Without another word, the director grabbed the phone that linked with Washington and began yelling into it. Martinson licked his lips, made his decision, and headed for the door.
«Where’re you going?» the director yelled at him.
«To stop them,» he yelled back, over his shoulder.
Heart pounding, Martinson raced down the corridor that led to the control center. Wishing he had exercised more and eaten leaner cuisine, he pictured himself expiring of a heart attack before he could get the job done.
More likely you’ll be gunned down by some soldier, he told himself.
He reached the control room at last, bursting through the door, startling the already nervous kids working the telescope.
«We’re being invaded,» he told them.
«Invaded?»
«What’re you talking about?»
«Parachute troops are landing outside. They’ll be coming in here in a couple of minutes.»
«Parachute troops?»
«But why?»
«Who?»
The youngsters at the consoles looked as scared as Martinson felt. He spotted an empty chair, a little typist’s seat off in a corner of the windowless room, and went to it. Wheeling it up to the main console, Martinson explained:
«I don’t know who sent them, but they’re not our own troops. Whoever they are, they want to grab the telescope and send out their own version of The Question. We’ve got to stop them.»
«Stop armed troops?»
«How?»
«By sending out The Question ourselves. If we get off The Question before they march in here, then it doesn’t matter what they want, they’ll be too late.»
«Has Washington sent The Question?»
«No,» Martinson admitted.
«The United Nations?»
He shook his head as he sat at the main console and scanned the dials. «Are we fully powered up?»
«Up and ready,» said the technician seated beside him.
«How do I—»
«We rigged a voice circuit,» the technician said. «Here.»
He picked up a headset and handed it to Martinson, who slipped it over his sweaty hair and clapped the one earphone to his ear. Adjusting the pin-sized microphone in front of his lips, he asked, «How do I transmit?»
The technician pointed to a square black button on the console.
«But you don’t have The Question yet,» said an agonized voice from behind him.
Martinson did not reply. He leaned a thumb on the black button.
The door behind him banged open. A heavily accented voice cried, «You are now our prisoners! You will do as I say!»
Martinson did not turn around. Staring at the black button of the transmitter, he spoke softly into his microphone, four swift whispered words that were amplified by the most powerful radio transmitter on the planet and sent with the speed of light toward the departing alien spacecraft.
Four words. The Question. It was a plea, an entreaty, a prayer from the depths of Martinson’s soul, a supplication that was the only question he could think of that made any sense, that gave the human race any hope for the future:
«How do we decide?»
WATERBOT
Sometimes you have to run like hell to stay ahead of the parade.
As I write this introduction, the news media are ballyhooing the announcement that famed movie director James Cameron has helped to form a new company called Planetary Resources, which, apparently, will look into the possibilities of mining asteroids.
«Waterbot» is a story set on the frontier of the Asteroid Belt. There are millions upon millions of chunks of rock, metal, and ice drifting in that region, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. An interplanetary bonanza that contains more mineral wealth than the entire planet Earth can provide.
But «Waterbot» is about another frontier, as welclass="underline" the frontier of human-machine interactions. Can a human being form an emotional relationship with an intelligent computer?
Or maybe even beat it at chess?
«Wake up, dumbbutt. Jerky’s ventin’ off.»
I’d been asleep in my bunk. I blinked awake, kind of groggy, but even on the little screen set into the bulkhead at the foot of the bunk I could see the smirk on Donahoo’s ugly face. He always called JRK49N «Jerky» and seemed to enjoy it when something went wrong with the vessel—which was all too often.
I sat up in the bunk and called up the diagnostics display. Rats! Donahoo was right. A steady spray of steam was spurting out of the main water tank. The attitude jets were puffing away, trying to compensate for the thrust.
«You didn’t even get an alarm, didja?» Donahoo said. «Jerky’s so old and feeble your safety systems are breakin’ down. You’ll be lucky if you make it back to base.»
He said it like he enjoyed it. I thought that if he weren’t so much bigger than me I’d enjoy socking him square in his nasty mouth. But I had to admit he was right; Forty-niner was ready for the scrap heap.
«I’ll take care of it,» I muttered to Donahoo’s image, glad that it’d take more than five minutes for my words to reach him back at Vesta—and the same amount of time for his next wiseass crack to get to me. He was snug and comfortable back at the corporation’s base at Vesta while I was more than ninety million kilometers away, dragging through the Belt on JRK49N.
I wasn’t supposed to be out here. With my brand-new diploma in my eager little hand I’d signed up for a logistical engineer’s job, a cushy safe posting at Vesta, the second-biggest asteroid in the Belt. But once I got there Donahoo jiggered the assignment list and got me stuck on this pile of junk for a six months’ tour of boredom and aggravation.
It’s awful lonely out in the Belt. Flatlanders back Earthside picture the Asteroid Belt as swarming with rocks so thick a ship’s in danger of getting smashed. Reality is the Belt’s mostly empty space, dark and cold and bleak. A man runs more risk of going nutty out there all by himself than getting hit by a ’roid big enough to do any damage.
JRK49N was a waterbot. Water’s the most important commodity you can find in the Belt. Back in those days the newsnets tried to make mining the asteroids seem glamorous. They liked to run stories about prospector families striking it rich with a nickel-iron asteroid, the kind that has a few hundred tons of gold and platinum in it as impurities. So much gold and silver and such had been found in the Belt that the market for precious metals back on Earth had gone down the toilet.
But the really precious stuff was water. Still is. Plain old H2O. Basic for life support. More valuable than gold, off-Earth. The cities on the Moon needed water. So did the colonies they were building in cislunar space, and the rock rats’ habitat at Ceres and the research station orbiting Jupiter and the construction crews at Mercury.
Water was also the best fuel for chemical rockets. Break it down into hydrogen and oxygen and you got damned good specific impulse.
You get the picture. Finding icy asteroids wasn’t glamorous, like striking a ten-kilometer-wide rock studded with gold, but it was important. The corporations wouldn’t send waterbots out through the Belt if there weren’t a helluva profit involved. People paid for water: paid plenty.
So waterbots like weary old Forty-niner crawled through the Belt, looking for ice chunks. Once in a while a comet would come whizzing by, but they usually had too much delta-v for a waterbot to catch up to ’em. We cozied up to icy asteroids, melted the ice to liquid water, and filled our tanks with it.
The corporation had fifty waterbots combing the Belt. They were built to be completely automated, capable of finding ice-bearing asteroids and carrying the water back to the corporate base at Vesta.
But there were two problems with having the waterbots go out on their own: