Higher Education

Chapter Thirteen

Rick was convinced that no one else would solve the problem of the ship’s travel time. It was a shock when at the end of the third day Barney French announced that a total of six people had obtained the right answer.

She did not, however, provide the names. “You know who you are,” she said to the assembled group. “This isn’t a school. My job isn’t to give out prizes.”

Which left Rick to stare around and wonder who was so smart. Chick Teazle? Gladys de Witt? Vido? Not Deedee, if what she had told Tom Garcia was the truth. Had a whole group of them cooperated, without telling the rest? Not judging from their expressions. It seemed to him that everyone was staring round at everybody else.

Barney also offered no public comment as to how people had managed on their individual assignments. She simply called them in later, one at a time, asked a few questions and made barbed comments on the answers, and piled on the work load.

“You’ll need this, and this, and this,” she said calmly to Rick. He didn’t argue, but he knew that each item she dropped on him meant four or five hours hard work. It made him wonder why he had been so keen to succeed when he was on CM-2.

He carried his assignments back to his cabin and started the grind. The next couple of days were endless labor, broken only by food, sleep, and stolen hours with Alice. Barney French had dumped on her even harder than Rick. Alice had only just squeaked through the finals on CM-2, and still she was barely making the grade. Rick felt almost guilty at the time they spent together—but he never suggested that they might stop seeing each other. Amid all the work, Alice provided the bright spot in a sea of drudgery".

Halfway point came and went, a few minutes of weightlessness while the Vantage turned end-over-end. Deceleration began. Four and a half more days, and they would be at their destination in the Belt.

Seventy-two hours after turnover Rick, wandering along to the dining area dazed by an excess of studying, found himself sitting opposite Deedee. She stared at him in a sad-eyed and accusing way, but all she said was, “How you doing, Rick?”

“Fine.” Did she know? How could she know? He had not spoken a word to anyone, and after the first day he had been careful not even to look at Alice in public.

He pulled out of his trance and made a big effort. “I’m fine,” he repeated. “How are you doing?”

“Busy. Working hard. Thinking a lot. About a lot of things.”

Their food had not yet appeared, but she stood up and went to another table. Rick felt uncomfortable, though he told himself that he had not certainly not done anything to Deedee. She kept looking at him from where she was sitting at the other table.

He wolfed his food down as fast as he could and returned at once to his cabin. It was late, and Alice had told him that she didn’t think she would be able to make it until the next day, but he really wanted to see her and touch her and talk to her.

He was lying on his bunk, supposed to be learning the table of the elements but actually drifting and dreaming, when it happened.

An urgent voice spoke over the general announcement channel. “Emergency. Please return at once to your cabin and secure all movable objects. Lie on your bunk and strap yourself down. In five minutes we will perform a major course change and move to high acceleration. Repeat, this is an emergency.”

Rick glanced around the little cabin. The chair was tucked away in the wall. He went across to the terminal, grabbed the picture of his mother, and locked it away in the high cabinet. As the announcement was repeated—this time he recognized Tom Garcia’s voice, nothing like as casual as usual—he went back to the bunk, lay down, and secured the straps across his body and legs.

Now what? The terminal came on without his touching it, something he had not realized could be done. Barney French’s image appeared on the ceiling above Rick. He realized for the first time that the terminal could also serve as a backlit projector, throwing an image onto the flat plane of the white ceiling.

“To repeat what our pilots told you,” Barney said quietly, “we have an emergency situation. Let me assure you that this is not what you apprentices refer to as a ‘zinger,’ part of a planned test. Since Tom Garcia and Marlene Kotite are otherwise occupied, I have agreed to tell you what we know so far. Fifteen minutes ago we received word from Headquarters of a major accident on one of our advanced mining facilities, Company Mine 31. There are casualties. We don’t know yet how many. After the initial message from CM-31 there has been no communication of any kind. Because of the changing geometry of our mines in the Belt, the Vantage happens to have the best location and velocity vector of all our vessels to reach CM-31 in minimum time. We will shortly change direction and go to our maximum acceleration of a little more than two gees. That will be maintained for four and a half hours, after which we will perform turnover and decelerate with equal force for six hours. We anticipate that accommodation changes on board the Vantage will be necessary upon our arrival at CM-31, but I cannot yet inform you of what those might be.

