The Precipice (Asteroid Wars)

by Ben Bova

  Pancho Lane had brought her sister to Selene, back when the teenager had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. Sis was losing her memory, losing control of her body functions, losing her ability to speak or smile or even to think. Pancho had given Sis the final injection herself, had watched her younger sister’s inert body being slid into the cold bloodless canister, watched the medical team seal the dewar and begin the long, intricate freezing process, her tears mingling with the cold white mist emanating ghostlike from the hoses.

  Six years ago, Pancho thought as she walked slowly along the quiet corridor, looking for her sister’s name on the long rows of metal cylinders resting along the blank stone walls.

  She had heard rumors that a few people had actually been revived from cryonic immersion, thawed back to life. And other rumors, darker, that claimed those revived had no memories, no minds at all. They were like blank-brained newborns; they even had to be toilet-trained all over again.

  Doesn’t matter, Pancho said to herself as she stopped in front of Sis’s dewar. I’ll raise you all over again. I’ll teach you to walk and talk and laugh and sing. I will, Sis. No matter how long it takes. No matter what it costs. As long as I’m alive, you’re not going to die.

  She stared at the small metal nameplate on the dewar’s endcap. SUSAN LANE. That’s all it said. There was a barcode next to her name, all Sis’s vital information in computer-readable form. Not much to show for a human lifetime, even if it was only seventeen years.

  Her wristwatch buzzed annoyingly. Brushing at the tears in her eyes, she saw that the watch was telling her she had one hour to get cleaned up and dressed and down to Humphries’s place.

  With Amanda.

  Mandy wore virginal white, a sleeveless mandarin-collared dress with a mid-thigh skirt that clung lovingly to her curves. She’d done her hair up in the latest piled-high fashion: some stylist’s idea of neoclassical. Pancho had put on her best pantsuit, pearl gray with electric blue trim, almost the same shade of blue as Elly. Next to Amanda, though, she felt like a walking corpse.

  She’d phoned Humphries several times to tell him she was bringing Amanda, and gotten the answering machine each time. It wasn’t until she’d been on her way to the catacombs that Humphries had returned her calls, angrily demanding to know who this Amanda Cunningham was and why Pancho wanted to bring her to their meeting.

  It was tough holding a reasonable conversation through the wristphone, but Pancho finally got across the information that Amanda was going to be her co-pilot on the mission and she’d thought he might be interested in recruiting her to help Pancho’s espionage work.

  In the wristphone’s tiny screen it was almost impossible to judge the expression on Humphries’s face, but his tone was clear enough.

  “All right,” he said grudgingly. “Bring her along if you think she might be able to help us. No sweat.”

  Pancho smiled sweetly and thanked him and clicked the phone off. No sweat, huh? she thought, laughing inwardly. He’ll change his mind once he gets a look at Mandy. He’ll sweat plenty.

  Pancho spent the time on the electric stairways to Selene’s lowest level telling Mandy everything she knew about Humphries. Everything except the fact that he’d hired her to spy on Dan Randolph.

  “He’s actually a billionaire?” Amanda’s big blue eyes went wider than ever when Pancho described Humphries’s underground palace.

  “Humphries Biotech,” Pancho replied. “The Humphries Trust, lord knows what else. You can look him up in the financial nets.”

  “And you’re dating him!”

  Frowning slightly at her incredulousness, Pancho replied, “I told you, it’s strictly business. He’s… eh, he’s tryin’ to hire me away from Astro.”

  “Really?” A suspicious, supercilious tone dripped from the one word.

  Pancho grinned at her. “More or less.”

  Once they stepped through the airlock-type door and into Humphries’s underground garden, Amanda gasped with awe. “It’s heavenly!”

  “Pretty neat,” Pancho agreed.

  Humphries was standing at the open door to the house, waiting for them, eying Amanda as they came up the walk.

