Mining the Oort (3 page)

The scenery before Dekker's eyes was all brand new to him. What he saw when he looked around the Martian surface were shadows like ink, boulders colored rose and rust, and a pink sky with the small, bright Sun overhead. It not only wasn't like Earth, it wasn't much like Dekker's familiar backyard, either. Sagdayev's soil was browner and grayer at this time of year; here at Sunpoint it was all pink windblown sands over the caliche. An Earthie might not have seen a difference between the two, but Dekker did.

Of course, that was only natural. All Martians knew that no one but the Martians knew what Mars really looked like. The mudsuckers could never understand. There was an Earth TV show that Dekker and the other Martian settler kids sometimes watched, because it was funny. It wasn't
meant
to be funny. It was supposed to be a kind of soap opera about passions and perversions among the Martian colonists, but any Martian could see that it was a fake. The whole thing had been computer-shot in studios somewhere on Earth. Good enough to fool the mudsuckers, but an obvious fraud nevertheless.

When Dekker had put a kilometer's worth of hillocks between himself and the work party, he stopped. It was as bright as daylight ever got on Mars, and the Sun as hot. Dekker turned down the heating coils in his suit and looked up at the sky.

The comet was majestic above him.

The thing was immense. Its tail now was forked into two streams of milky light, hardly dimmed by the sunlight. It spread from the western horizon, up past the midday sun and the spindly cables of the Skyhook, almost to the top of the mountain to the east. Dekker could hardly take it in all at once. The facemask wasn't built for sky-gazing. Although it gave nearly 360-degree vision in all horizontal directions, it wasn't made for looking up.

So, being well away from any interfering grown-ups, Dekker did what he had to do to observe the spectacle. He lay down on the rusty, pebbly Martian soil. He leaned against the side of a little boulder that wore a reddish yarmulke of dust on its top and gazed straight up. He slipped his arm out of the sleeve of his suit, fumbled in his waist pouch for a biscuit, and with two fingers eased it past the stiff helmet collar. He nibbled the biscuit thoughtfully while he admired the comet.

Dekker was feeling happy. It wasn't just the comet that Dekker wanted to find, out on the barren plains of the dead planet. There was something else there for him, and its name was "privacy."

Dekker didn't spend much time thinking about whether he disliked living in an underground town, where everyone was always in everyone else's pocket. He had no other life to compare it with; he had lived in Sagdayev deme since he was born. Dazzlingly huge as Sunpoint was to him, it was only a larger Sagdayev. There was no chance in any Martian settlement for the solitude a young boy needs. So as soon as he was old enough to be trusted out by himself, Dekker had spent a lot of his free roaming out of sight among the barren dunes. Out there, he had seen the comet almost as soon as the naked eye could detect it at all, more than a year earlier, when it was only a minute pearly blotch in the nighttime sky. He had followed it down toward its rendezvous with the Sun until it was lost in the solar glare, and picked it up again as it began its return toward Mars orbit. Now it was certainly a spectacular sight. It didn't really look like green fields and rainstorms and cloudy sunsets, but that was what it was supposed to turn into—though of course Dekker knew that this comet was only the first and tiniest beginning of the long effort to make Mars live.

And out there in the Oort, where this comet had been born and had lived its billion-year incidentless life until some Oort miner had zapped it and threaded it and sent it falling in toward the Sun—out there in the Oort, right this minute, some other Oort miners were picking other comets for the harvest.

Just as Dekker's father had done, once.

Dekker wrenched his thoughts away from that subject. Dekker didn't want to think about his father. Dekker had spent too many hours already thinking about the man—yes, crying about the man, too, sometimes when he was little—in all the long Martian years since Boldon DeWoe had lifted him up and kissed him good-bye and given him a stuffed animal to remember his father by, and set off for the Oort . . . and never come back.

Oh, the man was alive still, no doubt, somewhere on Earth—Dekker's mother had told him that, on the one of the few times she ever talked about her former husband. But Boldon DeWoe had never come back to see his son.