“I know that each of you has experienced much higher accelerations than two gees, but only in physical tests or for the short period of an ascent to orbit. Do not experiment. As soon as our thrust pattern has stabilized, I and others familiar with high-gee shipboard activity will come to each cabin in turn and instruct you on safe operations until we reach CM-31. Meanwhile, remain in your bunks.”

The screen went blank. Rick lay back and waited. There had been no sign of the usual sarcasm in Barney French’s voice, but also no room for compromise on her face. Anyone who left his bunk, that look said, would be in major trouble. Something terrible must have happened on CM-31, though Rick could not imagine what.

Ten minutes ago he had been brooding over Alice’s absence. Now he was glad that she had not been able to come to him. Were other apprentices struggling right now into their clothes, and scrambling back to their own cabins?

The drive turned off. There was the usual moment of disorientation as his stomach came up to meet his throat, and then the giddiness of a rotation and realignment of the ship in inertial space. Before that could become uncomfortable he was pressed back hard into his bunk. Wrinkles in the mattress and blanket that he had never noticed before made their mark on his back.

He had been told not to move from his bunk, but he was free to move within it. A set of controls for the terminal lay on the bunk’s right-hand edge, so that if you wanted to you could work the data banks while you were lying in bed. Rick keyed it now, with difficulty, adjusting to the use of fingers that suddenly did not want to lift from keys.

COMPANY MINE 31—at last it came—ONE OF THE NEWEST OF VANGUARD MINING’S ASSETS, THE BASE ASTEROID FOR CM-31 HAD AN ORIGINAL FORM CLOSE TO A TRIAXIAL ELLIPSOID WITH SEMI-MAJOR AXES 0.9, 0.7, AND 0.5 KILOMETERS. . . . What was that supposed to mean? Nothing at all, so far as Rick was concerned. He plowed on, word after unfamiliar word. . . . ALTHOUGH SMALL COMPARED WITH OTHER MINES SUCH AS CM-8 AND CM-20, CM-31 IS UNUSUALLY VALUABLE BECAUSE OF ITS HIGH CONTENT OF SIDEROPHILES. . . .

Siderophiles. Rick swore. That term again, the one Barney French had told him to check out—and he hadn’t done it.

He could hear sounds from outside his door, but no one came in. He had to be quick. He moved to the word-search data bank, and the definition appeared on the screen.

SIDEROPHILE: LITERALLY, IRON-LOVING. IN MINING OPERATIONS THE TERM REFERS TO A GROUP OF ELEMENTS TIIAT COMMONLY OCCUR IN THE PRESENCE OF IRON AND ARE PREFERENTIALLY REMOVED WITH IRON DURING AN EXTRACTION PROCESS. THE MOST IMPORTANT OF TI IESE FOR COMMERCIAL PURPOSES ARE NICKEL, IRIDIUM, AND PLATINUM.

So CM-31 was a potential gold mine—or at least, a platinum mine. Rick switched back to his other data file.

. . . CM-31 FORMS A TEST SITE FOR NEW LARGE-SCALE CENTRIFUGE AND ZONE MELTING METHODS. IT IS BEING USED IN PROOF-OF-CONCEPT MODE FOR SUCH MINING TECHNIQUES. . . .

Centrifuge was what they had done to him during the physical tests, spinning him around on the end of a long arm with a balance weight at the other end, faster and faster, until he blacked out. He didn’t see how you could put a whole asteroid on the end of anything.

Zone melting made even less sense. It was another phrase that meant nothing. He went again to his online dictionary and this time met with less success. The database defined what he wanted as a method of purifying certain metals, but after that it quickly became gibberish: The zone melting process relies on the fact that many impurities prefer to remain in the liquid phase rather than freeze out into the solid phase. A melted section propagating along an otherwise solid body will collect impurities in the moving melted section. They will be swept along and concentrated at one end.”

Rick puzzled out the message, word by painful word, and was as mystified when he finished as when he started. Concentrated at one end. One end of what? An asteroid didn’t have ends, the ones he had seen were all irregular roundish lumps.

. . . IN VIEW OF THE HIGH METAL FRACTION OF CM-31, A RECORD 99 PERCENT OF THE TOTAL MASS (ROUGHLY 8 BILLION TONS) CAN BE EXTRACTED. IT WILL BE TRANSFERRED TO CISLUNAR SPACE EMPLOYING A SMALL PART OF THE DROSS AS REACTION MASS FOR LOW-THRUST ION PROPULSION UNITS.

