Mining the Oort

by Frederik Pohl

  His usual shove-and-grunt partner was the rather large Martian, Belster, but when Dekker was suited up and headed toward where Belster was waiting the proctor stopped him. "New partner today, DeWoe," he said. "Amman's complaining that Ven Kupferfeld's too strong for her, so we're giving her a different partner. You."

  That was good enough news to restore Dekker's cheer, because he was reaching the point where he did want to get a little closer to Cresti Amman. So far it had been nothing but sitting with her at breakfast once or twice and comparing notes, because Cresti was floundering in the course and willing to spare no time for dates.

  Still, there was a certain amount of consideration due another student. Dekker asked, "What does Belster say about it?"

  "What has he got to say? Anyway, Belster's a lot, ah, rougher than you, so he can take on one of the others. After all, he's been on Earth for a long time, hasn't he? Get over there. Amman's waiting for you."

  And she was. And she looked good in her exercise suit, properly tall and slim the way a person ought to be, and with that red hair falling all over her face. When they were locked in the first struggle exercise, each trying to force the other to move a planted foot, she felt even better than she looked. There was a sweet, female smell about her, and a soft, slick, promising feel to her sweaty skin; all the young-male yearnings that the stresses of the last few weeks had kept submerged began to flood through Dekker DeWoe's body.

  And then, when they had dressed and the whole class was strolling back to their quarters, it was perfectly natural that the two of them should walk together. When Dekker suggested a beer later that night, Cresti Amman pursed her lips, hesitated, and then said, "Why not?"

  It would have happened, too.

  What kept it from happening was a last-minute impulse. On his way out of the rooms Dekker paused to check his messages.

  The message signal wasn't flashing, but sometimes Toro Tanabe took his own messages and forgot to turn the system back on for his roommate.

  This was one of the times.

  There was only one message waiting for Dekker DeWoe, but it was a nasty one. The face on the screen was a woman in the uniform of a Peacekeeper of the Colorado Rehabilitation Facility, and what she said, as though reading a stock report, was:

  "Dekker DeWoe, the Colorado Rehabilitation Facility regrets to inform you that your father, Rehabilitee Boldon DeWoe, died of respiratory and cardiovascular complications at ten twenty-two this morning."

  Because it was after hours it took Dekker two hours and twenty minutes to get through to someone capable of answering questions at the Colorado Rehabilitation Facility, and that person wasn't enthusiastic about the idea. "The administration office is closed for the weekend," he said. "If you'll call back at nine on Monday morning, someone will consider your request."

  "I don't have any fucking request," Dekker said, gritting his teeth. "I have a fucking demand. I want to know what happened to my father. Now."

  That didn't do it, quite, but another five minutes of profanity made his point. "Oh, very well," the man said, hostile but surrendering. "Let me check the data base. The name was Boldon DeWoe, you said? Hold on for one moment."

  Dekker held. Not just for one moment, either. He held for what seemed like an eternity—not long enough for his anger to pass off, but long enough for him to quarantine his feelings in one isolated section of his mind so he could think concretely about what he would have to do. The first problem he would have to deal with was time. He would need time off. That was likely to cause trouble for him, since the Oort faculty wouldn't take kindly to having him go that far from the mountain. Yet surely there must be some sort of arrangement possible for emergency leave. And what did Earthies do about funeral arrangements? The Martian customs would not apply here. And what would it all cost? And what about the apartment in Denver? And what—

  The man's face reappeared. "Yes," he said, studying an invisible screen, "Boldon DeWoe. He died of respiratory and cardiac complications at ten twenty-two yesterday morning. If there's nothing else—"

  "Hold on! What do I do about having the body taken care of?"

  The man looked puzzled. "Body?"

  "My father's body," Dekker exploded. "I need to make funeral arrangements."

  "But you don't, you know," the man said reasonably. "There aren't any arrangements to make. Standard procedures were followed; cremation was at twelve-thirty in the afternoon and the ashes were disposed of. There is no body."

