The Precipice

STORM SHELTER

Four worried people clustered around the table in Starpower 1’s wardroom. The wallscreen showed a chart of the solar system, with the radiation cloud that the solar flare had belched out appearing as a shapeless gray blob twisted by the interplanetary magnetic field. It was approaching Earth and the Moon rapidly. Deep in the Asteroid Belt a single pulsating yellow dot showed where their ship was.

Dan said to the computer, “Show the projections for the next two days.” The cloud grew and thinned, but surged out past the orbit of Mars and then engulfed the inner Belt and overran the blinking dot that marked Starpower 1’s position.

Pancho made a sound halfway between a sigh and a snort. “No way around it.

We’re gonna get hosed.”

Amanda looked up from her palmcomp. “If we could pump all our remaining fuel into one tank, it could serve as a shelter… of sorts.”

“I thought the secondaries would get us,” Dan muttered. “They’d be high,” Amanda admitted, “but if we could pressurize the fuel it might absorb most of the secondary particles before they reached us.”

“If we’re plumb in the middle of the tank,” Pancho said.

“Yes. Inside our suits, of course.”

“Can the suits handle the temperature? We’re talking about liquid hydrogen and helium; damned close to absolute zero.”

“The suits are insulated well enough,” Pancho said. Then she added, “But nobody’s ever tried a dunk in liquid hydrogen with ’em.”

“And we’d have to be dunked for god knows how many hours,” Dan muttered.

Fuchs had not said a word. His head was bent over his own palmcomp.

“How much protection would the fuel give us?” Dan asked glumly. Amanda hesitated, looked down at her handheld screen, then said, “We’d all need hospitalization. We’d have to set the flight controls to put us into lunar orbit on automatic.”

“We’d all be that sick?” Pancho asked.

Amanda nodded solemnly.

And I’d be dead, Dan thought. I can’t take another radiation dose like that. It would kill me.

Aloud, he tried to sound reasonably hopeful. “Well, it’s better than sitting here with our thumbs jammed. Pancho, start transferring the fuel.”

“How high can we pressurize one of the tanks?” Amanda wondered. “I’ll check the specs,” said Pancho. “Come on, we’ve got to—”

“Wait,” Fuchs said, looking up at them. “There is a better way.” Dan looked hard at him. Fuchs’s eyes were set so deep that it was difficult to see any expression in them. Certainly he was not smiling. His thin slash of a mouth looked tight, hard.

“Computer,” Fuchs called, “display position of asteroid 32 — 114.”

A yellow dot began blinking near the inner edge of the Belt.

“That’s where we must go,” Fuchs said flatly.

“It’s half a day off our course home,” Pancho objected.

“Why there, Lars?” Amanda asked.

“We can use it for a storm shelter.”

Dan shook his head. “Once the cloud runs over us, the radiation is isotropic. It comes from all directions. You can’t hide behind a rock from it.”

“Not behind the rock,” Fuchs said, with growing excitement. “Inside it!”

“Inside the asteroid?”

“Yes! We burrow into it. The body of the asteroid will shield us from the radiation!”

“That would be great,” Dan said, “if we had some deep drilling equipment aboard and a few days to dig. We don’t have either.”

“We don’t need them!”

“The hell we don’t,” Dan shot back. “You think we’re going to tunnel into that rock with your little core sampler?”

“No, no, no,” Fuchs said. “You don’t understand. That rock is a chondritic asteroid!”

“So what?” Pancho snapped.

“It’s porous! It isn’t a rock, not like Bonanza. It’s an aggregate of chondrites — little stones, held together by gravity.”

“How do you know that?” Dan demanded. “We haven’t gotten close enough to—”

“Look at the data!” Fuchs urged, waving a thick-fingered hand at the wallscreen. “What data?” The screen still showed the chart with the radiation cloud. Fuchs pointed his palmcomp at the screen like a pistol and the wall display suddenly showed a long table of alphanumerics.

“Look at the data for its density,” Fuchs said urgently. He jumped up from his chair and bounded to the screen. “Look! Its density isn’t much more than that of water! It can’t be a solid object! Not with such a density. It’s porous! An aggregation of stones! Like a…” he searched for a word,”… like a pile of rubble… a beanbag chair!”

Dan stared at the numbers, then looked back at Fuchs. The man was clearly excited now.

“You’re sure of this?” he asked.

“The numbers don’t lie,” Fuchs said. “They can’t.”

Pancho gave out a soft whistle. “Shore wish we had somethin’ more’n numbers to go on.”

“But we do!” Fuchs said. “Mathilde in the Main Belt, and Eugenia — several C — class bodies among the Near-Earth Asteroids — they are all aggregates, not solid at all. Microprobes have examined them, even gone inside them!”

“Porous,” Dan muttered.

“Yes!”

“We can dig into them without drilling equipment?”

“They are probably highly-tunneled by nature.”

Dan stroked his chin, trying to think, trying to decide. If he’s right, it’d be better than dunking ourselves in a pool of liquid hydrogen for hours on end. If Fuchs is right. If we can burrow into the asteroid and use it for a storm shelter. If he’s wrong, we’re all dead.

Pancho spoke up. “I say we go for the asteroid, boss.” Dan looked into her steady light brown eyes. Is she saying this because she knows I won’t make it otherwise? Is she willing to take the chance with her own life because it’s the only chance we’ve got to save mine?

“I agree,” Amanda said. “The asteroid is the better choice.”

He turned back to Fuchs. “Lars, are you absolutely certain of all this?”

“Absolutely,” Fuchs replied, without an instant’s hesitation.

“Okay,” Dan said, feeling uneasy about it. “Change course for — which one is it?”

“Asteroid 32-114,” Fuchs and Amanda answered in unison.

“Point and shoot,” Dan said.

Dan tried to sleep while Starpower 1 raced to the chondritic asteroid, but his dreams were troubled with faces and visions from the past and a vague, looming sense of dread. He awoke feeling more tired than when he’d crawled into his bunk. He felt stiff and sore, as if every muscle in his body were strained. Tension, he told himself. But that sardonic voice in his mind retorted, Age. You’re getting to be an old man.

He nodded to his image in the lav mirror. If I live through this I’m going to start rejuve therapy.

Then he realized what he’d said: if I live through this.

He put on a fresh set of coveralls and grabbed a mug of coffee on his way to the bridge. Amanda was in the command chair, with Fuchs sitting at her right. “Pancho’s sleeping,” Amanda said before Dan could ask. “We’ll be making rendezvous with 114 in…” she glanced at one of the screens,”… seventy-three minutes. I’ll wake her in half an hour.”

“Can we see the rock yet?” Dan asked, peering into the black emptiness beyond the windows.

“Telescopic view,” said Amanda, touching a viewscreen. A lumpy, roundish shape appeared on the screen. To Dan it looked like a partiallydeflated beach ball, dark gray, almost black.

“We’re getting excellent data on it,” Fuchs said. “Mass and density are confirmed.”

“It’s porous, as you thought?”

“Yes, it has to be.”

“It’s certainly no beauty,” Amanda said.

“I don’t know about that,” replied Dan. “It looks pretty good to me. In fact, I think I’ll call it Haven.”

“Haven,” she echoed.

Dan nodded. “Our haven from the storm.” Silently he added, if those numbers for its density mean what Fuchs says they do.