Mining the Oort

  When the program had run and the instructor asked if anyone hadn't understood anything, it was a while before one of the students raised her hand. "Maybe we just haven't come to that part of the course yet," she said tentatively, "but what happens if there's a massive collision and the power for the automatic systems goes out at the same time as the hull is breached?"

  Gillespie gave her an approving look. "Good question, Clarkson. You're on your toes, but you're right, we just haven't come to that yet. In a minute we'll set up some problem simulations for you to deal with, and that'll be one of them. Any other questions? Then go to step two on your screens, and let's see what some of the problems might be."

  On the way to lunch they walked together, naturally enough, and Dekker had plenty of time to tell Rima Consalvo all about himself. He did it with smiles and animated gestures, not entirely because he was aware of the fact that Ven Kupferfeld was only a few steps behind them. Consalvo responded, too. She showed definite signs of being interested in him, he thought, as well as being quite interesting herself. She had evidently had a privileged childhood—well, didn't every Earthie child?—but then she had signed up for the Oort. She described her four-year hitch out in the cloud, where she specialized in snake-handling by choice, now and then taking her turn in one of the spotter ships.

  "But that really wears you down, DeWoe, out there all by yourself for weeks at a time. Snake-handling's better. You don't have to wear those damn bodysuits, and you're on the base ship with your friends so when you're off shift you have somebody to talk to. I was really afraid I'd be missing all those guys," she added, as they joined the counter line, "but it looks to me like there are some good people here, too."

  That was a remark that pleased Dekker, since naturally he concluded that he was one of them. Unfortunately they got separated in the line, because Consalvo had had to go back for a clean tray, and their conversation was interrupted just when it was going well. Dekker was careful to save a seat for her on the assumption that they would have the whole lunch hour to get to know each other better. Maybe even to get her to answer a few questions more explicitly. Like why she had made the jump from a life of ease to the Oort. Like her age, for that matter. He guessed, as well as he could, that Consalvo was in her early thirties, Earth years, but she seemed to have that strange reluctance of Earthie women about revealing their ages—as though ten years or so one way or another could make much difference. Anyway, she certainly did seem to like him, and Dekker considered that that promised well for the future on Co-Mars Two.

  But when Consalvo came off the line with her tray she passed right by him with a nod and a friendly, but not inviting, smile, to sit down two or three tables away.

  That was a disappointment. It was a surprise, too, when he saw that the person she sat with was, of all people, Ven Kupferfeld. A moment later another man joined them—Dekker recognized him as one of the new group from the Oort, somebody named Berl Korman.

  Then there was a second surprise and maybe an even more unwelcome one, as Jay-John Belster put his tray down at the same table.

  Dekker concentrated his attention on his killed-animal cutlet. He wasn't really being snubbed, he explained to himself. It was only natural that Rima Consalvo would want to get to know as many of her new classmates as possible—but why those particular two new classmates? At least, he thought, her choice of companions seemed to prove that she wasn't avoiding him because of some prejudice against Martians—supposing that anyone could still think of Jay-John Belster as a real Martian.

  When they got back to the training center after lunch, Consalvo seemed as friendly as ever when she took her place right beside him again. The rest of the class was still drifting in, which gave him a chance for a little conversation. Dekker debated mentioning that he had been looking forward to having her company at lunch. It was certainly true, but he guessed that it probably wasn't a good idea to say it, since it might sound to her as though he were trying to be, well, possessive, and without much excuse considering the shortness of their acquaintance.

  Still, he couldn't see any reason not to say, quite casually, "I didn't know you knew Jay-John Belster."

  "Belster? Oh, yes. Met him last night," she said. "Kupferfeld, too. Were your ears burning? She was saying some very nice things about you, DeWoe."

  That was another surprise. It was unexpected enough to keep him from saying anything else just then, and a minute later they were deep into the afternoon's lesson and any further personal remarks had to be postponed. "The key to all the safety systems," Marty Gillespie announced, picking up where he had left off, "is communications. The sensors won't do you any good if their data doesn't get to the safety relays, and so the intrastation communications links are vital. They're all triply redundant, of course, but that doesn't mean they can't all go out at once. That's what we call 'common vulnerability,' meaning that sometimes what makes one of them fail will do the same thing to the others as soon as they come on. So we're going to work on the communications net now; fire up and start with the next step."

  So Dekker and Rima Consalvo spent the afternoon tracing communications links on a model space station. There were plenty of them that had to be learned: the emergency net that dealt with such potential disasters as fires, pressure drops, or solar flares; the relays that kept the controllers' displays continuously updated; the forwarding circuits that passed on communications from outside the station; the intrastation voice links and all the others.

  The final task of the day was to check the links between the station's comet-watching instrument, and the display, on the controllers' boards. As Dekker already knew, of course, Co-Mars Two's sensors continually interrogated every one of the comets and received status reports, which were passed on to the displays at each station; then, after the computers had produced their analyses and solutions, the controllers' burn instructions retraced the same steps back to the receivers on the comets themselves.

