This Old Rock (2 page)

“Hmmpf. I suppose not. I see it has the old-fashioned gas
retention vestibules outside of the inboard air locks.”

She meant, Dolph realized after a vocabulary-searching
second or two, the enclosed porch around the main airlocks; the ones that would
be on “top” of the two habitat modules when the frame rotated, i.e. toward the
center.

“That’s a good feature,” she added, almost inaudibly. Then
she cleared her throat and asked, clear and loud: “Did you re-stress the
angular momentum neutralizer?”

“Huh?” How, Dolph wondered, did you neutralize angular
momentum? Wasn’t it conserved? What kind of state of the art electronic device
would he have to buy now? “What the—”

“That’s the big stone wheel under the frame that turns in
the opposite direction. It cancels your habitat’s angular momentum, so your
habitat rotation doesn’t cause the asteroid to precess and swing your mast
around and wreck your new bearing. Now, did you tighten the cables that hold it
together?”

“
Hopper
, what about it?” Dolph asked, thoroughly
confused. The floor under the habitat was a circle of smooth solid rock—he hadn’t
realized it could turn.

“My IPA download,”
Hopper
replied, “makes no mention
reviving the momentum neutralizer, nor of this procedure.”

“Idiot bureaucrats!” McCarthy huffed. “I filed that
requirement two years ago!”

“Uh, is that wheel really necessary?” Dolph asked. Maybe
there was a reason it wasn’t in the book, the reason being an opportunity for
selective enforcement. He supposed the next thing he’d find out was it would
cost another EU to fix. “I mean, if the mast alignment is accurate enough—”

“
IF
,” she interrupted. “On a rock this small, the
first stray meteoroid big enough to get through your laser deflectors will knock
it out of alignment. And
that
’s assuming it was accurate in the first
place, which, from what I’ve seen so far would be asking a lot. Look, what you
have to do is clear the gap between the wheel and the well walls, float the
whole assembly out, check the tension on the wires that run around it, pull the
bearings apart, nanoplane them, and repack them. Take you a day.”

 Inspector McCarthy raised her hands and put them down again
in a clear gesture of disgust. “All right, Wigner, I’ve already seen enough to
spoil my appetite, but let’s go out to your ship anyway.”

“No,” Sasha sent on their private line, “not like that. Calm
her down first. I don’t want her to scare Tina.”

“Sasha...” Dolph pleaded. The last thing he wanted to do was
insult the testy Inspector. Maybe.

“No argument on this: my call, darling.”

Dolph took a deep breath. “Uh, Ms. McCarthy?”

The woman turned to him. “
Well
? What is it?”

“We, uh, have a three-year-old girl with us. Uh, her name is
Tina. Angry people frighten her. Could you…?” Leave the shouting act for the
adults, he wanted to say—but he choked that back. Temper, grace.

“You
what
?” Inspector McCarthy sounded shocked and
confused. “What is a child that age doing out here? Why wasn’t this in my
briefing?”

Dolph closed his eyes and counted to ten again. “Inspector,
she’s in our records. Born at L4 Von Braun station. The
Hopper
is family
rated.”

“For transportation! Not as a nursery! Why didn’t you leave
her with her grandparents or something? Until this job is done?”

Was there any way, he wondered, that he could space this
screaming harridan and get away with it? His past, and their problems with
their parents, were none of her damn business. Since when did a habitat
inspection become an excuse to cross-examine someone’s life? Or was this an
attempt to provoke him, make him do something like what he was supposed to have
done on the moon that would let some big Belt corporation step in and take the
asteroid that was all they owned.

“We wanted her with us and nothing in the IPA rules said we
couldn’t take her.”

“You didn’t ask?” The inspector sounded incredulous.

“Ms. McCarthy, one of the reasons we came out to the Belt
was to get away from having to ask. About everything.”

Eileen McCarthy rotated to face him, a silent cipher behind
a shiny faceplate.

“One of the reasons? What did they do to you kids to make
you risk
this
? No,” she held up a hand. “You’re right about that. I don’t
need to know your past. The kid’s out here now and we’ll just have to deal with
it. Some would say that it’s maybe better that way, if the whole family goes at
once. Let’s go down to your ship.” She got in the Tram cage for the two and a
half kilometer ride out to the
Hopper
.

