I shook my head in a daze that wasn’t entirely due to Pernod. “I didn’t know there was an emergency loan.”
“We’ve kept it a secret, that’s how bad things are. But pretty soon we’re going to have to pay it off. Only we can’t.” Isabel shook her glossy black bangs dismissively and forced a semblance of a smile. “So buy me another drink, Johnnie boy, and we’ll drink to twenty-three days from now when I’ll really be out of a job. Or maybe instead you can give me a stock market tip that’ll make a billion buckles for all of us—including City Hall.”
I scratched my chin and stared off at the mounds of garbage bags, and finally leaned forward and lowered my own voice to a fine conspiratorial whisper. “Kidding aside, Isabel, just how desperate is City Hall?”
“Kidding aside, dear friend, we’d throw our grandmothers into the city power plants for reaction mass. And your grandmother too, if we could get the old lady to stand still.”
I scratched my chin some more. “Hmmm. Maybe I have got an idea. Can you get us a ship to take us out to one of the mining asteroids?”
“Which one?”
“Doesn’t really matter. Whichever one is closest, I suppose. As long as it’s one that sends at least some of its ore directly to Earth.”
Isabel shrugged. “Well, I suppose so—what’s one more unpaid bill run up by City Hall? Now how about that last drink? Valérie-France will be waiting for her dinner.”
The beltship was a four-person vehicle with bright red Department of Citizens Service markings. It was a luxury model the city must have bought while its credit was still good. Neither of us was required to be even an apprentice pilot in order to take it out by ourselves: we merely told it where we wanted to go and it did the rest.
Now, a little more than a million kilometers from Ceres, the two of us were drifting about in the cramped office of Xhosa Xanchu, chief engineer for Magnus Mining’s ore block #827/G384. The office was little more than a pressurized tank anchored to the ore block by an expansion bolt jammed into the surface of its 17-percent nickel-iron rock. Eventually, of course, when the biologically tailored virophage had finished chewing its way through what had once been solid rock, there’d be nothing left of this partial hunk of asteroid but a hundred thousand tons or so of closely compacted dust and sand floating through the cosmos. And the office would be floating right along with it.
“But,” said Xanchu, “naturally we don’t wait for the entire block of ore to be phaged. We activate the virophage on each of the five other sides of the block and just as soon as it starts breaking down the molecular bonds we move in with electrostatic precipitators to separate the nickel-iron dust from the rest of the junk. By the time it’s finished and all the rock beneath this office has been phaged, we’ve got about 20,000 tons of raw nickel-iron to one side and all the rest—about 107,000 tons we figure on this particular job—off on another.”
“And you just wrap up all this stuff in big plastic bags?” asked Isabel. “That’s all you do to it?”
“Sure. What else would you suggest? We double-wrap the nickel-iron, get a governmental seal and certification of purity on it, strap on a couple of low-thrust boosters and some beacons and start the pod on its way to the refinery—or to Earth.”
“What do you do with the rest of the rock?” I asked out of pure curiosity.
“Either leave it floating in its plastic wrapper or introduce another type of virophage into it to break it down again for any leftovers that might be worth mining—gold, silver, copper. Sometimes there’s a lot, sometimes there’s nothing.”
“And the reason you can’t use virophages for mining on Earth or on the Moon is that it’s too difficult to segregate the raw ore?”
“That’s right, there’s too much potential risk of the virophage getting out of hand. Even though the biochemists say they’ve spliced in a DNA timer gene that only allows the virophage to reproduce a set number of times, it’s still best to be careful. Out here in the Belt we can just shove a whole block out into empty space a million kilometers from nowhere—that’s why our mining costs are so low and how we can compete with Earth.”
I drifted over to one of the room’s small portholes and looked out at the star-filled blackness of the sky and at the tiny piece of barren rock to which we were temporarily anchored. This particular ore block, I’d already learned, was of standard commercial size, a fifty-meter cube that had been licensed from Clarkeville Mining Authority, then cut out of the mining face of the 600-meter-long mother-lode asteroid and towed the prescribed two kilometers away. Like everyone else in the Belt, I knew it was a capital offense to use a mining virophage any closer than that to any other celestial body, no matter how small. There hadn’t been any executions in my own lifetime, but in 2247, three years before I was born, sixteen people had been airlocked as retribution for the Parnegi-6 disaster that had reduced an entire inhabited asteroid to drifting molecules. Since then miners and biochemists had been very, very careful indeed with their pet bugs.
“And all this nickel-iron that goes to Earth,” I said, “this… this incredibly valuable cargo, just goes sealed up in this transparent wrapping like a great big bag of dirt?”
“Sure,” said the mining engineer, “in a pod, how else? Once it’s in Earth orbit, they wrap it up in their own heat-proof stuff before they send it down for splashdown. But none of that concerns us here.”
“No, I suppose not,” I murmured. “Come on, Isabel, I think we’ve seen enough.”
“You have?” muttered Xanchu, surprised at our short stay. “Say, you still haven’t told me what you’re doing here.”
“Not much,” I said, “just checking out an idea I had.”
There was a life-size, seminude statue of Abner C. Clarke, the founder of Clarkeville, in a heroic pose in the rotunda of City Hall. It was made of nine semi-precious elements mined in the nearby asteroids. The right arm that gestured so nobly starwards had been cast entirely of titanium. Six days after our return from ore block #827/G384, the news media carried numerous images of the Mayor of Clarkeville staring in bewilderment at a pile of titanium dust on the statue’s base, all that remained of Abner C. Clarke’s right arm. A leathery-faced onlooker who identified herself to the cameras as a former miner, was quoted as saying that it looked as if the arm had been eaten away by a virophage—except, she added, everyone knew that virophages only dissolved raw materials, never their relined product.
Two days later, the hardware that automatically archived all communications to and from the offices of the Clarkeville Mining Authority recorded an ultra-narrow beam sent from the vicinity of a tiny asteroid some three and a half million kilometers from Ceres. The panicked voice on the beam identified itself as Shimon Rand, a licensed prospector and miner. He was, he said, merely testing a little bit of that latest kind of virophage for mining titanium when he discovered that not only was it tearing apart the molecular bonds of the asteroid’s carbonaceous rock, it was also turning to dust everything else it touched, including the landing gear and communications antenna of his beltship!