The Rock Rats gt-11 Read online

  Keeping those thoughts to himself, Humphries said without preamble as he stepped back to his desk, “We need to get rid of the rock rats.”

  If the statement surprised her, Verwoerd showed no hint of it. “Why should we?” she countered.

  “Simple economics. There’s so many of them out there claiming asteroids that they’re keeping the price of metals and minerals too low. Supply and demand. They’re overdoing the supply.”

  “Commodities prices are low, except for food products,” Verwoerd agreed.

  “And sinking,” Humphries pointed out. “But if we controlled the supply of raw materials—”

  “Which means controlling the rock rats.”

  “Right.”

  “We could stop selling them supplies,” Verwoerd suggested.

  Humphries waved a hand in the air. “They’d just buy their goods from Astro. I don’t want that.”

  She nodded.

  “No, I think our first step should be to establish a base of operations on Ceres.”

  “On Ceres?”

  “Ostensibly, it will be a depot for the supplies we sell to the rock rats,” Humphries said, sliding into his commodious high-backed chair. If he desired, the chair would massage his body or send waves of soothing warmth through him. At this moment, Humphries wanted neither.

  Verwoerd gave the appearance of thinking over his statement for several moments. “And actually?”

  “It’ll be a cover for putting our own people out there; a base for knocking the rock rats out of the Belt.”

  Verwoerd smiled coldly. “Once we open the base, we cut our prices for the supplies we sell the prospectors and miners.”

  “Cut our prices? Why?”

  “To get them buying from HSS and not Astro. Tie them to us.”

  Nodding, Humphries said, “We could give them more favorable terms for leasing spacecraft, too.”

  Now she took one of the upholstered chairs in front of his desk. Crossing her long legs absently, she said, “Better yet, lower the interest rates on purchase loans.”

  “No, no. I don’t want them to own the vessels. I want them to lease the spacecraft from us. I want them tied to Humphries Space Systems.”

  “Under contract to HSS?”

  Humphries leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. “Right. I want those rock rats working for me.”

  “At prices that you set,” she said.

  “We allow the prices for raw ores to keep going down,” Humphries mused. “We encourage the independents to bring in so much ore that the prices are forced constantly downward. That will drive them out of the field, sooner or later.”

  “Leaving only the people who are under contract to HSS,” Verwoerd agreed.

  “That way, we gain control of the costs of exploration and mining,” he said, “and on the other end we also control the prices for the refined metals and other resources that we sell to Selene and Earth.”

  “But individual rock rats could sell to companies on Earth on their own, independently,” she pointed out.

  “So what?” Humphries snapped. “They’ll just be undercutting each other until they drive themselves out of business. They’ll be cutting their own throats.”

  “Supply and demand,” Verwoerd murmured.

  “Yes. But when we get the rock rats working exclusively for us, we’ll control the supply. No matter what the demand, we’ll be able to control prices. And profits.”

  “A little on the devious side.” She smiled, though.

  “It worked for Rockefeller.”

  “Until the anti-trust laws were passed.”

  “There aren’t any anti-trust laws in the Belt,” Humphries said. “No laws at all, come to think of it.”

  Verwoerd hesitated, thinking, then said, “It will take some time to drive out all the independents. And there’s still Astro to consider.”

  “I’ll handle Astro when the time comes.”

  “Then you’ll have complete control of the Belt.”

  “Which means that in the long run it won’t cost us anything to set up a base on Ceres.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “That’s not exactly how the accounting department will see it.”

  He laughed. “Then why don’t we do it? Establish a base on Ceres and bring those rock rats under our control.”

  She gave him a long, careful look, a look that said, I know there’s more to this than you’re telling me. You’ve got a hidden agenda, and I’m pretty sure I know what it is.

  But aloud all she said was, “We can use this base on Ceres to centralize all the maintenance work, as well.”

  He nodded an acknowledgement to her. “Good idea.”

  “Offer the lowest possible terms on the maintenance contracts.”

  “Get the rock rats to come to HSS for maintenance,” he agreed.