Dross. Rick swore again. What the devil was dross? The trouble with learning was that the more you learned, the more you realized how much you didn’t know. Once you started you were on a never-ending treadmill and you couldn’t get off.

The opening door ended his frustration. It was Barney French herself, panting hard. “Luban? Up out of the bunk.” She caught sight of the screen display. “Good choice—let’s hope you don’t need that for a while. Don’t rush getting up. Slow is smart, first time you do it.”

Not just the best way—the only way. Rick came gingerly to his feet and stood there swaying. Tom Garcia had said two gee, but it felt more like ten.

“You’ll get used to it.” Barney was reading his mind. “All of you have been spoiled the past couple of months by low-gee environments. This is nothing. Think yourself lucky you didn’t sign with Avant Mining and have to live with pulsed fusion. Their high-acceleration mode takes them from two and a half gees to zero and back every few seconds, all day long. You ever try to eat dinner bouncing on a pogo stick?”

She moved to the door without waiting for an answer, and Rick followed her out of the cabin. He paused on the threshold. The passageway, along which he had often zoomed with so little effort, had become a deep vertical well. Handholds and footholds that he had never noticed before were placed every foot along it.

“This is the seventh time I’ve done this,” Barney complained. She looped a thick soft rope around her waist, tied the other end around Rick under his armpits, and motioned for him to start down. “Make me an old woman before my time, it will. Go on, start down. I’ll be right behind you. And go slow. You use both hands and both feet, and three of those must work to support your weight at all times. Did you ever go rock climbing back on Earth?”

“No. No rocks where I lived.”

“That figures.”

“I did a few night climbs, though. Up and down the outside of buildings.” Rick still shivered when he remembered the jump from the roof of the Lafferty apartments to a balcony on the building next door. Only eight feet, but when you stood in the dark waiting, ten stories up, eight seemed more like eighty.

“Dumb ass.” Barney sniffed, a few feet above him. “Risking your neck for nothing. Trying to impress some girl, I bet.”

“No.” Rick was climbing down the shaft, slowly and carefully, a boulder strapped to each arm and to his back. If he fell, Barney was supposed to hold him until he could grab another handhold. But could she do it? She’d have to hold up four times her own weight. “I was just trying to prove I was brave,” he panted.

“And did you?”

“I don’t think so. I proved I was scared.” Rick had no more breath for talking. He could see now why Barney had been struggling for breath when she came into his cabin. But he was almost there, reaching the solid floor of the little dining area.

“Take your time,” said Barney. “You won’t need to do much of this unless we have an emergency, but you have to know how ahead of time—just in case.”

Rick nodded a head made of solid lead. He turned, making sure that his feet landed in the correct place—and found himself staring into Deedee’s anxious face. Goggles Landau was next to her.

“Message from the flight deck,” said Goggles at once. He was talking not to Rick but to Barney French, now on the last step of her own descent. “Pilots Garcia and Kotite want you there as soon as possible. They have more news.”

“Shoot. I’ve got one more still to do. Anybody know where Teazle’s cabin is?”

“I do,” said Rick and Deedee simultaneously. They stared at each other. Her cheeks darkened with a blush, and she glared defiantly at Rick.

“Good.” If Barney noticed, she did not care. “Landau, you come with me. I have a job for you. Mao and Luban, I showed you how to climb. Now you go and show Teazle—I want all three of you roped together when you do it. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m putting a lot of trust in all of you, more than I should in an apprentice. Don’t let me down.”

“We won’t.” Rick and Deedee stared at each other as Barney and Goggles left the dining area for the lower level between passenger quarters and drive units, where the flight deck was located.

“What do you think happened on CM-31?” Deedee asked.

Rick jumped at the chance of a neutral subject. He was forced to put his arms around her to tie the rope, and it was the closest they had been since the night of the dance. He couldn’t help brushing against her.

“I’ll make a guess,” he said. “They were using new mining methods. Something went wrong while they were melting and separating the different metals. CM-31 is mostly metal, iron and nickel and platinum.”

She didn’t ask how he knew, merely nodded and started to climb. He followed close behind. Going up was harder work than going down, but it was also easier. You could see just where your hands had to go, instead of groping around with your feet.

