Beltrunner

by O’Brien, Sean

  “Recognize voice command. Ten centimeters right,” Collier said, and the beetle zipped nearer to the metal, still hovering. “Collect,” Collier ordered, and the beetle spun in a complex sphere, looking for the nearest piece of debris to put into its belly. The little beetles weren’t used much by the big corporations, which could afford to let P residue go uncollected in a large-scale mining venture, but the robots had more than paid for themselves, scooping up valuable particles on a strike.

  The robot had located the thallium, and deftly scooped it into its collection bay, sealing itself after the midair maneuver was complete.

  “Return and deposit,” Collier said, and the beetle promptly zoomed back to the sample bag, dumped its cargo, and hovered expectantly near Collier.

  “So how did that happen?” Sancho said, clearly irritated.

  “The sample I put inside wasn’t any different than the others,” Collier said. “It must have been the new code we entered. What was it again?”

  “Double tap design one, double tap design two, counter-twist A, no action to B, slide across design one.”

  “Okay. Lock that in as ‘thallium transmute,’” Collier told Sancho.

  “It might not be that,” Sancho replied.

  “Huh? What do you mean? You saw the pellet, and you were the one who said it was thallium.”

  “I know that, I’m just saying perhaps it isn’t the code for thallium as much as it is a code for ‘advance’, or something.”

  “I don’t follow you,” Collier said.

  “Gallium is a metal in the Boron group. So is thallium. Gallium is a period four element, while thallium is a period six element.”

  “I see what you’re getting at,” Collier said, his voice rising in excitement. “You think that I activated the ‘advance two periods’ result, or something like that.”

  “It’s at least as possible,” Sancho said. His voice, too, showed signs of excitement.

  “What’s between thallium and gallium? The period five element? Isn’t it indium?”

  “I’m impressed, Skipper. Periodic table knowledge.”

  “Put a gold star next to my name on the wall chart,” Collier said. “I wonder why or how we missed that.”

  “Maybe we didn’t. Gallium and indium are very similar. I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference on just my camera.”

  Collier thought for a while. “I guess so. Anyway, let’s keep trying combinations. If we can keep changing the outcome, I’m sure you’ll be able to suss the pattern.”

  “Thanks for the confidence, Skipper,” Sancho said brightly. “I do have a suggestion, though: you should wear your vacc suit. If we accidentally stumble upon, say, fluorine…”

  Collier nodded. “Good thinking.” He went aft and swam into his suit. He realized that he had been extraordinarily lucky — if in his random twiddlings of the controls, he had opened the tube to expose a toxic or reactive gas into the cabin, he might have died. The thrill of discovery inside him was suddenly tempered by caution as he fought back retroactive panic.

  After he had sealed his suit, he restarted his careful experiments with Sancho. In little time, the wand produced cadmium, tin, zinc, indium, and lead, and Sancho announced that he had determined the pattern of manipulation.

  “Skipper,” he said, his voice positively bouncy, “I am about to do something that the alchemists of old attempted for centuries.”

  “Okay,” Collier said, smiling. “I can’t help but notice, Sancho, that you seem to be warming to the alien magic wand.”

  “I make no statements as to its origin, but you are right. I like this thing, now that I understand it a little bit better.”

  “So, what were you going to do?”

  “Please, Skipper, place the last sample, the lead, into the magic wand.”

  Collier did as instructed.

  “Now, if you please, perform the following maneuvers to the wand,” Sancho gave Collier a series of instructions much like the ones they had been using for the past hour.

  Collier tapped, twisted, and slid according to his computer’s instructions, saying, “You sure about this?”

  “Yes. Eighty-seven percent chance of success.”

  “Eighty-seven?”

  “Just watch, Skipper. Close the wand, please, and activate the transmuter.”

  Collier did so, then opened the wand.

  A bright yellow metal tumbled out, catching the ambient light of the cabin and sparkling majestically as it spun in the air.

