Privateers (21 page)

Freiberg would return to the space station every few days with a batch of videotapes, and at night he would play the edited highlights of the past days’ communications for Dan, behind the locked door of his quarters aboard Nueva Venezuela.

“All’s well as can be expected,” Carstairs reported on the mission’s fortieth day. “Electrical power’s down six percent from nominal; I’ve scheduled an EVA for tomorrow to check the solar panels. Might be a micrometeor cracked one of the cells. Or maybe dust coating ‘em.” His Australian accent said “mybe.”

The voice of one of the mission controllers said, “We copy the tail off in electrical power. EVA is approved.” He said it over Carstairs’ continued talking, because it took his laser-borne words slightly more than a full minute to reach the spacecraft, nearly twelve million miles away. Because of the time lag in communications, there were no conversations between the spacecraft and the control center; they had two nearly simultaneous monologues instead.

“The bloody toilet’s acting up again,” Carstairs was complaining. “In all these years of battin’ about in space you’d think somebody would come up with a zero-gee toilet that actually works. And the air scrubbers are gettin’ marginal. Nothing the instruments will show, but it’s startin’ to smell foul in here. Damn tight living, y’know.” Carstairs grinned. “I think I’m fallin’ in love with Halloran.”

Halloran, the young geochemist from Chicago, happened to be just behind Carstairs at that moment. His beefy face turned as red as his brick-colored hair.

“Don’t let him fool you, Halloran,” said the mission controller, “it’s just a shipboard romance.”

But while the joke was speeding toward the spacecraft on the laser beam, Halloran-still red-faced-spluttered a denial laced with as much profanity as he knew. Which was neither large in quantity nor original in quality.

Dan laughed, sitting in his darkened cabin, lit only by the TV screen. Freiberg grinned too. Dan had insisted that all the crew members be male and heterosexual. He wanted no romantic entanglements of any kind during this long, difficult mission. He did not bother asking his company psychologists about it: why risk a security leak when he already was convinced of what he wanted? Thinking back to his own days as a working astronaut, he remembered that masturbation is much less damaging than murder.

With the inexorable precision of astronomical mathematics, the spacecraft made its rendezvous with the asteroid. Dan spent that whole day in the crowded, tense control center, in the back of the hot, sweaty room where he could survey the entire chamber easily. The circular chamber was dimmed, lit mainly by the glowing TV screens and banks of lighted control studs that lined each controller’s desk.

It was one thing to read a report that the asteroid was not much longer than a football field. It was quite another to see this enormous boulder tumbling slowly as it glided through space. It was only slightly oblong, almost as thick as its length, and big. Its dark, brooding ponderousness dwarfed the approaching spacecraft.

Dan watched in rapt silence. The control center crackled with nervous electricity. Freiberg, down at the center of the string of monitoring desks, was literally quivering with excitement. Dan could see that the scientist could hardly stay still; his hands were fluttering like a pair of large moths drawn to the light of the TV picture in front of him. He jittered as he dangled weightlessly in front of his monitor screen, jouncing and bouncing so much that he occasionally floated too far off the floor and had to pull himself down again. He had grown so accustomed to the zero gravity of the factory that he hardly noticed his own antics. But Dan laughed to himself. Better put a safety tether on Zach or he’ll float right out of here.

The mission controllers were watching their instruments and muttering into their headsets in the muted whispers of worshipers in a cathedral.

Christ, I wish I was there, Dan said to himself as he watched the main display screen, which took up most of the room’s front wall.

The spacecraft’s outside cameras showed views of the massive, looming asteroid. It was black and pitted, its surface lumpy and irregular. It reminded Dan of a huge chunk of coal.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” Freiberg’s voice sang through the darkness. “Isn’t she gorgeous?”

A few low chuckles answered.

“She’s metallic all right,” Freiberg said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “Got to be. Look at her. Nickel-iron, or I’ll eat it. Enough good steel in her to run this factory for ten years. Maybe more.”

