This Old Rock (5 page)
Authors: G. David Nordley
“
Hopper
,” Dolph quickly commanded, “push the pressure
up to the redline limits and start venting the habitat.” They had to reduce the
pressure differential to a minimum, if not get it going the other way. It would
be many seconds before venting the large volume of the habitat would have much
effect. His ears, though, told him it had started—and they could help it. “Sasha,
help me with the inner door.”
If they got it open, he realized, and the vestibule blew,
they’d be sucked into vacuum as well as Tina and Inspector McCarthy. But
neither of them wasted a moment reaching for their helmets. They crouched on
opposite sides of the oval door and pulled on its wheel handle
in
. They
strained, the motors strained, metal squealed, air whistled by going out, and
gradually the door swung open.
McCarthy shoved Tina through and Dolph hooked a tool tether
to her belt.
“Internal pressure down to point two one.”
Hopper
announced. Dolph felt the rush of air out increase second by second, and
quickly reached down for the Inspector’s hand, but she slipped away and slid
toward the outer door in the slipstream, frantically trying to slow herself by
grabbing pieces of equipment on the wall of the air lock.
Without really thinking, he dove through the inner door past
the struggling Inspector McCarthy and grabbed the rim of the outer door with
his hands. Straining muscles he hadn’t used in a long time, he pulled himself
back in against the airflow and moved to help her.
He was just in time. The Inspector lost her last handhold
and was blown into him. They untangled and he tried to help her up toward the
inner door. But the position was awkward and the airflow was too strong for
even their combined efforts to get her anywhere. He had to cut that wind down,
if only for a few seconds.
“Dolph!” Sasha screamed. “
Hopper
, put full reservoir
pressure into the suit lines. Now!”
Nothing happened. His luck, Dolph thought. The remaining
pipe must have been good. When you
wanted
something to give, it was rock
solid. The operating principal seemed to be that whatever he wanted wasn’t
going to...
Dolph heard a pipe burst behind him like a cannon shot. Air
rushed into the vestibule and, momentarily, the wind through the air lock
abated. He pushed the inspector through the inner door and pulled himself in,
with both Sasha and Inspector McCarthy helping.
As soon as his feet were clear, Sasha slammed the inner lock
door shut behind him with a force that made the whole habitat ring. They had
the barest moment to look at each other before a great rending boom echoed
through the habitat. The leak through the incomplete seal of the inner door now
became a scream.
“Vestibule air pressure is now one microbar and falling,”
Hopper
informed them.
Dolph reached for the emergency seal foam, but Inspector
McCarthy stopped him.
“There’s no way the outer air lock door can be shut against
that, and we still have to get out, “ she yelled. “Best get Tina in a bag and
our helmets on, then tell the computer to recover as much air as it can. With
vacuum on both sides, getting out will be easy.” Inspector McCarthy put a hand
on his arm as he moved to get her. “Let me help her.”
“It’s okay,” Sasha said. Dolph nodded.
“Tina, let’s go for another ride,” McCarthy suggested.
Tina giggled, obviously no longer afraid of the older woman.
“Where’s my ice cream?”
“It’s back in the
Hopper
, young lady. You’ll have to
get in your rescue tube now.”
“Are we going to go there
now
?”
“Soon.”
Dolph checked his seal as Inspector McCarthy tried to coax
Tina into a rescue tube.
“This is different,” Tina whined. “It’s not my ball. I want
my
ball.”
“It’s okay, Tina,” Sasha said. “This will get you to the
Hopper
and your ice cream. We have to wait a while for the air pressure to go down,
though. You can wait for ice cream, can’t you.”
“Okay. I like ice cream.”
“Are you okay, Inspector?” Dolph asked when they all had
their helmets on.
“All sealed. And in much better shape than your habitat, I’m
afraid.”
They hadn’t had time to prep the inside for decompression. Bottles
were bursting, wet towels boiling, partition panels blistered here and there.
∞±∞
Three hours later, Tina was fed, changed, and asleep in her
compartment. The haggard adults faced each other across the boardroom table.
