Mining the Oort (7 page)

"Look!" Dekker's mother cried.

Because—back to the cameras in orbit—all those myriad chunks of rubble turned dazzlingly bright at once as they struck the thin Martian atmosphere, the heat of friction producing a thousand blinding meteors. Switch again, this time to the remote ground-based cameras in their dugouts on the slope of Olympus Mons. . . .

And the fragments hit.

They were not tiny. The biggest was more than ten million tons. Even some of the smaller ones were the size of a skycraper. When they struck, they made H-bomb-sized fountains of cloud, red-lit and white-lit and yellow, with all that kinetic energy transformed at once into impact heat.

The people in Sunpoint City never did feel the shudder of that impact—they were too far away—but the needles of their seismographs jumped right off the tapes.

When Gerti DeWoe tucked her son in bed at last he said drowsily, "I guess we won't see any difference right away?"

His mother didn't laugh at him. She just shook her head. "Not right away, no. It'll be years before Mars has any decent atmosphere. And then we won't be able to breathe it directly, you know. There'll be too much carbon dioxide, not enough free oxygen, not much nitrogen at all. We'll have to find the nitrogen somewhere else. And then we'll need to seed the blue-green algae, and some kind of lichens, to start photosynthesis going so we'll have free oxygen, and then—But, oh, Dekker," she said, looking more excited and young than he had ever seen her, "what it's going to mean to us! Can you imagine crops growing under the naked
sky
? And the climate getting really
warm
?"

"Like Earth," he said bitterly.

"Better than Earth! There aren't as many of us, and we get along better!"

"I know," Dekker said, because he did know. Everyone on Mars had been told over and over why they needed to borrow all that money to get all those comets—water for the crops, water to make oxygen for animals and themselves.
Lakes
. Maybe even
rain
. The warming greenhouse effect that the water vapor would provide. The kinetic energy of each cometary impact transformed to heat, doing its part to warm the planet up.

He asked, "Do you think we'll live to see it?"

His mother hesitated. "Well, no, Dekker. At least I won't, or at least not to see the best part of it, because it'll be a lot of years. But maybe you will, or your children, or your children's children. . . ."

"Hell," Dekker said, disappointed. "I don't want to wait that long!"

"Well, then," his mother said, grinning fondly, "then when you grow up you'd better get out there and help make it happen faster!"

"You know," Dekker said, beginning to yawn, "I think that's what I'll do.

13

The funny thing was that Dekker DeWoe meant it. He did what he said he was going to do—sort of—though it didn't work out exactly the way he had planned, and it certainly didn't look as though it would work out at all for a while.

He started out well enough. Right that very week, before the Sagdayev people went back to their quite-unharmed home, Dekker took the first step. He made a trip all by himself to the Oort Corporation headquarters in Sunpoint City; but when he told the clerk he wanted to fill out an application for training at the academy on Earth, she naturally said, "You're too young."

"I won't always be," he said.

She shook her head. "But you are now. There's no point. Come back when you're—what is it?—" Because, of course, the clerk was an Earthie, too, and so she had to calculate. "—when you're twelve or thirteen, anyway."

"I will. But I want to fill out the application now."

"You're not supposed to do it until you're of age," she said, snapping her lips shut at the end of the sentence as though the subject were closed. It wasn't. Dekker didn't give up. He stayed there, reasoning patiently with the woman, and finally, maybe because she was just in a good mood or maybe because even an Earthie woman might have a soft spot for a determined young kid, she took his name and entered it in a "hold" file. She even gave him a study list—all the subjects he would need to know to pass the academy's entrance test—and, though she told him several times just how bad the odds against his acceptance were, she wished him luck.

That surprised him. "Why do I need luck?" he asked. "If I pass the test, they ought to let me in."

"But I thought you knew. They give the admission test at the academy itself. Back on Earth."

"So?"

She laughed, almost affectionately. "So how are you going to get there to take the test, Dekker DeWoe? Are you going to pay the fare yourself?"

