“Scary,” I said too cheerfully.
She looked at me. “You feel nice and cool? That’s a million tons of soil, old man, and a layer cake of mirror sheeting on top of that, and these old heat exchangers are still the most powerful ever built. Daylight doesn’t scare you? You’ll get over that.”
Kathry was a sixth-generation Belter from Mercury, taller than me by seven inches, not very strong, but extremely dexterous. She was my boss. I’d be sharing a room with her…and yes, she rapidly let me know that she expected us to be bedmates.
I was all for that. Two months in Ceres had shown me that Belters respond to social signals I don’t know. I had no idea how to seduce anyone.
Sylvia and Myron had been born on Mars in an enclave of arcologists digging out the cities beneath the deserts. Companions from birth, they’d married at puberty. They were addicted to news broadcasts. News could get them arguing. Otherwise they behaved as if they could read each other’s minds; they hardly talked to each other or to anyone else.
We’d sit around the duty room and wait and polish our skills as storytellers. Then one of the lasers would go quiet, and a tractor the size of some old Chicago skyscraper would roll.
Rarely was there much of a hurry. One laser would fill in for another until the Monster Bug arrived. Then the robots, riding the Monster Bug like one of Anton’s aircraft carriers, would scatter ahead of us and set to work.
Two years after my arrival my first quake shook down six lasers in four different locations and ripped a few more loose from the sunlight collectors. Landscape had been shaken into new shapes. The robots had some trouble. Sometimes Kathry could reprogram them. Otherwise her team had to muscle them through, with Kathry to shout orders and me to supply most of the muscle.
Of the six lasers, five survived. They seemed built to survive almost anything. The robots were equipped to spin new support structure and to lift the things into place, with a separate program for each design.
Maybe John Junior hadn’t used influence in my behalf. Flatlander muscles were useful when the robots couldn’t get over the dust pools or through the broken rock. For that matter, maybe it wasn’t some Belt tradition that had made Kathry claim me on sight. Sylvia and Myron were lockstepped, and I might have been female or bend. Maybe she thought she was lucky.
After we’d remounted the lasers that had survived, Kathry said, “They’re all obsolete, anyway. They’re not being replaced.”
“That’s not good,” I said.
“Well, good and bad. Lightsail cargo is slow. If the light wasn’t almost free, why bother? The interstellar probes haven’t sent much back yet, and we might as well wait. At least the Belt Speakers think so.”
“Do I gather I’ve fallen into a kind of a blind alley?”
She glared at me. “You’re an immigrant flatlander. Were you expecting to be First Speaker for the Belt? You thinking of moving on?”
“Not really. But if the job’s about to fold—”
“Another twenty years, maybe. Jack, I’d miss you. Those two—”
“It’s all right, Kathry. I’m not going.” I waved both arms at the blazing dead landscape, said “I like it here,” and smiled into her bellow of laughter.
I beamed a tape to Anton when I got the chance.
“If I was ever angry, I got over it, as I hope you’ve forgotten anything I said or did while I was, let’s say, running on automatic. I’ve found another life in deep space, not much different from what I was doing on Earth…though that may not last. These lightsail pusher lasers are a blast from the past. Time gets them, the quakes get them, and they’re not being replaced. Kathry says twenty years.
“You said Phoebe left Earth, too. Working with an asteroid mining setup? If you’re still trading tapes, tell her I’m all right and I hope she is, too. Her career choice was better than mine, I expect…”
I couldn’t think of anything else to do.
Three years after I expected it Kathry asked, “Why did you come out here? It’s none of my business, of course—”
Customs differ: I’d been three years in her bed before she had worked up to this. I said, “Time for a change” and “I’ve got children and grandchildren on the moon and Ceres and Floating Jupiter.”
“Do you miss them?”
I had to say yes. The result was that I took half a year off to bounce around the solar system.
