Asimov's SF, April-May 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Sudden change of perspective. Right. World curving away in all directions, stars outlining the horizon. We'll walk to the edge and suddenly the black plains will spread out below, maybe the twinkling of city lights on the horizon, far far away ... Instead, on the edge of our little world, came first the milky ghost of the solar corona, then sunrise, preceded by a few tongues of blinding prominence flame.

  The landscape expanded all around us, the two worlds, A and B, growing together, shadows shortening, as the neck valley of the our crippled snowman came out of eclipse.

  We made rendezvous with Willy and Minnie a little farther on than we expected. They were “standing” on a bit of underhang, just on the edge of the neck of striated rubble that formed the last bit of the bridge onto A, festooned with as much hardware as we had, floating together, looking down at something.

  I heard Willy say, “So what the hell is this?"

  Beyond them, amid the jumble of small craters and humps, there was a sudden change of color, a sinuous ridge of rusty brown material, like a snake under the regolith, spattered here and there with patches of black obviously blasted from nearby craters.

  Minnie whispered, “Um. That's odd."

  “No kidding."

  I said, “So what is it?"

  Minnie said, “Don't know.” She started working on the fasteners holding her parts of the core sampler to her harness, the rest of us following suit because she was pretty much calling the shots when it came to this stuff. “It almost looks like something that's bubbled out of the interior."

  “On a body this small?"

  In a small voice, she said, “You wouldn't think so...” I could see her head moving behind the helmet's faceplate, as if looking around. “But the orientation of those linear features..."

  It took almost two hours to set up the little drill rig, while the sun and stars went round and round. The biggest problem was driving the pitons to hold it down. We had an inertialess hammer, but it didn't work at all well, twirling out of my grip when I triggered it, banging out to the end of its lanyard.

  Willy and Sarah finally held me down with continuous firing of their backpacks, Minnie steadying the rig while I swung our high-tech gizmo like something from a hardware store.

  Finally, we were ready, and I got behind Minie, holding her more or less steady, one hand on her life-support system mounting rack, the other on my maneuvering unit controller. In theory, I would be able to feel her shifting movements and puff my jets appropriately, keeping her more or less where she needed to be.

  I said, “Okay?"

  “That's fine, uh ... one moment..."

  I could feel the core drill's vibration, propagating through Minnie's suit and into mine, while I wiggled the little thumb controller, trying to compensate. I said, “Minnie, are you..."

  “!?” She made an odd, wordless grunt.

  Shove.

  I felt myself going over backward, feet swinging up to the sky as Minnie's LSS rack popped out of my hand, pulling away as if propelled by a runaway thruster.

  Me: Dark ground whizzing by. Black sky. Dark ground, a little further away. Black sky...

  “Jesus Christ!” Willy's voice was almost a scream.

  I heard Minnie shout, “I can't see! Where the hell am I?"

  I watched the ground go by, then started toggling the controller this way and that, working against the spin, until I stabilized, facing away from the sample site, able to judge and kill what little bit of lateral movement I'd picked up.

  My heart was thundering like mad, lungs pumping, but ... good, good. Didn't panic. Very good. I caught my breath, and looked around.

  Minnie was up in the sky, maybe twenty meters off the surface, turning about her center of gravity, a spinning starfish, growing smaller as I watched. Her suit was somehow disfigured, almost as if misshapen, some kind of black splash on it, blending some of her edges against the sky, as if bites had been taken out by some space monster.

  And ... ?

  A column of bubbling liquid, jetting, curling around itself, climbing off the surface of B, carrying the remains of our little drill rig with it.

  For just a moment, I couldn't really make myself see it for what it was. No. Nothing like that. Not here. I must be misunderstanding what I see. Familiar expectations, as if this were a world of air and...

  Minnie's voice said, “Where am I...?"

  Sarah said, “You're about sixty meters up. Can you...?"

  “I can't see anything. There's something all over my faceplate."

  From not far away, I saw Willy rising off the surface, jetting in her direction. He said, “I'm coming after you. Hang on. Relax.” You could hear something like pride in his voice then. Proud of you, Minnie. Proud of myself.

