The Precipice (32 page)

Dan sat back in the little plastic chair in
Starpower's
wardroom and smiled into the camera of the phone console set into the bulkhead. His PR director acted as moderator, choosing
which reporter was allowed to ask a question, and a backup. Dan found that the time lag from the ship to Earth worked in his
favor; it gave him time to think before the next question arrived.

It's always smart to think before you talk, he told himself. Engage brain before putting mouth in gear.

C
able News:
Why did you hijack your own ship?

Dan Randolph:
How can you call it a hijacking if it's my own ship? And it's only partially mine, by the way.
Starpower 1
is owned by Starpower, Ltd., which in turn is owned by three organizations: Humphries Space Systems, Astro Manufacturing,
and the people of Selene. Far as I know, neither Humphries nor Selene is complaining, so I don't see this as a hijacking.

Cable News:
But the International Astronautical Authority says you have no right to be aboard
Starpower L

Dan Randolph:
Bureaucratic [DELETED]. There's no reason why a human crew can't ride in this vessel. The IAA is just trying to strangle
us in red tape.

BBC:
Why do you think the IAA refused to give permission for a human crew to fly in your vessel?

Dan Randolph:
I'll be double-dipped in hot chocolate fudge if I know. Ask them.

BBC:
Surely you have some opinion on the matter.

Dan Randolph:
Paper shufflers tend to be conservative souls. There's always a risk in allowing somebody to do something new, and bureaucrats
hate risk-taking. Much safer for them to say no, you need more testing or another round of approvals. Buck the responsibility
upstairs and don't stick your own neck out. If the IAA had been running America's expansion westward back in the nineteenth
century, they'd still be trying to decide whether to build Chicago or St. Louis.

Nippon News Agency:
What do you hope to achieve by this flight?

Dan Randolph:
Ah, a substantive question for a change. We intend to stake out a claim to one or more asteroids. Our goal is to open up
the vast resources of the Asteroid Belt for the human race.

Nippon News Agency:
Have you determined which asteroids you will investigate?

Dan Randolph:
Yes, but I'm not at liberty to reveal which they are. I don't want anyone or anything to cloud our claim.

Several questioners simultaneously:
What do you mean by that? What are you afraid of? Who would make a rival claim?

Dan Randolph:
Whoa! Hey, one at a time. Basically, I fear that if I announce that we're aiming for a certain asteroid, the IAA will find
a reason to declare it off-limits to development, just as they've declared the Near-Earth Asteroids and the moons of Mars
closed to development.

Network Iberia:
But the NEAs have been closed to development because there is the chance that their orbits could be perturbed and they would
crash into the Earth, isn't that so?

Dan Randolph:
That's the IAA's excuse for keeping the NEAs off-limits, right. Bureaucrats can always find a good excuse to prevent progress.

Network Iberia:
Are you saying, then, that the IAA has other motives in this? A hidden agenda?

Dan Randolph:
If they do, their agenda isn't hidden terribly
well. They've denied the resources of the NEAs to the needy people of Earth. If they could, they'd deny the resources of the
Belt, as well. Why? Ask them, not me.

Lunar News:
You seem to be implying that the IAA is working against the best interests of Earth.

Dan Randolph:
I'm not implying it, I'm saying it loud and clear: The IAA is working against the best interests of Earth.

Lunar News:
If that's the case, who do you think they are working for?

Dan Randolph:
The status quo, of course. That's what bureaucrats always support. Their goal is to keep tomorrow exactly like today, or
yesterday, even—no matter how lousy today or yesterday may have been.

Pan Asia Information:
You cast yourself in the position of helping the needy people of Earth. Yet isn't your true goal to make billions in profits
for your corporation?

Dan Randolph:
My true goal is to open up the resources of the Asteroid Belt. We are running this mission on a shoestring; we don't intend
to make a profit from this flight

Pan Asia Information:
But you hope to make profits from future missions, don't you?

