Mining the Oort (8 page)

14

The first thing a visitor to Earth discovered was that Earth didn't have just one Skyhook, like Mars. Earth had three of them. The reason was that there was a lot more ground-to-space traffic for Earth than for any other planet, and all three of its Skyhooks were kept busy.

They all, of course, had to touch ground at Earth's equator, because it is only over the equator that a geostationary satellite can stay in position. The one in Ecuador was the busiest, although the mountains around Quito made transshipment a problem. The one at Pontianak was the newest, and maybe some day it would be the best because its location right on a coast made the transshipment of bulk goods very practicable—or at least it would do that whenever the Martians finally succeeded in growing enough produce to ship to Borneo to matter. Until then, Pontianak had so little traffic that it still used only a single cable. But the one in Kenya was in some ways the best, not least because it was handy to all the businesses and industries of that very big African city called Nairobi.

Nairobi was so big and busy that people forgot that it was only accidentally a city. It didn't have most of the things that cities grow up around. It had no river or port or anything else to distinguish it from all the highland plains that surrounded it. It existed simply because it happened to be a convenient place for the developers to put a station stop when, long ago, the first railroad was built from the heart of Africa to the coast. Now that same place was still a station stop—though of a markedly different kind—and it was prospering therefrom.

15

Getting to Earth was a blast for Dekker DeWoe, all of it. It was a dream come true.

First there was the little Skyhook capsule screaming up the cable from the Martian surface to the transfer point, with all of Sunpoint City falling away beneath him and his heart dragged down into his belly with the acceleration—but buoyant, too, because he was
on
his
way
. Then there was the ship itself and the private cubicle they had given to him for his own—no bigger than a bathtub, maybe, but on a
spaceship
, with all the wonders that that entailed to thrill the heart of a quite mature twelve-year-old. No! Earth years, now! A twenty-year-old.

Just to make it more exciting still there was even a solar flare alarm eleven days out. A solar prominence erupted, and its violent outpouring of particles radiated out from the Sun, which meant that everybody was stuck in the shielded core chamber for twenty-two hours until the ruddy loop of the prominence collapsed back on itself and the solar radiation died back down. The experience wasn't dangerous, really, but it was certainly something to tell Tinker's grandson and the other kids back in Sagdayev—if he ever got back to Sagdayev, and if, whenever that might be, the kids were still kids.

Of course, Dekker himself wasn't really a kid anymore. But even a young adult like Dekker DeWoe could feel a special tingling in his heart when he was getting into a spaceship for the hundred-million-kilometer flight to Earth. By any standards at all, that was really
special.

But it took twenty-some days to traverse those hundred million kilometers, and with nowhere to go inside the ship and only the same eighteen people, passengers and crew, to talk to, the experience got old pretty fast.

Being
on Earth, though—that was something else entirely.

Once Dekker had come down the vastly bigger Skyhook and first stood on Earthie soil, it didn't take him long to realize just how different it was. It was not going to be all fun. Earth
hurt
, hurt his bones at every step with its cruel pull. Earth was
dirty
. Earth was hostile—or the people were; or so it seemed to a skinny Martian kid who couldn't run or jump very well, and had a loser for a father besides. All the advice and warnings, all the calcium milkshakes and polysteroid injections, all the shipboard indoctrination hadn't prepared Dekker for the many ways in which Earth was nastier than Mars, but the thing he was least prepared for of all was Dad.

Dekker limped out of the customs hall at the base of the Nairobi Skyhook, pulling his wheeled duffel bag behind him like a puppy on a leash, he looked for his father, but didn't see him. Instead, he saw a stooped, slow-moving old man hobbling toward him, and knew before the man spoke—but only half a second before—that this wreck of a man was indeed Boldon DeWoe.

The man stopped to regard Dekker, half a meter away. When Dekker looked at him closely he could tell that the man had been a Martian once, because he had the slender, stretched Martian physique. But now he was bent almost to Earthie height, and he was leaning on a thick cane, besides. He did not look well. His shoulders were hunched forward, but his head was bent back and his chin thrust out as he squinted at his son. They didn't kiss, hug, or even shake hands. Boldon DeWoe nodded, as though he were getting just what he had expected and hadn't expected very much, and said, "Well. You're here. What's the matter with your ear?"