  We're not really heroes of the Space Age, bold astronauts with that fabled Right Stuff. Just a bunch of geezers with ... damn. The right stuff after all.

  Sarah said, “Should we..."

  I said, “We need to stay here. If he can't catch up to her, or they can't get back, we'll need to go after them in Fafnir."

  “They're pretty far off, already. I guess the rendezvous radar..."

  I turned and looked back toward the brown column. It'd pinched off at its base and goo was slowly curling toward the surface, curling over the area we'd been sampling. The rest of it kept on climbing, hard to see against the dark sky, an independent body rising from the surface, losing its shape as it rose, af if some surface tension were...

  Well. A liquid body. Here?

  As I watched, it passed low over A's limb and receded toward the stars. Going. Going. Gone.

  * * * *

  It took us quite a while to make it back to Excelsior. Willy managed to retrieve Minnie, catching up to her, stopping her spin like an old EVA pro, though he was no Ox van Hoften for size, getting them both on their way back to the surface on a direct trajectory for Smaug's landing site.

  Once it was clear they were going to make it back, I'd said, “Okay. We'll head for Fafnir.” I moved over to the fresh curl of brown solid on the surface, looking at odd, lumpy shapes glistening in the sun, like fresh roofing tar in a bucket. “Want me to try for another sample before we go back? Maybe we can hack off..."

  Willy laughed, right on the edge of a hysterical giggle. “I think we have enough. Wait'll you see Minnie's suit!"

  All the way back to the mother ship, Willy complained about the stink in Smaug. Though they sealed it in the airlock as soon as they could, the “sample” was outgassing, making their eyes burn and noses run. Sniffling away, and despite Willy's loud objections, Minnie'd run the geo-sensor against it and taken some readings before slamming the hatch.

  Then we heard her voice, squeaky with amazement: “Hydrocarbon contaminants! Maybe we can become CHON miners after all..."

  Willy, voice dry and amused now that he'd calmed down, now that the ship's filters were cleaning out the CM's air, said, “Well, there's our damn article, Alan. Hell, we oughta clear a couple of thousand bucks on that, easy!"

  He'd ridden me about the unlikelihood of our little adventure paying off, whenever our funding sources couldn't hear.

  Minnie said, “Huh. Mostly constructs of methane and ethane. And, uh ... some kind of propylated compound."

  Sarah said, “How dangerous is this? The suit's still outgassing in your airlock, so how're you going to get back aboard...?"

  I said, “They can cycle the airlock once, then rush through, grabbing a sample on the way. The faceplate will come off easiest."

  * * * *

  A couple of hours later, we met them in the docking segment below Excelsior's cupola, floating above the closed hatch that led down to the habitat we'd built in the Apex 400's cargo bay.

  Sarah, said, “Wow! That really stinks! I hate to open up the hab and..."

  Willy held up the suit faceplate he'd detached. “Outgassing's about over. We need to get this down to the lab ASAP."

  As I cranked the hatch's lock lever, I thought about the familiar
ity of the odd, ethery smell in the air. Not such a bad smell, though one most people wouldn't like. I'd always been partial to certain chemical smells, and this one ... I said, “Y'know, it kind of smells like an oxygenated synthetics plant."

  Minnie gave me an odd look, then we were inside, Minnie going head down in the instruments, while Willy put the sample in a vice, slipped his toes in foot restrains and broke it up, faceplate and all.

  Only one spare of everything, I thought. We'll need to be more careful...

  Sarah got out the camera equipment, while I settled myself in front of the infosys console, popping the old Logitech MiniView KVM switch we'd pulled out of my office, looking at various screens. I said, “Okay, guys. Everything's up and running."

  Long silence. Then Minnie said, “Well..."

  Watching the raw data scroll by, I thought, Good thing one of us knows about this stuff. Willy was trained as an aerospace engineer, Sarah as a mathematician, and I was trained as nothing, just an old mechanic smart enough to think his way into the depths of software design.

  Minnie said, “These are some very nice aliphatic hydrocarbons we've got here."

