Exile-and Glory

by Jerry Pournelle

  Chapter Fourteen

  Kevin wandered through rock corridors, not quite lost but not entirely sure of where he was. He was somewhere inside the Ceres complex and as long as he did not go through an airtight door, he couldn't be very far from the central area; but he was looking for Ellen and he didn't have any idea of where to find her.

  When Wayfarer landed, the passengers had to help unload the ship and transfer cargo—most of the cargo, Kevin reminded himself. One compartment remained sealed. When Kevin's share of the work was over, many of the passengers had already gone inside. Kevin followed through the airlock doors, relieved to be off the harsh and barren surface of the asteroid. No one would say that Ceres was a pretty place, although the stars were spectacular; but Kevin had had enough stars to last him a long time.

  Why had Ellen left without telling him where she was going? he wondered. He would have to report in for work soon, and they might not have much time together until he could find out where he would be stationed. Then they could arrange something more permanent.

  The corridors shone. They had been painted with plastic to seal in air leaks, so that it was possible to move around inside the Ceres Station without a helmet. There were lights at intervals. Kevin hoped to see someone to ask directions from, but before he did, he came to a signpost.

  It showed DAEDALUS CORPORATE OFFICES just one corridor down. Kevin went there eagerly. They could tell him where he would be staying.

  There was an elderly man in the Daedalus Corporation offices. The offices themselves were merely two rooms cut in raw rock off the corridor. They were obviously little used; there was almost no furniture, and an automatic message-recording system was the only piece of large office equipment.

  The man was well over fifty, with a network of red lines around his mouth and chin that betrayed long exposure to face masks. He had wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and much gray in his hair. He frowned at Kevin. "You'll be Senecal."

  "Yes."

  "I'm John Eliot. Senior man for Daedalus out here. You got our other people with you?"

  "No—"

  "You should have. You're an engineer. It's your responsibility to look after non-professional employees. Now we'll have to go find them. We don't have much time. Time, Senecal, is the most valuable commodity in the Belt just now."

  "Yes, sir. Look, Mr. Eliot—"

  "Call me Johnny. We'll either be friends or you'll hate me before long, but either way, it works better if we use first names."

  "Johnny. Yes, sir. I am Kevin."

  "Yeah. I know. You were saying something?"

  "Mr.—Johnny, this is my first job. I'm no professional. I'm just an engineering student, and the idea of my looking after people twice my age is funny. They wouldn't take orders from me."

  "We'll see. Did they get on all right with Lange?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Too bad about him," Eliot said. "What happened, anyway?"

  Kevin explained all he knew. "George just vanished," he finished. "Never did find him, no trace of him. Nothing."

  "His stuff missing?"

  "No," Kevin said. "Captain Greiner has it. He didn't know what to do with it."

  "We'll collect it before we go up. May as well see to that, and to finding our workmen. You can leave that gear here."

  "All right." Kevin set down the travel cases he carried and started to go out into the corridor.

  "Nope," Eliot said. "Get your hat. Didn't they teach you that? First rule, never go anywhere without your helmet. We don't often have blow-outs on Ceres, but it only takes one to kill you if you don't have your hat with you. Remember that."

  "Yes, sir." Kevin retrieved his helmet, then thoughtfully put on his tool belt as well.

  "Good," Eliot said. "Now let's go." He led the way through the bare rock corridor. "They'll probably be at Fat Jack's," Eliot said. "Most head there when they get off work or off a ship. Surprised you didn't get there first."

  "I was hoping someone would tell me where I will be staying," Kevin said. "I didn't see any hotels—"

  Eliot laughed. "Hell, you won't be staying on Ceres."

  "Sir? Johnny? If we won't be staying on Ceres, where will we be?"

  "Didn't Lange tell you anything?" Eliot demanded. "Don't you even know what you'll be working on?"

  "No, sir. I asked once, and he said I'd find out in due time. But I never did."

  Eliot laughed. "Well, that was the company's orders all right, but it's damn foolishness. Everybody on Ceres knows our big secret, not that it's anything to be secret about anyway. Daedalus is responsible for the delivery system to get cargo to Earth. We're building it. I expect Lange kept everything about that a big secret too?"

  "Yes—"

  "Okay. Up there about a thousand kilometers above Ceres there's a rock a couple of hundred meters in diameter. It's mostly nickel-iron, good stuff. We're busily mining out corridors and putting in life-support systems. When we're done, we'll pack it with all the refined minerals Interplanet has collected and take it home."

  "Take a two-hundred-meter rock home? How?" Kevin demanded. "It must weigh five million tones—"

  "Thirty million," Eliot said. "Hell, it's simple. We put hydrogen bombs at just the right place—have to calculate the center of gravity pretty carefully—and light 'em off. Do that a few times and we'll have that rock in just the right transfer orbit. Off she goes to Earth. Down there they do it again to stop it. No sweat." Eliot chuckled. He was obviously enjoying the look on Kevin's face. "Lange really didn't tell you, eh? Well, that's what we're up to. You brought the bombs with you, on Wayfarer. That's why everybody got so excited down here when we heard you were in trouble. Needed the H-bombs. Without 'em, we'd really have troubles. No other way to get all that stuff home."