“Do you know what centrifuge melting is?” he asked, after they had climbed about five meters.

“Sure.” She was breathing heavily, but moving up steadily. “It’s a confusing term—two different things in one. It means melting, plus centrifuge separation. You take a cylinder filled with different materials, and you melt them. At the same time you spin the cylinder around on its axis. That gives you like a gravity gradient, but of course it’s not gravity, its centrifugal force. The denser liquids go to the outside, farthest from the axis. The light ones stay close to the middle, sort of floating on the heavy ones. So you’ve separated them out from each other. The dross floats at the very center.”

“Dross?”

“Scum. You know, the light useless stuff.”

The long speech had taken all her breath, and she paused in her climb. Rick, focused on the placement of his own hands and feet, took an upward step and ran the top of his head into something soft.

“Oof! Do you mind?” Deedee sounded exasperated. “That’s my rear end you’re poking. It’s off limits.”

“Sorry. Not the first time you’ve called me a butt-head, though.” Rick waited, until she began to move upward again. “What happens if you don’t have a cylinder available?”

“Then you can’t do centrifuge melting, can you? Why are you asking?”

“The data bank says CM-31 was testing centrifuge melting methods. That’s why I said I guessed that something went wrong when they were trying to do it.”

They had finally reached Chick Teazle’s cabin, tucked away up near the very front of the Vantage. Deedee knocked and went in without pausing.

“Hey there!” Rick heard Chick, loud and self-confident as usual. “This is an unexpected treat. Let’s get"—Chick saw Rick at the door, and his voice changed on the final word—"friendly.”

“Barney French sent us.” Deedee sounded abrupt and unnatural. “Get up from your bunk. We have to show you how to climb down to lower ship levels.”

“Why you two?” Chick stared at Rick.

“We happened to be there with Barney.” Rick held up the thick rope. “We have to be all tied together, just in case.”

“I don’t need no damn rope.” But Chick took the end that Rick handed him, looped the rope around under his arms, and tied a deft knot. “All right, go ahead. I’ll follow you down.”

“No.” Rick put his arm on Deedee’s, just as she was about to start the descent. “You go first, Chick. That way if you fall, we’ll be above you and have a chance to brace ourselves. If you were above us you could knock us with you.”

“I’m not going to fall, you dummy.” Chick glared at Rick, but he moved forward. “What happens if you fall on me?”

“You cushion my landing.” Rick watched as Chick started down. He was long-limbed and powerful, and he moved with a speed and confidence that Rick envied. Deedee followed, saying what Rick was thinking: “Slow down a bit, Chick, or you’ll pull us off-balance.”

Chick grunted, but he did as she asked. The three descended steadily, to find Barney French waiting for them back at the dining level.

“Good,” she said. “Everyone has been through the drill. Now you do it without the rope. I want each of you back in your own cabin, and on your own bunk until we get to CM-31.”

It seemed such an anticlimax that they all stared at her instead of jumping at once to do what she said.

“Can’t you tell us more about what happened?” asked Deedee.

“I propose to do exactly that. But I’m not going to go round telling you one at a time. Get to your bunk, or you’ll miss the beginning.”

It was incentive enough. Chick went swinging away up the vertical passage like a monkey, while Deedee started downward.

Rick, about to follow right behind Chick, felt Barney’s hand on his arm.

“Give him a few seconds,” she said. “If he does goof, I assume you don’t want two hundred pounds plummeting down on you under two gees.”

Rick waited impatiently, staring up but ready to jump out of the way, until Chick vanished into his cabin. Then he made his own ascent, trying to strike the balance between speed and caution. Barney was right. Practice made all the difference. Already it felt easier than the first time.

He lay down on his bunk, fixed the straps into position, and waited impatiently for something to happen. What had Chick meant when he said, “Let’s get friendly"? And why had Deedee suddenly turned all stiff and weird?

Rick could guess, but before he had time to brood on it Barney’s image was again projected on the ceiling.

