Outland (2 page)

It was a big mine, indicative of its importance to the vast international conglomerate that owned and operated it. It had gone up fast and would die with equal rapidity once the Ilmenite ran out. But at the moment it was a breathing, functioning entity. It lived.

The men and women who made it a temporary home called the time they were compelled to spend there by another name. The fecundity of the human vocabulary when confronted with isolation and hard work and danger is truly astonishing.

Like some lazy cephalopodian monster, the mine crawled up the sheer wall of the crater, stretching metal tentacles to its rim and dipping steel ovipositors deep into its bottom and flanks. From a distance the mine looked like the creation of an inspired cubist, a grand Christmas celebration of lights and glowing towers. Up close the illusion vanished and it became simply another tool.

Translucent tubes and accessways connected the major structures. The thin filaments of metal and plastic seemed barely strong enough to hold in the pressure of precious atmosphere that made life possible on Io. They cracked and leaked and were hastily patched with epoxies and welds. Great care was expended in those repairs, more so than was spent in the fixing of mining equipment. Broken machinery meant red ink. Broken accessways meant death.

The shadows of the actual mining area were sharper than its design, but it was efficient if not graceful. Scaffolding stretched over a hundred meters down the side of the crater wall. The lower levels were soaked in darkness. The scaffolding seemed too thin to hold men, let alone their heavy equipment. In that respect, the light gravity of Io was a blessing.

Jupiter hung suspended overhead and blackness swallowed the crater's bottom. With such numbing alternatives competing for his attention, it was easy for a man to concentrate wholeheartedly on his work.

The scaffolding was formed from a heavily oxidized metal whose orange hue matched that of Jupiter, an unintentional mimicry. Most of the men and women who crawled and swung like their ancestors from the struts and braces did not know the name of the metal that gave them support.

Of one thing they were pretty certain, however: the scaffolding contained little if any titanium. That precious metal was too valuable to be used simply to give support to a expendable miners.

One year, they told you. Just one year of hard work and your duty tour was over and you could go home, rich and satisfied with a job well done. It didn't seem like so long when you signed the contract. One lousy year, for more money than most of them could hope to earn in five on Earth.

Alter a month, you began wondering if it was really such a good deal. After two, you wished you hadn't signed. After six, you didn't much care about the contract or anything else anymore. After nine, you found yourself counting the minutes remaining to your year instead of the days.

After eleven months you spent much of your time trying not to scream. You watched longingly each time the shuttle departed without you. If you'd been lucky enough to have survived eleven months, that is.

There was no graveyard, no boot hill on Io. Excavation was expensive, and the great gouges left in the Ilmenite didn't lend themselves to gravesites. The running joke was that if you died while on Io, the Company treated you to an all-expenses paid tour of the solar system, concluding with a one-way tour of the Sun. It wasn't much of a joke, but any humor was welcome at the mine.

They all carried little suns of their own, the miners did. Sun-powered suns, work lights of pure white powered by the huge solar concentrators. Those vast panels managed to draw energy even from the distant, tiny star called Sol. The work lights playing over the crater wall made the mine look as though it were being worked by fireflies.

On Earth, where it had been designed, the mining equipment had looked gigantic. Jupiter took care of that fast, as it reduced all matters of scale.

In the mine the gargantuan cranes and crawlers looked like toys. They scuttled over the shrinking rim and the crater sides like fat gray beetles, gnawing away at the rock while pumps and generator emitted hums none could hear. But you could feel their vibration through the feet and gloves of your environment suit.

The miners grew quite sensitive to vibration. If it stopped unexpectedly it might mean that some crawler operator had paused for a quickie with his codriver. Or it might mean an overhead drill had shattered. That meant run like hell for safe cover before the flying bits of steel and plastic came hunting for your suit.

Everyone had a buddy out in the mine. You watched out for him or her. If you didn't, they might not watch out for you. Then there'd be no one to warn you of the silently falling, sharp rock that could tear your suit, exploding you out through the hole, guts and blood flying in slow motion toward the crater floor so far below.