  "The worst problem here," Marty Gillespie told them, "is when there's a fault in the downlink on the comet body. There's an example right here. Look at that little one on the up leg there, 67-JY. It's been giving erratic responses for months now; the controllers have had a lot of trouble with it. Tomorrow we're going to see what kind of commands you can use to conduct two-way parity checks and system search scans to try to straighten one out when there's what looks like a hardware fault out on the comet and you can't send a team to fix it in person; but that's all for today. Get a good night's sleep, and I'll see you in the morning."

  Rima Consalvo stood up, stretched, and yawned, while she watched Dekker turning off their screen. He smiled at her. "Is it all beginning to come back to you?"

  She gave him a puzzled look, then understood. "Oh, you mean comet handling. Yes, I guess so, but I'm glad we're getting this refresher. I think I need it. DeWoe? If I get stuck on anything, would you put in a little study time with me one of these days?"

  "Well, sure," he said, feeling a glow. "How about tonight?"

  She shook her head. "Not tonight," she said regretfully, "because I've made plans—matter of fact, I see my date's waiting for me. But thanks, DeWoe, and I'll see you in the morning."

  "Good night," he said, watching her go—watching, especially, to see which of his lucky male classmates was going to be the one waiting for her.

  But it wasn't any of them, and that was another big surprise from this surprising woman; because the person standing in the doorway, greeting Rima Consalvo, wasn't a student at all. It was Annetta Bancroft. And what very bad luck it was, Dekker thought, that the people Consalvo seemed most interested in spending time with included so many of the people he was most anxious to avoid.

  One of the other people he had been avoiding was his roommate, but when Dekker got to his quarters he found Toro Tanabe gazing despondently at their study screen.

  All those childhood repetitions of the Pledge of Assistance had left their indelible imprint on Dekker DeWoe. He could not help a feeling of sympathy for
his roommate; Tanabe might be a cheat, but he was also a friend, more or less. Anyway, what right did Dekker have to criticize another cheat? He said, cordially enough, "Cheer up, Tanabe. It's been a tough time, but we're on the homestretch."

  The Japanese gave him a sulky look. "I suppose so," he said, "but what of it? When we graduate, what have we to look forward to?"

  "You're really worried about having to fix toilets," Dekker guessed, but Tanabe shook his head. Dekker tried again. "Then you missed out on another lottery?"

  "Actually," Tanabe said with dignity, "I had five numbers on one card last time; if it had only been six I would at least have had eight or nine hundred cues for a consolation prize." He hesitated, then confided, "It isn't the course. It's the market again, DeWoe. It has dropped nearly five hundred points over the last two months, you know."

  "I haven't been following it," Dekker admitted.

  "No, of course not. Martians don't care for such things, do they? Still, it is a worry. It is going to get serious for my father if it goes down much more. He has a good many futures buying contracts coming due."

  "Well," Dekker said cheerfully, not at all tempted to try to have a futures buying contract explained to him again, "at least you'll have a regular job on Co-Mars Two, so you can support him in his old age if he goes broke. Personally, I'm off to dinner."

  "I'll come with you," Tanabe said, getting up. On the way to the dining hall Dekker puzzled over something about Tanabe's behavior, and realized just as they were coming off the line what it was. Tanabe's money worries must be real; it had been weeks since he had allowed himself a weekend in Denver, and he was actually eating almost all his meals with everyone else in the school cafeteria.

  Out of charity Dekker made a point of being upbeat all through the meal, and by the time they were back at their study screens Tanabe seemed to have recovered. "I think," he said judiciously, taking a break to make them some of that nearly flavorless Japanese tea that Dekker hated, but drank out of politeness, "I think you are right, DeWoe, or almost. My father is not after all likely to go entirely 'broke'—a bit less rich, perhaps, but by no means a pauper—and even if I did have to repair toilets I suppose I could do it. For a while. But it is more likely that I would draw something like power-plant maintenance. That is a decent job, and if you remember I did well in that part of the course—and anyway," he added, actually smiling, "it is a known fact that nothing ever goes wrong with the Augensteins. It can't; if they break down seriously, everyone dies."

  "What a cheerful creature you are," Dekker said. "All right, let's take another look at the debugging programs."

  By the third week of Phase Six, Dekker calculated, his mother was only days away from docking at one of Earth's Skyhook orbital terminals, which was a pleasing thought. He was doing well in the course, too, though no more than breaking even with Rima Consalvo. They did study together a time or two, but she was friendly but impersonal, and most of the time invisible after school hours. Her behavior, in fact, was not unlike what he had observed in Ven Kupferfeld for the first weeks of their acquaintance.

  It was quite possible, Dekker told himself, that this was simply the normal conduct of unattached Earthie women with an interested male. He could not be sure of that. It certainly wasn't Martian. Still, he reminded himself, if that were the case it might bode well, for in the long run things had developed very rapidly with Ven Kupferfeld. So perhaps all he needed was patience.

  Meanwhile he was learning more than he had thought possible about the things that could go wrong with a complex mechanism like Co-Mars Two. Doris Clarkson's question had been long answered: if a large-scale collision caused a pressure drop and a failure of the main power supply at once, the station would simply switch over to standby power. All the doors would seal themselves; air to the parts of the station that still had pressure would continue to come from the reserve tanks; the crew would survive locked in wherever they had happened to be caught—not comfortably, but not dead, either—until they either managed to make repairs or a service ship from Earth or Mars could get there to rescue them.

