Mining the Oort

by Frederik Pohl

  Dekker gazed at the landscape, puzzled. "How else should it look?"

  "But it's boring. Doesn't it ever change?"

  Dekker said defensively, "I don't know about here. Around Sagdayev it's pretty in the winter."

  "You mean snow?"

  "Snow?" He stared at her, marveling at her ignorance. "There isn't any snow, but sometimes there are frost shadows around the rocks, and things."

  She looked unconvinced, and smug about it. "Was I right? Were you watching the comet?"

  "Actually," he said, glad of the chance to show her she had been wrong, "I was reading a book."

  "You shouldn't read in an airsuit. It's bad for the eyes."

  He ignored that. "It was an Earth book called Huckleberry Finn. Did you ever read it?"

  "Read it? No. We had it in school once, I think. Anyway," she added practically, "it's getting late. I think I'd better take you home. Are you hungry?"

  "No," he said, but when he saw that she had picked up a little gilt candy box to offer him he changed his mind. He took one. That was just good manners, but then he discovered that it tasted really fine. It was chocolate! And it contained something fruity and sweet and wonderful inside; and, since she had left the box out, he took another. Dekker didn't think his mother would have approved of that, but he knew Earthies didn't have the same standards of manners as Martians.

  The girl put her hands on the controls. "Take off your suit," she ordered over her shoulder as she advanced the speed levers on both sets of wheels. She didn't ease them gently forward as a proper buggy driver would have done but just thrust them almost to full-out. Naturally the buggy wheels spun, wasting energy.

  "You're going to wear your treads out that way," he informed her, meaning to add that he didn't want to be driven back to Sunpoint anyway, as he was perfectly capable of walking.

  But she had left the box of chocolates out, and didn't seem to mind when he took a third, and then a fourth.

  7

  Even if you managed to pump Mars's atmosphere up to the thousand-millibar pressure of the Earth's, you couldn't breathe the stuff. It simply doesn't contain what people need for breathing.

  The first thing you think of wanting is oxygen, of course. Well, actually, there's oxygen in Mars's air. In fact, more than half of what atmosphere there is on Mars is oxygen—kind of. The trouble is, that oxygen is already tightly locked up into carbon dioxide. Only 5 percent of the negligible quantity of air Mars possesses is anything but that useless carbon dioxide, in fact, and a lot of that remaining 5 percent is equally useless stuff like argon. No, that won't do to support human life. What Mars needs to make it green is hydrogen, to react with some of that oxygen to create water, and nitrogen, to mix with the rest of the oxygen in order to reduce the air to something people could breathe without burning out their lungs—and, oh, yes, so that you can eat, because plants won't grow without nitrogen.

  8

  When they got back to the Sunpoint entry, Dekker watched critically as the girl mated her crawler with the city lock. All in all she did it fairly skillfully, and Dekker found little to criticize. He followed her inside, sealed the door himself, and turned around to see that someone was watching them. It was another mudsucker, male, a few years older than Dekker, and as short and squat as any Earthie; he was, of course, looking amused. Annetta greeted him warmly. "Dekker," she said, "I'd like you to meet my friend Evan."

  "Hi," Dekker said politely, shaking the young man's hand. "But I have to go, there's something I have to do. Thanks for the candy."

  The one named Evan didn't seem to mind that at all. He was already turning away from Dekker, talking to the girl. "Listen, Netty, about the party tonight—" he began, but Dekker was rapidly moving away.

  It wasn't entirely true that there was something he had to do. The fact of the statement was accurate enough, of course. Sooner or later; because even though they were in a strange deme, and in spite of the fact that the comet was due to strike in a matter of hours, and regardless of all the effort involved in protecting Sunpoint's destructibles against possible harm—in spite of all these things, the essential functions of life on Mars went on. For Dekker, one of them was the compulsory daily class in Getting Along.

  But he had an hour or so to go before he had to be there, and he spent it roaming around—blessedly alone, for Tsumi was, no doubt, grumpily tending the capybara meat animals by himself.

