Captain Stone took a last look into the double eyepiece of the stereo radar, swung the sweep control fore and aft and all around; the masses of the Hallelujah, indistinguishable from the background of stars by naked eye, hung in greatly exaggerated perspective in the false “space” of the stereo tank while the true stars showed not at all. None of them displayed the crawling trail of relative motion.
A point brighter than the rest glowed in a fluctuating pattern fairly close by and a few degrees out-orbit; it was the radar beacon on which he had homed. It, too, seemed steady by stereo; he turned to Castor and said, “Take a doppler on City Hall.”
“Just getting it, Captain.” In a moment he added, “Uh, relative about ten miles an hour—nine point seven and a whisper. And just under seven hundred miles away.”
“Vector?”
“Closing almost for it. We ought to slide past maybe ten, fifteen miles south and in-orbit.”
Roger Stone relaxed and grinned. “How’s that for shooting? Your old man can still figure them, eh?”
“Pretty good, Dad—considering.”
“Considering what?”
“Considering you used Pol’s figures.”
“When I figure out which one of us you are insulting, I’ll answer that.” He spoke to the mike: “All hands, secure from maneuvers. Power room, report when secure. Edith, how soon can we have dinner?”
“It’s wrapped up, son,” Hazel reported.
“About thirty minutes, dear,” his wife answered.
“A fine thing! A man slaves over a hot control board and then has to wait thirty minutes for his dinner. What kind of a hotel is this?”
“Yes, dear. By the way, I’m cutting your calorie ration again.”
“Mutiny! What would John Sterling do?”
“Daddy’s getting fat! Daddy’s getting fat!” Lowell chanted.
“And strangle your child. Anybody want to come out with me while I set jato units?”
“I will, Daddy!”
“Meade, you’re just trying to get out of helping with dinner.”
“I can spare her, dear.”
“Spare the child and spoil the fodder. Come with your fodder, baby.”
“Not very funny, Daddy.”
“And I’m not getting paid for it, either.” Captain Stone went aft, whistling. The twins as well as Meade went out with him; they made quick work of setting jato units, the young people locking them in place and the Captain seeing to the wiring personally. They set a belt of them around the waist of the ship and matched pairs on the bow and quarter. Wired for triggering to the piloting radar, set at minimum range, they would give the ship a sharp nudge in the unlikely event that any object came toward them on a collision course at a relative speed high enough to be dangerous.
Coming through the Asteroid Belt to their present location deep in it, they had simply taken their chances. Although one is inclined to think of the Belt as thick with sky junk, the statistical truth is that there is so enormously more space than rock that the chance of being hit is negligible. Inside a node the situation was somewhat different, the concentration of mass being several hundred times as great as in the ordinary reaches of the Belt. But most of the miners took no precautions even there, preferring to bet that this unending game of Russian roulette would always work out in their favor rather than go to the expense and trouble of setting up a meteor guard. This used up a few miners, but not often; the accident rate in Hallelujah node was about the same as that of Mexico City.
They went inside and found dinner ready. “Call for you, Captain,” announced Hazel.
“Already?”
“City Hall. Told ’em you were out but would call back. Nine point six centimeters.”
“Come eat your dinner, dear, while it’s hot.”
“You all go ahead. I won’t be long.”
Nor was he. Dr. Stone looked inquiringly at him as he joined them. “The Mayor,” he told her and the others. “Welcome to Rock City and all that sort of thing. Advised me that the Citizens’ Committee has set a speed limit of a hundred miles an hour for ships, five hundred miles an hour for scooters, anywhere within a thousand miles of City Hall.”
Hazel bristled. “I suppose you told him what they could do with their speed limits?”
“I did not. I apologized sweetly for having unwittingly offended on my approach and said that I would be over to pay my respects tomorrow or the next day.”
