by John F. Carr
Even after their “discovery,” Dover Development had continued to control the wholesale shimmer stone market until bootleg miners had formed their own association, the Haven Shimmer Stone Cooperative. Wholesale shimmer stone recovery costs had quadrupled since the late 2050s and this had not gone unnoticed at Dover HQ. Unlike ores and most gems, shimmer stones were rarely concentrated in clusters. They were produced by the heat and unfathomable pressures of volcanic eruptions and were rare in even the most productive veins.
The mechanism of gem formation required that a member of the species (now extinct) Giant Drillbit be buried in a burrow by hot lava. The teeth melted and reformed under the influence of an enzyme at the proper hellish temperature and pressure before turning into shimmer stones. This meant that they were rarely concentrated in the same place, and if so only in small numbers.
The best shimmer stone prospectors were diviners, with the same talents as dowsers, who could instinctively divine the stones’ presence as they passed over the rocky areas where the shimmer stones were known to hide. Some used thin sticks to “locate” the stones, while others used complicated electronic and magnetic sensors whose design and reliability remained secrets with the diviners, like gamblers with their ‘systems.’
To make things worse, Kennicott Metals had made a deal with the Harmonies that had squeezed Dover out of the southern Shangri-La Valley. Even though Haven was now a CoDominium Protectorate, much of its land was still owned by the Church of New Universal Harmony. After two failures in a row, anyone else—in other words non-family—would have been out on the streets. However, what had saved Erhenfeld’s bacon was the Company’s discovery of the richest known gallite deposit in the CoDominium sphere. Gallium was a rare mineral that was necessary for microwave circuitry, infra-red applications and semiconductors.
As he poured over the latest production report from his Chief Mining Development Officer, Timothy Rice, he noted that gallium production had dropped precipitously. Since the metal melted at temperatures below body temperature it had to be stored in special refrigerated units and handled with care.
He looked up from the report when his intercom buzzed.
“Mr. Rice is here, Consul Bronson.”
“Send him in,” he replied.
Timothy Rice looked like a sheepish school boy reporting to a vice principal in charge of discipline. He had a ruddy face and a shock of brown hair that stuck up in back in a permanent cowlick. He removed his thick glasses and began to rub his eyes, a nervous tic that Erhenfeld had noted at their first meeting.
Rice paused for a moment to take a deep breath of the Earth-normal oxygenated air in Erhenfeld’s office. “Your Excellency, I need to discuss the production slowdown at the Golconda Mines.”
Erhenfeld laced his fingers together before replying. “I hope you’ve got some answers, because if you don’t, heads are going to roll. Corporate’s not happy about the delays.”
“It’s the drought, sir. It’s been going on for three T-years. Its effects have been compounded by the fact that we’re using large amounts of water for gallite mining and refining. Dire Lake, according to our Company Ecologist, is very similar to the Salton Sea in California: briny and, except at the head waters, very shallow with an average depth of ten to twelve meters. Since we began operations at Golconda, the lake has lost a third of its size due to drought and water depletion. If we keep mining operations at their current level, within two years there won’t be enough water to land a splashship anywhere in the lake. That will quadruple our shipping costs to low-earth orbit.”
Erhenfeld nodded. “I got all that from your report. What are your solutions, and I don’t mean stopping the refineries?”
“One of our meteorologists, Professor Childress at Dover headquarters in Eureka, came up with the idea of pushing an ice comet or asteroid into a controlled collision course so that it would impact Dire Lake and provide a source of water.”
Erhenfeld smiled. “Now, that’s thinking outside the package. I like it. But how much is it going to cost?”
“There’s already been some asteroid mining at Cat’s Eye’s Trojan Points, although not a lot since Haven’s market for raw materials is small and out-of-system shipping is prohibitive, since our freightage charges—like the other mining outfits—are so high. But there’s an independent company, that calls itself MineSearch Ltd. that has contacts with the miners. It might cost a couple million CoDo credits, but we’ll lose that every T-week the mines are shut down.
