The Precipice Read online

  The access shafts had been drilled upward to the outside, on the side of the mountain. The first of the access shafts opened into an emergency shelter where there were pressure suits and spare oxygen bottles, in case the cable-car system overhead broke down.

  “And here we are,” Dan said.

  In the scant light from the flashlights that Dan and George played around the tunnel walls, Pancho saw a set of metal rungs leading up to another hatch.

  “There’s a tempo just above us,” he said as George started climbing the ladder. “We’ll jack into its electrical power supply to run the dewar’s cryostat.”

  “Won’t that show up on the grid monitors?” Pancho asked.

  Shaking his head, Dan replied, “Nope. The tempos have their own solar panels and batteries. Completely independent. The panels are even up on poles to keep ‘em out of the dust.”

  Pancho heard the hatch groan open. Looking up, she saw George squeeze his bulk through its narrow diameter.

  “How’re we gonna get Sis’s dewar through that hatch?” she demanded.

  “There’s a bigger hatch for equipment,” Dan said.

  As if to prove the point, a far wider hatch squealed open over their heads. Dim auxiliary lighting from the tempo filtered down to them.

  Even with the little winch from the tempo, it was a struggle to wrestle the bulky dewar and its equipment up through the hatch. Pancho worried that Sis would be jostled and crumpled in her liquid nitrogen bath. But at last they had Sis hooked up in the temporary shelter. The dewar rested on the floor and all the gauges were in the green.

  “You’ll have to come back here once a month or so to check up on everything. Maybe once every six or seven months you’ll have to top off the nitrogen supply.”

  A thought struck her. “What about when I’m on the mission?”

  “I’ll do it,” George said without hesitation. “Be glad to.”

  “How the hell can I thank you guys?”

  Dan chuckled softly. “I’m just making certain that my best pilot isn’t blackmailed by Humphries into working against me. And George…”

  The big Aussie looked suddenly embarrassed.

  “I used to live in one of the tempos,” he said, his tenor voice softer than usual. “Back when I was a fugitive, part of the underground. Back before Dan took me under ‘is wing.”

  Dan said, “This is a sort of homecoming for George.”

  “Yeah,” George said. “Reminds me of the bad old days. Almost brings a fookin’ tear to my eye.”

  Dan laughed and the Aussie laughed with him. Pancho just stood there, feeling enormously grateful to them both.

  STARPOWER, LTD.

  Dan had offered space in Astro Corporation’s office complex for the headquarters of the fledgling Starpower, Ltd. Humphries had countered with an offer of a suite in his own Humphries Space Systems offices. Stavenger suggested a compromise, and Starpower’s meager offices opened in the other tower on the Grand Plaza, where Selene’s governmental departments were housed.

  Yet Stavenger had not been invited to this working meeting. Dan sat on one side of the small conference table, Martin Humphries on the other. The room’s windowless walls were bare, the furniture strictly functional.

  “I hear you’ve been having some problems with hackers,” Dan said.

  For just a flash of a second Martin Humphries looked startled. He quickly regained his composure. “Whoever told you that?” he asked calmly.

  Dan smiled knowingly. “Not much happens around here without the grapevine getting wind of it.”

  Humphries leaned back in his chair. Dan noticed that it was a personally fitted recliner, unlike the other chairs around the table, which were inexpensive padded plastic.

  “The leak’s been fixed,” Humphries said. “No damage done.”

  “That’s good,” said Dan.

  “Speaking of the grapevine,” Humphries said lightly, “I heard a funny one just this morning.”

  “Oh?”

  “There’s a story going around that you and a couple of your employees stole a dewar from the catacombs last night.”

  “Really?”

  “Sounds like something out of an old horror flick.”

  “Imagine that,” Dan said.

  “Curious. Why would you do something like that?”

  Trying to find a comfortable position on his chair, Dan replied, “Let’s not spend the morning chasing rumors. We’re here to set our budget requirements.”

  Humphries nodded. “I’ll get one of my people to track it down.”

