Mining the Oort (23 page)

The snakes they handled were probably the hardest in the universe to deal with. Handling cobras would have been a good deal less trouble.

27

When they had finished Phase Two, three more classmates had been washed out, including Dekker's former teammate, Fez Mehdevi, but Dekker's own class standing had risen to number three. Ven Kupferfeld still led all the rest, as always. On the other hand, Toro Tanabe had slipped to fourth. What he had gained on the Augensteins he had lost on the communications systems and the sensors, because his father had unfortunately not been able to buy him duplicates of those.

"Fourth place. That is not good enough," Tanabe said, staring at the screen. "My father would say I should apply myself more, so I will perhaps stay home entirely this weekend. I may even study."

"Then," Dekker told him, "you might as well come along to the mess hall with me for dinner."

"No," said Tanabe, sighing, "that far I do not need to go yet. I have some ramen noodles my mother was kind enough to send me. They need only boiling water, and I will heat some water here."

Dekker shrugged and turned to go. Then he paused. "Tanabe," he said, "I've been meaning to ask you. What have you heard about people being sent down from the control stations on psych tests?"

Tanabe looked surprised. "You did not know? But that is where Dr. McCune went, to Co-Mars Two. And of course as soon as she got there she began washing people out."

"I didn't even know she was gone," Dekker said ruefully.

"It is not something to be sad about, I agree, although the one who replaced her is probably no kinder. Now let me start my dinner." He hesitated, then said with embarrassment, "I think I will also pray."

On the way out Dekker saw Fez Mehdevi sitting in the lobby with his bags. "Oh, hell," Dekker said, taking in the situation. "Bad luck, Mehdevi."

"Very bad," Mehdevi said bitterly. "My father will be quite furious, DeWoe. It is not a happy thing to be a youngest son."

Dekker had no comment for that, since he was too new to this apparently universal concern about fathers to have pinned down his own feelings about them. Instead, he asked, "What are you going to do now?"

Mehdevi looked up at the ceiling for an answer, as though the question had never occurred to him before. "Why," he said, "I suppose I will go back to my wife in Basra. Whatever my father and brothers may have to say to me, I expect that she will be pleased to have me back. Or actually," he corrected himself, "I don't imagine she will be pleased at all, but at least I will have my physical needs properly taken care of again."

Dekker, who was beginning to understand the urgency of physical needs all over again, was curious, if not exactly sympathetic. He said, "I thought I heard you were signing up for a dating service."

Mehdevi glowered at him. "There is no privacy here, none," he declared. "However, that is true. I did sign up. No one responded. It is because I am Moslem, of course. How all these Americans and Japanese and Europeans stick together! They treat us like dogs."

Dekker made an effort to be consoling. "They treat me pretty much the same, Mehdevi," he offered.

"Oh, but you're a Martian," Mehdevi said, surprised. "No offense, DeWoe, but it is not the same thing at all."

So for Phase Three the class strength was down to twenty-nine and Dekker had a new partner, a woman named Shiaopin Ye with black hair and skin the color of beach sand. She was quick, smart, efficient—but she was also a good deal older than Dekker and, she had already made clear to all the unfettered males in the class, married. Those considerations removed her from any more personal connection in Dekker's eyes, but all the same he liked the woman. She was a great improvement over the fumble-fingered Mehdevi. She had stood a consistent and respectable sixth to ninth in the class ratings, and there were times when she was able to help Dekker DeWoe through a tricky simulation.

He needed all the help he could get, too.

The first week of Phase Three wasn't bad. The instructor was a woman named Eva—she pronounced it "Ay-va"—Manuela Martina, and what she was teaching in the first week was spectrographic identification of cometary constituents. What that took was book learning. Dekker had plenty of that. He had no trouble matching the computer readouts produced when an imaginary "laser" zapped the surface of a make-believe "comet" and produced a rainbow of lines and colors. The computers marked the spikes and valleys, and Dekker was quite able to diagnose the value of the simulated body involved—this one marginal, too much carbon monoxide and silicates; this one a real treasure, because it was heavily laced with ammonia, which was to say scarce and precious nitrogen.

