Erik didn’t take any of them up on their offers. Not even Sheena, who had a helluva lot to offer. The sonofabitch must be made of very strong stuff. Either that or he’s gay, which I doubt, because Darling would’ve probably bent over backwards for him if that’s what he wanted.
They’re being so goddamned rotten that they’ve almost made me forget who our real enemy is. I let them babble and gabble and just clumped across the rough, pitted surface of Pittsburgh and went inside the dome Erik had so thoughtfully left for us. I ought to mention that the asteroid’s too small to have any noticeable gravity. We’re all outfitted with small magnets on our boots, which work very nicely on a body made predominantly of iron. But even though walking is as easy as stepping across a newly painted floor that’s still slightly tacky, my body’s feeling all the old sensations of nearly zero gravity.
I’m smiling to myself. As soon as my partners calm down enough to take stock of their situation, they’re going to get good and sick. I’m certain that Erik hasn’t included space-sickness medications in the pile of supplies he’s left us.
Good! Serves the whining little pricks right.
Sure enough, they’ve all been sick as dogs for the past two days. I felt kind of queasy myself for the first few hours, but I got over it quickly enough.
I’ve spent the time checking out just how much Erik left us, in his less then-infinite kindness. It’s not much. Eight crates of food briquettes; about enough to last six months. No medical supplies, not even aspirin.
The dome’s got air and water recyclers, offloaded from Argo’s spares. But no backup equipment and no spare parts. If anything goes wrong with the machinery, we die pretty quickly.
So our prospects are: (1) we starve to death in six months; (2) we die from lack of water or air if either of the recyclers craps out on us; or (3) we start murdering each other because there’s nothing else for us to do but get on each other’s nerves.
At least inside the dome we can get out of the space suits. There’s no furniture in here; nothing to sit on but the crates of food briquettes, eight inflatable sleeping rolls, and a zero-gee bathroom facility. The toilet seems to work okay, although there’s only the one of them. The women bitch about that constantly. Me, I worry about how much radiation we’re absorbing; the metallized plastic of this dome doesn’t stop cosmic ray primaries, and if there’s a solar flare we’ll probably get cooked inside of an hour or two.
There’s also the possibility that a smaller asteroid might puncture our dome. That would be absolutely poetic: killed by an asteroid striking another asteroid.
Reality is setting in.
My seven keen-minded partners are mostly recovering from their zero-gee puking and starting to realize that we are well and truly marooned on this chunk of nickel-iron. With only six months worth of food.
They’ve even stopped hollering at me. They’re getting morose, just sitting around this cramped little dome like a bunch of prisoners waiting for dawn and the firing squad.
“Would’ve been kinder of Erik to kill us outright and get it over with,” said Bo Williams.
The others are sad-faced as basset hounds with toothaches. Trying to sleep on a three-centimeter-thick inflatable bag laid over a rough floor of solid nickel-iron does nothing to improve anybody’s disposition.
“If that’s the way you feel about,” Lowell Hubble said to Bo, from behind his inevitable pipe, “why don’t you just commit suicide and save us the self-pity? That would leave an extra ration of food to the survivors.”
Williams’ shoulder muscles bunched underneath his grimy shirt. “And why don’t you try sucking on something else than that damned pacifier?”
“Why don’t you both shut up?” Marj snapped.
“I think this entire line of conversation is disgraceful,” said Jean. “If we can’t behave like polite adults we should leave the dome until we’ve learned how to act properly.”
We all stared at her. I started to laugh. In her own prissy way, Jean was right. We need some discipline. Something to keep our minds off our predicament.
“Maybe we ought to draw lots,” Grace suggested with mock cheerfulness. “Short straw goes outside without a suit. Maybe we could stretch the food long enough …”
“And even add to our food supply,” Williams said, eying Darling grimly. “Like the Donner party.”
Sheena’s eyes went like saucers. “Eat… ? Oh, I could never do that!”
“People do strange things when they’re starving,” Hubble said. He looked over at our overfed Mr. Darling, too.
If Rick understood what was going through their minds, he didn’t show it. “If only there was some hope of rescue,” he mewled. “Some slightest shred of hope.”
It hit me right then.
“Rescue, my ass!” I said. And before Jean could even frown at me, I added, “We’re gonna save ourselves, by damn!”
They laughed at Columbus. They laughed at Edison and the Wright brothers and Marconi.
None of my beloved partners laughed at me when I said we’d save ourselves. They just kind of gaped for a moment, and then ignored me, as if I had farted or done something else stupid or vulgar.
But what the hell, there isn’t anything else we can do. And we need some discipline, some goal, some objective to keep our brains busy and our minds off starvation and death. Instead of breaking down into an octet of would-be murderers and cannibals, I dangled the prospect of salvation in front of their unbelieving eyes.
“We can do it!” I insisted. “We can save ourselves. We can turn this little worldlet of ours into a lifeboat.”
“And pigs can fly,” Bo Williams growled.
“They can if they build wings for themselves,” I shot back.
Darling started, “How on earth do you propose …”
“We’re not on Earth, oh corpulent critic of the arts. Erik thinks he’s got us marooned here on Pittsburgh. But we’re gonna ride this rock back to the Earth/Moon system.”
Jean Margaux: “That’s impossible!”
Marj Dupray: “It beats sitting around and watching the food supplies dwindle.”
Grace Harcourt: “Can you really do it, Sam?”
Sheena Chang: “What do you think, Lowell?”
Hubble, our resident astronomer, took the pipe out of his mouth and squinted at me as if he had never seen me before. His mustache was getting ragged and grayer than usual. He needed a shave. All us men looked pretty shaggy, except for Darling, whose cheeks were still as smooth as a baby’s backside. Is he permanently depilated, or doesn’t he have enough testosterone in him to raise a beard?
Hubble said, “To move this asteroid out of its present orbit we’d need a propulsion system and navigational equipment.”
“We’ve got ’em,” I said. “Or at least, we can make ’em.”
I know the mining and smelting facilities inside out. We had left the equipment here on Pittsburgh. My idea had been, why drag them all the way back home when you’ll want them at the asteroid on the next trip out? The equipment’s nuclear powered, of course: you’d need solar-cell panels as big as cities to generate enough electricity at this distance from the Sun.
When Sheena found out we had two (count ’em, two) nukes on Pittsburgh, she gasped with alarm. “But nuclear power is bad, Sam. It’s got radiation.”
“Don’t worry about it, kiddo,” I told her. “They’re shielded real well.” I didn’t bother to inform her that her gorgeous body was getting more radiation from cosmic primaries than all the nuclear power plants on Earth gave off.
My idea was to use the mining lasers to slice off chunks of the asteroid, then use the smelting facility to vaporize the metal instead of just melting it down. If we could direct the vapor properly it’d push us like a rocket exhaust. I figured we could scoop out a pit in the asteroid’s surface and use it as a rough-and-ready rocket nozzle. Or maybe one of the existing craters that’ve put the pit in ol’ Pittsburgh would do.