This Old Rock (3 page)

“I know who and what to ask, Dolph Wigner. I think we’re
done for today.”

 It was over, Dolph thought. Maybe he could get enough for
the rock to get Sasha and Tina back to the moon. Her parents would take her in,
and Tina. But he would have to stay out here… doing what? It took a minute for
McCarthy’s words to sink in.

“For today?”

“We’ve inspected the air lock and the interior utilities of
half of your habitat. If you will stipulate the same fix-logs on the other
half, we should be able to work on the structure tomorrow.”

“Why? You’ve already ruined us and redlined us back to the
moon; why continue?”

“Wigner,” Inspector McCarthy said, coldly and evenly. “You
have the right to try to correct the redlines on the spot. It just so happens
that I’ve brought some materials along with me.”

“Available for a price, no doubt.”

Inspector Eileen McCarthy looked at him and raised an
eyebrow. Then she reached for her space helmet, put it on without further word,
and left.

“
Hopper
,” Dolph rasped, his voice halfway between
raging and sobbing, “send a message to legal assistance at, at…”

“Pallas would be closest,” the computer answered.

“Fine. Send a transcript of the last ten minutes of
conversation, and ask for help in declaring these fix-log items invalid.”

Maybe there would be some fairness, somewhere. He had to try
everything, he realized. He couldn’t bear to lose Sasha, not for one lousy
stupid mistake. Or two, or three he corrected, bitter at himself. They wouldn’t
be in this mess if it weren’t for his mistakes, he knew. It wasn’t all
Inspector McCarthy’s fault. But, damnit, they needed a break, not another
problem.

∞±∞

His answer came at dinner, a very quiet dinner, that night
in the wardroom of the
Hopper
.

“Put it on the wall here,” Dolph said.

“The caller suggests a private conference.”

He looked at Sasha, who simply reached over and touched his
arm. “Use Tina’s room. I’ll put some music on in here.”

He nodded and got up. They’d made Tina’s room by putting a
flat wall across the wardroom one meter from the wall. In the space between the
straight inner wall and the curved outer wall were a half-meter wide child’s bunk,
a compact washstand, and a video screen.

“You forgot to say ‘excuse me,’ Daddy,” Tina chirped. She’d
started chattering at twenty months and hadn’t stopped. He was afraid to get
her I.Q. tested.

Dolph rolled his eyes and managed a pained smile for his
daughter. “Excuse me, Daddy.”

Tina looked confused for a moment, then giggled and said. “No,
you’re
Daddy. You’re excused, but you have to come back for dessert!”

“Sure, Tina.” He ran his hand over her hair.

He covered the distance to the compartment door in one low
gravity stride, as one of Sasha’s bouncy moonjazz compositions started with her
characteristic three dissonant chords which resolved into walking scales under
a high riff. A century ago, he thought, her talent would have been a ticket to
independence. Not anymore. Her stuff was good—but with thirty billion people on
Earth and another three scattered among the other worlds, and almost all of
them with all the leisure time they could want, there was a solar system full
of good stuff out there.

The door slid shut and cut it down to background—a
centimeter of basalt foam was a good sound insulator. He knew damn well what
the lawyer wanted to talk about, and it wasn’t for Tina’s ears. So he sat on
her bunk in between her stuffed animals with her crayon drawings taped to the
wall for a backdrop and faced the video screen, which dissolved into a holo of
a distinguished looking balding man in a white turtleneck with a pointed black
beard, just starting to turn gray.

“Mr. Wigner, Jaynes Femrite. I’m with Femrite, Carson, and
Lu, doing pro bono for IPA Legal Assistance. I understand Eileen’s giving you
her, uh, best.”

Eileen? Dolph shook his head. Did
everyone
know
everyone out here?

“I’m about at the end of my rope, Mr. Femrite. Her standards
are a moving target. I’ve met all the legal requirements, all the
specifications, and I can’t get from here to there with her. We just don’t have
the money to pay her and all her friends for everything she wants us to buy
from them.” He took a breath. “We don’t want to cause trouble. We just want to
be left alone. But I have to do something. We can’t go back, and we’re within a
month of being self-sufficient here.”

