The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  Consolidators moved around a lot and carried defenses. The federal agencies put a lot of effort into protecting their monopolies. As is generally the case when fabulous profits stand to be made, the game could get very nasty and rough. Risk is always proportional to the possible gain.

  “Delta vee, two point five, reducing. Twenty-six seconds to contact.”

  Smooth, smooth—everything under control. It had been all along. Cassell could sense the sureness of touch on the controls as he watched the screen. He even got the feeling that the new arrival might have rushed the early approach on purpose, just to make them all a little nervous. His face softened with the hint of a grin.

  As a final flourish, the vessels rotated into alignment and closed in a single, neatly integrated motion. The three latching indicators came on virtually simultaneously.

  “Docking completed.”

  “Right on!” Fuigerado complimented.

  Without wasting a moment, the spider fired its retros to begin slowing the crate down to matching velocity, and steered it into an arc that brought it around stern-wise behind the launcher, hanging half a mile off the Maddox’s starboard bow. It slid the crate into the next empty slot in the frame holding the load to be consolidated, hung on while the locks engaged, and then detached.

  Cassell went through to the communications room behind the bridge, then down to the operations control deck, where the remote console that the spider had been controlled from was located. The kid was getting up and stretching, Suzi next to him, Hank Bissen, the reserve pilot who had been standing by, still at his console opposite.

  “You did pretty good,” Cassell said.

  “Thank you, sir.” He knew damn well that he had, and smiled. It was the kind of smile that Cassell liked—open and direct, conveying simple, unassuming confidence; not the cockiness that took needless risks and got you into trouble.

  “Your name’s Shimoto. What is that, Japanese?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, what should we call you?”

  “My first name is Icoro … . Does it mean I have a job, Mr. Cassell?”

  “You’d better believe it. Welcome to the team.”

  Nagai Horishagi leaned back wearily from the papers scattered across his desk in the Tariffs and Excise section of the Merylynch-Mubachi offices in the Tokyo Nagomi Building. It was his first day back after ten days in South America, and it looked as if he had been gone for a month. Even as he thought it, his secretary, Yosano, came through from the outer office with another wad. Nagai motioned in the direction of his In tray. He didn’t meet her eyes or speak. Her movements betraying an awkwardness equal to his own, she deposited the papers and withdrew. Nagai stared down at the desk until he heard the door close; then he sighed, rose abruptly, and turned to stare out the window at the city. That was when he noticed the plant on the ledge.

  It had bright green leaves, and flowers of pale yellow with a touch of violet—one in full bloom, two more just opening. He stared at it, perplexed. Where on Earth had it come from? He had no mind for flowers, as the rest of the office readily testified. And yet, as he looked at it, he had to admit that it seemed a happy little fellow. He reached out and touched one of the leaves. It felt cool and smooth. Very well, he thought. If you can do something to cheer this awful place up, you’ve earned your keep. I guess we’ll let you stay.

  All through the morning, he would pause intermittently and look back over his shoulder to gaze with a fresh surge of curiosity at the plant. And then, shortly before lunchtime, the answer came to him. Of course! Yosano had put it there. No wonder she had acted tensely. How could he have been so slow?

  Before he went away, they had gotten involved in one of those affairs that a professional shouldn’t succumb to, but which can happen to the best. But in their case it had uncovered real affection and become quite romantic. After years of living in an emotional isolation ward he had celebrated and exuberated, unable to believe his luck … and then blown the whole thing in a single night, getting drunk and disgracing himself by insulting everybody at that stupid annual dinner—even if they had deserved every word of it. He had agonized over the situation all the time while he was away, but really there was no choice. No working relationship needed this kind of strain. He had decided that she would have to be transferred.

  But now this was her way of telling him that it didn’t have to be that way. He was forgiven. Everything could be OK. And so it came about that he was able to summon up the courage to confront her just before she left for lunch and say, “Could we give it another try?”

  She nodded eagerly. Nagai didn’t think that he had ever seen her look so delighted. He smiled, too. But he didn’t mention the plant. The game was to pretend that the plant had nothing to do with it. “Can I apologize for being such an ass?” he asked instead.

  Yosano giggled. “There’s no need. I thought you were magnificent”

  “Then how about dinner tonight?” he suggested.

  “Of course.”

  Yosano remembered only later in the afternoon that she had agreed to meet the American that night. Well, too bad. The American would have to find somebody else. She would have to call him and tell him, of course—but not from the office, she decided. She would call his hotel as soon as she got home.

  Steve Bryant hung up the phone in his room at the Shinjuku Prince and stared at it moodily.

  “Well, goddamn!” he declared.

  Weren’t they the same the whole world over. He had already shaved, showered, and put on his pastel blue suit, fresh from the hotel cleaner’s. His first night to himself since he arrived in Japan, and he wasn’t going to hit the town with that cute local number that he’d thought he had all lined up, after all. He poured himself another Scotch, lit a cigarette, and leaned back against the wall at the head of the bed to consider his options.

  OK, then he’d just take off and scout the action in this town on his own, and see what showed up, he decided. And if nothing of any note did, he was going to get very drunk. Wasn’t life just the same kind of bitch, too, the whole world over.

