The Precipice (44 page)

Cardenas started to reply, but Stavenger said heatedly, “If they die—if any one of them dies—I'll have you arraigned for premeditated
murder.”

Humphries actually smiled at Stavenger. ‘That's so farfetched it's ludicrous.”

“Is it?”

“I had Randolph's ship sabotaged so he would abort his flight and come back to Selene. I admit to that Any sane man would
have turned around and headed for home as soon as he found the sabotage. But not Randolph! He pushed on anyway, knowing that
his radiation shield was damaged. That's his decision, not mine. If there's a crime in this, it's Randolph committing suicide
and taking his crew with him.”

Stavenger barely held on to his composure. His fists clenched, he asked through gritted teeth, “And just why did you want
to sabotage his ship?”

“So the stock in Astro Corporation would drop, why else? It was a business decision.”

“Business.”

“Yes, business. I want Astro; the lower its stock, the easier for me to buy it up. Dr. Cardenas here wanted her grandchildren.
I offered to get her together with them in exchange for a pinch of nanomachines.”

“Gobblers,” Stavenger said.

“They weren't programmed to harm anyone,” Cardenas protested. “They were specifically set to attack the copper compound of
the superconductor, nothing more.”

“My father was killed by gobblers,” Stavenger said, his voice as cold and sharp as an icepick. “Murdered.”

“That's ancient history,” Humphries scoffed. “Please don't bring your family baggage into this.”

Visibly restraining himself, Stavenger stared at Humphries for a long, silent moment. Electricity crackled through the office.
George decided that if Stavenger came around the desk and started beating up on Humphries, he would keep the door closed and
prevent anyone from coming to the bastard's aid.

At last Stavenger seemed to win his inner struggle. He took a shuddering breath, then said in a low, seething voice, “I'm
turning this matter over to Selene's legal department. Neither of you will be allowed to leave Selene until their investigation
is finished.”

“You're going to put us on trial?” Cardenas asked.

“If it were up to me,” Stavenger said, “I'd put the two of you into leaky spacesuits and drive you out into the middle of
Mare Nubium
and leave you there.”

Humphries laughed. “I'm glad you're not a judge. And, by the way, Selene has no capital punishment, does it?”

“Not yet,” Stavenger growled. “But if we get a few more people like you here, we'll probably change our laws on that point.”

Humphries got to his feet. “You can threaten all you like, but I don't think your courts will take this as personally as you
are.”

With that, he strode to the door. George stepped aside and let him open it for himself. He noticed that there was a thin sheen
of perspiration on Humphries's upper lip as he left the office.

The instant the door closed again, Cardenas broke into sobs. Half doubled over in her chair, she buried her face in her hands.

Stavenger's icy composure melted. “Kris… how could you do it? How could you let him…” He stopped and shook his head.

Without looking up at him, Cardenas said in a tear-choked voice, “I was angry, Doug. Angrier than you can know. Angrier than
I myself knew.”

“Angry? At Randolph?”

“No. At
them.
The crazies who let this greenhouse cliff ruin the world. The fanatics who've exiled us, who won't let me come to Earth to
see my children, my grandchildren. And they won't come here, not even for a visit I wanted to punish them, get even with them.”

“By killing Randolph?”

“Dan's trying to help them,” she said, looking up at him at last, her face streaked with tears. “I don't
want
them helped! They made this mess. They shut me out of their lives. Let them stew in their own juices! They deserve whatever
they get”

Stavenger shook his head, bewildered. He handed Cardenas a tissue and she dabbed at her reddened eyes.

“I'm going to recommend that you be placed under house arrest, Kris. You'll be able to go anywhere in Selene except the nanotech
lab.”

She nodded wordlessly.

“And Humphries?” George asked, still standing by the door.

“Same thing, I suppose. But he's right, the smug slime-bag. We don't have capital punishment; we don't even have a jail here
in Selene.”

“House arrest for him would be a lark,” George said.

Stavenger looked disgusted. But then his chin came up and his eyes brightened. “Unless we take it out on his wallet.”

“Huh?”