Femrite inclined his head slightly. Dolph saw the “secure
comm” telltale in the corner of his screen. Could he trust it? Did he care
anymore?

Femrite cleared his throat. “Got yourself in a little
trouble back at Shepard City, didn’t you.”

Dolph looked down. So the guy already knew, and so did
everyone else. That was probably another reason for “Eileen” to hound him out.

The lawyer waited a minute for an answer, but when Dolph
didn’t say anything, he continued. “Her name was Shan Toy. Want to tell me your
side of it?”

Why not, Dolph thought. What more harm could it do? “I’d
just finished a three week mine engineering school, and was celebrating. She
picked me up at the bar. I didn’t know how old she was, didn’t even suspect
because she came on so, so mature. I told her I was married, and she said ‘so
what, it’s just for a night.’ So we checked our records and went to my room.

“We were just getting into it when she complained about my
ring hurting her back so I took it off and put it on the nightstand. It was my
great-grandfather’s college ring, with a hand-cut diamond in it. She apparently
suspected what it was worth, because as soon as I set it down, she jumped up,
grabbed it, and headed for the door.

“I went after her and she pulled a gun—I don’t know from
where. I kept after her anyway because the ring meant so much. She shot once
and missed, and then I was grappling with her and the gun went off again. The
dart got in between the vertebrae in her neck somehow, and the trank shut her
heart down. It was a freak accident. I ran, then came to my senses and realized
they could trace me a hundred ways. So I called Sasha, and turned myself in.”

The lawyer nodded. “Self-defense, hung jury on the murder
charge. Parole with time served on the attempted statutory rape charge—you
could have checked her age.”

“She said she was twenty, right from Earth on a tourist visa
with her parents and five sisters. I was drunk and fell for it. It turned out
her so-called parents weren’t even related to her, and they both had raps
sheets in Thailand. The girls were supposed to sell themselves, or get in
someone’s room and grab something valuable. Preferably both. I wasn’t thinking...
damned stupid.”

It had been the most miserable episode in his life, and he
felt like he had used up a lifetime’s worth of emotional self-control getting
through the hearings. He stared at Femrite. Enough was enough. The universe had
to get off his back sometime.

Femrite raised an eyebrow. “But the court of public opinion
wasn’t so kind?”

Dolph sighed. “Her parents, and the tabloid media, said I
made up the ring story. Dad was mad as hell. He gave me a grubstake, pointed me
at the Belt, and told me not to come back. Sasha’s family tried to keep her at
L4, but she stuck with me. That was all that counted.” Damn it, his eyes were
getting wet. That big knot in his stomach, which had been there ever since
Shepard City, got a little tighter. Get a grip, he told himself. “Until now.”

“Uh, huh,” Femrite agreed. “That counts for a lot. That, and
your daughter. Look, I want to set you clear on a couple of things.

“First is that Eileen doesn’t care what your past is. That’s
usually the case in the Belt, and there are minuses as well as pluses to that. For
instance,” the lawyer flashed a shark-like grin at Dolph, “you’ll probably end
up doing business with a certain former drug dealer with a manslaughter rap
which, they say, included cannibalism. He’s behaved himself since getting out
here. Of course people take care not to rile him.” Femrite’s grin was
distinctly chilling. “At any rate,
your
crime is small potatoes out
here, even if you’re lying about what happened at Shepard City.”

“Lying!” Dolph couldn’t think of anything to say. Then anger
turned to uncertainty, tinged with fear. He wondered if the drug killer was
named Femrite.

“Now, don’t get mad. I said
if
, and, in fact, I think
you are being truthful. But my point is that all that’s irrelevant. What counts
now is what you do out
here
.”

“The second point is that, out here, what an inspector says,
goes. We don’t, and can’t, have the public infrastructure with all the appeals
you’re used to. Even with robotics and beam propulsion, the rocks are too far
apart. Rescue missions use up a lot of human resources, and we can’t do
hundreds of them a month. We’re a community out here, and while we scratch each
other’s backs a lot, we want time for our own lives. We don’t have a lot of
laws and not much to litigate; almost a million people now and only a couple of
dozen lawyers. So forget torts; you have to take care of yourself.