The second shift of controllers came on the job as Carstairs, Vargas and Halloran were emerging from the spacecraft’s airlock for their first EVA jaunt to the asteroid. The original shift relinquished their posts grudgingly. None of them left the control center. They clustered in the back, around Dan. eyes glued to the display screen. Dan could feel the heat

of their bodies in the darkness, smell the excitement in them.

Somebody passed a tray of coffee and soft drinks as the three-astronaut team jetted across the hundred yards or so between the spacecraft and the asteroid. They looked like tiny white midges next to the pitted dark bulk of the huge rock. Nobo was in charge aboard the spacecraft now, Dan knew. He saw the craft’s manipulator arms extending slowly, like a sluggish metal spider extending its many limbs.

Carstairs was the first to reach the dark, pitted asteroid. His space-suited form reminded Dan of a knight in white armor. Vargas was carrying a video camera and he got a good close-up of Carstairs planting his boots on the rock’s barren surface. He came in slightly too fast, though, and bounced off. The jets of his backpack puffed briefly and he settled down on the bare, airless rock like a deep-sea diver gingerly touching bottom.

“I name this little worldlet”-Carstairs’ voice sounded faint and slightly muffled inside his helmet-“after the man who made this voyage possible: Randolph One. And may there be thousands more like it.”

Dan let out his breath. He had not thought about giving the asteroid a name. In the shadowy darkness of the crowded control center, he heard mutters from the men and women standing around him.

“Carstairs is bucking for a raise, boss,” somebody said.

“He’s got it,” Dan shot back.

It turned out to be a metallic asteroid, just as Freiberg had predicted. Halloran set about testing samples of it, chipping off pieces and carrying them back to the small analysis lab aboard the spacecraft. Almost pure nickel-steel, about four million tons of it. Among the impurities he found over the next two days was platinum.

“I estimate there’s somewhere between fifty and seventy-five tons of platinum in her,” Halloran reported, his florid face grinning into the TV camera.

Dan grinned back at the geochemists happy image. Platinum was somewhere around $500 per troy ounce, he recalled. Fifty to seventy-five tons, he calculated swiftly, would come to $600 to $900 million. That pays for the mission all by itself! With a bit of profit besides. Sai will be ecstatic.

The question then was whether or not the crew should attempt to alter the asteroid’s orbit so that it could be “captured” by Earth’s gravity and swung into a permanent orbit between the Earth and Moon, where it could be more easily reached and mined. Back when Randolph I had been nothing more than a numbered speck of light in an astronomical catalog, Freiberg had picked this particular asteroid for their first mission because it was close enough to reach, it appeared to be a metal-rich body and its orbit was such that it could be maneuvered into an Earth-circling orbit.

During the two days that Halloran and the other crew members spent assaying the rock samples and filling the spacecraft’s storage tanks with them, computers in Caracas and California (thanks to Freiberg’s friends at Cal Tech) checked every facet of the orbital maneuver to twelve decimal places.

“I don’t want to send a four-million-ton spitball into an orbit that’ll crash into the Earth,” Dan insisted.

“You just don’t want to lose all that platinum,” Freiberg kidded back.

“Check it again, Zach.”

“Figures don’t lie, Dan. And they’re not going to change.”

“Check it again.”

The alternative was to allow the asteroid to continue on the orbit it had been following for millions of years, swinging out past the Sun and returning to Earth’s vicinity every three years. If the astronauts altered that orbit, Randolph I would end up circling the Earth at about the same distance as the Moon-a tiny new moonlet.

The numbers checked and checked again. Dan still felt a gnawing uneasiness about the idea. He could accept, intellectually, that the asteroid would not crash into the Earth. But something deep in his guts was warning him that it was unwise to push the rock out of its natural path around the Sun.

Nine hundred million dollars, he argued with himself, from the platinum alone. And enough nickel and iron to allow us to start a whole new operation here at the factory. The Russians don’t have any of the heavier metals; there aren’t any on the Moon.

