Mining the Oort (17 page)

Oh, Dekker's world wasn't perfect. Tanabe didn't fail to tell him when his father in Osaka wrote that the Bonds were dropping on the market again. And there were still those other little
 
worries that never quite went away. But his life was pretty good just as it was, and Dekker had no doubt at all that it was destined to keep getting better.

There was a "final" test on the last day of Phase One. Dekker breezed through it. So, surprisingly, did everybody else in the class, and Sahad ben Yasif shook his head ruefully. "That's one for the books," he declared. "I must be a hell of a teacher, because we usually wash three or four of you out at this point. Tell you what. You're a good class, so let's give you a prize. Come back after lunch and I'll take you all on a class trip."

The man next to Dekker looked suspicious. "What kind of class trip?" he demanded. His name was Jay-John Belster and he was a Martian, too, but an Earthified and not a very friendly one.

"Come back and find out," ben Yasif said, and walked away. In the dining hall speculation was wild. "He's going to give us an extra shove-and-grunt session," one guessed. And another offered, "Maybe a tour of the top ten whorehouses in Danktown?"

Jay-John Belster shook his head. "Whatever it is, he can keep it. I've got my own plans for this weekend. I've seen enough of this place for one week."

But in any event Belster did show up in the classroom after lunch, and so did Toro Tanabe, though he was sulky about missing the chance to get an early start on his weekend. When they had all straggled back to the classroom ben Yasif appeared and looked them over.

"All right," he said, "let's see how smart you are. How do the controllers in the orbital stations keep track of their incomings?"

Two hands went up, and the instructor pointed to the small Oriental woman nearest him, Shiaopin Ye. "They have virtuals of the solar system to track the comets. Every twelve hours they check each one, and order correction burns as needed."

"That's right—as you'll all find out in Phase Four, if you get there. But here in the academy you won't use virtual helmets. What will you use?"

A voice from the back: "There's a big tank up the hill."

"There is. We use that for training purposes, so everybody can see what everybody does when it's their turn in the basket. That's where we're going. I've got permission to take you all up for a tour of the operational control training section."

That made a stir; even Toro Tanabe looked pleased. As they trooped toward the great elevator that would take them up to the top of the hill, ben Yasif added, "There's one rule you have to remember. That is,
don
'
t
touch
anything
. The second rule is don't talk to any of the student operators unless they talk to you first. The third rule is don't get in anybody's way. The comet data is taken right from the control-station reports, and it's
real
. What you'll see in the tank is exactly the way the comets are at this moment deployed in their orbits, and we don't want anything messed up by visitors. So, I'll say it again, don't
touch
. If any of you fuck up here, you're out of the program, that minute. Only," he said seriously, "I'll be having something to say to you first."

What that sounded like to Dekker DeWoe was a threat of actual physical violence, bizarre though the thought was. But Sahad ben Yasif was a physical sort of person. Some of the students said ben Yasif had been busted out of the Oort itself because he failed his psych tests for quarrelsomeness, so it was, maybe, possible. . . .

Then Dekker forgot the instructor's past history, because the elevator had stopped at the control level, and all thirty-odd members of his class piled out, staring around.

The control chamber wasn't on just one level, like any other classroom or lab in the complex. The control chamber was two levels high, and at the center of it all was a huge interior space surrounded by balconies. Around the balconies were at least fifty workstations, each with the instruments and controls a controller needed to do his job. Fewer than twenty of the workstations were occupied, and what filled the entire interior space was . . . space.

It was the solar system that lay spread out before them.

