Rick stared at the little blue-grey marble, and made a decision that surprised him completely. He had been pleased to leave Earth, and he couldn’t wait to get to the Belt.
But one day, some day, he would come back.
Chapter Twelve
The training course on CM-2 had been tough. It was hard for Rick to believe that anything could be worse. During the first horrendous days of travel to the Belt, he learned that he was wrong. The difference, in one word, was “yourself.” Where Turkey had listened patiently to questions and provided answers, Barney French did no such thing.
“What do you think I am, your bloody nursemaid?” she said, when Rick went to her with an innocent question about silicaceous asteroids. “That’s what data banks and computers and hypermedia systems are for. They know a thousand times as much about planetary compositions as I do. Look the damn thing up for yourself. And while you’re at it, check out siderophilic ore refinement. You’re going to need that, too.”
Instead of an answer, Rick found himself thrown out with an additional assignment. It was hard to avoid Barney French in the ship’s cramped interior, but he quickly learned to do it. Sarcasm was her favorite mode of expression, and each time you met her she loaded another task on top of your heap.
DIY—Do It Yourself. Within twenty-four hours it became the motto of the apprentices. One of the first things that Rick had done for himself was to look up the word “apprentice,” which he had heard of only vaguely back in school. He found it defined as a “person under a legal agreement to work for a master craftsman in return for instruction and support.”
Nothing there about working at a terminal until your eyes popped out of your head and your brain was ready to turn to watery gruel and trickle out through your nose. All the same, he liked the sound of “master craftsman.” The suggestion was that you could eventually be one yourself.
Rick hid away in his cramped cabin and buckled down to his assignments. After the first few hours of stately recession from the Earth-Moon system there was little to see from the Vantage’s observation ports, and nothing to do inside but eat, sleep, and work.
He realized very quickly that there was no possible way he could complete all his assignments in the time available. Two months ago he would have thrown up his hands in despair, turned his back on the whole thing, and guaranteed his own failure. But he was learning. Nobody in the universe could know everything. Therefore, everyone made choices. Success might be no more than the right choice—plus a little bit of luck.
He examined the list of what he was supposed to do, and decided that the geography of Earth would be invaluable—to someone about to go there. He was heading in the opposite direction. The most important things for him to know were about the Belt. After that he could tackle other planets and moons, and if there happened to be any time left over he would worry about the rest. Not only was it logical to start with the Belt, but he knew from experience how much easier it was to learn about something in which you had a personal interest. Back in school, even the dullest idler had no trouble following the lessons about masturbation and sexual foreplay.
And what about the other problem they had been set, to estimate the travel time of the ship to the Belt? On the face of it, that was absolutely impossible. He would have to learn all sorts of orbital mechanics, for a body moving under the gravitational influence of the Sun and the Earth and who knew what else. And yet it was totally out of character for a question to be asked that a trainee had no chance of answering. . . .
Rick put the problem to one side. Instead, he tracked computer references and pulled up the Belt databases. He found that this piece of the assignment was actually fairly interesting. He had heard the word “Belt” thrown around many times since he signed up, and it brought to mind a tidy construct of sizeable planetoids orbiting the Sun in some well-defined and neat region of space. But the reality was more like a disorganized swarm of objects, some bodies dipping in their motions closer to the Sun than the Earth, some as they moved around the Sun also rotating about each other like miniature Earth-Moon systems. The main region of the Belt, between Mars and Jupiter, occupied a trillion trillion cubic kilometers of space. The bodies ranged in size from whole worlds like Ceres, a fifth as big across as the Moon, down to small pebbles and grains of sand.
From the point of view of Vanguard Mining, neither the very small nor the very large were apparently of interest, except to be avoided. The big ones did not permit Vanguard’s secret mining methods, which would be revealed to the apprentices when they were out in the Belt; the smallest ones were simple navigation hazards. The payoff lay in medium-sized bodies between half a kilometer and two kilometers across.
Even there, composition was important. Some asteroids were ninety-nine percent silicon oxides; in other words, they were just lumps of rock. But others were mostly metals, valuable iron and nickel and platinum and iridium. If a body was really high in metals, mining it was relatively easy—compared with finding it in the first place. You couldn’t send a prospecting ship to one little body after another, until you found the one that you wanted by taking material samples from it. That would be too slow and expensive. Instead, the exploration technique called for instrument surveys in which a body’s reflected light was measured from a distance in many different parts of the spectrum, then matched with predicted reflectance curves for different mixtures of metals and rocks. Only after that work was all done on the computers did it make sense to send a ship to a promising asteroid and stake a claim.
For the first time, Rick understood what Jigger Tait had been talking about when he grumbled about Avant Mining. Recently, the Vanguard staff had found, again and again, that when they sent a ship to an asteroid Avant Mining had beaten them to it and already staked a claim.
Just how did Avant or Vanguard mine an asteroid, once they had mining rights? Rick was all set to follow the data bank pointers and try to find an answer when he halted in mid-command. He had just been told that the Vanguard mining method was proprietary. Chasing information about it would be a pure waste of time. And time to waste was one thing he surely did not have.
Rick sighed, erased his query, and turned to the next piece of his assignment: learning the names of the major bodies in the Belt, together with their size and composition.
Within a few minutes he realized that the new task was mind-bogglingly boring. It was a relief to be interrupted by a soft tap on his door. He half-expected it to be Deedee, and he was all set to treat her with the coldness that he felt she deserved. But to his surprise it was Alice Klein.
“Mind if I come in?” She still had that shy little girl voice, but he noticed that she did not wait for his answer before she entered.
“What do you want?” He remembered Barney French’s warning: Help someone else with their problem if you like, but don’t think for one moment that it will get you off the hook with your own assignment. “I don’t have time to talk, I’m really busy.”
“That makes two of us.” He had the only seat, so she moved to sit on the edge of his folded bunk, as languid and graceful as ever. “I’m not here to pick your brains, Rick. At least, not just for that. I want to suggest that we work together on a problem.”
“Which one?” Rick knew from what Barney French had said that Alice still had problems with math. He didn’t, at least so far, which meant that working with her would be a one-way street.
“The problem we all have. The time it will take us to get to CM-26, out in the Belt. Have you looked at that yet?”