penthouses were considered the most desirable, and therefore were the most expensive. On the Moon, where human settlements were dug into the ground, prestige increased with depth. The airless lunar surface was dangerous, subject to four-hundred-degree temperature swings between sunlight and shadow, bathed in hard radiation from deep space, peppered with meteoric infall. So in Selene and the other communities on the Moon, the deeper your living quarters, the more desirable it was, and the more expensive.

  Martin Humphries must be rotten rich, Pancho thought as she rode the elevator down to Selene’s lowest level. According to the biofiles on the nets Humphries was supposed to be one of the wealthiest men in the Earth/Moon system, but that could be public relations puffery, she thought. The tabloids and scandal sites had more on him than the biofiles. They called him “Hump,” or “the Humper.” He had a reputation as a chaser, married twice and with lots of media stars and glamour gals from the upper crust to boot. When Pancho looked up the pix of his “dates” she saw a succession of tall, languid, gorgeous women with lots of hairdo and skimpy clothes.

  Pancho felt completely safe: the Humper wouldn’t be interested in a gangly, horse-faced tomboy. Besides, if he tried anything Elly would protect her.

  He had called her personally. No flunky; Martin Humphries his own self had phoned Pancho and asked her to come to his home to discuss a business proposition. Maybe he wants to hire me away from Astro, she thought. Astro’s been a good-enough outfit, but if Humphries offers more money I’ll go to work for him. That’s a no-brainer. Go where the money is, every time.

  But why did he call me himself, instead of having his personnel office interview me?

  There were only a few living units carved into the rock this far underground. Big places, Pancho realized as she glided along the well-lit corridor in the practiced bent-kneed shuffle that you had to use to walk in the Moon’s low gravity. The walls of the corridor were carved with elaborate low-relief sculptures, mostly astronomical motifs, but there were some Earthly landscapes in with the stars and comets. She counted about a hundred strides between doors, which meant that the living units on the other sides of the corridor walls were bigger than a whole dorm section on the floors above. The doors were fancy, too: most of them were double, all of them decorated one way or another. Some of them looked like real wood, for crying out loud.

  But while all this impressed Pancho, she was totally unprepared for Martin Humphries’s home. At the very end of the corridor was a blank metal door, polished steel from the look of it. More like an airlock hatch or a bank vault than the fancy-pants door she’d passed along the corridor. It
slid open with a soft hiss as Pancho approached within arm’s length.

  Optical recognition system, she thought. Or maybe he’s got somebody watching the corridor.

  She stepped through the open doorway and immediately felt as if she’d entered another world. She found herself in a wide, high-ceilinged cavern, a big natural cave deep below the lunar surface. Flowers bloomed everywhere, reds and yellows and green foliage spread out on both sides of her. Trees! She gaped at the sight of young alders and maples, slim white-boled birches, delicately fronded frangipani. The only trees she’d seen in Selene were up in the Grand Plaza, and they were just little bitty things compared to these. After the closed-in gray sameness of Selene’s warren of corridors and tightly-confined living quarters, the openness, the color, the heady scent of flowers growing in such profusion nearly overwhelmed Pancho. Boulders jutted here and there; the distant walls of the cave and the ceiling high above were rough bare rock. The ceiling was dotted with full-spectrum lamps, she saw. Jeez, it’s like being in Oz, Pancho said to herself.

  Like Oz, there was a path winding through the shrubbery, littered with flower petals. Pancho liked that much better than yellow bricks.

  She realized that there were no birds singing in the trees. No insects buzzed among the flowers. There was no breeze sighing past. This ornate garden was nothing more than a big, elaborate hothouse, Pancho decided. It must cost a freaking fortune.

  She glide-walked along the path until a final turn revealed the house set in the middle of the cavern, surrounded by still more trees and carefully-planted beds of roses, irises and peonies. No daisies, Pancho noted. No marigolds. Too ordinary for this layout.

  The house was enormous, low but wide, with a slanted roof and walls of lunar stone, smoothed and glazed over. Big sweeping windows. A wide courtyard framed the big double doors of the front entrance, with a fountain gurgling busily in its center. A fountain! Pancho approached the door slowly, reached out her hand to touch its carved surface. Plastic, her fingertips told her, stained to look like wood. For several moments she stood at the door, then turned to look back at the courtyard again, the gardens, the trees, the fountain. What kind of a man would spend so much money for a private palace like this? What kind of a man would have that much money to spend?