  “I have unlocked the Philosopher’s Stone!” Sancho shouted in triumph.

  Collier was well aware that gold, although still a precious metal, did not command a fraction of the mystique it once had ages ago. Had he found a vein of gold on an asteroid, harvesting it would have brought only modest profits, as the best prices were still to be found on Earth, and payload costs were high. Despite this, there was something symbolically powerful about the transmuting of lead into gold. The bright yellow metal floated through the cabin with Collier’s eyes locked onto it, and it took Sancho’s voice to bring him back to the wand.

  “All joking aside, Skipper, I really think I’ve cracked the code. Assuming there aren’t any missed elements in its repertoire, I believe I can find the proper manipulations to make anything at all.”

  Collier added, “Also assuming there aren’t any elements we don’t know about.”

  “I don’t see how that’s possible,” Sancho said. He did not elaborate.

  Collier opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it. He was going to argue with Sancho, saying that the very existence of the wand was proof enough that human beings obviously didn’t know everything, but he refrained. If their work on the wand had taught him anything about his partner, it was that Sancho was touchy about things he didn’t understand.

  The next few hours confirmed Sancho’s hypothesis. He was able to transmute at will, though the two agreed to skip some of the more reactive, toxic, and radioactive elements for now.

  “We certainly seem to have found the goose we were looking for, Skipper,” Sancho said after the successful transmuting of some of the gallium to rhodium.

  “Yep,” Collier said. “The goose that lays the rhodium eggs.”

  “I think it’s golden eggs in the legend, Skipper.”

  “Rhodium is worth more,” Collier quipped.

  “Cute. So what are we going to do with it?”

  Collier snorted. “We’re not going to make the same mistake as the guy in the story, that’s for sure. What is bringing the highest price on the market right now?”

  “Stand by. Contacting Ceres commodities database.” Sancho said. There was a pause, presumably during which time Sancho was searching the various indices for high prices.

  Collier took the opportunity to think about their discovery. Assuming the wand didn’t break down or simply stop working, it was an endless supply of whatever metal he desired. The first order of business was to collect enough cash to satisfy Starcher that he was on to something, and then he could certainly borrow much more money to finance some kind of independent research project on the device if he felt like it. Or maybe the Jovians would agree to some kind of deal where he turned over the wand for analysis in exchange for a shipload of money that would set him up for the rest of his life.

  Or, he could simply keep the wand, keep producing metals, and sell them for profit.

  The last thought did not appeal to him as much as he thought it would, and that puzzled him. He was always searching for the next big strike, and now that he had found it, he wasn’t sure he wanted to stop.

  “Calculations complete. Highest priced element currently californium. Selling at 65,000 per gram.”

  Collier frowned. The two hadn’t transmuted any californium in their experiments: the element had been classified by both as too radioactive and d
angerous. He was reasonably sure the wand could handle it, but that wasn’t the problem.

  “How am I going to explain where I got my hands on californium?”

  “I don’t know, Skipper.”

  “Okay, let’s come back to that idea. What about good old-fashioned platinum? Keep it simple?”

  “Platinum is currently selling for eleven point seven seven per gram.”

  Collier nodded. The price hadn’t moved much in the last few months. The problem had always been the extraction fee. Ceres Authority charged almost a thousand an hour for use of its extractor, and in that hour, even a ten percent vein would only yield about three hundred grams.

  Collier’s lips moved as he calculated. “We can easily make ten kilograms of the stuff from garbage and whatnot around the cabin, so that’s over one hundred thousand right there.” It would have taken about twenty times that much raw material to yield ten kilograms of platinum: certainly not more than his cargo space could handle. And it would have cost him around thirty hours of extraction rental at a thousand an hour.

  He smiled. They wouldn’t be needing the Authority extractors. That raised his profit margin appreciably. He would be able to start paying back Starcher, which should give him breathing room. A few rounds of buying worthless scrap and converting it to platinum, or palladium, or rhodium and he would be out of debt and be able to repair and upgrade Dulcinea.

