Mining the Oort

by Frederik Pohl

  A huge boom from outside interrupted his thoughts. Startled, Dekker limped naked to a window to look out.

  The gentle rain had become a storm, violent and electrical. Great flashes of violet-white light sliced through the black sky, making the city's buildings stand out in black silhouette. The distant rumbles had become sharp cracks of thunder that rolled and crashed, and the rain pelted down violently. It wasn't just rain, either. Some of the droplets bounced away as they struck his windowsill, and Dekker realized with astonishment that he was looking at the thing they called "hail."

  And everything he saw was oddly shimmering—the streets, the two-hundred-meter towers downtown, the creeping car lights along the road—because it was wet.

  There was a marvel! Everything wet. Wet with profligately wasted water, falling from the sky. Unplanned and unforced, perhaps even sometimes undesired. Torrents of it. Making the streets and building roofs shine as they reflected the lightning.

  This, Dekker thought wonderingly, was what it was all about. This was what Mars would be some day, when the last Oort comet had dropped its final blessing of water and gases onto the old planet and made it young again. It would all be worth it, then. Dekker promised himself it would: all the sacrifices, like Mrs. Garun's; all the pain, like his father's; all the work—like his own . . .

  Then an especially loud crash made him jump, and a moment later he saw a reflection in the window and turned.

  His father was there, leaning on the back of a chair, holding a sheet over his broken body.

  "Are you all right?" Dekker asked.

  His father was silent for a moment, as though researching the answer. Then he said, "Sure. Are you the one who brought me home?" Dekker nodded.

  "That's all right, then," his father said. It wasn't an expression of regret for having needed to be carried home, and it certainly wasn't any kind of an apology. But it was all Boldon DeWoe had to say on the subject. He went on gazing silently at the rain.

  Dekker remembered Mrs. Garun's advice. "Do you want some soup?"

  "Christ, no. Old lady Garun's been around? Nice of her, but no."

  It was as good a chance to talk to him as Dekker was going to get, and there were things Dekker had been wanting to talk to him about. He cleared his throat. "Dad," he said, beginning with the less important thing, "Walter Ngemba invited me to come to his father's farm this weekend."

  His father turned painfully to look at him. "Ngemba," he repeated thoughtfully. "His father's the plantation owner, out in the Mara?"

  "I told him I'd come."

  Boldon DeWoe gave a small acquiescent shrug. "You might as well, Dek. You've been looking pretty tired; you could use the rest. Anyway, the Ngembas are the kind of people it might be useful to know."

  Dekker took a breath and got to the more important one. "They were asking about you in school today."

  His father looked wary. "You were talking about me?"

  "Well, more or less. They were talking about living in the Oort, and duty wives—and things like that—and, well, it made me wonder something," Dekker said. "About you and Ma. You never came back home after your accident, Dad. Don't you ever miss your wife?"

  His father looked at him without expression. "Do you know how badly I got hurt?"

  "Well . . . not exactly. Pretty badly, I guess."

  "Badly enough." His father stared out at the rain for a moment, "I guess your mother didn't want to talk about it," he said at last "It was dope, Dek. You can't dock a spotter ship when you've been doing drugs, so there was a crash. You know what it's like in a spotter ship? You're practically part of the ship; your suit fits right in to fill all the space there is, and you don't get out of the suit until you get back. So when the bow of the ship crumpled it got my legs and the lower part of my body, and I pretty nearly died. Well, I did die. My heart was stopped by the time they got me out, and they had a hell of a time bringing me back. It didn't help the lock much, either—they gave me a hard time about that. It could have cost me my pension, but I guess they figured I was paying enough anyway, the way I am. Oh," he said, noticing Dekker's appalled look, "yes, Dek, it was me that did it. I was the pilot that was doing drugs."

  "But we don't do that!"

  His father looked very weary. "No, we don't," he agreed. "Not at home. I never did before, but it's different out in the Oort. You're out there spotting, weeks at a time, all by yourself. And other people do it. They do it a lot here on Earth, and some of them take the stuff with them wherever they go."

