The Rock Rats gt-11 Read online

  The Rock Rats

  ( Grand Tour - 11 )

  Ben Bova

  Brimming with memorable characters and human conflict, rugged high-tech prospectors and boardroom betrayals, The Rock Rats continues the tale of our near-future struggle over the incalculable wealth of the Asteroid Belt. Before it ends, many will die—and many will achieve more than they ever dreamed was possible.

  The Rock Rats

  by Ben Bova

  Yet each man kills the thing he loves,

  By each let this be heard,

  Some do it with a bitter look,

  Some with a flattering word,

  The coward does it with a kiss,

  The brave man with a sword!

  Some kill their love when they are young.

  And some when they are old;

  Some strangle with the hands of Lust,

  Some with the hands of Gold:

  The kindest use a knife, because

  The dead so soon grow cold.

  —Oscar Wilde

  The Ballad of Reading Gaol

  To Charles N. Brown and the Locus team.

  PROLOGUE: SELENE

  Amanda clutched at her husband’s arm when Martin Humphries strode into the wedding reception, unannounced and uninvited.

  The Pelican Bar went totally silent. The crowd that had been noisily congratulating Amanda and Lars Fuchs with lewd jokes and lunar “rocket juice” froze as if somebody had doused the place with liquid nitrogen. Fuchs patted his wife’s hand gently, protectively, as he scowled up at Humphries. Even Pancho Lane, never at a loss for a quip, simply stood by the bar, one hand holding her drink, the other balling into a fist.

  The Pelican wasn’t Humphries’s kind of place. It was the workers’ bar, the one joint in Selene’s underground warren of tunnels and cubicles where the people who lived and worked on the Moon could come for relaxation and the company of their fellow Lunatics. Suits like Humphries did their drinking in the fancy lounge up in the Grand Plaza, with the rest of the executives and the tourists.

  Humphries seemed oblivious to their enmity, totally at ease in this sea of hostile stares, even though he looked terribly out of place, a smallish manicured man wearing an impeccably tailored imperial blue business suit in the midst of the younger, boisterous miners and tractor operators in their shabby, faded coveralls and their earrings of asteroidal stones. Even the women looked stronger, more muscular than Humphries.

  But if Humphries’s round, pink-cheeked face seemed soft and bland, his eyes were something else altogether. Gray and pitiless, like chips of flint, the same color as the rock walls and low ceiling of the underground bar itself.

  He walked straight through the silent, sullen crowd to the table where Amanda and Fuchs sat.

  “I know I wasn’t invited to your party,” he said in a calm, strong voice. “I hope you’ll forgive me for crashing. I won’t stay but a minute.”

  “What do you want?” Fuchs asked, scowling, not moving from his chair beside his bride. He was a broad, dark-haired bear of a man, thick in the torso, with short arms and legs heavily muscled. The tiny stud in his left ear was a diamond that he had bought during his student days in Switzerland.

  With a rueful smile, Humphries said, “I want your wife, but she’s chosen you instead.”

  Fuchs slowly got up from his chair, big thick-fingered hands clenching into fists. Every eye in the pub was on him, every breath held.

  Amanda glanced from Fuchs to Humphries and back again. She looked close to panic. She was a strikingly beautiful woman, with a wide-eyed innocent face and lusciously curved figure that made men fantasize and women stare with unalloyed envy. Even in a plain white jumpsuit she looked utterly stunning.

  “Lars,” Amanda whispered. “Please.”

  Humphries raised both hands, palms out. “Perhaps I phrased myself poorly. I didn’t come here for a fight.”

  “Then why did you come?” Fuchs asked in a low growl.

  “To give you a wedding present,” Humphries replied, smiling again. “To show that there’s no hard feelings … so to speak.”

  “A present?” Amanda asked.

  “If you’ll accept it from me,” said Humphries.

  “What is it?” Fuchs asked.

  “Starpower 1.”

  Amanda’s china blue eyes went so wide that white showed all around them. “The ship?”

