Mining the Oort (16 page)

"Look," he said desperately, "things aren't so bad. You'll be out of here in a couple of months, with any luck at all, and then you can start taking care of yourself. I'll be in the program by then, so you won't have to worry about me."

"Sure, Dek," his father said.

"I'll pass the test. I promise."

His father nodded.

"So then you can go back to Nairobi, get out of this cold, wet climate—"

"Right."

Dekker shook his head. "Dad," he said, "I
care
about you."

His father was silent for a moment. Then he said, "I know you do," and looked around, and then quickly stepped up to his son, flung his arms around him, and kissed him on the cheek.

When he stepped back he was grinning. 'That'll put at least an extra ten days on my time, I guess," he said, "but it was worth it.

20

The next morning, back in the furnished room in Danktown, Dekker awoke to a hammering on the door. When he got his braces on and had limped over to open it Marcus Hagland was there, looking accusing. "What are you doing, sleeping late?" he demanded. "Where were you yesterday?" And when Dekker had explained, Hagland looked angrily amused. "Sure they locked him up," he said. "He's a Martian, isn't he? I bet the guy he was fighting was Jap or Yankee or some other kind of Earthie, and I bet they didn't arrest
him
. You really ought to open your eyes and see what's going on, DeWoe."

Dekker didn't answer that. He shuffled over to the hot plate and asked, "Do you want some coffee?"

"Why not?" But Hagland was watching him closely, and before Dekker had poured it he said, "We'd better talk money first. You owe me for yesterday even if you weren't here; I did my part, I showed up. So let's get this account up to date before we start today."

That took Dekker by surprise. "Oh," he said, "right. I see what you mean. But can't do anything about that. I don't have enough cues left on my amulet."

"You
what
?"

Dekker said, embarrassed, "Well, my father was the one who paid you, wasn't he? I just had enough for incidentals—and most of that went yesterday."

"Jesus!" Marcus snarled. "How dumb can you be? You saw him; didn't you think of getting him to transfer funds to your account?"

"I'll take care of it right away," Dekker promised.

"Damn right you will. Forget the coffee; you need it more than I do. And I'll be back tomorrow to collect."

It wasn't just a matter of paying Marcus Hagland for tutoring, Dekker realized; he was also going to need money for food. So as soon as he was dressed he .went in search of his father's bank.

When he finally found out where it was, the assistant manager was polite but unhelpful. "You see, our problem is that your father's not here to authorize transferring his credit balance," he explained. "From what you say, he's a rehabilitee."

"He
is
a rehabilitee. He's in Pueblo. That's the whole problem."

"Well, rehabilitees' rights are safeguarded by law," the man said primly. "Maybe you are this Boldon DeWoe's son, maybe you aren't, probably you are—no, Mr. DeWoe, don't bother trying to prove it. That's not the point. What difference does it make if you are? We have to keep in mind that your father may not want you to receive his credit balance."

"But I don't have any other money!"

The assistant manager shrugged in mild sympathy. "If there's nothing else—?" he suggested.

"I don't even have enough to eat on."

"If you could get a notarized statement from your father—"

"He's not allowed to do anything like that! I visited him, and he can't have any other outside contact for the rest of the month."

"A court order, then?"

"How do I get a court order?"

"You retain a lawyer, of course. It's quite simple," the assistant manager told him, looking surprised. But could not tell him how to "retain" a "lawyer" when he didn't have the money to "retain" him with.

Back in the empty-feeling room, Dekker was sure that there had to be a way, if he had the time, and the luck, to find out what it was—some sort of retrainees'-aid society, or free legal services for the indigent—
something
.

On the other hand, he didn't want to do any of that. That was tantamount to accepting Earthie charity, and he was a Martian. Martians took care of their own problems, and the very idea of begging for aid made him feel unclean.

In any case, he reminded himself, it was only a matter of four days until the entrance examination would come up.

Dekker took stock of his resources. The apartment rent was paid until the end of the month. There was some food in the little chiller—not enough for four days, but since there was only himself to eat it perhaps there was enough, maybe, for the first couple. And, although the trip to Pueblo had mortally wounded his credit balance, there were a few cues left on his amulet—if he ate lightly.

