Industrial Revolution Read online

  "What about the observation terrace at Leyburg?" Gilbertson challenged.

  "That was different," Ellen Ziska said. "Everything was safe and civilized. This is like being on the edge of creation."

  Blades could see why Goddard House had so long resisted the inclusion of female officers on ships of the line, despite political pressure at home and the Russian example abroad. He was glad they'd finally given in. Now if only he could build himself up as a dashing, romantic type ... But how long would the Altair stay? Her stopover seemed quite extended already, for a casual visit in the course of a routine patrol cruise. He'd have to work fast.

  "Yes, we are pretty isolated," he said. "The Jupiter ships just unload their balloons, pick up the empties, and head right back for another cargo."

  "I don't understand how you can found an industry here, when your raw materials only arrive at conjunction," Ellen said.

  "Things will be different once we're in full operation," Blades assured her. "Then we'll be doing enough business to pay for a steady input, transshipped from whatever depot is nearest Jupiter at any given time."

  "You've actually built this simply to process ... gas?" Gilbertson interposed. Blades didn't know whether he was being sarcastic or asking a genuine question. It was astonishing how ignorant Earthsiders, even space-traveling Earthsiders, often were about such matters.

  "Jovian gas is rich stuff," he explained. "Chiefly hydrogen and helium, of course; but the scoopships separate out most of that during a pickup. The rest is ammonia, water, methane, a dozen important organics, including some of the damn ... doggonedest metallic complexes you ever heard of. We need them as the basis of a chemosynthetic industry, which we need for survival, which we need if we're to get the minerals that were the reason for colonizing the Belt in the first place." He waved his hand at the sky. "When we really get going, we'll attract settlement. This asteroid has companions, waiting for people to come and mine them. Homeships and orbital stations will be built. In ten years there'll be quite a little city clustered around the Sword."

  "It's happened before," nodded tight-faced Commander Warburton of Gunnery Control.

  "It's going to happen a lot oftener," Blades said enthusiastically. "The Belt's going to grow!" He aimed his words at Ellen. "This is the real frontier. The planets will never amount to much. It's actually harder to maintain human-type conditions on so big a mass, with a useless atmosphere around you, than on a lump in space like this. And the gravity wells are so deep. Even given nuclear power, the energy cost of really exploiting a planet is prohibitive. Besides which, the choice minerals are buried under kilometers of rock. On a metallic asteroid, you can find almost everything you want directly under your feet. No limit to what you can do."

  "But your own energy expenditure—" Gilbertson objected.

  "That's no problem." As if on cue, the worldlet's spin brought the sun into sight. Tiny but intolerably brilliant, it flooded the dome with harsh radiance. Blades lowered the blinds on that side. He pointed in the opposite direction, toward several sparks of equal brightness that had manifested themselves.

  "Hundred-meter parabolic mirrors," he said. "Easy to make; you spray a thin metallic coat on a plastic backing. They're in orbit around us, each with a small geegee unit to control drift and keep it aimed directly at the sun. The focused radiation charges heavy-duty accumulators, which we then collect and use for our power source in all our mobile work."

  "Do you mean you haven't any nuclear generator?" asked Warburton.

  He seemed curiously intent about it. Blades wondered why, but nodded. "That's correct. We don't want one. Too dangerous for us. Nor is it necessary. Even at this distance from the sun, and allowing for assorted inefficiencies, a mirror supplies better than five hundred kilowatts, twenty-four hours a day, year after year, absolutely free."

  "Hm-m-m. Yes." Warburton's lean head turned slowly about, to rake Blades with a look of calculation. "I understand that's the normal power system in Stations of this type. But we didn't know if it was used in your case, too."

  Why should you care? Blades thought.

  He shoved aside his faint unease and urged Ellen toward the dome railing. "Maybe we can spot your ship, Lieutenant, uh, Miss Ziska. Here's a telescope. Let me see, her orbit ought to run about so...."

  He hunted until the Altair swam into the viewfield. At this distance the spheroid looked like a tiny crescent moon, dully painted; but he could make out the sinister shapes of a rifle turret and a couple of missile launchers. "Have a look," he invited. Her hair tickled his nose, brushing past him. It had a delightful sunny odor.