Erhenfeld took out a cigarette from its pack and used the Quiklite to ignite it. After a couple of puffs, he said, “The Sally Bee is arriving in three T-days. I’ll talk to the Captain and see what he thinks of this plan. He might even be able to do it himself and keep it in the Company.
“Your call, boss. The only potential problem is that when the asteroid lands it’s going to cause some incidental reactions, like earthquakes and big storms, when the Dire Lake is momentarily vaporized—and who knows what else?”
“It’s in the Northern Highlands, right? So, it’s not going to affect the Shangri-La Valley, or is it?”
Rice was looking more and more uncomfortable, his head hanging lower. “Probably not, Consul-General; however, there are about two million Arabs and Muslims living in the Highlands, not counting all our own miners, and the Bureau of ReLocation keeps sending us more.”
“What’s the death of a few thousand towel heads going to mean to the Company, Rice? Are they somehow going to petition the Grand Senate and complain; hell, we’re doing them a service. They won’t live long without water. That’s the spin we need to put on this; we’re doing it to save the settlers from famine.”
Rice looked up sheepishly. “They could petition the Humanity League or the Save the Planets people. I suggest we move everyone out of the area before we move the rock.”
“Sure, but you don’t have to pay for shipping, as well as food and board for ungrateful immigrants, either. Do you?”
Rice shook his head.
“Do you have any ideas where the Company can cache them for a couple of months, until the side effects die down? I suspect the Castell City Hilton could hold two or three hundred!”
Rice was pressed back so far it looked like his chair was in danger of tipping over.
“I’m not mad at you, Rice. You came up with a wonderful proposal; it’s not your fault you’re not mentally equipped to see it through. It’s my job, to do the heavy lifting.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, what are the problems you mentioned with the miners?”
“It’s work stoppages by the Muslims and their attacks against Company property. They’re blaming the drought on us!”
“How many times have you people complained that the Arabs and Pakis are indifferent miners—at best. It is the Cornishmen, brought to Haven by the Company, who make up the bulk of the miners.”
Rice nodded. “Yes, sir. But it was the Company who suggested that the Bureau of Relocation drop off all the rebels.”
“That was a Corporate decision. No one took the time to ask how well a hot-climate people would flourish on a frigid world like Haven. They knew we needed miners and BuReloc needed to quell a local uprising. No one at Company HQ looked at the big picture, although I suspect some BuReloc bureaucrat got a good laugh at our expense.”
“Yes, because those Arabs and Palestinians turned out to be the worst sort of miners. Well, some of the Pakis and Lebanese worked out, but for the most part it was a complete snafu. If it wasn’t for the Cousin Jacks, we’d still be in trouble.”
“Yes, and to think the Bureau of Relocation wanted to drop most of the Muslims off in the Valley.”
Rice shook his head in wonderment.
Erhenfeld took the cigarette butt and mashed it out in a ashtray made from a fossilized cliff lion jaw. “What’s done, is done. Now, we’ve got to get more water in Dire Lake before we’re both sacked. As you know, when you get the boot on Haven there’s no place left to go….”
>
POUND-FOOLISH
Charles E. Gannon
Cat’s Eye, 2076 A.D.
As Nadine Przbylski opened the old-fashioned letter, she thought: Gotta hand it to him, he’s persistent. This newest wrinkle in young Paul Nkomu’s one-man crusade—the registered snail mail missive now in Nadine’s hands—was an inspired innovation.
Its implicit brilliance was vested not in its content, but in its quaint, but shrewd, presumption of a well-mannered recipient. In the course of any single day, Nadine could, and cheerfully did, delete literally hundreds of emails, voicemails, vidmails and multifarious attachments from her comm-node. But a paper letter—sent “signature of addressee required”—deftly sidestepped the oblivion of electronic communiqués. True, she could have simply refused to sign for it, but that was not merely an impersonal act of deletion; it was an act of personal rejection.
And from their modest prior exchanges, Mr. Nkomu had obviously—and correctly—intuited that politeness mattered to Nadine Przbylski, the Senior Energy & Fuel Administrator responsible for watchdogging Haven Hydrogen Generation And Servicing (predictably acronymized as H2GAS). She might be as inflexible as any other government administrator, but she was not rude.