  “It’s yours, if you’ll have it. I’ll even pay for the refurbishment necessary to make it spaceworthy again.”

  The crowd stirred, sighed, began muttering. Fuchs looked down at Amanda, saw that she was awed by Humphries’s offer.

  Humphries said, “You can use it to return to the Belt and start mining asteroids. There’s plenty of rocks out there for you to claim and develop.”

  Despite himself, Fuchs was impressed. “That’s… very generous of you, sir.”

  Humphries put on his smile again. With a careless wave of his hand, he said, “You newlyweds need some source of income. Go out and claim a couple of rocks, bring back their ores, and you’ll be fixed for life.”

  “Very generous,” Fuchs muttered.

  Humphries put out his hand. Fuchs hesitated a moment, then gripped it in his heavy paw; engulfed it, actually. “Thank you, Mr. Humphries,” he said, pumping Humphries’s arm vigorously. “Thank you so much.”

  Amanda said nothing.

  Humphries disengaged himself and, without another word, walked out of the bar. The crowd stirred at last and broke into dozens of conversations. Several people crowded around Fuchs and Amanda, congratulating them, offering to work on their craft. The Pelican’s proprietor declared drinks on the house and there was a general rush toward the bar.

  Pancho Lane, though, sidled through the crowd and out the door into the tunnel, where Humphries was walking alone toward the power stairs that led down to his mansion at Selene’s lowest level. In a few long-legged lunar strides she caught up to him.

  “I thought they threw you out of Selene,” she said.

  Humphries had to look up at her. Pancho was lean and lanky, her skin a light mocha, not much darker than a white woman would get in the burning sunshine of her native west Texas. She kept her hair cropped close, a tight dark skullcap of ringlets.

  He made a sour face. “My lawyers are working on an appeal. They can’t exile me without due process.”

  “And that could take years, huh?”

  “At the very least.”

  Pancho would gladly have stuffed him into a rocket and fired him off to Pluto. Humphries had sabotaged Starpower 1 on its first—and, so far, only—mission to the Belt. Dan Randolph had died because of him. It took an effort of will for her to control her temper.

  As calmly as she could manage, Pancho said, “You were pretty damn generous back there.”

  “A gesture to true love,” he replied, without slowing his pace.

  “Yeah. Sure.” Pancho easily matched his stride.

  “What else?”

  “For one thing, that spacecraft ain’t yours to give away. It belongs to—”

  “Belonged,” Humphries snapped. “Past tense. We wrote it off the books.”

  “Wrote it off? When? How in hell can you do that?”

  Humphries actually laughed. “You see, Ms. Director? There are a few tricks to being on the board that a greasemonkey like you doesn’t know about.”

  “I guess,” Pancho admitted. “But I’ll learn ’em.”

  “Of course you will.”

  Pancho was newly elected to the board of directors of Astro Manufacturing, over Humphries’s stern opposition. It had been Dan Randolph’s dying wish.

  “So we’ve written off Starpower 1 after just one flight?”

  “It’s already obsolescent,” said Humphries.
“The ship proved the fusion drive technology. Now we can build better spacecraft, specifically designed for asteroid mining.”

  “And you get to play Santy Claus for Amanda and Lars.”

  Humphries shrugged.

  The two of them walked along the nearly-empty tunnel until they came to the power stairs leading downward.

  Pancho grabbed Humphries by the shoulder, stopping him at the top of the moving stairs. “I know what you’re up to,” she said.

  “Do you?”

  “You figger Lars’ll go battin’ out to the Belt and leave Mandy here in Selene.”

  “I suppose that’s a possibility,” Humphries said, shaking free of her grip.

  “Then you can move in on her.”

  Humphries started to reply, then hesitated. His face grew serious. At last he said, “Pancho, has it ever occurred to you that I really love Amanda? I do, you know.”

  Pancho knew Humphries’s reputation as a womanizer. She had seen plenty of evidence of it.

  “You might tell yourself that you love her, Humpy, but that’s just because she’s the only woman between here and Lubbock that won’t flop inta bed with you.”

