The Sam Gunn Omnibus (71 page)

Good! Serves the whining little
pricks right.

SURE ENOUGH, THEY’VE
all been sick as dogs for the past
two days. I felt kind of queasy myself for the first few hours, but I got over
it quickly enough.

I’ve spent the time checking out
just how much Erik left us, in his less then-infinite kindness. It’s not much. Eight
crates of food briquettes; about enough to last six months. No medical
supplies, not even aspirin.

The
dome’s got air and water recyclers, offloaded from Argo’s spares. But no backup
equipment and no spare parts. If anything goes wrong with the machinery, we die
pretty quickly.

So our prospects are: (1) we starve
to death in six months; (2) we die from lack of water or air if either of the
recyclers craps out on us; or (3) we start murdering each other because there’s
nothing else for us to do but get on each other’s nerves.

At least inside the dome we can get
out of the space suits. There’s no furniture in here; nothing to sit on but the
crates of food briquettes, eight inflatable sleeping rolls, and a zero-gee
bathroom facility. The toilet seems to work okay, although there’s only the one
of them. The women bitch about that constantly. Me, I worry about how much
radiation we’re absorbing; the metallized plastic of this dome doesn’t stop
cosmic ray primaries, and if there’s a solar flare we’ll probably get cooked
inside of an hour or two.

There’s also the possibility that a
smaller asteroid might puncture our dome. That would be absolutely poetic:
killed by an asteroid striking another asteroid.

REALITY
IS SETTING IN
.

My seven keen-minded partners are mostly
recovering from their zero-gee puking and starting to realize that we are well
and truly marooned on this chunk of nickel-iron. With only six months worth of
food.

They’ve even stopped hollering at me.
They’re getting morose, just sitting around this cramped little dome like a
bunch of prisoners waiting for dawn and the firing squad.

“Would’ve been kinder of Erik to
kill us outright and get it over with,” said Bo Williams.

The others are sad-faced as basset
hounds with toothaches. Trying to sleep on a three-centimeter-thick inflatable
bag laid over a rough floor of solid nickel-iron does nothing to improve
anybody’s disposition.

“If that’s the way you feel about,”
Lowell Hubble said to Bo, from behind his inevitable pipe, “why don’t you just
commit suicide and save us the self-pity? That would leave an extra ration of
food to the survivors.”

Williams’ shoulder muscles bunched
underneath his grimy shirt. “And why don’t you try sucking on something else
than that damned pacifier?”

“Why don’t you both shut up?” Marj
snapped.

“I think this entire line of
conversation is disgraceful,” said Jean. “If we

can’t
behave like polite adults we should leave the dome until we’ve learned how to
act properly.”

We
all stared at her. I started to laugh. In her own prissy way, Jean was right.
We need some discipline. Something to keep our minds off our predicament.

“Maybe
we ought to draw lots,” Grace suggested with mock cheerfulness. “Short straw
goes outside without a suit. Maybe we could stretch the food long enough ...”

“And
even add to our food supply,” Williams said, eying Darling grimly. “Like the
Donner party.”

Sheena’s
eyes went like saucers. “Eat... ? Oh, I could never do that!”

“People
do strange things when they’re starving,” Hubble said. He looked over at our
overfed Mr. Darling, too.

If
Rick understood what was going through their minds, he didn’t show it.
“If only there was some hope of rescue,” he
mewled. “Some slightest shred of hope.”

It
hit me right then.

“Rescue,
my ass!” I said. And before Jean could even frown at me, I added, “We’re gonna
save ourselves, by damn!”

THEY LAUGHED AT
Columbus. They laughed at Edison
and the Wright brothers and Marconi.

None
of my beloved partners laughed at me when I said we’d save ourselves. They just
kind of gaped for a moment, and then ignored me, as if I had farted or done
something else stupid or vulgar.

But
what the hell, there isn’t anything else we can do. And we need some
discipline, some goal, some objective to keep our brains busy and our minds off
starvation and death. Instead of breaking down into an octet of would-be murderers
and cannibals, I dangled the prospect of salvation in front of their
unbelieving eyes.

“We
can do it!” I insisted. “We can save ourselves. We can turn this little
worldlet of ours into a lifeboat.”

“And
pigs can fly,” Bo Williams growled.

“They
can if they build wings for themselves,” I shot back.

Darling
started, “How on earth do you propose ...”

“We’re
not on Earth, oh corpulent critic of the arts. Erik thinks he’s got us marooned
here on Pittsburgh. But we’re gonna ride this rock back to the Earth/Moon
system.”

Jean Margaux: “That’s impossible!”

Marj Dupray: “It beats sitting
around and watching the food supplies dwindle.”

Grace Harcourt: “Can you really do
it, Sam?”

Sheena Chang: “What do you think,
Lowell?”

Hubble, our resident astronomer,
took the pipe out of his mouth and squinted at me as if he had never seen me
before. His mustache was getting ragged and grayer than usual. He needed a
shave. All us men looked pretty shaggy, except for Darling, whose cheeks were
still as smooth as a baby’s backside. Is he permanently depilated, or doesn’t
he have enough testosterone in him to raise a beard?

Hubble said, “To move this asteroid
out of its present orbit we’d need a propulsion system and navigational
equipment.”

“We’ve got ‘em,” I said. “Or at
least, we can make ‘em.”