  “Make them dependent on you.”

  He laughed again. “Gillette’s dictum.”

  She looked puzzled.

  “Give ’em the razor,” he explained. “Sell ’em the blades.”

  DOSSIER: OSCAR JIMINEZ

  The illegitimate son of an illegitimate son, Oscar Jiminez was picked up by the police in one of their periodic sweeps through the barrios of Manila when he was seven years old. He was small for his age, but already an expert at begging, picking pockets, and worming his way past electronic security systems that would have stopped someone bigger or less agile. The usual police tactic was to beat everyone mercilessly with their old-fashioned batons, rape the girls and the better-looking boys, then drive their prisoners far out into the countryside and leave them to fend for themselves. Until they got caught again. Oscar was lucky. Too small and scrawny to attract even the most perverse of the policemen, he was tossed from a moving police van into a roadside ditch, bleeding and covered with welts.

  The lucky part was that they had thrown him out near the entrance to the regional headquarters of the New Morality. The Philippines were still heavily Catholic, but Mother Church had grudgingly allowed the mostly Protestant reformers to operate in the island nation with only a minimum of interference. After all, the conservative bishops who ran the Philippine Church and the conservatives who ran the New Morality saw eye to eye on many issues, including birth control and strict obedience to moral authority. Moreover, the New Morality brought money from America into the Philippines. Some of it even trickled down enough to help the poor. So Oscar Jiminez became a ward of the New Morality. Under their stern tutelage his life of crime ended. He was sent to a New Morality school, where he learned that unrelenting psychological conditioning methods could be far worse than a police beating. Especially the conditioning sessions that used electric shock. Oscar swiftly became a model student.

  CHAPTER 4

  Kris Cardenas still looked little more than thirty. Even in a gritty, shabby one-room habitat carved out of one of Ceres’s countless natural crevices, she radiated the blonde, sapphire-blue-eyed, athletic-shouldered look of a California surfer. That was because her body was filled with therapeutic nanomachines, virus-sized contrivances that pulled apart molecules of fat and cholesterol in her bloodstream, repaired damaged cells, kept her skin smooth and her muscles taut, acted as a purposeful immune system to protect her body from invading microbes. Nanotechnology was forbidden on Earth; Dr. Kristine Cardenas, Nobel laureate and former director of Selene’s nanotechnology laboratory, was an exile on Ceres.

  For an exile who had chosen to live on the ragged frontier of human settlement, she looked happy and cheerful as she greeted Amanda and Lars Fuchs.

  “How are you two doing?” she asked as she ushered them into her quarters. The twisting tunnel outside her door was a natural lava tube, barely smoothed by human tools. The air out there was slightly hazy with fine dust; every time someone moved in Ceres they disturbed the rock dust, and the asteroid’s gravity was so slight that the dust hung in the air constantly.

  Amanda and Fuchs shuffled their feet across Cardenas’s bare roc
k floor and made their way to the room’s sofa—actually a pair of reclining seats scavenged from a spacecraft that had limped to Ceres and never made it out again. The seats still had safety harnesses dangling limply from them. Fuchs coughed slightly as he sat down.

  “I’ll turn up the air fans,” Cardenas said, gliding to the control panel set into the room’s far wall. “Settle the dust, make it easier to breathe.”

  Amanda heard a fan whine from somewhere behind the walls. Despite being dressed in a long-sleeved, high-buttoned jumpsuit, she felt chilled. The bare rock always felt cold to her touch. At least it was dry. And Cardenas had tried to brighten up the underground chamber with holowindows that showed views of wooded hillsides and flower gardens on Earth. She had even scented the air slightly with something that reminded Amanda of her childhood baths in real tubs with scads of hot water and fragrant soap.

  Cardenas pulled an old laboratory stool from her desk and perched on it before her visitors, locking her legs around its high rungs. “So, how are you?” she asked again.

  Fuchs cocked an eye at her. “That’s what we come to you to find out.”

