The Rock Rats

CHAPTER 5

As soon as he stepped out onto the surface of Ceres, Fuchs realized that this was the first time he’d been in a spacesuit in months. The suit still smelled new; he’d only used it once or twice. Mein gott, he said to himself, I’ve become a bourgeois. The suit didn’t fit all that well, either; the arms and legs were a trifle too long to be comfortable. His first venture into space had been aboard Starpower 1’s ill-fated maiden voyage, five years earlier. He’d been a graduate student then, heading for a doctorate in planetary geochemistry. He never returned to school. Instead, he married Amanda and became a rock rat, a prospector seeking his fortune among the asteroids of the Belt. For nearly two years now, he had abandoned even that to run a supply depot on Ceres and supervise the habitat project. Helvetia Ltd. was the name Fuchs had given his fledgling business, incorporating it under the regulations of the International Astronautical Authority. He was Helvetia’s president, Amanda its treasurer, and Pancho Lane a vice president who never interfered in the company’s operations; she seldom even bothered to visit its headquarters on Ceres. Helvetia bought most of its supplies from Astro Corporation and sold them to the rock rats at the lowest markup Amanda would allow. Humphries Space Systems ran a competing operation, and Fuchs gleefully kept his prices as low as possible, forcing Humphries to cut his own prices or be driven off Ceres altogether. The competition was getting to the cutthroat level; it was a race to see who would drive whom out of business. The rock rats obviously preferred dealing with Fuchs to dealing with HSS. To his pleasant surprise, Helvetia Ltd. prospered, even though Fuchs considered himself a mediocre businessman. He was too quick to extend credit on nothing more than a rock rat’s earnest promise to repay once he’d struck it rich. He preferred a handshake to the small print of a contract. Amanda constantly questioned his judgment, but enough of those vague promises came through to make Helvetia profitable. We’re getting rich, Fuchs realized happily as his bank account at Selene fattened. Despite all of Humphries’s tricks, we are getting rather wealthy.

Now, gazing around the bleak battered surface of Ceres, he realized all over again how lonely and desolate this place was. How far from civilization. The sky was filled with stars, such a teeming profusion of them that the old familiar constellations were lost in their abundance. There was no friendly old Moon or blue glowing Earth hanging nearby; even the Sun looked small and weak, dwarfed by distance. A strange, alien sky: stark and pitiless. Ceres’s surface was broodingly dark, cold, pitted by thousands of craterlets, rough and uneven, boulders and smaller rocks scattered around everywhere. The horizon was so close it looked as if he were standing on a tiny platform rather than a solid body. For a giddy instant Fuchs felt that if he didn’t hang on, he’d fall up, off this worldlet, into the wild wilderness of stars.

Almost distraught, he caught sight of the unfinished habitat rising above the naked horizon, glittering even in the weak sunlight. It steadied him. It might be a ramshackle collection of old, used, and stripped-down spacecraft, but it was the handiwork of human beings out here in this vast, dark emptiness.

A gleam of light flashed briefly. He knew it was the little shuttlecraft bringing Pancho and Ripley back to the asteroid’s surface. Fuchs waited by the squat structure of the airlock that led down into the living sections below ground.

The shuttle disappeared past the horizon, but in a few minutes it came up over the other side, close enough to see its insect-thin legs and the bulbous canopy of its crew module. Pancho had insisted on flying the bird herself, flexing her old astronaut muscles.

Now she brought it in to a smooth landing on the scoured ground about a hundred meters from the airlock.

As the two spacesuited figures climbed down from the shuttle, Fuchs easily recognized Pancho Lane’s long, stringy figure even in her helmet and suit. This was the first time in nearly a year that Pancho had come to Ceres, doubling up on her roles of Astro board member and Helvetia vice president.

Tapping on the communications keyboard on his left wrist, Fuchs heard her talking with Ripley, the engineer in charge of the construction project.

“… what you really need is a new set of welding lasers,” she was saying, “instead of those clunkers you’re workin’ with.”

Rather than trying to walk in the low-gravity shuffle that was necessary on Ceres, Fuchs took the jetpack control box into his gloved hand and barely squeezed it, feather-light. As usual, he overdid the thrust and sailed over the heads of Pancho and the engineer, nearly ramming into the shuttlecraft. His boots kicked up a cloud of dark dust as he touched down on the surface.

“Lord, Lars, when’re you gonna learn how to fly one of those rigs?” Pancho teased.

Inside his helmet Fuchs grinned with embarrassment. “I’m out of practice,” he admitted, sliding his feet across the surface toward them, raising still more dust. The ground felt gritty, pebbly, even through his thick-soled boots.

“You were never in practice, buddy.”

He changed the subject by asking the engineer, “So, Mr. Rip-Icy, will your crew be able to assemble the latest additions on schedule?”