“I told you during our very first session that when you came aboard the Vantage all the babying ended,” she said. “Well, I lied. This phase of your training is supposed to place you in what we call a Level Three environment. Unfortunately, the situation at CM-31 represents a Level Five environment—the highest level of danger and uncertainty that fully-trained staff ever expect to meet. You are not ready for that, but needless to say this was not from choice. Headquarters have again confirmed that every other ship in the fleet will need at least thirty-six hours more than the Vantage to reach Company Mine 31. That time could be the difference between life and death. Therefore you, the apprentices, must assist in operations. When we reach CM-31 you will supplement six experienced staff members: myself, Tait, and Styan; Garcia and Kotite, our pilots; and Skipios, our engineer.

“Meanwhile, in the nine hours remaining until our arrival at CM-31, you are all to remain in your bunks. If you can sleep, do so. First, however, I am going to give you background on where we are going and what we will find there.”

It was far into the usual rest cycle and Rick was tired out, but the idea of sleep while in a two-gee field sounded like pure fantasy. The slightest movement made you aware of your body. Even breathing was an effort.

“Here is CM-31,” Barney went on, “as it was when our original prospecting team arrived and confirmed the nature of the find.” Her face vanished, and was replaced by the image of an irregular and pock-marked lump of rock. Rick knew that the Belt held billions of similar mountain-sized boulders. Without knowing this one’s composition there was no hint that it might have unusual value.

“Now for a few basics,” went on Barney. “Gravity is the force that defines the whole shape and movement of the solar system—the galaxy, too, if it comes to that—but for objects the size of the one you are looking at now, gravity is a very weak force. It is just strong enough to pull small particles of material into contact with each other, but if gravity was all that held CM-31 together, you’d be able to mine it and the other asteroids with a spoon. But when the dust and grains of sand and pebbles meet, a different form of bonding takes over. The little particles sinter, which means that they all stick together to form a single mass. And that mass doesn’t come apart easily. You can think of CM-31 as we discovered it as a ball of iron, with some rock and small fractions of other metals. It’s solid, and it’s hard, and if you want to break a bit off you have to do it with a chisel.

“It’s strong enough that it would still hold together if you started to rotate it around its principal axis of inertia, which is the most stable way to make it spin.”

The lumpy surface of CM-31 now showed dozens of bright points of light all around it. They were drive units. Rick could not tell if this was a simulation or the real thing, but the body began to turn, slowly at first and then gradually faster.

“You can rotate it pretty fast, and the body will still hold in one piece,” Barney’s voice said. “But that’s not true if you also heat it. We use electric induction, which will produce internal currents to heat the body all the way through. If you did that until CM-31 melted, and it was also spinning, it would just fly apart.”

The image on the screen showed the dark planetoid beginning to glow a dull red. It slowly deformed to the shape of a thick plastic disk, then suddenly disintegrated and was gone, parts flying away in all directions.

“Obviously, that’s no way to mine an asteroid. You’d lose the asteroid itself, and you’d lose valuable drive units. It’s also not what people imagine, when they think of the word ‘mining.’ You might ask, what’s the point of heating and spinning a body, when you could just as well mine CM-31 the way most of the mines, like CM-2, were done? Remember the tunnels in CM-2? Mining machines made those, dug ore, and brought it out from the interior.

“The answer to my question, in one word, is economics. It’s far less expensive if you can melt and refine and process a whole asteroid, in one swoop.

“And you can. Here’s how.

“First, you place a cylinder in position around the whole body.”

CM-31 reappeared, just as it had been at the time of discovery. Now a huge silvery cylinder appeared from nowhere and gradually swallowed the whole asteroid into its open end. When the body was totally engulfed, the open end of the cylinder irised shut.

“There’s a couple of things to notice about that cylinder,” said Barney. “First, if you look very closely you’ll see drive units spaced at intervals around the curved part. On the cylinder, not on the asteroid. They will make it spin around its central axis. Second, you can’t see them but there are also hundreds of induction field generators on the cylinder. They will heat anything inside by induced eddy currents. They will also, if the cylinder is rotating, make the asteroid inside start to rotate through an electromagnetic dragging effect. Keep that up long enough, and the material inside will melt. When it melts, it will be thrown outward to the wall of the cylinder.

“One other thing, and this you can’t see: the cylinder is made of the strongest material we know, dislocation-free carbon filaments. It remains strong at high temperatures. It will contain the materials inside it, even when everything is spinning around the cylinder main axis at high speed.”

Rick could see what was coming next, he had known it the moment that the cylinder appeared. The fact that he really owed his knowledge to Deedee did nothing to lessen his pleasure. He could imagine her, tucked away in her own bunk, hugging herself in satisfaction. She had got it exactly right.

