Brian Thorne was on a private five-day SensoryTrip in his Battle Mountain home. No communication.
Brian Thorne was to be reported in the Andes, and his destination was “leaked” at the last moment. Many would rush there, thinking I had some inside information on new iron discoveries. Then I was to be seen in Mississippi, in Tsingtao “incognito,” and sailing on the Tasmanian Sea with Tommi Mitchell.
By that time I should be on Mars. A pretaped report by me would then be given the General Anomaly board of directors by Huo. They would be angry, but too late. In their own interests they would have to keep up the pretense of shuffling Brian Thorne around the world. I felt like a boy sneaking off to join the circus.
And I loved it.
Diego Braddock was one of my easiest personas to don and maintain, for his job was one of asking questions about anything that suited him, a situation not unlike that of his boss, far up the table of organization, a certain Brian T.
It was as Diego Braddock, Publitex scribbler, space-suited and cleared, that I boarded the shuttle for Station Two from Sahara Base Three. In my inner pocket, sealed by thumb ident, were cargo tickets for six containers, already being transferred to the Vasco Nunez de Balboa up at the space station.
The money that I had “stolen” from my own companies had gone for the contents of those six containers, which were, in a way, my trade goods and beads for the natives. They contained frozen bovine ova and sperm, plus the apparatus that would give the nuvomartians their first cattle herds . . . if they lived. There were shimmercloth and entertainment tapes. There were a few cases of wine, all vintages that traveled well, sealed in stasis tubes. The largest container had its own inner environment and held tiny mutant seedlings from the University of California Martian Research Center, trees and plants that the scientists hoped would thrive on the new and still thin Martian atmosphere. The shuttle thundered up through the overcast that had drifted over from the shallow new Lake Sahara to the south, and then the safety ports slid back and we were in space. The trip was short and fast, and we docked at Station Two without incident.
I unbuckled and let myself drift up, enjoying the familiar weightlessness. I kicked off from the seat top and sealed down the faceplate of my suit, as I came up to the exit port with my fellow passengers.
The steward guided us into the lock, where we were greeted by a no-nonsense technician who directed us to grab a thin guideline and heave ourselves into the transfer tube. Another efficient technician, this one a woman, met us at the other end of the short passage, keeping us moving on into the station. It was a busy place, and there was no time for gawkers. There would be plenty of time to be struck dumb by the vast beauty of space later on. The romance of going to Mars was reduced to
“Keep it moving, hombre,” and a commicator’s order that all passengers for the Balboa report to Decontamination at once.
“Don’t they trust the Decon Earthside?” I asked the tech who was hanging up my suit in the six-sided locker tube.
She didn’t even look around. “Don’t wait around, amigo, get your ass to E deck.”
“Have my cargo pods been transferred?”
“Routine transfer through Decon. C’mon, I have to cycle this lock!”
I moved from the weightless center of the big can out through the radial tubes to the Point Eight gravity of the exterior skin, along with the others, past the clearly marked signs to Decon.
I overcompensated in an attempt to avoid a pinwheeling neophyte and bumped my head, not on the padded sides, but on a hatch edge. But in the main the sailing feeling was delightful, somehow much more real than dancing in the big ballroom on Station One. There, I had always been carefully VIPed, but this time I knew the station commander would not give me a personal tour. Diego Braddock was just a hired hand, a nobody.
I was pushed through Decon along with a couple of Marines destined for the Ares Center police garrison who were ahead of me, and a Redplanet Minerals geologist named Pelf behind me. We were resuited and hustled through to the smaller, all-purpose shuttlecraft that ran passengers and cargo hundreds of kilometers out to where the asteroid ships were in parking orbits.
We sailed silently past several of the older extended-flight ships, which had long lost their original global shape beneath the additions of domes, extra pods, stasis cylinders, antennae, modifications, exterior storage tetrahedrons, spidery cargo waldos, and vacuum-welded lumps studded with sensors. Most of these ships were now research vessels or served in the Earth-orbit-to-Moon-orbit run. The obliging copilot pointed out the passenger ship Emperor Ming-huang, one of the sleek new moon ships.
Just past it was the President Kennedy, under construction, and beyond, President Washington, with a swarm of shuttles and tugs transhipping cargo and passengers from Luna City.
“That’s the Neil A. Armstrong over there,” the pilot said.
“They’re modifying her again.” He laughed and said, “Ships may get old in space, but they rarely die.”
“Old ships never die, they just modify,” the copilot grinned, repeating the old cliché.
Pelf leaned past me to point ahead, where we could just see an irregular blot against the half-moon. “There!”
The pilot nodded and thumbed a stud. “Two-seventeen to Balboa NE-five, request approach computation check. Over.”
“Two-seventeen, this is Balboa NE-five. Confirm on Fifty-six-five, over.”
“Roger, Balboa, out.”
“Look,” Pelf said, “more.”
Ahead of us were the asteroid ships, mountain-sized rocks brought in, mostly from the Asteriod Belt, by PanLunar or Transworld, or by free-lancers. Clusters of sealed living and power units are sent out, the asteroids are found, their center of mass determined, and the big central corings made. The cylindrical units are inserted and sealed, the trim is checked, and if need be, big bull lasers cut off chunks to ballast the rock, and a ship is created. Skeleton crews bring them back into Earth orbit, where cargo holds are scooped out of the ancient rock, tunnels drilled to the surface, for access and observation ports, and a more careful study is made of how the asteroid is to be cut up for efficient self-destruction.
The asteroid ships literally consume themselves. The rock is cut up and fed to the fusion torch for fuel, the cuts monitored carefully to preserve the ship’s trim. The asteroid provides fuel, storage capacity, and protection from meteorites and radiation.
They aren’t pretty, but they are big and work better and faster than anything yet devised. The old ships had to carry their own fuel, whereas with these bulky beauties the ship is the fuel. The seven or eight months’ trip has been reduced to four or five weeks, and commerce is still picking up.
The copilot pointed at a work crew fitting a cylindrical unit into a large pitted rock twenty times its size. “That’s not the kind of ship Captain Laser uses.”