The Precipice

OUTWARD BOUND

An adenoidal woman lamented lost love as country music twanged softly in the bridge of Starpower 1. “That was some performance you put on,” said Pancho. She was sitting in the command-pilot’s seat at the instrument panel. Dan was in the right-hand seat, beside her, separated by a bank of control knobs and rocker switches. He saw that half the touchscreens on the panel had been personalized by Pancho: they showed data against backgrounds of the Grand Canyon, sleek acrobatic aircraft, even muscular male models smilingly reclining on sunny beaches.

“The interview?” Dan laughed softly. “I could’ve predicted three-quarters of the questions they asked. Maybe more.”

He stared out at the view through the wide glassteel port that ran the length of the instrument panel and wrapped around its sides. To his left, behind Pancho, was the Sun, its brilliance toned down by the port’s heavy tinting but still bright enough to dominate the sky. It made Pancho look as if she had a halo ringing her closecropped hair. The zodiacal light stretched out from the Sun’s middle clear across the width of the port; dust motes scattered the sunlight, leftovers from the solar system’s early days of creation. Beyond was darkness, the deep black infinity of space. Only a few of the brightest stars shone through the port’s tinting. “You really think the stock price’ll go up?” Pancho asked, her eyes shifting back and forth among the displays on the panel.

“Already has, a couple of points,” Dan said. “That’s one of the reasons I did the interview.”

She nodded. “From what I heard afterward, the IAA wants to slap your butt in jail the instant you get back into their jurisdiction.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been in jail,” Dan muttered. “Yeah, but that wouldn’t do the stock any good, would it?”

“Pancho, you talk like a worried stockholder.”

“I’m a stockholder.”

“Are you worried?”

“What, me worry?” she joked. “I got no time for worryin’. But I would like to know exactly where we’re heading.”

“Would you?”

“Come on, boss, you can razzle-dazzle the reporters but I know you got an asteroid all picked out. Maybe a couple of ’em.”

“I want to get to three of them.”

“Three?”

“Yep. One of each type: stony, metallic, and carbonaceous.”

“How deep into the Belt will we hafta go?”

“We’d better bring Fuchs into this; he’s the expert.”

In a few minutes the four of them were seated around the table in the ship’s wardroom: Amanda and Fuchs on one side, Pancho and Dan on the other. A computer-generated chart of the Asteroid Belt was displayed on the bulkhead screen, a ragged sprinkling of colored dots between thin yellow circles representing the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

“So you can see that the metallic asteroids,” Fuchs was saying, in an almost pedantic drone, “lie mostly in the outer areas of the Belt. This is a region that hasn’t been explored as well as the inner zones.”

“Which is why we haven’t picked a specific metallic rock as yet,” said Dan.

“What’re we talkin’ here?” Pancho asked. “Three A Us? Four?”

“Four astronomical units,” Amanda replied, “give or take a fraction.”

“And you want to head out there and scout around?” Pancho clearly looked incredulous.

“We have enough fuel for some maneuvering,” Dan said. Pulling her palmcomp from her coverall pocket, Pancho said, “Some maneuvering. But at that distance, not a helluva lot.”

“I need a nice chunk of nickel-iron,” Dan said. “Doesn’t have to be big: a few hundred meters will do just fine.”

Fuchs broke into a smile. It made his heavy-featured, normally dour face light up. “I think I understand. A nickel-iron piece a few hundred meters across would contain enough iron ore to feed the world’s steel industry for a year or more.” Dan jabbed a forefinger in his direction. “You’ve got it, Lars. That’s what I want to show them, back home.”

Amanda spoke up. “Didn’t someone bring a nickel-iron asteroid into the Earth-Moon vicinity?”

“Gunn did it,” Fuchs answered. “He even named the asteroid Pittsburgh, after the steel-producing center in the United States.”

“Yeah, and the double-damned GEC tossed Gunn off the rock and damned near ruined him,” Dan recalled sourly.

“You simply can’t have people bringing potentially dangerous objects into the Earth-Moon region,” Amanda said. “Suppose this Pittsburgh thing somehow was perturbed into an orbit that would impact Earth? It could have been devastating.” Dan scowled at her. “It’s been more than four centuries since Newton figured out the laws of motion and gravity. We can calculate orbits with some precision. Pittsburgh wasn’t going to endanger anything. It was just the double-damned GEC’s way of maintaining control.”

