Mining the Oort (36 page)

Tanabe hooked one foot into a wall loop so he could wipe his hands on his apron before shaking hands with Wang. "To be truthful, DeWoe," he said judiciously, "I mostly am enjoying it, yes. The work is quite easy, as you see. For most dishes it is only a matter of taking things out of the freezer and putting them in the microwave. But the food could be better, don't you think?"

Dekker thought for a moment. "Seems all right to me," he said.

"Yes," Tanabe said kindly, "but you're a Martian, aren't you? Still, it is not as bad as the slop the school served us, I know. I think the worst part is that we can't fry anything, not even tempura. It produces too much fat for the air recirculators to handle. But the noodles are good. Come sometime when I'm on duty and I'll fix a special sukiyaki for you; I had my mother's cook send me the recipe. You, too," he added to Dekker's teammate.

"Don't try to bribe the inspectors," Wang said, and then took the sting out of it by smiling. "Anyway, we have to check for spilled food, and how you're handling your wastes, and for the seals around the cooking units—I smell something baking."

"Only when we open the ovens," a tall Martian said, coming over; he turned out to be the head cook, and while Dekker and Wang were looking for possible fire hazards he and Dekker managed to exchange hometowns and schools.

On the way out, Dekker commented, "They seemed all right. You know what surprises me, Wang? I didn't expect there would be so many Martians here."

"Why not?"

"Somebody told me Martians just didn't seem to fit in well," Dekker said.

"Bullshit. Martians do as well as anybody else. Anyway," Wang said earnestly, "I
like
Martians. Matter of fact, Hattie and I are thinking of settling on Mars when our time runs out here."

"You'd certainly be welcome," Dekker said, touched—it was the first time he'd ever heard that from an Earthie. But of course, he reminded himself, he was on an Oort station. These were not ordinary Earthies. These were men and women who had volunteered to leave their homes on Earth and venture out into space, for years at a time, to help Mars come into its rich and rightful heritage. It couldn't have been just money that brought them here. There had to be an idealism, too.

He counted himself lucky to be with these decent human beings. Only when he and Hattie Horan were checking the emergency systems in one of the exit air locks, where great spacesuits stood like headless scarecrows for the occasional extravehicular maintenance, he caught a glimpse of the comet-control workstation next door. He didn't know either of the women working there, but he felt a sudden heat in his chest.
He
should be there, too, he thought. . . .

And, within the next few minutes, convinced himself that it was only fair that he was not; after all, the new station chief was a fair man—undoubtedly he was; he was a Martian, after all—and he had promised that everyone would get a turn.

An hour later, back in his quarters, the new rotation orders came out on Dekker's screen, and suddenly he was less sure of Simantony Parker's fairness.

Parker had promised one of the new shipment would have a turn each day. He had kept the promise. The rotation was for the next five days, and there were five names from the shipment on it.

They were Ven Kupferfeld, Jay-John Belster, Berl Korman, Rima Consalvo, and Annetta Bancroft.

Three cheats and two last-minute substitutions from the Oort. Only those, and no others. It was, Dekker thought, really quite a strange coincidence.

When he reported to Jared Clyne the next morning he couldn't help bringing the subject up. Partway up, anyway. Dekker couldn't make himself mention the subject of cheating, but what he did say was: "How do you suppose the chief picked the new people to go on the control boards?"

Clyne gave him a quick and not particularly friendly look. "How do you mean?"

"Well—there's Consalvo and Korman, for instance. Why those two and not any of the others who came from the cloud?"

Clyne seemed to relax. "He has to start somewhere, doesn't he? And there's Annetta Bancroft. She's on the list, too, but the reason for that is that she's had the experience here already."

"Yes, but—"

"Yes, but," Clyne said patiently, "you still don't like it. Well, you're not the only one. I don't like it, either, because Parker's reshuffled everything. He's put me back on shift every day—I'll have to be on in a couple of hours, in fact. That'll be ten days straight for me, DeWoe. We never do that."

"Then why did he do it?" Dekker asked, surprised to hear the plaintive sound in his boss's voice.

