On to the Asteroid

by Travis S. Taylor

  “Not a bad idea. There’s plenty of fuel left—we didn’t use it as much as had been planned.” Paul rummaged through his garment bag for the LCVG and started getting into it.

  “Is this rock big enough for tidal forces?” Hui asked.

  “I doubt it. It would more likely be a trajectory change imparting a different vector force on the body,” Rykov said knowingly. “We are still millions of kilometers from Earth. Tidal forces wouldn’t be serious until we got to twenty to fifty thousand or so kilometers, I’m guessing. I’m not even sure it could be a vector change causing centrifugal force or something. We are really not even to the edge of the Earth-Moon sphere of influence yet. This is quite perplexing, comrades.”

  “Let’s look around and see what is going on and then we’ll send data back to NASA. Maybe they can figure it out if we can’t,” Paul said.

  * * *

  “Paul, be careful moving in and out between the ship and the rock. If it lurches again it could crush you between them,” Rykov warned him over the open mic.

  Paul could see him just to his right on his three-nine line and slightly above him using the EVA jets to maneuver about the ship. Paul was following him in general but was doing his own recon of the surface and of the ship. There was nothing he could see that would suggest why the ship had moved.

  “Paul, this Hui.”

  “Go ahead Hui.” Paul looked up at the tail of the Tamaroa and could see the CTV undocking.

  “CTV is free of the Tamaroa,” she said. “I’m going to swing around the ship once and then I’ll make my way up and down the fracture in the asteroid.”

  “Roger that, Hui.” Paul looked about as best he could in his EVA suit and spun himself toward the front of the ship. “I think I’m going to go down the rabbit hole toward Earth. Mikhail, you give the ship a really good once over at least twice.”

  “American humor,” Rykov grunted.

  Paul carefully spiraled about the forward section of the Tamaroa and was astounded and horrified once he reached the command capsule section. The outside of the ruggedized inflatable section of the spacecraft looked like monsters from four different horror flicks had been clawing at it trying to get in. The hardened gel layer had many places that were chipped and scraped clean through to the composite fabric. Fibers of carbon filament and composites were frayed loose. Paul’s first impression was that the front end of the ship looked like a deranged Chia Pet that was just starting to grow in. Spacecraft were just not supposed to have fuzzy exteriors. Paul forced himself to move on. Rykov would check it out with engineering rigor.

  “Paul, Hui.”

  “Go, Hui.”

  “So, from this distance it is hard to tell even that the ship has shifted. However, there are several places where the fault line along the surface appears to have blown outward,” Hui described to him.

  “What do you mean, blown outward?” Paul wasn’t so sure he liked the sound of that.

  “Well, there are several points along the fault that looks like something inside the fracture exploded.” Hui sounded as perplexed as Paul felt.

  “See if you can get some closer imagery and maybe some radar data,” Paul told her. “I’m pushing on through the hole.”

  “Roger that,” Hui replied.

  Paul fired his rear thrusters with a very short burst pushing him into the cavern in front of the ship. The ship had apparently poked through a thin section in the fault and was currently sticking out into a cavern about the size of a basketball half court. He carefully and slowly pressed forward toward the light at the end of the tunnel. As he turned his focus about the walls of the fault line as he passed through he saw several veins of silvers, reds, and golds flicker in the sunlight.

  Paul fired his forward thrusters and brought himself to a relative stop compared to the wall of the asteroid fracture. He shone his helmet lights at a dark rust red vein in the wall. Sunlight on the wall just above the vein moved down the wall as he watched. The daylight-shadow line on the wall barely touched on the edge of the red. It was enough light that Paul could see the wall above the shadow line like it was daylight on Earth.

  He flicked his light off to see if it made any visual differences. He half expected it to be something similar to science fiction movies where something odd would be glowing once the lights were out, but there was nothing. There was nothing but a ping against his EVA suit and a cloud of dust bursting in his faceplate.

  “Shit!” he yelled. He flicked his lights back on to see if there was any damage. As far as he could tell there was none, but his suit was covered in dust even worse than it had been.

