She came straight up to him. “Anything in the rules that says we can’t start early?”
“Nothing I know of.”
“Right. Let’s get going.”
“No.” Rick gestured to the place opposite him. “First you eat.”
“Hunger sharpens the brain.”
“And low blood sugar turns it off.” Rick keyed in a huge meal for her, then felt obliged to increase his own order. “We eat. Then we go.”
They chewed doggedly, without enjoyment, watching each other’s plate until both were empty. By the time they had finished it was close to official breakfast time. Unwilling to talk to other trainees they hurried out and headed for the lock that led to the interior of CM-2.
The hardest thing of all was to avoid rushing. They put their suits on carefully and checked each other’s seals. No little surprises there from Turkey Gossage. But as Deedee pointed out, he was not likely to do anything so obvious.
“Which means if he did do something obvious,” Rick pointed out, “it would surprise us. No assumptions.”
“Agreed. No assumptions.”
They drifted together through the deep interior of CM-2, heading for the side of the planetoid opposite to the main training facilities. The corridor by now seemed as familiar as home. They did not need to consult map or tracers. The ore carrier and the mining robot, as promised, were waiting in the main loading chamber. The tailings had already been sintered to form oddly-shaped but identical solid blocks, each weighing half a ton. In a pinch, Rick and Deedee could load each one themselves; but that was a sure way to flunk the exercise.
They put the mining robot through its paces on a dummy run, checking that each movement corresponded exactly to that pictured. Finally, and gingerly, Deedee directed the machine to begin loading. She watched the pick-up stage, while Rick counted blocks and monitored their stowing aboard the ore carrier. There were still a hundred more to go when he came out and told Deedee to stop.
“Why? The robot’s doing fine.”
“Maybe. But we have a problem. The carrier is nearly full. It won’t take more than another couple of dozen and we’ve only loaded nine hundred.”
“That can’t be right. The carrier is rated for at least five hundred tons cargo mass. Maybe the blocks are heavier than they’re supposed to be? Or maybe they’re less dense and bigger.”
They checked the mass of a sintered block. It was half a ton exactly. Its density was as it should be. Then they crouched in the loading chamber, helmet to helmet, and pored over the electronic and printed manuals. At last Rick sighed. “I get it. I’m a dummy. I should have realized it as soon as the loading started.”
Deedee was still staring at the electronic layout diagram of the carrier. “Well, I don’t. Everything looks just fine.”
“The carrier’s fine. The ore blocks are fine, too.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“It’s the shape of the blocks. I noticed they looked odd when we first came in. They have the right mass and density but they don’t pack tight. There’s too much space left between them.”
“So what do we do?”
“We look for a better packing arrangement, one that fits the blocks together more tightly.”
Ten minutes of useless brainstorming was enough to prove that they would never find the answer by abstract thought. Under Deedee’s direction the mining robot began to fit blocks one on another, turning them every way to seek the best fit of the irregular faces. The right answer, when they finally reached it, seemed absolutely obvious. With one particular arrangement the sintered blocks keyed in together tightly and seamlessly.
Then the carrier had to be unloaded, and the whole operation begun over. This time the five hundred tons fitted with room to spare. Deedee came over to watch the last block go in. She ordered the mining robot in on top of it before she closed the hatch.
“Think that was the Gossage surprise?” she said as she followed Rick into the ore carrier’s control room.
“The first one, maybe. Nobody said he keeps it to one. There could be another right here.”
They examined the carrier’s status indicators one by one with enormous care, until at last Deedee shrugged. “We can’t stay here forever just looking. Do it, Luban.”
Under Rick’s nervous control the carrier crept forward out of the loading chamber and into open space. By all Belt standards the journey was a trivial one: a couple of hundred kilometers through unobstructed vacuum, to rendezvous with another body having negligible velocity relative to CM-2. The training facility’s refinery was in an essentially identical orbit around the Earth-Moon system.
That fact did not offer Rick any sense of security. He was keyed tighter than he had ever been until at last the carrier was snugly into the refinery’s dock. Then it was Deedee’s turn. She unloaded the robot and it carried the sintered ore blocks one by one to the refinery’s gigantic hopper.
They stared at each other as the final block went in.
“Smooth,” Deedee said at last.
“Too smooth?”
“There’s no such thing.”
“You know what I mean.” Rick stared at the distant bulk of CM-2, its outside lights clearly visible from the refinery. “Let’s get back. If there are surprises here I don’t want to hang around and wait for them to find us.”
He checked the fuel as he switched on the drive. More than enough. He could cut off power after a couple of minutes, coast all the rest of the way to CM-2, and finish with a little fuel to spare. And even with the delay in loading they had plenty of time to complete the assignment before the end of the work period. Maybe the only Gossage surprise was the sintered block shape.
That comforting thought was still in his head when he realized that the star field outside was slowly rotating. Instead of heading straight for CM-2 the ore carrier was yawing, turning its blunt prow farther and farther away from the planned heading.
Rick slapped at the controls and turned all thrust power off.
“What’s wrong?” Although he had not said a word, Deedee caught the urgency of his movement.
“Drive. We’re crabbing.” Rick was already calling up onto the control display the rear perspective layout of the carrier, to show the six independent but balanced units that provided the ship’s drive. “Something’s wrong with one of the modules. We’re getting no thrust from it.”
Deedee was watching the changing starscape in the front port, noting the exact direction of rotation of the ship.
“We’re tilting to the right and down.” She touched her gloved hand to the display, one finger on the stylized image of a module. “If it’s a problem with just one thruster, it has to be this one. Any of the others would turn us in a different direction.”
“Agreed.”
“So turn off the opposite one of the six, directly across from the bad one. Do it, Rick! That will balance us again.”
“I can’t.” Rick gestured at the control panel. “The thrust modules are not separately controllable. It’s all or nothing.”
“So what do we do?”
Rick did not answer. He had called up a section of the ship’s manual onto the display. More than anything he had ever wanted in his life, he wanted to read that manual. And he couldn’t. The words were too long and unfamiliar, the sentences seemed too complex. He strained to understand, willing the words to make sense. And still he couldn’t read them. The ship was drifting along, but CM-2 was not directly ahead. Their present course would miss the planetoid.
“Help me, Deedee.” Rick was sweating inside his suit. “Help me to figure this out. The manual will tell us what to do. It has to. Help me to read. You read better than me.”