Dekker wanted something better than that to do with his precious solitary time, so he fumbled in his suit pouch again and pulled the
Huckleberry
Finn
book out. He forwarded through to the part about the feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons and read it over again. How baffling it was! How
awful
. People causing death to each other, and not for any crazy impulse of passion but deliberately, because of some matter
of
pride
. . . yes, and other people applauding them for it, as though that sort of beastlike behavior were the most natural, and even the most
proper
, thing for them to do!

He could not understand. He gave up trying after a while and read on. He was back on the safety of the raft with Huck and the runaway slave, Jim, when something made him stop reading. He snapped off the book and blinked, squirming around in his suit. He became aware that he was feeling a slithery, clattery vibration from the soil under him. He jumped to his feet to look around.

A buggy was coming toward him, heading in the direction of Sunpoint City.

He couldn't hear it, of course. No one could hear much in the scanty Martian atmosphere, but he could see the buggy clearly as it topped a rise. Evidently the driver saw him. The vehicle hesitated, then made a sharp turn. Rusty pebbles flew like spray from one set of its great mesh wheels; then all wheels spun together and it rolled rapidly to his side. It stopped with the nearest wheel almost touching him, and a young girl looked down at him from the enclosed control seat.

Dekker realized he had seen her before. She was one of the Earthies his mother had pointed out, and he had even heard her name. Anna? Annette? Something like that. There was no question that she was an Earthie, anyway. Dekker didn't have to recognize her face to know that, because no Martian child would have been allowed a buggy of her own just to wander around in.

The Earthie girl was gesturing for him to climb up and join her inside the buggy.

Dekker scowled up at her. He hadn't come out onto the plain to talk to some spoiled Earth brat! But she had already ruined his solitude, and anyway it was easier for him to do what she wanted than to try to argue about it in sign language. He gave in, stepped between the metal mesh wheels, each one twice as tall as Dekker himself, and climbed the spike ladder into the little entrance.

When the air hissed in and the inner door clicked he opened the door and unsealed his facemask to look at her.

"Are you lost?" the girl asked. "You shouldn't go out here by yourself. What would happen if you fell or something? Your father's going to give you hell, boy!"

"I'm not lost," he told her. He didn't bother to tell her all the ways m which she was wrong. If he fell! He supposed she meant if he broke a leg or something—imagine breaking a leg here! Where there was nothing high enough to fall from, and only the gentle Martian gravity to speed the rail. Even if he had somehow managed to knock himself unconscious the suit radio would immediately send out a distress signal and someone would be out to rescue him in minutes.

There was one other thing she was very wrong about. His father was certainly nowhere around to punish him, but he wasn't prepared to talk about that to this young female mudsucker from Earth.

"I guess you just wanted to look at the comet, like me," she said, studying his face. "My name's Annetta Cauchy."

He shook her hand, mostly to show that he knew Earth customs. "I'm Dekker DeWoe." And, to show that he recognized her, "You're Mr. Cauchy's daughter."

She nodded graciously, as though he had given her a compliment. "Isn't the comet pretty?" she asked, making polite conversation.

"I guess so."

She nodded again, satisfied with his concurrence. Then she advised him, "You ought to like it. It costs a zillion dollars to bring those things here, and my daddy is one of the people paying for it. He's an underwriter for the Bonds."

Although Dekker wondered for a moment what an "underwriter" was, he didn't answer that. He had heard all he wanted to hear about what the Earthies were paying for, and what they were going to want in return. Anyway, she didn't seem to expect an answer. She was pointing out the window to the Skyhook cable, where a capsule was sliding swiftly down toward the touchdown on the far side of Sunpoint. "My daddy's firm helped pay for that, too," she told him. "It's nice. I rode down it when I came from Earth with my parents. I'll be going up it again when we go home. Would you like to go into space some day?"

"Of course I would. I will," Dekker said sternly, "some day."

The girl looked skeptical but polite. She sighed to show she was changing the subject, but without prejudice to her own opinions, and frowned as she looked around at the mountainside. "Tell me, Dekker," she said. "Don't you think all this stuff is pretty, well, creepy? It looks like somebody's just thrown rocks around."

Dekker gazed at the landscape, puzzled. "How else should it look?"

"But it's
boring
. Doesn't it ever change?"