“I assume you can all see what’s coming next,” said Barney’s voice, taking away Rick’s sense of superiority. “As everything rotates, the liquid metals press outward on the cylinder wall, the heavier ones toward the outside and forcing the lighter ones closer to the axis of rotation. Actually, it’s not quite as simple as that, because some metals form eutectic alloys that don’t separate by centrifuging, but the general principle is valid. The heaviest metals are tapped first, from spigots on the outer circle of the circular ends of the cylinder. Then we run out the lighter ones. Finally all that’s left behind is a low-density layer of melted rock and sand. With a really high metal content asteroid, that’s not much more than a froth. We empty that, too, and leave it behind in space, all that remains of the original asteroid. At that point, the empty cylinder—after a bit of scrubbing and servicing—is ready to move on and tackle the next mine.

“I’m sure you’re asking, what went wrong in processing CM-31 ? If I could answer that, I would tell you. But I don’t know. We’re moving closer as fast as we can, and a few hours from now we’ll be able to take a look. Until then I suggest that you all rest, even if you don’t think you can sleep.”

Barney French stopped speaking. The projection unit remained alive, throwing onto the ceiling an image of the cylinder, drive units flaring, spinning hypnotically. Rick watched and watched, until at last he slipped into a half-trance. He was neither asleep nor fully awake. He was aware of a time of freefall, when the Vantage turned end-over-end and began its deceleration, but he could not have given an estimate as to how long it lasted. It seemed long after that when the thought came into his head that it should not be necessary to watch a simulation. By now it might be possible to see the real CM-31.

He roused himself and tapped the code for Barney French’s cabin. There was a risk that she was sleeping, but somehow he doubted it.

“Yes?” The answer came at once.

“This is Luban.”

“I know. I can see your call ID. Why aren’t you sleeping?”

“I can’t. I want to ask your permission to climb up to the front of the ship and use the scope there to look for CM-31.”

“You may not be sleeping, but your brain is turned off. We passed turnover a while ago, so we are now decelerating—which means that the front of the Vantage is pointed directly away from our destination. You’d see nothing.” And, while Rick was feeling like a prize buffoon, “You are the fourth person to call and ask me that, so I suppose it’s a general concern. There is no observation port down toward the stern, but there are imaging sensors. Stay where you are. I’m going to hook the output of the rear-pointing sensors into the terminal display. You’ll have a chance to see CM-31 at the same moment as the pilots. Don’t expect anything for a while.”

The projection on the ceiling above Rick flickered through a kaleidoscope of random color swirls, then settled to show a stationary star field. A blue icon at the upper left of the image blinked “target zoom.” There was an impression of impossibly fast motion as stars moved toward the scene edge and disappeared. The image became increasingly grainy, until at last the words “maximum magnification” replaced the first icon.

Rick peered, and saw nothing but fuzzy points of starlight. The scene was steady now, but as minute followed minute he noticed that one point of light at the outside edge of the image area was creeping slowly across the screen. That was not a zoom effect. The moving point had to be a substantial asteroid. It was close to the Vantage compared with everything else, but it could not be CM-31. The ship’s telescope would surely be aimed to place the mine at the center of the field of view.

He focused his attention on that middle area, and was finally rewarded by the sight of a central point of light that came and went at random. The sensitive detectors of the ship’s imaging system must be picking up and displaying single photons. It was their first sight of the target mine.

Rick settled again into a near-trance. He did not think that he slept, but he did close his eyes occasionally. Each time he opened them there was a little more to see. Over minutes and hours the vagrant point of light gradually steadied, to become a pale silver dot, and then a blurry round disk. Soon the ship’s optics made an adjustment, trading magnification for contrast. It was possible to discern that the disk had a slight asymmetry, longer top to bottom than it was side to side.

Fifteen minutes more, and there was no doubt. Rick was looking at an oblong shape, longer than it was wide. It must be the mining cylinder enclosing the ore body of CM-31. But it was not the smoothly spinning regular figure shown in the simulations. There was a definite slow wobble to its motion, and part of the curved surface seemed darker than the rest.

“We have established contact with a maintenance module associated with CM-31.” Tom Garcia’s voice brought Rick’s attention away from the growing image. “Signals indicate two survivors on board the module. We have no indication of survivors on the main mining habitat. The module is running very low on air. The Vantage will end deceleration and achieve rendezvous in fourteen minutes. Personnel stand ready for emergency stations.”