  And, after Dekker had hung up, it was nearly an hour before he remembered Cresti Amman, waiting—but surely not waiting any longer—for him to show up for their date.

  23

  Oort training didn't cover everything. Before a candidate could even take the entrance test for Oort training, he—or, approximately 47 percent of the time, she—had to have completed the prerequisites. These included three years of college-level courses in mathematics; two of gas chemistry and chromatography; three years of physics, at least one of which was nuclear physics with particular emphasis on antimatter reaction processes and products; and whatever other courses were necessary to secure a bachelor of science degree or equivalent. And that was not the end of it. It was also necessary to have a pilot's license of some sort, preferably, though not necessarily, for spacecraft.

  The course itself ran twenty-four weeks, divided into six four-week segments: Phase One, Orientation and Review; Phase Two, Antimatter Propulsion and Instrumentation; Phase Three, Comet Capture and Preparation; Phase Four, Orbit Planning; Phase Five, Orbit Control; and Phase Six, Review and Specialization—including, for those destined for the Mars orbiters, Demolition and Impact Control.

  But that was not the end of the training. That was just as far as anyone could go in the school, and the course got harder as it went along.

  Phase Two was where the hard part started. Oort workers didn't usually have to be Augenstein mechanics. It was just that when they did have to—when something went wrong and there was nobody else around to fix it—they had to be very good ones indeed.

  24

  Phase Two was hardware. It started out by covering emergency repairs to the Augenstein drive, the thing that drove the little spotter ships out in the Oort, and Dekker saw immediately that the easy times were over. He wasn't sorry. The harder the work was, the less time he had to think about the death of the father he had lost for so long, and regained for so little.

  By the third day of Phase Two, when they had the shell of their Augenstein off, Dekker's partner stuck his head inside and pulled it out with an expression of despair. "All these parts are so heavy, DeWoe," he complained. "I do not see why we must do this dirty work when it is enough to understand the theory."

  "The corporation doesn't think so," Dekker told him. "Move over. Let me have a look."

  But when his own head was inside he was startled at the sheer bulk of the components, too. Of course, Dekker knew the theory of the Augenstein. What he knew was nothing but theory, though. He had never seen a real one, and hadn't been prepared for the labyrinth of piping and the vast shell of the magnetic containment that kept the whole thing from blowing up in their faces.

  It couldn't really do that there, of course, because they certainly didn't have a real, powered-up Augenstein in the shop. There was no fuel inside the containment shell. Nobody ever had real antimatter anywhere on Earth, or on Mars, either, except maybe in the tiniest amounts in some research laboratory. Nobody was ever that reckless, because antimatter didn't stay antimatter when there was any normal matter anywhere around for it to react with, and you didn't want to be there when that reaction occurred. What they had were dummies of the drives, a dozen of them to share around the class, and each one the size of a hydrocar.

  Since they contained no fuel, they could never be made to work, but they were structurally complete, great heavy things you could walk right into once you'd pulled the interior plumbing out. On Earth that was a sufficiently tough job by itself, because in gravity you needed hoists and jack
s to lift the five-hundred-kilogram parts and ease them out of the way.

  What the trainees had to do was to strip their Augensteins and put them together again. In space you wouldn't need the hoists. On the other hand, no one ever would do that sort of thing in practice, in space or anywhere else. Anyone who ever tried to take a live Augenstein apart would die of radiation sickness very soon thereafter. The idea, though, was that they had to know how all the parts worked just in case some minor part should fail—which was unlikely to happen in practice, fortunately—and happen to be repairable—which was pure fantasy.

  It was hard, dirty work, and nothing in Dekker's studies had prepared him for this kind of labor in a 1-g environment. At that, he was better prepared than the partner the Phase Two teacher had paired him with. At least Dekker had done hard physical labor in his life—naturally; he was a Martian. Fez Mehdevi clearly had not. As far as Dekker could see, the man had never before lifted a finger for any task more arduous than pushing the button to start a machine, and not much of that. "For this sort of thing," Mehdevi groaned, sucking a knuckle he had just skinned on a pipe end, "we hire mechanics in Tehran."