  He smiled coldly. “Does that mean that you would?”

  “In your dreams!”

  Humphries laughed and started down the stairs. For a few moments Pancho watched him dwindling away, then she turned and headed back toward the Pelican Bar.

  As Humphries rode down to Selene’s bottommost level, he thought, Fuchs is an academic, the kind who’s never had two pennies in his hands at the same time. Let him go out to the Belt. Let him see how much money he can make, and all the things that money can buy. And while he’s doing it, I’ll be here at Amanda’s side.

  By the time he reached his palatial home, Humphries was almost happy.

  DATA BANK: THE ASTEROID BELT

  Millions of chunks of rock and metal float silently, endlessly, through the deep emptiness of interplanetary space. The largest of them, Ceres, is barely a thousand kilometers wide. Most of them are much smaller, ranging from irregular chunks a few kilometers long down to the size of pebbles. They contain more metals and minerals, more natural resources, than the entire Earth can provide.

  They are the bonanza, the El Dorado, the Comstock Lode, the gold and silver and iron and everything-else mines of the twenty-first century. There are hundreds of millions of billions of tons of high grade ores in the asteroids. They hold enough real wealth to make each man, woman, and child of the entire human race into a millionaire. And then some.

  The first asteroid was discovered shortly after midnight on January 1, 1801, by a Sicilian monk who happened to be an astronomer. While others were celebrating the new century, Giuseppi Piazzi was naming the tiny point of light he saw in his telescope Ceres after the pagan goddess of Sicily. Perhaps an unusual attitude for a pious monk, but Piazzi was a Sicilian, after all.

  By the advent of the twenty-first century, more than fifteen thousand asteroids had been discovered by earthbound astronomers: As the human race began to expand its habitat to the Moon and to explore Mars, millions more were found.

  Technically, they are planetoids, little planets, chunks of rock and metal floating in the dark void of space, leftovers from the creation of the Sun and planets some four and a half billion years ago. Piazzi correctly referred to them as planetoids, but in 1802 William Herschel (who had earlier discovered the giant planet Uranus) called them asteroids, because in the telescope their pinpoints of light looked like stars rather than the disks of planets. Piazzi was correct, but Herschel was far more famous and influential. We call them asteroids to this day.

  Several hundred of the asteroids are in orbits that near the Earth, but most of them by far circle around the Sun in a broad swath in deep space between the orbits of Mars and giant Jupiter. This Asteroid Belt is centered more than six hundred million kilometers from Earth, four times farther from the Sun than our homeworld.

  Although this region is called the Asteroid Belt, the asteroids are not strewn so thickly that they represent a hazard to space navigation. Far from it. The so-called Belt is a region of vast emptiness, dark and lonely and very far from human civilization.

  Until the invention of the Duncan fusion drive the Asteroid Belt was too far from the Earth/Moon system to be of economic value. Once fusion propulsion became practical, however, the Belt became the region where prospectors and miners could make fortunes for themselves, or die in the effort.

  Many of them died. More than a few were killed.

  CHAPTER 1

  THREE YEARS LATER

  I said it would be simple,” Lars Fuchs repeated. “I did not say it would be easy.”

  George Ambrose—Big George to everyone who knew him—scratched absently at his thick red beard as he gazed thoughtfully out through the window of Starpower 1’s bridge toward the immense looming dark bulk of the asteroid Ceres. “I di’n’t come out here to get involved in daft schemes, Lars,” he said. His voice was surprisingly high and sweet for such a shaggy mastodon of a man.

  For a long moment the only sound in the compartment was the eternal hum of electrical equipment. Then Fuchs pushed between the two pilots’ seats to drift toward Big George. Stopping himself with a touch of his hand against the metal overhead, he said in an urgent whisper, “We can do it. Given time and resources.”

  “It’s fookin’ insane,” George muttered. But he kept staring out at the asteroid’s rock-strewn, pockmarked surface.