I
know the mining
and smelting facilities inside out. We had left the equipment here on
Pittsburgh. My idea had been, why drag them all the way back home when you’ll
want them at the asteroid on the next trip out? The equipment’s nuclear
powered, of course: you’d need solar-cell panels as big as cities to generate
enough electricity at this distance from the Sun.

When Sheena found out we had two
(count ‘em, two) nukes on Pittsburgh, she gasped with alarm. “But nuclear power
is bad, Sam. It’s got radiation.”

“Don’t worry about it, kiddo,” I told
her. “They’re shielded real well.” I didn’t bother to inform her that her
gorgeous body was getting more radiation from cosmic primaries than all the
nuclear power plants on Earth gave off.

My idea was to use the mining
lasers to slice off chunks of the asteroid, then use the smelting facility to
vaporize the metal instead of just melting it down. If we could direct the
vapor properly it’d push us like a rocket exhaust. I figured we could scoop out
a pit in the asteroid’s surface and use it as a rough-and-ready rocket nozzle.
Or maybe one of the existing craters that’ve put the
pit
in ol’ Pittsburgh would do.

We wouldn’t need pinpoint
navigation. All I’d need was to get us moving at a good clip toward the
Earth-Moon system. Once we crossed the orbit of Mars the automated meteor-watch
radars’d’ pick us up. Hell, Pittsburgh’s big enough to scare the bejeezuz out
of the IAA. An asteroid this big, heading for the Earth-Moon system? They’d at
least send a robot probe to check us out; maybe a manned spacecraft with enough
extra propulsion aboard to nudge us away from the inhabited region. Either way,
there’d be a radio aboard and we could yell for help.

DAMN! HUBBLE’S DONE
some calculations on his wrist
computer and given me the bad news. Oh, my scheme will work all right, but it’ll
take seventy or eighty years before Pittsburgh gets past the orbit of Mars.

“She’s just too massive,” Hubble
said. “If we want to accelerate this asteroid that quickly we need a lot more
energy than we can get by burning off mass at the rate the smelting facility
can produce.”

Gloom. All seven of them became
even more morose than ever. I felt down, too. For a while. Then Sheena saved
the day.

(Not that we can tell day from
night on Pittsburgh. The only way we can keep track of time is by the clocks
built into our wrist computers. Even though the asteroid’s slowly tumbling as
it swings through space, inside the dome we get no sensation of daylight or
nighttime. The sky’s always dark, even when the Sun is visible outside. Our mood
matched our environment: cold, dark, dreary.)

Sheena came up to me while I was
trying to decide whether I’d make dinner out of a green briquette or a red one.
They both looked kind of brown to me, but that may have been just the lighting
inside the dome, which was pretty low and murky.

“Sam,” she said. “Can I ask you a
favor?”

We were all so glum and melancholy
that I had forgotten how beautiful Sheena was. Whether it was natural or
surgically enhanced, even in the shabby unwashed blouse and slacks she’d been
wearing for days on end she looked incredibly lovely. I forgot about food,
temporarily.

“A favor?” I said. “Sure. What is
it?”

“Well...”
she hesitated, as if
she had to put her thoughts together. “Since we won’t be using the mining
equipment and all that other stuff, can’t we toss those ugly old nuclear
generators out? I mean, they can’t be doing us any good sitting out there making
radiation....”

I
jumped to my feet
so hard that my magnetic soles couldn’t hold me and I went skyrocketing
straight up to the top of the dome.

“YAHOO!” I yelled. My seven
partners gaped up at me. To say they were startled would be a very large
understatement.

I
turned in midair
and glided down onto Lowell Hubb
l
e’s
shoulders. “The nukes!” I yelled, tapping out a jazz rhythm on his head. “Instead
of using them to generate electricity we can
explode
the mothers!”

It took a while for me to calm down
enough to explain it to them. There was enough energy in the nuclear piles of
our two generators to blast out a sizeable portion of Pittsburgh—enough to
propel us back toward the inner solar system.

“Like atomic bombs?” Bo Williams
actually shuddered. “You’ve got to be crazy, Sam.”

But Hubble was pecking away at his
wrist computer. I could tell he was almost as excited as I was: he had even
dropped his pipe.

“You can’t set off nuclear explosions
here,” Grace said, looking kind of scared. “You’ll get us all killed.”

I
gave her a grin
and a shrug. “Might as well go down fighting. You want to wait until we put
long pig on the menu?”

She didn’t answer.

But Jean did. “Interplanetary law
forbids using nuclear explosives in space unless specifically permitted by the
IAA and under the supervision of their inspectors.”

“So sue me,” I told her. “Better
yet,
call
the friggin’ IAA and
have them come out here and arrest me!”

Hubble had a different kind of
objection. “Sam, I don’t know if you can get those power piles to explode. They
have all sorts of safeguards built into them. They’re designed to fail-safe,
you know.”

“Then we’ll have to pull ‘em out of
the generators and disengage all their safety systems.”

“But the radiation!”

“That’s what robots are for,” I said
grandly.

I
SHOULD’VE
KNOWN
that
those friggin’ simpleminded robots we have for working the mining and smelting
equipment couldn’t handle the task of disassembling the nuclear reactors. Three
of our five stupid tin cans can’t even move across the goddamned surface of
Pittsburgh; it’s too rough for their delicate goddamned wheels. They’re
stranded where they sit. The two that can move aren’t strong enough to pry the
power piles out of the generators. Sure, everything here is in micro-g, but
those piles are imbedded inside deep shielding, and friction makes it tough to
slide them out.