The Rock Rats

CHAPTER 11

There was no meeting hall in Ceres, no single place designated for public assemblies. That was mainly because there had never been a need for one; Ceres’s ragtag collection of miners and prospectors, repair people and technicians, merchants and clerks had never come together in a public assembly until now. The closest thing to a government on Ceres was a pair of IAA flight controllers who monitored the take-offs and landings of the ships that were constantly arriving for supplies and maintenance, then departing into the dark emptiness of the Belt.

So when Fuchs called for a public meeting, it took some doing for him to convince the other rock rats that a gathering was necessary and beneficial. As it was, hardly forty men and women out of the several hundred in the asteroid showed up at the Pub, which Fuchs had commandeered for his meeting. A few dozen others attended electronically, from their ships in transit through the Belt. Big George was among those latter; he had left Ceres in his Waltzing Matilda several days before Fuchs’s meeting convened.

It was a good-natured crowd that came together in the Pub at 1700 hours that afternoon. Like most spacecraft and off-Earth facilities, Ceres kept Universal Time. The Pub’s owner/barkeep had allowed his place to be used for the meeting upon Fuchs’s promise that it would take no longer than an hour. The “six o’clock swill” could proceed as usual.

“I’m no public speaker,” Fuchs said, standing atop the bar so everyone in the milling, chattering crowd could see him. Three big flatscreens had been wheeled into the back of the room; they showed nearly a score of individuals attending the meeting remotely. Many of the prospectors refused to do even that, claiming that they didn’t want anyone to know where they were, outside of the usual IAA trackers, whom they tolerated only because of the IAA’s tradition of confidentiality and non-interference in spacecraft operations, except for safety conditions.

“I’m no public speaker,” Fuchs repeated, louder.

“Then what’re you doing up there?” came an irreverent voice from the crowd. Everyone laughed.

Grinning back at the heckler, Fuchs rejoined, “It’s a dirty job…”

“…but somebody’s got to do it,” the whole crowd finished with him.

Fuchs laughed, a little sheepishly, and looked at Amanda, standing off by the wall toward his right. She smiled encouragement at him. The twins stood beside her, fully clothed in glittering metallic outfits. Even in plain coveralls Amanda still looked far more beautiful than they, in Fuchs’s eyes.

“Seriously,” he said, once the crowd settled down, “it’s time we talked about something that most of us find distasteful—”

“What’samatter Lars, the toilets backing up again?”

“The recycler breaking down?”

“No,” he said. “Worse than that. It’s time to start thinking about forming some kind of a government here.”

“Aw, shit!” somebody yowled.

“I don’t like the idea of rules and regulations any more than you do,” Fuchs said quickly. “But this community is growing and we don’t have any laws or law enforcement.”

“We don’t need ’em,” a woman shouted.

“We’ve been getting along okay without any.”

Fuchs shook his head. “There have been two brawls right here in the Pub in the past month. Someone deliberately damaged Yuri Kubasov’s ship last week. Deliberate sabotage.”

“That’s a private matter,” came a voice from the back of the chamber. “Yuri was chasing the wrong woman.”

A few people snickered knowingly.

“Then there was the break-in in my warehouse,” Fuchs added. “That was no minor affair; we lost more than a hundred thousand dollars worth of inventory.”

“Come on, Lars,” a woman challenged. “Everybody knows that you’re competing against HSS. So they’re playing a little rough; that’s your problem, not ours.”

“Yeah, if you and Humphries are battling it out, why try to drag us into your fight?”

Glancing again toward Amanda, Fuchs answered, “It’s not my fight. It’s yours.”

“The hell it is!” said one of the men, heatedly. “This is between you and Humphries. It’s personal and it’s got nothing to do with us.”

“That’s not true, as you’ll soon find out.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Reluctantly, surprised at how hard it was to bring out the words, he told them, “It means that Amanda and I will be leaving Ceres shortly. We’ll be returning to Earth.”

“Leaving?”

Feeling real pain, Fuchs went on, “Humphries has made an offer that’s much too generous for us to us to ignore. HSS will be taking over Helvetia’s warehouse and all its services.”

For several heartbeats there was absolute silence through the Pub.