Reluctantly, still feeling vague forebodings, he gave the order to push the asteroid into an Earth-circling orbit. Nearly twenty million miles away, the astronaut team unrolled huge aluminized sheets of plastic-Reynolds Wrap, Dan always called them-and fitted them to the prefabricated frame of a concave solar mirror. They set it up at a mathematically chosen spot on the asteroid’s bare, dark surface. Sunlight, focused to an intensity that boiled metal, jabbed its searing finger at the asteroid’s body. The boiling metal acted like the jet exhaust of a rocket engine, exerting a force on the massive rock that altered its trajectory slightly. For two more days, as the astronauts made their preparations to leave the asteroid and return to Earth, Freiberg and a picked team of astronomers watched the asteroid carefully.

“It all checks out,” the scientist told Dan. “She’s swerving slightly, right on the predicted course. Eleven months from now the Earth will gain an extra moon, and you’ll have a billion-dollar platinum mine at your disposal.”

Dan smiled and shook Freiberg’s hand. “Mission accomplished,” he said. But he still had that uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach.

He had two more months to wait while the Dolphin One made its way back to Earth. Two months to pretend to be doing business as usual, paying the Soviets their increased prices for lunar ores, playing the role of the billionaire bachelor, partying and being seen in public with the world’s most beautiful women.

Everything in Caracas seemed to be normal. Too normal, Dan worried. The only unusual thing he could detect was that

Malik seemed to be visiting the city every other week. His ostensible reason was to court Lucita Hernandez. But what’s his real reason? Dan asked himself. He decided that there was one person who might know: Lucita Hernandez.

Their meeting had to appear casual, yet private. Dan was under no illusions. The KGB watched every move he made, as a matter of course. He was accustomed to that. And he suspected that Malik had a team of people watching Lucita, too.

“Two can play at that game,” Dan muttered to himself. Phoning the director of the Astro Manufacturing division that operated the company’s Earth resources satellites, Dan soon had detailed photographs of Caracas playing across the wall-sized TV screen in his office.

The pictures were taken by satellites that kept their exquisitely sharp camera eyes and other sensors focused on the Earth, from altitudes that ranged from a few hundred to one thousand miles up. The data they recorded on videotape was sold to customers around the world who were willing to pay for such information. Commodities speculators wanted to know how grain and other crops were growing, all over the world. Geologists looked for rock formations that promised the presence of oil or other natural resources. Environmental protection agencies wanted to see sources of pollution. Commercial fishermen needed to find schools of fish. Railroad managers used the satellite data to keep track of their trains and even individual cars. The city planners of Caracas used the pictures to see, day by day, how their zoning and building laws were being obeyed.

Much of the data that Dan’s company sold around the world was illegal. International law forbade giving up any data about a nation that had not been previously approved for release by that nation. And almost every nation in the world stoutly refused to release any data about its own territory. Some of the individual governments, such as many in Africa, refused because they did not want foreign nations or corporations to know about their mineral wealth; they had a long history of foreign exploitation, and no desire to continue it. Other nations, like the Soviet Union, were secretive to the point of paranoia; any pictures taken of their territory were regarded as spying. Still others, such as some of the jackboot dictatorships in Latin America and Southeast Asia, did not want the world to know how harshly they were treating their own people, and how poorly the people were faring under military rule.

Yet Astro’s satellites orbited placidly over every nation on Earth, beaming pictures and other forms of data to the corporate headquarters in Caracas. And the company sold the information to almost every nation-even those that protested the loudest against such “spying.” The entire operation was known to all. And although it was as illegal as reproducing the pages of a library book in a copying machine, or secretly videotaping a new Broadway production, it went on anyway. The protests were formalities. The reality was that nations, corporations, even private individuals were willing to pay for the satellite data. They were willing to pay for it because they needed it, for their businesses, for their national welfare and security.

Dan needed the pictures of Caracas for a slightly different reason. With computer enhancement, he was able to watch the Hernandez home and see, day by day, when Lucita’s forest-green MG left the house and where it went. Because it was a convertible, he could even enlarge the pictures electronically to the point where he could see that the driver was dark-haired.