Then they came to the snake-handling.

Operating the snake-handling controls took more than knowledge. It took practice and skill. Even in the first few days, when all they did was familiarize themselves with the boards and screens in each two-person workstation, it was tricky. It took a steady hand and a sharp eye to operate the controls that would send a snake of instrumentation as much as sixty million kilometers away into the heart of a comet, and have every last commset and diagnostic sensor and Augenstein nozzle wind up in its exact right place.

Working at such long distance was the hardest part. To be sure, the "distance" wasn't any more real than the "comet" or the "instrument snake"; they were all simply bits of programming from inside the school's data bases. But they were good programs, and their effects were convincing. The readings from the instruments took precisely the two hundred or so seconds that were required for electromagnetic impulses to travel the sixty million imaginary kilometers, and the return instructions as long to get back to the snake. You couldn't respond to what just happened, out there in the comet itself; you were too far away. What you had to do was to
anticipate
what was going to happen next, and Shiaopin Ye was better by far than Dekker DeWoe in sensing the troubles that hadn't quite got around to occurring yet in the distant heart of the target.

He did, sometimes, wish that she were freer, and maybe just a little bit better looking. She was certainly not his first choice in the more intimate hopes he continued to nurture. Ven Kupferfeld remained his most promising target of opportunity, but she also remained merely friendly. Sometimes she was quite friendly, in a warm, sisterly way, as when she happened to sit next to him at a meal and told him how much she admired Martians, but the only actual touching of her flesh allowed to him came in the weekly sessions of shove-and-grunt . . . and more than half the time, now, he found himself stuck with some other partner there.

Dekker had some hope that when the class moved from target-zapping to snake-handling he might wind up with Ven as a work partner. Another of those pop psych ordeals had washed out two more trainees. That meant some reshuffling of partners, and working together could lead to studying together, and studying together could lead to more. That didn't happen. Ven Kupferfeld got a new partner, all right, but the partner was Jay-John Belster.

So it was Shiaopin Ye who sat beside Dekker as they prepared to do their first "actual"—if in fact simulated—comet preparation. "You two will go first," the teacher decreed, pointing at Dekker and Ye, "and everyone else will gather around and watch. Will this make you nervous? Yes, but think how nervous you will be when you are dealing with a real snake and a real comet, and the stakes are higher than simply performing an exercise. In any case, since this is your first penetration, I have set the range for half a million kilometers, so it will be easier than anything you will normally experience in the Oort. Do you both understand?"

Ye and Dekker nodded, and she said, "Very well, then. Do it! I will activate your display."

And she leaned forward to press the activation stud, and there on the screen was the image of a comet body.

It had no tail, naturally—out in the Oort, where comets were tagged and prepared, there was not enough solar-thermal radiation to boil the frozen gases out of the gray-white, lumpy object on the screen. Hovering near it was the "snake"—not very snakelike now, because it was still compacted into the untidy package of its travel mode.

"Ready," Dekker said, preparing for the first step.

Beside him Shiaopin Ye took a deep breath. Then, "Deploy the snake," she ordered, and obediently Dekker keyed the instructions for releasing the package into penetration mode. Seconds later the untidy package released itself, and Dekker watched it uncoil as his partner began to set up the program for the insertion bite. Dekker was not involved in that. His job at the moment was to make sure that the snake untangled itself and that each element in the string could move freely. The snake's components were all "smart" on their own—had to be, of course, for the times when the distance involved was more than a mere five hundred thousand kilometers, and any correction from the snake handler was likely to arrive too late to save a broken string and perhaps even a lost comet. But sometimes, he knew, the autonomous parts of the string might malfunction.

"Bite completed," Ye reported. On the screen the head of the snake had seated itself firmly on the comet's crust, and the readouts showed that it was secure.

"Beginning penetration," Dekker said, as he activated the program that would guide the snake's antimatter thruster as it melted its way through the snowy, flaky, crusty, lumpy body of the comet. And, seconds later, he saw it begin to pull its long train of instruments and strain gauges and polymer-mix tanks behind.