  “Paul! Are you alright?” Rykov asked.

  “I’m fine. I’m fine,” he said as he panned his light along the daylight to shadow line on the wall. As it crossed the red vein to a bright silver vein there were much larger pops followed by dust clouds. “What the hell?”

  Paul fired his thrusters, moving him completely into the sunlight. He examined the wall and noticed that wherever there were different colors of material along the rock wall it was pockmarked with divots. The rocks were literally exploding.

  “Mikhail, Hui, the sunlight is doing something to the rocks making them explode,” he said.

  “What do you mean, Paul?” Rykov asked. “Is it violent explosion or simply a crack?”

  “Uh, I’d say somewhere in between.” Paul rubbed his fingers about the crater rim of one of the pockmarks. “It is mostly where there are different colored materials in the rock surface. The largest ones are near the silver-looking veins.”

  “I’m going to push onward and take some more pictures,” he said.

  * * *

  It had taken Paul almost thirty minutes to carefully thrust through the opening in the fault. There were never any “tight squeezes” but he went slowly to make certain he didn’t lose control and crash into the cavern walls. He also wasn’t sure what a lot of the mineral ores were that he was seeing in the rock and so he didn’t want to touch any of them if he didn’t have too. Who knew? Some of those minerals might be reactive with his suit. He wasn’t a mineralogist, a chemist, or even a miner. One thing he was sure of, though, was that this asteroid was filled with minerals and ores. He was very certain that he’d seen gold veins several times and something that was bright silver was in abundance throughout the rock. He was guessing the silver stuff was iridium, but only because he’d read about it being abundant in asteroids and seeing it being silver-colored in movies.

  He slowly eased through the cavern precipice into the daylight side of the asteroid. He’d already had to flip his sun visor down. He brought himself to a relative stop on the surface and then fired a harpoon cable into the rock. He reeled himself tight to the surface and then took a breath. He turned a full three hundred sixty degrees to take in the well-lit asteroidscape.

  Sutter’s Mill was only twenty-five or so million kilometers from Earth and two hundred million kilometers from the Sun. The Sun looked pretty much the same size as it did on Earth to Paul. Maybe it was a bit smaller, but he couldn’t tell. The Earth was so small that he could just barely make out its angular subtense and discern it from a point of light—just barely. He could also see a bright point that was clearly the Moon. The sight was breathtaking.

  “You guys should come up here and see this view,” he said.

  As far as Paul could see on the surface of the asteroid the fracture ran all the way across. He realized then that there must not be much holding the two pieces together. From the full sunlight view he was guessing that the fracture broke the cookie-shaped rock into unequal parts. One side was about two-thirds of the asteroid and the small side about one-third. The small third was on the Earth side of the asteroid and the large piece the space side.

  “Maybe that’s a good thing,” he muttered to himself. “Hui, see if you can orbit this thing and give us a good light side model.”

  “We did that early on, Paul,” she replied from the CTV. “Do you think something has changed?”r />
  “Call it a hunch. I don’t know. I’m not sure.” Paul was thinking on contingency plans. What if they hadn’t pushed the asteroid hard enough to miss the Earth?

  “Comrades, my survey of the ship is complete,” Rykov announced. “There is little holding it in place now. I think we should consider moving it.”

  “We still have the ACS thrusters. That might be doable,” Paul replied. “It might be safer too.”

  Paul could see a glint in the sunlight rise over the horizon of the asteroid. The CTV slowly approached at about one hundred meters off the surface. Paul wanted the bird’s eye view too.

  “I see you, Hui.” Paul released his harpoon cable and thrust his suit upward and added velocity horizontal to the surface to begin matching the CTV. “Mind if I hitchhike?”

  “Careful Paul,” Hui said. “I’ll reduce my horizontal speed so you can match easier.”

  “Affirmative.”

  Paul carefully matched pace with the CTV until he intercepted it. He reached out and grabbed at the landing struts with both hands and then pulled himself to the ladder. He pulled a cable from his belt harness and snapped it on one of the rungs.

