The Precipice (Asteroid Wars)

by Ben Bova

  When faced with a vast cloud of deadly subatomic particles blasted out by a solar flare, the ship was charged to a high positive electrostatic potential by a pair of electron guns. The energetic protons in the cloud were repelled by the ship’s positive charge. The magnetic field was strong enough to deflect the cloud’s lighter, less energetic electrons—and thus keep the negatively-charged electrons from ruining the ship’s positive charge.

  Safely cocooned inside the protective magnetic field, the crew of Starpower 1 watched the swift approach of the storm’s plasma cloud.

  “Be here in another six hours,” Pancho announced, pulling off her headset as she swiveled the command pilot’s chair to face Dan.

  He frowned at the news. “That’s for certain?”

  “Certain as they can be. Early-warning spacecraft in Mercury co-orbit have plotted out the cloud. Unless there’s a great big kink in the interplanetary field, it’s gonna roll right over us.”

  Nodding, Dan said, “The electron guns are ready to go.”

  “Better start ‘em up,” she said. “No sense waitin’ till the last minute.”

  “Right.” Dan stepped through the hatch, into the empty wardroom, and headed aft, where the electron guns were housed. Pancho could control them from the bridge, but Dan wanted to be there in case any problems cropped up.

  “And send Amanda up here, will you?” Pancho called to him. “I gotta take a break.”

  “Right,” Dan shouted back, over his shoulder.

  Where is Amanda? He asked himself. The wardroom was empty. The doors to the privacy compartments along the passageway were closed. Aid where is Fuchs? he wondered, starting to feel nettled.

  He found them both in the sensor bay, where Fuchs was explaining something about the x-ray projector.

  “It would be more helpful if we could use a small nuclear device,” the planetary astronomer was saying, totally serious. “That would be the most convenient way of generating x-rays and gamma rays all at the same time. But of course, nuclear devices are banned.”

  “Of course,” Amanda said, looking just as intent as Fuchs.

  “Pancho needs you on the bridge, Mandy “ Dan said.

  She looked startled for a flash of a second, then said, “Right.”

  As she hurried toward the bridge, Dan asked Fuchs, “What in the name of the nine gods of Sumatra do you want a nuke for?”

  “I don’t!” Fuchs said. “They’re illegal, and justly so.”

  “But you just said—”

  “I was explaining to Amanda about x-ray spectroscopy. How we use x-rays to make an asteroid fluoresce and reveal its chemical composition. The x-rays from this solar flare would have been very helpful to us if we were only close enough to the Belt.”

  “But a nuke?”

  Fuchs spread his hands. “Merely an example of how to produce x-rays and gamma rays on demand. An example only. I have no intention of bringing nuclear explosives into space.”

  “I don’t know,” Dan said, scratching his chin. “You might be onto something. Maybe we could talk the IAA into letting us use nukes as sources for spectroscopic studies.”

  Fuchs looked aghast. Dan laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. Fuchs saw the joke and grinned weakly back.

  Dan’s mood darkened as he edged down the narrow walkway in the aft end of the module. He did not like the thought of being exposed to hard radiation. He had taken a lifetime’s worth of radiation back in his earlier days, working in space. Much more of a dose would kill him, he knew. It wouldn’t be an easy way to go, either.

  As he lifted the covers protecting the electron guns’ innards and checked them for the eleventh time since they’d launched out of lunar orbit, Dan thought, Maybe Stavenger’s right. Get a jolt of nanomachines, let them clean up the damage the radiation’s done, rebuild me from the inside. So I won’t be able to go back to Earth. So what? What’s down there that I’d miss so much?

  He knew the answer even as he asked the question. Sea breezes. Blue skies and soft sunsets. Birds flying. Flowers. Huge ugly brutal cities teeming with life. Vineyards! Dan suddenly realized that no one had yet tried to grow wine grapes off-Earth. Maybe that’s what I’ll do when I retire: settle down and watch my vineyards grow.

  The intercom speaker set into the narrow walkway’s overhead carried Pancho’s voice. “Dan, you ready for me to light up the guns?”

