Mining the Oort (35 page)

By the time Dekker had found something to anchor himself to he saw that Shiaopin Ye was swimming toward them. She was upside-down to Dekker, but he saw the expression of worry on her face. "What's the matter?" he asked.

She shook her head, twisting around so that they were closer to a normal conversational position. "I don't know what kind of place we've come to, DeWoe. Were you there when they found narcotics in the cargo?"

"Yes."

"Did you know who it belonged to? It was in personal effects for the chief of station, Marine. And they woke him up and gave him a test, and he had drugs in his bloodstream. Rosa McCune is sending him down with the ship; now this man Parker is the chief."

"Jesus," Tanabe said. "The
chief
? And he is being
fired
from his own station?"

Dekker shook his head. "If he's doing drugs, he has to go. Of course.
Especially
the chief of station."

"But if the chief of station is an addict," Ye persisted, "what does that say about Co-Mars Two?"

Dekker had no answer for that. He squirmed around to look toward the doorway. The last few stragglers were coming in; he saw Annetta Bancroft hauling herself along the wall, no longer weeping but the expression on her face still furious. Close behind her were Rosa McCune and the deputy chief—no, now the
chief
. Parker gave an order, and the door closed, sealing them inside.

He picked up a microphone. "Quiet down," he ordered. "I have an announcement. Narcotics have been found on the ship, and therefore Dr. McCune has ordered a blood test for all personnel. There is no actual flare. This is only a drill. But each of you will give a blood sample before you leave. The drill is over, but you can start lining up for your tests now." And added, as a late afterthought, "Please."

Dekker realized very quickly that testing two hundred people was going to take time. That was an annoyance, but he became aware of a greater annoyance still. There was one simple biological task he had neglected ever since getting on the ship. Before very long he would have to relieve his bladder.

There had to be provisions for that in the flare shelter, he realized. There were; there were a dozen of them, along one stretch of wall.

He was, however, now in zero gravity.

He was grinning when he came out, proud of himself for having managed the unavoidably complicated machinery of a zero-g toilet, and he discovered his boss, Jared Clyne, hanging nearby. Clyne was grinning, too. "I saw you go in, so I thought I'd better stay around in case you needed help, your first time," he said. "How'd you do?"

"I don't think I'll ever
like
it. But all right."

"Good," Clyne said. "Listen, we're going to be here for a while yet, so we can talk now instead of your coming to the office. You've trained on the emergency systems? Then I won't have to teach you anything. All you need, probably, is to walk around the station with me or one of the others in the section, so you can get the feel of the place. The virtuals are good, but, I don't know about you, personally I don't feel as if I know a thing until I get my hands on it. Wang's on shift now. He'll be off in about an hour; if you're up to it, why don't the three of us get something to eat and you can meet him?"

"I'm up to it," Dekker said. "After that, maybe I should get some sleep."

"No problem." Clyne turned himself around to look toward the exit. Half the crew were still clustered around there, waiting their turns to give blood samples.

"Clyne?" Dekker ventured, puzzling over something. "Did you say this other person was on shift? You mean working as a controller?"

"Right. Part-time. Everybody on the station gets a shot once a month or so."

"Yes, but what if this had been a real flare? Don't the controllers have to take shelter, too?"

"Ah, no, DeWoe. All the boards are in the flare shadow—they're put there on purpose, because the shelter here is between them and the Sun. They're pretty safe there. In a bad flare the controllers might take a little secondary radiation—you know, reemitted from the structure of the station itself. But the doses should be light. Of course, you have to keep track of light doses, too, because you have to watch your total lifetime exposure, so next time there was a flare a different team of operators would be manning the boards."

He cast another look at the door, and shrugged ruefully. "We'll be a while yet. Where are you from, DeWoe?"

"Sagdayev. It's a little deme on Mount—"

"Oh, hell, DeWoe, I know where Sagdayev is. I'm from Kennedy—you know, on Elysium? But it's been a long time since I saw it." He looked at Dekker thoughtfully. "If you're from Sagdayev, you're probably related to Gerti DeWoe?"

"My mother," Dekker said, waiting for the complaint about her he had learned to expect.

He didn't get it. "She's a great woman, DeWoe," Clyne said sincerely. "My uncle served with her in the Commons. I'm glad to have you here."
 