“I thought Mars would have some elbow room,” Hazel grumbled. “It turned out to be nothing but scissorbills and pantywaists and tax collectors. So we come on out to the wide open spaces and what do we find? Traffic cops! And my only son without the spunk to talk back to them. I think I’ll go to Saturn.”
“I hear that Titan Base is awfully chilly,” her son answered without rancor. “Why not Jupiter? Pol, flip the salt over this way, please.”
“Jupiter? The position isn’t favorable. Besides I hear than Ganymede has more regulations than a girls’ school.”
“Mother, you are the only juvenile delinquent old enough for a geriatrics clinic whom I have ever known. You know perfectly well that an artificial colony has to have regulations.”
“An excuse for miniature Napoleons! This whole system has taken to wearing corsets.”
“What’s a corset?” inquired Lowell.
“Uh…a predecessor to the spacesuit, sort of.”
Lowell still looked puzzled; his mother said, “Never mind, dear. When we get back, Mother will show you one, in the museum.”
Captain Stone proposed that they all turn in right after supper; they had all run short on sleep during the maneuvering approach. “I keep seeing spots before my eyes,” he said, rubbing them, “from staring into the tank. I think I’ll sleep the clock around.”
Hazel started to answer when an alarm shrilled; he passed instantly from sleepy to alert. “Object on collision course! Grab something, everybody.” He clutched at a stanchion with one hand, gathered in Lowell with the other.
But no shove from a firing jato followed. “Green,” Hazel announced quietly. “Whatever it is, it isn’t moving fast enough to hurt us. Chances favor a near miss, anyway.”
Captain Stone took a deep breath. “I hope you’re right, but I’ve been on the short end of too many long shots to place much faith in statistics. I’ve been jumpy ever since we entered the Belt.”
Meade went aft with dirty dishes. She returned in a hurry, round eyed. “Daddy—somebody’s at the door.”
“What? Meade, you’re imagining things.”
“No, I’m not. I heard him. Listen.”
“Quiet, everyone.” In the silence they could hear the steady hiss of an air injector; the lock was cycling. Roger Stone lunged toward the airlock; he was stopped by a sharp warning from his mother. “Son! Hold it a second.”
“What?”
“Keep back from that door.” She had her gun out and at the ready.
“Huh? Don’t be silly. And put that thing away; it isn’t charged anyhow.”
“He won’t know that. Whoever is coming in that lock.”
Dr. Stone said quietly, “Mother Hazel, what are you nervous about?”
“Can’t you see? We’ve got a ship here with food in it. And oxy. And a certain amount of single-H. This isn’t Luna City; there are men out here who would be tempted.”
Dr. Stone did not answer but turned to her husband. He hesitated only momentarily, then snapped, “Go forward, dear. Take Lowell. Meade, you go along and lock the access hatch. Leave the ship’s phones open. If you hear anything wrong, radio City Hall and tell them we are being hijacked. Move!” He was already ducking into his stateroom, came out with his own gun.
By the time the hatch to the control room had clanged shut the airlock finished cycling. The four remaining waited, surrounding the airlock inner door. “Shall we jump him, Dad?” Castor whispered.
“No. Just stay out of my line of fire.”
Slowly the door swung open. A spacesuited figure cr
ouched in the frame, its features indistinct in its helmet. It looked around, saw the guns trained on it, and spread both its hands open in front of it. “What’s the matter?” a muffled voice said plaintively. “I haven’t done anything.”
Captain Stone could see that the man, besides being empty-handed, carried no gun at his belt. He put his own away. “Sorry. Let me give you a hand with that helmet.”
The helmet revealed a middle-aged, sandy-haired man with mild eyes. “What was the matter?” he repeated.
“Nothing. Nothing at all. We didn’t know who was boarding us and we were a bit nervous. My name’s Stone, by the way. I’m master.”
“Glad to know you, Captain Stone. I’m Shorty Devine.”
“I’m glad to know you, Mr. Devine. Welcome aboard.”