  "Can your mechanics handle a magnetic containment system?"

  "Can anyone?" Mehdevi looked sorrowfully around at the clutter of parts. "This must be dangerous," he complained. "Look, it is unstable. Without the magnetic containment the antimatter will surely touch the walls of the vessel and explode. Yet when the Augenstein is not operating there is no power to run the magnets."

  "That's why they ship them with external power," Dekker said, peering into the cluster of cooling elements.

  "But what if it fails?" He gave the thing a look of loathing and pleaded, "You uncouple that tubing, DeWoe, please. I am injured."

  So it was Dekker DeWoe, the limitations of his Martian physique notwithstanding, who did most of the grunt work of tearing the damn, dirty thing down and putting it together again, and when he got back to his room at night he was too tired to worry about anything else.

  Which did not, actually, keep him from worrying.

  Night after night, Dekker DeWoe lay in his bed, listening to the faint snores and occasional grunts and moans from Toro Tanabe's room across the hall, and thinking. Dekker had never experienced insomnia before. Insomnia simply wasn't a Martian kind of problem. He didn't like it. He didn't like the black depression that came over him when he thought of his father's last days, caught in the dehumanizing tedium of the Colorado Rehabilitation Facility, or, for that matter, of his father's last years, the pain-filled and futureless wreck of the former daring Oort flyer.

  Fez Mehdevi, at least, had formally offered condolences when he heard of Dekker's loss—that was the main reason Dekker hadn't pleaded for a change of partners—but no one else in the class had seemed to care.

  Of course, he'd passed the news of Boldon DeWoe's death on to his mother at once, but all Gerti DeWoe had to say about it in her return message—voicemail only, no picture—was, "It's a pity, Dek. I guess the important thing to remember is that he did his best."

  It was a shorter and less personal response than Dekker had expected; it did not occur to him that she might not have wanted her son to see her, perhaps, crying. He agreed that it was a pity. But there didn't seem to be any supply of pity anywhere in this world to spare for the tragedies of Boldon DeWoe.

  There was one complication in his life he didn't have to worry about any more, though. That was Cresti Amman. Cresti no longer figured in Dekker's future prospects. She hadn't been angry about being stood up, at least not after Dekker explained what had happened. On the other hand, Cresti's forgiveness no longer mattered much. The psychologist's note-taking in the control center had had its consequences. Cresti had been caught at something, no one knew what. The next morning an advisory had appeared on every screen in the dorms to say that three of Dekker's classmates, Cresti included, had been summarily dropped for "insufficient diligence." The class size was down to thirty-one, and Cresti Amman was history.

  Amazingly, Toro Tanabe was still around.

  In spite of the fact that Dekker had never seen him study, Dekker was astonished to learn that the man had actually come in second in the class, half a dozen names above Dekker's own respectable, but not startling, eighth place in the standings.

  "How the hell do you manage it?" Dekker demanded one night, rubbing the muscles that ached from trying to heave hundred-kilogram masses of metal around in the shop all day.

  Tanabe looked startled. "What do you mean? My grades? Oh, perhaps that first phase was just the natural result of a good education. I notice that you did quite well yourself, DeWoe."

  "That was theory. What I'm talking about is what we're doing now. The Augenstein. Your team got through the containment check twice as fast as mine did today."

  Tanabe spread his hands. "But that is also only training and practice, DeWoe. This whole segment of the course is foolishness, of course. If anything went wrong with the containment while we were out in spotter ships, ten or twenty million kilometers from the base, we would not be repairing it. We would simply die. But as we were aware this segment would be required for the course, my father and I arranged for special instruction."