Pancho looked up from her palmcomp. “We’ve got fuel enough to maneuver for three days, out at the four AU range.”

“Good enough,” Dan said. “We’ll be scanning all the way out there. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find a nickel-iron baby right away.”

Fuchs shook his head gloomily. “There is vast emptiness out there.” Pointing to the wallscreen display, he went on, “We think of the Belt as crowded with asteroids, but really they are nothing but infinitesimal bits of matter floating in an enormous sea of emptiness. If that chart was drawn to true scale, the asteroids would be too small to see, except in a microscope.”

“A few needles in a tremendous haystack,” Amanda added. Dan shrugged carelessly. “That’s why we have radar and telescopes and all the other sensors.”

Pancho brought the conversation back to practicality. “Okay, so we have to go huntin’ to find a metallic rock. What about the others you want, boss?”

“Lars has already picked them out.”

Tapping on his own palmcomp, lying on the table before him, Fuchs highlighted two particular asteroids on the wall display. Bright red circles flashed around them. With another touch of his stylus on the palmcomp’s tiny keyboard, the trajectory of Starpower 1 appeared on the display, with the ship’s current position outlined by a flashing yellow circle.

“The closer object is 26 — 238, an S-type asteroid.”

“Stony,” Amanda said.

“Yes,” Fuchs agreed, smiling at her. “Stony asteroids are rich in silicates and light metals such as magnesium, calcium and aluminum.”

Dan stared at the display. The dot showing Starpower 1’s position was noticeably moving. Christ, we’re going like a bat out of hell. He had known the facts and figures of the fusion-driven ship’s performance, but now, seeing the reality of it on the chart, it began to hit him viscerally.

“Our second objective,” Fuchs was going on, “will be 32-114, a C-type, chondritic object. Chondritic asteroids contain carbon and hydrates—”

“Water,” said Pancho, getting up from the narrow table and heading for the food freezer.

“Yes, water, but not in the liquid form.”

“The water molecules are linked chemically to the other molecules in the rock,” Amanda said. “You have to apply heat or some other form of energy to get the water out.”

“But it’s water,” Dan said, watching Pancho as she pulled a foil-wrapped prepackaged meal from the freezer. “Selene needs water. So does anybody working in space.”

“You will do your work on water,” Amanda murmured. “ ‘An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.’ ”

“What’s that?” Dan asked, puzzled.

She looked almost embarrassed. “Oh… Kipling. Rudyard Kipling.”

“ ‘Gunga Din’,” Fuchs added quickly. “A very fine poem.”

“By a white European male chauvinist,” Pancho quipped as she slid her meal into the microwave oven.

“How can you be hungry?” Amanda asked. “You had a full meal only a few hours ago.”

Pancho grinned at her. “I don’t have to watch my figure. I burn off the calories just like that.” She snapper her fingers.

“But those prepackaged meals,” Amanda said. “They’re so… prepackaged.”

“I like ’em,” said Pancho.

“Anyway,” Dan said, raising his voice slightly to cut off any disagreements, “those are the two rocks we’re going after. We’ll take some samples to solidify our claim and then head for the outer region of the Belt and find ourselves a metallic body.”

“I’ve been wondering,” Amanda said slowly, “about the legal status of any claims we make. If the IAA considers this flight to be illegal… I mean, if we’re deemed to be outlaws—”

“They could disallow our claims to the asteroids,” Dan finished for her. “I’ve thought about that.”

“And?”

A single, sharp, clear ping sounded from the open hatch to the bridge. Pancho sprinted from the microwave oven and ducked through the hatch. She came back into the wardroom a moment later, her face taut. “Solar flare.” Amanda got to her feet and pushed past Pancho, into the bridge. Fuchs looked concerned, almost alarmed.

Dan said, “I’ll check out the electron guns.”

“Might not hit us,” Pancho said. “The plasma cloud’s still too far away to know if it’ll reach us or not.”

“I’ll check out the electron guns anyway,” Dan said, getting up from his chair.

“I’ve taken enough radiation to last me a lifetime. I don’t need any more.”