Then, from one of the flatscreens, Big George said, “That means HSS will be our only supplier.”

“They’ll have a monopoly here!” someone else wailed.

With a grave nod, Fuchs said, “That’s why it’s important for you to form some kind of government, some group that can represent you, maybe get Astro to set up another facility—”

“fire,” said the synthesized computer voice from the speakers by the Pub’s entryway. “fire in section four-cee.”

“That’s my warehouse!” Fuchs blurted.

The crowd bolted through the entryway and out into the tunnel. Fuchs jumped down from the bar, grabbed Amanda by the hand, and raced along behind the others.

Each section of the underground settlement was connected to the others by the tunnels. Airtight hatches stood in the tunnels every hundred meters or so, programmed to seal themselves shut in case of a drop in air pressure or other deviation from normal conditions. By the time Fuchs reached the entrance to his warehouse, still grasping Amanda’s hand, the hatch that sealed off the cave had long been shut tight. He pushed through the crowd from the Pub, coughing violently at the dust they had raised, and touched the hatch’s metal surface. It felt hot.

“The warehouse cameras are out,” said one of the technicians. “Must be a pretty intense fire.”

Fuchs nodded, scowling. “Nothing to do but wait until it consumes all the air in there and kills itself off.”

“Was anyone inside?” Amanda asked.

“I don’t believe so,” Fuchs said. “Not any of our people; they were all at the meeting.”

“So we wait,” said the technician. He fumbled in his coverall pocket, then pulled out a breathing mask and slipped it on.

Several people in the crowd murmured condolences. Most of the others drifted off, buzzing with low-voiced conversations. Here and there someone coughed or spluttered from the dust.

“He did this,” Fuchs muttered.

“Who?” asked Amanda.

“Humphries. One of his people.”

“No! What would he—”

“To convince us to leave Ceres. The money offer he made was a ruse. We haven’t told him of our decision to accept it, so now he uses force.”

“Lars, I can’t believe that he’d do that.”

“I can.”

Amanda looked at the few people remaining in the tunnel and said to her husband, “There’s nothing we can do here. We should go home; we can come back later, when the fire’s burned itself out.”

“No,” Fuchs said. “I’ll wait here.”

“But you don’t have a breathing mask and—”

“You go. I’ll wait here.”

Amanda tried to smile, failed. “I’ll wait with you.”

“There’s no need…”

“I’d rather be with you,” Amanda said, taking his big-knuckled hand in both of hers.

Standing there with nothing to do except wait, coughing in the gritty dust, Fuchs felt a seething anger rising within him, a burning hatred for the man who could order such a thing and his henchmen who actually did it.

The swine, he said to himself. The filthy, sneaking, murderous swine. A fire! In a sealed community like this. If the safety hatches didn’t work they could have killed us all! The fire could consume all our air and asphyxiate every one of us!

Murderers, he told himself. I’m dealing with men who would commit murder to get what they want. I’m taking Humphries’s money and running away from this place like a lackey being paid off by the lord of the manor.

“Lars, what wrong?” Amanda asked.

“Nothing.”

She looked truly worried. “But you were trembling. You looked—I’ve never seen such an expression on your face before.”

He tried to control the rage boiling inside him, tried to hide it, keep it bottled up where no one could see it, not even his wife.

“Come on,” he said gruffly. “You were right. There’s nothing we can do here until we can open the hatch and see how much damage has been done.”

When they got back to their apartment, he picked at the dinner Amanda set before him. He could not sleep. The next morning, when he and a pair of technicians went back to the warehouse, the airtight hatch was fused shut. They had to use one of Astro’s mining lasers to cut it open and then wait several minutes for the big, gutted chamber to fill with breathable air.

The warehouse was a blackened shambles. The technicians, both of them young men new to Ceres, stared at the wreckage with round eyes.

“Jeez,” muttered the one on Fuchs’s right as they played their hand lights around the still-hot ruins.

Fuchs couldn’t recognize the place. The shelving had collapsed, metal supports melted by the heat of the blaze. Tons of equipment were reduced to molten lumps of slag.

“What could’ve caused such a hot fire?” wondered the kid on Fuchs’s left.

“Not what,” Fuchs muttered. “Who.”