Nadine sighed, opened the letter, and read:
Dear Ms. Pryrzbylski:
Thank you for consenting to read this brief proposal for the establishment of a commercially viable ice-mining operation on the sixth satellite of Byers’ Star Two, the moon known as Ayesha…
She sighed. Paul Nkomu was nothing if not determined. The proposal was not much changed from the one he had delivered as a hypertrophied elevator pitch last month. Intercepting her as she descended the steps of Castell City’s new (mostly pre-fab) Government & Commercial Annex, he had waxed eloquent and, alas, excessive about the merits of extracting ice from the moon Ayesha. Unfortunately, despite his impressive scientific and engineering credentials—awarded at the Bayerische Institut, virtually next door to where his shattered family had fled as members of Germany’s latest wave of African gastarbeiter—Nkomu was a political naïf.
He had not considered the social and political requirements of his scheme. Had he gathered a base of provisional corporate support? His blank stare told Nadine he wasn’t even sure what the term meant, much less why it was crucial. Had he given any thought as to how to phase out the current method of hydrogen harvesting—scooping directly from the upper reaches of Cat’s Eye’s turbulent atmosphere—and phasing in his proposed system? Why, no. Any plan for how to train or transition the current work force into the new operations? Again, no.
And so it went for six minutes, at which point Nkomu’s technically shrewd plan had been hacked to pieces by Nadine’s unrelenting practical critique of the hurdles standing between it and implementation. Like so many fine ideas that she’d seen in her time, it was doomed to fail not because it had flaws, but because it was a solution that no one wanted. Not the interface pilots, not the repair crews, not the tankage techs, not the ops directors, and certainly not the CEOs and CFOs of the consortium that had won the original fuel provisioning contract for the Byers’ Star system, and later merged together to become H2GAS. No, they were all inflexibly wedded to the notion of continuously sending their pitted harvester shuttles into the hydrogen and helium cyclones that comprised Cat’s Eye’s atmosphere. Despite mounting operational losses, Nadine knew it would take a genuine disaster to compel a rethinking of H2GAS’s penny-wise but pound-foolish dedication to the status quo
“Status, Chabron?”
“Good to go, Avram.”
Avram Meissen stooped under the wing of his gas scoop shuttle—a wide, flat lifting body design with swept wings—and saw at least half a dozen new dime-sized patches just aft of the leading edge. “Chabron, when are you going to re-coat and anneal these wings?”
“Soon as the frame has logged another twenty flight hours, fly-boy.”
Avram sent a critical eye along the belly of his battered bird. “I don’t like flying right up to the maintenance limits. It’s not—smart.” Avram had wanted to say “safe,” but his pilot’s pride would not permit even that oblique—and perfectly reasonable—intimation of fear.
“Yeah, well, tell the company fat-cats to let me re-hire the preflight techs I had to let go last quarter and we can return to a ten percent safety margin on operational maintenance. But until then, I can barely keep these birds flying at all.”
Avram shook his head, and signaled the remote system to lower the cockpit module down from the seamless belly of his craft.
Fifteen minutes worth of preflight checks later, Avram grudgingly declared himself and Cloud Scraper II ready for flight. Klaxons wailed, red warning lights spun and air moaned out of the hangar into storage tanks. When the hangar read zero pressure, Claude Chabron, safe in the glassteel bubble that was the flight operator’s booth, triggered the hangar door release. The immense bay-doors slid back, revealing a starfield, and the top quarter of a vast, milky sphere: Cat’s Eye.
“You are sure about the paperwork?” asked a high voice behind Chabron.
“What paperwork do you mean?” Claude didn’t turn to face his eternally cowering ops coordinator, Egon Klimczak.
“I mean, the old maintenance logs Ortiz found in the storage room last week.”
“What about them?”
“There are considerable—discrepancies—between those maintenance logs and the ones in our online system.”
“So?”