  "How did you know?" Dekker asked, and then stopped himself. Tanabe's expression had clouded over, and Dekker had remembered the interesting fact that his own father had, somehow, known in advance just what would be on the entrance test. "I mean," he amended himself, "what do you mean, 'arranged'? You didn't have an Augenstein to practice on, did you?"

  "But I did have one." Tanabe smiled. "My father's business interests include space ventures. Because of that good fortune he was able to provide me with a dummy quite like the ones in the shop, as well as a technician to help me learn. It is true," he said, looking regretful, "that my father did not approve of my decision to come here. My father is unfortunately no longer of the opinion that the Oort project is economically sound. Still, once I had convinced him that the training was what I wanted, and he had given his permission, he helped me in every way he could." He finished lacing his cowboy boots and stood up. "Of course," he added, "I imagine your team would have performed better if your partner had not been Fez Mehdevi."

  Dekker didn't answer that. It wasn't that he didn't agree, but there was some sort of cloudy loyalty to his partner involved. Tanabe didn't press the point. He glanced at himself in the wall mirror. "Well," he said sunnily, "it's about time to 'knock back' a few beers, as you say. Would you care to join me?"

  Dekker, who never said anything like "knock back" about anything, shook his head. "There's a test tomorrow," he reminded his roommate.

  "Of course there is," Tanabe agreed. "Study diligently, then, DeWoe. I'll see you later."

  All that physical exercise was reshaping Dekker DeWoe's body—that and the shots. He no longer needed the polysteroids; his muscles had responded to Earth-normal gravity by thickening and strengthening themselves until he no longer felt he was carrying another person on his back. The calcium intake had increased the density of his bones—pretty well, anyway. He couldn't compete with the bigger and stronger Earthie males in shove-and-grunt, but he did abandon the leg braces.

  After he reached that plateau, walking just for the sake of walking around became a lot more pleasant. More interesting, too. When the weather was good Dekker allowed himself the recreation of walking around on the mountainside, among the many buildings of the Oort center.

  It was a pretty place, more like a college campus than he had realized—though he had never seen an Earthie college campus before. Buildings of various ages, originally intended for an assortment of various purposes, had been assimilated by the Oort authorities and bent to their own needs as the project grew, while new special-purpose ones had been constructed. His own dormitory, he learned, had been built originally as a "sanitarium" for people with lung ailments, long ago. The headquarters building had at one time been a deluxe resort hotel, and still possessed the swimming pools and tennis courts it
had started with. The central auditorium had begun life as a "movie" theater, whatever that was. Down lower on the mountain, below the classrooms and workshops and offices, there was still a scattering of private homes and other, smaller hotels, though none of them were "private" anymore; now they housed the administrative employees of the corporation and the faculty of the training center. So damn many employees, Jay-John Belster once pointed out bitterly—and the salaries of every last one of them paid for out of the money raised by the Bonds, which would sooner or later have to be paid off by Mars.

  At the top of the mountain, though out of sight, was the actual working headquarters of Oortcorp itself.

  Of course, you couldn't see that from outside. All of that was not only new but firmly underground—because, Jay-John Belster sneered, of the rich Earthie fear of crowds and demonstrations. All you could observe to prove it was there was the overhead array of communications dishes, the vast fixed one that always pointed south and east to the main geostationary satellite at the end of the Skyhook that hung over the west coast of South America, and the smaller—but still meters-across—geared antennae that tracked Oortcorp's dozens of special-purpose satellites.

  And all around, in every direction, were the lovely peaks of the Rocky Mountains. They were a balm to the vision. Mountains in themselves were nothing special to a man who had lived on the slope of Olympus Mons, but these were beautifully green and sometimes spectacularly ice-capped, and Dekker DeWoe was delighted at their sight.

  When the results of the test on Augenstein and antimatter theory were posted Dekker had managed to improve his standing to fifth. But number one was still the same Earthie woman, someone named Ven Kupferfeld, and right below her name was Toro Tanabe's, still firmly in place with the second highest grade in the class.