“I know that each of you has experienced much higher accelerations than two gees, but only in physical tests or for the short period of an ascent to orbit. Do not experiment. As soon as our thrust pattern has stabilized, I and others familiar with high-gee shipboard activity will come to each cabin in turn and instruct you on safe operations until we reach CM-31. Meanwhile, remain in your bunks.”
The screen went blank. Rick lay back and waited. There had been no sign of the usual sarcasm in Barney French’s voice, but also no room for compromise on her face. Anyone who left his bunk, that look said, would be in major trouble. Something terrible must have happened on CM-31, though Rick could not imagine what.
Ten minutes ago he had been brooding over Alice’s absence. Now he was glad that she had not been able to come to him. Were other apprentices struggling right now into their clothes, and scrambling back to their own cabins?
The drive turned off. There was the usual moment of disorientation as his stomach came up to meet his throat, and then the giddiness of a rotation and realignment of the ship in inertial space. Before that could become uncomfortable he was pressed back hard into his bunk. Wrinkles in the mattress and blanket that he had never noticed before made their mark on his back.
He had been told not to move from his bunk, but he was free to move within it. A set of controls for the terminal lay on the bunk’s right-hand edge, so that if you wanted to you could work the data banks while you were lying in bed. Rick keyed it now, with difficulty, adjusting to the use of fingers that suddenly did not want to lift from keys.
COMPANY MINE 31—at last it came—ONE OF THE NEWEST OF VANGUARD MINING’S ASSETS, THE BASE ASTEROID FOR CM-31 HAD AN ORIGINAL FORM CLOSE TO A TRIAXIAL ELLIPSOID WITH SEMI-MAJOR AXES 0.9, 0.7, AND 0.5 KILOMETERS. . . . What was that supposed to mean? Nothing at all, so far as Rick was concerned. He plowed on, word after unfamiliar word. . . . ALTHOUGH SMALL COMPARED WITH OTHER MINES SUCH AS CM-8 AND CM-20, CM-31 IS UNUSUALLY VALUABLE BECAUSE OF ITS HIGH CONTENT OF SIDEROPHILES. . . .
Siderophiles. Rick swore. That term again, the one Barney French had told him to check out—and he hadn’t done it.
He could hear sounds from outside his door, but no one came in. He had to be quick. He moved to the word-search data bank, and the definition appeared on the screen.
SIDEROPHILE: LITERALLY, IRON-LOVING. IN MINING OPERATIONS THE TERM REFERS TO A GROUP OF ELEMENTS TIIAT COMMONLY OCCUR IN THE PRESENCE OF IRON AND ARE PREFERENTIALLY REMOVED WITH IRON DURING AN EXTRACTION PROCESS. THE MOST IMPORTANT OF TI IESE FOR COMMERCIAL PURPOSES ARE NICKEL, IRIDIUM, AND PLATINUM.
So CM-31 was a potential gold mine—or at least, a platinum mine. Rick switched back to his other data file.
. . . CM-31 FORMS A TEST SITE FOR NEW LARGE-SCALE CENTRIFUGE AND ZONE MELTING METHODS. IT IS BEING USED IN PROOF-OF-CONCEPT MODE FOR SUCH MINING TECHNIQUES. . . .
Centrifuge was what they had done to him during the physical tests, spinning him around on the end of a long arm with a balance weight at the other end, faster and faster, until he blacked out. He didn’t see how you could put a whole asteroid on the end of anything.
Zone melting made even less sense. It was another phrase that meant nothing. He went again to his online dictionary and this time met with less success. The database defined what he wanted as a method of purifying certain metals, but after that it quickly became gibberish: The zone melting process relies on the fact that many impurities prefer to remain in the liquid phase rather than freeze out into the solid phase. A melted section propagating along an otherwise solid body will collect impurities in the moving melted section. They will be swept along and concentrated at one end.”
Rick puzzled out the message, word by painful word, and was as mystified when he finished as when he started. Concentrated at one end. One end of what? An asteroid didn’t have ends, the ones he had seen were all irregular roundish lumps.
. . . IN VIEW OF THE HIGH METAL FRACTION OF CM-31, A RECORD 99 PERCENT OF THE TOTAL MASS (ROUGHLY 8 BILLION TONS) CAN BE EXTRACTED. IT WILL BE TRANSFERRED TO CISLUNAR SPACE EMPLOYING A SMALL PART OF THE DROSS AS REACTION MASS FOR LOW-THRUST ION PROPULSION UNITS.
Dross. Rick swore again. What the devil was dross? The trouble with learning was that the more you learned, the more you realized how much you didn’t know. Once you started you were on a never-ending treadmill and you couldn’t get off.
The opening door ended his frustration. It was Barney French herself, panting hard. “Luban? Up out of the bunk.” She caught sight of the screen display. “Good choice—let’s hope you don’t need that for a while. Don’t rush getting up. Slow is smart, first time you do it.”
Not just the best way—the only way. Rick came gingerly to his feet and stood there swaying. Tom Garcia had said two gee, but it felt more like ten.
“You’ll get used to it.” Barney was reading his mind. “All of you have been spoiled the past couple of months by low-gee environments. This is nothing. Think yourself lucky you didn’t sign with Avant Mining and have to live with pulsed fusion. Their high-acceleration mode takes them from two and a half gees to zero and back every few seconds, all day long. You ever try to eat dinner bouncing on a pogo stick?”
She moved to the door without waiting for an answer, and Rick followed her out of the cabin. He paused on the threshold. The passageway, along which he had often zoomed with so little effort, had become a deep vertical well. Handholds and footholds that he had never noticed before were placed every foot along it.
“This is the seventh time I’ve done this,” Barney complained. She looped a thick soft rope around her waist, tied the other end around Rick under his armpits, and motioned for him to start down. “Make me an old woman before my time, it will. Go on, start down. I’ll be right behind you. And go slow. You use both hands and both feet, and three of those must work to support your weight at all times. Did you ever go rock climbing back on Earth?”
“No. No rocks where I lived.”
“That figures.”
“I did a few night climbs, though. Up and down the outside of buildings.” Rick still shivered when he remembered the jump from the roof of the Lafferty apartments to a balcony on the building next door. Only eight feet, but when you stood in the dark waiting, ten stories up, eight seemed more like eighty.
“Dumb ass.” Barney sniffed, a few feet above him. “Risking your neck for nothing. Trying to impress some girl, I bet.”
“No.” Rick was climbing down the shaft, slowly and carefully, a boulder strapped to each arm and to his back. If he fell, Barney was supposed to hold him until he could grab another handhold. But could she do it? She’d have to hold up four times her own weight. “I was just trying to prove I was brave,” he panted.
“And did you?”
“I don’t think so. I proved I was scared.” Rick had no more breath for talking. He could see now why Barney had been struggling for breath when she came into his cabin. But he was almost there, reaching the solid floor of the little dining area.