Inspector McCarthy raised a bushy gray eyebrow and sighed. “I
estimate it’s going to take you six months to repair the damage. Exposing the
interior to vacuum won’t have done any good. Most of your water pipes went. You’ve
got paint flecks, ice, and other floating debris everywhere including all the
places that should be kept free of it. So I’d guess another six months of work
before it’s ready to inspect again.”
“A year to get ready for another provisional?” Dolph tried
to adjust to the shock.
But for the maybe the second or third time since he’d met
her, Inspector McCarthy smiled. “Not a provisional, a final. I’m going to pass
you on provisional and move those items left on the fix-now log to the
fix-later.” She shot Dolph a look. “Except for one—a simple remove and dispose
item.”
“We get the asteroid?” Sasha exclaimed, wonder in her voice.
“Provisionally. And I have another proposition.”
Dolph tensed. Too good to be true usually was. “Yes?”
“I happen to have a number of things in my cargo tanks that
you can use. I’ll have to collect their cost from you, so that I can replace
them and be ready for the next newcomers who get in trouble. With my
provisional, the Pallas branch of the Asteroid Development Fund should give you
a loan.”
He set his mouth. At exorbitant terms no doubt. What they
give with one hand, they take... No. No, that attitude was a one-way ticket to
more trouble, he told himself.
Sasha looked at him, clearly worried. Was she more worried
about undertaking a loan, or at his potential reaction? Probably both.
“Darling,” he said, we have to trust someone. Inspector
McCarthy just risked her life for Tina.”
Sasha exhaled and grinned, eyes glistening.
“Good, Dolph.” Eileen McCarthy said, smiling. “It won’t be
that much compared to what you should get out of this rock in water alone in
the next year, and you won’t have to pay until you’ve been self-sufficient for
a couple of years. Now, one more thing. Could you do without Tina for that time?
I think I can teach her a thing or two on Pallas about how to live in space,
follow instructions, and so on.” Then she got a little glint in her
grandmotherly eye. “And don’t worry about Jaynes Femrite hooking her on
something. Anyway, it was a gang initiation thing and he was only thirteen at
the time. He didn’t know what he was eating.”
The cannibal. Damn, his suspicions had been right. Suddenly
the knot in his stomach was back in force. He didn’t care how reformed the man
was... “I’m not...” Dolph began.
McCarthy grinned now. “Young man, the look on your face! That’s
got to be the oldest yarn in the Belt, and I’m the one who would know. I
invented it so people wouldn’t take him for a wimp!”
His breath left him at a rate just short of explosive
decompression. He’d just bought the ghost station—got taken big. Tension
started to drain out of him. Yes, the whole thing was a damn conspiracy, but a
benign one. And it looked like, for once in his life, he was being given the
opportunity to become one of the conspirators. At least, believing that might
get him through the next year. He nodded and smiled, but suppressed the
beginnings of a laugh. That, perhaps, could come later. When the work was done.
“I think boarding Tina with Eileen would be an
excellent
idea,” Sasha broke in. “Once she gets used to Eileen a little more, it will be
safer for her and us. But why?”
“Sasha,” McCarthy answered, “I missed my chance at being a
grandmother over half a century ago, when my son and his wife lost their lives
in an eminently survivable equipment failure. Their own fault, and mine. They
built poorly, but I didn’t instill the proper standards—” the old woman’s face
fell “—in them.”
“I’m sorry...” Sasha began.
Eileen McCarthy held up her hand. “Too long ago for tears. But
I’ve always wondered what being a grandmother would be like. This could be a,
well, useful opportunity to find out. There are hints from the Interstellar
project’s biology group that any of us that can hang on for a just few more
years could get a second chance.”
This was the same Inspector McCarthy, physically. But now,
somehow, Dolph could take the pounds, and the years, off with his mind’s eye
and see that someone had once loved her, and might again. But, despite his
feeling that he could trust people again—at least some people—something in
Dolph still couldn’t believe his luck had changed. Something had to be wrong. The
habitat was in too big of a mess.
“I’m grateful for your help, Inspector, but I need to be
prepared for the worst. How can the bank, or the IPA, accept an approval, even
yours, when the habitat is in worse shape than when you got here?”
“It’s not. You’ve done a lot, and the vacuum damage is only
superficial. Inspectors have discretion, you know, and as far as the
provisional approval is concerned, I am the IPA. Our objective is to have
people be self-sufficient out here, to be as independent as possible of our
rather sparse emergency services.”