  “Oh, your physical.” Cardenas laughed. “That’s tomorrow, at the clinic. How are you getting along? What’s the news?”

  With a glance at Amanda, Fuchs answered, “I think we’ll be able to go ahead with the habitat project.”

  “Really? Has Pancho agreed—”

  “Not with Astro’s help,” he said. “We’re going to do it ourselves.”

  Cardenas’s eyes narrowed slightly. Then she said, “Is that the wisest course of action, Lars?”

  “We really don’t have that much of a choice. Pancho would help us if she could, but Humphries will hamstring her as soon as she brings it up to the Astro board of directors. He doesn’t want us to improve our living conditions here.”

  “He’s going to establish a depot here,” Amanda said. “Humphries Space Systems will, that is.”

  “So you and the other rock rats are going to pursue this habitat program on your own?”

  “Yes,” said Fuchs, quite firmly.

  Cardenas said nothing. She clasped her knees and rocked back slightly on the stool, looking thoughtful.

  “We can do it,” Fuchs insisted.

  “You’ll need a team of specialists,” Cardenas said. “This isn’t something that you and your fellow prospectors can cobble together.”

  “Yes. I understand that.”

  Amanda said slowly, “Lars, I’ve been thinking. While you’re working on this habitat project you’ll have to stay here at Ceres, won’t you?”

  He nodded. “I’ve already given some thought to leasing Star-power to someone else and living here in the rock for the duration of the project.”

  “And how will you earn an income?” Cardenas interjected.

  He spread his hands. Before he could reply, though, Amanda said, “I think I know.”

  Fuchs looked at his wife, clearly puzzled.

  “We can become suppliers for the other prospectors,” Amanda said. “We can open our own warehouse.”

  Cardenas nodded.

  “We can deal through Astro,” Amanda went on, brightening with each word. “We’ll obtain our supplies from Pancho and sell them to the prospectors. We can sell supplies to the miners, too.”

  “Most of the mining teams work for Humphries,” Fuchs replied darkly. “Or Astro.”

  “But they still need supplies,” Amanda insisted. “Even if they get their equipment from the corporations, they’ll still need personal items: soap, entertainment videos, clothing…”

  Fuchs’s face was set in a grimace. “I don’t think you would want to handle the kinds of entertainment videos these prospectors buy.”

  Undaunted, Amanda said, “Lars, we could compete against Humphries Space Systems while you’re directing the habitat construction.”

  “Compete against Humphries.” Fuchs rolled the idea on his tongue, testing it. Then he broke into a rare grin. It made his broad, normally dour face light up. “Compete against Humphries,” he repeated. “Yes. Yes, we can do that.”

  Amanda saw the irony in it, although the others didn’t. The daughter of a small shopkeeper in Birmingham, she had grown up hating her middle-class background and the lower-class workers her father sold to. The boys were rowdy and lewd, at best, and they could just as easily become dangerously violent. The girls were viciously catty. Amanda discovered early that being stunningly beautiful was both an asset and a liability. She was noticed wherever she went; all she had to do was smile and breathe. The trick was, once noticed, to make people see beyond her physical presence, to recognize the highly intelligent person inside that tempting flesh.

  While still a teenager she learned how to use her good looks to get boys to do what she wanted, while using her sharp intellect to keep one jump ahead of them. She escaped her father’s home and fled to London, took lessons to learn to speak with a polished accent, and—to her complete astonishment—found that she had the brains and skill to be a first-rate astronaut. She was hired by Astro Manufacturing Corporation to fly missions between Earth and the Moon. With her breathless looks and seeming naiveté, almost everyone assumed she had slept her way to the top of her profession. Yet the truth was just the opposite; Amanda had to work hard to fend off the men—and women—who wanted to bed her.

  It was at Selene that she had met Martin Humphries. He had been her gravest danger: he wanted Amanda and he had the power to take what he wanted. Amanda had married Lars Fuchs in part to get away from Humphries, and Lars knew it.

  Now, here out on the fringe of humankind’s expansion through the solar system, she was about to become a shopkeeper herself. How father would howl at that, she thought. The father’s revenge: the child becomes just like the parent, in the end.