"Well, thanks," Dekker said, warming to the man. Anybody who admired Gerti DeWoe was automatically a friend of her son's; and, actually, the more he learned about Jared Clyne, as they talked, the better he liked the man. Clyne, he discovered, had been upped to full-time controller after Rosa McCune's purge of the "unstable," but he was pulling double duty as head of the damage-control unit—"It's not that I don't trust the other guys, DeWoe; it's just that I wanted to hang on until the station got back to strength."
 

"Is it now?"

"Well—not really. But closer, at least." He hesitated, then said, "Anyway, I don't have as much interest in time off as I used to. My wife was one of the ones who got sent down."
 

"Oh, hell. Too bad."

Clyne nodded. "I thought so—still, she was acting sort of jumpy, the last couple of weeks. What I'm hoping is that whatever it was that bothered her they'll fix in the clinics, and then she'll be back here—well, if I'm lucky, anyway." He cleared his throat and turned away, gazing at the diminishing crowd at the door. "Maybe we should start lining up," he offered.

"All right." Dekker watched carefully as Clyne gracefully pushed himself from one wall to the other, neatly missing collision with any of the other people still in the shelter. He tried to copy him. He very nearly succeeded; with only one small bump he brought up just behind his boss, and looked around.

There were only about thirty people left in the gym. Three people were taking the blood samples, Rosa McCune and, Clyne informed him, the station's two medical doctors. It wasn't a complicated procedure; a jab, a pause, a name scribbled on the little ampul of blood, a Band-Aid on the arm, and the subject was allowed to exit.

Annetta Bancroft was just going through. When Jared Clyne saw Dekker was looking at her, he said, "Tough break for her."

"Annetta? Why? I mean, she was obviously upset about something, because I saw her arguing with McCune just before they came in here. But I don't know what it was about."

"I think I do," Clyne said. "I'd give big odds it was about Pelly Marine. McCune sent him down, you know? Found narcotics in his shipment from Earth?"

"I heard."

"Well, naturally Annetta was upset. She used to be his duty wife.

38

If you wanted to give Mars an atmosphere as dense as Earth's, you would have to find a lot of gas somewhere. How much is "a lot"? Call it about 4,000,000,000,000,000—that's four
quadrillion—
-tons of gas.

That's a lot in human terms, all right, but rather little in the larger numbers used by astronomers. Fortunately it doesn't all have to come from the Oort. There's a fairish supply on Mars itself.

The principal things you need to make a planet capable of sustaining life are what scientists call "volatiles," principally water and air.

If you look at the composition of the planets of the solar system, you can see that these volatiles are distributed in a fairly orderly way. Mercury, the planet nearest the Sun, has practically none; whatever it may originally have had of them has long since been volatilized by the Sun's heat and—because the hotter volatiles get the more rapidly their molecules move, thus attaining enough speed to overcome the pull of the planet—they have been lost into space.

Venus and Earth, being farther from the Sun and also a lot bigger than Mercury, are luckier; they have retained much of their volatiles. Then, when you get farther out, past the asteroid belt, you find that practically all of the volatiles have been retained; in fact, the gas-giant planets, from Jupiter through Neptune, are essentially nothing
but
volatiles . . . but, partly because they are so large and their gravitational grip is therefore so firm, and also because these planets are so far from the Sun, and therefore so cold, the volatiles haven't been able to escape.

All of that is quite orderly and sensible, and fits the pattern of how the solar system was supposed to develop—with one exception.

There's the unusual case of the planet Mars.

Mars seems to have been shortchanged on volatiles. It ought to have more than it does. It did have, once. There are clear indications of river valleys on Mars, which means that there must have been liquid water at some time. Indeed some of these features, like the Valles Marineris, are huger than anything on Earth. They look like a magnified Grand Canyon, and if, like the Grand Canyon, they were carved out by the erosion of liquid water flowing, that amount of water must have been very great. In fact it must have been enough, once, to have given Mars great oceans. How great? Enough, if the water involved had been spread evenly over the surface, to cover the planet half a kilometer deep. It wouldn't have been spread evenly, of course; it would have collected, like Earth's oceans, at low points. But it would have been a lot.

So where did those volatiles go?

Most of them must have been lost to space, simply because Mars's weak gravity could not hold them forever. They weren't all lost, though. Visibly, there is still enough of them left to make the Martian polar ice caps. Invisibly, bound into the minerals of the Martian surface, there is a great deal more.