  "How small she seems," the girl said, with the same note of wonder as before. "And how huge when you're aboard."

  Big, all right, Blades knew, and loaded to the hatches with nuclear hellfire. But not massive. A civilian spaceship carried meteor plating, but since that was about as useful as wet cardboard against modern weapons, warcraft sacrificed it for the sake of mobility. The self-sealing hull was thin magnesium, the outer shell periodically renewed as cosmic sand eroded it.

  "I'm not surprised we orbited, instead of docking," Ellen remarked. "We'd have butted against your radar and bellied into your control tower."

  "Well, actually, no," said Blades. "Even half finished, our dock's big enough to accommodate you, as you'll see today. Don't forget, we anticipate a lot of traffic in the future. I'm puzzled why you didn't accept our invitation to use it."

  "Doctrine!" Warburton clipped.

  The sun came past the blind and touched the officers' faces with incandescence. Did some look startled, one or two open their mouths as if to protest and then snap them shut again at a warning look? Blades' spine tingled. I never heard of any such doctrine, he thought, least of all when a North American ship drops in on a North American Station.

  "Is ... er ... is there some international crisis brewing?" he inquired.

  "Why, no." Ellen straightened from the telescope. "I'd say relations have seldom been as good as they are now. What makes you ask?"

  "Well, the reason your captain didn't—"

  "Never mind," Warburton said. "We'd better continue the tour, if you please."

  Blades filed his misgivings for later reference. He might have fretted immediately, but Ellen Ziska's presence forbade that. A sort of Pauli exclusion principle. One can't have two spins simultaneously, can one? He gave her his arm again. "Let's go on to Central Control," he proposed. "That's right behind the people section."

  "You know, I can't get over it," she told him softly. "This miracle you've wrought. I've never been more proud of being human."

  "Is this your first long space trip?"

  "Yes, I was stationed at Port Colorado before the new Administration reshuffled armed service assignments."

  "They did? How come?"

  "I don't know. Well, that is, during the election campaign the Social Justice Party did talk a lot about old-line officers who were too hidebound to carry out modern policies effectively. But it sounded rather silly to me."

  Warburton compressed his lips. "I do not believe it is proper for service officers to discuss political issues publicly," he said like a machine gun.

  Ellen flushed. "S-sorry, commander."

  Blades felt a helpless anger on her account. He wasn't sure why. What was she to him? He'd probably never see her again. A hell of an attractive target, to be sure; and after so much celibacy he was highly vulnerable; but did she really matter?

  He turned his back on Warburton and his eyes on her—a five thousand per cent improvement—and diverted her from her embarrassment by asking, "Are you from Colorado, then, Miss Ziska?"

  "Oh, no. Toronto."

  "How'd you happen to join the Navy, if I may make so bold?"

  "Gosh, that's hard to say. But I guess mostly I felt so crowded at home. So, pigeonholed. The world seemed to be nothing but neat little pigeonholes."

  "Uh-huh. Same here. I was also a square pigeon in a round hole." She laughed. "Luckily," he added, "S
pace is too big for compartments."

  Her agreement lacked vigor. The Navy must have been a disappointment to her. But she couldn't very well say so in front of her shipmates.

  Hm-m-m ... if she could be gotten away from them—"How long will you be here?" he inquired. His pulse thuttered.

  "We haven't been told," she said.

  "Some work must be done on the missile launchers," Warburton said. "That's best carried out here, where extra facilities are available if we need them. Not that I expect we will." He paused. "I hope we won't interfere with your own operations."

  "Far from it." Blades beamed at Ellen. "Or, more accurately, this kind of interference I don't mind in the least."

  She blushed and her eyelids fluttered. Not that she was a fluffhead, he realized. But to avoid incidents, Navy regulations enforced an inhuman correctness between personnel of opposite sexes. After weeks in the black, meeting a man who could pay a compliment without risking court-martial must be like a shot of adrenalin. Better and better!

  "Are you sure?" Warburton persisted. "For instance, won't we be in the way when the next ship comes from Jupiter?"