  Anyway, that sort of collision was unlikely. A service ship or one of the fixbots that performed out-of-station repairs and surveys might crash on docking, but surely never at high speed. A wandering natural comet or errant asteroid might do a great deal more harm, of course, if it hit the station. But it wouldn't. The chances of such a thing were tiny to begin with. And if, miraculously, one such did turn out to be on a collision course with the station, the sensors would pick it up in plenty of time and the station would simply use its position-keeping thrusters to move out of the way.

  A more real threat was a solar flare. They weren't improbable. They happened all the time, and the particle rain from the Sun was deadly. But the station's Sun-spotters would detect the optical flare long before the particles arrived, and everyone would simply retreat to the shielded core chamber—which every man-made object in space had as a basic necessity of design—and wait it out.

  No, the real dangers were all internal. An explosion of the Augensteins would be instantly fatal—though, as Toro Tanabe had pointed out, very unlikely. The greatest concern of all was fire.

  That surprised Dekker at first, for what was there on a space station to burn? But the answer was that there was plenty. Not the structure itself; the station was designed to contain almost nothing flammable in its parts. The people who manned the station were another story. Inevitably crews would bring their choicest possessions along and, given the right chance, many of those would burn. The fires that might occur would not be huge—no one would be likely to roast from a bonfire of sports shoes and shirts—but they didn't have to be. Where there was fire there was smoke, and in the enclosed space of the station the smoke was where the real danger lay. The smoke could kill.

  There was a cure for that, a simple but drastic one: the emergency evacuation systems. Those could drain the air almost instantly from any part of the station—even from the whole station, except for sealed compartments, if that should be necessary. Every compartment and passage door would lock. Then the fire would starve for lack of air. When it was out the station could be sealed again by closing the blowout vents, and the air would be replaced from stores.

  Shiaopin Ye raised her hand after they had gone through a simulated air drain. "That seems dangerous to me. What if someone decided to blow off all the air when there wasn't a fire?"

  Gillespie said, "Let me answer you this way, Ye. Do you cook?"

  "Sometimes, of course."

  "And do you have sharp knives to fix the food with?"

  "Naturally."

  "Do you ever cut your throat with one of them? No, don't answer. I know you don't. Dangerous accidents do not occur if no one makes them happen. There are dangerous things around all of us, all the time. The next hydrocar driver you see could turn the wheel and run you down, but he doesn't do that. We just have to learn how to live with things that could kill us."

  That night, as a group of them were waiting to begin their hostility-release session, Ye brought the subject up again. She said to Dekker, "I'm not satisfied, DeWoe. I still think it's dangerous."

  "Gillespie says it doesn't happen," Dekker offered, noticing that Rima Consalvo was listening.

  "Gillespie could be wrong. What if someone wanted to commit suicide and take the whole station with him? He could blow out the air, or override the safety controls on the Augensteins, or crash one of those fixbot ships into the hull. What would stop him?"

  Dekker didn't have an answer for that, only a generalized feeling that the instructor had been right. Rima Consalvo answered instead. "That's a nonexistent problem, Ye. He would stop himself. What do you think all those psych tests are for? Suicidal people don't get onto a station. They're weeded out in advance."

  "Every time?" Ye asked doubtfully.

  "Every time so far, anyway," Consalvo assured her. "You'd better work out hard tonight, Ye, so you can get rid of some of those negative feelings."
Then, dismissing Shiaopin Ye's fears, she turned smiling to Dekker. "DeWoe, I feel as though I could use a really good workout, too. Do you want to try partnering me tonight?"

  Of course he did. When they were stripped down to exercise clothes he discovered what he had expected all along: however aged Rima Consalvo might be, she still had a first-class figure. They did push-away, and squeeze, and then they did flopover wrestling.

  In his heart of hearts Dekker still regarded this shove-and-grunt thing as a foolish Earthie waste of time. No Martian would ever need that kind of therapeutic struggle, since every Martian learned from childhood the necessity of tolerating one another rather than simply masking intolerance. But when you were doing these very physical things with an attractive woman whom you would like to know a lot better than you did, it wasn't a bad way to spend an evening at all.

  He had always been wary of working out with an Earthie, even a female Earthie. To his surprise he had little difficulty with Rima Consalvo. She did not succeed in pushing him off the square, and when she tried to resist his turning her over onto her back as they struggled on the floor, she suddenly yelped in pain and stopped resisting. "Hey, DeWoe! You're pulling my arm right out of its socket. Take it a little easier, please," she gasped.

  Startled, he released her. He hunkered down next to her supine form to make sure she was all right. She was gazing up at him ruefully, rubbing her collarbone. "I know you're a Martian, but, remember, I just came back from being out in the Oort for four years. I had to take shots for Earthside leave, too, just like you—so, please, not so much muscle in the clinches."

  "I'm sorry," he offered.

  "Nothing to be sorry about." She got up slowly, still breathing hard. "You got me all sweaty, too," she complained. "I must stink like a pig."