Dekker saw no reason to go into the complicated story of the hydrogen leak on the dirigible and the pain of the transplant. He just said, "Frostbite."

His father didn't comment on that. "That's all the baggage you've got?" he said. "Then come on. We've got a train to catch." He was turning away to limp down the ramp before he thought to add, over his shoulder, "Son."

Dekker followed, moving not very much more quickly than his father with his luggage cart to pull. They probably should have kissed, he thought, but he had been unwilling to make the first move.

They descended a moving staircase to a platform where eighteen or twenty little cars, not joined together like a train, were waiting. Boldon DeWoe led the way to the first car in line. When he got in he punched out a code on the keypad and inserted a shiny, pencil-thick thing that he wore around his neck in a slot. He looked at his son.

"That's how you pay for things, with your credit amulet. You have to pay for things here."

"We pay for things on Mars, too," Dekker said. "Of course, you probably wouldn't remember."

His father didn't comment on that. He lowered himself to a seat and, looking at Dekker, "Why is your face so red?"

"They give you whole-blood transfusions before you land, to help build up the red cells. That's plus all the other shots and—" He held up one leg to show. "—the braces."

"Hold on tight, then," his father said, just about in time. At that moment two or three other cars smacked into theirs, finally forming a train. When it moved off the acceleration was a good deal more violent than Dekker expected. He thought for one unhappy moment that he might get sick, but didn't. None of the other passengers seemed to be bothered. There were only four others in the little car, all apparently Earthies, and when the train stopped three of those got off.

The other cars uncoupled themselves, too, and their car lurched away. In five minutes it stopped and Boldon DeWoe got out.

"This is the neighborhood," he said over his shoulder.

It wasn't much of a neighborhood: Little cars and bigger vans were whining along the streets, trailing clouds of steam from their exhausts; people, most of them black, were cluttering the sidewalks; the buildings were astonishingly tall, by Dekker's Martian standards—eight to ten stories, some of them—but they seemed old and not particularly well cared for. Even the air had a funny sort of smell—smoky, perhaps, or
spoiled
. Dekker sneezed as his father turned and painfully began to climb some brick steps.

There were four or five tall black men lounging on the stoop, drinking beer. Most of them were wearing shorts and brightly—or formerly brightly—colored open-necked shirts. Some of the garments were faded, most were sweat-stained. The men themselves seemed friendly enough: they moved aside to make room, and all of them nodded amiably to Boldon as they approached.

This was not what Dekker had expected, none of it, and the man who was his father was not what he remembered. What Dekker remembered of Boldon DeWoe was a string-bean thin, smiling man, tall and skinny even for a Martian. Not this twisted, scrawny old guy, so bent that he was no taller than the black Earthies on the stoop. But when Boldon DeWoe introduced Dekker around he said, "This is my son." Then things began to look up a little for Dekker, because his father sounded actually proud when he said it.

Then they were in the lift, which took back some of that momentary optimism, because not only did it smell of stale sweat and worse but it jolted Dekker's troubled legs so that he staggered. But he was glad the elevator was there, because the alternative would have been worse; his father's apartment was on the top floor.

Then he saw the place where his father lived, where
he
would live. It wasn't just that it was small—Dekker was used to small—this place was also
dirty
.

"You get the couch," his father told him, limping over to a sink and beginning to rinse out a glass. "It's short, but you're young. I'm going to have a drink."

"No, thanks," Dekker said, though he hadn't been offered one. He picked a half-empty case of bottles off the couch and brushed the cushions off before he put his duffel bag on it. Then he began picking up dirty dishes from around the room.

"Leave that," his father ordered, sitting down heavily with the drink in his hand. "I want to find out what you know. What's an Augenstein?"

Dekker blinked. "What?"

"An Augenstein drive. What is it, how does it work?"

He was evidently serious.

