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 multi-colored display light up on her bubble helmet.