  The electron guns were just as good as they’d been all the other times he’d inspected them. Closing the cover on the one on his right, Dan answered, “You may fire when ready, Gridley.”

  Pancho retorted, “I don’t know who this Gridley guy is, but I can’t rev up the guns till you close both their covers and seal ‘em right and proper.”

  “Aye, aye, skipper,” Dan said.

  By the time he made it back to the bridge, Pancho was nowhere in sight. Amanda sat alone in the right-hand seat, and the bridge was rocking to the beat of high-intensity pop music. As soon as she saw Dan come through the hatch, Amanda snapped the music off.

  “Pancho’s in the loo,” she said as Dan slid into the command-pilot’s seat.

  “How’s the storm?”

  “Precisely on track.” Amanda tapped at one of her touch-screens; it displayed a simplified map of the inner solar system, the orbits of Earth and Mars shown as thin lines of blue and red, respectively; the position of Starpower 1 was a blinking bright yellow dot. A lopsided gray miasma was almost touching the dot.

  Dan’s mouth went dry. “I hate these things,” he mumbled.

  “It missed the Earth completely. Mars, as well.”

  “But it’s going to swamp us.”

  “Actually,” Amanda said, “we’ll merely be brushed by it. A few hours, that’s all/’

  “That’s good.”

  “Our own velocity is helping a lot, you know. An ordinary spacecraft, coasting along the way they do, would be in the cloud for days on end.”

  Dan had no desire to be in the cloud for even ten minutes. He changed the subject, as much to get away from the fear building up inside him as any other reason. “How friendly are you and Fuchs?”

  Amanda’s brows shot up. “Lars? He’s very earnest— about his work. Nothing more.”

  “That’s all there is to it?”

  “Yes.”

  Dan thought it over. Two healthy young people locked in this sardine can for a couple of weeks. Of course, there’s Pancho and me to chaperon them. Dan grinned to himself. Damn, it’s like being a teenager’s father.

  Pancho returned to the bridge. “Hey boss, get outta my chair.”

  “Yes’m,” said Dan.

  The plasma cloud hit them less than an hour later. There was no buffeting, no clanging of alarms, nothing to tell them that they were being engulfed in the cloud of killing radiation except the rising curves of fire-engine red on the radiation monitoring screens.

  Pancho did not consider the storm so dangerous that someone had to be on the bridge at all times. She came into the wardroom and joined the others for dinner. Dan ate mechanically, not really tasting his food, not really hearing the conversation. Double-damned radiation, he kept thinking. I hate this. Despite two steaming mugs of coffee, he felt cold inside.

  But the others seemed completely unfazed by the storm. After the meal Dan said good-night to them all and went to his compartment. He dreamed of floating helplessly in space, slowly freezing as the Sun glowered at him.

  NANOTECHNOLOGY LABORATORY

  Long past midnight, Kris Cardenas sat alone in her office in Selene’s nanotechnology lab. The rest of the lab was empty, darkened to its nighttime lighting level.

  She had agreed to have dinner with Martin Humphries because she wanted to get the man to warn Dan Randolph about the nanomachines that she had planted in his vessel, virus-sized disassemblers that once were known as “gobblers.”

  They were the reason that nanotechnology was banned on Earth—and under careful supervision at Selene.

  Quis custodiei ipsos custodes? she a
sked herself. Who will watch the watchmen? Some Roman asked that question more than two thousand years ago, Cardenas knew.

  All nanotech work was under very strict control in Selene. No one was allowed to work with gobblers: they had killed people. They had even been used to commit murder. If they ever got loose they could destroy all Selene. The medical work had to be supervised down to the nanometer because the therapeutic nanobugs that took apart plaque in a person’s arteries or destroyed tumors atom by atom were forms of gobblers, nothing less. If they ever got loose, if their programming was ever-so-subtly altered…

  That was why Kris Cardenas’s primary duty as head of all nanotech work at Selene was to protect against such a catastrophe. She watched over every aspect of the work done in the nanotech lab.