∞±∞

Out of her helmet, Inspector Eileen McCarthy looked as
formidable as she sounded. Her curly hair was as steel gray as her manner. Her
slight excess mass softened her face to a degree, and the one-sixth gee of the
tethered spacecraft did not tug the features down as much as they would on her
native Earth. Otherwise, Dolph thought, the hooknose and downturned lips would
have evoked some costumer’s idea of a witch. He tried to imagine her as someone’s
lover, once upon a time, and failed.

She wrinkled that large nose as soon as her helmet came off
as she emerged from the airlock into their bedroom/wardroom, “Child,” she said
to Sasha, “you need to take the lenses off the air cleaning lasers and polish
them occasionally. The automatic systems you have can’t get at them, and, in
this low gravity, they develop a film that blocks some of the most effective
frequencies. Surface tension effect—take a microscope to them some day and see
what I mean.”

“Ms. McCarthy—” Sasha began, a note of outrage in her voice.
Dolph held up a hand and shook his head vigorously. Too much was at stake to
risk offending the offensive. Sasha, fortunately, caught the hint. “We’ve been
a bit busy. I’ll get to it before you come back. Anyway, you’re welcome to
share a meal with us.”

It wasn’t much—a plate of protein biscuits and three narrow-necked,
low-gee water glasses.

Inspector McCarthy ignored it. “You want to live out here
all alone? You learn to be very careful. Yes, you’re in the Pallas Association,
but most of the time, you’ll still be a week or two away from any physical help.
Hell, most of the time you kids will be too many light minutes away for anyone
to even use your computer’s motiles interactively. We may have retroviruses to
make our genes radiation tolerant, but the bugs and viruses we take with us
have no such luck. They mutate. Cleanliness is a survival skill. While I’m at
it, my briefing said you’re going to mount your A.I. on an Opticor 721. Tell me
it’s not so! You ought to have one of ICA’s double N thirty-sixes.”

Sasha shook her head. “We could get
three
721s for
the price of one of those…”

Inspector McCarthy scowled.

Sasha smiled. “So we did.”

McCarthy looked surprised and almost smiled—at least Dolph
thought he could detect some movement in the deep crevasses that emanated from
the corners of her mouth. Then, without saying anything more, she sat down,
reached for a protein biscuit, took a bite, and chewed. It was so quiet that
Dolph could hear her crunch the flavor nuts between her teeth.

Finally she swallowed, lifted her glass of water, watched it
slosh around a bit, drank, and nodded. “I’ll give you a marginal pass on that. I
like redundancy, excess capacity, and graceful degradation. Mind you, three
double N thirty-sixes would have been better.”

Tina chose that time to come out of her compartment,
swinging from the handholds, as was her custom, so that she could look adults
in the eye. They kept her hair short, for convenience and her favorite nighty
was a brown flannel jumper—nothing really abnormal, but the total effect could,
Dolph realized all too late, be distinctly simian.

She also needed a changing, but before he could do anything,
Tina swung over to the wardroom ceiling above and in front of Inspector
McCarthy, directly over her plate, and shyly mumbled “Hi.”

What was most noticeable in the following seconds was the
growing color in Inspector McCarthy’s hitherto pale cheeks as the smell wafted
about. “Do you,” she choked out at length, “ever discipline this child? What
exactly are… her behavioral limits?”

“Hi?” Tina repeated in a small, uncertain voice. McCarthy
had used, Dolph realized, at least two words that were not often used in the
Wigner family. He and Sasha were determined to be as not like their own parents
as they could.

“Tina,” Sasha began, conversationally, “hasn’t mastered low
gravity toilets yet, but she’s working on it, at her own pace. Aren’t you,
darling?”

Tina pouted. “I’m
Tina
, not darling.”

Sasha beamed indulgently. “Tina, this is Inspector McCarthy,
who will be helping us get our new house ready.”

“Hi?” Tina repeated. “Are you a witch?”

Inspector Eileen McCarthy wrinkled her nose, took a deep
breath. “Hello, Tina.” Then she reached up and pulled the child from her
handhold.