If he ate lightly, that was, and if he didn't spend anything at all on everything
but
food, and if he was careful to save out the fare to get up to the mountain for the entrance test, and especially if he gave up Marcus's services. That was a given, anyway. A single day's pay to Marcus would have bankrupted him; the one day of cramming he already owed remained as a considerable grievance in Marcus's eyes, and the tutor flatly refused to provide any more of his time for any mere promise of eventual repayment whenever Boldon DeWoe got out of the correctional facility.

So Dekker did the only thing possible. He closeted himself in the little room, and he studied. When he was hungry he tried to put the thought of food out of his mind. Sometimes he succeeded.

Unfortunately, he discovered that he had another growing appetite, as well. It had been a long time since the Masai village and Sheila.

The Peacekeeper secretary who had admitted him to the Pueblo center had not struck him as particularly attractive when he was there, but for some reason images of her crossed knees floated before his eyes when they should have been firmly focused on his screen—of her knees, and of Doris Ngemba's bare breasts and warm chocolate-colored rump. Even of some of Sheila's more useful parts, though his memories of Sheila were not visual, because it had been dark in the hut.

There were so
many
women in the world, he reflected. Even this harder, nastier world. Surely there was one woman somewhere—perhaps even one right here in Denver, if only he knew where to look for her—who would not object to a little bed time with a fairly healthy and passably good-looking young Martian?

But not for a Martian without any money at all. It was a long four days.

When the test was over and they informed him he had passed and would be able to enter the dormitories the next day, Dekker thanked the proctors and went away. Other candidates were there, rioting and jubilant or slinking away in depression. Dekker didn't talk to any of them.

He hadn't needed to be told that he had passed. He had known it as soon as he looked at the test questions, and confirmed his belief that they were identical to the ones his father had given him to study.

21

It costs a lot to make a dead planet live again. It takes a tremendous mobilization of talent and treasure.

The treasure is the physical assets, and they are very considerable: the space stations, the spotter ships, the transports, the Augensteins that pull the comets out of their Oort orbits and deliver them as atmospheric replenishment to the surface of Mars, and all the associated tools and instruments and control mechanisms.

The talent is even more costly, because there's a lot of it and it constantly needs to be replenished. To start, there are the crews out in the Oort itself: six hundred miners and snake handlers, plus the mechanics and supervisors and cooks and doctors and all the others that support the miners; there are two hundred and fifty of them to be added in. In each of the co-Mars stations there are another two hundred controllers, plus fifty support personnel, and the same in each of the Mars orbiters. Total personnel in space at any one time thus comes to just about 1,850.

Of course, that doesn't complete Oortcorp's payroll. There are the administrators and the instructors and all their helpers at Denver base, five hundred and more of those. There are the pilots and crews of the resupply ships that feed the stations in space, not to mention the tens of thousands employed by the corporation's suppliers, the people who make the Augensteins and the drill snakes and all the other bits and pieces of equipment that keep the operational teams working; Oortcorp is certainly a major employer.

But it is in space that the academy graduates are employed. If you subtract the support teams, that leaves 1,400 who are operational crews on duty, plus another five or six hundred operational who are on leave, or in transit; and all of these men and women, nearly two thousand of them, have to be trained at Denver base.

As do their replacements. The operational crews don't last forever. Ultimately they retire, or they are invalided out, or they die. The average working life of an operator is less than ten years, and so the academy keeps busy grinding out replacements. They produce only fifteen or twenty a month—no more than they need.

No more than they need, and every one of them is paid for through the Bonds, and thus is a running charge on the future export earnings of the planet Mars . . . whenever those earnings may start.

22

The academy for Oort training was tough and demanding, but it was only a school, and by Dekker DeWoe's third week in it he was beginning to feel confident about his prospects. It wasn't that he didn't have worries. The Earthies were having another flurry in their "securities" exchanges, and the news screens were filled with the usual mix of scandals, strikes, bitter lawsuits, and political name-calling. Now and then there was an occasional—actually, quite a lot more than occasional—very unpleasant feeling about the admissions test. And always there was the thought of his father, immured in the Colorado Rehabilitation Facility.