  Nothing was the same here as in Sagdayev. The place was not only bigger, it was laid out funny. Mostly it was huge—six levels deep, against Sagdayev's three—and Dekker had a satisfying hour or so just roaming it, always remembering to look as though he had some important errand so that no one would ask him why he wasn't doing anything useful.

  He cut the time a little fine. When it was time to get to docility he suddenly realized he didn't know where to go. He asked directions; but all the preimpact excitement nobody seemed to know where anything was happening, and so he arrived in the classroom just when the Pledge of Assistance was about to begin.

  The room was crowded. There were at least sixty or seventy young and women there, and Dekker was startled to see that Tsumi Gorshak was among them. What was the kid doing in a session meant for eights-and-ups? For that matter, why was Tsumi nodding satisfiedly to the proctor and pointing at Dekker at the same time?

  Dekker slid into a seat on the floor next to Tsumi and joined the recital:

  "I pledge my life

  to those who share it,

  to the safety and well-being of my planet,

  and all who live in it.

  One world,

  with liberty and justice for all,

  through sharing."

  But everybody was looking at him, and as soon as they were finished Tsumi whispered, "You're late."

  He wasn't alone. The proctor was pointing at him. "Punctuality," the young man, a ten-year-old with a sparse beard, said, "is the courtesy of kings. What's your name?"

  "Dekker DeWoe," he admitted.

  "Dekker DeWoe. Well, Dekker DeWoe, lateness steals time from other people. It is as bad to take someone's time as to take his property."

  "I meant no offense," said Dekker, looking around to see if, by any chance, that Annetta Cauchy person was in the room. She wasn't. There weren't any Earth children at all in the class. Perhaps Earthies didn't need to be taught to be nonaggressive. Or perhaps they didn't care.

  "And meanwhile," the proctor was going on, "your young nephew was worried about you."

  "I meant no—" Dekker began again automatically, and then realized what the man was saying. He turned a glare on Tsumi, who shrugged blandly.

  "I said you told me to meet you here," Tsumi whispered.

  "You had no right." Dekker whispered back, but stopped there because the proctor was addressing his audience. Dekker subsided as the proctor spoke:

  "Let's begin. I haven't met all of you before, so let's get back to basics. This is docility training. What do we mean by 'docility'?"

  He looked around. A Sunpoint eight-year-old in the first row had her hand up already. "Docility is learning to consider the needs of society and other people," she said.

  "That's right. That doesn't mean being passive. We're not passive, are we? But we're docile; which is to say, we're civilized. And, being civilized people, we just made our Pledge of Assistance. Does everybody do that?"

  "Everybody on Mars," the same girl said at once.

  Another put in, "Everybody in space, even, the Loonies and everybody. But not the Earthies."

  The proctor nodded in satisfaction. "That's true. When you see our Earth guests here you have to remember they're a little different Of course they have their own kind of training—well, they have to, don't they? Or they'd still be having wars there. But they make a different kind of pledge in their schools; they pledge 'allegiance.' What does that mean?"

  Dekker knew the answer to that, and it was a good time to regain a little favor. "It means they pledge to be loyal, and that kind of mean
s you'll do what someone tells you."

  "Exactly," the proctor said, looking surprised. "They pledge allegiance to a flag. Do we have a flag?"

  The class sat silent for a moment—Dekker, too, because he was interested in hearing the answer. Finally a girl almost as old as the proctor put her hand up. "No, because we don't need one. We have each other."

  The proctor nodded. "Right. What flags are for," he went on, settling into his lecture for the day, "is so you can see which side is which when you're fighting. So you know who to kill." He waited for the little gasp of shock from his audience. He got it. He went on, "Yes, they killed people for their flags, and the terrible thing, friends, is that the people doing the killing liked it. Oh, they didn't like getting killed themselves—or burned, or paralyzed, or blinded—but they thought that fighting gave them a chance to be heroes. What's a 'hero'? Anybody?"