“Let me go, you witch!” Tina protested.

Inspector McCarthy had handed her off to her mother with a
suffering look. Then she turned to Dolph. “When you are both working on the
habitat, where is she?”

“She comes with us,” he replied. “We modified a rescue
bubble into a sort of nursery, which she used until we pressurized and—”

“Let me,” McCarthy groaned, “see if I understand this. She’s
allowed to float around wild in a habitat under construction among the motile
spiders, laser welders, nanoplaners, and so on? And she’s still
alive
?”

“We have a net around her,” Dolph snapped. “It works fine.”

McCarthy shook her head. “Did it ever occur to you dear
young people to ask for some help?”

“As you pointed out,” Dolph answered, trying to keep his
voice even and conversational, “we are normally several light-minutes from any
other habitation. And there’s no more money.”

McCarthy frowned and pushed herself up from the table. “I
can see that. You’ve been cutting back rations. I have an extra fifty kilo CMF
standard—I’ll send a telop down with it.”

Sasha shook her head, “We can’t... “

“Did I ask? You can’t feed the baby that way if you don’t
feed yourself.”

Sasha’s face turned red, and her smile got very tight.

How, Dolph wondered, had this old biddy known Tina was still
suckling? And what business was it of hers? His indignation began to rise, but
he thought better of it. Fifty kilos of vacuum dried food would keep them going
for two or three months, if they stretched it. He was in no position to object.
“Thank you, Inspector McCarthy,” he finally choked out.

“Hmmpf. We will start inspecting this supposedly childproof habitat
construction site at oh-eight-hundred tomorrow morning. I can find my way back
to my ship.”

In an embarrassed silence, she put her helmet back on and
cycled out of the lock.

Sasha’s face fell as soon as the door hissed shut, and she
began to sob. Dolph put his arms around his wife and child.

“Oh,
oh
!” Tina squeaked, realizing something was
wrong.

∞±∞

The inspection was a disaster. By the end of the day, there
were some thirty-three items which had to be fixed before provisional approval,
and another seventy-two that needed to be corrected by final approval. It
seemed to Dolph that McCarthy’s sole purpose was to prevent them from occupying
their asteroid, and when it seemed no amount of appeasing her would slow the
accumulation of items on the list, he’d allowed himself, in desperation, to
argue. At this rate, they would have to vacate before they even got to her gift
rations. Maybe that’s why she could be so generous—she was going to get it back
anyway.

Finally, Dolph blew his gasket. The vestibule air seals had
been the final crack in the air hose, so to speak, and Dolph’s feelings had
gushed out as they shut the inner door and stood in the bright, clean, sweet
smelling entryway to the home Dolph was beginning to realize would never really
be his.

“Ms. McCarthy,” he wailed, “those seals are in spec! All the
vestibule is supposed to do is to guide the last wisps of air from the airlock
to the ion pumps so you can open the door sooner. It’s never
supposed
to
hold any real pressure. It’s
not
a backup system!”

“A seal is a seal. You never know when you might need it.”

“Damn it! I’m going by the book and the book says IPA
certified pipe is safe to use outside as is!”

“The book, young man, says inspectors are to use their
judgment,” she said in as frosty and imperious a tone as he’d yet heard her
use, “and my judgment right now is that you have an attitude problem; not
toward me—while I can see that, too, it’s irrelevant. But you aren’t attacking
your problem. You’re just filling squares on the list—not thinking, not being
proactive. This isn’t a chore you kids have to do—it’s your lives and you don’t
seem to realize it!

“Specifically, here and now, I don’t consider your vestibule
seal installation adequate and I don’t consider your piping installation
adequate”

“But, by the book, they are! And I’m going to damn well
appeal this, and your fix-log on the door motors. I got the certified
equipment, certified materials, installed them with certified procedures, and
you redline it! I don’t know what your game is, whether Shan Toy’s parents are
paying you, or some people that want this rock without taking the trouble to
settle on it, or some politicos that don’t like people running around outside
the grip of some power structure they can control, but it’s not fair!”

“Neither,” she said, so softly he had to concentrate to hear
it, “is death.”

“Is that a threat? Because if it is, I’ll fight back, and if
you don’t think so just ask—”