  “Martin Humphries,” Pancho said, as close to a formal introduction as she knew, “I would like you to meet—”

  “Ms. Amanda Cunningham,” Humphries said, all smiles. “I looked up your dossier when I got Pancho’s message that you were joining us this evening.”

  Pancho nodded, impressed. Humphries can tap into As-tro’s personnel files. He must have Dan’s offices honeycombed with snoops.

  Humphries took Amanda’s extended hand and bent over it, his lips barely touching her satiny white skin. Amanda looked as if she wanted to faint.

  “Come in, ladies,” Humphries said, tucking Amanda’s arm under his own. “Come in and welcome.”

  To Pancho’s surprise, Humphries didn’t come on to Amanda. Not obviously, at least. A human butler served aperitifs in the library-cum-bar and Humphries showed ofif his collection of first editions.

  “Pretty rare, some of them,” he boasted mildly. “I keep them here because of the climate control system. Back home in Connecticut it would cost a considerable sum to keep the old family home at a constant temperature and humidity. Here in Selene it comes automatically.”

  “Or we breathe vacuum,” Pancho commented. Amanda gave her a knowing look.

  The butler showed them to the dining room, where the women sat on either side of Humphries. A pair of squat, flat-topped robots trundled back and forth from the kitchen carrying plates and glasses. Pancho watched intently as the robots’ padded claws gripped the chinaware and crystal. They didn’t drop a thing, although while clearing the salad plates one of them missed Pancho’s dish by a fraction of a millimeter and almost knocked it off the table. Before anyone could react, though, it recovered, grasped the plate firmly and tucked it into its recessed storage section.

  “That’s a pretty good optical recognition system they’ve got,” Pancho said.

  “I don’t believe it’s optical,” Amanda countered. To Humphries she asked, “Is it?”

  “Very sharp, Amanda,” he said, impressed. “Very sharp. The dishes have monomolecular beacons sprayed on their bottoms. The robots sense the microwave signals.”

  Pancho lifted up her water tumbler and squinted at its bottom.

  “The chip’s too small to see with the naked eye,” Humphries said.

  “What powers’em?”

  “The heat from the food or drink. They have trouble with iced drinks… and your salad.”

  Pancho thought it over for half a second. “Dishes pick up residual heat when we handle them, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  Pancho smiled as the other robot placed a steaming plate of frogs’ legs before her. Don’t want Humphries to think Mandy’s the only smart one here, she told herself.

  All through dinner Humphries was charming, solicitous, all smiles. He paid almost as much attention to Pancho as he did to Amanda, up to the point where he encouraged Mandy to tell them about her early life. She began to talk, hesitantly at first, about growing up in London, winning a scholarship to the International Space University.

  “It wasn’t easy,” Amanda said, with almost childlike candor. “All the men seemed to think I was better suited to be a photographer’s model than an astronaut.”

  Humphries made a sympathetic murmur. Pancho nodded, understanding all over again that Mandy’s good looks had been as much of a problem for her as an advantage.

  “But I made it,” she finished happily, “and here we all are.”

  “Good for you,” said Humphries, patting her hand. “I think you’ve done wonderfully well.”

  As dessert was being served—fresh fruit from the botanical garden outside with soymilk ice cream—Amanda asked where the lavatory was.

  Once she had left the room Pancho leaned closer to Humphries and asked in a lowered voice, “Well, whattaya think?”

 
He frowned with annoyance. “About what?”

  “About Mandy.” She almost added, lunkhead, but stopped herself just in time.

  “She’s wonderful,” Humphries said, beaming. “Beautiful but brainy, too. You don’t see that very often.”

  Pancho thought, Women don’t let you see their brains very often, not if they can get by on their looks.

  Aloud, she asked, “So d’you think she’d be any good cozyin’ up to Dan Randolph?”

  “No!” he snapped.

  “No?” Pancho was astonished. “Why not?”

  “I don’t want her anywhere near Randolph. He’ll seduce her in a hot second.”

  Pancho stared at the man. I thought that was the whole idea, she said to herself. Get Mandy into Randolph’s bed. I thought that’s what he’d want.