  The bar was brightly lit and glittery, and starting to fill up for the evening. There was a low stage with a couple of dancers and a singer in a dress that was more suggestion than actuality. It was later than Alan Quentin had wanted stay, and he could feel the drink going to his head. He had stopped by intending to have just one, maybe two, to unwind on his way back to the garage-size apartment that came with his yearlong stint in Tokyo. Then he’d gotten talking to the salesman from Phoenix, here on his first visit, who had been stood up by his date.

  On the stool next to him, Steve Bryant went on, “Can you imagine, Al, five thousand dollars for a box of old horseshoes and cooking pots that you could pick up in a yard sale back home? Can you beat that?” American-frontier nostalgia was the current rage in Japan.

  “That’s incredible,” Al agreed.

  “You could retire on what you’d get for a genuine Civil War Colt repeater.”

  “I’ll remember to check the attic when I get back.”

  “You’re from Mobile, right?”

  “Montgomery.”

  “Oh, right. But that’s still Alabama.”

  “Right.”

  Steve’s attention was wandering. He let his gaze drift around the place, then leaned closer and touched Al lightly on the sleeve. “Fancy livening up the company? There’s a couple of honeys at the other end that we could check out.”

  Al glanced away. “They’re hostesses. Work here. Keep you buying them lemonades all night at ten dollars a shot. See the guy out back there who’d make a sumo wrestler look anorexic? He’ll tell you politely that it’s time to leave if you don’t like it. I’ll pass, anyhow. I’ve had a rough day.”

  Steve sat back, tossed down the last of his drink, and stubbed his cigarette. His face wrinkled. “Suddenly this place doesn’t grab me so much anymore. What d’you say we move on somewhere else?”

  “Really, no. I only stopped by for a quick
one. There’s some urgent stuff that I have to get done by tomorrow, and—”

  “Aw, come on. What kind of a welcome to someone from home is this? It’s all on me. I’ve had a great day.”

  The next bar around the corner was smaller, darker, just as busy. The music was from a real fifties jukebox. They found a table squeezed into a corner below the stairs. “So what do you do?” Steve asked.

  “I’m an engineer—spacecraft hydraulic systems. We use a lot of Japanese components. I liaise with the parent companies here on testing and maintenance procedures.”

  “Sorry, but I don’t have an intelligent question to ask about that.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  Steve fell quiet for a few seconds and contemplated his drink. Suddenly he looked up. “Does that mean you’re mathematical?”

  Al frowned. “Some. Why?”

  “Oh, just something I was reading on the plane over. It said that a butterfly flapping its wings in China can change the weather next week in Texas. Sounds kinda crazy. Does it make sense to you?”

  Al nodded. “The Butterfly Effect. It’s a bit of an extreme example, but what it’s supposed to illustrate is the highly nonlinear dynamics of chaotic systems. Tiny changes in initial conditions can make the world of difference to the consequences.” He took in Steve’s glassy stare and regarded him dubiously. “Do you really want me to go into it?”

  Steve considered the proposition. “Nah, forget it.” He caught the bartender’s eye and signaled for two more. “How much do you think you’d get here for a genuine Stetson? Have a guess.”

  Al lost count of the places they visited after that, and had no idea what time he finally got back to his apartment. He woke up halfway through the morning feeling like death, and called in sick. He was no better by lunchtime, and so decided to make a day of it.

  It so happened that among the items on Alan Quentin’s desk that morning was a technical memorandum concerning structural bolts made from the alloy CYA-173 /B. Tests had revealed that prolonged cyclic stressing at low temperatures could induce metal crystallization, resulting in a loss of shear-strength. These bolts should be replaced after ten thousand hours in space environments, not thirty thousand as stipulated previously. Since CYA-173/B had been in use less than eighteen months, relatively few instances of its use would be yet affected. However, any fittings that had been in place for more than a year—and particularly where exposed to vibrational stress—should be resecured with new bolts immediately.

  Because Al wasn’t there to do it, the information didn’t get forwarded to his company in California that day. Hence, it was not included in that week’s compendium of updates that the Engineering Support Group beamed out to its list of service centers, repair shops, maintenance-and-supply bases, and other users of the company’s products, scattered across the solar system.

  Forty-eight hours after the updates that did get sent were received at GYO-3, a Federal Space Command base orbiting permanently above Ganymede, the largest satellite of Jupiter, the robot freighter Hermit departed on a nine-day haul to Callisto. In its main propulsion section, the Hermit carried four high-pressure centrifugal pumps, fastened to their mountings by CYA-173/B bolts. The Hermit had been ferrying assorted loads between the Jovian moons for over six months now, after trudging its way outward from the Belt for even longer before that. The bolts still holding the pumps were among the first of that type to have been used anywhere.

