Mining the Oort (6 page)

"I bet," Dekker said belligerently, swallowing a sip of the wine, "you've never been in an airship."

"A what?" the Earthie asked tolerantly, one eyebrow raised.

"A dirigible airship. We use them all the time—for mass lifting, you know. They're hot-air. You cruise over the Valles Marineris for the mines, say, and you're looking right down into the crevasses—"

Annetta appeared from nowhere. "Here, let me take that for you," she said, tugging the glass from his hand with a glare at Evan. "Dirigible, you say? That sounds really fun, Dekker."

"It is," Dekker affirmed, and went on describing the raptures of lighter-than-air flight on Mars—well, not really out of his own
personal
experience, of course, but they didn't have to know that; he'd seen it often enough in the virtuals, and it had been just as his mother had described it to him.

"So you have virts," the girl, Ina, said. "Virtuals," she added helpfully, when he looked surprised.

He blinked at her. She seemed a nice enough girl, short and squat, but too nice for that snot, Evan. "Did I say anything about virtuals?" he asked, trying to remember.

"Of course they have virtuals, Ina," Evan said, his hand on her shoulder. "Only sight and sound, of course. On Earth," he informed Dekker, "we have full-sensory virts. Of course—" He gave Dekker an unexpected wink and poke in the ribs. "—they're not very convincing unless you dope up a little first."

"Dope up? You mean like this wine stuff?"

Evan laughed. "Oh, a lot better than that. I mean serious dope."

"Oh," Dekker said. "I know. I saw it in the plays, but it's against the law."

"Of course it's against the law. Who ever lets that stop him?"

Dekker looked around to see what Annetta Cauchy thought of that, but the girl had disappeared. He did see his nearly empty wine glass on the table where she had left it. He picked it up and drank the remains while he thought over what it meant to deliberately break laws. That struck him as preposterous. What were laws for, if they were broken?

But the Earth boy was still pressing him. As he refilled Dekker's glass he said, "What about games?"

"Well, of course we have games. All kinds of games. Prospecting's good, and there's Blowout, and Building—"

"I mean
competitive
games. War games. Crime games."

"I don't think I've ever seen anything like that," Dekker confessed.

"I didn't think you would have," Evan said comfortably, stroking Ina's back in a leisurely, self-confident way. "What do you do? I mean your father."

"Oort miner," Dekker said, omitting the verbs in order to avoid bringing up the subject of whether his father was still with him.

"Oort miner," the Earthie boy echoed, transparently pretending to be impressed. "How very interesting, Dekker. Mine's nothing so glamorous. Just an ordinary investment-fund portfolio manager, if you know what that is."

Dekker was getting pretty well fed up with people supposing he didn't know what things meant. Especially when he didn't. "It's connected with the Bonds," he guessed, supposing that it must have something to do with them since everything these Earthies were involved in apparently did.

"Yes, more or less. Someone has to buy them, you know, I mean with real money. We're the ones who make it easy for them to do it, and that's how your bonds get sold. That means," he went on modestly, "that we're the people who did all this for you. Oort miners are all very well, but it takes money—
cue
money—to get all those comets down here. Without us this whole planet would stay a permanently useless desert. But," he added, twinkling, "you don't have to thank me. Have some more wine."

"I think he should have something solid," Annetta said. He hadn't noticed that she had returned. "What have you been eating, Dekker?"

He tried to remember. "I had some of the killed-meat things, I think."

There was a quick, hushed titter around the group, and Evan laughed. "Oh, Dekker! You're just too precious. Why do you say 'killed-meat'? Do you think we'd be likely to eat it while it was still alive?"

Dekker concentrated for a moment until he remembered the answer to that—it had come from so many docility classes, so long ago, that it was buried in his subconscious now. "Because we always say that. It's to, you know, remind us that in order for us to eat ki—to eat
meat
, something has to be slaughtered."

Evan opened his eyes wide in an imitation of surprise. "But that's what they're
for
; boy. No, don't worry about things like that. Here, give me your glass."