It wasn't to scale. The proportions were distorted, because if the planets—or especially if such tiny bodies as the comets—had been plotted to their proper relative size they would have been invisible in the vast emptiness of the solar system. But everything that mattered was there. A glowing orange ball the size of a grapefruit hung in the center of the space; that was the Sun. Smaller red globes represented the planets, as far out as Neptune. Pluto wasn't in the tank, of course. There wasn't room for it, and if Pluto ever presented a problem, which was hardly likely, it would be dealt with by the launchers out in the cloud itself. Each planet flickered faintly in its own pulse-code, and so did every planet's moons; Dekker couldn't read the codes, but he certainly could tell which planet was which—after all, there only were eight of them in the tank. Five bright white stars, two large and three smaller and close together, marked the location of the control stations. The big ones needed no recognition code—they were the stations that shared Mars's own orbit around the Sun, and even a beginner could identify them by their positions. The three in arecentric Martian orbits were coded, but the codes weren't important. There was no particular need to distinguish among them, since the tightest communication beam aimed at any of them would be received at all three. Finally—or almost finally—were the hundred or more winking blue lights that represented the ships currently traveling in space, some in inner-planet orbits and one or two, obviously supply ships, looping up toward the Oort.

Then there were the objects that really mattered: the comets.

The comets were what Oortcorp was all about. The comet dots came in two colors, purple and yellow. There were hundreds of them in the tank, and they flowed in two great streams. Dekker didn't have to be told which was which. The purple stream was made up of the comets principally controlled by Co-Mars Station One; they were still dropping down from the Oort toward their rounding of the Sun. The yellow belonged to Co-Mars Two, as it trailed sixty degrees behind Mars; those comets had completed their critical perihelion-passing maneuver and—God willing!—were now on their proper trajectory for their rendezvous with Mars, the operators on Co-Mars Two fine-tuning them all the way.

Of course, the comets didn't really need to be color-coded for identification. As with the major planets, they identified themselves simply by their positions in the tank. Every object that was
not
a comet lay close to the plane of the ecliptic, that great disk of sky in which all the Sun's planets and asteroids and moons revolved. Everything that was out of the ecliptic was certainly a comet. The natural comets that human beings had wondered at for thousands of years could come from any direction in the sky, since the Oort cloud was a spherical shell around the entire solar system. The ones that were ripped untimely from the Oort to replenish Mars were a different case. They all came from the same general point, somewhere around the constellation Cetus; that was the particular region of the immense cloud where the Oort miners were busy selecting them and preparing them and launching them down.

As Dekker's class filed in, ben Yasif waved them around the lower gallery, muttering to each as they passed: "Spread out. Pick a control station and stand behind it, but if there's anybody in it don't talk to him. And don't touch anything." Dekker found himself grinning; he had a quick flash of recollection of a long-ago school trip to the copper smelters at Sagdayev.

He found himself standing with a classmate named Fez Mehdevi behind a fifth-phase student who was nervously studying the control board. Nothing seemed to be happening. All the fifth-phasers were sitting idle, most of them turning around to glance at the new arrivals. They were all on the lower tier, though Dekker caught a glimpse of someone moving about on the upper one.

When they were all in place, ben Yasif called: "Remember, you're only here on sufferance, so
no
fooling
around
. I'm going to keep my eye on you all, and I won't be the only one."

He nodded to the fifth-phase instructor, who spoke into his microphone. "You're on, Torres," he said. "Your shift is starting; begin your checks."

They were there only half an hour before the fifth-phase instructor muttered to ben Yasif, and ben Yasif cleared them out.

It wasn't enough, but, Dekker DeWoe thought, it was
wonderful
. Every one of those things was headed straight for his home world, and every one would bring Mars just a trifle nearer to the promised paradise.

Most of the class was as thrilled as he, and they dawdled on the way back to the dorms. Cresti Amman was chattering about the pair of comets, 65-A4 and 65-BK, that had been entering perihelion—"That's the part that scares me; that's where you can really screw up"—and Jay-John Belster was shaking his head.

"That's what Co-Mars Two is for," he said. "If it comes out anywhere near trajectory, Two will get it in its envelope."

Somebody else was complaining about the Oort miners. "Did you see that little one, 67-JY? It's less than a kilometer across; why would they waste a snake on something like that?"

"And they're going to have trouble with that one at perihelion," Cresti Amman predicted. "Thank God it'll pass before I get out there!"

