Just before Corrie turned the outside window to its opaque setting and dimmed the room lights, Rob had one more fleeting and disturbing thought. The means for his disposal would not be confined to the aquasphere. If Morel wanted to kill him, there must be a hundred ways to do it in the living-sphere. Rob would be heading back to L-4 in a couple of days. Meanwhile, it might be a good idea to walk very carefully indeed.
After a couple of brief and typical last-minute hitches, the tap of the asteroid began. While Regulo handled the main controls, Rob kept his attention on the Spider. It was performing the high-temperature extrusion of materials adequately, but he was not at all happy with its performance. They were getting differential heating effects in the extruded cable, and that would weaken it.
“We can’t use the Spider this way on a big asteroid,” he said to Regulo, who was examining the assay of the latest length of cable. “I’ll have to make a few changes. I’m sorry, but I don’t see any way to do it unless I go all the way out to the Belt when you have the big one ready.”
Regulo was watching the cable as it snaked red-hot and sputtering out of the Spider’s glowing spinneret. “That’s fine with me. I was hoping you would be there anyway. We should have Atlantis all the way to the Belt by then.” He keyed out a spectrographic reading. “See, that’s the last of the volatiles, venting through the side port. Next time we’ll collect those and store them in a separate sphere. Once they’ve cooled off they’ll be useful reaction mass. Better than digging holes in the rock and hoping you’ll get the right veins, eh? Look at these.”
Regulo passed the assay results across to Rob, who took his eyes off the Spider long enough to make a quick assessment.
“We’re into the fourth layer,” he said after a few moments. “Eighty meters in. I expected the iron and the nickel, but the copper and the cobalt are a nice surprise. You know, I may have an alternative to your zone-melting idea. Why not begin the mining at the axis of rotation? If we put the proboscis straight in along the axis, we ought to get all the light elements out first. Once they’ve gone, we can squeeze the heavy stuff in to the middle and never move the proboscis at all.”
Regulo leaned back in his seat. The benefits of Morel’s treatment were apparent. There was no wincing with pain when he moved, no muscular spasms as he worked at the control board.
“It sounds nice, but I don’t think it will work,” he said at last. “We’d be pushing against the natural flow of materials. Once the ball is spinning, everything tends to fly outward and centrifugal acceleration does our work for us. If you start at the axis of spin, you’ll need some way of shrinking the ball as the tap goes on. I don’t see a good way to do it, not without wasting a lot of energy.” He shrugged. “There’s my top-of-the-head evaluation, but don’t take too much notice of it. We need options, and there’s more than one way to do most things. Think about it some more when you’re back with the beanstalk — and while we’re at it let’s tie our schedules together. Atlantis will be out in the Belt and ready for action with Lutetia two months from now. Can you fit that into your timetable?”
“We’ll be flying the beanstalk in from L-4 right about then.” Rob was watching the bright stream of metal as it squirted from the spinneret. Was it his imagination, or had the asteroid already shrunk enough to see a difference? “Once it’s in orbit around Earth, we’ll be locked into the landing and tether schedule. If you can have a ship ready for me, I can be here again either before or after we land the beanstalk.”
“Come here first. We’ll do Lutetia, then you fly back and take care of the beanstalk. Tight timing, but it will work.” Regulo was frowning. “Pity about the damned flight regulations. If they’d let me put a decent drive on some of the ships, I could halve your transit time. About a year ago I had Cornelia explore some financials for me. Did you know that half our resources are tied up all the time, just sitting and waiting for materials to get where we need them in the System? I’m not talking transportation costs, either. I’m talking about the effects of delays on budgets.”
Rob shrugged. “I don’t like the time it takes to travel around the System any better than you do, but we’re stuck with it.” Regulo was chewing on an old and familiar problem, and one where Rob could see little chance of changing the rules. His time would be better spent examining the changes they would need for the Spider.
“Trips out to the Belt aren’t too bad if you have plenty of work to keep you busy,” Rob went on. “You can’t buck the laws of dynamics. Unless you can come up with a matter transmitter, we’re stuck with transit times to match the drives. Your only other hope is the General Coordinators. Get them to change the laws on maximum permissible drive accelerations, and you’ll be able to cut the transits.”
It seemed to Rob like an unproductive conversation. He pulled a sketchpad input sheet towards him and began to draw in the schematic for the Spider’s extrusion process. He wanted to begin looking at the design modifications. Regulo regarded the younger man with a paternal eye.
“I’m not a theoretician,” Regulo said. “You won’t find a matter transmitter design inside my head. The only solutions I know how to offer are based on things we already understand — strength of materials, simple dynamics, and engineering design. Let me take a look at your drawing there. I still want to know more about the Spider, even if you hold all the trade secrets.”
Rob moved the sketchpad so that Regulo could see his work. There was a long silence, while Rob sketched in changes to the nozzle profile. While Darius Regulo looked on, the screen before the two men showed the steady shrinking of the molten asteroid as it was consumed by the mining operation.
The old man’s expressions were never easy to read, in a countenance so transformed by disease. All the same, there was something in his eyes that few people would ever see. It was a gleam of self-satisfaction and secret pleasure.
CHAPTER 14: Goblin Mystery
“Look, Howard, there’s no way that I can get down there before the fly-in from L-4. That’s only twenty days away, and we’re on a round-the-clock schedule. Can’t you tell me the highlights now, and save the rest?”
Rob Merlin’s image on the screen was disturbing. Howard Anson adjusted the magnification and looked closely at the enlarged picture. There was no doubt about it. Rob showed all the signs of severe strain. His eyes were black-pouched and deep in their sockets, and his face was paler and thinner than ever. Anson wondered how close to the limit Rob had been driving himself.
“You still have twenty days, Rob,” he said. “That’s a long time, and you’ll never have the beanstalk ready for descent if you work yourself to death first. Can’t you find somebody else to pick up some of the effort?”
“Not at this stage.” Rob gave a grim smile. “I’ve been through all this before on the bridge construction jobs. You can delegate the mechanics but not the responsibility. Don’t worry, I’ll last out. If only I could get my mind off those damned Goblins, the rest of the work would be a lot easier to take. I’ve had new ideas about them. After the beanstalk is landed and tethered I’d like to have another session with you. I want to be sure that I’m not inventing something where there’s really nothing, or making a theory that’s contradicting known facts. I wish now that I’d done more last time I was out on Atlantis.”
“No.” Anson shook his head firmly. He was sitting at a long desk in his Information Service office, a great pile of papers stacked untidily in front of him. “I’ve checked further on Morel. You took too many risks as it is. He could have found ten ways to kill you, and from the sound of it he’d do it if he had a strong enough reason to. The records all show that he’s super-logical, and the things that he wants to do are always more important than anything else. You did well to get away with that trip in the aquasphere, but when you go there again you need to be better prepared.”