The thing about wine was that it made you feel nice and warm and rather cheerful, although it also seemed to make you feel as though your skin were tightening up on your face, and the floor didn't seem as solid as it ought.

Dekker decided, though, that he was conducting himself rather well. Evan had finally left him alone—Dekker saw him off in a corner with Annetta Cauchy, looking tolerant as the girl scolded him about something—and Dekker just wandered about, talking to whoever seemed to want to talk to him. Not everyone did. Some of the people, especially one of the sallow-skinned women with the straight, jet-black hair, didn't seem to understand him very well, and when she spoke to him he was startled to find that he was being addressed in some other language.

But others were quite nice. Annetta's mother, for instance. He didn't quite understand the worried look in her eyes as she spoke to him, but when she asked him about his home he was glad to tell her all about Sagdayev deme. He described the landscape, and the rooms, and the copper mine; he told her how they concentrated solar heat so that the molten copper flowed out of the ore, and how the oxygen that had bound it was usefully added to the deme's supply. He was going on to explain some of the differences between Sagdayev and Sunpoint City when he discovered that she was no longer listening. That surprised him, because he didn't remember her turning away. Nor did he remember how he came to have a filled glass in his hand again, but he cheerfully lifted it to his lips. It was astonishing how the taste had improved.

He was, he felt confident, holding his own in this strange party, where people kept trying to impress other people rather than make them feel partyishly happy. The most striking thing was the established pecking order: the richest deferred to by the not-quite-as-rich, and the one Martian couple among the guests condescended to by all. That bothered Dekker. Yet even the Martians were smiling as though they were enjoying all this opulence and laughter.

And the blocky young Earthie, Evan, kept refilling Dekker's glass, and everything around him seemed even brighter and more beautiful and exciting . . . right up to the time he felt himself being picked up and carried.

"Where'd you come from?" he croaked, twisting around to stare into the face of Tinker Gorshak.

"Came to get you, you idiot," Gorshak snarled. "I knew you'd make a fool of yourself. Shut up. What you need is a good night's sleep.

11

No matter how badly you want water and air, there are limits. You certainly don't want a hundred billion tons of anything crashing into your planet in one lump. That would cloud the skies with more dust than even Mars has seen for a very long time, not to mention shaking up everything around.

So you have to take some precautions. Before your approaching comet gets that far, you site demolition charges in its core, carefully placed to shatter it into the tiniest pieces you can manage. (The pieces won't be all that tiny, anyway, but still.) Most of the fragments will burn up or at least volatilize from air friction—even Mars's thin air is enough to do that—and the seismic impacts of the residues as they strike will be, you hope, tolerable.

You don't want them crashing into the surface at an excessively high velocity, either. So you navigate your comet to come up on the planet from behind, so that both are going in the same orbital direction around the Sun and the combined speeds are minimized. Then, at that last moment, you fire the deceleration jets from the Augenstein drives you have forethoughtfully already installed in the comet in order to slow it still more—so that your impact velocity isn't much more than one or two kilometers a second. Then you jettison the Augensteins, cross your fingers, and hope.

12

Dekker didn't get a good night's sleep after all, or at least not as much of it as he really wanted; it seemed only minutes had passed before his mother was shaking him awake. "Are you all right, Dekker?" she was asking anxiously. "I didn't think you'd want to miss seeing the impact."

He fended her off, wincing. Someone was pounding nails into his head. Tinker Gorshak was standing over him with a cup of something hot. "Strong tea," Gorshak muttered. "Go ahead, drink it. You'll be all right in a while, hangovers never kill anybody."

And after a few scalding gulps and an eternity of throbbing temples, it began to seem that Tinker Gorshak was right. When the pounding behind his eyes began to subside Dekker bundled up in a robe before the news screen and watched what was happening. The time was impact minus thirty minutes, and on the screen he could see the comet's drive jets detaching themselves and hurling themselves away, bright and tiny shooting stars, to be captured and salvaged by the workers in the tender spacecraft. There weren't any additional burns after that; now the comet was purely ballistic.