Clyne shrugged. "He's the station chief; he makes those decisions. Now can we do a little work? Dzhowen Wang thinks we ought to have one of the air pumps pulled down for maintenance, so, before he gets here, let's take a look at its service record. See if you can get it on the screen for me."

Of course Dekker could get it on the screen, but while they were poring over the schematics a window opened in the corner of the picture. Shiaopin Ye's face looked out at them. "Clyne? This is the communications center. We're having some trouble with the solar optics, and I thought you ought to take a look."

Clyne frowned at the screen. "Let me talk to your boss," he ordered.

"I'm sorry. Toby Mory isn't here, just Carlton and me. Am I reporting to the wrong department? Because Carlton wasn't sure, only I thought since the optics were part of the emergency system for solar flares—"

"No," Clyne said, "you've got the right people. We'll take a look and call you right back." As he reprogrammed the screen for the solar-optics circuitry, he glanced up at DeWoe. "She's one of your people, isn't she?"

"Yes. Shiaopin Ye. She was in my class. A good student."

"Well, then we'd better check it out."

They did, Dekker and Clyne, and then, when Dzhowen Wang came in a few minutes later, all three of them ran test signals through the complex fiber-optic net. "I didn't know this was really our job," Dekker commented.

"The communications, no. The alarm systems, yes. But I don't see anything; do you, Joe?"

Wang shook his head. "If it's intermittent we might not, though."

"Right." Clyne pressed the numbers for the comm center again, and this time he got the head of the department, Toby Mory, who looked annoyed.

"Sorry, Jared," Mory said. "I was only out for half an hour. Ye should've waited for me to come back instead of bothering you."

"No harm done, Toby. Listen, we can't find any discrepancies in the net, either, so I'm going to ask Wang and DeWoe to take a look at the hardware outside—I'd do it myself, but I have to get ready for my shift. Could be the solar scope is shifting alignment. I'll have them let you know if they find anything."

When he was off the screen he turned to his assistants. "Well, guys," he said. "What do you say? Feel like taking a little ride in a fixbot?"

Since inspections had taken him just about everywhere on the station, Dekker had been in the worklock before. A fixbot, though, was something else. Through a port he could see the fixbot moored just outside, and the idea of getting into it, even in a spacesuit, made his nose tingle.

While Dzhowen Wang was checking them in on the screen, Dekker looked around. The spacesuits, the lock hatch, the emergency vent controls, the little window that looked out on the controllers' workstation next door—that was an irresistible temptation, and when he peered through the window, for a yearning look at the lucky pair of controllers who were actually on shift, it took him a moment to realize that he knew one of them.

It was Annetta Bancroft. She and another woman had their heads down over the board, checking trajectories—probably getting ready for a burn, Dekker thought jealously. That was one of the things about Co-Mars. Two's comets; they came up from the Sun with a lot of excess velocity, and every one of them needed repeated burns to kill off enough of it to make their Mars approach within tolerable limits.

He was staring longingly at her—not resenting her good fortune, just wishing he had shared it—when Wang finished his report and pushed himself away from the screen. As he caught Dekker's shoulder to stop himself he said, "It's okay. They're going to turn
off
the transmitters between here and Sunside so we won't get fried." He peered past Dekker into the workstation. "Hey, that's Bancroft in there, isn't it? Wonder how she feels about it?"

Dekker turned his head to look at him. "About what?"

"Why, about being here. Right next to the lock where she had her accident. Look, you can still see scratch marks on the lock where she hit. Didn't you know about it?"

"I heard something," Dekker admitted.

"Well, it was a damn close call. She was in her suit, getting ready to go out, only she didn't have a firm grip on anything when she blew the air out. So the suction threw her against the edge of the lock. Almost ripped her suit; she nearly got killed. Not from the accident, you know. There were complications from her condition."

"What condition was that?" Dekker demanded.

Wang hesitated, then said, "I guess it isn't a secret. She was pregnant. She lost the baby. This place has to be bad memories for her."

He pushed himself away, floating toward the rack of suits. "Anyway, let's get on with it, DeWoe. They don't want us to be out for more than fifteen minutes, so let's be on our way."

