Mining the Oort (33 page)

He didn't ponder it long. Gerti DeWoe was waiting for her son, and at his first tap on her door she opened it, beaming at him. "Hey, Dek," she said fondly. "Come on in and let me get a look at what they've been doing to you."

When they kissed she didn't put her arms around him, the way she used to. She couldn't. She was holding onto a walker for support against the harsh Earth-gravity weight, but her lips were warm against his cheek.

"Do you want some breakfast?" she asked at once.

"I ate while I was waiting for you to phone," he said, shaking his head. They studied each other for a moment. She was, Dekker saw with discontent, looking tired and frail and—well,
old
. It was only her voice that hadn't aged at all. It was still the soft, clear contralto that had sung him to sleep as a child, now complaining that he was
fat
.

"That's the polysteroids," he said. "You get used to it."

She shook her head and hobbled over to a straight-backed chair by the window. "I won't be here that long," she said. "A week or two at the most, I hope; I have to be in Tokyo tomorrow morning."

"How does it look?" he asked.

She made a face. With an effort she leaned forward to the low table before her chair and took a flask out of her bag. When she poured something out of it into a glass, Dekker was startled to realize it was whiskey.

He tried to keep the disapproval off his face, but Gerti DeWoe wasn't fooled. She laughed. "Come on, Dek, honey," she said, chiding him. "It's not as bad as you think. I need a drink because I
hurt
. Anyway, it may be morning for you here but for me it's maybe midnight. So it's all right to have a drink, and don't worry; I'll be sober for your graduation." She took a quick sip, and then leaned back against the chair.

"To answer your question," she said, "the Earthies want to renegotiate the terms of the loan, and I'm here to try to persuade them to keep the terms the way they are." She thought for a minute, then said, "No, that's not quite true. What I'm really here for isn't to negotiate. It's to
beg
."

He blinked at her. "Oh, Dekker," Gerti DeWoe said sorrowfully, "don't you pay attention to what's going on? Just this morning on the blimp I heard a news story; now the Russians are talking about putting up farm satellites of their own, along with the Japanese. I think they'll do it, too, because when they figure out their spread sheets, the satellites come up as a better investment. One way or another, somebody's satellites are going to be shipping farm crops to Earth in five years. Ten at the most. We can't match that, so some of the underwriters are backing off."

"But they can't call the project off, can they? They've got so much invested already—"

"No, they can't—I hope. At least, they can't kill the project outright. What they can do, though, is hold us up for higher interest, and we can't afford that." She took another pull at her drink. "I guess the future isn't even as bright as we thought it would be, Dek. Not that we were that well off anyway."

Dekker gave his mother the kind of shocked look an American politician might have given a colleague who intimated that George Washington hadn't been a particularly good president. "What are you talking about? Mars is going to be self-supporting and free!"

"Mars is going to be their plantation and we're going to be their slaves," Gerti DeWoe corrected her son. "We're going to hoe their cotton and plant their corn, and sell them their raw materials and buy back their manufactured goods—like the old British Empire, the people at home getting rich on the poverty of their colonies. Oh," she said, looking remorseful, "I'm sorry to be talking this way today, Dek—on your big day, when you're just about to go out there and do your job for us. But that's the way it's going to be if I can't get them to leave the terms alone. See, they don't just want higher interest. They want guarantees."

"They already have guarantees!"

"Not like the ones they want. They want their loan treaty to be the basic law for Mars, superseding even the constitution. They want the treaty to give them the right of repossession of Martian land, using Earth police, in case we don't make the payments."

"
Police
? With
guns
?"

"Oh, no, nobody said anything about guns. Why would they need guns with us? They probably wouldn't even need those Peacekeepers of theirs, because Martians always keep their promises. All they want is to own us."

"You can't let them do that," he said positively.

"I'm afraid we can't
not
let them do it, if they insist. They're the ones with the money." Then she shook her head in annoyance at herself. "Anyway, that's what I'm here for, to try to get them to act decently; maybe I'll succeed. God knows I'll give it a good try. Earthies are human beings, too, and they're not all wicked exploiters. If I can just get them to remember that we're all part of the same human race—" She shook her head. "Change the subject; how are you doing?"

