Freedom. He knew he was confined inside the spacesuit and he couldn’t survive for a minute without it. Yet hanging there weightlessly in the silent emptiness of infinity, Dan felt free of all the world, alone with the cosmos, in tune with the ethereal music of the spheres. Glorious freedom. Radiation be damned; he felt he could soar out into the universe forever and leave the petty lusts and hates of humankind far behind. It wouldn’t be a bad way to die.
Then the asteroid slid into his view. Massive, ponderous, an enormous pitted dark looming reality hanging over him like an ominous cloud, a mountain floating free in space. Starpower 1 looked pitifully small and helpless alongside the two-kilometer-long asteroid; like a minnow next to a whale. Dan suddenly understood how Jonah must have felt.
You can’t scare me, he said to the asteroid. You’re two kilometers of high-grade iron ore, pal. You’re going to look beautiful to a lot of people on Earth. Money in the bank, that’s what you are. Jobs and hope for millions of people. Bonanza: that’s your name and that’s just what you are.
“Ready for EVA.” Fuchs’s voice broke into Dan’s silent monologue.
“Clear for EVA. Lars,” he heard Amanda reply.
Dan squeezed the right handgrip on his maneuvering controls with the lightest of touches. The cold gas jet on the backpack squirted noiselessly and he turned enough to be looking back at the ship. Starpower 1 glinted nicely in the starlight. She still looked brand-new, shining, not a pit or a scratch on her. The airlock hatch slid open and a spacesuited figure stood framed in it.
“Exiting the airlock,” Fuchs said, his voice trembling slightly.
“Come on, Lars,” Dan called. “Isn’t she a beauty?”
Fuchs jetted toward him. Dan saw that his suit was bristling with hammers and drills and all sorts of equipment.
“It’s enormous!” He sounded awestruck.
“She’s just an average-sized chunk of metal,” Dan said. “And as soon as you chip a piece off her, we can claim her.”
Fuchs showed no hesitation at all, although he seemed a bit clumsy working the controls of his maneuvering thrusters. For a moment Dan thought he was going to ram into the asteroid, but at the last instant Fuchs fired a braking blast and hovered a scant few meters above its pitted, pebbly surface.
Dan jetted toward him, and with a bare touch of the handgrip controls lowered himself to the surface of the asteroid. He felt his boots make contact and then recoil slightly. Not much gravity, he thought, as he puffed down again and finally stood on the surface of Bonanza. Clouds of dust rose where his boots made contact with the surface; they just hung there, barely moving in the minuscule gravity.
It took Fuchs three tries to get firmly onto the surface; he kept coming down too hard and bouncing off. In the end, Dan had to reach out and yank him down.
“Don’t try to walk,” he told Fuchs. “The gravity’s so light you’ll float up and away.”
“Then how—”
“Slide your boots along.” Dan demonstrated a couple of steps, shuffling up even more dust. “Like you’re dancing.”
“I don’t dance very well,” Fuchs said.
“This isn’t the smoothest dance floor in the solar system, either.”
The asteroid’s surface was rough and uneven, covered with a powdery coating of dust, much like the surface of the Moon. Dan thought it was more like standing on the deck of a boat, though, than on solid ground. There wasn’t really a horizon; the rock just ended. Pinhole craters peppered the surface, pebbles and fist-sized rocks littered it, and out along its far end, Dan could see a more sizeable crater, a big depression with a raised rim all around it.
“How much iron do you think we’ve got here?” Dan asked.
“We’ll have a good measure of its mass by the time we return to the ship,” Fuchs said. “With the ship orbiting the asteroid we have a classic two-body system. It’s simple Newtonian physics.”
Dan thought to himself, He’s a scientist, all right. Ask him a simple question and you get a dissertation. Without the answer to your question.