“Just Shorty.” He looked around. “Uh, excuse me for busting in on you and scaring you but I heard you had a doctor aboard. A real doctor, I mean—not one of those science johnnies.”
“We have.”
“Gee, that’s wonderful! The town hasn’t had a real doctor since old Doc Schultz died. And I need one, bad.”
“Sorry! Pol, get your mother.”
“I heard, dear,” the speaker horn answered. “Coming.” The hatch opened and Dr. Stone came in. “I’m the doctor, Mr. Devine. Dear, I’ll use this room, I think. If you will all go somewhere else, please?”
The visitor said hastily, “Oh, they needn’t.”
“I prefer to make examinations without an audience,” she said firmly.
“But I didn’t explain, ma’am—Doctor. It isn’t me; it’s my partner.”
“Oh?”
“He broke his leg. Got careless with two big pieces of core material and got his leg nipped between ’em. Broke it. I guess I didn’t do too well by him for he’s a powerfully sick man. Could you come over right away, Doctor?”
“Certainly.”
“Now, Edith!”
“Castor, get my surgical kit—the black one. Will you help me suit up, dear?”
“But Edith, you—”
“It’s all right, Captain; I’ve got my scooter right outside. We’re only eighty-five, ninety miles away; we won’t be gone long.”
Captain Stone sighed. “I’m going with you. Will your scooter take three?”
“Sure, sure! It’s got Reynolds saddles; set any balance you need.”
“Take command, Hazel.”
“Aye aye, sir!”
They were gone all night, ship’s time, rather than a short while. Hazel sat at the control board, tracking them all the way out—then watched and waited until she spotted them leaving, and tracked them back. Devine, profuse with thanks, had breakfast with them. Just before he left Lowell came into the saloon carrying Fuzzy Britches. Devine stopped with a bite on the way to his mouth and stared. “A flat cat! Or am I seeing things?”
“Of course it is. Its name is Fuzzy Britches. It’s a Martian.”
“You bet it is! Say, do you mind if I pet her for a moment?”
Lowell looked him over suspiciously, granted the boon. The prospector held it like one who knows flat cats, cooed to it, and stroked it. “Now ain’t that nice! Almost makes me wish I had never left Mars—not but what it’s better here.” He handed it back reluctantly, thanked them all around again, and left.
Dr. Stone flexed her fingers. “That’s the first time I’ve done surgery in free fall since the old clinic days. I must review my techniques.”
“My dear, you were magnificent. And Jock Donaher is mighty lucky that you were near by.”
“Was he pretty bad, Mummy?” asked Meade.
“Quite,” answered her father. “You wouldn’t enjoy the details. But your Mother knew what to do and did it. And I was a pretty fair scrub nurse myself, if I do say so as shouldn’t.”
“You do say so and shouldn’t,” agreed Hazel.
“Roger,” asked Dr. Stone, “that thing they were living in—could it be operated as a ship?”
“I doubt it, not the way they’ve got it rigged now. I wouldn’t call it a ship; I’d call it a raft.”
“What do they do when they want to leave?”
“They probably don’t want to leave. They’ll probably die within hailing distance of Rock City—as Jock nearly did. I suppose they sell their high grade at Ceres, by scooter—circum Ceres, that is. Or maybe they sell it here.”
“But the whole town is migratory. They have to move sometime.”
“Oh, I imagine you could move that hulk with a few jato units, if you were gentle about it and weren’t in any hurry. I think I’d decompress it before I tried it, though.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ROCK CITY
THE ASTEROID BELT IS A FLATTENED
torus ring or doughnut in space encompassing thirteen thousand five hundred thousand million trillion cubic miles. This very conservative figure is arrived at by casting out of the family the vagrant blacksheep who wander in down to Mars and farther—even down close to Sun itself—and by ignoring those which strayed too far out and became slaves to mighty Jove, such as the Trojan Asteroids which make him a guard of honor sixty degrees ahead and behind him in orbit. Even those that swing too far north or south are excluded; an arbitrary limit of six degrees deviation from ecliptic has been assumed.