That's where the Oort program gets its biggest bonus. Once enough comets are dumped on the surface to raise the surface pressure and the surface temperature a little, all those locked and frozen invisible volatiles can begin to become visible again.

39

On Co-Mars Two an exercise session was mandatory, every day, for everybody. It was also hard work. Worse than that, Dekker believed it was, for a Martian who never intended to go back to Earth if he could help it, largely unnecessary work: he didn't need the polysteroided muscles that had kept him alive through the training school, and if a little calcium migrated out of his bones, so what? "For your heart, then," Jared Clyne advised, "As one Martian to another, that's what I tell myself. It doesn't matter
why
you do it, anyway. The best reason for doing it is that you don't have a choice, because if you skip more than two or three days a month Rosie McCune will have you out of here on the next ship."

So Dekker spent his hour a day in the gym, like everyone else, working his arms and legs against the springs that provided the only real resistance his muscles would ever get to fight against on the station. The machine he hated most was the one they called "the rack." You buckled your feet onto one set of springs and stretched up as far as you could to grip the handles of another set, and then you did your best to pull your left leg up and your right arm down, and then the other way around, for a prescribed minimum of ten nasty minutes.

When he finished with the rack he was always aching. As he unstrapped himself he saw that the person who had begun working out next to him was Annetta Bancroft.

She gave him a cheerful, but noncommittal, nod. "Hi," she said. "How are you getting along?"

"Outside of aches and pains, you mean?" he asked, rubbing his thighs. "Just fine. And you?"

She said she was doing just fine, too. The conversation might have stopped there if Dekker hadn't added, "I'm sorry about what happened. With Pelly Marine, I mean."

She looked at him with the suspicion of a smile. "There aren't any secrets in a place like this, are there? It's true enough; Pelly and I were together for more than a year. I admit the whole thing took me by surprise, because he never did any drugs while I was with him. But people change, don't they? I guess Sime Parker just did what he had to do. They tell me Pelly was acting sort of suspicious and jumpy the last few weeks before we got here."

"You're very forgiving," Dekker told her, meaning it—even liking her for it; how many Earthies could be so objective in a case like that? "That's funny, though. That's pretty much what Jared Clyne said about his duty wife. The one that Rosa McCune sent down for instability."

Annetta gave him a sharp look, then bent to check the fit of her foot grips. She finished strapping herself in before she responded. "Maybe there's some kind of instability epidemic going around the station. Take care you don't catch it, too, DeWoe."

For a while Dekker thought that maybe there really was something contagious going around Co-Mars Two, because everyone seemed a little jumpy—or abstracted—or merely mysterious. Some of his former classmates, Ven Kupferfeld and Jay-John Belster for two, appeared almost to have disappeared from sight. They spent no time at all with the group they had come up with, somehow having integrated themselves instantly into the permanent party of Co-Mars Two. Nor, apart from that one brief contact in the gym, had he seen anything of Annetta Bancroft or, more importantly, of Rima Consalvo, except when he called Rima on the interstation a time or two. When he did get her what he got was a friendly brush-off. Friendly it was; she said very sweetly that they really had to get together sometime soon. But a brush-off nonetheless.

It astonished Dekker that in a community of only about two hundred people five or six could so effectively vanish from his sight.

Dekker didn't have a lot of time to brood about it, though, because the other thing that was going all around the station was Dekker DeWoe himself. He became a part of the damage-control survey team at once. He never went out on the team's inspections by himself; if it wasn't Jared Clyne who was with him it was one of the other team members, like Dzhowen Wang—"Joe," for short—or Wang's duty wife as well as teammate, the dark little woman named Hattie Horan. Centimeter by centimeter Dekker and his partner of the moment traveled all the station's corridors, from air locks to water pumps. From time to time he came across old classmates at work: Shiaopin Ye in the communications plenum, supervising the routing of incoming messages to the person or department they were meant for; Doris Clarkson glumly a gym attendant; Toro Tanabe—surprisingly not glum, for a change—hard at work in the station's "kitchens." When Tanabe saw Dekker come in he shoved the casserole he was holding into an oven, pulled off his gloves, set the timer, and pushed himself over to greet him. "This is Joe Wang," Dekker said. "My former roommate, Toro Tanabe. You look like you're enjoying your work, Tanabe."