Yet, with all of that, Dekker was very nearly
happy
.

The objective facts justified reasonable pleasure with his lot. He was where he wanted to be, learning what he needed to know to serve his planet. He had a fine place to live, decent meals to eat, even a fifty-cue-a-week stipend from Oortcorp for any little luxuries he might desire, and every hour's training brought him one hour closer to getting out in space to help make Mars green.

Of course, that day of triumph might never arrive for Dekker DeWoe. It surely would not for a fair number of his classmates. Dekker was well aware of the probabilities. It was common knowledge that an average of 10 percent of the students flunked out in each of the six phases of the course, and what he had learned in all those math courses had made it easy for him to estimate what that meant It meant that it was a statistical probability that nearly half his class would be kicked out before they finished.

Dekker DeWoe simply determined that he was not going to be one of those recurring 10 percents.

Actually, he wasn't in any immediate danger. Dekker was breezing through Phase One, since that was nothing but basic science review and indoctrination. The review of basic theory was a snap for Dekker; all those hours of study were paying off—with the help of Boldon DeWoe's useful tips from God-knew-where. The indoctrination was a snap for everybody, because it was just a matter of sitting there while their instructor, a slim, sallow man named Sahad ben Yasif, explained, as though anyone in the class needed explanation, just what kind of disastrous hell a comet could raise if it fell on the wrong place on Mars—or if it, God forbid, hit a spaceship, or a habitat, or even, though certainly nothing of that sort could ever really happen, the wrong
planet
.

Taken all in all, Phase One was not much more demanding than a paid vacation for Dekker DeWoe. His quarters were, well,
lavish
. He had never in his life had so much space to live in. He not only had a bedroom that was all his own, but he had to share the common study room and bath with only a single other person.

That person was an Earthie, of course; there were only three other Martians among the thirty-four trainees in his class. But Dekker's new roommate didn't seem to be a bad fellow. He was that particular breed of Earthie called "Japanese," a slim, well-dressed, profane, and indolent man, with a weakness for late rising and single-malt Scotch, and when they first met he stuck out his hand and said, "Hi. I'm Toro Tanabe, and I don't snore. And you're . . . ?"

And then his voice trailed off as he got a good look at the stainless-steel credit amulet that hung around Dekker's neck. Tanabe blinked in surprise. Fingering his own gold one, he said, in some embarrassment, "Well, shit, money isn't everything, is it? We'll get along, I guess."

As a matter of fact they did. Tanabe's obvious wealth didn't bother Dekker, and Dekker DeWoe was Martianly decent enough to do nothing to bother Tanabe. For roommates, they saw surprisingly little of each other, because Dekker kept to his room when he wasn't studying in the sitting room they shared, and Tanabe was seldom in the way. The man didn't seem to bother to study, ever, and on weekends, when students were allowed to leave the base for the excitements of Denver, Tanabe simply was not around.

Actually in Dekker's first-impression judgments, all thirty-three of his fellows seemed a decent enough lot, not the least of their assets being that among them there were no fewer than fourteen presumably unattached but quite possibly attachable
women
.

Dekker definitely marked their presence, particularly the one named Cresti Amman, since she not only had interesting red hair and a pretty face but happened to be Martian herself. Still, he didn't spend a great deal of his time trying to attach even Cresti to himself, at least at first. They exchanged hometowns—she was from a little deme called Schiaparelli, up on the flank of Alba Petera—and sought vainly a time or two for friends in common. That was all. Dekker hadn't forgotten the sexual hunger that had filled his thoughts on his last few days in Danktown. But Cresti seemed thoroughly preoccupied with her studies. Anyway, the hunger just wasn't as obsessive as it had been when there seemed no clear way of finding a partner—not gone away, no, but submerged to a bearable level in the great adventure of finding himself with a real place in the world at last.