After I visited my kids and grandkids, I stayed three weeks with Phoebe. She’s second in command of a mining setup on a two-kilometer asteroid orbiting beyond Jupiter. They’ve been refining the metal ores and shaping them into scores of kilometers of electromagnetic mass driver, then running the slag down the mass driver: a rocket with real rocks in it and an arbitrarily high exhaust velocity, limited only by the length of the mass driver, which they keep extending. The asteroid will reach Ceres as mostly refined metal.
I think Phoebe was bored; she was seriously glad to see me. Still, I came back early. My being away from Mercury made us both antsy.
Another year passed, and once again Kathry wanted to know, “Why Mercury?”
I said, “What I did on Earth was a lot like this. The difference is, on Earth I’m dull. Here—am I dull?”
“You’re fascinating. You won’t talk about the ARM, so you’re fascinating and mysterious. I can’t believe you’d be dull just because of where you are. Why did you leave, really?”
So I said, “There was a woman.”
“What was she like?”
“She was smarter than me. I was a little dull for her. So she left, and that would have been okay. But she came back to my best friend.” I shifted uncomfortably and said, “Not that they drove me off Earth.”
“No?”
“No. I’ve got everything I once had herding construction robots on Earth, plus one thing I wasn’t bright enough to miss. I lost my sense of purpose when I left the ARM.”
I noticed that Myron was listening. Sylvia was watching the holo walls, the three that showed the face of Mercury: rocks blazing like coals in the fading twilight, with only the robots and the lasers to give the illusion of life. The fourth wall generally carried newscasts. Just then it showed a view up the trunk into the waving branches of the tremendous redwoods they’ve been growing for three hundred years in Hovestraydt City on the moon.
“These are the good times,” I said. “You have to notice or they’ll go right past. We’re holding the stars together and having a fine time doing it. Notice how much dancing we do? On Earth I’d be too old and creaky for that—” Sylvia was shaking my shoulder. “Sylvia, what?”
I heard it as soon as I stopped talking: “Tombaugh Station relayed this picture, the last broadcast from the Fantasy Prince. Once again, the Fantasy Prince has apparently been—”
Starscape glowed within the fourth holo wall. Something came out of nowhere, moving hellishly fast, and stopped so quickly that it might have been a toy. It was egg-shaped, studded with what my memory said were weapons.
Phoebe won’t have made her move yet. The warcats will have to be deep in the solar system before her asteroid mine can be a deterrent. Then one or another warcat ship will find streams of slag sprayed across its path, impacting at comet speeds and higher.
By now Anton must know whether the ARM actually has plans of its own to repel an interstellar invasion.
Me, I’ve already done my part. I worked on the computer shortly after I first arrived. Nobody’s tampered with it since. The dime disk is in place.
We kept the program relatively simple.
Until and unless the warcats destroy something that’s being pushed by a laser from Mercury, nothing will happen. The warcats must condemn themselves. Then the affected laser will lock on to the warcat ship…and so will every Mercury laser that’s getting sunlight. Twenty seconds, then the system goes back to normal until another target disappears.
If the warcats can be persuaded that Sol system is defended, maybe they’ll give us time to build defenses.
&nbs
p; Asteroid miners dig deep for fear of solar storms and meteors. Phoebe might survive the warcat weapons. We might survive here, too, with shielding built to block the hellish sun and laser cannon to battle incoming ships. But that’s not the way to bet.
We might get one ship.
It might be worth doing.
A GIFT FROM EARTH
To Hank
A good critic, a good Friend
The Ramrobot
IA ramrobot had been the first to see Mount Lookitthat.
Ramrobots had been first visitors to all the settled worlds. The interstellar ramscoop robots, with an unrestricted fuel supply culled from interstellar hydrogen, could travel between stars at speeds approaching that of light. Long ago the UN had sent ramrobots to nearby stars to search out habitable planets.
It was a peculiarity of the first ramrobots that they were not choosy. The Procyon ramrobot, for instance, had landed on We Made It in spring. Had the landing occurred in summer or winter, when the planet’s axis points through its sun, the ramrobot would have sensed the fifteen-hundred-mile-per-hour winds. The Sirius ramrobot had searched out the two narrow habitable bands on Jinx, but had not been programmed to report the planet’s other peculiarities. And the Tau Ceti ramrobot, Interstellar Ramscoop Robot #4, had landed on Mount Lookitthat.