“Believe it or not,” Ripley replied archly, “they will.”

Niles Ripley was an American of Nigerian heritage, an engineer with degrees from Lehigh and Penn, an amateur jazz trumpet player who had acquired the nickname “Ripper” from his headlong improvisations. The sobriquet sometimes caused problems for the mild-mannered engineer, especially in bars with belligerent drunks. The Ripper generally smiled and talked his way out of confrontations. He had no intention of letting some musclebound oaf damage his horn-playing lip.

“Your schedule will be met,” Ripley went on. Then he added, “Despite its lack of flexibility.”

Fuchs jabbed back, “Then your crew will earn its bonus, despite their complaints about the schedule.”

Pancho interrupted their banter. “I’ve been tellin’ ol’ Ripper here that you’d get this job done a lot faster with a better set of welding lasers.”

“We can’t afford them,” Fuchs said. “We are on very tight budget restraints.”

“Astro could lease you the lasers. Real easy terms.”

Fuchs made an audible sigh. “I wish you had thought of that two years ago, when we started this operation.”

“Two years ago the best lasers we had were big and inefficient. Our lab boys just came up with these new babies: small enough to haul around on a minitractor. Very fuel efficient. They’ve even got a handheld version. Lower power, of course, but good enough for some jobs.”

“We’re doing well enough with what we have, Pancho.”

“Well, okay. Don’t say I didn’t make you the offer.” He heard the resigned, slightly disappointed tone in her voice.

Pointing a gloved hand toward the habitat, which was nearly at the far horizon, Fuchs said, “We’ve done quite well so far, don’t you think?”

For a long moment she said nothing as the three of them watched the habitat glide down the sky. It looked like an unfinished pinwheel, several spacecraft joined end to end and connected by long buckyball tethers to a similar collection of united spacecraft, the entire assembly slowly rotating as it moved toward the horizon.

“Tell you the truth, Lars old buddy,” said Pancho, “it kinda reminds me of a used-car lot back in Lubbock.”

“Used-car lot?” Fuchs sputtered.

“Or maybe a flyin’ junkyard.”

“Junkyard?”

Then he heard Ripley laughing. “Don’t let her kid you, Lars. She was pretty impressed, going through the units we’ve assembled.”

Pancho said, “Well, yeah, the insides are pretty good. But it surely ain’t a thing of beauty from the outside.”

“It will be,” Fuchs muttered. “You wait and see.”

Ripley changed the subject. “Tell me more about these handheld lasers. How powerful are they?”

“It’ll cut through a sheet of steel three centimeters thick,” Pancho said.

“How long does it take?” asked Ripley.

“Couple nanoseconds. It’s pulsed. Doesn’t melt the steel, it shock-blasts it.”

They chatted on while the habitat sank out of sight and the distant, pale Sun climbed higher in the dark, star-choked sky. Fuchs noticed the zodiacal light, like two long arms outstretched from the Sun’s middle. Reflections from dust motes, he knew: microscopic asteroids floating out there, leftovers from the creation of the planets.

As they started toward the airlock, Pancho turned to Fuchs. “Might’s well talk a little business.”

She raised her left arm and tapped the key on her cuff that switched to a secondary suit-radio frequency. Ripley was cut out of their conversation now.

Fuchs hit the same key on his control unit. “Yes, business by all means.”

“You asked us to reduce the prices for circuit boards again,” Pancho said. “We’re already close to the bone, Lars.”

“Humphries is trying to undersell you.”

“Astro can’t sell at a loss. The directors won’t stand for it.”

Fuchs felt his lips curl into a sardonic smile. “Humphries is on your board of directors still?”

“Yup. He’s promised not to lower HSS’s prices any further.”

“He’s lying. They’re offering circuit boards, chips, even repair services at lower and lower prices. He’s trying to drive me out of the market.”

“And once he does he’ll run up the prices as high as he pleases,” she said.

“Naturally. He’ll have a monopoly then.”

They had reached the airlock hatch. It was big enough for two spacesuited people, but not three, so they sent Ripley through first.

Pancho watched the engineer close the hatch, then said, “Lars, what Humphries really wants is to take over Astro. He’s been after that since the git-go.”

“Then he’ll have a monopoly on all space operations, everywhere in the Belt…everywhere in the whole solar system,” Fuchs said, feeling anger rising within him.

“That’s what he’s after.”

“We’ve got to prevent that! Whatever it takes, we must stop him.”

“I can’t sell you goods at below cost, buddy. The board’s made that clear.”

Fuchs nodded wearily. “Then we’ll have to think of something else.”

“Like what?”

He tried to shrug his shoulders, but inside the spacesuit it was impossible. “I wish I knew,” he admitted.