  "And somebody's going to ride this thing to Earth?" Kevin said.

  "Sure. Safest place around. There'll be a couple of hundred meters of nickel-iron and rock between the crew and the bombs—what could happen?"

  That made sense, but Kevin still didn't like the idea much. "Are we supposed to be the crew?"

  "Naw. Interplanet provides the crew. They wouldn't trust a half-billion francs' worth of cargo to anybody but their own people. Understand the manager, Mr. Stoire himself, is going. Guess I can't blame them much."

  They moved on through the rock corridor. In Ceres's low gravity they couldn't walk, nor could they simply glide from place to place as they would in no gravity at all. Instead they moved in a series of bounds, like oversized kangaroos.

  They came to a cross corridor, and Eliot turned down it. There were bright lights at the end, their glare contrasting with the dim light in the corridor. They heard sounds: shouting and singing. Happy sounds.

  "That's Fat Jack's place," Eliot said. "Best bar on Ceres. Mainly because it's the only bar here. Pretty good place, though. You can get nearly anything you want. Not that you'll be here all that often."

  Kevin had already thought of that. "Don't we get to come—down to Ceres?"

  "Sure, the company provides recreation trips when we're caught up on the work. Don't cost that much to run the scooters."

  It looked as if everyone who had come in Wayfarer, and half the permanent crew of Ceres, were packed into Fat Jack's. The proprietor was a burly man with no legs. When one of the newcomers asked why he hadn't gone back to Earth, the owner laughed.

  "Sure, they'll pay my way back and give me a goddam pension, but I don't want it. What the hell use is a cripple on Earth? Out here I don't need legs." He waved to indicate the crowd in his saloon. "I make my own beer and whiskey and I get good prices. I've got a thousand friends. What do I want with Earth?"

  The saloon consisted of a large chamber carved from rock, a few tables and booths, and one long bar running across the back of the room.

  All the drinks were served in covered containers with straws, although most of the customers had learned the art of popping open the top, sucking out a drink, and closing it before their beer or whiskey drifted
away.

  Kevin pointed out the Daedalus employees, and Eliot went to round them up. While Kevin was waiting, Ellen came in. Bill Dykes was with her.

  "Hi," Kevin shouted. He went over to them. "Glad I found you. They want me to go up to one of Ceres's moons—"

  "C-4," Dykes said. "The one they're fitting up as a spaceship."

  "Right. How did you know?" Kevin asked.

  Dykes shrugged. "No secret what Daedalus does. Everybody on Ceres knows about the H-bombs. Wonder why they were so damn close-mouthed aboard Wayfarer."

  "Well, they are hydrogen bombs," Kevin said.

  "Sure. And bombs can kill people. Lots of other ways to get killed out here. I need a drink. You, Ellie?"

  "Yes, thank you."

  Dykes went to fight his way to the bar.

  "I get some recreation visits," Kevin said. "I won't see you often at first, only when I'm down. Where will you be staying?"

  "I—I'll be staying with Bill," Ellen said.

  It took Kevin a moment to understand what she had said. "In his—"

  "Yes, I'll be living with him."

  "But—damn it, he's old enough to be your father!" Kevin shouted. He wanted to say more: That at first she had put him off because she didn't want lasting attachments, and now they were lovers, and what was this? Bitterness made him say more: "I get it. He can pay you more than I can."

  "It's none of your damned business," she said. She spoke loudly, so that many of the people in the bar could hear her. "You don't own me and you have no right to make judgments."

  "No. I don't suppose I do," Kevin said. "Except—except that I thought we were friends."

  "If you're my friend, you don't act much like it," Ellen said.

  "Trouble, Ellie?" Dykes was back, without the drinks he'd gone after.

  "Not really," she said.

  "Kevin. Are you about ready to leave?" John Eliot called.

  "Yes. I'll wait for you outside," Kevin said. He turned and left without looking at Ellen.

  "Hell, this place is getting to be a drag," Bill Dykes said. His voice carried through the room and out to where Kevin stood. "Let's split and throw our own party."

  "All right," Ellen giggled. It was obvious what kind of party Dykes had in mind. She followed the miner out. They came past Kevin, and as they did, Ellen said, very quietly, "Kevin. Please. I know you don't understand, but please trust me. And for God's sake, don't let anyone know I've said anything to you. Make people believe you hate me." With that she went on without looking back, and when Dykes made a loud ribald comment about Kevin, she laughed.

  Ceres has five moons, if you can call small rocks a few hundred meters in diameter "moons." Three of them had been extensively mined, but two had been temporarily abandoned when better grades of ore were found on Ceres itself. The other one, C-4, was Kevin's home for the next few weeks.

  There was plenty of work and not enough people to do it. First, the asteroid had to be surveyed to find the exact center of gravity. Once that was located, a pit was to be dug for the hydrogen bombs that would be used to turn the tiny moon into an enormous rocket ship. On the opposite side the Daedalus crew would carve out chambers for the crew to live in, more compartments for the gold and silver and copper and other refined metals produced on Ceres. Meanwhile, another crew would set up huge mirrors on C-4 and use those to concentrate sunlight so they could boil and refine the ores extracted from the planetoid. "No point in wasting anything," Eliot had said.