  Or one of my people, Dan grumbled to himself. But it’ll be okay as long as he can’t find Pancho’s sister. Only she and George and I know where we stashed her.

  He said to Humphries, “Okay, you do that. Now about the budget…”

  They spent the next hour going over every item in the budget that Humphries’s staff had prepared for Starpower, Ltd. Dan saw that there were no frills: no allocations for publicity or travel or anything except building the fusion drive, testing it enough to meet the IAA’s requirements for human rating, and then flying it with a crew of four to the Asteroid Belt.

  “I’ve been thinking that it makes more sense to up the crew to six,” Dan said.

  Humphries’s brows rose. “Six? Why do we need two extra people?”

  “We’ve got two pilots, a propulsion engineer, and a geologist. Two geologists would be better… or a geologist and some other specialist, maybe a geochemist.”

  “That makes five,” Humphries said warily.

  “I want to keep an extra slot open. Design the mission for six. As we get closer to the launch, we’ll probably find out we need another hand.”

  Suspicion showed clearly in Humphries’s face. “Adding two more people means extra supplies, extra mass.”

  “We can accommodate it. The fusion system’s got plenty of power.”

  “Extra cost, too.”

  “A slight increment,” Dan said easily. “Down in the noise.”

  Humphries looked unconvinced, but instead of arguing he asked, “Have you picked a specific asteroid yet?”

  Dan tapped at his handheld computer, and the wall screen that covered one entire side of the conference room displayed a chart of the Belt. Thousands of thin ellipsoidal lines representing orbital paths filled the screen.

  “It looks like the scrawling that a bunch of kindergarten brats would make,” Humphries muttered.

  “Sort of,” said Dan. “There’s a lot of rocks moving around out there.”

  He tapped at the handheld again and the lines winked out, leaving the screen deep black with tiny pinpoints of lights glittering here and there.

  “This is what it really looks like,” Dan said. “A whole lot of emptiness with a few pebbles floating around here and there.”

  “Some of those pebbles are kilometers across,” Humphries said.

  “Yep,” Dan replied. “The biggest one is—”

  “Ceres. Discovered by a priest on New Year’s Day, 1801.”

  “You’ve been doing your homework,” Dan said.

  Humphries smiled, pleased. “It’s a little over a thousand kilometers across.”

  “If that one ever hit the Earth…”

  “Goodbye to everything. Like the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.”

  “That’s just what they need down there,” Dan muttered, “an extinction-level impact.”

  “Let’s get back to work,” Humphries said crisply. ‘There’s no big rock heading Earth’s way.”

  “None has been found,” Dan corrected. “Yet.”

  “You know,” Humphries said, musing, “if we were really smart we’d run a demo flight to Mars and do a little prospecting on those two little moons. They’re captured asteroids, after all.”

  “The IAA has ruled the whole Mars system off-limits for commercial development. That includes Deimos and Pho-bos.”

  Hunching closer to the conference table, Humphries said, “But we could just do it as a
scientific mission. You know, send a couple geologists to chip off some rock samples, analyze what they’re really made of.”

  “They already have pretty good data on that,” Dan pointed out.

  “But it could show potential investors that the fusion drive works and there’s plenty of natural resources in the asteroids.”

  Frowning, Dan said, “Even if we could get the IAA to allow us to do it—”

  “I can,” Humphries said confidently.

  “Even so, people have been going to Mars for years now. Decades. Investors won’t be impressed by a Mars flight”

  “Even if our fusion buggy gets there over a weekend?”

  Firmly, Dan said, “We’ve got to get to the Belt. That’s what will impress investors. Show them that the fusion drive changes the economic picture.”

  “I suppose,” Humphries said reluctantly.

  “And we’ve got to lay our hands on a metallic asteroid, one of the nickel-iron type. That’s where the heavy metals are, the stuff you can’t get from the Moon or even the NEAs.”

  “Gold,” Humphries said, brightening. “Silver and platinum. Do you have any idea of what this is going to do to the precious metals market?”