Dan Randolph:
Certainly! But more important than that, we'll have shown that the people of Earth can tap the enormous treasures of resources
waiting for us in the Belt. We'll be glad to see other companies coming out to the Bdt to find and develop those resources.

Columbia Broadcasting:
You'd be glad to see competitors going to the Belt, but only after you yourself have claimed the best asteroids.

Dan Randolph:
That's real flatland thinking. There are millions of asteroids in the Belt. Hundreds of millions, if you count the boulder-sized
ones. We could claim a thousand of them and that wouldn't even begin to put a dent into the total number available.

Columbia Broadcasting:
You say “claim” an asteroid. But isn't it illegal to claim any object in space?

Dan Randolph:
It's been illegal since 1967 to claim sovereignty over any body in space. But since the founding of Selene, it has been perfectly
legal to claim
use
of the natural resources of a celestial body.

Euronews:
Weren't you accused of piracy at one time? Didn't you hijack shipments of ore on their way from the Moon to factories in
Earth orbit?

Dan Randolph:
That was a long time ago, and all those legal issues have been resolved.

Euronews:
But aren't you doing the same thing now? Stealing a ship and going out to claim resources that rightfully belong to the entire
human race?

Dan Randolph:
Look, pal, I
own
this ship, One-third of it, at least. And those resources out in the Belt won't do the entire human race one diddley-squat
[DELETED] iota's worth of good if somebody doesn't go out there and start developing them.

Anzac Supernet:
Is it true that
Starpower 1
runs on fusion rockets?

Dan Randolph:
Yes. For more about the Duncan Drive you should talk to Lyle Duncan, who headed the team that built this propulsion system.
He's at the university in Glasgow.

Anzac Supernet:
Are you really going to be able to reach the Asteroid Belt in two weeks?

Dan Randolph:
If we accelerate at one-sixth
g
halfway and then decelerate to our destination, yes, two weeks.

Global News:
Do you think this stunt will help the price of Astro Manufacturing stock?

Dan Randolph
[grinning]: You must be a stockholder. Yes, if we're successful I think Astro's price should climb considerably.
But that's just my guess. I'm in enough trouble with the IAA; I wouldn't want the GEC's regulators on my back, too.

Global News:
How many people are on the ship with you? Could you introduce them?

Leaning back in his reclining chair as he watched the interview, Martin Humphries felt whipsawed by emotions. Try as he might
to remain calm, he seethed inwardly with cold fury at Dan Randolph and Amanda Cunningham.

Yet when Amanda appeared on the wallscreen, sitting at the ship's control panel alongside Pancho Lane, looking properly businesslike
in her flight coveralls and her hair pinned up, his anger melted in the light from her eyes.

How could you? He silently asked Amanda. I offered you everything and you turned your back on me. How could you?

After hardly a minute of seeing her on-screen he abruptly snapped the broadcast off. The wallscreen went blank.

It's over and done with, he told himself as he called up his appointments calendar on his desk screen. Put it behind you.
Grimly he searched for the date of the next quarterly meeting of Astro Manufacturing's board of directors. He marked the date
in red. Randolph will be dead by then. I'll be able to pick his bones and snap up Astro for a song. They'll all be dead by
then. Her too.

Furious at the way his hands trembled, Humphries called up his most reliable dating service and began scrolling through the
videos of the women who were available and ready to please him.

None of them were as desirable as Amanda, he realized. But he began making his choices anyway.

A
n adenoidal woman lamented lost love as country music twanged softly in the bridge of
Starpower 1.

“That was some performance you put on,” said Pancho.

She was sitting in the command-pilot's seat at the instrument panel. Dan was in the right-hand seat, beside her, separated
by a bank of control knobs and rocker switches. He saw that half the touchscreens on the panel had been personalized by Pancho:
they showed data against backgrounds of the Grand Canyon, sleek acrobatic aircraft, even muscular male models smilingly reclining
on sunny beaches.