Crane or screwdriver, everything in the mine had a use. Even the colors of the environment suits had purpose, and nothing to do with aesthetics.

Crater miners wore yellow suits. Equipment drivers favored red, while maintenance personnel were always blue-clad. Management wore white. The last was the subject of many jokes among the other workers. There was no purity on Io, save for the blackness overhead.

Additional identification of a more personal nature was provided by the nametags stitch- welded to everyone's left breast pocket. To management the suit colors carried more meaning than the letters.

Experienced workers could be seen disdaining the elevators and jumping from one level to the next, ignoring the vast drop. In the light gravity, leaps of prodigious size were within the ability of the puniest worker.

The Jove-jockies, as the multiple-tour workers were called, delighted in testing the limits of their expanded athletic abilities, They horrified newcomers wtih jumps that teased death, pushing their safety tethers to the limit.

One legendary miner, a four-year old-timer by the name of Gomez, supposedly had made the jump into Jupiter's waiting gravitational field. He'd jumped so high so hard that his tether had busted. His fellow workers had gathered below to watch him soar upward toward a yellow-orange death. His last word had been "mierda!" spoken in the self-amazed drawl of his native home state of Chiapas.

His comrades had watched because that was all they could do. There were no ships stationed at the mine, none which could have affected a rescue. There was only the shuttle, and it came but once a week.

Every so often a Jove-jockey would retell the story of Gomez, supplying his own details and embellishments. The new workers would listen, and deprecate, and then when they were alone would wonder if it had really happened. They'd glance up at the roiling, awesome mass of Jupiter pressing down overhead, and shiver, and hurry back to their work. It was better to concentrate on the rock.

Each colored environment suit was a little world, crammed full of liquid food, water, atmosphere, and the babble of many conversations relayed over open channels.

On the ninth level brilliant white arc cutters lanced the rock, separating chunks of ore from the crater wall. One of the miners pushed off and floated up toward Level Ten. Everyone moved carefully, always conscious of his or her individual safety tether. They seemed to be moving through water, when they were actually moving through nothing.

In contrast to physical movements, conversation proceeded at a frenetic pace. Mine-talk was a time-worn buzz of rumor, commentary on the ancestry of the supervisors and foremen, ribald jokes, curses, complaints, and quips, all counterpointed with the grunts and wheezes of people striving harder with their muscles than their minds.

"No way," the man with the name WALTERS stenciled on his suit was grumbling softly. "I told them, no way they're gonna bring an automated vacuum loader in here. Cost too many jobs and besides, the old jockies would never let 'em get away with it."

His companion, a bucolic individual named Hughes, laughed derisively. The sound came hollowly over the suit intercom units and possessed a faint echo.

"Wanna bet? When they installed them on Fourteen and Twenty-three they said it was just a temporary experiment. Well, they're still in there, on both levels, puffin' away all by their damned robotic lonesomes. That's some temporary if you ask me." He flipped a null switch on his cutter, gesturing to Walters' left.

"Hand me that connector, will you? Arc's sputtering. I'd better go to a new line."

Walters turned, picked up a thin metal tube from a cluster and carefully placed it in Hughes' glove. His faceplate was partly fogged over. Perspiration dribbled down his cheeks and chin. In-suit perspiration produced a clammy, hot-moist sensation that one worker had likened to drowning in recently dipped sheep. The smell that went with it only served to intensify the analogy.

Perspiration did not endanger a worker, however. Therefore it did not warrant additional Company investment in upgrading and improving suit design. And if the workers didn't have the heat to complain about, so the reasoning went, they'd find something else to complain about, wouldn't they?

"What about Wooton?" Walters had returned to reducing his assigned section of wall, playing the cutter across the bare black rock with a skill that depended more on instinct now than forethought.

"He's the shop steward. What'd he say? Union going to do anything to stop those loaders being installed?"

"I'll tell you what he said. Zip." Hughes' cutter slashed a long vertical burn in the cliff face, a carbon-electro exclamation point. "That's exactly what he said when I asked him about it . . . total zip."

