Analog SFF, June 2011 (2 page)

Maybe, in the last analysis, terrorism is just another risk like those others. Certainly we want to take reasonable precautions against it; but we may have to realize at some point that not all precautions are reasonable, and that if we insist on fanatical and unrealistic pursuit of freedom from the slightest imaginable risk, we may have to give up far too many other freedoms.

The cumulative effect of large numbers of small steps can be hard to undo, and periodically along any such path it's a good idea to ask, “Is this trip necessary?” and “How far do I need, or want, to go?” I realize this is a complicated problem—and it's just one of many. But in this or any other, seizing on any one thing as The Answer, without thinking through where it would really lead, is asking for trouble on the grandest scale.

Copyright © 2011 Stanley Schmidt

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Even—maybe especially—when problems have become overwhelming, don't expect agreement on what to do about them. . . .

PROLOGUE

Saturday, February 22, 2020

Earth hovered, almost at full phase, breathtakingly magnificent. Distance concealed the works—and blights—of man, and the globe seemed pristine. Its oceans sparkled. Its cloud tops and icecaps glistened. And it was
huge
: The natural moon, had it been visible, would have appeared only about one-hundredth as wide.

Earth seemed close enough to touch through the exercise room's tinted dome, but Gabriel Campbell held firmly to the handles of the stationary bicycle. Not that he relied on the strength of his grip: He wore a seatbelt, too, and straps bound his feet to the pedals.
This
world had too little gravity to notice.

His eyes alternated between the vista overhead and the image of Jillian, his fiancée, which he had taped to the bike's digital readout. Strawberry-blond hair cascaded down her neck and shoulders. Freckles lay scattered across that most adorable, pert little nose. Her clear green eyes—and more so, her smile—all but outshone the Earth.

He was here, on Phoebe, to make a future for both: the Earth and the love of his life. In just one more month, he would go home. Then he and Jillian would marry and they would never be apart again.

Basking in earthlight, his legs pumping furiously on the bike, Gabe was pleasantly tired, professionally fulfilled, emotionally satisfied—unaware that before two hours had passed, he would be dead.

Phoebe completed an orbit around the Earth in just less than six hours, and as Gabe pedaled, darkness crept across the face of the world. The changing phase of the Earth told him he had been working out for almost two hours.

Sweat soaked his Minnesota Twins T-shirt, and still ahead of him was a stint on the not-quite weight machine: the resistive exercise device. Without exercise, muscles atrophied and bones lost mass in Phoebe's minuscule gravity. Four hours of daily workout were mandated, but he would have worked out anyway. He patted Jillian's picture. “I'll be plenty fit for you when I come home.” Fit, and horny as the devil.

And with no way up here to spend a dime, he would have banked six months’ salary with which to build their future. The pay was damned good, too, much higher than anything he could get on the ground. He tried not to think of the premium as hazardous-duty pay.

The bike whirred. A damper rattled in the ventilation system. Voices, indistinct, blended with dueling music players. And then, from the comm unit clipped to his sleeve, soft chimes. Gabe tapped the unit. “Campbell."

"We've got a bot in trouble,” Tina Lundgren said, her voice throaty. She was deputy station chief of Phoebe base and in command on the night shift. Not that day or night had any meaning here. The station followed Eastern time for the convenience of folks on the ground. “In sector twelve."

"And it's my turn to go outside.” Hell, Gabe was happy to go out. Only a handful of geologists had ever left Earth, and
he
was one of them. Had there been any way to get Jillian up here, he would want to stay forever. “What's the problem?"

"Stupid bot tangled itself up in a rock jumble. Otherwise, it's healthy."

Likely a thirty-second task, after an hour or so to suit up and trek halfway across the moonlet. Good deal.

Tina contacting him meant that he was in charge of the excursion. But no one went outside alone—too many things could go wrong. Gabe asked, “Who else is on call tonight?"

"Thaddeus and Bryce. Shall I give one of them a holler for you?"

"I'll take Thad. Newbie could use the practice.” Gabe eased off his pedaling. “And no, don't call. I'm in the gym. I need to cool off first.” Outside was not the place to get stiff and inflexible.