  “I’m on, Hui. Take us on back.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Mikhail, we’ll see you inside.”

  “I’m already in the airlock,” Mikhail answered.

  Paul took one last look at the Earth as they passed over the edge of the asteroid. We’re going to make it home, he thought. Somehow.

  CHAPTER 46

  “The crack is wider.” Hui pointed at the imagery data. “Here is the image of the asteroid when we first got here. And here it is today. Analysis shows the fracture is almost two times wider now. And during my survey I found several places where I could see completely through the fracture and see sunlight like the hole here that we are in.”

  “Well, it isn’t gravity,” Rykov said. “I double checked my thinking on that and we are nowhere near the Roche limit of Earth yet. It is something else.”

  “Sunlight,” Paul said matter-of-factly. “I saw it. When the light would hit the mineral veins the rock would pop and crackle. A few times it even exploded like a firecracker.”

  “Yes, of course.” Rykov slapped his forehead. “The asteroid is filled with many different minerals and each of those minerals has a very different coefficient of thermal expansion. A shadow to sunlight swing in temperature could be as much as three or four hundred degrees. An iridium vein, which I’m certain is the silvery metal you saw, would expand almost ten centimeters per couple of meters, and the rock, on the other hand, would only barely expand.”

  “Ah yes. It is ripping itself apart,” Hui added. “I once worked on an optical telescope system that the manufacturers used the wrong type of metallic bolts in to hold the mirror in place. As soon as we put the scope in the environment chamber and dropped the temperature the mirror cracked. The bolts shrank at a different rate than the glass and tore it apart. This is happening here and getting worse as we get closer to the Sun.”

  “Well, not closer,” Rykov corrected her. “We are and have been for some time about the same distance from the Sun as far as light exposure is concerned. We are getting something like a kilowatt per square meter on the surface. But we moved it and its trajectory is tilting different parts of the asteroid toward the sunlight.”

  “Before it was spinning like a chicken on a rotisserie,” Paul said. He could see in his mind what was going on. “Once they stopped the rotation of this thing it began cooking on one side and freezing on the other. The shear forces must be incredible.”

  “Yes, comrade, now you get it.” Rykov nibbled at a meal bar as he talked. He stopped long enough to take a drink from a juice tube. “We need to either get the ship out of the fracture. Or abandon it. I no longer think it is safe to stay in here.”

  “I agree,” Paul said. “Let’s see if the ACS thrusters can move us out. We’re still over two weeks out and I don’t want to have to stay in the CTV that long if we don’t have to.”

  Neither Hui nor Rykov made mention of the fact that none of them had any idea how they were going to get off the asteroid, slow down to an Earth orbit speed, and then get back down to Earth. Those were just the details.

  “Once we’re out, then what?” Hui asked.

  “I was thinking about that while I was on the light side out there,” Paul said. “Look here at the images. The fracture unequally divides the asteroid. The smaller third, here, is on the Earth side of the trajectory. If this thing were to break loose, then this is the side likely to hit the Earth. We should be on it.”

  “Comrade, I know you want to make it home but that seems a bit extreme.”

  “No no. I don’t want us to hit the Earth. But this is the most likely candidate to get us closest. Somehow we’ll have to jump off at the right time,” Paul said. “And once we jump off, somehow, we’ll have to slow ourselves down to stay in Earth orbit.”

  “Those are some big somehows.” Rykov frowned as he chewed through the last of his meal bar.

  “We can certainly use the CTV to jump off, but there will be nowhere near enough delta-vee to slow down for an Earth orbit. We’d need a much larger burn than we have available to us now,” Hui explained.

  “I know all that.” Paul rubbed his chin. He needed to shave the day’s long stubble. Carolyn never liked it when he didn’t shave. “But this is at least a start to a plan. Let’s get the Tamaroa out safely and tie it down to the smaller piece of the asteroid on the dark side.”