  “Humphries won’t like competition,” Cardenas pointed out.

  “Good!” exclaimed Fuchs.

  Shaken out of her reverie, Amanda said, “Competition will be good for the prospectors, though. And the miners, too. It will lower the prices they have to pay for everything.”

  “I agree,” said Cardenas. “But Humphries won’t like it. Not one little bit.”

  Fuchs laughed aloud. “Good,” he repeated.

  CHAPTER 5

  TWO YEARS LATER

  As soon as he stepped out onto the surface of Ceres, Fuchs realized that this was the first time he’d been in a spacesuit in months. The suit still smelled new; he’d only used it once or twice. Mein gott, he said to himself, I’ve become a bourgeois. The suit didn’t fit all that well, either; the arms and legs were a trifle too long to be comfortable. His first venture into space had been aboard Starpower 1’s ill-fated maiden voyage, five years earlier. He’d been a graduate student then, heading for a doctorate in planetary geochemistry. He never returned to school. Instead, he married Amanda and became a rock rat, a prospector seeking his fortune among the asteroids of the Belt. For nearly two years now, he had abandoned even that to run a supply depot on Ceres and supervise the habitat project. Helvetia Ltd. was the name Fuchs had given his fledgling business, incorporating it under the regulations of the International Astronautical Authority. He was Helvetia’s president, Amanda its treasurer, and Pancho Lane a vice president who never interfered in the company’s operations; she seldom even bothered to visit its headquarters on Ceres. Helvetia bought most of its supplies from Astro Corporation and sold them to the rock rats at the lowest markup Amanda would allow. Humphries Space Systems ran a competing operation, and Fuchs gleefully kept his prices as low as possible, forcing Humphries to cut his own prices or be driven off Ceres altogether. The competition was getting to the cutthroat level; it was a race to see who would drive whom out of business. The rock rats obviously preferred dealing with Fuchs to dealing with HSS. To his pleasant surprise, Helvetia Ltd. prospered, even though Fuchs considered himself a mediocre businessman. He was too quick to extend credit on nothing more than a rock rat’s earnest promise to repay once he’d stru
ck it rich. He preferred a handshake to the small print of a contract. Amanda constantly questioned his judgment, but enough of those vague promises came through to make Helvetia profitable. We’re getting rich, Fuchs realized happily as his bank account at Selene fattened. Despite all of Humphries’s tricks, we are getting rather wealthy.

  Now, gazing around the bleak battered surface of Ceres, he realized all over again how lonely and desolate this place was. How far from civilization. The sky was filled with stars, such a teeming profusion of them that the old familiar constellations were lost in their abundance. There was no friendly old Moon or blue glowing Earth hanging nearby; even the Sun looked small and weak, dwarfed by distance. A strange, alien sky: stark and pitiless. Ceres’s surface was broodingly dark, cold, pitted by thousands of craterlets, rough and uneven, boulders and smaller rocks scattered around everywhere. The horizon was so close it looked as if he were standing on a tiny platform rather than a solid body. For a giddy instant Fuchs felt that if he didn’t hang on, he’d fall up, off this worldlet, into the wild wilderness of stars.

  Almost distraught, he caught sight of the unfinished habitat rising above the naked horizon, glittering even in the weak sunlight. It steadied him. It might be a ramshackle collection of old, used, and stripped-down spacecraft, but it was the handiwork of human beings out here in this vast, dark emptiness.

  A gleam of light flashed briefly. He knew it was the little shuttlecraft bringing Pancho and Ripley back to the asteroid’s surface. Fuchs waited by the squat structure of the airlock that led down into the living sections below ground.

  The shuttle disappeared past the horizon, but in a few minutes it came up over the other side, close enough to see its insect-thin legs and the bulbous canopy of its crew module. Pancho had insisted on flying the bird herself, flexing her old astronaut muscles.

  Now she brought it in to a smooth landing on the scoured ground about a hundred meters from the airlock.