Even with their flying yokes, mostly because they were unfamiliar with the territory, it took them over an hour to find what they were looking for, wandering up and down the clean and cheerful passageways and sometimes—asking passersby for directions only seemed to confuse things more—doubling back. At long last, within a few levels of the summit, they found a number of offices labeled:
ADVOCATE MINING AND SALVAGE
FRITZ MARSHALL, PROP.
“This is it!”
Taking a deep breath, Emerson stepped out of his yoke, folded it, and walked through the open door, where he was greeted by a female receptionist sitting behind a desk. It was a long moment before he could give her his full attention, however, for behind her was a wall-sized window, opening—only in a manner of speaking, of course—onto the unterraformed crater floor several thousand feet below. Outside, he knew, there was no air. The temperature would be either close to absolute zero or hot enough to boil the blood in his veins, depending on sun and shade.
From where he stood, well back from the window, he couldn’t see any spaceships.
“Excuse me,” repeated an insistent voice. “I said, may I help you with something?”
He looked down at the receptionist, a tidy-looking elderly woman of about Miri’s age, dressed, he assumed, in what was the latest fashion on Earth. In his opinion, the plaids and stripes did nothing for each other, especially in fluorescent colors. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he told her, “that’s quite a view you’ve got there. I’m Emerson Ngu, and these are my friends...er, Digger and Miri.”
Recognition lit her features. “Good afternoon, Mr. Ngu.” She nodded politely at Drake-Tealy and his wife. “Mr. Marshall is expecting you. You may go right in.”
Emerson moved in the direction indicated until he came to a door which opened before he reached it. A big, broad-faced man, also wearing fluorescent stripes and plaid, stood just inside with his hand on the knob, but Emerson hardly noticed him at first. Further inside the office, seated before another spectacular window with a mug in one hand and a cigar in the other, was a familiar figure.
“Aloysius!” He rushed in and seized the innkeeper’s hand.
“Surprise!” Aloysius answered. “Only the surprise is after bein’ on me, it seems. Fritz,” he addressed the man who’d opened the door. “Allow me to introduce me old friend Emerson Ngu, and me even older friend, Raymond Louis Drake-Tealy—‘Digger’ to his intimates—an’ his lovely spouse, Mirelle Stein.”
Marshall blinked. “You mean, the—“
“The the, themselves,” Aloysius replied, “t’quote the funniest movie ever made. Emerson, yer a sight fer sore eyes—but who wants sore eyes? Come an’ sit down. Pour yerself some of Fritz’s hand-imported coffee. Why did ye not tell me it was these two ye were stayin’ with out in the Pocks? Why, I’ve known ’em since—”
“Since you dug me out of the wreckage”—Miri wafted forward to take his hand—“and sat with Raymond for three days while they patched me together. Aloysius Brody, of all the faces I might see for the first time after thirty years, I would want it to be yours!”
The man actually blushed. “Mrs. Drake-Tealy, we’ve got to stop meeting like this.”
Emerson shook his head with exasperation. “Aloysius, what are you doing here? And how did you get down here before we did? It’s twice as far from Curringer as it is—”
Aloysius waved it off. “Henrietta’s overgrown dune buggy will do twice the speed of one of your hula hoops as long as you can keep it on the road. As to why I’m here, I presume ye want t’be charterin’ the fastest asteroid minin’ ship available on this rock, one of the new fusion/ion-driven craft, perhaps. Well, I’ve come t’make sure this sharpy here don’t take ye to the cleaners.”
Marshall only laughed.
“But why—” insisted Emerson.
“Because, me boy, I’m goin’with ye.”
Utopia on Ice
He who loves should live, he who knows not how to love should die, and he who obstructs love should die twice.
—Pompeiian wall inscription
The red banner, printed on some lightweight synthetic already beginning to deteriorate under the onslaught of hard vacuum and unfiltered ultraviolet light, read: “Personkind Has Matured Beyond the Need to Accumulate Material Goods.”