  “We’ll convert all the spare trash and scrap into platinum, sell it, and go from there,” Collier said, half to himself, half to Sancho.

  He just didn’t know where “there” was going to be.

  *

  Days later, after arriving back at Ceres, Collier found a platinum buyer and arranged the sale. The man had been a bit surprised at the appearance of the metal when he took it — he asked where it had come from and had demanded to test it for purity. Collier had readily agreed to the test, but was unprepared for the buyer’s response half an hour later. In the meantime, Collier had read all he needed to of the man’s dossier: Kein Go. Licensed metal broker. Specializing in small purchases. Shareholder in TransMars shipping. Member in good standing Ceres Chamber of Commerce and so on.

  “What the fuck is this supposed to be?” Go demanded over the holoscreen, his face too close to the camera pickup. Either his transmitter was faulty, the camera angle was too steep, or he had an enormous lantern jaw.

  “What do you mean? Something wrong with the metal?” Collier asked, sitting upright in his couch.

  “One hundred percent pure? That’s fuckin’ impossible. What are you trying to pull?” He stuck his stubbly chin out even farther, almost completely obscuring the rest of his vaguely Asiatic face.

  “So you’re complaining because the metal is too pure?”

  “No, asshole, I’m complaining because you probably plated the stuff.”

  Collier seized the camera as if it were Go’s cheeks. “I don’t plate. If it’ll make you feel better, pulverize the goddamn sample and do a full spec on it. Look at each goddamn atom one by one. But you’re not going to get out of a sale because you think it’s too pure. Buy it, or don’t buy it and give it all back, every microgram, so I can sell it to someone with a brain.”

  Go hesitated, looked off-camera for a moment. “Calm down. I tell you what. I’ll take it all, but I’m going to have an Authority assay agent look it over. And if you’ve been plating, it’ll be all over the system. You won’t make another sale until Halley’s Comet comes back.”

  “Fine. Just authorize your transfer of funds.”

  Go’s face disappeared, and Collier watched carefully as his cred balance shot up by over a hundred and fifteen thousand.

  “Shall I call Barney Starcher?” Sancho asked.

  “Yeah. No, wait,” Collier said, grinning. “I think I’ll take it to him in person.”

  He crawled back into his vacc suit, helmet dangling from the back of the suit’s neck, and made his way down to Ceres. He was halfway down the descent cable when he realized he could have afforded a capsule and gone down in relative luxury. He grunted at himself, mumbled, “Old habits,” and continued his descent.

  He resisted the urge to enter the Trojan Point and instead made straight for Starcher’s kiosk. He dodged a knot of Solarites who had cornered a rookie rockherder (she hadn’t even started her braid yet) in the maroon and grey outfit of the Quantum Concern and slid noiselessly into Starcher’s office.

  “I’ve—” he started before he realized Starcher had a client. Both looked up at him, Starcher with exasperation, the middle-aged, plump client with no readable expression on his waxen face.

  “Sorry,” Collier said, checking his flight on a ceiling rail and shoving back out. He handwalked his way up the face of Starcher’s marquee, bumping lightly on the horizontal partition separating this level from the one above. Even before he swiveled around to face the open quadrangle, he smelled the shitbum who had managed to adhere to the ceiling with a dull grey slab of stik-tite.

  “Jesus, fella, can’t you…” he started, but the vagrant was either asleep or comatose, his eyes closed and his chest moving down and up gently.

  Collier eyed him with distaste. The man’s choice of camping spots was not unique: he had seen shitbums suspended from high corners many times before. This particular one smelled of sour milk and vomit, and when a passerby disturbed the air currents as to waft some of the shitbum’s body odor toward him, Collier had to suppress a gag. Collier let go of the handhold and began to drift toward the ground, looking for any place other than the front corner of Starcher’s marquee to wait, when the hobo awoke with a shuddering start and began instantly to tear at the stik-tites that held him. He gurgled wildly as he thrashed about, ripping the worn-out adhesive strips from his body and knocking himself roughly against the ceiling partition. The rebound from his actions sent him downward toward Collier, who twisted violently to avoid contact with the shitbum as he bounced off the floor.