Dekker couldn't make the transition quite that fast—apart from the fact that he didn't really want to answer that question, or at least not all of it. "Fine," he said, getting up and wandering over to the window.

His mother turned painfully to look with him. "I was sitting here looking at the snow before you came," she said wistfully. "It's pretty."

"It is," he agreed, glancing at his watch. His mother didn't miss it.

"Should you be getting ready for your graduation?"

"Pretty soon. Not right this minute. It won't be much of a ceremony, you know," he added. "They don't make a big deal of graduating here. We just sign the articles of employment, and one of the instructors makes a little speech to congratulate us and wish us well, and that's it."

"It'll be a big deal for me, Dek," his mother said. She hesitated, then said, "You know, I was going to bring Tsumi with me as my assistant"

"
Tsumi
?"

"Well, I would rather have had you, but what you're doing is more important. Tsumi wanted desperately to go. I wish I did have somebody to help out. Somebody with younger legs than mine."

"But
Tsumi
!" Dekker said, unable to keep himself from remembering that it had been so very difficult to scrape up the fare to Earth for him—and so evidently easy to do it for Tsumi Gorshak.

"I know you don't like him, Dek. All the same, I felt I owed it to Tinker. But it didn't work out. Tsumi was going for a piloting license, and he failed the test, and—and he tried to bribe the instructor, Dekker. I didn't have any choice. I fired him."

"I see," Dekker said, seeing much more than she had said. She was looking at him curiously.

"Is something on your mind, Dek?" she asked.

He hesitated. But what was there to tell her? That he was a cheat, and covering up for other cheats, and, really, not that much better than Tsumi Gorshak?

He shook his head and looked again at his watch. "It's just that I'd better get on down there. We have to read the articles and get a blood test before the ceremony."

"A blood test? For
narcotics
?" And when he nodded she said sorrowfully, "Maybe I was wrong about the Earthies. Maybe we're not part of the same race after all."

And ten hours later they were on their way: Dekker's graduating class, the bunch from the Oort, and Annetta Bancroft.

There was only one surprise, and it was Toro Tanabe.

At the last moment, shamefaced and not looking at Dekker, Tanabe had stepped forward and signed the articles of employment with everybody else. It was only when they had broken ranks and were getting ready to leave that Tanabe saw Dekker's eyes on him. The Japanese grinned in embarrassment. "After all," he said, "it would be a pity to come this far and not go the rest of the way, would it not? And at least if I am to do the cooking, I may even be able to enjoy the food.

36

Co-Mars Two was in the same orbit as the planet Mars—that was why it was called Co-Mars—but it trailed Mars by a sixth of a Martian year, in what is called a "Trojan" point. There was another control station just like it at the orbit's other Trojan point, the same sixty degrees away but in the other direction. These two Co-Mars stations commanded the entire sky. The stations in orbit around Mars itself could help if necessary, but that seldom happened. Actually any of the stations could, in a pinch, handle all the comets at once, at least all the ones not blocked by the Sun. The reason they divided the work was for safety's sake. Co-Mars Two was the one that vectored the incoming comets on the final legs of their approach to Mars and thus it was the most important of all . . . or at least its personnel liked to think so.

Co-Mars Two wasn't small. It was about the size of a seagoing cargo vessel of Earth, and it would weigh around fifteen thousand tons if it weighed anything at all. Being in orbit, it didn't. Nothing inside it weighed anything, either, because there was no spin on Co-Mars Two. Therefore there was no centrifugal pseudogravity to hold the objects inside to the shells as there was in, say, the stations in the Oort cloud itself. Co-Mars Two couldn't afford the luxury of spin. Its myriad antennae were all aimed with great precision at particular points in the sky, and they couldn't be allowed to wander.

Nor did the people who manned it experience even the tiny micro-gravity that was found in the transfer stations at the top of a Skyhook. They didn't experience any gravity at all, which caused a lot of queasy stomachs. Co-Mars Two's corridors went in all three of the directions of three-dimensional space, and there was no such thing in it as a stairway. For the convenience of its crew the corridors were colored red, green, and yellow, corresponding, but in no particular order, to left-right, front-back, and up-down.