13,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic miles of space.
Yet the entire human race could be tucked into one corner of a single cubic mile; the average human body is about two cubic feet in bulk.
Even Hazel’s dauntless hero “Captain John Sterling” would be hard put to police such a beat. He would need to be twins, at least.
Write the figure as 1.35 x 1025th cubic miles; that makes it easier to see if no easier to grasp. At the time the Rolling Stone arrived among the rolling stones of Rock City the Belt had a population density of one human soul for every two billion trillion cubic miles—read 2 x 1021. About half of these six thousand-odd lived on the larger planetoids, Ceres, Pallas, Vesta, Juno; one of the few pleasant surprises in the exploration of our system was the discovery that the largest Asteroids were unbelievably dense and thus had respectable surface gravitations. Ceres, with a diameter of only 485 miles, has an average density five times that of Earth and a surface gravity about the same as Mars. These large planetoids are believed to be mainly core material of lost Lucifer, covered with a few miles of lighter debris.
The other three thousand inhabitants constitute the Belt’s “floating population” in a most literal sense; they live and work in free fall. Almost all of them are gathered into half a dozen loose communities working the nodes or clusters of the Belt. The nodes are several hundred times as dense as the main body of the Belt—if “dense” is the proper word; a transport for Ganymede could have ploughed through the Hallelujah node and Rock City and never noticed it except by radar. The chance that such a liner would hit anything is extremely small.
The miners worked the nodes for uranium, transuranics, and core material, selling their high grade at the most conveniently positioned large Asteroid and occasionally moving on to some other node. Before the strike in the Hallelujah the group calling themselves Rock City had been working Kaiser Wilhelm node behind Ceres in orbit; at the good news they moved, speeding up a trifle and passing in-orbit of Ceres, a ragtag caravan nudged through the sky by scooters, chemical rocket engines, jato units, and faith. Theirs was the only community well placed to migrate. Grogan’s Boys were in the same orbit but in Heartbreak node beyond the Sun, half a billion miles away. New Joburg was not far away but was working the node known as Reynolds Number Two, which rode the Themis orbital pattern, inconveniently far out.
None of these cities in the sky was truly self-supporting, nor perhaps ever would be; but the ravenous appetite of Earth’s industries for power metal and for the even more valuable planetary-core materials for such uses as jet throats and radiation shields—this insatiable demand for what the Asteroids could yield—made certain that the miners could swap what they
had for what they needed. Yet in many ways they were almost self-supporting; uranium refined no further away than Ceres gave them heat and light and power; all of their vegetables and much of their protein came from their own hydroponic tanks and yeast vats. Single-H and oxygen came from Ceres or Pallas.
Wherever there is power and mass to manipulate, Man can live.
For almost three days the Rolling Stone coasted slowly through Rock City. To the naked eye looking out a port or even to a person standing outside on the hull Rock City looked like any other stretch of space—empty, with a backdrop of stars. A sharp-eyed person who knew the constellations well would have noticed far too many planets distorting the classic configurations, planets which did not limit their wanderings to the Zodiac. Still sharper attention would have spotted motion on the part of these “planets,” causing them to open out and draw aft from the direction the Stone was heading.
Just before lunch on the third day Captain Stone slowed his ship still more and corrected her vector by firing a jato unit; City Hall and several other shapes could be seen ahead. Later in the afternoon he fired one more jato unit, leaving the Stone dead in space relative to City Hall and less than an eighth of a mile from it. He turned to the phone and called the Mayor.
“Rolling Stone, Luna, Captain Stone speaking.”
“We’ve been watching you come in, Captain,” came the voice of the Mayor.
“Good. Mr. Fries, I’m going to try to get a line over to you. With luck, I’ll be over to see you in a half hour or so.”
“Using a line-throwing gun? I’ll send someone out to pick it up.”