  Willy said, “What the ... look over there. Six-carbon ring, some double bonds, with nitrogen crap all over it...."

  I felt old, old knowledge surface out of nowhere, things I'd forgotten I ever knew. My dad had been a geologist too, in the long ago and far away, and I'd taken quite a few organic chemistry courses before flunking out of my first attempt at college, back at the tail end of the 1960s. Out of the blue, I said, “When it has the CH3 and the two extra hydrogen radicals, it's called toluene."

  Willy's head jerked out of the binocular eyepieces, looking at me, astounded. “And the nitrogen?"

  Minnie's giggle tinkled. “You need a refresher course in organics, don't you? Think about what you'd call a cyclohydrocarbon compound with three NO2 radicals sticking out of it like that!"

  Must be nice, knowing stuff like that. I started typing notes for the article, alongside the data flow. You never know.

  Willy seemed to stutter. “Uh ... I guess these layered sheets of hex ring must be fragments of ... graphite?"

  I choked suddenly, making them both look. “Not necessarily. You could crack it out as isomers of n-hexane and -heptane. I guess..."

  Their mouths popped open in two little O's, making me laugh.

  Willy looked away, then, softly, said, “What a scientist you would've made if you'd been able to get a real education."

  I laughed again, nothing sensible to say in response. “Explains the smell, don't it?"

  He said, “I guess so.” He looked back at the data flow, and said, “Hard to imagine this stuff just forming out here."

  I said, “Maybe little green zombies from the Phantom Planet left it for us?"

  His turn to laugh.

  Sarah said, “What the hell are you talking about?"

  Before I could answer, Minnie said, “Quasimodo is surfaced with CHON material, meaning B must've had its final processing out in the Kuiper belt, maybe even the Oort. Assume B is largely CHON, descended from your classic ‘dirty snowball.’ From its density, we know A has to be a stony-iron, formed close in."

  Willy said, “Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen. In a lot of old stories, I remember the authors assumed we'd be eating CHON someday."

  Minnie said, “Ghaak!"

  I said, “What do you call a mess of aliphatic hydrocarbon sludge?” and waited.

  Moment of silence, then I saw Sarah's eyes light up. “I know. Petroleum."

  Willy looked at her, suddenly respectful. “Well, yeah. And maybe a pool of it stuck between the two components of near-earth asteroid UB(2009)/21."

  Sarah said, “A pool."

  Minnie said, “I told you asking about the striated ridge linear orientation was a damned good question."

  Willy said, “How does it happen on Earth? Dead ferns are made of the same stuff as CHON, that's why those old writers thought we'd be eating it one day. Then all you need is time, temperature, and pressure."

  I said, “Pretty cold out in the Oort."

  Minnie said, “Not to mention the Oort cloud. But A and B are two distinct entities with wildly different histories. Just because they went splat and stuck together way back when doesn't mean they haven't been in slightly different orbits, grinding away against each other for however long it's been, converting orbital kinetic energy into thermal energy..."

  It was left to Sarah to say, “And CHON particles into oil."

  * * * *

  A day or so later, I sat strapped in my flight engineer's seat, head tipped back, looking out through the cupola dome. From this perspective, Quasimodo seemed to have tumbled head first toward the Sun, light shining on its bald pate, and also on that bit of neck where we'd been, fresh little scar just barely visible next to the old, two rusty little flecks of tar, like scabs on a vampire's bite.

  I imagined the glob of asphalt sailing slowly away, in its own orbit now, and thought, There must be other ones out there as well, little spurts of paving material drifting around the Sun. Well. This is the only one with geological sampling tools stuck in it.

  After a little argument, we'd decided it was safe to move Excelsior in close to the asteroid, not really in orbit, more sort of co-orbital around the Sun. We don't have a drill-rig anymore, so it's not that likely to squirt oil or tar or whatever all over our main ride home.

  For safety's sake, we'd gone down in one ship only, leaving the other one aloft for an added safety margin, knowing if anything went wrong on the surface, we could probably get back up on EVA jetpacks alone.