  The man toed off the floor and shot himself, cartwheeling, through the open quadrangle center, caroming off people until he fetched up squarely against a bearded miner in the midnight blue uniform of the Ad Astra Corporation.

  “Damn!” the miner exclaimed, holding his nose and mouth with one hand while trying to fight off the man’s unfocused flailing with the other. “Get away from me, you fuck!” The Ad Astra man was having trouble — the vagrant’s kinetic energy had caused the two to tumble somewhat, and the miner’s handicap of keeping a hand to his mouth was proving too much to overcome. As Collier watched, the two flew through the quadrangle while other flyers dodged them with varying levels of success and arced slowly down to the other side of the circular walkway on the same vertical level the hobo had launched himself from.

  The miner, using both hands, managed to grasp the shitbum securely around the shoulders (receiving a few glancing blows from the man’s crazily windmilling arms in the process) and, bracing himself against a storefront display, chest pressed him violently away.

  The bum spun rapidly head-over-heels and slammed into the inner railing, his body folding itself around the railing before it slingshotted off again, this time headed downward at fair speed. The man’s posture indicated that he was no longer conscious — he had cracked his head against the railing, and even in the microgravity, it looked as if it had been rough.

  He was headed down at an angle, and Collier, who had been watching the whole affair with morbid curiosity, calculated quickly that he was going to land badly and painfully on the walkway below.

  Even as he mumbled to himself, “Why am I doing this?” Collier vaulted the railing and flung himself powerfully downward to intercept the shitbum. He passed the vagrant and reversed himself just in time to receive the man’s body. He allowed himself to crumple under the shitbum’s inertia, using his own muscles to soften the landing.

  He found himself on his ass with a shitbum face-first against hi
s neck while onlookers gaped.

  Then the bum threw up noisily. The jet of vomit pushed the hobo away, but more than a little of the mess made its way into the unpressurized and therefore loose neck gasket of Collier’s suit. He could feel the warm slime oozing down the inside of his suit. He fought to keep his own gorge settled as the odor of acid assaulted him.

  He pushed the bum off and rose, ignoring the onlookers who chuckled and made half-witty comments. The man was semi-conscious, but didn’t look as if he was going to choke on his own vomit, and Collier did not feel disposed to help him anymore. Trailing noxious fumes, he leapt back to Banker’s Row level in time to see Starcher’s client leave the office.

  “Holy — what happened to you?” Starcher said, wrinkling his nose.

  “Never mind. Let me use your washroom, will ya? I have to get cleaned up.”

  “Yeah, you do,” Starcher said, stepping back.

  Collier floated into the tiny washroom at the back of Starcher’s office, and bought some water from the flexible hose. He sprayed off his face and neck, then cleaned off the inside of his suit as best he could. He tried not to think about what was trapped between his body and the inside of the pressure suit — at least the vomit was diluted with water now. After he finished with Starcher, he’d get a proper cleaning done.

  He emerged from the washroom and approached Starcher’s work desk in the front of the office. The moneylender was standing at his station, lightly tethered at the waist. He turned his head at Collier’s approach.

  “What the hell was that all about?”

  “Oh, some shitbum was hanging over your sign outside. He was gonna land rough on the lower level.”

  “That’s Rufeerio. He waits up there in the corner, drops down on people loitering near the Bank of Mars. Complete wetware burnout, he is.” Starcher made no effort to hide the contempt in his voice. “Since when do you care about shitbums?”

  Collier cocked his head. “What do you mean? I care about them. Just don’t want them throwing up on me, that’s all.” He slid into one of the frames opposite Starcher’s desk, settled down and tethered himself to the recliner.