  When they were finished, C-4 would carry a cargo worth nearly a billion francs. In addition, the asteroid itself would be valuable—nearly ten million metric tons of nickel-iron, which would end up in Earth orbit. Refineries there would extract the iron to use in space construction. Even the twenty million tons of rock would be useful in orbit. The asteroid could be used as a platform.

  Kevin's job was installation of the life-support equipment for the flight crew. With the help of miners and a lot of mining machinery, he hollowed out the crew chambers, then sprayed them with a thick coating of plastic; when the plastic dried, the chambers were airtight. Airlock doors were machined from chunks of the moonlet itself, and set on hinges. Sometimes the whole structure reminded Kevin more of a series of bank vaults than a spaceship; everything was massive, and rather crudely made.

  There were no work shifts, there was simply a job that had to be done. Eliot explained what was needed and was available for consultation. Otherwise he left Kevin alone. When one task was completed Eliot would check it out, then assign another.

  Kevin found the job exacting, but it was important work, and everyone was enthusiastic about it. They were taking part in something that might change man's future.

  "Think about it," Eliot said. "If we can get all of Earth's metals out here, they won't have to strip-mine on Earth. No pollution down there. You know, in fifty years Earth can be one big park, with all the industries out in space."

  Kevin became lost in a maze of calculations: food, oxygen, and water consumption for a crew of two (with standby provision for three) on a trip four hundred days long; g stresses which the equipment would endure when the one-megaton H-bombs went off; finding stress seams in the nickel-iron moonlet so they could be reinforced. Slowly the "ship" began to look like something that could support human life, with fuel cells for electric power, caves of ice for water and cooling, telescopes and radar for finding the exact position; navigation computer, galley, bunk rooms—with a separate stateroom for each of the crew, there being no space limits at all.

  Finally Eliot relented and took the work crew down to Ceres. They went in a scooter much like the one used to get from the Earth satellite to Wayfarer: an open framework with seats for the passengers, a baggage compartment, and a large kerosene-oxygen rocket engine. The scooters also had a navigation computer; C-4 moved around Ceres at more than a third of a kilometer each second, and the total velocity change needed to get from the "moon" to Ceres was more than eight hundred miles an hour. The transfer orbit was tricky.

  Kevin talked with the scooter pilot in Fat Jack's after they arrived on Ceres.

  "Yeah, sure, I could eyeball it," Hal Donnelly said. "But it'd be tough. Not like flying an airplane." Donnelly had once been a test pilot, and would be one of the crew accompanying C-4 on the long trip to Earth. "Airplanes have air to work with. You can turn a corner, or slow down. Scooter doesn't work that way."

  Kevin wasn't really listening to the pilot. He was thinking about Ellen. There had been so much work on C-4 that he hadn't had much time to brood about her before—except when he was ready to go to sleep at night—but he had felt a quick excitement when Eliot announced they were going down to Ceres, and he hoped to see her. He didn't know what to say to her, but there had to be some way—

  He didn't know how to ask about her. He was afraid of what he would hear. His fellow workers on C-4 had talked about the various prostitutes on Ceres, and although none of them had mentioned Ellen by name, they all assumed that any single woman who came out not under contract to one of the companies could have only one purpose in mind.

  Why the hell was she living with Bill Dykes? She'd hardly spoken to Dykes on the ship. She certainly hadn't known him very well, yet she moved in with him her first day on Ceres. It didn't make sense.

  Of course it makes sense, Kevin thought. She likes the guy and I just didn't know it. She's got every right to move in with anybody she wants to and you've got no call to be jealous about it. She said everything would be over when they got to Ceres. It was just a shipboard thing. He could tell himself that, but it didn't help.

  "You haven't heard a damned thing I said," Hal Donnelly said. "You drink my liquor but you don't listen to me." The pilot was grinning slightly.

  "Oh—uh, sorry," Kevin said.

  "No sweat. I know what you need. I'm about to go looking for a little poon myself. I know a good house. Want to come along?"

  The idea was not attractive. Kevin still hoped to meet Ellen. He knew that wasn't very reasonabl
e, and that she was likely to be with someone else, but there was always a chance—"Thanks, Hal. Not just yet. I'll have a couple more."

  The pilot shrugged. "Suit yourself. We lift out of here in thirty-four hours. Meet you here."

  "Right. And thanks for the drink."

  " 'S okay. You'll get me one next time. Right now I've got a more urgent urge . . . ." Hal grinned again and left the bar.

  And just what the hell am I doing here? Kevin wondered. I don't know anybody in this place. He ordered another drink. The vacuum-distilled whiskey was rough and strong and cost too much. Kevin sipped at it disconsolately.

  He didn't want to leave because Fat Jack's was the place where everyone came to find people. The recreation schedule for the C-4 crew was known and posted in Fat Jack's. If Ellen wanted to see him, she'd know where to find him.