  “She’s much too fine a woman to be used that way,” Humphries added.

  Oh, for cryin’ out loud, Pancho realized. He’s fallen for her! This guy who picks up women like paperclips and dumps ‘em when he feels like it, he doesn’t just have the hots for Mandy. He’s fallen in love with her. Just like that!

  SELENE GOVERNING COUNCIL

  Dan couldn’t help contrasting in his mind this meeting of Selene’s governing council with the meeting of the GEC’s executive board he’d attended a few weeks earlier in London.

  The meeting took place in Selene’s theater, with the council sitting at student’s desks arranged up on the stage in a semi-circle. Just about every seat on the main floor and the balconies was taken, although the box seats on either side of the stage were all empty. Maybe they’ve bewi roped off for some reason, Dan thought. Must be two thousand people out there, he thought as he peeked out at the audience through the curtains screening the stage’s wings. Just about every voting citizen in Selene’s showed up for this meeting.

  As he stood in the wing of the stage, the council members filed past him, taking their seats. For the most part they looked young, vigorous. Six women, five men, none with white hair. A couple of premature baldies among the men; they must be engineers, Dan thought. He knew that membership on the council was a part-time task assigned by lottery; no one was allowed to duck their public service, although they could take time off their regular jobs to attend to their extra duties.

  “Nervous?”

  Dan turned at the sound of Doug Stavenger’s voice.

  Smiling, he answered, “When you’ve had to sit through as many board meetings as I have, you don’t get nervous, you just want to get it the hell over with.”

  Stavenger patted Dan lightly on the shoulder. “This one will be different from all the others, Dan. It’s more like an old-fashioned New England town meeting than one of your board of directors’ get-togethers.”

  Dan agreed with a brief nod. Often in his mind he’d spelled it b-o-r-e-d meeting. This one would be different, he felt sure.

  It was.

  Stavenger served as non-voting chairman of the governing council, a largely honorary position. More pomp than circumstance, Dan thought. The chairman stood at the podium set up at one end of the stage, only a few meters from where Dan stood waiting for his turn to speak. The meeting agenda was displayed on a wallscreen along the back of the stage. Dan was dismayed to see that he was last on a list of nine.

  The first five items went fairly quickly. The sixth was a new regulation tightening everyone’s water allotment. Several people from the audience shot to their feet to make their opinions heard in no uncertain terms.

  One of the council members was chairman of the water board, a chubby, balding, red-faced man wearing the coral-red coveralls of the Tourism Department The student’s desk at which he sat looked uncomfortably small for him.

  “There’s no way around it,” he said, looking flustered. “No matter how efficiently we recycle our water, it’s not a hundred percent and it never will be. The more people we allow in, the less water we have to go around.”

  “Then why don’t we shut down tourism,” came an angry voice from the floor.

  “Tourism’s down to a trickle anyway,” the water chairman replied. “It’s less than five percent of our problem. Immigration is our big difficulty.”

  “Refugees,” someone said in a harsh stage whisper.

  “Don’t let ‘em in!” an angry voice snapped.

  “You can’t do that!”

  “Why the hell not? They made the mess on Earth. Let ‘em stew in their own crap.”

  “Can’t we find new sources of water?” a citizen asked.

  Stavenger answered from the podium, “Our exploration teams have failed to locate any other than the polar ice fields we’ve been using all along.”

  “Bring up a few loads from Earthside,” someone suggested.

  “Yeah, and they’ll gouge us for it.”

  “But if we need it, what else can we do?”

  The audience stirred restlessly. A dozen conversations buzzed through the theater.

  The water board chairman raised his voice to be heard over the chatter. “We’re negotiating with the GEC for water shipments, but they want to put one of their own people onto the water board in return.”

  “Hell no!”

  “Never!”

  “Those bastards have been trying to get control of us since day one!”

  The audience roared its angry disapproval.