That, of course, was the question. Dekker thought about it all the way back to his room, and talked about it with his mother as soon as he saw her.

The problem at root—like almost all Martian problems, at root—was money. The Martians didn't have it. They didn't have Earth currency units to pay for an applicant's fare to Earth except by diverting the price of the fare—the highly
exorbitant
price of the fare, far higher than the operating costs of a spacecraft justified—from other things that the planet needed even more.

It wasn't that Gerti DeWoe—and Dekker himself, when he got old enough to do anything about it—couldn't save the money, it was that the money they saved wasn't worth anything for that purpose. Their money wasn't Earthie currency units. If they had been allowed to buy cues at the official exchange rate they could have managed it, but there were far more important uses for every cue Mars could get its hands on than sending one more young person out to work in the Oort.

"But when I'm there I can pay my way!" Dekker complained. "They pay the Oort miners in cues. They even pay an allowance at the academy itself—I could even send money home!"

"They do," his mother agreed. "You would. It's the getting you there that's hard, Dek."

"The fare, right. But I don't understand. Look, we're supposed to pay off the Bonds by shipping food to Earth, right? So why does it cost less to ship, I don't know, fifty tons of wheat to Earth than to ship me?"

She said somberly, "It's simple. The Earthies want the wheat, Dek. They don't particularly want you."

The one loophole in that otherwise impenetrable barrier was that Mars itself did want Martians in the Oort, and not only because their earnings there would help the balance of payments. So there were scholarships available. Not many, but enough for someone who was bright enough, and willing enough to work hard enough.

So Dekker studied twice as hard as anyone else, and his grades showed it. The scholarship that meant the Oort looked possible, and meanwhile he had his job—for even a would-be Oort miner had to work his way on Mars.

Dekker's job was as third pilot on an interdeme blimp, though he didn't actually do much piloting at that stage. "Flight attendant" would have been a more accurate job description, because his biggest task was sure the passengers stayed in order and caused no trouble, but he was qualified to take the controls if the pilot and copilot both suddenly dropped dead in flight. Still, it was a very worthwhile job to have: it paid well, if only in Martian currency; it took him all over Mars, from the North Polar Cap to the outpost demes in the freezing southland; and it let him meet a lot of interesting people, many of them young women who were happy to get to know him better.

That was a benefit Dekker enjoyed. He could not have been said to have a girl in every port, but he went to a lot of ports. Besides, the job was good background experience for piloting a spotter ship in the Oort.

And then that prospect receded almost to invisibility.

The thing that happened was a little glitch in Earth's financial markets. It wasn't anything severe, at least for most of the Earthies. A few speculators were ruined, a few others got suddenly very rich, but those things happened every now and then.

But when Earth sneezed, Mars got pneumonia. The break came at a bad time. A new issue of the Bonds was just due out, and in the temporarily queasy market climate they were under subscribed. Earthie cues had always been sparse; now they had all but dried up entirely. Imports were slashed, luxuries disappeared from the Martians' own market—though the Earth colonists still did themselves as well as ever—and that one most valued luxury, the scholarship program, was abolished.

What Dekker was good at—what all Martians were good at, because how else could anyone survive on Mars?—was making the best of what he had and not spending a lot of time grieving over what he didn't.

Losing the hope of the Oort had been a blow, but Dekker had a whole other life to live, and he spent his efforts on living it. By the time he was eleven—nineteen or so, by Earth standards—he not only had a promotion to second pilot, he had a medal. At least as close to a medal as Martians ever gave each other. It was a little
 
green rosette, and it was for courage.

There weren't many medals for courage on Mars, for two reasons. The first was that it took so much courage to get by there that there was hardly any point in making a fuss about a little extra bravery. The other reason was that any time someone was called on to display that little extra bit of courage, it was generally because someone else had done something particularly dangerous and dumb. Such as failing to secure the LH
₂
valve on Dekker's dirigible before takeoff. So there they were, sailing along at three thousand meters above the Valles Marineris, with their precious reserve hydrogen bubbling away. Apart from the possible danger to the ship, there was the hydrogen itself: hydrogen was too hard to come by on Mars to waste.