Dekker said defensively, "I don't know about here. Around Sagdayev it's pretty in the winter."

"You mean snow?"

"Snow?" He stared at her, marveling at her ignorance. "There isn't any
snow
, but sometimes there are frost shadows around the rocks, and things."

She looked unconvinced, and smug about it. "Was I right? Were you watching the comet?"

"Actually," he said, glad of the chance to show her she had been wrong, "I was reading a book."

"You shouldn't read in an airsuit. It's bad for the eyes."

He ignored that. "It was an Earth book called
Huckleberry
Finn
. Did you ever read it?"

"Read it? No. We had it in school once, I think. Anyway," she added practically, "it's getting late. I think I'd better take you home. Are you hungry?"

"No," he said, but when he saw that she had picked up a little gilt candy box to offer him he changed his mind. He took one. That was just good manners, but then he discovered that it tasted really fine. It was chocolate! And it contained something fruity and sweet and wonderful inside; and, since she had left the box out, he took another. Dekker didn't think his mother would have approved of that, but he knew Earthies didn't have the same standards of manners as Martians.

The girl put her hands on the controls. "Take off your suit," she ordered over her shoulder as she advanced the speed levers on both sets of wheels. She didn't ease them gently forward as a proper buggy driver would have done but just thrust them almost to full-out. Naturally the buggy wheels spun, wasting energy.

"You're going to wear your treads out that way," he informed her, meaning to add that he didn't want to be driven back to Sunpoint anyway, as he was perfectly capable of walking.

But she had left the box of chocolates out, and didn't seem to mind when he took a third, and then a fourth.

7

Even if you managed to pump Mars's atmosphere up to the thousand-millibar pressure of the Earth's, you couldn't breathe the stuff. It simply doesn't contain what people need for breathing.

The first thing you think of wanting is oxygen, of course. Well, actually, there's oxygen in Mars's air. In fact, more than half of what atmosphere there is on Mars is oxygen—kind of. The trouble is, that oxygen is already tightly locked up into carbon dioxide. Only 5 percent of the negligible quantity of air Mars possesses is anything
but
that useless carbon dioxide, in fact, and a lot of that remaining 5 percent is equally useless stuff like argon. No, that won't do to support human life. What Mars needs to make it green is hydrogen, to react with some of that oxygen to create water, and nitrogen, to mix with the rest of the oxygen in order to reduce the air to something people could breathe without burning out their lungs—and, oh, yes, so that you can eat, because plants won't grow without nitrogen.

8

When they got back to the Sunpoint entry, Dekker watched critically as the girl mated her crawler with the city lock. All in all she did it fairly skillfully, and Dekker found little to criticize. He followed her inside, sealed the door himself, and turned around to see that someone was watching them. It was another mudsucker, male, a few years older than Dekker, and as short and squat as any Earthie; he was, of course, looking amused. Annetta greeted him warmly. "Dekker," she said, "I'd like you to meet my friend Evan."

"Hi," Dekker said politely, shaking the young man's hand. "But I have to go, there's something I have to do. Thanks for the candy."

The one named Evan didn't seem to mind that at all. He was already turning away from Dekker, talking to the girl. "Listen, Netty, about the party tonight—" he began, but Dekker was rapidly moving away.

It wasn't entirely true that there was something he had to do. The fact of the statement was accurate enough, of course. Sooner or later; because even though they were in a strange deme, and in spite of the fact that the comet was due to strike in a matter of hours, and regardless of all the effort involved in protecting Sunpoint's destructibles against possible harm—in spite of all these things, the essential functions of life on Mars went on. For Dekker, one of them was the compulsory daily class in Getting Along.

But he had an hour or so to go before he had to be there, and he spent it roaming around—blessedly alone, for Tsumi was, no doubt, grumpily tending the capybara meat animals by himself.

Nothing was the same here as in Sagdayev. The place was not only bigger, it was laid out funny. Mostly it was
huge
—six levels deep, against Sagdayev's three—and Dekker had a satisfying hour or so just roaming it, always remembering to look as though he had some important errand so that no one would ask him why he wasn't doing anything useful.