  Stavenger, still standing at the podium, pressed his thumb on a button set into its control panel and a painftilly loud hooting whistle rang through the theater, silencing the shouters. Dan covered his ears until the shriek died away.

  “We’ve got to maintain order here,” Stavenger said in the numbed silence. “Otherwise we’ll never get anywhere.”

  Reluctantly, they accepted the fact that water allotments would be decreased slightly. Then the water board chairman held out a potential carrot.

  “We’ll have the new recycling system on-line in a few months,” he said, drumming his fingers nervously on his desktop. “If it works as efficiently as the simulations show it should, we can go back to the current water allotments—at least for a year or so.”

  “And what happens if this recycling system fails?” asked a stern-faced elderly woman.

  “It’s being thoroughly tested,” the water chairman answered defensively.

  “This is just a way for the people running the damned hotel to put up their own swimming pool and spa,” grumbled a lanky, longhaired citizen. He looked like a physicist to Dan. “Tourism is down so they want to fancy up the hotel to attract more tourists.”

  Dan wondered about that Tourism is down because the world’s going down the toilet, he thought. Then he admitted, But, yeah, people running tourist facilities will try their damnedest to attract customers, no matter what What else can they do, except go out of business altogether?

  In the end, the council decided to accept the water allotment restrictions until the new recycling system had been in operation for three continuous months. Then they would have a new hearing to decide on whether they could return to the old allotments.

  Two more items were swiftly disposed of, then at last Stavenger said, “The final item on our agenda tonight is a proposal by Dan Randolph, head of Astro Manufacturing.” He turned slightly and prompted, “Dan?”

  There was some scattered applause as Dan stepped up to the podium. Astro employees, Dan thought Stavenger moved off-stage.

  He gripped the edges of the podium and looked over the crowd. He had no notes, no visual aids. For several moments he merely stood there, thinking hard. The audience began to murmur, whisper.

  Dan began, “Halley’s Comet will be returning to the inner solar system in a few years. Last time it came by, Halley’s blew out roughly thirty million tons of water vapor in six months. If I remember the numbers right, the comet lost something like three tons of water per second when it was closest to the Sun.”

  He waited a heartbeat, then asked, “Do you think you could use that water?”

  “Hell yes!” somebody shouted. D
an grinned when he saw that it was Pancho Lane, sitting up in the first row of the balcony.

  “Then let’s go get it!” Dan said.

  He spent the next fifteen minutes outlining the fusion rocket system and assuring them that it had performed flawlessly in all its tests to date.

  “A fusion-driven spacecraft can bring in all the water you need, either from hydrate-bearing asteroids or from comets,” Dan said. “I need your help to build a full-scale system and flight test it.”

  One of the women councilors asked, “Are you asking Selene to fund your corporation? Why can’t you raise the money from the regular sources?”

  Dan made himself smile at her. “This project will cost between one and two billion international dollars, Earthside. None of the banks or other funding sources that I’ve approached will risk that kind of money. They’re all fully committed to rebuilding and mitigation programs. They’ve got their hands full with the greenhouse warming; they’re not interested in space projects.”

  “Damned flatland idiots,” somebody groused.

  “I agree,” Dan said, grinning. ‘They’re too busy doing what’s urgent to even think about what’s important.”

  “Out of all the corporations on Earth,” someone called out, “surely you can make a deal or two to raise the capital you need.”

  Dan decided to cut the discussion short. “Listen. I could probably put together a deal that would raise the money we need, but I thought I’d give you a chance to come in on this. It’s the opportunity you’ve been waiting for.”

  “Selene doesn’t have that kind of money at its disposal,” said one of the councilmen.

  “No,” countered Dan, “but you have the trained people and the facilities to build the fusion rocket with nanomachines “

  A hush fell over the theater. Nanotechnology. They all knew it was possible. And yet…

  “Nanomachines aren’t magic wands, Mr. Randolph,” said the councilor seated closest to Dan, a lean, pinch-faced young man who looked like a jogging fanatic.

  “I understand that,” said Dan.