After winding down for a few minutes, Gabe unstrapped his slippers from the pedals, unbelted, and, carefully dismounting, firmly planted a slipper on one of the deck's Velcro strips. Trailing damp footprints, he crossed the exercise room, the Velcro pads on the soles of his slippers
zip-zipping
with each step.

At the hatchway he took hold of the handrail that ran along the corridor ceiling. The Tarzan swing was the quickest way through the station. Many of his crewmates would be asleep, and he kept a Tarzan yell to himself.

Thaddeus Stankiewicz was not in his quarters, the tiny common room, or the even tinier sanitary facilities. When Gabe tried the machine shop, the hatch squeaked on its hinges.

Thad was new to Phoebe and micro-gee; his surprised twitch launched him from his stool and scattered whatever he was working on. Gabe saw cordless soldering pistols, metal tubes, metal rods, wire coils—and, writhing free at the end of its oxygen and acetylene hoses, a cutting torch tipped with blue flame.

Gabe leapt, catching the torch by a hose and with his other hand giving Thad a firm shove clear. The push—equal and opposite reactions—brought Gabe to a near halt at mid room, above the deck. About a foot: Call it thirty seconds hang time. That was plenty long to give Thad a tongue-lashing for his carelessness.

Newbie looked so flustered that Gabe relented. He killed the torch and merely glared as Thad, who by then had grabbed a bench edge, began gathering parts (of what?) and cramming them into his pockets. Stankiewicz was short, broad-shouldered, and intense. His thick black eyebrows and deep-set eyes made him seem perpetually brooding. He wore a standard station jumpsuit, the royal-blue version, with its integral Velcro slippers.

Finally touching down, Gabe slid his foot until it engaged a Velcro strip. “What are you working on?"

Thad shrugged, looking uneasy. Embarrassed? “Personal project."

The station offered precious little privacy, so Gabe let it go. “A surface rover got stuck. You and I are up to extract it."

"Okay.” Thad kept grabbing and stowing the scattered pieces of his project. “Almost done."

"Leave that, Newbie. We have a job to do."

They made their way to the main air lock. The closer they got, the more dark streaks and splotches marked the gray metal panels that lined the corridor. You couldn't help but track Phoebe's dust and grime into the station, and once inside, the stuff found its way everywhere. The crew vacuumed endlessly, but it was a losing battle.

Their spacesuits were filthier than the interior halls and no longer permitted in most of the station. Once you couldn't change in a closet-sized cabin, bracing yourself between opposing walls, the best place to suit up was inside the air lock.

In the air lock, back to back and studiously ignoring each other, the two men stripped. Even more studiously they ignored jostling and brushing into each other.

The body suits fit snugly against bare skin. Donning a very elastic body suit in the all-but-nonexistent gravity was like squirming into a sausage casing—underwater. Every nudge and bump sent them careening off bulkheads and decks and each other. Still, these mechanical counterpressure suits beat the hell out of bulky, pressurized spacesuits. Gabe had tried an old-style suit once in training. It was easier to get into, but
way
more massive. Inertia varied with mass, not weight, and fighting that much inertia was exhausting.

Gabe finally wriggled into his suit and helped Thad finish getting into his own. “Check me out,” Gabe said. He launched himself, with a bit of practiced footwork, into a slow, midair pirouette.

"You look fine,” Thad said.

The answer had come too quickly. Anywhere that the suit failed to settle securely into place, fluid would pool beneath. Gaping was the major issue with the skin suits, with the crotch area especially problematical. It wasn't as if Gabe wanted another guy checking out his crotch, but he wanted even less to have blisters down there from an ill-fitting suit. “Check it again,” he snapped.

Done properly, spacesuit checkout took time. Eventually, though, their suits were wrinkle-free and without sags or pouching. They mounted and sealed the compression neck rings to which their helmets would attach. They slipped on their backpacks and checked readouts for everything: oxygen, heating, sensors, radio, batteries. Their helmets and air hoses were locked into place.

They stowed their indoor clothes, Thad's pockets clanking, in lockers near the air lock; they buckled on tool belts and tether reels, stuck emergency maneuvering guns in their holsters, and pulled on gloves and boots. Ready at last, Gabe configured the air-lock controls for surface access.