Okay, Dolph thought. Back to work. “What’s the final class
one fix-it item, Inspector—the remove and dispose?” There were some old oxygen
tanks that might eventually burst, but they were at the south pole, a class two
item.
She smiled gently at him, looking like anyone’s grandmother.
“You’ve shown some insights, learned how to do a number of things right, and
had a lesson that is often obtained at much higher expense. I suspect someday
you’ll be able to pass that on to someone else. It would be a shame to waste
all this experience by sending you home, wouldn’t it?”
“Sure, but…”
“That last item on the list, the thing that needed to be
torn out of here and pushed away on a fast trajectory to the Oort cloud, was
that chip on your shoulder. But I think I see that heading out past Jupiter,
now.” She nodded judiciously. “So I’ll pull it from the list. You’re starting
fresh here, son. Make the most of it. That habitat,” she concluded, “was not
the only object of this inspection.”
The End
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THE BLACK HOLE PROJECT –
sample chapter
In Space,
at the Impactor Launch Site
26 October
2275
The impactor looked like a long thin filament that seemed to
run out to infinity. At high magnification, Liz and David could see a slight
texture to it; individually controlled superconducting solenoid rings were
placed every few meters to stretch the wire taut to just the right tension,
giving it some rigidity for maneuvers and providing a fine control on its
density. Somewhere, out toward the end of the rod, was the main magnetic
reflector. Any time now, David thought.
Cyan’s term as chief executive had begun well. The impactor
launch was back on schedule, albeit with the smallest of windows. No more
delays could be tolerated, but so far, so good. He, Judi, Cyan, and Liz took a
shuttle out to the launch site, a point high over the asteroid belt where the
impactor coasted, waiting for the main beam. While far from the revelry, they
had all wanted to, well, be there.
They waited in blackness, their eyes adapted to the star
spangled night. Some constellations he could recognize despite the distortions
of distance: the hook of Scorpius, belted Orion, and the mane and haunches of
Leo. He smiled. From here, Leo had acquired a knee; Rigel Kentaurus, Alpha
Centauri’s other name, was now Rigel Leonis! And between the lion and a barely
recognizable big dipper was the Sun.
If I forget thee, oh Jerusalem,
he
thought.
Liz announced, “About now.”
He looked south to the impactor, below the lion and its new
knee. At its far distant end a tiny blue star appeared and gradually grew to an
iridescent flower, brighter and brighter with its far edges fading into a deep
violet.
In the close-up optics, the impactor began to move across
the field of view. Faster and faster it went. The view zoomed back.
It was bright enough now that David risked a look at
Campbell and the ring of beam projectors around it. Only a few of them were
active at this early stage, he knew, but already the power was a million times
that used to launch a starship. And it would grow by many orders of magnitude
over the next nine months. By that time, he would be deeply into analyzing the
results of the planetoid’s impending impact on Martin.
He felt Liz’s arms around him and smiled. Time enough for
work later. Her face was glowing—he kissed her. Cyan Mutori glanced at them and
looked away.
They watched for an hour or so, until the violet flower had
faded into the interstellar depths. Then their shuttle turned back for Minot.
Once home David put his full energies into his own projects.
To the victors went the spoils, David thought. His work, which he’d worried
about losing altogether, was now getting high priority; such was his reward for
backing the winners.
An urgent message awaited him—results from his Prospector
Probes deep in the icy mantle of Martin. They’d struck water. No question about
it; 11.36 kilometers under the ice surface was a huge lake, filling the bed of an
ancient caldera. No, he thought, not all that ancient. Martin must not be
completely stone cold. There was some tidal stress from its eccentric orbit,
and its radioactive ores still put out a fair amount of heat. It had to get out
somewhere, and the readings pointed to several vents across the bottom of the
lake. There could be life down there, he thought.
The thought hit him in the gut. Oh, God! If Martin had water
and heat, then… his imagination ran wild.
Far from being the agent of a temporary rebirth of this
planet, the impending collision might mean the destruction of one of the six
independently evolved biologies known.