Thoughtfully Dekker helped Wang into his suit, then let Wang help him into his own. He paid full attention—he knew what it meant to check your suit before going extra-v—but a part of his mind kept repeating wonderingly, the
baby
? Annetta had never said a word about a
baby
.

Actually the spacesuits were not much unlike the suits he had worn to walk the surface of Mars—no reason they should have been, since the difference between Mars's thin air and the vacuum of space hardly mattered. It was fortunate that a couple of the suits were built in sizes for Martian physiques, though the fit was only approximate.

When they were suited up, Wang leaned his helmet over to touch Dekker's. "Stand clear while I evacuate the lock," he said. "Have you got your key?"

Dekker remembered to take his out and offer it, but Wang only nodded. "Just checking. I'll use my own." He pulled the emergency key out of the suit pocket and inserted it in the board. There were ten separate controls there, each of them lighting up in turn: one to evacuate each of the station's ten worklocks. There was a flashing red light under each to show that the locks were not sealed; Wang touched the keypad, and behind Dekker the seals to the interior of the station slid closed.

Then he turned the key. The outer lock opened; Dekker felt the quick tug as the air in their little space rushed out into space. The two of them crawled into the fixbot—a tiny, fragile-looking skeleton of a ship, no more than a framework with drives and handling tools to repair anything that went wrong with the station's externals, entirely open to space—and then Wang cut it loose.

Dekker caught his breath. All thoughts of Annetta's baby and everything else vanished from his mind in the wonder of where they were.

They were floating in space. Station Co-Mars Two was a huge presence beside them—or below; or above; it sat there next to them in some dimension, but Dekker could not have said which—and there was nothing else anywhere around, in any direction, for millions of vacant kilometers. And, everywhere Dekker looked, there were points and splashes of lights: stars, planets, above all the host of bright comets that were bringing life to Mars—so many scores of them, large and near or distant and dim, their torches of bright gas lit as, for the first time in their billion-year lives, they began to be warmed by the Sun. From the surface of Mars the comets had been bright, even seen through the sludgy air of Earth they had been almost overpowering, but here—here they illuminated the heavens.

There was no time to stare at them, because Wang was getting impatient. He waved to Dekker to warn him to get braced for acceleration, and started a thruster. The fixbot was too tiny a vessel to have any use for anything as violent as an Augenstein. It had to have drives, but they were only scaled-down versions of the same hydrogen peroxide thrusters that the station itself used when it needed to correct orbit. The fixbot's were much smaller, just enough to nudge the tiny thing gently out of the lock. Wang dexterously brought it to relative rest, and then gave it the little thrust it needed to move toward the Sunward side of the station.

Dekker could see that the warning lights were out on all the beam sensors on their side—otherwise they would have been fried. They floated over the disks and rectennae of communications transceivers, sensors, and scopes, and as they rounded the shape of the station their faceplates clouded at the first impact of the blinding Sunlight. A moment later the barrels of the Sun-facing telescope appeared.

Wang stopped the handler above them and raised a magnifier before his helmet, signing Dekker to do the same.

After a moment he leaned over and touched helmets. "What do you think, DeWoe? See any damage?"

Dekker took his time to be sure. If there was anything physically wrong with the station's external eyes it should have been visible—a shattered mirror from a micrometeorite strike, perhaps, or a component that had somehow come loose. "They all look okay to me," he said.

"Me, too. The connections look tight. I can't see a thing wrong. Let's go back."

"Do we have to?" Dekker asked, enthralled by the sights around him, yearning to stay. But he waited to ask until the helmets were no longer touching, and by then, of course, he knew that Dzhowen Wang couldn't hear.

The spell didn't vanish simply because they were back in the station. Dekker couldn't help grinning with remembered pleasure as they came out of the lock, grinning at nothing, grinning at Annetta Bancroft and her partner as they appeared at the control station door, just coming off shift.

Annetta gave him a startled look, then smiled back. "Nice to see you happy, Dekker," she said.

Wang looked at her, then, in a more curious way, at Dekker, then gave them a flip of a wave and left. As he and the other woman disappeared down the passage, Annetta added, "By the way, thanks for letting us have our display back."