The Precipice

BONANZA

“It’s a beauty,” Dan breathed, staring at the image on the control panel’s radar screen.

“Purty ugly-lookin’ beauty,” Pancho countered. The radar image showed an elongated irregular lump of an asteroid, one end rounded and pitted, the other dented by what looked like the imprint of a giant mailed fist. “It looks rather like a potato,” said Amanda, “don’t you think?”

“An iron potato,” Dan said.

Fuchs came through the hatch, and suddenly the bridge felt crowded to Dan. Lars isn’t tall, he said to himself, but he fills up a room. “That is it?” Fuchs asked, his eyes riveted to the screen.

“That’s it,” Pancho said, over her shoulder. She tapped at the keyboard on her left and a set of alphanumerics sprang up on the small screen above it. “Fourteenth asteroid discovered this year.”

Amanda said, “Then its official name will be 41-014 Fuchs.”

“How’s it feel to have your name on an asteroid, Lars?” Pancho asked. “Very fine,” Fuchs said.

“You’re the first person to have his name attached to a newly-discovered asteroid in years,” Amanda said. She seemed almost aglow, to Dan. “Most of the new rocks have been found by the impact searchers,” Pancho said.

“Those li’l bitty probes don’t get their names into the record.”

“Asteroid 41-014 Fuchs,” Amanda breathed.

He smiled and shrugged — squirmed, almost, as if embarrassed by her enthusiasm.

“The official name’s one thing,” Dan said. “I’m calling her Bonanza.”

“Her?” Fuchs asked.

“Asteroids are feminine?” Pancho challenged.

Dan held his ground. “Hey, we speak of Mother Earth, don’t we? And they call Venus our sister planet, don’t they?”

“What about Mars?” Pancho retorted.

“Or Jupiter,” said Amanda.

Pointing to the lump imaged on the radar screen, Dan insisted, “Bonanza’s going to make us all rich. And very happy. She and her sisters are going to save the world. She’s a female.”

“Sure she’s female,” Pancho said laconically. “You want to dig into her, don’t you?”

Fuchs sputtered and Amanda said, “Pancho, really!”

Dan put on an innocent air. “What a dirty mind you have, Pancho. I admire that in a woman.”

Within three hours they were close enough to Bonanza to see it for themselves: a dark, deformed shape glinting sullenly in the wan light of the distant Sun. The asteroid blotted out the stars as it tumbled slowly end over end in the cold empty silence of space.

“… eighteen hundred and forty-four meters along its long axis,” Amanda was reading out the radar measurements. “Seven hundred and sixty-two meters at its maximum width.”

“Nearly two kilometers long,” Dan mused. He hadn’t left the bridge all during their approach to the metallic asteroid.

“Killing residual thrust,” Pancho said, her attention focused on the control displays.

“Throttling down to zero,” Amanda confirmed.

The asteroid slid out of view as the pilots established a parking orbit around it. Dan felt what little weight remaining dwindle away to nothing. He floated up off the deck, stopped himself with a hand against the overhead. He felt Fuchs come through the hatch behind him.

“Lars, we’re going to be in zero g for a while,” Dan said.

“I know. I think I’m getting accustomed to it.”

“Good. Just don’t make any sudden head movements and you’ll be fine.”

“Yes. Thank — mein gott! There it is!”

The dark lopsided bulk of Bonanza rose in front of the bridge windows like some pitted, pockmarked monster, huge, overawing, menacing. Despite himself, Dan felt a wave of unease surge through him. It’s like confronting an ogre, he thought, a giant beast from a fairy tale.

“Look at those striations!” Fuchs said, his voice vibrant with excitement. “This must have been broken off from a much larger body, perhaps a planetesimal from the early age of the solar system! We’ve got to get outside and take samples, drill cores!”

Dan broke into laughter. Fuchs turned toward him, looking confused. Even Pancho glanced over her shoulder.

“What so funny, boss?”

“Nothing,” Dan said, trying to sober himself. “Nothing.” Inwardly, though, he marveled that the same sight that brought back to him memories of childhood dread stirred Fuchs into a frenzy of scientific curiosity. “Come on,” Fuchs said, ducking past the hatch. “We’ve got to suit up and go outside.”

