“And how will you earn an income?” Cardenas interjected.
He spread his hands. Before he could reply, though, Amanda said, “I think I know.”
Fuchs looked at his wife, clearly puzzled.
“We can become suppliers for the other prospectors,” Amanda said. “We can open our own warehouse.”
Cardenas nodded.
“We can deal through Astro,” Amanda went on, brightening with each word. “We’ll obtain our supplies from Pancho and sell them to the prospectors. We can sell supplies to the miners, too.”
“Most of the mining teams work for Humphries,” Fuchs replied darkly. “Or Astro.”
“But they still need supplies,” Amanda insisted. “Even if they get their equipment from the corporations, they’ll still need personal items: soap, entertainment videos, clothing…”
Fuchs’s face was set in a grimace. “I don’t think you would want to handle the kinds of entertainment videos these prospectors buy.”
Undaunted, Amanda said, “Lars, we could compete against Humphries Space Systems while you’re directing the habitat construction.”
“Compete against Humphries.” Fuchs rolled the idea on his tongue, testing it. Then he broke into a rare grin. It made his broad, normally dour face light up. “Compete against Humphries,” he repeated. “Yes. Yes, we can do that.”
Amanda saw the irony in it, although the others didn’t. The daughter of a small shopkeeper in Birmingham, she had grown up hating her middle-class background and the lower-class workers her father sold to. The boys were rowdy and lewd, at best, and they could just as easily become dangerously violent. The girls were viciously catty. Amanda discovered early that being stunningly beautiful was both an asset and a liability. She was noticed wherever she went; all she had to do was smile and breathe. The trick was, once noticed, to make people see beyond her physical presence, to recognize the highly intelligent person inside that tempting flesh.
While still a teenager she learned how to use her good looks to get boys to do what she wanted, while using her sharp intellect to keep one jump ahead of them. She escaped her father’s home and fled to London, took lessons to learn to speak with a polished accent, and—to her complete astonishment—found that she had the brains and skill to be a first-rate astronaut. She was hired by Astro Manufacturing Corporation to fly missions between Earth and the Moon. With her breathless looks and seeming naiveté, almost everyone assumed she had slept her way to the top of her profession. Yet the truth was just the opposite; Amanda had to work hard to fend off the men—and women—who wanted to bed her.
It was at Selene that she had met Martin Humphries. He had been her gravest danger: he wanted Amanda and he had the power to take what he wanted. Amanda had married Lars Fuchs in part to get away from Humphries, and Lars knew it.
Now, here out on the fringe of humankind’s expansion through the solar system, she was about to become a shopkeeper herself. How father would howl at that, she thought. The father’s revenge: the child becomes just like the parent, in the end.
“Humphries won’t like competition,” Cardenas pointed out.
“Good!” exclaimed Fuchs.
Shaken out of her reverie, Amanda said, “Competition will be good for the prospectors, though. And the miners, too. It will lower the prices they have to pay for everything.”
“I agree,” said Cardenas. “But Humphries won’t like it. Not one little bit.”
Fuchs laughed aloud. “Good,” he repeated.
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.