  Dan blinked at him. I’m trying to move the Earth’s industrial base into space and he’s playing games with the prices for gold. We just don’t think the same way; we don’t have the same goals or the same values, even.

  Grinning slyly, Humphries said, “We could get a lot of capital from people who’d be willing to pay us not to bring those metals to Earth.”

  “Maybe,” Dan admitted.

  “I know at least three heads of governments who would personally buy into Starpower just to keep us from dumping precious metals onto the market.”

  “And I’ll bet,” Dan growled, “that those governments rule nations where the people are poor, starving, and sinking lower every year.”

  Humphries shrugged. “We’re not going to solve all the world’s problems, Dan.”

  “We ought to at least try.”

  “That’s the difference between us,” Humphries said, jabbing a finger in Dan’s direction. “You want to be a savior. All I want is to make a little money.”

  Dan looked at him for a long, silent moment. He’s right, Dan thought. Once upon a time all I was interested in was making money. And now I don’t give a damn. Not anymore. None of it makes any sense to me. Since Jane died—god, I’ve turned into a do-gooder!

  Leaning forward again, toward Dan, his expression suddenly intense, earnest, Humphries said, “Listen to me, Dan. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make money. You can’t save the world. Nobody can. The best thing we can do is to feather our own nests and—”

  “I’ve got to try,” Dan interrupted. “I can’t sit here and just let them drown or starve or sink into another dark age.”

  “Okay, okay.” Humphries raised both hands placatingly. “You go right ahead and beat your head against that wall, if you want to. Maybe the asteroids are the answer. Maybe you’ll save the world, one way or the other. In the meantime, we can clean up a tidy little profit doing it”

  “Yep.”

  “If we don’t make a profit, Dan, we can’t do anybody any good. We’ve got to make money out of this or go out of business. You know that. We can’t do this mission at cost We’ve got to show a profit”

  “Or at least,” Dan countered, “a profit potential.”

  Humphries considered the idea for a moment, then agreed, “A profit potential. Okay, I’ll settle for that. We need to show the financial community—”

  “What’s left of it”

  Humphries actually laughed. “Oh, don’t worry about the financial community. Men like my father will always be all right, no matter what happens. Even if the whole world drowns, they’ll sit on a mountaintop somewhere, fat and happy, and wait for the waters to go down.”

  Dan could barely hide his disgust. “Come on, let’s get back to work. We’ve had enough philosophy for one morning.”

  Humphries agreed with a smile and a nod.

  Hours later, after Dan had left the conference room, Humphries went back to his own office and sank into his high-backed swivel chair. As he leaned back and gazed up at the paneled ceiling, the chair adjusted its contours to accommodate his body. Humphries relaxed, smiling broadly. He missed it, he said to himself. The numbers are right there in the budget and Randolph went past them as if they were written in invisible ink.

  It was so easy to distract Randolph’s attention. Just get him started on his idiotic crusade. He blanks out to everything else. He wants to go to the Belt to save the world. Sounds like Columbus wanting to reach China by sailing in the wrong direction.

  Humphries laughed out loud. It’s right there in the budget and he paid no attention to it at all. Or maybe he thinks it’s just a backup, a redundancy measure. After all, it’s not a terribly large sum. Once the nanos have built one fusion system, it only costs peanuts to have them build another one. * The real expense is in the design and programming, and that’s all amortized on the first model. All the backup costs is the raw materials and the time of a few people to monitor ^ the process. The nanos work for nothing.

  He laughed again. Randolph thinks he’s so fricking smart, sneaking Pancho’s sister out of the catacombs. Afraid I’ll terminate her? Or does he want to keep Pancho under his thumb? I won’t be able to use her anymore, but so what, who needs her now? I’ll be building a second fusion drive and he doesn’t even know it!

  SPACEPORT ARMSTRONG

  Pancho stared across the desolate, blast-scarred expanse of the launch center and wrinkled her nose unhappily. “It sure looks like a kludge.”