  "But—"

  Dekker swallowed the rest of that particular "but." He shook his head—not in reproach, or not just in reproach, but principally in sorrow and shock. It took him a moment to remember what it was that he wanted to know.

  "But you could have come home," he said.

  "I didn't think so, Dek."

  "Because you were, well, embarrassed, yes, I understand that. But didn't you miss your—" The word would have been "family," but pride got in Dekker's way. "—your wife, anyway?"

  His father looked at him for a moment before he said, "What would I do with a wife now?"

  By Friday the storm was long gone, the sky was cloudless, and the African sun hotter than ever. If Dekker DeWoe had thought Nairobi was sweltering hot, as indeed he had, when he reached the Masai Mara he discovered a whole new order of heat.

  It didn't hit him right away. Walter Ngemba had a private plane waiting on the outskirts of the city. They drove out to it in the long, blue limousine, the pilot touched her cap as they strapped themselves in, and the plane took off for a private landing strip at the foot of a mountain. The strip didn't look like much of an airport, and it wasn't. It was nothing but a thousand meters of hardtop scratched out of the sparse brush, a wind sock that hung listlessly from its pole, and nothing else at all. There wasn't even a shed to protect a waiting passenger from the sun's rays. There weren't any waiting passengers, either. There was nothing but scrub and bare, dry soil. After the bustling streets of Nairobi, with their crowds of human beings, the place looked almost homelike to Dekker DeWoe. Even almost Martian.

  "Look over there," Walter Ngemba said. He leaned over Dekker's shoulder—he had politely let Dekker take the copilot's seat, since there wasn't any need for a copilot in the tiny plane—and pointed to something like a large bug that was sliding across the scrub toward them. The thing was trailing a cloud of dust. "That's our ride coming. And, see, there's our compound, up there on the hill past the watering hole."

  Dekker couldn't see anything that could be called a compound. He couldn't see much of anything at all, the way the plane was banking and twisting, not unless the quick glimpse of scarlet rectangles among the blotchy dun of the landscape was the roofs of buildings. Dekker wasn't really spending much effort on looking, either. He was busy clinging to his seat, because this aircraft was no ponderous Martian dirigible. The thing swerved and darted. The pilot had already buzzed the strip once—apparently to scare away something that moved in the brush beside the strip—and then spun around in a tight curve to make her landing.

  By the time the plane had slowed at the end of the runway the buglike vehicle had reached the strip. It turned out to be a hovervan, with a tall, skinny Masai woman jumping out of the driver's seat to open the door for them.

  That was when the heat really hit.

  This wasn't Nairobi's dank air, it was parched and toasting. It was Dekker's opinion that if he had to stay out in this bake-oven for more than minutes, his brains would coagulate, like a cooked egg. He didn't have to, though. The interior of the van was air-conditioned, and as soon as the woman had closed the door on them she hurried over to help the pilot carry their bags to the van's luggage compartment.

  Walter paid her no attention. He rummaged in the van's little chiller for a moment and produced a couple of beers. "Welcome to Ngemba country," he said, lifting the can in a toast. "I hope you don't mind if we take the hover; I'm afraid it makes the dust a good deal worse, and lord knows the dust's bad enoug
h anyway, but we won't bounce our kidneys around so much on the game trails. Did you see the lions?"

  Lions. Dekker thoughtfully sipped the beer, trying to remember just what strange creatures he had seen. Along the way up from Nairobi Walter had been nudging him every few minutes, pointing out the window at elephants, giraffes, and grazing animals of a dozen kinds, all previously known to Dekker only from pictures. But lions? "I don't think so," he said. "When was that?"

  "Now, of course," said Walter, pointing. "They're right over there. Don't you see them?" And not more than ten meters away, in the shade of a clump of thorny bushes, half a dozen large, tawny cats were peering incuriously out at them.