“You heard that.” The distorted cylinder of CM-31 vanished and was replaced by Barney French’s impassive face. “Over the next ten minutes I will assign an emergency station to each apprentice. Do not—repeat, do not go to those stations until I tell you to do so. In thirteen minutes we will change from our present deceleration to a near-freefall environment. Remain in your bunk until that time. Once we are in freefall, unstrap yourself, make sure that you are dressed in regulation fashion, and remain in your cabin. Be prepared to move at once when I tell you to do so. Do not worry if you hear nothing more from me for the next few minutes. I will be addressing each one of you individually.”

CM-31 appeared again, close enough for a clear image to fill the projection screen. Rick was looking at a distorted shell, wobbling slowly around an off-center axis. A long split ran almost from end to end, revealing a dark interior. It looked as though the cylinder had burst, buckling outward. Where were the billions of tons of metallic ores that had been inside it? Where was the maintenance module, with its survivors? He could see no sign of it—no sign of anything resembling a ship or a life-support habitat. What had happened to the rest of the miners on CM-31?

“Luban,” Barney’s voice said suddenly over the intercom.

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you know the location of Port A-3?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You will go there when we move to freefall, without waiting for further instructions. Put on a suit, and take your subsequent orders from Tait or Styan. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any questions?”

“No, sir.” Rick had a thousand, but this was no time to ask them.

“Very good.”

The intercom fell silent, leaving Rick in a ferment of nervousness and speculation. He had been in a suit often enough, that was not a problem. Some other fear—of dying, of failure, of loss of nerve—was tying his guts into a knot.

The image was still on the screen but he took little notice. He was mentally rehearsing, over and over—unstrapping himself, hurrying out of his cabin, swinging his way down to Port A-3. The module is running very low on air. That part of Tom Garcia’s message didn’t need explanation. The speed with which the crew of the Vantage acted could be the difference between life and death.

Freefall—sooner than expected. Rick was off his bunk and out of his cabin in seconds. He realized at once that his mental rehearsal was totally useless. He had missed the obvious—that a score of other apprentices would be scrambling through the same narrow passageways, all heading for different destinations.

He eased past Goggles Landau, past Skip Chung, past Lafe Eklund, all heading in the opposite direction. Chick Teazle, by some miracle, zipped past Rick going in the same direction. Deedee Mao and Alice Klein were standing together in the dining area, obviously waiting for somebody. Rick nodded at them and zoomed on, down to the lower ship level where Port A-3 was located. Vido Valdez was already there, working his way into a suit. Rick was oddly pleased to see him—he trusted Vido, maybe more than any other trainee. Rick put on his own suit, and they went through the thirty-six point sequence together, checking suit seals and functions.

Before they were done, Jigger Tait arrived. He was already in his own vacuum suit, complete with mobility pack.

“Radios on?” he said. And at their nods, “Good. I don’t expect you’ll be going outside, but if I need help I’ll holler. Here.” He handed each of them two squat oxygen cylinders. “Hang on to these, and stand by for cycling.”

They were clearly in emergency mode. The air pressure dropped three times as fast as usual, and even before vacuum was established the outer lock was opening. The remaining air puffed away. Rick, floating with the security of an anchor line, realized that he was at the very edge of open space. The deformed cylinder of CM-31 hung in front of him, huge and somehow ominous.

“There they are,” Jigger said. “Spitting distance. Hats off to Tom Garcia and Marlene Kotite. Be ready with the oxygen and wait here.”

Without another word he was away, jetting toward a small crab-shaped vessel poised in space no more than two hundred meters from the Vantage. Rick and Vido stood and stared. Five more suited figures were leaving the ship from some other exit lock. They all wore mobility packs. One of them was heading for the maintenance module, the other four were jetting off in the direction of CM-31’s cylindrical hulk. It was impossible to make individual identification, but everyone moved in space with the confidence and economy of long space experience.

Jigger and one other person had reached the crab-like maintenance module and were entering on its under side. Within seconds they had reappeared, each holding a suited figure. They jetted at once toward the Vantage. If they had said one word to each other, it was on a frequency not received by Rick and Vido.