  They made an odd pair: the big, bulky Aussie with his shaggy brick-red mane and beard, hovering weightlessly beside the dark, intense, thickset Fuchs. Three years in the Belt had changed Fuchs somewhat: he was still burly, barrel-chested, but he had let his chestnut brown hair grow almost to his collar, and the earring he wore was now a polished chip of asteroidal copper. A slim bracelet of copper circled his left wrist. Yet in their individual ways, both men looked powerful, determined, even dangerous. “Living inside Ceres is bad for our health,” Fuchs said.

  George countered, “Plenty of radiation protection from the rock.”

  “It’s the microgravity,” Fuchs said earnestly. “It’s not good for us, physically.”

  “I like it.”

  “But the bones become so brittle. Dr. Cardenas says the rate of fractures is rising steeply. You’ve seen that yourself, haven’t you?”

  “Maybe,” George half-admitted. Then he grinned. “But th’ sex is fookin’ fantastic!”

  Fuchs scowled at the bigger man. “Be serious, George.”

  Without taking his eyes off Ceres’s battered face, George said, “Okay, you’re right. I know it. But buildin’ a bloody O’Neill habitat?”

  “It doesn’t have to be that big, not like the L-5 habitats around Earth. Just big enough to house the few hundred people here in Ceres. At first.”

  George shook his shaggy head. “You know how big a job you’re talkin’ about? Just the life support equipment alone would cost a mint. And then some.”

  “No, no. That’s the beauty of my scheme,” Fuchs said, with a nervous laugh. “We simply purchase spacecraft and put them together. They become the habitat. And they already have all the life support equipment and radiation shielding built into them. We won’t need their propulsion units at all, so the price will be much lower than you think.”

  “Then you want to spin the whole fookin’ kludge to an Earth-normal g?”

  “Lunar normal,” Fuchs answered. “One-sixth g is good enough. Dr. Cardenas agrees.”

  George scratched at his thick, unkempt beard. “I dunno, Lars. We’ve been livin’ inside the rock okay. Why go to all this trouble and expense?”

  “Because we have to!” Fuchs insisted. “Living in microgravity is dangerous to our health. We must build a better habitat for ourselves.”

  George looked unconvinced, but he muttered, “Lunar g, you say?”

  “One-sixth normal Earth gravity. No more than that.”

  “How much will it cost?”

 
Fuchs blinked once. “We can buy the stripped-down spacecraft from Astro Corporation. Pancho is offering a very good price.”

  “How much?”

  “The preliminary figures work out…” Fuchs hesitated, took a breath, then said, “We can do it if all the prospectors and miners put in ten percent of their income.”

  George grunted. “A tithe, huh?”

  “Ten percent isn’t much.”

  “A lot of us rock rats don’t make any income at all, some years.”

  “I know,” said Fuchs. “I factored that into the cost estimate. Of course, we’ll have to pay off the spacecraft over twenty- or thirty-year leases. Like a mortgage on a house, Earthside.”

  “So you want everybody here in Ceres to take on a twenty-year debt?”

  “We can pay it off sooner, perhaps. A few really big strikes could pay for the entire project all by themselves.”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  With burning intensity, Fuchs asked, “Will you do it? If you agree, most of the other prospectors will, too.”

  “Whyn’t you get one of the corporations t’ do it?” George asked. “Astro or Humphries…” He stopped when he saw the look on Fuchs’s face.

  “Not Humphries,” Fuchs growled. “Never him or his company. Never.”

  “Okay. Astro, then.”

  Fuchs’s scowl shifted into a troubled frown. “I’ve spoken to Pancho about it. The Astro board would not vote for it. They will sell stripped-down spacecraft to us, but they won’t commit to building the habitat. They don’t see a profit from it.”

  George grunted. “Lot they care if we snap our bones.”

  “But you care,” Fuchs said eagerly. “It’s our problem, George; we have to solve it. And we can, if you’ll help.”

  Running a beefy hand through his thick mop of red hair, Big George said, “You’re gonna need a techie team to do the integration job. There’s more to puttin’ this habitat of yours together than just connectin’ Tinkertoys, y’know. You’ll need a flock of geek boys.”