  The hairs on Dekker's forearms sprang to attention. "Jesus," he said.

  And said it many times again, though mostly under his breath, over the next twenty-four hours or so. First appearances had been all wrong. The Ngemba "farm" was a very un-Martian place.

  Simply physically, being on the Ngemba farm was an ordeal for Dekker. The heat was blinding out in the open air, and the air-conditioning next to freezing inside. What was more, the main house was dismayingly full of stairways that had to be climbed and descended. Psychologically the strain of being there was even greater. Dekker's ideas of spaciousness, already revised upward from his Martian standards, expanded again as he began to grasp the size of the Ngemba household. There was a dining room and a breakfast room, there was a "morning" room and a "sun" room, and there was a library. Dekker couldn't help looking startled when they came to the library. It was full of books. Not the kind of book cartridges Dekker was used to dealing with. Real books, printed on paper and bound in cloth or leather, great heavy things that lined all four walls of this very large room. "Yes, the old gent's a great reader," Walter said indulgently. "A touch old-fashioned, too, wouldn't you say? Of course, he doesn't just spend his time reading; this is where he manages his investments, too."

  Dekker looked around wonderingly. "How?"

  Walter grinned and touched a keypad. One whole row of what had seemed to be the spines of books slid away and revealed a bank of screens. "Direct channels to all his brokers," he said proudly. "I won't turn them on, though; he'd go through the roof if he caught me playing at them. He buys and sells securities." Then, when he saw Dekker's expression, "You do know what securities are?"

  "Like the Bonds?"

  "You mean the Oortcorp bonds? Well, yes, those are securities, but there are all different kinds. Common stocks, preferred stocks, double-dips, self-liquidating debentures—good lord, I don't know what they all are. Father's most active in futures right now, I think." Walter sighed. "Oh, you don't know what futures are. Well, you sign a contract. It says that maybe six months from now you'll sell some securities at a certain price, and some other chap signs the contract with you to buy them then."

  "How do you know what the price will be in six months?"

  "Well, that's the tricky part, isn't it? Maybe you don't. Maybe you guess wrong, and then you're stuck. The good guessers make money—like the old man."

  "It sounds—" Dekker had been about to say "stupid" but revised his intention. "—complicated," he finished.

  Walter laughed. "No offense, Dekker," he said, "but Martians just don't understand the market, do they? But come, I haven't shown you the game room yet."

  All in all, there had to be at least thirty rooms in the rambling main house, to be shared only by Walter; his younger sister, Doris; and his parents—his parent and stepparent, actually, the slim and youthful Gloria Ngemba being his classmate's father's second wife. And, of course, their many servants, all in one curious uniform or another. Dekker did not succeed in counting the servants. However many of them there were, their number wasn't relevant to the space-to-occupant ratio, anyway, since Dekker discovered that the servants had their own fairly spacious quarters—at least by Martian standards—down past the vehicle shed and the repair shop.

  It was a close decision for Dekker as to which of these new categories of living beings was the more grotesquely strange: the wild animals roaming around loose out in the Mara, or the servants that populated the Ngemba compound. Nothing on Mars, or even in Nairobi, had prepared him for either. Nor had he been prepared for the problems of "dressing for dinner"—why would anyone put on special clothes just to eat?—or for Mr. Theodore Ngemba.

  He didn't meet Mr. Theodore Ngemba at once. Mr. Ngemba was unavoidably detained by business matters, and so Dekker was welcomed to the estate by the two female members of the family, the beautiful Gloria, the teenage Doris, both in riding habits and smelling faintly of the horses from which they had just dismounted. He was escorted to his rooms—rooms!—by a servant, and then immediately taken for a walk around the grounds by Walter.

  Dekker appreciated the courtesy. He didn't appreciate the exercise. Most of the walking was up and down steps, because the compound was at the top of a small hill. "To keep the animals out," Walter explained. "Not that most of them would come near us anyway, but some of the buffalo are pretty stupid."