  Standing beside her in the little observation bubble, Dan had to agree. The fusion drive looked like the work of a drunken plumber: bulbous spheres of diamond that sparkled in the harsh unfiltered sunlight drenching the lunar surface, the odd shapes of the MHD channel, the pumps that fed the fuel to the reactor chamber, radiator panels and the multiple rocket nozzles, all connected by a surrealistic maze of pipes and conduits. The entire contraption was mounted on the platform-like deck of an ungainly, spraddle-legged booster that stood squat and silent on the circular launch pad of smoothed lunar concrete.

  The observation chamber was nothing more than a bubble of glassteel poking up above the barren floor of Alphonsus’s giant ringwall. Barely big enough for two people to stand in, the chamber was connected by a tunnel to the control center of the launch complex.

  “We didn’t build her for beauty,” Dan said. “Besides, she’ll look better once we’ve mated her with the other modules.”

  Subdued voices crackled from the intercom speaker set into the smoothed wall of the chamber just below the rim of the transparent blister.

  “Pan Asia oh-one-niner on final descent,” said the pilot of an incoming shuttle.

  “We have you on final, oh-one-niner,” answered the calm female voice of a flight controller. “Pad four.”

  “Pad four, copy.”

  Dan looked up into the star-flecked sky and saw a fleeting glint of light.

  “Retrorockets,” Pancho muttered.

  “On the curve,” said the flight controller.

  Another quick burst. Dan could make out the shuttle now, a dark angular shape falling slowly out of the sky, slim landing legs extended.

  “Down the pipe, oh-one-niner,” said the woman controller. She sounded almost bored.

  It all seemed to be happening in slow motion. Dan watched the shuttle come down and settle on the pad farthest away from the one on which the fusion rocket was sitting, waiting for clearance to take off. The shuttle pilot announced, “Oh-one-niner is down. All thrusters off.”

  Pancho let out a puff of pent-up breath.

  Surprised, Dan asked, “White knuckles? You?”

  She grinned, embarrassed. “I always get torqued up, unless I’m driving the buggy.”

  Glancing at his wristwatch, Dan said, “Well, we ought to get clearance
to launch as soon as they offload the shuttle.”

  With a nod, Pancho said, “I’d better get suited up.”

  “Right,” said Dan.

  The fusion system itself was the last part of their spacecraft to be launched into orbit around the Moon. The propellant tanks and the crew and logistics modules were already circling a hundred kilometers overhead. Pancho would supervise the assembly robots that would link all the pieces together.

  Dan went with her along the tunnel and into 1he locker room where the astronauts donned their spacesuits. Amanda was already there, ready to help check her out. Euan realized it had been a long time since he’d checked out anyone or donned a spacesuit himself. Spaceflight is so routine nowadays that you can come and go from the Earth to the Moon just like you ride a plane or a bus, he thought. But another voice in his head said, You’re too old to be working in space. Over the years you’ve taken as big a radiation dose as you’re allowed… and then some.

  He felt old and pretty useless as he watched Pancho, worm into the spacesuit while Amanda hovered beside her, checking the seals and connections. Like Pancho, Amanda was wearing light tan flight coveralls. Dan noticed how nicely she filled them out.

  Well, he sighed to himself, at least you’re not too old to appreciate a good-looking woman.

  But he turned and headed for the tunnel that connected the spaceport to Selene proper, feeling useless, wondering if Humphries was right and he was butting his head against a stonewall.

  As he started down the corridor that led to the connector tunnel, he saw Doug Stavenger coming up in the other direction, looking youthful and energetic and purposeful.

  Dammitall, he thought, Stavenger’s older than I am and he looks like a kid. Maybe I ought to get some nanotherapy.

  “Going to watch the launch?” Stavenger asked brightly.

  “Think I’ll go to the launch center and watch it from there.”

  “I like to watch from the observation bubble.”

  “I was just there,” Dan said.

  “Come on, let’s see the real thing instead of watching it on a screen.”

  Stavenger’s enthusiasm was contagious. Dan found himself striding along the narrow tunnel again, out to the bubble.