“Bah!” Wilcox shook his head. “What do they call themselves out there? Rock rats? They pride themselves on their independence. They resisted the one attempt we made to establish a full-fledged office on Ceres. So now they’re crying to us about piracy, are they?”
“It’s only one person making the accusation: this man Fuchs.”
“A maniac, no doubt,” said Wilcox.
“Or a sore loser,” Zar agreed.
WLTZING MATILDA
Big George’s stomach rumbled in complaint.
He straightened up—no easy task in the spacesuit— and looked around. Waltzing Matilda hung in the star-strewn sky over his head like a big dumbbell, its habitat and logistics modules on opposite ends of a kilometer-long buckyball tether, slowly rotating around the propulsion module at the hub.
Been too many hours since you’ve had a feed, eh? he said to his stomach. Well, it’s gonna be a few hours more before we get any tucker, and even then it’ll be mighty lean.
The asteroid on which George stood was a dirty little chunk of rock, a dark carbonaceous ‘roid, rich in hydrates and organic minerals. Worth a bloody fortune back at Selene. But it didn’t look like much: just a bleak lump of dirt, pitted all over like it had the pox, rocks and pebbles and outright boulders scattered across it. Not enough gravity to hold down a feather. Ugly chunk of rock, that’s all you are, George said silently to the asteroid. And you’re gonna get uglier before we’re finished with ya.
Millions of kilometers from anyplace, George realized, alone in this cold and dark except for the Turk sittin’ inside Matilda monitoring the controls, squattin’ on this ugly chunk of rock, sweatin’ like a teen on his first date inside this suit and me stomach growlin’ ’cause we’re low on rations.
And yet he felt happy. Free as a bloomin’ bird. He had to make a conscious effort not to sing out loud. That’d startle the Turk, he knew. The kid’s not used to any of this.
Shaking his head inside the fishbowl helmet, George returned to his work. He was setting up the cutting laser, connecting its power pack and control module, carefully cleaning its copper mirrors of clinging dust and making certain they were precisely placed in their mounts, no wobbles. It was all hard physical work, even though none of the equipment weighed anything in the asteroid’s minuscule gravity. But just raising your arms in the stiff, ungainly suit, bending your body or turning, took a conscious effort of will and more muscular exertion than any flatlander could ever appreciate. Finally George had everything set, the laser’s aiming mirrors pointing to the precise spot where he wanted to start cutting, the power pack’s superconducting coil charged and ready.
George was going to slice out chunks of the asteroid that Matilda could carry back to Selene. The prospector who’d claimed the rock wouldn’t make a penny from it until George started shipping the ores, and George was far behind schedule because the wonky laser kept malfunctioning time and again. No ores, no money: that was the way the corporations worked. And no food, George knew. It was a race now to see if he could get a decent shipment of ores off toward Selene before Matilda’s food locker went empty.
As he worked, a memory from his childhood school days back in Adelaide returned unbidden to his mind; a poem by some Yank who’d been in on the Yukon gold rush nearly two centuries ago:
Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear, And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear; With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold, A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold; While high overhead, green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars?—
Then you’ve a hunch what the music meant…hunger and night and the stars.
George nodded solemnly as he checked out the laser’s focus. Hunger and night and the stars, all right. We’ve got plenty of that. And a stark, dead world, too, aren’t you? he said to the impassive asteroid. Come to think of it, you’ve prob’ly got some gold tucked away inside you, huh? Strange kinda situation when water’s worth more’n gold. Price of gold’s dropped down to its value as an industrial metal. Jewelers must be going bonkers back Earthside.