Dan nodded his agreement and followed the scientist. He’s forgotten about zero-g, Dan realized. He’s not worried about upchucking now, he’s got too much work that he wants to do.

Amanda remained on the bridge as Pancho followed Dan down to the airlock.

“You’re not thinkin’ of goin’ EVA, are you?” she asked Dan.

“I’ve been a qualified astronaut since before you were born, Pancho.”

“You’ve been redlined. You can’t go outside.”

“And rain makes applesauce.”

“I mean it, Dan,” Pancho said, quite seriously. “Your immune system can’t take another radiation dose.”

“Fuchs can’t go out there by himself,” he countered.

“That’s my job. I’ll go with him.”

“Nope. You stay here. I’ll babysit him.”

“I’m the captain of this craft,” Pancho said firmly. “I can order you to stay inside.”

He gave her a crooked grin. “And I’m the owner. I can fire you.”

“Not till we get back to Selene.”

Dan huffed out an impatient sigh. “Come on, Pancho, stop the chickenshit.”

“Your medical records say—”

“Dammitall to hell and back, I don’t care what the medical records say! I’m going out! I want to see this sucker! Touch her with my own hands.”

“No gloves?”

They had reached the airlock, where the spacesuits hung in racks like suits of armor on display. Fuchs was sitting on the bench that ran in front of the racks, already into the lower half of his suit, sealing the boots to the cuffs of his leggings. Dan reached for the suit that bore his name stenciled on its chest.

“I thought you were scared of the radiation,” Pancho said. “I’ll be okay inside the suit,” Dan said. “The weather’s calm out there; no radiation storm.”

Fuchs looked up at them, said nothing.

“The regulations say—”

“The regulations say you’re not supposed to bring pets aboard,” Dan said, grinning again as he pulled the lower half of his suit from its rack and sat down beside Fuchs. “But I’ve got to look into my shoes every morning to make sure your damned snake isn’t curled up inside one of them.”

“Snake?” Fuchs yelped, looking alarmed.

Pancho planted her fists on her hips and glared down at Dan for a long moment.

Then she visibly relaxed.

“Okay, boss,” she said at last. “I guess I can’t blame you. But I’m gonna monitor your vitals back on the bridge. If I say come in, you come in. Right then. No arguments. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Dan replied instantly. A voice in his head was laughing mockingly. Are you satisfied? the voice asked. You’ve shown her that you’re not a sick old man. Big deal. How are you going to feel when the cold clamps down on you and your bones start hurting again?

Doesn’t matter, Dan answered himself. I’m not going to stay cooped up in here like a cripple. To hell with it; I don’t really give a damn. If I’ve got to die, I’d rather wear out than rust out. What difference does it make? “Clear for EVA.” Amanda’s voice came through the speaker in Dan’s helmet.

He was in the airlock, sealed in his suit, feeling like a robot in a metal womb. “Opening outer hatch,” he said, pressing a gloved finger on the red light of the control panel.

“Copy, outer hatch.”

The hatch slid open and Dan felt his pulse start to quicken. How long has it been since I’ve been outside? he asked himself. That sardonic voice in his head answered, Not since you got the radiation overdose, jiggering commsats in the Van Alien Belt.

Ten years, Dan realized. That’s a long time to be away from all this. He pushed himself through the hatch and floated in emptiness. The universe hung all around him: stars solemn and unwinking, staring at him even through the heavy tinting of his fishbowl helmet. Turning slowly, he saw the Sun, strangely small and pale, with its arms of faint zodiacal light outstretched on either side of it. Freedom. He knew he was confined inside the spacesuit and he couldn’t survive for a minute without it. Yet hanging there weightlessly in the silent emptiness of infinity, Dan felt free of all the world, alone with the cosmos, in tune with the ethereal music of the spheres. Glorious freedom. Radiation be damned; he felt he could soar out into the universe forever and leave the petty lusts and hates of humankind far behind. It wouldn’t be a bad way to die. Then the asteroid slid into his view. Massive, ponderous, an enormous pitted dark looming reality hanging over him like an ominous cloud, a mountain floating free in space. Starpower 1 looked pitifully small and helpless alongside the twokilometer-long asteroid; like a minnow next to a whale. Dan suddenly understood how Jonah must have felt.