Once they got used to its little eccentricities, the crews of Co-Mars Two found that it wasn't a bad place to be. There was plenty of power from their Augenstein-powered MHD electricity generators for civilized comforts. They needed a lot of power. The station's sensors, after all, had to reach out past the orbit of Neptune to keep in touch with their quarry.

Those sensors were powerful, and before the supply ship came within ten thousand kilometers of Co-Mars Two whole banks of them had to be turned off, because otherwise the radio energy the sensors emitted would quickly fry everybody aboard.

37

They were docked, they were actually on the station; Dekker DeWoe was now a part of Co-Mars Two and thus of the whole Oort project! He could not repress that wonderful glow of Being There. He couldn't really take time to enjoy it, either, because first things had to come first, and before Dekker DeWoe or any of his shipmates had the chance to look around their wonderful new surroundings, the supply ship they had come in had first to be unloaded.

That was hard work. Awkward work, too; there Dekker was, sweating like a pig, weightless, unskilled at being weightless, doing his best. "Coming through," Jay-John Belster would yell from inside the hatch, and Dekker, or somebody else, would have to dive and scramble for the carton or sack or machine part as it came floating through the ship's hatch and try to slow it and guide it to the handiest wall. That was their whole job. Once there, it would stay there, because there were stick-to-me patches on every piece of the cargo and the walls of the hold were covered with the stuff. The flow of cargo kept coming, though. By the time you got one thing firmly secured, another was already floating through right at you, and you had to try to flounder back into position in time to catch it.

It was dumb, difficult grunt work. Dekker bashed himself a dozen times against ungiving wall or sharp-cornered machine part, but he didn't care, not as long as he could feel that glow building up inside him anyway. Dekker DeWoe was
home
. He was well aware that he was a tiny cog in a machine as big as the solar system itself. Yet, as he flung himself at a bale of something as big as himself and scrabbled for a handhold to help him slow it down, he felt fully satisfied. He was
there
. He was at last taking a real part in the rebirth of his planet. When, weeks or months later, the shattered fragments of some arriving comet crashed down onto the Martian plains and left their increment of life-promising gases, it would be because Dekker DeWoe was part of the team that had made it fly there straight and true.

It was a pity that his stomach didn't enjoy it as much as he did. His first experience of weightlessness was taking its predictable toll. The saliva glands under his tongue were fountaining, and Dekker was not at all sure that his unease would stop there. Already two of his classmates had surrendered to motion sickness and gone off for shots, but he wasn't ready to give up.

He envied the easy maneuvering of the station personnel who had drifted by to share the work. He watched them when he could take a second off his own efforts, because they were the ones who knew what they were doing. They swam nonchalantly into the room, one hand on a holdtight and the other for work; sometimes, he saw, they could even use two hands to work, because they would brace themselves with no more than the toe of a foot while they tugged some item from the wall where it had just been put. They didn't bother with the toss-and-catch of the actual unloading. Their job was to tow the things to wherever they belonged in the recesses of the station itself.

One thing puzzled Dekker. For some reason, before any of them left the entrance hold, each one had to stop at the exit. There a woman went over each item with an instrument that looked like a funnel stabbed into a metal box.

Dekker couldn't identify the instrument, but he recognized the woman easily enough. She was Rosa McCune, the psychologist who had given him his entrance examination. He swallowed a mouthful of saliva and nudged Shiaopin Ye, by the chance of the moment next to him, though upside down. "What's she doing?" Dekker panted.

"I think she's checking for drugs with that sniffer," Ye said, pressing something round and soft against the wall.

"Drugs," Dekker said scornfully, and then had to pause as the muscles of his abdomen began to heave ominously. He grabbed a wall bracket and closed his eyes, to see if that would help, but it didn't. He felt as though he was falling, corkscrewing, tumbling; his inner ear squawked complaints about the signals it was getting, and the saliva glands under his tongue pumped faster.