"Oscar, end-to-end system check,” Gabe said. Status messages, the text all green, scrolled down the inside of his helmet visor. He had named the voice-activated user interface Oscar as a nod to the suit in
Have Spacesuit, Will Travel
, a book he had loved as a child—and because, crammed into this suit, he knew how a sardine must feel.

"Comm check, Thad,” Gabe radioed on the public channel.

"Back at you,” Stankiewicz said.

Gabe called, “Tina? Two robot wranglers set to go outside."

"Happy trails,” Tina answered, yawning. “Stay in touch."

"Roger that.” Gabe tapped the airlock control panel. Pump noises faded as air was sucked into holding tanks. He felt the first stirrings of warmth from the heating elements in the thermal layer of his suit. Light poured inside as the outer hatch opened. Shrunken to a crescent, the Earth still shone more brightly than a full moon. For now, the moon itself remained hidden behind the Earth.

Newbie gestured at the ladder. “Age before beauty."

"Pearls before swine."

Gabe grabbed the ladder rails and climbed. He paused on the third rung, with only his head and shoulders above the surface. The horizon was freakishly close. Despite earthlight, the landscape was only a dim presence, less reflective than asphalt. Without its coat of rocks, soot, and hydrocarbons, Phoebe's ice—the ice they were here to mine, the ice that could change
everything
—would have streamed off as a spectacular comet tail.

His grandparents still talked about where they were, what they had been doing, when they first heard that President Kennedy had been shot. For his parents’ generation, and even for some of Gabe's own, the event seared into the collective consciousness was 9/11. The World Trade Centers crashing down had marked Gabe too—he had been sixteen that day—but the news that had
truly
marked him, had changed everything for him, even more than 9/11 or the Crudetastrophe, had come a mere five years ago.

As though it were yesterday, he remembered: a rumor at first, run rampant on the blogosphere, then the hastily called presidential address. A space rock, a
big
one, was headed Earth's way. It was not dinosaur-killer sized, not quite, and the likelihood it would hit Earth was only one in a thousand—but no sane person would leave home against those odds, let alone bet the future of civilization. The rock had to be deflected, and despite its many woes only the United States had the capability to tackle the job.

But the excitement, the game changer, was this: Rather than deflect the rock
away
, NASA would undertake to aim it more precisely
at
Earth. To ensure capture of the object. To exploit its resources and forever change space exploration.

And to hell with whether anyone else thought this was a bad idea. Gabe had never encountered much in the way of presidential leadership. It was exhilarating.

He had long ago lost his youthful interest in the space program. Decade after decade of pointlessly circling the world, scarcely skimming the top of the atmosphere: What was the point? No one cared anymore.

But suddenly there
was
a reason. Saving the planet. Maybe, in the process, pulling the country out of an economic abyss. And to be honest—adventure. Faster than the president could finish speaking that night, Gabe had vowed he would be an astronaut. Somehow.

That rock—only it had turned out to be far more complex and interesting, a dormant comet—was now Earth's second moon. Was Phoebe. And once again,
he
was about to explore its ancient surface.

"The view here is less interesting,” Thad radioed from the bottom of the air lock.

"Sorry.” Gabe unreeled four feet of tether, clipping its carabiner around the staked cable labeled “sector twelve.” He clipped a second tether to the guide cable before grabbing handholds outside the hatch and pulling himself up and out. He waited ten feet along the cable until, gopherlike, Thad's head and shoulders appeared.

"
Two
tethers,” Gabe reminded the newbie.

It was easier by far to fall off this toy world than to cross it. Phoebe was roughly a sphere a mile and a quarter across—where
rough
better described the body than
sphere
. It was round in the sense that a popcorn ball was round, with stony lumps taking the place of popped kernels and veins of frothy ice—and in spots, only vacuum—taking the part of molasses. And in the sense that a popcorn ball remained a ball after it had been whacked a bit, dented here, flattened there. Phoebe was less a single object than a rubble pile loosely bonded by its mutual gravity. If its orbit had dipped much lower, the tidal forces from Earth's gravity would have ripped the little moon to shreds.