  Buck Rogers? Well, no. Buck rode a coal mine into the future and wound up fighting the Chinamen from Outer Space. Still, you know what I mean.

  We'd taken more samples, brought down the little Standard ARM pennon with its cute comet logo, read our statement about how we were claiming ownership of UB(2009)/21, Outer Space Treaty or no Outer Space Treaty. We did our best to take high definition photos with Willy's expensive digital camera, and had a hard time with the foursome shots, because it didn't occur to anyone the tripod wouldn't work so well in the near absence of gravity.

  Back aboard ship, we'd chirped into the comsat system to get CNN's attention, gotten them to set up the secure link we'd arranged, then given another one of those long, halting interviews to Ms. Clanton. When we sent in the recordings, there was a short break while she watched, then her next transmission began, “There'll be hell to pay over this, you know."

  But she was grinning all the same.

  Hell to pay is money in the bank to a TV journalist.

  About an hour after the interview was broadcast, CNN called again, reestablishing the secure link, and let us know they'd been asked to provide us with wireless broadband through their satellite, so we could get to our email accounts, among other things.

  I'm sure they expected they'd be able to read the data flow, and they got what they expected. I let Willy and Sarah handle the government and media howling. I'd already figured what might happen, so I'd set up an Internet-based VPN interface with the hardware in the network at my business office.

  Not some commercial crap, either.

  I do this for a living, and I doubt the Homeland Security hackers would even know there were extra packets going out over CNN's bandwidth. Maybe some geeks in Redmond would be able to get in, but only if it occurred to them to look.

  There were tens of thousands of messages waiting in the public mailboxes of Alan Burke Enterprises, everybody under the sun wanting everything from a piece of the action to our hides nailed to the barn door. Sometimes both. But in the special accounts I'd set up, there were only six, and only one of those really mattered.

  I said, “Guys? ExxonMobil is offering ten billion USD for the rights to UB(2009)/21. They also want our prospecting data, so they can decide which other NEAs are worth looking at."

  Sarah whistled. “I wouldn't have thought..."

  Willy said, “Anyb
ody else?"

  “Not even in the ballpark."

  “Huh. That's going to make it hard to negotiate the price up some. I mean a bidding war..."

  Minnie said, “Oil is everything to our civilization."

  I said, “And our technology is geared to use it. Everything from rocket fuel to plastics feedstock. Until fusion power reactors running off helium-3 stop being a pipe dream, this stuff's going to be worth its weight in ... oh, hell. Worth so much if there hadn't been any here, they'd've had to ship it up by rocket."

  Willy said, “So what'll we say?"

  I said, “Yes, obviously, but meanwhile...” the keyboard rattled as I typed.

  Willy said, “Hey! We need to talk..."

  I said, “Oh, I'm not emailing ExxonMobil yet. This is just a note to AndrewsSpace, putting down a deposit on one of those ships."

  That stopped them cold. After a minute, eyes very far away, he said, “I wonder if I'll be in good enough shape for this, when the time comes..."

  I laughed. “Willy, I'm ten years older right now than you'll be in 2022! And if you think you're going without me, guess again."

  Outside, Quasimodo tumbled in the sun, shining gray and black, and it was maybe another thirty seconds before where I was and what I'd just said grabbed my soul and flung it out to the stars. m

  * * * *

  Author's Note:

  First of all, a word of appreciation for Michael Capobianco, who did substantial research on a much earlier version of this story, and for Kevin J. Anderson, who sent me a most amusing critique of that original tale. Thanks, guys! And Kevin, you'll notice I took your advice about not naming the two spaceships Hesperornis and Rhamphorynchus...

  Second?

  EVERYTHING IN THIS STORY IS TRUE.

  Not true in the sense that's it's already been done, but in the even more important sense that if you have a great big steaming wad of cash burning a hole in your pocket, there are real companies that already have every product and gizmo in the story not just in the form of imaginative viewgraphs, but in the design stage and beyond, many of them already under construction. There's no single item in the story that costs more than a few tens of millions of dollars, and if you've got the bucks, you can buy the Buck Rogers.