This Old Rock
by G. David Nordley
Illustration by Vincent Di Fate
“Damn bloodsucking tiny-skulled government bureaucrats!” Dolph Wigner yelled as soon as the link dropped and returned the Hopper’s viewscreen to a view of their peanutshaped asteroid. He slapped the worn upholstery of the arm of the captain’s chair in frustration. “Sasha, I think it’s a conspiracy to make us buy more junk from the friends of these vampires on credit. By the time they’re done, we won’t own half of this rock!”
“Daddy?” a small, sleepy voice ventured from the compartment directly under him.
“What is it Tina?” he snapped, much too loud, he realized.
“What’s wrong, Daddy?” she asked. “Are you mad?”
Tiny-skulled, Dolph realized, might sound like Tina-something to his three-year old.
“Not at you, Tina. Go back to sleep now, OK? Sweet dreams.”
“What’s wrong, love? It’s one in the morning!” Sasha called from the wardroom below, which doubled as their bedroom. “Is Tina OK?”
“Tina is fine. I was just venting at whoever changed the requirement on the air lock door motors three months after our shipment left Luna! Forgot the time.”
There was a rustle of bedding, and his wife made the easy one-sixth gravity jump up to the command deck from their bed—stretched her skinny, almost scrawny, body; yawned; and ran a hand through her long, wavy, hopelessly tangled black hair. He could see her bones; hell, he could see his own. They’d both been cutting way back on rations and working like demons for three months. But if they could just get approval, they’d have the old hydroponics system going and be eating their own tomatoes in another month or so.
“Can we afford the new motors?” she asked.
He smiled at her and sighed. There were many better things to do with the night than fight refurbishment supply problems. But every hour counted.
“If,” he answered, “we can use the old ones, or sell them, the price difference isn’t that much. The problem is that there’s no way we can get them here in time for our inspection.”
“They can’t hold us to that, can they? I’m getting tired of this.”
He nodded. “This” was hanging out in a cramped, smelly spaceship swinging around with its nose tied to the end of a hundred meters of tether when they had five hundred square meters of habitat that was ready to inhabit on the asteroid above them. But until they passed their inspection, they had three rooms, three meters in diameter by two-and-a-half high, with a head and an airlock at the top.
“Look, I can’t do anything about it. It’s the damn Interplanetary Association’s rules, and if we don’t follow the IPA rules, we lose the homestead. So don’t vent me about it, OK? I’m sorry, darling.” He immediately hated himself for snapping at Sasha. She was everything to him; the only part of the Universe that wasn’t trying to stomp him. At twenty-four, he felt like a ninety-year-old curmudgeon with the world on his back, and sometimes it showed.
“But it’s not our fault! They can’t make us leave our homestead for something that’s not our fault.”
“I just don’t know, Sash, I just don’t know.”
They were interrupted by a two-note attention tone.
“Go ahead, Hopper,” Dolph told the spacecraft. He heard Sasha try to suppress a giggle. “Voice only,” he added.
“We have an incoming message from an Inspector Eileen McCarthy of the local IPA Compliance Authority. She’s C&C on Belt Runner four-one-two, a light-minute out from Pallas.”
Almost here, then. So it was too late to get anything more done on the supplies or equipment. They’d pass with what they had, or not. “We’ll see what she has to say later,” Dolph instructed. “We’ve gone to bed. Acknowledge and record—I’ll reply tomorrow morning.”
“Yes, Dolph. I’ve sent the acknowledgment. Good night.”
The command deck lights dimmed, and Sasha started pulling him down to their bed.
Two days later, Dolph took the tram cage up to the tether axis on the mast at the north pole of their rock. Well, not quite their rock yet, he reminded himself, though he had a lot of sweat equity in it. It was three kilometers across its longest dimension and Swiss-cheese-full of craters, the largest being the football field-wide hole at the top. They’d name it after Tina, they’d decided, as soon as they had the right to do so.
Below him was their habitat, deep in a hundred-meter cylindrical pit for radiation protection. A fifty-meter-radius squirrel cage of trusswork, it mounted a couple of big bent sausages and other equipment around its circumference. Above him was the great dish of their solar collector. A few kilograms of nearly perfectly reflecting flexidiamond aluminum sandwich almost two hundred meters across, it focused on a flat relay mirror. There was enough dust around the asteroid for him to trace the beam into the big black cylindrical converter at the top of the mast.
He saw few stars on his way up to the docking ring. Their pole was in sunlight, and would be for another year. He looked back toward the Sun. Mars was a reddish dot just far enough from the Sun to see if he shaded his helmet window. Earth, Venus, and Mercury were lost in the glare. Even when he looked away from the Sun, the sunlit structures around him banished any hope of dark adapted vision, mocking his mood with their unsoftened vacuum brilliance.
But Jupiter, now near opposition at the perihelion of the Pallas association, shone brightly against the black sky. Jove was over five times as bright as from Earth, and its four large satellites were clearly visible—he could even see the orangish tint of Io. Saturn, way off to the right, still seemed very distant, but the asteroid Pallas was brighter than Venus from here, and showed a tiny disk. Sirius, Procyon, Betelgeuse, Regulus—the brighter stars got through as well, and the effect was almost three-dimensional—-he could image the planets on a plane stretching out toward infinity, with those few bright fixed stars set beyond.
Despite all the work and all the details of things to be removed, tested, repaired, replaced, and tested again, there was still a sense of wonder that he was out here—the descendent of apes with stone axes daring to live out here on the doorstep of all creation. He was going to do it. Somehow, despite everything, he was going to do it.
An instant and temporary comet got his attention. Inspector McCarthy’s spacecraft was in the final stages of rendezvous, with thrusters flaring. Like their Hopper, it was a standard spin-electric rock hopper—essentially a smooth cylinder with a two-ring magnetic mirror plasma nozzle at the end—indistinguishable from Hopper on the outside except for the outsize volatile tanks mounted at its middle and the IPA insignia. It grew smoothly out of the dark and made the standard mast connection, nose in, rings out. Next to its connecting probe, a hatch swung in and poured out light. Into the light floated the black shadow of a space-suited figure.
“Welcome to 12478, Ms. McCarthy.” Dolph gestured to the peanutshaped carbonaceous chondrite below them. The space-suited figure coming down the mast to him was obviously female, of average height, and perhaps a bit hefty the way people too busy to exercise get in low gravity.
She put her helmet to the mast for a moment, then turned toward him, her face invisible behind the mirror finish of her helmet window. “You’ve got a sick stator magnet on one of your despin mast bearings,” she announced in a no-nonsense, almost imperious tone. “I heard it screech after my dock.”
Dolph opened his mouth, but couldn’t think of a response.
The complaint was trivial, as far as he was concerned. The hollow despin mast held their main elliptical mirror and the docking fixture. Some torque on the despun inertial mast was inevitable as a ship docked, and it might momentarily cause physical contact in the bearing if one of the bearing magnets were a little weak; but if the mast was properly aligned with asteroid spin axis, that would vanish as soon as any transverse accelerations were damped. And the asteroid spin period was a leisurely eight hours plus; at that rate, the damn bearing could be made of taffy.