Only the Plateau on Mount Lookitthat was habitable. The rest of the planet was an eternal searing black calm, useless for any purpose. The Plateau was smaller than any region a colony project would settle by choice. But Inter stellar Ramscoop Robot #4 had found an habitable point, and that was all it knew.
The colony slowboats, which followed the ramrobots, had not been built to make round trips. Their passengers had to stay, always. And so Mount Lookitthat was settled, more than three hundred years ago.
A flock of police cars fanned out behind the fleeing man. He could hear them buzzing like summer bumble-bees. Now, too late, they were using all their power. In the air this pushed them to one hundred miles per hour: fast enough for transportation in as small a region as Mount Lookitthat, but, just this once, not fast enough to win a race. The running man was only yards from the edge.
Spurts of dust erupted ahead of the fugitive. At last the Implementation police had decided to risk damaging the body. The man bit the dust like a puppet thrown in anger, turned over hugging one knee. Then he was scrambling for the cliff’s sharp edge on the other knee and two hands. He jerked once more, but kept moving. At the very edge he looked up to see a circling car coming right at him from the blue void beyond.
With the tip of his tongue held firmly between his teeth, Jesus Pietro Castro aimed his car at the enraged, agonized, bearded face. An inch too low and he’d hit the cliff; an inch too high and he’d miss the man, miss his chance to knock him back onto the Plateau. He pushed two fan throttles forward…
Too late. The man was gone.
Later, they stood at the edge and looked down.
Often Jesus Pietro had watched groups of children standing fearful and excited at the void edge, looking down toward the hidden roots of Mount Lookitthat, daring each other to go closer—and closer. As a child he had done the same. The wonder of that view had never left him.
Forty miles below, beneath a swirling sea of white mist, was the true surface of Mount Lookitthat the planet. The great plateau on Mount Lookitthat the mountain had a surface less than half the size of California. All the rest of the world’s surface was a black oven, hot enough to melt lead, at the bottom of an atmosphere sixty times as thick as Earth’s.
Matthew Keller had committed, deliberately, one of the worst of possible crimes. He had crawled off the edge of the Plateau, taking with him his eyes, his liver and kidneys, his miles of blood tubing, and all twelve of his glands—taking everything that could have gone into the Hospital’s organ banks to save the lives of those whose bodies were failing. Even his worth as fertilizer, not inconsiderable on a three-hundred-year-old colony world, was now nil. Only the water in him would someday return to the upper world to fall as rain on the lakes and rivers and as snow on the great northern glacier. Already, perhaps, he was dry and flaming, in the awful heat forty miles below.
Or had he stopped falling, even yet?
Jesus Pietro, Head of Implementation, stepped back with an effort. The formless mist sometimes brought strange hallucinations and stranger thoughts—like that odd member of the Rorschach inkblot set, the one sheet of cardboard which is blank. Jesus Pietro had caught himself thinking that when his time came, if it ever came, this was the way he would like to go. And that was treason.
The major met his eye with a curious reluctance.
“Major,” said Jesus Pietro, “why did that man escape you?”
The major spread his hands. “He lost himself in the trees for several minutes. When he broke for the edge, it took my men a few minutes to spot him.”
“How did he reach the trees? No, don’t tell me how he broke loose. Tell me why your cars didn’t catch him before he reached the grove.”
The major hesitated a split second too long. Jesus Pietro said, “You were playing with him. He couldn’t reach his friends and he couldn’t remain hidden anywhere, so you decided to have a little harmless fun.”
The major dropped his eyes.
“You will take his place,” said Jesus Pietro.
The playground was grass and trees, swings and teeter-totters, and a slow, skeletal merry-go-round. The school surrounded it on three sides, a one-story building of architectural coral, painted white. The fourth side, protected by a high fence of tame vine growing on wooden stakes, was the edge of Gamma Plateau, a steep cliff overlooking Lake Davidson on Delta Plateau.
