Rehearsals For Retirement Part 2

"That means you want to blow it up, Marty," she spat. "Don't play games with me!"

He had never seen Fern's temper before. Part of him sympathized with her. Once they had shared the same dreams, wanting to escape the chains of Earth. She still had dreams, but his had faded. He had seen too many carefully reasoned economic a.n.a.lyses proving that colonizing Mars was ludicrously expensive, that the Moon was only slightly less ridiculous, and that orbital colonies could never be cost effective. He wasn't sure the studies were right, but it didn't matter, because the people in charge wanted to believe them, and n.o.body else cared. Once it had been the young who dreamed; now it was only old people like Fern.

As captain of the Ron McNair, he was responsible for its mission, however ludicrous that might be. Marty wondered if the management courses he had chosen to ignore would have helped. Were there any magic quick fixes for recalcitrant subordinates?

Fern had tired of staring at him. "Look, Marty, this is a stalemate, and you know it."

He nodded.

"Let me make a suggestion, then. Suppose we just pretend to blow it up? Then it will be there for our children to find . . ."

"You don't have any children, Fern," Marty said. He had children, but there would never be grandchildren. His sons lacked the attention span and the commitment to do anything but have a good time. Like the rest of the human race, he thought.

"That isn't the point, Marty. Someday, sometime in the future, somebody is going to come out again . . ."

Marty shook his head. "They will never come again, Fern. It's too dangerous. Don't you read the reports? The risks of s.p.a.ce travel on statistical average shorten life by 0.85 year. The groundlings aren't going to risk their precious little necks . . ."

"We did!"

"We're out of date, Fern," he grumbled. "We're out of touch with the 21st century. We didn't grow up rich and fat and happy like proper groundlings. My parents had to work their way out of the black ghetto. Yours came from Vietnam on overloaded boats as children, lucky to make it out alive. Those days are all over. Now everybody just wants to add a few miserable months to their affluent lives. s.p.a.ce is history."

Tears stained Fern's eyes. "Don't say it, Marty. I don't want to hear it."

"But that's reality . . ."

"It doesn't have to be. We can keep it alive. We can leave the stuff here. Detonate the explosives and pretend to destroy it, but don't. We can fool the groundlings; they never look closely."

Bewildered, Marty shook his head.

"It will be easy, Marty. We just override the robots' programming. Normally they go pinging away to find the faults that run through the rock, then place the bombs in holes drilled so the explosions push the cracks open and break the asteroid into smaller pieces. There shouldn't be much cracking if we put the bombs above the surface in fault-free zones. The radiation monitors will pick up the blast, so it will look like a normal demolition."

"But it won't fly apart in pieces . . ."

"Sometimes they don't, at least not right away, because they have some gravity of their own. The original goal was to crack the asteroid enough that it would fall apart in the Earth's gravitational field, but when the groundlings don't understand that, the Cooperative promised to blow the rocks up. Besides, does anybody really look to check?"

Marty thought a moment and shook his head. A dozen radar tracking stations monitored the asteroid belt, but all they would do is sound an alarm if anything started coming toward the Earth. No one would ever look at the McNair's data archives. "I still think you're crazy."

"No, Marty, I'm not. This is a treasure that we've got to save. I can't be sure that anybody else will ever find it, but we can hope. Maybe someday . . . maybe someone will go through old data and find what we saw. Maybe by then, people will be ready to go back into s.p.a.ce to find it. And maybe if we're lucky they will know what to do with it."

Staring at Fern, he started to shake his head. The idea was insane. Yet maybe it was the answer. It would get Fern off his back, and let him complete the mission, at least as far as Earth Control was concerned. n.o.body would ever notice that the asteroid wasn't totally destroyed. The monitors, if programmed correctly, would say the asteroid had been damaged enough that it would fall apart in a planet's gravitational field, although it remained partially intact. The asteroid would never approach Earth until long after he was dead. Finally, he nodded. "Only if no word ever gets out."

Once she agreed, the job was as good as over. She freed two bombs from their programmed inhibitions and a.s.signed robots to deliver them. Marty watched, but did not interfere. He had started the sonar sensors; it was Fern's job to interpret their outputs.

Marty copied Fern's screen onto his display. The screen showed fault patterns as blue streaks running through the white-outlined rock. Flashing red spots were fault foci. Putting bombs there, the computer believed, would shatter the asteroid. Fern was overriding the system to send the robots to places away from blue fault lines and the red spots.

Watching the sabotage, he wondered what would happen if they were discovered. He wanted to leave the entire job to Fern, but he had to help if they were to meet schedules. He steered a robot into the bomb bay and picked up a disabled weapon. If someone a.n.a.lyzed the data files carefully, his trail would be covered. Fern was the one who overrode the robot programs to put their two smallest bombs in safe places, far from the relics. They placed four disabled explosives, so the records would show they had installed the standard half dozen. The distant radiation sensors detected nuclear explosions, but they could not tell how many occurred; the bombs were leftovers from the arms race, so old their yields varied widely.

They left orbit an hour late, bombs armed and ready to fire in 24 hours. They were the proper ten thousand kilometers away when the explosions came. Fern monitored the blasts, careful not to take too much quant.i.tative data. Anyone who studied the files would consider the data recording sloppy, an acceptable mistake when schedules were tight because it wouldn't cost the Cooperative money.

Fern turned off the data recorders and checked the sensors. The asteroid was intact. She flicked the recorders back on. "I wonder why they left the stuff there?" she asked, turning away from the display.

Marty shrugged. "I guess it looked like a good place to put the garbage."

"I'll find out later. I'm going back. I don't know how, but somehow I will get back. I'll copy the tapes and show them to people . . ."

Alarmed, Marty interrupted, "but you promised not to tell . . ."

Fury surged through her tongue. "Don't you care about anything beyond yourself? I'm not looking to betray you. I just want to save the dream. Remember the dream, Marty? Remember the dream you had when you were young? Remember the dream that brought you here?"

Sighing, Marty closed his eyes and nodded slightly. The thoughts brought tightness to his throat and moisture to his eyes. "I can if I try hard enough," he said softly. "The years have left so many scars that I have to try very hard now. Sometimes I think I was a fool then . . ."

"It's never foolish to dream."

"It would have been an easier life without it, Fern," he said sadly.

"There are lots of easier ways to make a living."

"But it would have been a poorer life, down among the groundlings."

"Probably," he sighed, "but that's where I'll be soon enough." He had had little rest in the past two days, and he was too old for such things. Exhaustion was replacing his last wave of exhilaration. "I've done as much as I can. I'm almost finished with my rehearsals for retirement. It's all yours," he gestured at the controls, rising. "I'm going to sleep."