“The interview?” Dan laughed softly. “I could've predicted three-quarters of the questions they asked. Maybe more.”

He stared out at the view through the wide glassteel port that ran the length of the instrument panel and wrapped around its
sides. To his left, behind Pancho, was the Sun, its brilliance toned down by the port's heavy tinting but still
bright enough to dominate the sky. It made Pancho look as if she had a halo ringing her close-cropped hair. The zodiacal light
stretched out from the Sun's middle clear across the width of the port; dust motes scattered the sunlight, leftovers from
the solar system's early days of creation. Beyond was darkness, the deep black infinity of space. Only a few of the brightest
stars shone through the port's tinting.

“You really think the stock price'll go up?” Pancho asked, her eyes shifting back and forth among the displays on the panel.

“Already has, a couple of points,” Dan said. “That's one of the reasons I did the interview.”

She nodded. “From what I heard afterward, the IAA wants to slap your butt in jail the instant you get back into their jurisdiction.”

“Wouldn't be the first time I've been in jail,” Dan muttered.

“Yeah, but that wouldn't do the stock any good, would it?”

“Pancho, you talk like a worried stockholder.”

“I'm a stockholder.”

“Are you worried?”

“What, me worry?” she joked. “I got no time for worryin'. But I would like to know exactly where we're heading.”

“Would you?”

“Come on, boss, you can razzle-dazzle the reporters but I know you got an asteroid all picked out. Maybe a couple of em.

“I want to get to three of them.”

“Three?”

“Yep. One of each type: stony, metallic, and carbonaceous.”

“How deep into the Belt will we hafta go?”

“We'd better bring Fuchs into this; he's the expert.”

In a few minutes the four of them were seated around the table in the ship's wardroom: Amanda and Fuchs on one side, Pancho
and Dan on the other. A computer-generated
chart of the Asteroid Belt was displayed on the bulkhead screen, a ragged sprinkling of colored dots between thin yel-Jow
circles representing the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

“So you can see that the metallic asteroids,” Fuchs was saying, in an almost pedantic drone, “lie mostly in the outer areas
of the Belt. This is a region that hasn't been explored as well as the inner zones.”

“Which is why we haven't picked a specific metallic rock as yet,” said Dan.

“What're we talkin' here?” Pancho asked. “Three AUs? Four?”

“Four astronomical units,” Amanda replied, “give or take a fraction.”

“And you want to head out there and scout around?” Pancho clearly looked incredulous.

“We have enough fuel for some maneuvering,” Dan said.

Pulling her palmcomp from her coverall pocket, Pancho said, “Some maneuvering. But at that distance, not a helluva lot.”

“I need a nice chunk of nickel-iron,” Dan said. “Doesn't have to be big: a few hundred meters will do just fine.”

Fuchs broke into a smile. It made his heavy-featured, normally dour face light up. “I think I understand. A nickel-iron piece
a few hundred meters across would contain enough iron ore to feed the world's steel industry for a year or more.”

Dan jabbed a forefinger in his direction. “You've got it, Lars. That's what I want to show them, back home.”

Amanda spoke up. “Didn't someone bring a nickel-iron asteroid into the Earth-Moon vicinity?”

“Gunn did it,” Fuchs answered. “He even named the asteroid Pittsburgh, after the steel-producing center in the United States.”

“Yeah, and the double-damned GEC tossed Gunn off the rock and damned near ruined him,” Dan recalled sourly.

“You simply can't have people bringing potentially dangerous
objects into the Earth-Moon region,” Amanda said. “Suppose this Pittsburgh thing somehow was perturbed into an orbit that
would impact Earth? It could have been devastating”

Dan scowled at her. “It's been more than four centuries since Newton figured out the laws of motion and gravity. We can calculate
orbits with some precision. Pittsburgh wasn't going to endanger anything. It was just the double-damned GEC's way of maintaining
control.”