  “We’ll have to run an antenna relay up to the surface or we’ll lose comms,” Rykov added. “Why not park in space near the asteroid so I can repair and realign the high-gain antenna? If we need to attach to the asteroid we can do that at the last minute.”

  “Good plan. Let’s do that,” Paul agreed. “Mikhail, were there any of the tethers still attached to the ship? I don’t want us getting hung up on something when we try to get out of here.”

  “No, I checked them all. You pulled every single one of them loose when you pushed the asteroid with the main engines.”

  “All right, I’m going to tell NASA our plans and make sure they don’t have any hiccups about it.” Paul thought for moment. He wasn’t sure if there was anything he was leaving out. “Can the two of you think of anything else?”

  “Not really. I’ll get started on the high-gain antenna again,” Rykov said.

  “I think I should detach the CTV when you move the ship. Don’t want to damage our only lifeboat,” Hui said.

  “Agreed. I’m going to update NASA. Let’s get started on this.”

  CHAPTER 47

  “We were lucky, Gary.” Bill walked underneath the wing of the Dreamscape dragging his finger along the leading edge as he inspected the spacecraft. “Los Angeles was hammered and Nevada didn’t get so much as a light show.”

  “It seems as though everything has been working against us on this all along,” Gary replied. Bill watched his friend and boss as he limped up the ramp into the vehicle. He was still, after all this time, favoring the leg in which he’d been shot. Bill wasn’t sure if it was mental or not, but medical had cleared him for flight. And that was what mattered.

  “Have you got all the passengers lined up?” Bill asked.

  “You would think, but we’re only twelve days out from impact and I still have several multi-billionaires wanting to haggle over price.” Gary sounded disgusted. “I told them the price is what it is—take it or leave it. But I don’t think some of them have taken me seriously.”

  “Well, this has never been more serious,” Bill started. “As far as NASA can tell, Sutter’s Mill is just as likely to impact the Earth as not. Our friend is up there with no way to slow down or get back home. Hell, I’m not even sure they can get far enough away from the rock to avoid impact themselves. I damn near feel helpless and hopeless.”

  Bill hated feeling that way. He had been in tough situations that only required he keep his head about himself, w
ork through the problem, and come out on the other end alive and kicking. This time there didn’t seem like there was any way to keep working through to the end. At least, there didn’t seem to be any way that lead to a happy end.

  “One day, if we keep flying to space, I’m going to have a spaceship like in the movies that can just zip up there, go anywhere, and do anything. Then we could just fly up there and get Paul and the others. I’m not giving up yet, but we are drastically and rapidly running out of time,” Gary said as the two of them looked about the ship.

  It was a little early to worry about preflight inspections. But Bill had wanted to double check everything since the ship had been repaired. Nobody knew the ship better than Paul and he wasn’t there to clear it. He was in deep space over nine million miles from home hurling toward the Earth at cataclysmic speeds. And Bill was thinking that he needed Paul’s help. He was sure Paul could use all the help he could get.

  * * *

  “…we sure could use your help on this, buddy,” Bill Stetson’s image told Paul. Since Rykov had realigned and repaired the high-gain antenna the daily video messages had resumed. Paul stopped the video recording playback for a second to glance over the systems icons.

  The Tamaroa was purring like a kitten. Well, a kitten that was out of gas. The reactor was continuously pumping out power, the habitat pressure was holding perfect at three-quarters of an atmosphere, the carbon dioxide scrubbers showed the levels were safe, and as far as he could tell both Hui and Mikhail were in their bunks sawing logs.

  Paul looked out the window at the fracture in the asteroid about one hundred meters away from the ship. In the sunlight he could see the fracture on the edge of the cookie-shaped rock clearly. For the past two days it had continued to expand and branch out with smaller fractures. In fact, Paul was pretty sure he could have seen through the fracture almost to the other side. The only reason he couldn’t was because it was curved. The surface of the asteroid now had several smaller fractures stretching across it. Paul wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. But what he was sure of was that the two bigger pieces were barely connected, if at all. He resumed the playback.