"Not too fast," Ye cautioned, and Dekker gave her a quick glance. It was the first time she had showed any signs of nervousness. Dekker gave her an encouraging wink, and she smiled back, embarrassed.

The warning was unnecessary; Dekker was not being careless. You couldn't afford to be careless when you were guiding a thermal thruster as it melted its way through the layers and pockets of frozen gases, towing the snake behind it.

As soon as the head was well embedded Dekker activated the snake's polymerizers. They were what made it possible to apply an Augenstein's powerful thrust to anything as crumbly as a comet. The polymerizers fed seeds of long-chain organic molecules into the melted ice as it moved along. When the thrusters had passed and the line of slop they had created refroze, it wouldn't be simple ice anymore. Then it would be a strong cable of polymers that would hold the comet together when its Augenstein thrusters began to fire.

All that was just the preliminary work that had to be done to push a comet around. The comet's structural integrity couldn't be trusted. As a sort of sherbet of frozen gases, comets didn't have any. Each one of them had to be laced with not just a single thread of polymers but a spidery webbing of braces to hold it together under the Augenstein's quarter-g thrust, because otherwise the thing would simply break apart. Moving a comet was not unlike trying to bulldoze a three -kilometer-high mountain of Jell-O.

Dekker took another quick look at Shiaopin Ye. She had settled down, the nervousness gone, and she was setting up the programs for drive emplacement. That was good, for what she was doing now was actually the most demanding part of snake-handling. She had to study all the data pouring in from those sounders and strain gauges, to find the best possible sites for mounting the Augenstein drives in that fragile mass. She made her choice and quickly marked a blue-green circular overlay where they were to go.

"Check, please," she said, sitting back, and Dekker studied the readouts.

It looked good. "Confirm," he said, and Ye began the task of threading the simulated snake into position.

Just as Dekker became aware of a sweet hint of perfume from behind him its owner spoke. "Good work, Ye," Ven Kupferfeld said amiably. Dekker frowned and put his finger to his lips; it was not a good time to break Ye's concentration. Kupferfeld said, lowering her voice, "I wish I had her steady hand."

"It's gentleness that does it," Dekker whispered back. "You can't jerk it. Just slide it in easy, where it fits—think of threading a needle with very weak thread, you know?"

She gave him a quick, veiled look. "I wouldn't know," she said. "I've never threaded a needle."

After the snake was in place Dekker and Ye accepted the congratulations of their classmates, and even the teacher said it had been a satisfactory exercise.

On the way back to the dorms both Ye and Dekker were surrounded with little knots of their classmates. What particularly pleased Dekker was that Ven Kupferfeld was one of the people who attached themselves to him. What pleased him less was that Jay-John Belster was tagging along, but, pleasingly, that didn't last. Most of the others turned off toward the gym; Belster hesitated, looked at Ven Kupferfeld, and then waved and followed.

Leaving Dekker and Ven Kupferfeld alone. "Well," Dekker said. "Here we are."

"And about time," Ven said warmly. "We've taken a while to get around to that talk we were going to have. It's been a tough couple of months, hasn't it?"

"I wouldn't think it was tough for somebody who keeps coming up number one in the standings."

She grinned at him. "I'm just lucky, mostly, I guess," she said modestly. "But anyway it looks like I'm still going to be here for the next module. You, too, DeWoe. You were fantastic on the practical." He made a deprecating gesture, but that was not entirely sincere; he knew how well he had done. Then she looked at him speculatively. "Tell me something. Are you married?"

Startled, he gave her an honest answer. "No. Never got around to it."

"I see," Ven said. "So then why don't we go have that beer or something?"

It was certainly a something, but it definitely wasn't a beer.

It wasn't in the student canteen, either. Ven had a car—a private
car
!—parked outside the school, which explained a small question that had lingered in Dekker's mind: the reason he saw so little of Ven Kupferfeld around the dormitories at night was that she didn't live there. She drove the two of them halfway down the mountain, flashing a card at the perimeter guard. Who simply waved her on.