Like oxygen, Emerson thought. Like food, water, or electricity, since these would-be People’s Economic Democrats disdained use of the cold-fusion reactors on which the rest of civilization seemed content to run. Below the banner’s six-inch letters, he could just make out another motto, “Fraternity, Equality, Political Responsibility.” Clearly they’d identified and dispensed with that part of the old French Revolutionary triad which had caused all the difficulties.
“Sure, an’ wasn’t it Lenin himself who said that freedom is precious—so precious it must be rationed?”
For some reason, Aloysius had been in what Emerson always thought of as his literary mode ever since they’d taken off from Port Amundsen. The man’s voice came clearly to him now over his spacesuit helmet radio. At the moment, in fact, it was the only thing to be heard above the constant low background hiss of a hundred billion stars gleaming down coldly on them as they trudged across the unbearably bright but utterly lifeless basalt surface of the asteroid Vesta.
Just within the camp perimeter as they were, they should have heard other voices long before now. They’d been calling from time to time since Marshall had lowered them on a slender cable from synchronous orbit. They’d even tried calling earlier, from the ship.
No one had answered.
That didn’t keep Emerson from wishing he had his Grizzly strapped around his waist. Unfortunately, firearms were an iffy proposition in circumstances like these. For one thing, it was possible for the cartridges to “cook off”—discharge spontaneously—simply from the heat of the sun, unabated by an atmosphere.
With the constant boost of catalytic fusion to speed them on their way, the journey here had lasted a hundred hours, a little over four days. Nearly all asteroids had eccentric orbits, Pallas’s a bit more than most, Vesta’s a bit less. Pallas had been chosen for colonization in the first place because, among other things, its path swept through so much of the Belt, offering developers an accretion of highly varied materials as well as a convenient jump-off to a great many more resources relatively nearby. There were times when the orbits of Pallas and Vesta overlapped deeply, but this wasn’t one of them. Murphy’s, Emerson had learned long ago, was the fundamental law of the universe.
He recalled looking through Marshall’s office window, across the broad, mountain-ringed crater plain of Port Amundsen, at the Darling Clementine, the little mining ship he’d offered them. She’d rested on the airless surface like a gnat on a serving platter—there had been no access tunnels under the surface, Emerson had discovered, because this South Polar crater, like many of its neighbors, was filled with a titanic dust-covered glacier ten miles across and a couple of miles deep—and he’d expected the voyage ahead to be cramped and boring.
But he’d been wrong on both counts. Prospectors and miners like Marshall and his employees often spent months in space, and provided themselves with every luxury they could afford. The comfortable apartments at his own Ngu Departure factory were a good deal less luxurious and well-appointed than this little ship, which had turned out considerably bigger than she had looked at first.
Basically a short, fat cylinder sitting on mechanical legs, with work-blackened ion drivers protruding from her flat underside, and instruments, antennas, and folded ore manipulators sticking out of her top, she carried whatever cargo she happened to acquire behind her—there’d be none on this trip, at least on the outbound portion of it—in fine-meshed nets at the ends of long cables.
Inboard, elbow room was at a premium only with respect to the oxygen and other breathing gases it had to be filled with. And since three-quarters of all asteroids—the carbonaceous chondrites—were made up of six to ten percen
t water, and a third of that was oxygen, and the electrical power to extract it was plentiful if not practically free, that seldom represented a serious problem.
Darling Clementine “flew” with her upper surface forward. Inside, she was divided into three decks or levels with a utility core running down the center. The lowermost level contained the engine and all the machinery and equipment which made asteroid mining possible. It looked rather like Nails’s plumbing shop in Curringer.
The middle level was cut into wedges, with a little companionway running around the outside of the utility core, providing private sleeping spaces (the cabin Emerson was shown to was larger than his room at Mrs. Singh’s), places to wash up, prepare food, do laundry, and the hundred other little chores required to maintain life.