  Beside Dekker little Tsumi's hand shot up. He didn't wait to be called, but shouted out: "Somebody very brave who does great things!"

  The proctor gave him a measuring look. '"That's one way to look at it, yes," he said, in a tone that showed he thought that way was the wrong way. "But that depends on what you mean by 'great,' doesn't it? People used to have a different idea of heroes. They used to think they were like gods—and what they thought about gods, those days, was that the gods always did whatever they wanted to. They didn't question themselves, they shoved people around any way they felt like, and they always thought they right. That's what a man named Bernard Knox wrote once; he said were like gods, and he said, 'Heroes might be, usually were, violent, antisocial, destructive.' Now tell me, friends. Would we call people like that heroes? Or would we see anything heroic in a war?"

  Resoundingly the class roared, "No." Even Dekker. But not, he saw with surprise, little Tsumi, who was sitting next to him with his thumb in his mouth and a thoughtful expression on his face.

  They never did finish the class. Just as the proctor was getting into the main work-together docility activity—it was a cooperative project, building a geodesic structure out of struts and cords, impossible to do unless every member of the group held and lifted and pulled just at the right moment in his turn—there was a harsh alarm beeping for a blowout drill.

  It was only practice, of course. It was always only practice—except the one time when, maybe, it would be real, and that was the one they always had to be ready for. So they never fooled around, even when they were sure it was just practice. Everyone scattered to check the automatic corridor seals and the room doors and vents, making sure everything was closed off and airtight, all over Sunpoint City, in a matter of a minute or two; and then there was nothing to do except to sit there, in a little room with the air motionless and almost beginning to stale, for a few more minutes until the lights blinked three times and the long wailing beep sounded "all clear."

  Then the docility class had disintegrated, the proctor long gone to his duty post for the drill. Dekker looked around for a while for Tsumi Gorshak, but not very hard, and then went back to the room he shared with his mother for a nap.

  His conscience was clear, and his hopes high: he wanted to stay awake as much as he could that night, so as not to miss a moment of the comet's final approach and strike.

  He woke when he heard someone coming in the door, and sat up quickly, hoping it would be his mother. It was only Tinker Gorshak, though, looking surprised. "So there you are," he said. "Your mother wondered. She had to go to a meeting, but she said we might as well eat here tonight, so we could watch the comet together. She's a wonderful woman, Dek."

  Dekker nodded resignedly, measuring out enough water in the bowl to wash his face and run a comb through his hair. "We're going to eat here?"

  "We're going to cook our own dinner," Tinker said, offering good news as a gift. "Just the three of us—I wish Tsumi could have been along, but he has to be with his dad tonight. Now, give me a hand while I braise the cappy for the stew."

  Decker did as he was told, helping get the dinner ready. The killed-meat animal smelled good as it began to sear, which left Dekker with mixed feelings. It really was a treat for him and his mother to cook something up together instead of going to the community dining hall—but not necessarily with Tinker Gorshak sticking himself in. Dekker would have been almost as happy to go to the hall. Their tiny room was somewhat gloomy—everywhere in Sunpoint was gloomy now, with only one light allowed per room to conserve power in case of accident, and hot, too, with all the climate machines turned down to barely tolerable levels—but it was an occasion, and so they were allowed to have the news screen on.

  Naturally the screen was relaying the satellite observations, as they followed the comet. When Dekker looked up to the screen he could see the comet's core; it was the grayish-yellow color of old Tinker Gorshak's beard, lumpy as a Jerusalem artichoke. It was spinning slowly, with the drive jets now spitting out slow-down correction burns every few seconds.

  He checked the time. There was still a long way to go. The actual impact was scheduled to take place in midmorning—midmorning according to the time it would be at the impact point, that was, though it would be nearly noon at Sunpoint in its position to the east. "That's so it will be a kind of grazing hit," Tinker Gorshak informed the boy as they were preparing their meal. "There'll be less kinetic energy released that way, they think, so maybe less ground shock. How are you doing with those onions?"

