Not to worry. Sparky's on the job!
The Oberon Chamber of Commerce and Tourist Bureau claims that, left to itself, the situation would result in one major hit for every ten thousand trips. That figure is in great dispute, but it really doesn't matter, since the situation has not been left to itself. Each ship that enters this solar pinball field carries good radar and good lasers, and fries an average of six rocks on the trip in and out. Most of those would, of course, never have troubled the ship, but ship's captains hate tailings with a mighty passion. They never let one go.
This would actually be enough to reduce ship/tailings encounters to one every few decades. But it's not enough for the Oberoni, who hate tailings even more than captains do. For one thing, they are a hazard to the great structure of Oberon II. For another, they give the system a terrible black eye in the minds of the traveling public, one hit per decade or not. So the Great Wheel bristles with radars and lasers, which clear a thousand rocks an hour... or was that per second? Go look it up. It's a bunch.
And that's still not enough for the fifteen moons of the Uranian League: Oberon, Titania, Umbriel, Ariel, Miranda, Peasblossom, Cobweb, Mustardseed, Pyramus, Thisbe, Snug, Bottom, Flute, Snout, and Moth. (I once met a fellow who hailed from Bottom; he said his people called themselves Bottom-dwellers, but the neighbors, naturally, referred to them as Assholes. I always wondered what inhabitants of Snug and Snout were called.) The League aims to clean up the system in a few centuries, and their main weapon is a genengineered cyborg critter called a snark.
You're unlikely to see a snark during your trip to Uranus. Though they number in the billions, they're not very big and they cover a lot of space. (Spacers believe sighting one is very bad luck.) But they all look like lengths of pipe, ranging from a few feet long up to about fifty feet. They have gossamer "wings" that they spread to soak up solar radiation. They have radar eyes and a system that generates gas for propulsion: hydrogen + oxygen = bang! They survive on a meager diet of ice and rock, which they get by dipping into the rings. They are alive, semi-intelligent, self-reproducing, and their mission in life is to destroy tailings. They drift, ever-alert, conserving their strength by using their thrusters only at orbital points where it can be used most economically, like eagles soaring on a desert thermal. When they spot a rock, they vaporize it.
Like most perfect solutions, the snarks revealed a few problems not long after they were let loose. One toasted a group of seven spacedivers during the first month postrelease. A viral program had to be devised and broadcast on the wavelength they used to talk to one another, making sure they only attacked objects smaller than a basketball. Anything larger would be reported to human agencies which would track it down and dispose of it.
And a few decades after that they began showing up at Neptune, Saturn, Jupiter, all the related Trojan points, and the asteroid belt, where they were about as welcome as rabbits in Australia. But they did no real harm.
I mention all this for two reasons. One is that, during the fifth season, Sparky found an injured snark and nursed him back to health. B.J. the Snark became one of the most beloved members of the Gang, along with Toby the Dog, sometimes outselling Sparky in action-figure totals. Of course, B.J. had a friendly face—real snarks have nothing that looks like a face—and had no trouble flying around inside municipal pressure, which would have made a real snark helpless as a butterfly in a blender.
The other reason is to explain the glorious, continuous fireworks show surrounding Oberon II as my ship began her final approach. The black sky was alive with a thousand points of scintillating light, light that was all the colors of the spectrograph as the mostly sand-sized particles were vaporized, announcing their chemical composition in their final seconds, to anyone with the knowledge to read the colors.
I didn't have that knowledge, but who cares?
It was even more beautiful than I remembered it.
"Is this Hank's Bank?"
"Yes, you have—"
"Automated answering service?"
"That's right, you have—"
"Looking for an account in the name of Otis B. Driftwood."
"We have no—"
"Cleopatra Pepperday?"
"We have no—"
"T. Frothingwell Bellows?"
"We have no—"
"So long."
Three more down. It was looking like a losing proposition.
I wish I could say I had time, leisure, and the temperament to enjoy the approach to Oberon II. If you don't like fireworks, there are also the holoboards, which we started picking up while still a thousand miles out. Miles on a side, they trumpet the allures of the big hotels and casinos and shows, with more glitter per square foot than anyplace since Old Las Vegas.
In reality, I had only two things on my mind. My stomach, and my bowels.
I had been awake almost continuously for the previous week, having stretched the deadballs as far as I could. I had grown a beard, and my toenails looked like pruning hooks. There are 168 hours in a standard week. Ten thousand minutes. I had spent every one of them thinking about food.
I had eaten the last of my provisions. I had licked the wrapping paper and cardboard, then I ate the cardboard. Then I ate the paper. I chewed on rags, hoarded my last ten sticks of chewing gum like some wild-eyed troll at the bottom of a well. I hate to admit this, but several times I thought about Toby, snuggled safe and warm only a few feet beneath me. I began to wonder if he'd taste like chicken.
They say that historical fasters like Gandhi and Hornburg eventually didn't feel much in the way of hunger. That's what they say, but you couldn't prove it by me. It only got worse, hour by hour, and when I thought it couldn't possibly get any worse, it did. Then it got worse again.
There was really only one thing to distract me from my hunger, and that was the state of my lower digestive tract. Every ounce of high-nutrition food I'd eaten since the trip began was down there now, a bolus about the size and shape of Phobos and twice as hard. It was going to take surgery to pass it, I felt sure, and the medico had better go in with a sharp pickax and plenty of dynamite.
So pardon me if I sort of skip lightly over the arrival (thousands of ships at least as large as mine, floating inside a vast cylinder spangled with the light from a billion portholes), the transfer (swarms of robot tugs no bigger than park squirrels detaching each cargo pod, reading its destination, then jetting off toward the correct bay like ten thousand maniacs charging for a front-row seat at a Motomania Show), and my exit from the Pantechnicon and subsequent reentry into public pressure (my spine was trying to form some unusual letter—Q or Z, I think—and my legs promised never to be straight again). When I could walk I looked briefly, with little enthusiasm, at the cargo pod Ukulele Lou had rejected at Pluto. All I could determine was that whatever had been inside was spoiled, for sure. Then I had to step lively as a big cargobot plucked the damaged pod from the line and took it off somewhere, presumably to fill out quintuplicate insurance forms. I couldn't pick out the pod Lou had escaped to. It might have been delivered to a bay clear on the other side of the hub for all I knew. I wished him luck again, and found the exit to public corridors.
Thirty seconds later I was devouring the mother of all hamburgers, the National Gall'ry, the Garbo's sal'ry, the Camembert of hamburgers. Actually, it was a MacVending 15¢ Microwave Special, dab of ketchup, dab of mayo, hold the pickle, lettuce, purple Bermuda onion, beefsteak tomato, sprouts, mustard, slice of Cheddar cheese and everything else you might think of, but by then I was ready to lick dried soda pop and crushed peppermints off the auditorium floor... and like it. So I shall always treasure that burger.
I ate two more just like it, hurried to the bathroom and threw them all up, went back outside, and ate another that seemed likely to stay down. Then I sought out the nearest Minute Surgery franchise and had someone take care of the other problem. I promised you I would skip over that part, and I will, though I did take note of some of the medico's expressions of astonishment and merriment, and some of my own caustic replies for possible use in my next Punch and Judy show.