  Not all the animals were kept out, though. In the rose garden three gardeners were repairing damage done by some of the invaders—"Baboons," Walter explained—and leaping through all the shrubbery were little, long-armed furry things that Walter said were called colibri monkeys. By the swimming pool a tall Masai wearing a thing like a white nightgown patrolled the area with a slingshot; his job was to keep the monkeys away from the water, "Oh, damn," Walter said as they approached the pool. "The infant's there, curse the luck."

  The infant was his sister, tying up her hair by the side of the pool. She studied Dekker, looking up from under her hair. "Do you like to swim?" she asked.

  Dekker considered the question. There was certainly a possibility that there might, somewhere, once have been a Martian who had possessed the skill to keep himself afloat in a body of water, but Dekker had never encountered such a person. He didn't say that. He only said, "I don't know how."

  "I'll teach you, if you like," she said. "It's easy. Watch me."

  He did, and discovered that the kid sister, Doris Ngemba, wasn't really all that much of a kid. When she threw off the robe to dive into the pool she was wearing nothing over her breasts and only the tiniest of patches over her pubic area. Dekker's eyes attentively followed every movement. Not just Dekker's eyes, either. The Masai with the slingshot was watching her closely, too, until he saw Walter watching him; then the man grinned in embarrassment, turned, and sent a random shot with his slingshot into the shrubs before he stalked away.

  Doris had swum the width of the pool and returned; now she was clinging to the side of it, wet and smiling up at Dekker. "How about it, then?" she asked.

  "How about your not showing your breasts off in front of the Masai?" her brother said angrily.

  "Oh, the Masai," she said, dismissing the whole tribe at once. "I wasn't talking to you anyway, Wally dear. I was talking to Dekker. Are you game for a swimming lesson?"

  "Maybe tomorrow," Walter told her, answering for his guest. "Dekker's got to bathe and dress for dinner now. And you'd better get on with it, too, because Father doesn't like to be kept waiting."

  Mr. Theodore Ngemba wasn't kept waiting for dinner. It was a close thing, though, because when Walter discovered that his guest didn't have a dinner jacket he had to scour the servants' quarters for clothes from some former Masai butler to fit him. At least fit him closely enough to get through a dinner, though the long-gone Masai butler had been a much fatter man and the jacket hung loose on Dekker's Martian frame.

  They were six for dinner: the Ngembas, Dekker, and an elderly woman who wore pearls—six diners and, Dekker saw, eight servants to see that they had the food to dine on. One servant behind each person at table, and a couple of others to carry dishes in and out. It wasn't only the elderly woman who wore expensive baubles, because both Doris and her stepmother had bright mineral stones in their hair and around their necks, and even Mr. Theodore Ngemba had a thick chain of gold supporting a gold medallion
of some sort around his neck. Dekker had seen no such display of wealth since that long-ago dinner party with Annetta Cauchy's family on the night of the first comet strike.

  Uncomfortable in his scratchy jacket, Dekker found himself seated between Mrs. Ngemba and the elderly woman, who turned out to be a business associate of Mr. Theodore Ngemba. She was named Mrs. Kurai, She ate quietly, listening to the others talk—a welcome bit of luck for Dekker, he thought, since he had no idea what a proper dinner-table conversation should be.

  Walter filled all the conversational gaps. He leaned forward to address his father. "Dekker was very interested in the library, sir."

  Mr. Theodore Ngemba looked indulgently at his son's guest. "Are you a reader then, Mr. DeWoe?"

  "Yes . . . sir," Dekker said, glancing at Walter to make sure he was saying it right.

  "Indeed. What have you read recently?"

  With everyone looking at him, Dekker thought back. Damn little, actually, if you didn't count school texts. Then he remembered a good subject. "There was this book I read once by a man named Mark Twain. It's called Huckleberry Finn. Huck Finn is floating down the Mississippi River with a man named Jim, an escaped slave, and they talked about what they call the Law of the—"