“And yes, we buy local and favor those who do. We know each
other. The Belt runs on a lot of handshakes and understandings. That’s just the
way it is.

“Now, Eileen’s not that unreasonable. She might be willing
to ameliorate some of these fix-it log items you’re complaining about, but the
main requirement—” the lawyer’s voice took an icy edge “—I say the
main
requirement for not having the Interplanetary Association ship you out as a
menace to yourselves and anyone that might have to rescue you, is that
you
pass inspection
. There’s no appeal to that. We’re a pretty independent lot,
so we don’t choose Inspectors at random. Am I clear?”

He was clear, but Dolph had to ask anyway, just to rub in
the unfairness of it. “No appeal? No legal recourse?”

Femrite threw up his hands in apparent exasperation. “If,
and I mean a big
if
, we could prove pecuniary bias on Eileen’s part, you
could get reinspected by someone else. But you can imagine what the next
inspector is going to think about your filing such charges against Eileen
McCarthy!”

“I thought,” Dolph said lamely, “some people from the moon
might be using their influence on her. Or someone who wanted the rock; second
mineral rights or some such. You hear a lot about that kind of conspiracy thing
on the University.”

Femrite nodded. “That you do. Conspiracy is the sophomore’s
favorite religion—kids want to believe things happen for a reason, even if it’s
a bad one.” He sniffed. “They learn. Anyway, Eileen’s not one to be influenced
by anything like that—quite the opposite, I’d say. Try to push that woman and
she’ll push harder in the other direction.”

Dolph couldn’t suppress the flicker of a smile.
That
he could believe.

“Of course,” Femrite continued. “I’m obligated to file a
protest and represent you if you insist.”

Dolph glanced at the floor. So a protest would be useless.
So the whole universe was a damn conspiracy against him and he had no rights,
none. He’d lost anything resembling rights back on the moon when he tried to
take back great-grandpa’s ring. “No, Mr. Femrite,” he sighed, defeated. “No
protest. I’ve got the picture.”

Femrite shook his head skeptically. “Well, I’m not quite
sure of that, but it’s the best I can do. Good day then.”

Just like that, his hope of doing something about this
miserable, unfair ordeal vanished. Dolph found himself staring at a blank wall
in pitch darkness—the room’s only window, near the
Hopper
’s shadowed
south pole, looked away from the asteroid’s bright horizon. He didn’t ask for
lights, but looked out through a meter of clear shielding water toward the
stars. As his eyes adapted to the dark, the zodiac became visible, each ancient
animal sliding by his view every fifty seconds as the ship swung around. The
Milky Way passed by with Sagittarius, a bright river with dark clouds here and
there. Constellations became harder to recognize as more and more stars
confused his view.

Gradually, at the limits of his vision, the Belt itself
emerged, its trillions and trillions of tiny pebbles reflecting enough light to
make a broad, ghostly band—once his refuge, now, apparently, a nest of callous
enemies. Involuntarily, he clenched his fists. Then, faintly imposed on his
view of the cosmos, he saw the reflection of his own starlit face.

The door of the room hissed open and glare flooded the room.
He turned.

Tina launched herself into his arms. “Dessert time!” she
piped. “Why are you crying, Daddy?”

∞±∞

Sasha was polishing seal flanges when Dolph returned from
the next day’s structural inspection. She’d fixed one of the flat rings to a
table with another to a block of basalt glass, and was rubbing them together,
slowly turning the top block as she stroked. McCarthy had just added another
dozen critical items to the fix-log. He was numb with disappointment, and there
Sasha was—polishing seals by hand.

“What are you doing?” he asked, as if he couldn’t see. What
he had meant, of course, was ‘why?’ Any effort at all seemed to be futile.

“I called Inspector McCarthy last night to ask what they did
to seal flanges to make them acceptable to her, and she told me. I thought it
was something I could do myself, by hand, with the ones we’ve got. You see,
they’ll fit exactly with a little curvature if you polish them together, and
still come apart without damage. It’s like making a telescope mirror.”

“I think you’re wasting your time.”

She shrugged. “Probably. But I had to do something physical.
I also checked on who has secondary claims on our rock while you were out.”

“Anyone we know?”

“Ever hear of Cistrojan Enterprise Limited?”