You can’t scare me, he said to the asteroid. You’re two kilometers of high-grade iron ore, pal. You’re going to look beautiful to a lot of people on Earth. Money in the bank, that’s what you are. Jobs and hope for millions of people. Bonanza: that’s your name and that’s just what you are.

“Ready for EVA.” Fuchs’s voice broke into Dan’s silent monologue.

“Clear for EVA. Lars,” he heard Amanda reply.

Dan squeezed the right handgrip on his maneuvering controls with the lightest of touches. The cold gas jet on the backpack squirted noiselessly and he turned enough to be looking back at the ship. Starpower 1 glinted nicely in the starlight. She still looked brand-new, shining, not a pit or a scratch on her. The airlock hatch slid open and a spacesuited figure stood framed in it.

“Exiting the airlock,” Fuchs said, his voice trembling slightly.

“Come on, Lars,” Dan called. “Isn’t she a beauty?”

Fuchs jetted toward him. Dan saw that his suit was bristling with hammers and drills and all sorts of equipment.

“It’s enormous!” He sounded awestruck.

“She’s just an average-sized chunk of metal,” Dan said. “And as soon as you chip a piece off her, we can claim her.”

Fuchs showed no hesitation at all, although he seemed a bit clumsy working the controls of his maneuvering thrusters. For a moment Dan thought he was going to ram into the asteroid, but at the last instant Fuchs fired a braking blast and hovered a scant few meters above its pitted, pebbly surface.

Dan jetted toward him, and with a bare touch of the handgrip controls lowered himself to the surface of the asteroid. He felt his boots make contact and then recoil slightly. Not much gravity, he thought, as he puffed down again and finally stood on the surface of Bonanza. Clouds of dust rose where his boots made contact with the surface; they just hung there, barely moving in the minuscule gravity. It took Fuchs three tries to get firmly onto the surface; he kept coming down too hard and bouncing off. In the end, Dan had to reach out and yank him down. “Don’t try to walk,” he told Fuchs. “The gravity’s so light you’ll float up and away.”

“Then how—”

“Slide your boots along.” Dan demonstrated a couple of steps, shuffling up even more dust. “Like you’re dancing.”

“I don’t dance very well,” Fuchs said.

“This isn’t the smoothest dance floor in the solar system, either.” The asteroid’s surface was rough and uneven, covered with a powdery coating of dust, much like the surface of the Moon. Dan thought it was more like standing on the deck of a boat, though, than on solid ground. There wasn’t really a horizon; the rock just ended. Pinhole craters peppered the surface, pebbles and fist-sized rocks littered it, and out along its far end, Dan could see a more sizeable crater, a big depression with a raised rim all around it.

“How much iron do you think we’ve got here?” Dan asked. “We’ll have a good measure of its mass by the time we return to the ship,” Fuchs said. “With the ship orbiting the asteroid we have a classic two-body system. It’s simple Newtonian physics.”

Dan thought to himself, He’s a scientist, all right. Ask him a simple question and you get a dissertation. Without the answer to your question. “Lars,” he said patiently, “can’t you give me some idea of this lump’s mass?” Fuchs spread his hands. In the spacesuit, he looked like a bubble-topped fireplug with arms.

“A back-of-the-envelope guesstimate?” Dan coaxed.

“Oh… considering its dimensions… nickel-iron asteroids are typically no more than ten percent nickel… it must be somewhere in the neighborhood of seven or eight billion tons of iron and eighty million tons or so of nickel.” Dan’s eyes went wide. “That’s five or six times the world’s steel production in its best year! Before the floods and all!”

“There are impurities, of course,” Fuchs warned. “Platinum, gold and silver, other heavy metals.”

“Impurities, right,” Dan agreed, cackling. His mind was spinning. One asteroid is enough to supply the world’s steel industry for years and years! And there are thousands of these chunks out here! It’s all true! Everything I hoped for, all those wild promises I made — they’re all going to come true! Fuchs seemed oblivious to it all. “I want to look at those striations,” he said, turning toward the far end of the asteroid. His effort made him rise off the surface and Dan had to yank him down again.