Egon tapped an index finger anxiously. ”So, the Chief before you might have—well, ‘altered’ the data. As we have had to do.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong.” Chabron was aware his comment had emerged in the form of a defensive growl. “I get orders, and I obey them.”
“Of course, of course…but every time management increases or extends the maximum maintenance interval, they also order the logs rounded down for ‘ease of tracking’.”
“Yes…and?”
“Well, Claude, if that has happened before—if, as the logs show, the company has been steadily expanding the maintenance intervals—the shuttles could be dozens of hours beyond the currently indicated limits. Or more. Lots more.”
Claude finally turned, which elicited a satisfying cringe from mousy Klimczak. “Look. I’m no design engineer and neither are you. So if the brain boys and bean-counters in the risk analysis division tell me that the old minimal maintenance requirements were too cautious, I believe them. And if they say it’s safe to round down the old accumulated flight hours to the nearest hundred, I’ll believe that, too.”
Egon actually had the nerve to voice one last reservation. “What if this is not actually coming from the people in risk assessment? What if these numbers are simply fairytales spawned in management when the news from accounting is bad?”
“Maybe, but there’s no way for me to know that, and nothing I could do, even if I did.” Claude turned away, looked back out the hangar door at the distant delta shape now dwindling into Cat’s Eye’s roiling clouds. “Besides, those shuttles are fine. Just fine.”
The commo channel from the trailing shuttle, Klaus Vebler’s Luft Fresser, was scratchy and irregular in Avram’s headset. “Turbulence up twenty percent. There’s a lazy storm front receding from our equator-side. Our tail is clear.”
“And polar-side?”
“Should be clear, too.”
Avram heard the evasive tone. “Talk to me, Klaus: what’s coming out of the cold top?” Cold, of course, being a relative measure, since even the equatorial cloud belts of Cat’s Eye never went above a balmy -150 degrees centigrade.
“It’s probably nothing, Avram. But I’m watching some top churn starting about 200 klicks polar-side.” Top churn meant a problematic weather system lower down in the gas giant’s murky atmosphere. Whether it would ever emerge at their cloud-skimming altitudes—or head in their direction—was, at this stage, wholly uncertain. Wholly troubling, too. But those were the risks that came with the job, Avra
m conceded philosophically. If Earth’s ancient mariners had run home to port every time a cloud had troubled the horizon, humanity would still have been living landlocked and primitive. “Well, just keep an eye on it, Klaus.”
“Understood. Time to form up for the scoop run?”
“Affirmative. But don’t stay so far out on the trailing flank. Put a little more distance between yourself and that possible storm front.”
“Avram, that will also put me too close to your wake turbulence. How about I boost up, cross over your jet wash, and settle in on your hot side trailing quarter, away from the weather?”
“Negative, Klaus. There’s more water vapor in the hot side: if you shift over there, we’ll bring back less H2. That pushes up the filtration and refining costs. So you just stay alert and close the interval to twenty kicks. That way you can tuck closer and still stay out of my vortex.”
“Avram, that’s less than the minimum safe flight distance. A lot less.”
“Yeah, but you’re in more danger from a nasty weather surprise than from a chip of paint coming off of me. So close up and tuck into the cold-side sweet spot.”
“You’re the flight leader, Flight Leader.”
Avram smiled at Klaus’ wry communiqué. Klaus was a good pilot, but—as one might expect of an expatriate Schweizer—he was a bit overcautious, as well. And today’s run was nothing special; just another day flying though a hell that made Dante’s Ninth Circle of damnation seem positively balmy by comparison.
“Deploying scoops,” Avram signaled, bringing the shuttle’s nose up and matching its heading and speed to the prevailing weather patterns.
The scoops—rearward facing to minimize drag—opened, louvers rotating to create a vent in the lee of the upswept portion of the aft fuselage, where the shuttle’s belly began winnowing back into the tail section. Vacuum pumps activated with a howl that Avram could not hear; he only felt it as a faint, thready vibration added to all the many other jolts, jostles, and hums that were his craft’s customary operating cacophony.