With a slow smile spreading across his youthful face, Stavenger said, “If he's found guilty of murder, or even attempted murder,
maybe the court can divest him of his share of Starpower and keep him from taking over Astro Corporation.”

George huffed. “I'd rather punch his ribs in.”

“So would I,” Stavenger admitted. “But I think he'd
rather
have his ribs punched in than to have to give up Astro and Starpower.”

“
T
here it is,” Pancho sang out. “How's that for navigation?”

Dan crouched slightly behind the command chair and peered through the window. The asteroid was visible to their naked eyes
now against the distant glow of the Sun's zodiacal light, a dumbbell-shaped dark mass tumbling slowly end over end.

Fuchs stood beside Dan, his hands on the back of Amanda's chair.

“It's two bodies in contact,” he said. “Like Castallia and several others.”

“Looks like a peanut,” said Dan.

“A peanut made of rock,” Pancho said.

“No, no,” Fuchs corrected, “a peanut made up of thousands of little stones, chondrules, that are barely holding together in
their very weak mutual gravitational attraction.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Look, you can see craters on the surface.”

Dan strained his eyes. How in hell can he see craters on that black slug in this dim lighting?

“They have no rims,” Fuchs went on, talking fast in his excitement. “Smaller objects have collided with the asteroid but they
don't make impact craters as they would on a solid body. They simply burrow into the loose rubble.”

“Same as we're gonna do,” Pancho said.

“Our storm cellar,” Amanda added, glancing up at Fuchs.

It's our storm cellar only if he's right, Dan added silently. If that chunk out there really is a beanbag and we can dig into
it until the storm's over.

Aloud, he asked, “How long before the radiation starts to build up?”

“Four hours, plus a few minutes,” Pancho said. “Plenty of time.”

You hope, Dan said to himself.

She established
Starpower
1 in a close orbit around the tumbling asteroid, and then the four of them floated weightlessly down to the airlock, where
Dan and Fuchs had already assembled six emergency tanks of air. As they wriggled into their spacesuits Fuchs begged to go
out the airlock first, but Dan overruled him.

“Pancho goes first, Lars. You're still a tenderfoot out there.”

Through his fishbowl helmet, Fuchs's broad face frowned in puzzlement. “But my feet are fine,” he said. “Why are you worried
about my feet?”

Dan and Pancho both laughed, but Amanda shot an annoyed glance at Dan and said, “It's an American expression, Lars. From their
western frontier, long ago.”

“Yep,” Dan conceded. “I learned it from Wild Bill Hickok.”

Getting serious, Pancho said, “We can go together, Lars and me—whenever you guys are ready to stop horsin' around.”

“Aye-aye cap'n,” said Dan, touching his helmet with a gloved hand in a sloppy salute.

Pancho and Fuchs went through the airlock and, once it cycled, Dan and Amanda. While he stood in the cramped metal chamber,
listening to the air-pump's clatter dwindling to silence, he heard Fuchs's excited voice through his helmet speaker:

“It's like a sandpile!”

Dan offered a swift thanks to whatever gods there be. Maybe we'll all live through this, after all.

With Amanda, he went through the airlock and then jetted the hundred meters or so separating the ship from the asteroid. It
sure looks solid, Dan thought, staring at the black, slowly tumbling mass as he approached it And yes, there were craters
here and there with no rims to them; just holes, as if some giant had poked his fingers into the asteroid.

Then he saw Fuchs's helmet and shoulders; the rest of him was in some sort of a pit. He's digging like a kid in a sandbox,
Dan saw.

As he got closer, Dan saw that the surface of the asteroid looked hazy, blurred. Is he stirring up that much dust? Dan asked
himself. No, it's not just where Fuchs is digging. It's everywhere. The whole surface of the asteroid is blurry. What the
hell is causing that?

“Are my eyes going bad or is the surface blurred?” he said into his helmet microphone.

“Dust,” came Fuchs's immediate reply. “Particles from the solar wind give the dust an electrostatic charge. It makes the dust
levitate.”

“That doesn't happen on the Moon,” Dan objected.