Dekker sipped his tea and began to feel almost human again—human enough to begin replaying the scenes of the party in his mind. "You know," he announced, astonished at his discovery, "she didn't really like me. She only invited me to make that other guy jealous."

"Earthies," Gorshak grumbled, looking at his watch. "In about two minutes now—"

"I don't think they even like each other," Dekker went on, thinking it through. "Evan was always making jokes about the Japanese and the Brazilians, and they were mean kinds of jokes, too."

"Of course they don't like each other. Don't you know yet what Earthies are like? They used to have
wars
," Gorshak informed him. "They probably still would, except nobody dares anymore. Now they just try to take each other's money."

"Oh, yes, the money," Dekker said, remembering. "What's an 'underwriter,' Tinker?"

"An underwriter! An underwriter is somebody who sucks your blood, and wants you to thank him for it."

"Tinker," his mother said gently. "Dek, it's how they do things on Earth. We borrow money by selling bonds—you know what the Bonds are. But we don't sell the Bonds directly to the people who want to invest in them. That would take too long and, anyway, we don't really know how to do that sort of thing. So somebody 'underwrites' the bonds. He buys the whole lot from us, and then he sells them, a few at a time, to the people who really want them."

"Stealing part of the money along the way," said Tinker Gorshak.

"You know it isn't stealing, Tinker," Gerti DeWoe said crossly. "There's no Earthie law against it. Besides, we agreed to it. If the bond is supposed to sell for, say, a hundred of their cues, then the underwriter gives us, say, ninety. So every time he sells one he makes a ten-cue profit."

Dekker puzzled that over for only a moment before he saw the flaw. "But what if he can't find anyone to buy it?"

"Then," Tinker said, "he has our bonds at a bargain rate. But don't worry about that, Dek. They'll always find somebody to buy. Any way they can."

The boy nodded, thinking about the glamorized pictures on the Cauchys' wall, deciding not to mention them to Tinker. He thought of something else. "Ina said . . . was saying something to Annetta. It was really quite unpleasant, about 'unloading' their bonds if the comet impact was successful—"

"
If
it was successful!" Gorshak said indignantly. "What a way to talk! And
if
it's successful, then you know what will happen. We're going to be swamped by immigrants from Earth."

"We're all immigrants from Earth," Gerti DeWoe reminded him, "or our parents were."

"But our roots are here! It isn't just
money
with us. It's
freedom
."

Dekker refused to be distracted into that familiar argument. "But what did they mean about unloading?"

"It's just another thing they do, Dek," his mother said. "They have a kind of saying, 'Buy on bad news, sell on good.' A successful strike tonight will be good news, so that means the price of the Bonds might go up a little."

"But everybody already knows the comet's going to land. Why would just seeing it happen make the Bonds worth more?"

"It wouldn't really, Dek. It might make people
think
they were worth more, though, and that's how Earthies act. They go by what they
think
things are worth. So if any of the people that owned the Bonds now wanted to get out—I don't know why; maybe because they want the money to invest in something else—I suppose this would be when they'd sell."

"That's foolish," Dekker pronounced.

"That's Earthies for you," Tinker Gorshak said. "Hey, look! It's going off!"

And indeed it was. On the screen they saw the sequenced charges inside the comet mass doing their job. A lump flaked off one side of the comet, then another. The main mass split in two, then the demolition charges in each section blew up, all at once, and the comet became a mass of rubble, all falling together toward Chryse Planitia. The scene shifted swiftly to a quick shot from the surface cameras atop Sunpoint City. The churning mass of the comet was now visible to the naked eye, moving perceptibly down and to the east. The comet didn't have a tail anymore. Rather, they were now
inside
the tail. All they could see was a general unnatural brightness of the sky.

"I hope it works," Gertrud DeWoe said prayerfully.

Tinker Gorshak grunted. "I hope we can pay for it," he grumbled. "Those bloodsuckers from Earth are charging us plenty for the capital. Do you know what it costs, Dekker? I'm not talking about the whole project. I'm just talking right now about that party you went to—who do you think is paying for it? And all they're doing is watching to see it fall—at a thousand cues a day apiece, and we have to pay—"