They reached the lock, and Rick saw that the other person was Gina Styan. Still without a word, she and Jigger grabbed oxygen cylinders. They attached them to the suits of the two new arrivals. Jigger peered in through the visors. The eyes of the occupants, both women, were flickering open.

“All right,” said Jigger. “We sure cut it fine. I’m going to cycle the lock so we can flush carbon dioxide, but there’s no rush on that now.”

One of the women was giving him a weak thumbs-up sign.

“I’d better get back out there and secure the module,” Gina said. “Then I’ll see if they need any help over at the main facility.”

Rick peered past her out of the open lock. He saw what he had expected to see, the little maintenance module and beyond it the massive cylinder of CM-31. But there was something else. Off to the left, small but steadily growing, was a feathery plume of brightness.

Should he mention it, or would he seem like an idiot? He glanced at the others, and realized that Vido had seen it, too. They stared at each other, and said in unison, “What’s that?”

“It’s a ship,” added Vido. “Isn’t it?”

“Can’t be,” Jigger said. He was still busy with the two survivors of the accident. “Not for another thirty-six hours.”

“But it is.” Gina had looked where Rick pointed. “It’s not one of ours—it’s an Avant Mining vessel.”

Rick told himself he ought to have realized that. He had seen such a feathery exhaust before, the result of the pulsed fusion drive used by Avant. But it was so unexpected, out here far from anywhere.

And then he realized that it should not be unexpected at all. This was the very place where you might think to meet an Avant Mining ship—out in the broad region of the valuable metal-bearing asteroids.

The other ship was closing steadily, heading right for the Vantage. Rick heard a voice in his headset.

“This is Morse Watanabe, captain of the Avant Mining vessel, Scarab. We happened to be in a compatible orbit, and we picked up a Mayday signal on a broad frequency band with these coordinates. Do you need assistance?”

Jigger Tait and Gina Styan said nothing. It was Tom Garcia’s voice that sounded in the headsets. “Thanks for the offer, Scarab. As you can see, we’ve had a major accident here, but everything seems to be under control.”

“Glad to hear it.” There was a pause, then Watanabe continued, “Unless proprietary elements are involved, would you tell us what happened?”

“We are still in the process of determining that. However, it seems certain that the integrity of the containment cylinder was breached, suddenly and violently. The melted ore spewed out into space in all directions. Unfortunately, the main crew habitat was impacted and destroyed.”

Rick heard a grunt in his headset. It came from one of the two women picked up by Jigger Tait and Gina Styan. This must be their first direct evidence that their friends and co-workers were dead.

“I am truly sorry to hear that,” Watanabe said. “Any idea what caused the rupture?”

“Not yet. We are working on it. Our preliminary assumption is impact by another body.”

“That would have been my guess. Lots of material in this region. Something pretty big, that somehow got past the radar.” Watanabe sighed. “Again, our regrets and sympathy. Since we can’t help, we’ll be on our way.”

The feathery plume of the Scarab’s exhaust appeared again. The other ship slowly receded. Rick watched it until it was no more than a tiny spark of light, no different from one of the silent stars.

The incident had changed his whole view of Avant Mining. It was a terrible shock to hear Jigger Tait, cycling the lock to fill it with air, mutter to himself, “That slimy bastard. ‘Regrets and sympathy’—like hell.”

“They were just trying to help,” protested Vido. “Weren’t they?”

“You can think that if you like.” Jigger glared at him, and the two rescued women did the same.

“If you hadn’t come along in time,” one of them said. “We’d have been dead in another hour or two. With no survivors, CM-31 would have been a derelict. The Scarab would have taken possession and filed for full or partial ownership.”

“And they’d have got it, too,” growled Jigger. “That’s space law. Watanabe can say he’s glad that things are under control here as often as he likes, but I’ll never believe it. He’s been robbed of a big gain, and he knows it.”

“But the ore’s all gone,” Rick said. “It was thrown all over the place by the accident.”

“Not the ore. That’s not what Watanabe wanted. He was after technology. “Jigger jerked his thumb at the hovering cylinder. “Avant Mining has nothing like that. They still mine using the old bore-and-scoop method. There’s nothing they’d like better than a good look at the inside of CM-31. The general technique may sound simple, but the details aren’t. Watanabe’s out there now, gnashing his teeth—and wishing that the whole lot of us had died on CM-31.”