  But who will watch the watchmen? She had produced a microscopic batch of gobblers for Humphries, specifically tailored to damage Starpower 1 enough so Dan would have to turn the ship around and limp back to Selene. Humphries had promised that he would obtain permission for her to visit Earth again, to see her daughters and her grandchildren.

  Now he was offering to bring them up here. Even better. But the price! Dan Randolph and the other people on that ship could get killed.

  Is that what Humphries really wants? She asked herself. If I warned Dan now he’d have to return to Selene. Flat and simple. But Humphries wants to wait another day or so, let Dan get to the inner fringes of the Belt and then tell him that his ship’s going to fail.

  Or maybe he won’t warn Dan at all!

  Cardenas sat up straight in her desk chair. That’s it, she told herself. He wants to kill Dan and the rest of the crew. She knew it with the certainty of revealed truth.

  What can I do about it?

  Warn Dan, she answered her own question. Warn him now.

  But how? She wondered. I can’t just pick up a phone and put a call through to him. They’re out past the orbit of Mars by now.

  I’ve got to get to someone in the Astro office. Someone who can put me through to Dan. Maybe that big Australian bodyguard of his. What’s his name? George something.

  * * *

  Martin Humphries could not sleep, despite the exertions he’d been through with the raven-haired woman lying beside him. Nominally an environmentalist on the consulting staff of Humphries Trust, the young woman’s favored environment seemed to be a bedroom with plenty of furniture to play on, as far as Humphries could determine.

  She was sleeping peacefully. He was wide awake.

  Dr. Cardenas. Humphries was worried about her. Even the lure of seeing her grandchildren wasn’t going to outweigh her overdeveloped sense of honor, he thought. She wants to warn Randolph; she’s probably figured out that I want the sonofabitch dead.

  He sat up in the bed and glanced at the woman sleeping beside him. Slowly, carefully, he pulled the silk sheet down from her shoulders. Even with no lights in the room except the green glow from the digital clock, he could see that her body was smooth, flawless, perfectly proportioned. Too bad she’s heading back to Earth in a few days.

  Cardenas, he reminded himself sternly.

  She’s going to try to warn Randolph, he felt certain. Maybe that’s a good thing. If Randolph turns back now, Amanda will come back with him. With him. She won’t be coming back to me. She doesn’t want me, that’s why she ran off with him. If Cardenas warns them, they’ll come back here together to gloat at me.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to drive out the mental images of Randolph and Amanda together. I’ve got to think this through carefully. Logically.

  For Cardenas to warn Randolph she’ll have to get somebody here in Selene to set up the message for her. She’ll probably go to Astro; that’s where Randolph’s people are. And if she asks them to let her put through a call to Randolph they’ll ask her why. Sooner or later she’ll tell them why: Martin Humphries has bugged the Starpower ship with nanomachines. And then they’ll know all about it.

  Conclusion: For my own protection, I’ve got to stop her from talking to anyone at Astro. I’ve got to stop her from even trying to warn Randolph. I’ve got to stop her. Period.

  When Dan awoke from his troubled sleep the solar storm had passed. Pancho was in the wardroom when he shambled in, bleary-eyed.

  “Top o’ the mornin’, boss,” she said cheerily, hefting a mug of steaming coffee.

  “How’s the weather out there?” Dan asked, heading for the juice dispenser.

  “Clear and calm, except for a few rocks we should be passin’ by this afternoon.”

  That made Dan smile. “We’re at the Belt.”

  “Will be, by sixteen hundred hours. Right on shedyule, as Mandy would say.”

  “Good. Great. Where’s Fuchs? We’ve got to make some course adjustments.”

  Ten minutes later the four of them were seated around the table in the wardroom.

  “I want to get a metallic nugget first,” Dan said.

  Fuchs lifted his heavy shoulders slightly. “The metallic bodies are more heavily concentrated towards the outer area of the Belt.”

  “So we go to the outer edge of the Belt,” Dan replied, “and search for a lump of iron. We can pick up the stony and carbonaceous rocks on the way back.”