Walters shook his head to indicate his disgust, though the gesture did not translate well through his suit. "They're always trying to pull something. Fucking company. Like they don't make enough profit out of this hole as it is. They have to try to keep cutting corners, try and push some other poor schmuck out of a job."

"Yeah, well, it's a bunch of crap." Hughes made a rude noise over the intercom. "No way they can get away with it, no way. They got seven worker shifts on Fourteen and Twenty-three, ever since they installed those loaders. You know the by-laws as well as me. 'Eight workers for each shift.' In black and white, that's what it says.
Eight workers
." His voice lowered.

"I knew the two who got replaced. Mariel and Dortmunder. Good people. It's a damned shame."

Walters' energy level rose a trifle. "Yeah, well, they want to get cute, we can get cute, too."

Hughes' cutter snapped off again and he looked across to his workmate. "You got something in mind?"

"Damn right. I'm sick of being pushed around. I'm gonna tell Wooton I want a meeting. Maybe what we need is a new shop steward. By-laws are by-laws or they ain't worth shit." He picked at several dials set into the left forearm of his suit but they were aleady shoved as far over as they'd go.

"Jesus, can't they regulate these suits? Minus a hundred seventy goddamn degrees out here and we broil our asses off." He looked past Hughes to where a third cutter was working another section of cliff face.

"Ain't that right, Tarlow?" The other miner didn't reply. Walters grunted, turned disconsolately back to his own work. Mention of the men replaced by the autoloaders had made him more depressed than usual.

Tarlow turned off his arc cutter, carefully setting it down in its cradle. Hughes and Walters paid him no notice.

"Where's your other suit?" Hughes asked his friend.

"In the shop, where else? Said they'd have it fixed two days ago." He made a noise, hesitated, then swallowed. "Know the worst thing about these damn metal overcoats? You can't spit."

Hughes chuckled. "That depends on your personal hygiene factor, I suppose. Some do it anyway."

"Not me," Walters replied. "I'm not that far gone. But I wish they'd fix my spare."

"Don't blame the shop. They're always backed up."

"Yeah, that's right, they are. How come they never put any automated help in
there?
"

"Autoservs are for replacing people, not helping 'em." He peered closely at Walters' faceplate. "Hey, you really are getting hot in there, aren't you?"

"That's a clever observation."

"Put some mylar over the sensor. Translucent repair stuff, not the opaque. Does something to the heating coil, without fouling up the climate chip. You stay cooler and nothing's damaged."

"Really?" Walters was genuinely surprised.

"No, moron, I just made it up." The sarcasm passed quickly. "Yeah, it works. Some wall fracturer up on Top Level found it out by accident. Didn't report it in because the Company would forbid it."

"Why?"

Hughes grinned behind his faceplate. "Makes the suit draw more power. You know what the Company would think of
that
. The mylar fools the climate chip governor into thinking it's hotter outside than it really is, and so you get colder air. Most of the guys do it."

Walters shut off his cutter, moving to inspect Hughes' helmet. "Yeah, I see the stuff," he finally declared. "That's all there is to it?"

"That's all," Hughes replied, turning back to look at him. "Just make sure you peel it off before going back inside. Supervisor might catch it. Just throw the patch over the side. No problem getting mylar—it's all over the mine."

"Thanks," said Walters gratefully. "I can't wait for the next shift to try it out." They both laughed at that one.

The third cutter, Tarlow, stood shivering nearby while staring at the floor. He was mumbling something, but so softly that his words were lost in the static that filled the intercom channels.

"Ohhhhh . . . I hate spiders. Spiders . . . all over . . ." He started stamping on the metal platform, trying to smash something that wasn't there.

"Eight workers for eight jobs," Hughes was saying, having turned his attention back to the rock. "That's the contract Con-Amalgamated signed in order to get the mineral rights here. They'd damn well better live up to it or there's gonna be trouble."

"Maybe our shop steward should read the contract. He sure as hell reads his paycheck entry before they put it through the computer into his account." Walters paused stared past his friend and frowned.