George looked unconvinced, but he muttered, “Lunar g, you say?”
“One-sixth normal Earth gravity. No more than that.”
“How much will it cost?”
Fuchs blinked once. “We can buy the stripped-down spacecraft from Astro Corporation. Pancho is offering a very good price.”
“How much?”
“The preliminary figures work out…” Fuchs hesitated, took a breath, then said, “We can do it if all the prospectors and miners put in ten percent of their income.”
George grunted. “A tithe, huh?”
“Ten percent isn’t much.”
“A lot of us rock rats don’t make any income at all, some years.”
“I know,” said Fuchs. “I factored that into the cost estimate. Of course, we’ll have to pay off the spacecraft over twenty- or thirty-year leases. Like a mortgage on a house, Earthside.”
“So you want everybody here in Ceres to take on a twenty-year debt?”
“We can pay it off sooner, perhaps. A few really big strikes could pay for the entire project all by themselves.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
With burning intensity, Fuchs asked, “Will you do it? If you agree, most of the other prospectors will, too.”
“Whyn’t you get one of the corporations t’ do it?” George asked. “Astro or Humphries…” He stopped when he saw the look on Fuchs’s face.
“Not Humphries,” Fuchs growled. “Never him or his company. Never.”
“Okay. Astro, then.”
Fuchs’s scowl shifted into a troubled frown. “I’ve spoken to Pancho about it. The Astro board would not vote for it. They will sell stripped-down spacecraft to us, but they won’t commit to building the habitat. They don’t see a profit from it.”
George grunted. “Lot they care if we snap our bones.”
“But you care,” Fuchs said eagerly. “It’s our problem, George; we have to solve it. And we can, if you’ll help.”
Running a beefy hand through his thick mop of red hair, Big George said, “You’re gonna need a techie team to do the integration job. There’s more to puttin’ this habitat of yours together than just connectin’ Tinkertoys, y’know. You’ll need a flock of geek boys.”
“That’s already in the cost estimate,” Fuchs replied.
George huffed a mighty sigh, then said, “All right, Lars, I’m in. I guess it would be pretty good to have a base out here in the Belt with some decent gravity to it.”
Fuchs smiled. “You can always have sex aboard your own ship.”
George grinned back at him. “Believe it, mate. Believe it.”
Fuchs went with George to the ship’s main airlock and helped the bigger man get back into his hard-shell spacesuit.
“They’re testin’ lightweight suits back at Selene, y’know,” he said as he slid into the rigid torso and worked his arms through the stiff sleeves. “Flexible. Easy to put on.”
“And the radiation protection?” Fuchs asked.
“Magnetic field surrounds the suit. They claim it’s better’n this stuff.” He rapped his knuckles against the torso’s cermet carapace.
Fuchs gave a little snort of disdain. “They’ll need years of testing before I’d buy one.”
As he wormed his hands into the gloves, George said, “Me too.”
Handing the bigger man his fishbowl helmet, Fuchs said, “Thanks for agreeing, George. It means a lot to me.”
George nodded solemnly. “I know. You two want to have kids.”
Fuchs’s cheeks reddened. “It’s not that!”
“Isn’t it?”
“Well, not alone, no.” Fuchs looked away from George for a moment, then slowly admitted, “I worry about Amanda, yes. I never thought she would want to stay out here with me. I never thought I myself would be out here this long.”
“There’s a lot of money to be made here in the Belt. A lot of money.”
“Yes, yes indeed. But I worry about her. I want her to be in a safer place, with enough gravity to keep her from deconditioning.”
“And enough radiation shielding to start a family,” George said, grinning. Then he pulled on his helmet before Fuchs could think of a reply.
CHAPTER 2
Once George had cycled through Starpower 1’s airlock and jetted back to his own Waltzing Matilda, Fuchs went down the ship’s narrow central passageway to the compartment where his wife was working.
She looked up from the wallscreen as Fuchs slid the compartment door open. He saw that she was watching a fashion show beamed from somewhere on Earth: slim, slinky models in brightly colored gowns of outrageous designs. Fuchs frowned slightly: half the people of Earth displaced by floods and earthquakes, starvation rampant almost everywhere, and still the rich played their games.
Amanda blanked the wallscreen as she asked, “Has George left already?”
“Yes. And he agreed to it!”
Her smile was minimal. “He did? It didn’t take you terribly long to convince him, did it?”
She still spoke with a trace of the Oxford accent she had learned years earlier in London. She was wearing an oversized faded sweatshirt and cutoff work pants. Her golden blonde hair was pinned up off her neck and slightly disheveled. She wore not a trace of makeup. Still, she was much more beautiful than any of the emaciated mannequins of the fashion show. Fuchs pulled her to him and kissed her warmly.
“In two years, maybe less, we’ll have a decent base in orbit around Ceres with lunar-level gravity.”
Amanda gazed into her husband’s eyes, seeking something. “Kris Cardenas will be happy to hear it,” she said.
“Yes, Dr. Cardenas will be very pleased,” Fuchs agreed. “We should tell her as soon as we arrive.”
“Of course.”
“But you’re not even dressed yet!”
“It won’t take me a minute,” Amanda said. “It’s not like we’re going to a royal reception.” Then she added, “Or even to a party in Selene.”
Fuchs realized that Amanda wasn’t as happy as he’d thought she would be. “What’s the matter? Is something wrong?”
“No,” she said, too quickly. “Not really.”
“Amanda, my darling, I know that when you say ‘not really’ you really mean ‘really.’ ”
She broke into a genuine smile. “You know me too well.”
“No, not too well. Just well enough.” He kissed her again, lightly this time. “Now, what’s wrong? Tell me, please.”
Leaning her cheek on his shoulder, Amanda said very softly, “I thought we’d be home by now, Lars.”
“Home?”
“Earth. Or even Selene. I never dreamt we’d stay in the Belt for three years.”
Suddenly Fuchs saw the worn, scuffed metal walls of this tiny coop of a cubicle, the narrow confines of the ship’s passageway and the other cramped compartments; smelled the stale air with its acrid tinge of ozone; felt the background vibrations that rattled through the ship every moment; consciously noticed the clatter of pumps and wheezing of the air fans. And he heard his own voice ask inanely:
“You’re not happy here?”
“Lars, I’m happy being with you. Wherever you are. You know that. But—”
“But you would rather be back on Earth. Or at Selene.”
“It’s better than living on a ship all the time.”
“He’s still at Selene.”
She pulled slightly away, looked straight into his deep-set eyes. “You mean Martin?”
“Humphries,” said Fuchs. “Who else?”
“He’s got nothing to do with it.”
“Doesn’t he?”
Now she looked truly alarmed. “Lars, you don’t think that Martin Humphries means anything to me?”
He felt his blood turning to ice. One look at Amanda’s innocent blue eyes and full-bosomed figure and any man would be wild to have her.