  “We’ll have to go more than four astronomical units, then,” Amanda pointed out. “No one’s gone that far before.”

  Dan said, “We’ve got the supplies for it. And the fuel. Everything’s running all right, isn’t it?”

  “No major problems,” said Pancho.

  His brows rising, Dan asked, “What are the minor problems?”

  She grinned at him. “The coffee’s pretty awful. A couple of li’l maintenance chores to do. You know, a cranky pump, one of the fuel cells is discharging when it shouldn’t. Nig-glin’ stuff. Mandy and I are takin’ care of it”

  Amanda nodded. Dan looked from her back to Pancho. Neither woman seemed worried. Well, he thought, if the pilots aren’t worried, no reason for me to sweat.

  “The sensor suite is in perfect working order,” Fuchs volunteered. “I’m already recording data.”

  “We’ll have to do the turnaround maneuver soon,” said Amanda.

  Gesturing vaguely toward infinity, Dan asked Fuchs, “Have you picked a destination point out there?”

  “A general area only,” he replied. ‘The outer Belt has not been mapped well enough to pick a precise asteroid. Most of them are not even numbered yet.”

  “Have you given Pancho the coordinates?”

  Fuchs’s face colored slightly. “I gave them to Amanda.”

  “I’ve put the data into the nav computer,” Amanda said quickly, looking at Pancho.

  Pancho nodded. “Okay. I’ll go check it out.”

  “Onward and upward,” said Dan, rising from his chair. “We’ll be breaking distance records, if nothing else.”

  “Four AUs,” Pancho muttered, getting to her feet also.

  She headed for the bridge. Dan followed her, leaving Amanda and Fuchs still sitting at the table.

  Pancho slid into the pilot’s chair and tapped on her main touchscreen, the one showing the hunk on the beach. Standing behind her, Dan saw the navigation computer program come up over the muscles and teeth.

  But Pancho was looking at one of the smaller screens, where an amber light was blinking slowly.

  “What’s that?” Dan asked.

  “Dunno,” said Pancho, working the screen with her fingers. “Running a diagnostic… h’mmph.”

  “What?”

  Without turning her head from the display screens, Pancho muttered, “Says there’s a hot spot on one of the superconducting wires outside.”

  A jolt of alarm surged through Dan. “The superconductor? Our storm shield?”

  She glanced up at him. “Don’t get frazzled, boss. Happens all the time. Might be a pinhole leak in the coolant line. Maybe a micrometeor dinged us.”

  “But if the coolant goes—”

  “The rate of loss ain’t much,” Pancho said
calmly. “We’re due for turnaround in six hours. I can angle the ship then so’s that side’s in the shade. If the hot spot doesn’t go away then, Mandy and me will go EVA and fix the leak.”

  Dan nodded and tried to feel reassured.

  STAVENGER THEATER

  Kris Cardenas marveled at the crowd’s willingness to leave their comfortable homes and jam themselves cheek-by-jowl into the cramped rows of narrow seats of the outdoor theater. A considerable throng of people was flowing into the theater. It was built in the Grand Plaza, “outdoors.” Exactly one thousand seats were set in a shallow arc around the graceful fluted shell that backed the stage.

  Even with three-dimensional interactive video and virtual reality programs that were nearly indistinguishable from actuality, people still went to live performances. Maybe it’s because we’re mammals, Cardenas thought. We crave the warmth of other mammals. We’re born to it and we’re stuck with it. Lizards have a better deal.

  There was one particular mammal Cardenas wanted to see: George Ambrose. That morning she had phoned the Astro corporate office trying to find him, only to reach his video mail. Late in the afternoon he returned her call. When she said she had to talk to him in person as soon as possible, and preferably in a public place, George had scratched at his thick red beard for a moment and then suggested the theater.

  “I’ve got a date comin’ with me,” he said cheerfully, “but we can get together in the intermission and chat for a bit. Okay?”

  Cardenas had quickly agreed. Only as an afterthought did she ask what the theater was playing.

  George sighed heavily. “Some fookin’ Greek tragedy. This date of mine, she’s a nut for th’ classics.”