Thanks to his dealings with the Race, he had a security clearance that let him go almost anywhere on the U.S. network (not quite, as he’d found out when he went snooping after data on the Lewis and Clark). He’d found a couple of interesting archives of signals received just after the orbiting weapon, whosever it was, launched its warheads at the orbiting ships of the colonization fleet.
The screen went dark. After a moment, a message appeared: CONNECTION BROKEN. PLEASE TRY AGAIN. Disgustedly, he whacked the computer. That happened all too often with it. “Miserable half-assed piece of junk,” he growled.
Few men in the history of the world-no, of the solar system-had enjoyed the view Glen Johnson had now. There was Ceres below him: mostly dust-covered rock, with a little ice here and there. It was the biggest asteroid in the whole damn belt, but not big enough to be perfectly round; it looked more like a roundish potato than anything else. The landscape put Johnson in mind of the heavily cratered parts of the moon. Rocks of all sizes had been slamming into Ceres for as long as it had been out there.
Colonel Walter Stone had a different way of looking at things. “That’s the worst case of acne I’ve ever seen,” he said.
“Yeah, any kid with that many zits wouldn’t like high school a whole hell of a lot,” Johnson agreed.
“None of the other asteroids can tease Ceres, though,” his mentor observed. “They’re all just as ugly and just as pockmarked-or if there are any that aren’t, we haven’t found ’em yet. Still, no matter how ugly it is, we’re in business here, and that’s what counts.”
“We’ve been in business for a while, too,” Johnson observed. “I can’t believe how fast we got here.”
“Just a couple of months.” Stone sounded as complacent as if he’d got out behind the Lewis and Clark and pushed. “You have to remember, Glen old boy”-he put on a British accent too fruity to be real-“this isn’t one of those old-fashioned rocket ships. They’re as out of date as buggy whips, don’t you know.”
“And we could have been a little faster, too, if we hadn’t swung wide to keep from coming too close to the sun.” Johnson shook his head in slow wonder. “I wouldn’t have believed how quick we could get here if I hadn’t done the math-well, had the math done for me, anyhow.”
“And if we hadn’t been hanging around here in orbit for the past three and a half months,” Stone added. “Except we’re not really hanging around. We’re going exploring. That’s what it’s all about.”
“Finding that big chunk of ice only a few hundred miles away was a lucky break,” Johnson remarked.
“That’s not a chunk of ice-it’s an asteroid,” Walter Stone said. “And it was only part luck. There are lots of chunks of-uh, icy asteroids floating around here. The first exploration team saw that. No reason why one of ’em shouldn’t be someplace where we can get at it.”
Lieutenant Colonel Mickey Flynn, a large, solidly built fellow who let nothing faze him, floated into the control room. “I’m here a couple of minutes early out of the goodness of my heart,” the Lewis and Clark ’s second pilot said, “so you poor peasants can get an early start on supper. I expect nothing in return, mind you. Worship isn’t necessary. Even simple adoration seems excessive.”
“You’re what seems excessive,” Stone said with a snort. Being senior to Flynn, he could sass him with, if not impunity, at least something close. “And why should we trust anybody who’s named after a knockout drop?”
“That’s Finn, my cousin,” Flynn said in dignified tones. “Sassenachs, the both of you. And Sassenachs wasting their time getting out of here by giving a hard time to a son of Erin who never did ’em any harm.”
Johnson undid his harness. “I’ll go to supper,” he said, unsnapping his safety belt. Now that the Lewis and Clark was in orbit around Ceres, he didn’t even have.01g to hold him in his seat. He pushed off, grabbed the nearest handhold, and then swung onto the next. Still snorting, Stone followed him.
Because of the banter they’d traded with their relief, the mess hall was already crowded when they got to it. Then the banter started up again. A woman called, “If you’re here, who’s flying the damn ship?”
“Nobody,” Johnson shot back. “And if you don’t believe me, go ask Flynn. He’ll tell you the same thing.”
“No, he’d say that was going on during the shift before his,” somebody else returned. Walter Stone said something pungent. Johnson mimed being wounded. In spite of that, he was grinning. When he first involuntarily came aboard the Lewis and Clark, people wouldn’t give him the time of day. They treated him like a spy. A lot of people had thought he was a spy.
Now he was one of the crew. He might not have helped build the spaceship, but he’d helped fly her. And even if he was a spy, he couldn’t very well telephone whoever he was spying for, not from a quarter of a billion miles away he couldn’t. What he could do, better than Stone or Flynn or anybody else, was fly the little hydrogen-burning rockets the Lewis and Clark used to explore the asteroids in Ceres’ neighborhood. They weren’t just like Peregrine, the upper stage he’d flown countless times in Earth orbit, but they weren’t very far removed, either. He understood them, the way his grandfather had understood horses.
He didn’t fully understand the dynamics of chow lines in weightlessness, not yet. At last, though, he drifted up in front of the assistant dietitian, who gave him chicken and potatoes that had been frozen and dried out and were now reconstituted with water. They tasted like ghosts of their former selves.
With them, he got a squeeze bulb full of water and a lidded plastic cup full of pills: vitamins and calcium supplements and God only knew what all else. “I think we carry more of these than we do of reaction mass,” he said, shaking the pills.
The assistant dietitian gave him a dirty look. “What if we do?” she said. “If we get here but can’t finish the mission because we’re malnourished, what’s the point of coming at all?”
“Well, you’ve got me there,” Glen said, and drifted away. There weren’t any tables or chairs-they were no good in weightlessness, or even in.01g. Instead, he snagged a handhold and started gossiping with some people who looked interesting-which was to say, at least in part, some people who were female.
More women had come along in the Lewis and Clark than he’d expected when he came aboard: they made up something close to a third of the crew. Very few of them were married to male crew members, either. Come to that, very few of the men were married. Johnson was divorced, Walter Stone a widower, Mickey Flynn a bachelor, and they were pretty typical of the crew.
And military rules about fraternization were a dead letter. The Lewis and Clark wasn’t going home again. More people might come out, but nobody here was going back. People had to do the best they could with their lives out here, and to hell with Mrs. Grundy. So far as Johnson knew, nobody’d got pregnant yet, but that wasn’t through lack of effort.
“Hi, Glen,” said the mineralogist, a brunette named Lucy Vegetti. She was on the plump side, but he liked her smile. He liked any woman’s smile these days. She went on, “Have you heard about the latest samples up from Ceres?”
He shook his head. “Nope, sure haven’t. What’s the new news?”
“Plenty of aluminum, plenty of magnesium, plenty of all the light metals,” she said. “All we need is energy, and we can get them out of the rocks.”
“We’ve got energy, by God-we’ve got more energy than you can shake a stick at,” Johnson answered, pointing back toward the engine on its boom at the rear of the Lewis and Clark. “Just have to worry about getting it out.” He was also worrying about getting it in, but not to the point where it made him stupid. Any man who lived by himself and didn’t take advantage of the five-finger discount was a damn fool, as far as he was concerned.