“Take a sample here, first,” Dan said. “Then we can claim it.” The light was so dim that Dan could see Fuchs’s head outlined inside his bubble helmet. He nodded and slowly, very slowly, got down into a kneeling position. Then he pulled a rock hammer from his equipment belt and chipped off a bit of the asteroid. The effort raised more dust and lifted him off the surface again, but this time he clawed at the ground with one gloved hand and pulled himself back down. “Anchor yourself, Lars,” Dan said. “Hammer a piton in and tether it to your belt.”

“Yes, of course,” Fuchs answered, fumbling with the equipment clipped to his waist.

Dan said, “Record this, Amanda, and mark the time. Starpower Limited has begun taking samples of asteroid 41-014 Fuchs. Under the terms of the International Astronautical Authority protocol of 2021, Star-power Limited, claims exclusive use of the resources of this asteroid.”

“I’ve got it,” Amanda’s voice replied. “Your statement is being beamed to IAA headquarters on Earth.”

“Good,” Dan said, satisfied. He recalled from his school days the story of the Spanish explorer Balboa first sighting the Pacific Ocean. From what he remembered of the tale, Balboa waded out into the surf and claimed the whole bloody ocean and all the lands bordering on it for Spain. They thought big in those days, Dan said to himself. No pissant IAA to worry about. Fuchs got the knack of shuffling along the surface of the asteroid, and started chipping out samples and making stereo videos. Dan worried about the dust they were kicking up. It could get into the joints of our suits, he thought. Damned stuff just hangs there; must take a year for it to settle back again. He saw a bulge off to his right, like a small knoll or a rounded hill. That must be the tail end of this rock, Dan told himself. Looking back at Fuchs, he saw that the scientist had finally anchored himself to the ground and was busily chipping away, raising lingering clouds of dust.

“I’m going to go up to that ridge,” he told Fuchs, pointing, “and see what’s on the other side.”

“Very well,” said Fuchs, still bent over his sampling.

Dan shuffled carefully along, worrying about the dust. On the Moon, dust raised from the ground was electrostatically charged; it clung stubbornly to the suits and helmet visors. Probably the same thing here.

He started up the slight rise. Something didn’t feel right. Suddenly his boots slid out from under him and he tumbled, in dreamlike slow motion, face forward. His fall was so gentle that he could put out his hands and stop himself, but he bounced off the dusty ground and found himself floating up the rise like a hot-air balloon gliding up the side of a mountain.

Dan’s old astronaut training took over his reflexes. In his mind he saw clearly what was happening. The gravity on this double-damned rock is so low that I’m floating off it! He saw the bulbous end of the asteroid sliding slowly beneath him and, beyond it, the star-strewn infinity of space.

Twisting his body so that he pointed himself back toward the asteroid’s bulk, Dan squirted his maneuvering jets and lurched back to the asteroid. Gently, tenderly, he touched down again on its surface. Fuchs was still tapping away with his sampling hammer, rising off the ground with every blow, his anchored tether pulling him back again for another crack.

Dan was breathing hard, but otherwise no worse the wear for his little excursion. With even greater care than before he shuffled back to stand beside Fuchs and help bag the samples he’d chipped out.

At last Pancho said sternly, “Time to come in, guys.”

“Just one more sample,” Fuchs replied.

“Now,” Pancho commanded.

“Aye-aye, cap’n,” said Dan. He rapped his gloved knuckles on Fuchs’s helmet. “Come on, Lars. You’ve done enough for one day. This rock isn’t going to go away; you can come back another time.”

Amanda was at the airlock to help them take off their backpacks and dustspattered spacesuits. Dan caught a strange, pungent smell once he removed his helmet. Not like the sharp firecracker odor of the lunar dust; this was something new, different.

Before he had time to puzzle out the dust’s odor, Pancho came down to the airlock area, looking so somber that Dan asked her what was the matter. While Fuchs chattered happily with Amanda, Pancho said, “Bad news, boss. Another section of the superconductor is heating up. If it goes critical it could blow out the whole magnetic shield.”

Dan felt his jaw drop open. Without the shield they’d be cooked by the next solar radiation storm.

“We’ve gotta get back to Selene pronto,” Pancho said. “Before another flare breaks out.”

“What’re our chances?” Dan asked, his throat dry.

She waggled a hand. “Fifty-fifty… if we’re lucky.”