“Everything looks all right?” asked VettiLou Propokov, floating upside down in her powersuit in the ship’s airlock. I nodded glumly. “I personally checked the water supply, power, lighting, the galley, the head, and the air-recycling,” she assured me. “Everything is fine—you should have a very comfortable trip.”
“I’ve got thirty classic books I’ve always told myself I was going to read someday and an instructional chess program—the trip may be boring, but at least it’s going to be educational.”
It was also, I discovered, three and a half days later, going to be cold.
They’d forgotten to install the beltship’s heating system.
In another two days, when the power inside my self-contained powersuit ran out, I was going to freeze to death.
They’d also forgotten the communication system—or, more likely, simply overlooked the fact that it wouldn’t function from inside a sixty-four-meter ball of nickel-iron ore with three-meter-thick walls.
By the time I discovered that, the Ore-ball Express was 36 million klicks from Ceres and still accelerating at a constant .1 g. We were, my pocket calculator informed me, now moving at 286 klicks per second and picking up speed with every passing moment. Already it was far too late for anyone in the Belt to match courses with me—even if I had been able to get anyone to hear my frantic screams for help.
But why, you ask, had it taken me three and a half days to discover that I was going to freeze to death?
The answer, it seems, is in the intrinsic insulating properties of nickel-iron ore walls three meters thick—and the almost equally fantastic insulating values of a beltship’s far thinner metal and ceramic skin. Together they had served to retain the substantial heat buildup that a week or so of various engineering tasks had generated within the hermetically sealed ore-ball. Then, once we were underway, these same walls had kept the near-absolute cold of interplanetary space from seeping through.
Fora while....
When first my numbed fingers and then the beltship’s thermometer told me that I was getting cold I merely growled irritably. Carefully dog-ear-ring page 379 of Moby Dick—it was fully as tedious as I’d expected it to be—I moved carefully from my bunk through the unaccustomed 10 percent gravity to the thickly upholstered easy chair that had been brought in to replace the pilot’s command chair.
I scanned the control panel, idly fingering the outlines of J. Davis Alexander’s all-important codecard that for safety’s sake had been taped to the bare skin in the center of my chest. Where, I muttered, were the life-support controls?
Ah, here.
One dial was clearly marked CABIN TEMPERATURE. I turned it from the present arctic-like 8 degrees Celsius to a toasty 28, tightened the bunk’s blanket around my shoulders, and sat back to wait.
Nothing happened.
Twenty minutes later I had located the nine widely scattered vents through which warm air was supposed to be pouring into the cabin. I held my hand in front of each small opening.
The only air coming through was cold enough to form icicles on my fingernails.
I didn’t panic—yet.
It took another five minutes to get what remained of the beltship’s computer system to bring up the repair manual on screen. I jumped it to Heating, Cabin, Internal.
Then to Source, Schematics.
I wanted to scream.
Heating for the beltship’s living quarters was generated and stored as a by-product of its propulsion system.
The propulsion system had been cut out and discarded 36 million klicks away so that the rest of the beltship could be installed in the ore-ball.
The only cooking heat in the galley was provided by microwaves.
There was no way to heat the cabin. And no way, I now discovered, to call for help. Unless I did something clever in the next few hours I was going to freeze to death.
I folded the blanket in two, pulled it around my shoulders, and tried to think.
After a while my glazed eye and numbed brain came to the yellow and blue powersuit that I had worn when I’d made the final transit through the airless ore-ball into the beltship cabin. Now it hung forlornly in a niche next to the galley.
The powersuit—it had its own internal heating system!
I leapt to my feet, my heart thudding violently.
I was saved!
Every Belter, even the most chair-bound ethical broker & bourseman, knows how to use a powersuit. Ninety seconds later I was inside the suit and had snapped the faceplate shut. A warm glow suffused mind and body as the subtle heat of the life-support system automatically swung into action. I sank back into my easy chair and wriggled my half-frozen toes luxuriously. It was going to be a long, boring nineteen and a half days inside the powersuit but at least I would make it to Earth as a hunk of animated warm meat instead of a frozen corpsicle.
And I could always play chess on the faceplate’s holographic display visor.
Which reminded me...
I pressed the wrist controls that were just one of the powersuit’s four independent ways of activating the display, then brought up the suit’s operating system info. My eye ran over the red characters arrayed in neat lines.
Everything was normal.
Interior suit heat was already 11 degrees Celsius at waist level and rising rapidly to the default setting of 22.
Oxygen content was—
My eye halted, went back to a previous line.
Power reserves: 48 hours, 23 minutes, .02 seconds.
Even as I stared at it the minute display changed to 22.
For a long breathless moment I once again felt the stirring of incipient panic. Then sweet reason reasserted itself.
All I had to do was recharge the suit by plugging it into the ship’s power system. If there was enough power in what remained of the beltship for lights and air recycling, there had to be enough to run one miserable powersuit.
That was when I discovered that the suit’s recharging cord with its universal adapter plug was missing. All that remained of it in the zippered pocket on the suit’s left leg was a ten-centimeter section of heavily insulated wire with a badly frayed end. Even on Ceres, I reflected incredulously, there were rats hungry enough and stupid enough to chew through six-gauge cable...
My eyes swung back to the power display—48 hours, 19 minutes, 24 seconds.
I ground my teeth angrily. I refused to be turned into a corpsicle on account of J. Davis Alexander and his wretched bearer box!
We Belters are a resourceful lot.
I shrugged myself out of the powersuit, then located the nearest of the cabin’s standard power outlets. The galley provided a knife sharp enough to strip away the insulation from the recharging cable’s two wires. A few minutes later I had three centimeters of neatly exposed copper wires on the end of the cable that projected from the powersuit.
I ran a quick mental review of what I had done, gave myself a mental pat on the back, and jammed the naked wires into the two slots of the outlet.
Flash!
Hiss! Crackle! Bang!
Sizzled fingers!
The acrid smell of power overload!
A wisp of pale blue smoke drifted out of the recharge pocket.
I gaped in dismay at the powersuit I had reflexively jerked away from the outlet and across the cabin. The two wires I had exposed were now a fused mass of melted copper. With leaden fingers I pulled myself back into the powersuit. I snapped the faceplate shut. The faint susurrus of its life-support system hummed sofdy in my ears. Warm air caressed my skin. At least the suit was still working.
I activated the faceplate display—and stared at it in horror.