“The Moon is a very large body,” said Fuchs. “This asteroid's gravity is too weak to hold the dust on the surface.”

Just then Dan touched down on Haven. It was like stepping on talcum powder. His boots sank into the dark dust almost up to
his ankles even though he came down with a feather light touch. Cripes, he thought, it's like one of those black sand beaches
in Tahiti.

Dan turned and saw Pancho, long and lean even in her spacesuit, gliding across the asteroid's dusty surface toward him.

“Bring out the air tanks, Mandy,” Pancho said.

Amanda soared weightlessly to
Starpower
1's airlock, then emerged again towing a string of six tall gray cylinders behind her. In her gleaming white spacesuit she
looked like a robot nurse followed by a half-dozen unfinished pods.

“Better start diggin', boss,” Pancho said.

Dan nodded, then realized that she might not be able to see the gesture. There wasn't all that much light out here, and they
had decided to keep their helmet lamps off to save their suit batteries.

“We go with the buddy system,” Dan said as he unlimbered the makeshift shovel he had carried with him. “You and me, Pancho.
Amanda, you stay with Lars.”

“Yes, of course,” Amanda replied.

It wasn't quite like digging at the beach. More like working on a giant, black hunk of Swiss cheese, Dan thought. There were
holes in the surface, tunnels that had apparently been drilled by stray chunks of rock hitting the asteroid. There was no
bedrock, just a loose rubble of black rounded grains, the largest of them about the size of a small pebble. It's a wonder
they hold together, Dan thought.

“Here's a ready-made tunnel for two,” Pancho called to him. He saw her slowly disappearing into one of the tunnels.

It was wide enough for the two of them, just barely.

“How far down does it go?” Dan asked as he gingerly slid over the lip of the crater, careful not to catch his backpack.

“Dunno,” Pancho answered. “Deep enough to ride out the storm. Better start fillin' in the hole.”

He nodded inside his helmet and took a tighter grip on his improvised shovel: it had been a panel covering an electronics
console. They had to cover themselves with at least a meter of dirt to protect against the oncoming radiation.

As he dug away at the sides of the sloping tunnel, Dan expected the gritty dirt to slide down into their hole. That's what
would have happened on Earth, or even on the Moon. But Haven's gravity was so slight that the tunnel walls would not cave
in no matter how furiously he dug into them.

In short order he and Pancho, working side by side, had buried themselves as deep as their waists. Not enough, Dan knew. Nowhere
near enough, not yet.

“How're we doing… on time?” he asked Pancho, panting from the exertion of digging.

She straightened up. “Lemme see,” she said, tapping at the keyboard on her left forearm. Dan could see a multicolored display
light up on her bubble helmet.

“Radiation level's not up much over ambient yet,” she said.

“How soon?” Dan asked impatiently.

The lights on her helmet's inner face flickered, changed. “Hour and a half, maybe a little less.”

Dan went back to digging, blinking sweat out of his eyes, wishing he could wipe his face or just scratch his nose. But that
was impossible inside the suit. Should have worn a sweat band, he told himself. Always did when I went outside. Been so long
since I've done any EVA work I forgot it. Hindsight's always perfect.

“Y'know we're gonna need at least a meter of this dirt over us,” Pancho said, digging alongside him.

“Yep.”

“And then dig our way out, after the cloud passes.”

“Yep,” Dan repeated. It was the most he could say without stopping work. His muscles ached from the unaccustomed exertion.

It seemed like hours later when he heard Pancho's voice in his helmet speaker. “How're you guys doin', Mandy?”

“We're fine. We found a lovely cave and we have it almost completely filled in.”

“Once you're all covered over it's gonna degrade our radio link,” Pancho said.

“Yes, I'm sure it will.”

“Got your air tanks in there with you?”

“Yes, of course.”

Dan saw that their air tanks were still lying out on the surface, more than arm's reach away.

“Okay, keep your radio open. If we get completely cut off, you stay in the hole for fourteen hours. Got that?”

“Fourteen hours, check.”

“Time count starts now.”