Matthew Leigh Keller sat beneath a watershed tree and brooded. Other children played all around him, but they ignored Matt. So did two teachers on monitor duty. People usually ignored Matt when he wanted to be alone.
Uncle Matt was gone. Gone to a fate so horrible that the adults wouldn’t even talk about it.
Implementation police had come to the house at sunset yesterday. They had left with Matt’s big comfortable uncle. Knowing that they were taking him to the Hospital, Matt had tried to stop those towering, uniformed men; but they’d been gentle and superior and firm, and an eight-year-old boy had not slowed them down at all. A honey-bee buzzing around four tanks.
One day soon his uncle’s trial and conviction would be announced on the colonist teedee programs, along with the charges and the record of his execution. But that didn’t matter. That was just cleaning up. Uncle Matt would not be back.
A sting in his eyes warned Matt that he was going to cry.
Harold Lillard stopped his aimless running around when he realized that he was alone. He didn’t like to be alone. Harold was ten, big for his age, and he needed others around him. Preferably smaller others, children who could be dominated. Looking rather helplessly around him, he spotted a small form under a tree near the playground’s edge. Small enough. Far enough from the playground monitors.
He started over.
The boy under the tree looked up.
Harold lost interest. He wandered away with a vacant expression, moving more or less toward the teeter-totters.
Interstellar Ramscoop Robot #143 left Juno at the end of a linear accelerator. Coasting toward interstellar space, she looked like a huge metal insect, makeshift and hastily built. Yet, except for the contents of her cargo pod, she was identical to the last forty of her predecessors. Her nose was the ramscoop generator, a massive, heavily armored cylinder with a large orifice in the center. Along the sides were two big fusion motors, aimed ten degrees outward, mounted on oddly jointed metal structures like the folded legs of a praying mantis. The hull was small, containing only a computer and an insystem fuel tank.
Juno was invisible behind her when the fusion motors fired. Immediately the cable at her tail began to unroll. The cable was thirty miles long and was made of braided Sinclair molecule chain. Trailing at the end was a lead capsule as heavy as the ramr
obot itself.
Identical cargo pods had been going to the stars for centuries. But this one was special.
Like Ramrobots #141 and #142, already moving toward Jinx and Wunderland—like Ramrobot #144, not yet built—Ramrobot #143 carried the seeds of revolution. That revolution was already in process on Earth. On Earth it was quiet, orderly. It would not be so on Mount Lookitthat.
The medical revolution that began with the beginning of the twentieth century had warped all human society for five hundred years. America had adjusted to Eli Whitney’s cotton gin in less than half that time. As with the gin, the effects would never quite die out. But already society was swinging back to what had once been normal. Slowly; but there was motion. In Brazil a small but growing, alliance agitated for the removal of the death penalty for habitual traffic offenders. They would be opposed, but they would win.
On twin spears of actinic light the ramrobot approached Pluto’s orbit. Pluto and Neptune were both on the far side of the sun, and there were no ships nearby to be harmed by magnetic effects.
The ramscoop generator came on.
The conical field formed rather slowly, but when it had stopped oscillating, it was two hundred miles across. The ship began to drag a little, a very little, as the cone scooped up interstellar dust and hydrogen. She was still accelerating. Her insystem tank was idle now, and would be for the next twelve years. Her food would be the thin stuff she scooped out between the stars.
In nearby space the magnetic effects would have been deadly. Nothing with a notochord could live within three hundred miles of the storm of electromagnetic effects that was a working ramscoop generator. For hundreds of years men had been trying to build a magnetic shield efficient enough to let men ride the ramrobots. They said it couldn’t be done, and they were right. A ramrobot could carry seeds and frozen fertile animal eggs, provided they were heavily shielded and were carried a good distance behind the ramscoop generator. Men must ride the slowboats, carrying their own fuel, traveling at less than half the speed of light.