  "They're almost chopped," Dekker reported, rubbing at his stinging eyes with the back of his hand.

  Gorshak dumped the chopped onions into the stew, stirred it, sniffed it critically, then put the lid on. "It'll be ready in twenty minutes," he declared. "Gerti ought to be back before then, and if she isn't, it'll just get better the longer it simmers. What do you say, Dekker, do you want something to drink? Tea? Water?"

  Dekker shook his head, and watched the old man carefully measure out a "highball"—straight alcohol, diluted with water one to three, flavored with a little mint extract. Dekker wrinkled his nose. That was one of the other things Dekker didn't like about Tinker Gorshak. Dekker's father had never been known to drink alcohol, or at least as far as Dekker remembered he hadn't. Nor had his mother, as long as his father was around. "So," said Gorshak, swallowing the first half of his drink. "Have you been thinking about what you want to do when you grow up?"

  "Not much," Dekker admitted.

  "I mean," Gorshak explained, "it's all going to be different, now that it looks like the crystal plants are a dead end." He got that discontented look he always had when the subject of the purpose-built Martian plants came up. "I always hoped—"

  He stopped there without saying what he had hoped, but he didn't have to. Dekker knew what it was. As a geneticist, Tinker Gorshak's main job on Mars had been tending and crossbreeding the artificially produced photo synthetic plants—well, organisms: you could hardly really call them "plants," because they certainly didn't look like anything that had ever grown on the Earth—that the Martians had hoped would produce some sort of natural crops for them. They were pretty little things, mushroom shaped, with parasols of ultraviolet-opaque crystal on their tops. The crystal let the light necessary for photosynthesis in, but screened out the deadly ultraviolet—a very necessary precaution on Mars, where there was no ozone layer to protect them. The mushrooms were most wonderful simply in that they grew there at all.

  That was where the wonderfulness stopped. As a crop, the glass-headed mushrooms were hopeless. They had to have long taproots to get down to the little frozen water under Mars's hard-crusted surface, and so much of their metabolic energy had to go into the work of sinking their roots and building their sunscreens that there was nothing to speak of that was worth harvesting.

  But that had all been Tinker Gorshak's fantasy, anyway. It certainly hadn't been Dekker's. As far as Dekker had thought about his grown-up career, which wasn't very far, he had leaned more toward what his father had done—even, maybe, going out into the Oort some day—than to following the career of th
e man who wanted to usurp his father's place.

  Tinker lifted the pot lid, sniffed, and then sat down, gazing at Dekker. "Tsumi says you've got his book," he said.

  Dekker was suddenly flustered, "Oh, that. The Huckleberry Finn. I guess I ought to give it back to him."

  "Have you read it?"

  Dekker debated with himself for a moment, but saw no reason to deny it. "Well, yes."

  Tinker nodded with an appearance of satisfaction, then got up to refill his glass. "I really wanted Tsumi to get something out of it, but the boy's not much of a reader. You are, though, Dek, aren't you?" Dekker nodded cautiously. "Tell me, then. What did you think of the Law of the Raft?"

  Dekker searched his memory. "The Law—?"

  "—of the Raft, right. What Huck says about getting along together, Dek. Didn't you get to that part?"

  "I'm not sure what part you mean."

  "It's when Huck and Jim are floating down the Mississippi River, and all these bad things are happening on the land—lynchings and thievery and so on. And Huck thinks about how people get along on the raft and he says—I think I remember the exact words—he says, 'What you want above all things on a raft, is for everybody to be satisfied, and feel right and kind toward the others.' Do you remember that?"

  "Oh, right," Dekker said, energized. "Then they go on down the river and they come to—"

  "No, that's not what I'm after, Dek. I didn't want to talk about the story itself. Just that one thing that Huck says. Do you see, that's what docility training is all about. Not just getting along, but wanting everybody to be satisfied, and to feel good about the other people. Not just on the raft, everywhere. On our planet, too. That's what we do here on Mars, while the Earthies are always grabbing whatever they can grab and competing with each other—"