The uppermost level served as a sort of lounge or living room, and its many windows and mostly transparent ceiling allowed sunbeams and starlight to fall across several overstuffed chairs and sofas sitting on a plushly carpeted deck. It featured a bar, as well as expensive and powerful communications and entertainment gear.
Marshall himself acted as captain and pilot.
During the first few minutes of their voyage, another few when they’d been halfway to their destination, and the last few when they’d arrived, he’d left his recliner and swung up into a control chair at the uppermost end of the utility core, cut at this level with windows so that he could continue to converse with his guests. Like any other constant-boost spaceship, they’d accelerated all the way out to the halfway point. At turnover, when the ship would go on doing precisely what it had been doing so far—only with its thrusters pointed in the direction they were headed—he’d invited Emerson to occupy the copilot’s seat.
Trying to conceal his excitement, Emerson had climbed the four ladder rungs required to take him from the living room floor to the controls of the Darling Clementine. Aloysius, on a sofa below with a seatbelt loosely across his lap, had a drink in his hand, by which he said he planned to judge Marshall’s piloting skills. Emerson had strapped himself in and looked over the panel of instruments. There were plenty of those, but where he’d expected to see a steering yoke and thruster levers, all that presented itself was a computer keyboard.
“We’re really here more to kibitz than to do any flying ourselves,” his host had informed him. “I had my company mainframe write this navigating program for Clementine before we left, and I’m just making certain now that it’s running right. Look over there, Emerson. Displayed in blue on that screen is our projected course, overlaid in red with the route we’ve already followed. On this screen here, Clementine’s counting down the seconds before we turn over. We’re not supposed to feel a thing, but you can look out the window and see it happen.”
And that was how it had gone.
The numbers on the second screen had dwindled until they were a long line of zeroes divided by a colon and a decimal point. Something began to beep and there was a faint hissing audible throughout the ship as attitude thrusters operated briefly.
Emerson already had his eye on the stars, which whirled overhead in a complex, dizzying pattern. When they were steady again and both the hissing and the beeping had stopped, he looked down at Aloysius, sitting with his drink undisturbed.
“Nary a drop spilled,” he observed. “Do I congratulate the pilot, the Clementine, or yer company mainframe?”
Marshall ignored him to punch a few more keys, then unfastened his own lap belt and sat up. “So much for this exercise in spacemanship.” He grinned at Emerson. “Let’s inspect the reefer and see what we can microwave for dinner. Baked potatoes, that goes without saying. And I had my assistant lay in a carton of American bison steaks. All of this drudgery has given me an appetite.”
Emerson followed him down the ladder.
Aloysius joined them as they descended through a hole in the carpet to the middle deck.
In one respect, Emerson’s first experience with space travel had been a trifle disappointing. He’d secretly looked forward to being free of gravity, to squatting cross-legged in midair like a levitating yogi or bouncing off the walls as he’d seen people do in science fiction movies and old NASA films. Yet, owing to her internal architecture and the fact that Darling Clementine accelerated (and later on, decelerated) at a constant rate throughout their entire voyage, he might as well have stayed at home. His feet seemed to exert the same amount of pressure on her carpeted deck as they would have on a floor on Pallas.
Much of his time aboard Darling Clementine had been occupied with what he came to think of as “spacesuit practice,” and that, too, had turned out rather differently than he’d anticipated. Most of what he’d read about the subject was apparently obsolete. Where he’d expected complicated equipment and long checklists to assure its proper operation, he discovered instead the deceptive simplicity—another age had called it “user friendliness”—of a mature technology.
The spacesuits carried aboard Darling Clementine were “menu-driven” from a “heads-up” display inside the visor. That meant that whenever he put the helmet on—and that was always the first item of business with this kind of suit—he saw, floating before his face and superimposed on the real world outside, a series of computer-generated questions which he could answer either by looking directly at the selection he desired and blinking hard or by pushing buttons on either of the miniature keyboards on the forearms of his sleeves. The system “walked” him through the process of putting the suit on, powering it up, making sure it was properly sealed and completely functional, and adapting it both to his own body dimensions and the environment in which he planned to operate.