  Fully loaded, the Maddox’s cargo cage combined the consignments from over fifty independents, averaging a thousand tons of asteroid material each, and stretched the length of an old-time naval cruiser. The loads included concentrations of iron, nickel, magnesium, manganese, and other metals for which there would never be a shortage of customers eager to avoid federal taxes and tariffs. A good month’s work for a team of ten working one of the nickel-iron asteroids would earn them a quarter million dollars. True, the costs tended to be high, too, but the offworld banks offered generous extended credit with the rock pledged as collateral. This was another source of friction with the federal authorities, who claimed to own everything and didn’t recognize titles that they hadn’t issued themselves. But ten billion asteroids, each over a hundred meters in diameter, was a lot to try to police. And the torroidal volume formed by the Belt contained two trillion times more space than the sphere bounded by the Moon’s orbit.

  Better money still could be made for hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and other light elements essential for biological processes and the manufacture of such things as plastics, which are not found on the Moon but occur in the carbonaceous chondrites. This type of asteroid contains typically up to five percent kerogen, a tarry hydrocarbon found in terrestrial oil shales, “condensed primordial soup”—a virtually perfect mix of all the basic substances necessary to support life. At near-Earth market rates, kerogen was practically priceless. And there was over a hundred million billion tons of it out there, even at five percent.

  The driver, consisting of a triple-chamber fusion rocket and its fuel tanks, attached at the tail end when the cage was ready to go. Now flight-readied, the assembled launcher hung fifty miles off the Turner Maddox’s beam. The search radars were sweeping long range, and the defenses standing to at full alert. There’s no way to hide the flash when a two-hundred-gigawatt fusion thruster fires—the perfect beacon to invite attention from a prowling federal strike force.

  “We’re clean,” Fuigerado reported from his position on one side of the bridge. He didn’t mean just within their own approach perimeter. The Maddox’s warning system was networked with other defense grids in surrounding localities of the Belt. Against common threats, the independents worked together.

  Cassell checked his screens to verify that the Maddox’s complement of spiders, shuttles, maintenance pods, and other mobiles were all docked and accounted for, out of the blast zone. “Uprange clear,” he confirmed.

  Liam Doyle tipped his cap to the back of a head of red, tousled Irish hair and ran a final eye over the field- and ignition-status indicators. A lot more was at stake here than with just the routine retrieval of an incoming crate. The skipper liked to supervise outbound launches in person.

  “Sequencing on-count at minus ten seconds,” the controller’s voice said from the operations deck below.

  “Send her off,” Doyle pronounced.

  “Slaving to auto … . Guidance on … . Plasma ignition.”

  White starfire lanced across twenty miles of space. The launcher kicked forward at five gs, moved ahead, its speed seeming deceptively slow for a few moments; then it pulled away and shrunk rapidly among the stars. On the bridge’s main screen, the image jumped as the tracking camera upped magnification, showing the plume already foreshortened under the fearsome buildup of velocity. Nineteen minutes later and twenty thousand miles downrange, the driver would detach and fire a retro burn, separating the two modules. The cage would remain on course for the Inner System, while the driver turned in a decelerating curve that would eventually bring it back to rendezvous with the Maddox.

  “We’ve got a good one,” the controller’s voice informed everybody. Hoots and applause sounded through the open door from the communications room behind.

  “Mr. Cassell, a bottle of the Bushmill’s, if you please,” Doyle instructed.

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  Doyle turned to face the other chiefs who were present on the bridge. “And I’ve some more news for you to pass on; this is as good a time as any to mention it,” he told them. “This will be our last operation for a while. This can feels as if it’s getting a bit creaky to me. You can tell your people that we’ll be putting in for an overhaul and systems refit shortly, so they’ll have a couple of months to unwind and blow some of their ill-gotten gains on whatever pleasures they can find that are to be had this side of Mars. Details will be posted in a couple of days.” Approving murmurs greeted the announcement, which they toasted with one small shot of Irish mellow each.

  Later, how
ever, alone in his private cabin with Cassell, Doyle was less sanguine. “I didn’t want to mention it in front of everybody, but I’ve been getting ominous messages from around the manor,” he confided. “The Bandit has been very quiet lately.”

  Cassell took in the unsmiling set of the boss’s face. The Beltway Bandit was another consolidator like the Turner Maddox: same business, same clients, same modus operandi. “How quiet?” he asked.

  Doyle made a tossing-away motion. “Nothing.” And that was very odd, for although accidents happened, and every now and again an unlucky or careless outfit was tracked down by federal patrols, disaster was never so quick and so total as to prevent some kind of distress message from being sent out.

  “Are you saying it was the feds—they took it out?” Cassell asked.

  “We don’t know. If it was, they did it in a way that nobody’s heard of before. That’s the real reason why I’m standing us down for a while.” He paused, looking at Cassell pointedly. “Some of the operators are saying that they’re using insiders.”

  Cassell caught the implication. “You think Shimoto’s one?” he asked. “Could we be next?”

  “What do you think? He’s with your section.”

  Cassell shrugged. “He’s good at the job, mixes in well. Everybody likes him. We’re operating standard security. It hasn’t shown up anything.”

  “His kind of ability could come from a federal pilots’ school,” Doyle pointed out. “And a pilot would be able to get himself away in something once the strike was set up.”

  Cassell couldn’t argue. “I’ll make sure we keep a special eye on him during the R and R,” he said.

  “Yes, do that, why don’t you?” Doyle agreed. “I want to be absolutely sure that we’re clean when we resume operating.”