Dekker put his collection of dishware on a sideboard, pushing a stack of clean, but unsorted, laundry out of the way to make room. He sat down. "Well," he began, "an Augenstein is what drives spaceships. Basically its power chamber is a porous tungsten block in a hydrogen atmosphere. There's a pipette through the block that admits antiprotons to the central chamber; the antiprotons react with the hydrogen,
blam
, and the heat propels the working fluid out the rocket nozzle. Mostly they use powdered rock for the working fluid, but it could be—"

His father stirred. "Don't say 'they,' Dekker. 'We.' Say 'we.'"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Get in the habit of saying it. I want you to think like an Oort miner so you'll
act
like an Oort miner.
We
use powdered rock for the working fluid, only, of course, out in the Oort we don't. What do we do there?"

"We use comet mass."

His father nodded, swallowing a sip of his drink. "Comet mass, right. We tank up with frozen gases from a comet. What about the antiprotons that fuel the Augenstein?"

"The antiprotons?"

"Where do they come from? How do they make them?"

For a moment Dekker was tempted to point out to his father that he had said "they," but it didn't seem like a good idea. This sudden pop quiz looked to be very important to the old man. Instead, Dekker said, as though called on in class, "Antimatter is made on the Moon, because of the vacuum environment, the ready availability of electric power, and the danger of accident. The photovoltaic power from the sunlight is used to run a ring accelerator that's about forty kilometers across, inside a big crater, and the accelerator produces antiparticles. Do you want me to write out the reaction?"

"I do," Boldon DeWoe said, and pointed to a memo screen under the piled clothing on the sideboard. When Dekker retrieved it, his father watched carefully while Dekker wrote the equation out on the tiny screen. When that was finished, he wanted to know how Dekker would go about determining the deltas for an orbit from Mercury to Mars, what sort of comets were the most valuable, and how their orbits were controlled. He didn't comment on any of the answers. Finally he said, "All right, now what kind of shape are you in?" He wouldn't settle for an answer but ordered Dekker to pull out his record cartridge and display the results of the tests for his physical parameters—reaction time, depth perception, concentration factor, and the rest. Then Boldon DeWoe leaned back thoughtfully in his chair, stared at the ceiling for a moment, and sighed. He levered himself erect and stumped over to the refrigerator. "You want a beer?" he called over his shoulder.

Dekker didn't, particularly; he'd never really enjoyed alcohol since Annetta Cauchy's party so many years before. Still, he said yes anyway, simply because drinking beer with his father seemed like a bonding kind of thing to do. He could feel the stuff bubbling ticklishly behind his nose. Then his father said, "I guess you're tired."

Dekker nodded, reminded to notice that he was.

"So let's get some sleep. You'll need all the rest you can get, Dek. There's a good prep school here in Nairobi. I know some of the teachers. The school isn't particularly aimed at the Oort, but they can brush you up on the theoretical stuff." He paused to sip from his drink. "The school isn't cheap, Dek, and I don't have much money. Do you have any cues?"

"Earth cues? No. You sent the money for the fare, but there wasn't anything left over."

"I didn't think there would be. Well, I'll get you an amulet—that's what you need to pay for things—and I'll transfer a hundred cues or so to your account, just for walking-around money. There won't be much, though, and I can't afford to keep you in the school forever. But you don't have forever, anyway. In about seven weeks you're going to have to take the tests for Oort training, and they're a bitch."

"I've already taken all the preparatory courses," Dekker said proudly.

"Sure you have. On Mars, a long time ago. Anyway, it's going to be harder here; just physically, you're not used to the gravity. It wears you. down. I hear you can work hard when you want to, is that right?"

"I guess so."

"Then want to, Dek. It's important. All I can give you is the one chance."

After a week Dekker decided the school was just as hard as Boldon DeWoe had predicted, and that was a surprise to him. In spite of what his father said, he hadn't expected it. He had been of the comforting Martians' opinion that, since everything on Mars was naturally better than anything on Earth—physical-environmental problems notwithstanding—anybody who could get along well in a Martian deme school would naturally jump right to the head of the class in any school Earth had.