It had even asked about and allowed for his missing right eye.
Lacking any better facilities for the exercise—it would have been impossibly dangerous even for a professional to work outside the ship under acceleration—Marshall had evacuated a small compartment on the lower deck for Emerson to practice in. Aloysius joined him in these maneuvers. They’d reluctantly decided to limit their expedition to three people because of the room that would be required for rescuees aboard the Darling Clementine if the effort were successful. He was certainly no amateur when it came to using a spacesuit. He’d spent most of his time wearing one a lot more primitive than these, he informed Emerson, during the terraformation of Pallas. On the other hand, that meant that he was long out of practice and needed updating on the latest technology.
Together, they practiced getting in and out of the equipment, climbing up and down, dealing with various types of emergencies, even engaging in some hand-to-hand sparring.
Now, standing on the unforgivingly rugged and sterile rock of which Vesta was composed, death by freezing lurked in the shadows, with the faraway but cruel sun beating down on his armored head and shoulders. Emerson was grateful that he’d spent all those hours, essentially locked in a closet, getting to know his equipment. No technology was perfect. Whenever he looked away from the sun, into the profound blackness that only an airless world engenders, incredibly lacy crystals began to form at the bottom edge of his visor until it became necessary to prompt the tiny computer and get the helmet blower working.
“This is Darling Clementine, gentlemen, with a regular time-check.” Marshall was calling from where he orbited a few miles over their heads. “It says here you’ve got two more hours of air left. Sounds awful quiet down there to me. Come back.”
“Hello, Darling Clementine,” Emerson answered. “We’re quiet because there isn’t much to say. How do you describe an airless ball of sunbaked frozen rock, and why would you want to try? We’ve found signs of what we’re looking for—signs literally, I mean—but no indication of life so far, which is another reason it’s quiet down here. We’re just inside the front gate, in a manner of speaking, and there’s some sort of formless heap about fifty yards ahead. Over.”
“Probably all that remains of their airtent after a couple of months of micrometeorite bombardment,” Aloysius guessed. “Cheap equipment, but we kn
ew that, did we not?”
“We’re going to check it out,” Emerson added, not feeling enthusiastic at the prospect.
“Roger that,” Marshall replied. “I can see you in my little spyglass, now that you’re out of the shadows.” Not certain how they’d be greeted if there were any survivors, they’d dropped to the surface in slightly rougher country than this, a mile or so from the camp. “Try and keep in touch a little better. Over.”
“We’ll do it,” Emerson told him. He looked back to make sure Aloysius was following him—he worried a little about the man’s age and the fact that one of his legs was a prosthetic. Then he reluctantly made his way toward the object he and his older companion had described, knowing long before they reached it what they were about to find.
“As an anonymous urban guerrilla once put it,” observed Aloysius, drawing beside him and looking down at the heap of rubbish before them, “y’can’t dig a foxhole in a sidewalk.”
Marshall’s guess had been correct. What they were looking at appeared to be the remains of a plastic airtent suitable only for the briefest use by people like tourists. It was exactly the kind of thing, according to Aloysius, that some of the less scrupulous concessionaires rented to visitors at Port Amundsen and Port Peary. Its brilliant toy colors had already faded and it was in worse shape than the banner they’d seen earlier. Emerson was sure that most of the meteorite holes in the thing were microscopic and that there were likely to be millions of them. Naturally, that hadn’t stopped the air from leaking out, and it had given the destructive effect of ultraviolet light that much more surface area to work on.
What he didn’t really want to investigate more closely, or even think about very much—although he would force himself to the task, since it was the reason they were here on Vesta—were the two dozen or more motionless lumps lying beneath the flattened plastic. Emerson gulped, suddenly very conscious of what it would be like to lose control of his stomach inside a spacesuit.
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