So what else was a third pilot, desirous of making second pilot, to do? It cost him an ear, while he was clinging to the outside of the bag and the damn freezing-cold stuff was seeping out right past his vulnerable head, but the ear could be replaced. It got him the promotion and the rosette—a reasonably good trade.

But the Oort was still far away.

Sometimes on night flights, when the passengers were quiet and the captain was letting another pilot take a turn at the wheel, Dekker would crawl up into the skyside bubble and just look at the comets, the dozens and dozens of comets that had begun to fill the heavens and blur the stars. He didn't feel sorry for himself, he didn't brood about his missed chances; he just looked at the comets and wondered what it would be like to be out there, capturing some prize ones and sending them falling in toward Mars.

There were plenty of comets landing on Mars every week now, sometimes twice a week. There wasn't any real atmosphere on Mars to show for it yet, though the dust storms were certainly denser and a lot more frequent, but every once in a while Dekker's blimp would pass over a recently comet-struck area and he could see the great craters the impacts had gouged out. More than once he was able to persuade himself that, yes, there really was a kind of a faint haze that was visible, or almost visible, at the crater bottoms. The pilots claimed the blimp rode higher these days, too. The worldwide pressure was certainly up a millibar or two.

Then one day, while Dekker was talking to a pretty passenger in the lounge at a little Ulysses Patera deme called Collins, he got the call from his mother. "I need to talk to you," she said. "Come on home."

And would say no more.

So Dekker took a five-day leave and headed for Sagdayev. He hadn't seen his mother very often recently, because she had been stuck with the job of representing Sagdayev in the Commons—dull work, and hard work, too, trying to keep the planet's affairs running smoothly—and that meant she was never home. He hoped she would meet him, but the first person Dekker saw at the passenger lock as he came out was Tinker Gorshak. Old linker was looking worried, but as soon as he saw Dekker he broke into a welcoming grin. "Hello, boy," he said. "Your mother wants to talk to you."

"I know that. What about?"

Tinker looked mysterious. "She's got a right to tell you herself. Listen, what I wanted to ask you, Tsumi isn't on your ship, is he?"

"Tsumi? No. I haven't seen him for months. Isn't he here?"

"If he was here, would I be asking you? The little bastard's supposed to be in school in Sunpoint, but the school called the other day to say he was missing his classes. He's hanging around with a bunch of people I don't like, Dek. I called all his friends—all the ones I knew about, anyway—and told them to tell him to get his ass back here so I could straighten him out, but—"

The old man sighed. Then he brightened. "But go see your mother, Dek. She's waiting for you."

Dekker did. By the time he got to Gerti DeWoe's little room Tinker had already called her to say he was on his way, and she was waiting for him. She even had a pot of cocoa on the stove.

He flung his arms around her and she kissed him fondly, then pushed him back to look in his eyes. "I've got some news for you, Dek," she said. "Do you still want to work in the Oort?"

"Well," he said, "sure." Then he took it in. "Is there a chance? Have they loosened up the scholarships again?"

"No such luck," she said, shaking her head. "Haven't you been watching the news? The Earthies are screwing up again—strikes, and banks failing, and—no, we're going to have to find some more cuts to make, in fact. No, it's something else." She hesitated, looking at him almost apologetically. "The thing is, I got in touch with your father."

He blinked at her. "My father?"

"Well, why shouldn't I?" she asked, sounding defensive. "I let him know about what you were doing a long time ago, as soon as they canceled the scholarship program. Dekker, I didn't beg him for anything. I couldn't. He's living on his disability pension, and he didn't have much money to spare. But he said he'd try. It took him a long time, but—"

Dekker felt his heart suddenly pound. "You don't mean he's going to pay my way to the academy, do you?"

"That's what I do mean, Dek. The money for your fare to Earth is here, and he'll put you up while you take some refresher courses before you take the entrance exam and—well, Dekker. That's the way it is. The rest is up to you.