  "She'll approach the opposite end of the asteroid," Blades said. "Won't stay long, either."

  "How long?"

  "One watch, so the crew can relax a bit among those of us who're off duty. It'd be a trifle longer if we didn't happen to have an empty bag at the moment. But never very long. Even running under thrust the whole distance, Jupe's a good ways off. They've no time to waste."

  "When is the next ship due?"

  "The Pallas Castle is expected in the second watch from now."

  "Second watch. I see." Warburton stalked on with a brooding expression on his Puritan face.

  Blades might have speculated about that, but someone asked him why the Station depended on spin for weight. Why not put in an internal field generator, like a ship? Blades explained patiently that an Emett large enough to produce uniform pull through a volume as big as the Sword was rather expensive. "Eventually, when we're a few megabucks ahead of the game—"

  "Do you really expect to become rich?" Ellen asked. Her tone was awed. No Earthsider had that chance any more, except for the great corporations. "Individually rich?"

  "We can't fail to. I tell you, this is a frontier like nothing since the Conquistadores. We could very easily have been wiped out in the first couple of years—financially or physically—by any of a thousand accidents. But now we're too far along for that. We've got it made, Jimmy and I."

  "What will you do with your wealth?"

  "Live like an old-time sultan," Blades grinned. Then, because it was true as well as because he wanted to shine in her eyes: "Mostly, though, we'll go on to new things. There's so much that needs to be done. Not simply more asteroid mines. We need farms; timber; parks; passenger and cargo liners; every sort of machine. I'd like to try getting at some of that water frozen in the Saturnian System. Altogether, I see no end to the jobs. It's no good our depending on Earth for anything. Too expensive, too chancy. The Belt has to be made completely self-sufficient."

  "With a nice rakeoff for Sword Enterprises," Gilbertson scoffed.

  "Why, sure. Aren't we entitled to some return?"

  "Yes. But not so out of proportion as the Belt companies seem to expect. They're only using natural resources that rightly belong to the people, and the accumulated skills and wealth of an entire society."

  "Huh! The People didn't do anything with the Sword. Jimmy and I and our boys did. No Society was around here grubbing nickel-iron and riding out gravel storms; we were."

  "Let's leave politics alone," Warburton snapped. But it was mostly Ellen's look of distress which shut Blades up.

  To everybody's relief, they reached Central Control about then. It was a complex of domes and rooms, crammed with more equipment than Blades could put a name to. Computers were in Chung's line, not his. He wasn't able to answer all of Warburton's disconcertingly sharp questions.

  But in a general way he could. Whirling through vacuum with a load of frail humans and intricate artifacts, the Sword must be at once machine, ecology, and unified organism. Everything had to mesh. A failure in the thermodynamic balance, a miscalculation in supply inventory, a few mirrors perturbed out of proper orbit, might spell Ragnarok. The chemical plant's purifications and syntheses were already a network too large for the human mind to grasp as a whole, and it was still growing. Even where men could have taken charge, automation was cheaper, more reliable, less risky of lives. The computer system housed in Central Control was not only the brain, but the nerves and heart of the Sword.

  "Entirely cryotronic, eh?" Warburton commented. "That seems to be the usual practice at the Stations. Why?"

  "The least expensive type for us," Blades answered. "There's no problem in maintaining liquid helium here."

  Warburton's gaze was peculiarly intense. "Cryotronic systems are vulnerable to magnetic and radiation disturbances."

  "Uh-huh. That's one reason we don't have a nuclear power plant. This far from the sun, we don't get enough emission to worry about. The asteroid's mass screens out what little may arrive. I know the TIMM system is used on ships; but if nothing else, the initial cost is more than we want to pay."

  "What's TIMM?" inquired the Altair's chaplain.

  "Thermally Integrated Micro-Miniaturized," Ellen said crisply. "Essentially, ultraminiaturized ceramic-to-metal-seal vacuum tubes running off thermionic generators. They're immune to gamma ray and magnetic pulses, easily shielded against particule radiation, and economical of power." She grinned. "Don't tell me there's nothing about them in Leviticus, Padre!"