It was all good talk, shoptalk, and for almost the first time Dekker felt as though he were part of a group that could have been nearly Martian. When he finally got back to his dorm room he was not surprised to find that Toro Tanabe was there before him, just coming out of the shower and beginning to dress. "Well, DeWoe," his roommate said, pulling on pants, "how did you like it?"

"It was
great
," Dekker declared enthusiastically, and would have gone on if Tanabe hadn't held up a hand to stop him.

"I'll tell you what I didn't like," he said. "I didn't like the psychologist taking notes on us. Did you see her?"

Dekker frowned at him. 'The psychologist? Oh, hell," he said, remembering. "Rosa McCune, right? In the upper gallery?"

"That's the one. She was watching everybody, and making little notes on her screen."

"I guess I didn't recognize her," Dekker admitted. "With her clothes on, I mean. Anyway, she was probably checking on the fifth-phase people, don't you think?"

"They always check on
everybody
," Tanabe said sourly. "Just hope you didn't do anything stupid, DeWoe, because she can boot you out of here anytime she wants to."

Then he finished buttoning his shirt, looking pensive. "Too late to worry about it now, I guess. Well, what about it, DeWoe? Are you coming into town this weekend?"

"I don't think so."

"Ah," said Tanabe, understandingly, fingering his credit amulet. "Well, another time, maybe. I can't wait to get out of this place for a couple of days."

"Aren't you going to eat first?"

"That slop?" Tanabe shuddered, though Dekker couldn't have said why; as far as he was concerned, the food was both edible and plentiful. "No, thanks."

"What about tonight's shove-and-grunt?"

"I'll have to skip it this one time if I'm going to get an early start tonight," Tanabe said, glancing at his dressed self in the mirror. He ran a comb through his stiff, short, uncombable hair and turned to go.

Then he paused. He looked around at Dekker. "DeWoe? Do you want to know what I think about that little comet?"

"The, what was it, 67-JY? What about it?"

"I have a hunch," Tanabe said wisely. "My father told me that the farm habitats want some comets of their own—you know, so they can mine them for water and gases and save importing them from Earth. I'll bet a dinner in Denver that Oortcorp's sneaking through a few comets that are reserved for them."

Even shove-and-grunt seemed tolerable tonight, with the uplift from the visit to the control-training center. Dekker was in a good mood as he hurried over to it.

It was not the kind of thing that any Martian was likely to need, but Martians were no more exempt from attending the sessions than the surliest and most tightly repressed Earthie. Still, Tanabe's gossip about the farm habitats had left Dekker DeWoe with the barest suggestion of an atavistic urge to do something violent. How
could
they? Those comets were meant for
Mars
. They were
paid
for by Mars—or at least would be, when enough of the terraforming was complete for crops to be grown there and the interminable cue-slavery of paying back the loans had begun.

His usual shove-and-grunt partner was the rather large Martian, Belster, but when Dekker was suited up and headed toward where Belster was waiting the proctor stopped him. "New partner today, DeWoe," he said. "Amman's complaining that Ven Kupferfeld's too strong for her, so we're giving her a different partner. You."

That was good enough news to restore Dekker's cheer, because he was reaching the point where he did want to get a little closer to Cresti Amman. So far it had been nothing but sitting with her at breakfast once or twice and comparing notes, because Cresti was floundering in the course and willing to spare no time for dates.

Still, there was a certain amount of consideration due another student. Dekker asked, "What does Belster say about it?"

"What has he got to say? Anyway, Belster's a lot, ah, rougher than you, so he can take on one of the others. After all, he's been on Earth for a long time, hasn't he? Get over there. Amman's waiting for you."

And she was. And she looked good in her exercise suit, properly tall and slim the way a person ought to be, and with that red hair falling all over her face. When they were locked in the first struggle exercise, each trying to force the other to move a planted foot, she felt even better than she looked. There was a sweet, female smell about her, and a soft, slick, promising feel to her sweaty skin; all the young-male yearnings that the stresses of the last few weeks had kept submerged began to flood through Dekker DeWoe's body.