••∞••
Liz stared up at the sky in her dome with restless
anticipation. She touched the net to check the countdown… 1205013 seconds…
about two standard weeks… the particle projectors would finish their job—and
hers. Then what?
A beep on her comm sounded. A message from David in his new
lab in Lenore.
“Liz, come over, please. I need your help!”
She found him staring at a micrograph of a rock sample
brought up from a deep borehole on the planetoid falling toward Martin. He
hadn’t noticed her coming in, but instead continued to stare at the dark rock.
She found herself staring at it, too.
Liz saw a number of what looked like tiny microbes,
squirming around. “From the planetoid?” she asked.
“Liz.” They kissed cheek to cheek, not on the mouth, Liz
noted. He was all business.
“The center of the planetoid is now above the melting point
of water. It would be boiling in a near vacuum; but here and there, the vapor
can’t get out fast enough and the pressure rises to the point where liquid
water exists. They thaw out once every hundred and eighty-three thousand years,
and they’re thriving, for the last time.”
“In the wild anyway. What are they?” she asked.
“Archea. Almost eighty percent identical to those in the
Solar System and thirteen other star systems. Their DNA forms loops instead of
the strings capped with telomeres that we use. They’re rugged; that’s why so
many of them are extremophiles.”
Liz looked at him quizzically.
“Their DNA doesn’t wear out.”
“Wow! Neat.” She knew the whole astrobiology team was in a
race to study every facet of the colliding worlds before the collision
destroyed the incoming planetoid and utterly transformed Martin as well.
“Expected. We find them on Martin too, and on that planetoid
you found back in the Solar System. But there is something else in some of the
volcanically-warmed lakes on Martin: multicellular archea with knobby-loop DNA.
See?”
Liz couldn’t tell if the stringy stuff she was looking at
were loops or not, but they appeared to have knots in them.
“God knows how long these little critters have survived
protected by that layer of ice, Liz. We’ll probably never know their earliest
beginnings. What could they have shown us?”
Liz squeezed his hand. “I think they’ve shown us that life
is everywhere.”
He squeezed her hand back. “I need your help badly, Liz.”
“How?”
“I know I was against changing the trajectory of the
incoming asteroid originally. But I did not know about the knobby DNA then. We
have to stop the collision.”
“What? David? How? The BHP impactor needs the entire array
output for the next ten days. And look at the simulations. Even if we were to
turn the array on the planetoid now, without time for any preparation there’s
no guarantee it would accomplish anything.”
“There must be a way! That is your field. Give us a chance
to study Martin biology in situ!”
Liz shook her head. “I’m truly sorry, David.”
He looked at her, anguish written all over his face. “That
is all I get? ‘I’m sorry?’”
Liz felt torn. “David, my job is to make sure the impactor
gets exactly what it needs. There are three other impactors headed for the
experiment site. If any one of them is off, a half-century of work goes down
the drain. I can’t think of anything we can do at this point that wouldn’t
jeopardize that. But I’ll ask the staff. Anyway, the geometry is wrong; the
planetoid’s trajectory is in the local ecliptic plane, so half the array is
blocked by the other half. The gap is on the one side, and Martin blocks the
other side. We won’t be able to get a significant push on the planetoid for
another three days in any event. Maybe you’ll have enough samples by then.”
He abruptly got up. “I need a break.”
She took his hand and held it tightly.
“Make it enough time, Liz, please,” he said. “I am going out
to the remote lab to do what I can.”
••∞••
Three weeks later, David greeted Liz at his remote lab deep
inside the only natural satellite of Martin, and gave her a quick tour. The
moon was a captured nickel-iron asteroid about seventy kilometers by fifty by
thirty. Robots had hollowed out a 500-meter spherical cavity deep beneath the
surface. They also built a rotating drum that was 200 meters in radius to provide
enough gravity to keep the researchers’ bones solid and to settle the various
fluids of life in and outside the isolation lab. Construction was still going
on, and people were working out of cubicles. Plantings and roofs would come
later, he explained.
She looked grim and troubled, he thought—and steeled himself
for bad news. He showed her a seat in a bare cubicle he used as a staff
conference room. Cyan Mutori was on screen, seated with a couple of council
members and three or four people he thought might be project engineers. Cyan
looked as poised as ever, with no hint as to the position she might take. He
took a deep breath.
