He then turned off his fusion motor, climbed laboriously into suit and backpac, and left the ship carrying a telescope and his mining magnet.
The stars are far from eternal, but for man they might as well be. Nick floated among the eternal stars, motionless though falling toward the tiny sun at tens of thousands of miles per hour. This was why he went mining. The universe blazed like diamonds on black velvet, an unforgettable backdrop for golden Saturn. The Milky Way was a jeweled bracelet for all the universe. Nick loved the Belt from the carved-out rocks to the surface domes to the spinning inside-out bubble worlds; but most of all he loved space itself.
A mile from the ship he used ’scope and mining magnet to fix the location of the new source. He moved back to the ship to call in. A few hours from now he could take another fix and pin the source by triangulation.
When he reached the ship the communicator was alight. The gaunt fair face of Martin Shaeffer, Third Speaker, was talking to an empty acceleration couch.
“—Must call in at once, Nick. Don’t wait to take your second fix. This is urgent Belt business. Repeating. Martin Shaeffer calling Nick Sohl aboard singleship Hummingbird—”
Nick refocused his laser. “Lit, I’m truly honored. A simple clerk would have sufficed to record my poor find. Repeating.” He set the message to repeat, then started putting away tools. Ceres was light-minutes distant.
He did not try to guess what emergency might need his personal attention. But he was worried.
Presently the answer came. Lit Shaeffer’s expression was strange, but his tone was bantering. “Nick, you’re too modest about your poor find. A pity we’re going to have to disallow it. One hundred and four miners have already called in to report your monopole source.”
Nick gaped. One hundred and four? But he was in the outer system… and most miners preferred to work their own mines anyway. How many had not called in?
“They’re all across the system,” said Lit. “It’s a hell of a big source. As a matter of fact, we’ve already located it by paralax. One source, forty AU out from the sun, which makes it somewhat further away than Pluto, and eighteen degrees off the plane of the solar system. Mitchikov says that there must be as big a mass of south magnetic monopoles in the source as we’ve mined in the past century.”
Outsider! thought Nick. And: Pity they’ll disallow my claim.
“Mitchikov says that big a source could power a really big Bussard ramjet — a manned ramrobot.” Nick nodded at that. Ramrobots were robot probes to the nearby stars, and were one of the few sources of real UN-Belt cooperation. “We’ve been following the source for the past half-hour. It’s moving into the solar system at just over four thousand miles per second, freely falling. That’s well above even interstellar speeds. We’re all convinced it’s an Outsider.
“Any comments?
“Repeating—”
Nick switched it off and sat for a moment, letting himself get used to the idea. An Outsider!
Outsider was Belter slang for alien; but the word meant more than that. The Outsider would be the first sentient alien ever to contact the human race. It (singular) would contact the Belt instead of Earth, not only because the Belt held title to most of the solar system but because those humans who had colonized space were clearly more intelligent. There were many hidden assumptions in the word, and not every Belter believed them all.
And the emergency had caught Nick Sohl on vacation. Censored dammit! He’d have to work by message laser. “Nick Sohl calling Martin Shaeffer, Ceres Base. Yes, I’ve got comments. One, it sounds like your assumption is valid. Two, stop blasting the news all over the system. Some flatlander ship might pick up the fringes of a message beam. We’ll have to bring them in on it sooner or later, but not just yet. Three, I’ll be home in five days. Concentrate on getting more information. We won’t have to make any crucial decisions for awhile.” Not until the Outsider entered the solar system, or tried sending messages of its own. “Four—” Find out if the son of a bitch is decelerating! Find out where he’ll stop! But he couldn’t say any of that. Too specific for a message laser. Shaeffer would know what to do. “There is no four. Sohl out.”
The solar system is big and, in the outer reaches, thin. In the main Belt, from slightly inside Mars’s orbit to slightly outside Jupiter’s, a determined man can examine a hundred rocks in a month. Further out, he’s likely to spend a couple of weeks coming and going, just to look at something he hopes nobody else has noticed.
The main Belt is not mined out, though most of the big rocks are now private property. Most miners prefer to work the Belt. In the Belt they know they can reach civilization and civilization’s byproducts: stored air and water, hydrogen fuel, women and other people, a new air regenerator, autodocs and therapeutic psychomimetic drugs.
Brennan didn’t need drugs or company to keep him sane. He preferred the outer reaches. He was in Uranus’s trailing Trojan point, following sixty degrees behind the ice giant in its orbit. Trojan points, being points of stable equilibrium, are dust collectors and collectors of larger objects. There was a good deal of dust here, for deep space, and a handful of rocks worth exploring.
Had he found nothing at all, Brennan would have moved on to the moons, then to the leading Trojan point. Then home for a short rest and a visit with Charlotte; and, because his funds would be low by then, a paid tour of duty on Mercury, which he would hate.
Had he found pitchblende he would have been in the point for months.
None of the rocks held enough radioactives to interest him. But something nearby showed the metallic gleam of an artifact. Brennan moved in on it, expecting to find some Belt miner’s throwaway fuel tank, but looking anyway. Jack Brennan was a confirmed optimist.
The artifact was the shell of a solid fuel rocket motor. Part of the Mariner XX, from the lettering.
The Mariner XX, the ancient Pluto fly-by. Ages ago the ancient empty shell must have drifted back toward the distant sun, drifted into the thin Trojan-point dust and coasted to a stop. The hull was pitted with dust holes and was still rotating with the stabilizing impulse imparted three generations back.
As a collector’s item the thing was nearly beyond price. Brennan took phototapes of it in situ before he moved in to attach himself to the flat nose and used his jet backpac to stop the rotation. He strapped it to the fusion tube of his ship, below the lifesystem cabin. The gyros could compensate for the imbalance.
In another sense the bulk presented a problem.
He stood next to it on the slender metal shell of the fusion tube. The antique motor was half as big as his mining singleship, but very light, little more than a metal skin for its original shaped-core charge. If Brennan had found pitchblende the singleship would have been hung with cargo nets under the fuel ring, carrying its own weight in radioactive ore. He would have returned to the Belt at half a gee. But with the Mariner relic as his cargo he could accelerate at the one gee which was standard for empty singleships.
It might just give him the edge he’d need.
If he sold the tank through the Belt, the Belt would take thirty percent in income tax and agent’s fees. But if he sold it on the Moon, Earth’s Museum of Spaceflight would charge no tax at all.
Brennan was in a good position for smuggling. There were no goldskins out here. His velocity over most of his course would be tremendous. They couldn’t begin to catch him until he approached the Moon. He wasn’t hauling monopoles or radioactives; the magnetic and radiation detectors would look right through him. He could swing in over the plane of the system, avoiding rocks and other ships.