  "Very fine for a ship's autopilot," Blades agreed. "But as I said, we needn't worry about rad or mag units here, we don't mind sprawling a bit, and as for thermal efficiency, we want to waste some heat. It goes to maintain internal temperature."

  "In other words, efficiency depends on what you need to effish," Ellen bantered. She grew grave once more and studied him for a while before she mused, "The same person who swung a pick, a couple of years ago, now deals with something as marvelous as this...." He forgot about worrying.

  But he remembered later, when the gig had left and Chung called him to his office. Avis came too, by request. As she entered, she asked why.

  "You were visiting your folks Earthside last year," Chung said. "Nobody else in the Station has been back as recently as that."

  "What can I tell you?"

  "I'm not sure. Background, perhaps. The feel of the place. We don't really know, out in the Belt, what's going on there. The beamcast news is hardly a trickle. Besides, you have more common sense in your left little toe than that big mick yonder has on his entire copperplated head."

  They seated themselves in the cobwebby low-gee chairs around Chung's desk. Blades took out his pipe and filled the bowl with his tobacco ration for today. Wouldn't it be great, he thought dreamily, if this old briar turned out to be an Aladdin's lamp, and the smoke condensed into a blonde she-Canadian—?

  "Wake up, will you?" Chung barked.

  "Huh?" Blades started. "Oh. Sure. What's the matter? You look like a fish on Friday."

  "Maybe with reason. Did you notice anything unusual with that party you were escorting?"

  "Yes, indeed."

  "What?"

  "About one hundred seventy-five centimeters tall, yellow hair, blue eyes, and some of the smoothest fourth-order curves I ever—"

  "Mike, stop that!" Avis sounded appalled. "This is serious."

  "I agree. She'll be leaving in a few more watches."

  The girl bit her lip. "You're too old for that mooncalf rot and you know it."

  "Agreed again. I feel more like a bull." Blades made pawing motions on the desktop.

  "There's a lady present," Chung said.

  Blades saw that Avis had gone quite pale. "I'm sorry," he blurted. "I never thought ... I mean, you've always seemed like—"

  "One of the boys," she finished for him in a brittle tone. "Sure.
Forget it. What's the problem, Jimmy?"

  Chung folded his hands and stared at them. "I can't quite define that," he answered, word by careful word. "Perhaps I've simply gone spacedizzy. But when we called on Admiral Hulse, and later when he called on us, didn't you get the impression of, well, wariness? Didn't he seem to be watching and probing, every minute we were together?"

  "I wouldn't call him a cheerful sort," Blades nodded. "Stiff as molasses on Pluto. But I suppose ... supposed he's just naturally that way."

  Chung shook his head. "It wasn't a normal standoffishness. You've heard me reminisce about the time I was on Vesta with the North American technical representative, when the Convention was negotiated."

  "Yes, I've heard that story a few times," said Avis dryly.

  "Remember, that was right after the Europa Incident. We'd come close to a space war—undeclared, but it would have been nasty. We were still close. Every delegate went to that conference cocked and primed.

  "Hulse had the same manner."

  A silence fell. Blades said at length, "Well, come to think of it, he did ask some rather odd questions. He seemed to twist the conversation now and then, so he could find things out like our exact layout, emergency doctrine, and so forth. It didn't strike me as significant, though."

  "Nor me," Chung admitted. "Taken in isolation, it meant nothing. But these visitors today—Sure, most of them obviously didn't suspect anything untoward. But that Liebknecht, now. Why was he so interested in Central Control? Nothing new or secret there. Yet he kept asking for details like the shielding factor of the walls."

  "So did Commander Warburton," Blades remembered. "Also, he wanted to know exactly when the Pallas is due, how long she'll stay ... hm-m-m, yes, whether we have any radio linkage with the outside, like to Ceres or even the nearest Commission base—"

  "Did you tell him that we don't?" Avis asked sharply.

  "Yes. Shouldn't I have?"

  "It scarcely makes any difference," Chung said in a resigned voice. "As thoroughly as they went over the ground, they'd have seen what we do and do not have installed so far."