Cyan started. “David, for those of us who are not
exobiologists, perhaps you could start this conversation with a little background.”
“Thank you, Cyan. We have found multicellular life on
Martin. Worms, actually, primitive, but with a pass-through tube for a gut and
the beginnings of a primitive nervous system. We suspect there are more
complicated life forms.”
The light speed delay between the lab and Minot was almost a
minute. It seemed more like an hour. Finally, the people on his screen reacted
with a murmur, but it was not as loud as he’d hoped for.
He tried again. “You must understand the importance of this.
We have found the first multi-celled life form that humanity has ever found
off-Earth.”
Another minute, more murmur.
Cyan beamed at him. “David, this is great news, and your
team is to be congratulated for all their hard work. Wouldn’t everyone agree?”
Louder murmuring and congratulations poured toward him.
“Could we have some additional perspective of your discovery?”
Gehenna. What else could he tell them? He spread his arms.
“Look, it’s a given that all the life we know spawned from single cells. That’s
the beginning. What we have here are multi-celled organisms. So the problem to
investigate is: Where did they evolve? Near the thermal vents at the bottom of
the lakes on Martin, or somewhere else? And if so, why were they able to
survive on this particular planet?”
Liz leaned forward. “These life forms may have come from
someplace else?”
He had expected his good news would set everyone’s
enthusiasm on fire. Instead he was getting polite questions.
“They have loop DNA like extremophiles but we aren’t sure
whether they are descended from archea. That means we have another, entirely
different architecture of life floating around the galaxy. But the gene trace
diagrams indicate a recent origin, pointing toward a development unique to
Martin. I’m betting that life for these worms started right on this planet.”
Another wait, then someone else asked, “Have you looked into
the geologic history of this planet enough to be able to substantiate this
thesis?”
He shook his head. “We do not have data enough to decide one
way or the other. We need more bore holes, more lakes, and more samples. We
need an intact planet on which to do this.”
“But we don’t have the time,” Liz said simply.
He shot her a look, then looked back to Mutori. “That’s
where you all come in. We have to divert the incoming planetoid. It would be
nice if this could be done without affecting the Black Hole Project, but this
has to take priority.
“Look, I’ve studied the project plans and there is some
margin built in. The impactors lock into beacons as they approach the impact
point and start exchanging vectors. They can all decelerate a little to recover
synchronicity if one is a little off. We can make up the total momentum after
diverting the planetoid and let the impactor control system get things back in
sync again. But even if that doesn’t work, would it really matter if it takes
another century to make a black hole? This is something that may never come our
way again.”
Liz shook her head. “I can’t endorse that approach. What if
we aren’t the only ones with some kind of problem? Yes, there is some margin,
but not enough to cover things if all four impactors make changes as big as we
are contemplating here. We can’t just grab all the margin of error for
ourselves. We have to put that impactor on exactly the prescribed profile if we
humanly can.”
After the light speed delay, a project engineer shook his
head. “It would be better to destroy the impactor and start over again than to
be slightly off. A great many things could happen with an asymmetric impact,
some of them very dangerous indeed, and to people other than ourselves.”
Cyan Mutori nodded gravely.
David’s heart sank. They just couldn’t see how important it
was! Of course not, he thought. They were mostly physical scientists and
engineers. They had different values. Against all logic, he searched Cyan’s
face for a hopeful sign, but her face, of course, gave nothing away.
There were more questions and answers, but in reality
everyone was well-informed. This was not a question of facts, but one of value
and perspective. His, he realized, was not theirs.
One of the council members made a motion to adjourn without
acting on the diversion proposal. They voted silently.
Finally, Cyan looked at him. “The consensus of the Council
is to continue with the original mission plan. We’ll put all available
resources into getting as large a physical sample of pre-collision Martin as we
can, right up to the last minute. I am sorry, David, but it is the best we can
do for you. I know human team members will want to stay until the last minute,
so we need to be fairly firm about getting them off. Please inform everyone
that all human team members should plan to be off of Martin within 24 hours of
impact, for safety.”
David nodded dumbly and sighed. “I understand. Thank you for
considering this. Since there is so little time, I should get back to work.”
