“. . . and after a thorough analysis of all the available options,” the handsome young man was saying, “they’ve come to the conclusion that yours is the only spacecraft capable of reaching the comet in time.”
Arlan was the government’s coordinator of operations for all the mining ships in the Asteroid Belt, a job that would drive a lesser man to madness or at least fits of choler. There were dozens of mining ships plying the Belt, each owned and operated by a cantankerous individualist who resented any interference from some bureaucrat back on Earth.
But Arlan Prince did not descend into madness or even choleric anger. He smiled and patiently tried to help the miners whenever he could. Cindy dreamed about his smile. It was to die for.
“I don’t want to mislead you, Cindy,” he was saying, very seriously. “It’s a tricky, dangerous mission.”
Grease my monkey! she thought. He wants me to go out and catch a comet? They must be in ultimate despair if they expect this creaking old bucket of bolts to catch anything except terminal metal fatigue.
Cindy’s aged spacecraft was coasting along the outer fringe of the Asteroid Belt, well beyond the orbit of Mars, almost four times farther from the Sun than the Earth’s orbit. Since she was on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth’s current position, it took thirty-eight minutes for a communications signal to reach her lonely little mining craft.
That meant that she couldn’t have a conversation with Arlan Prince. She could talk back, of course, but it would be more than half an hour before the man heard what she had to say.
So he didn’t wait for her response. He just went right on talking, laying the whole load on her shoulders.
“I know it’s a lot to ask, but the entire world is depending on you. Yours is the only spacecraft anywhere in the solar system that has even a slight chance of catching up with the comet and diverting it.”
He’s not going to give me a chance to say no, Cindy realized. I either do it or the world gets smashed.
A thousand questions flitted through her mind. Why can’t they just send some missiles out to the comet and blast it into ice cubes? No missiles and no H-bombs, she remembered. They’ve all been dismantled.
Do I have enough propellant to get to the comet? That’s a whole mess of delta vee we’re talking about. While Arlan droned on lugubriously, she flicked her fingers across her computer keypad. The numbers told her she could reach the comet, just barely. If nothing at all went wrong.
Which was asking a lot from this ancient wheeze of a mining ship she had inherited from her father. The old man had died brokenhearted out here among the asteroids that orbited between Mars and Jupiter. Looking for a mountain of gold floating in the dark emptiness of space.
All he ever found were chunks of nickel-iron or carbon-rich rock. Just enough to keep him going. Just enough to get by and raise his only child out in the loneliness of this cold, dark frontier.
Cindy couldn’t remember her mother at all. She had died when Cindy was still an infant, killed by a tiny asteroid no bigger than a bullet that had punctured her spacesuit while she worked outside the ship alongside her husband.
Her father had died of cancer only a few months ago. An occupational hazard, he had joked feebly, for anyone who spends as much time exposed to the radiation of space as an asteroid miner has to.
So now all she had was the old spacecraft, so tiny and tight that you had to go into the airlock to have enough room to sneeze. It was all the home that Cindy had ever known, and all she ever would know, yet it felt more like a prison to her.
Cindy knew she would spend her life alone in this ship, plying the vast empty spaces of the asteroid belt. Miners were few and very far between. Born and raised in the weightlessness of zero gravity, her delicate bones could never hold her up on the surface of Earth, or even the Moon.
Arlan was still talking earnestly about saving the Earth from certain doom. “According to our figures, you won’t have enough propellant to return once you’ve matched velocities with the comet, therefore we will send a drone tanker to your expected position”
Drone tanker, Cindy thought. And if I miss it I’ll go sailing out of the solar system forever. I’ll die all alone, farther from Earth than anyone’s flown before.
So what? a voice sneered at her. You’re all alone now, aren’t you? You’ll always be alone.
Wedged amid consoles and control boards like a key in a slot, Cindy turned to the laser control console and pecked at its faded color-coded keys. Power okay. Focusing optics needed work, but she could bring them in and spruce them up during the couple of months it would take to reach the comet.
She turned off the sound of Arlan’s somber voice and spoke into her comm unit’s microphone. “Okay, I’ll do it. Track me good and have that tanker out there.”
The truth was, she could not have refused anything that Arlan Prince asked of her, even though they had never met face-to-face. In fact, they had never been closer to each other than fifty million miles.
The comet was huge. Cindy had never seen anything so big. It blotted out the sky, a massive overpowering expanse of dirty gray-white. She was so close that she couldn’t see all of it, any more than a butterfly hovering near a flower can see the entire garden.
Cindy floated weightlessly to the ship’s only oh servation port and craned her neck, gaping at the monumental stretch of dust-filmed ice. The port’s crystal surface felt cold to her touch. There was nothing outside except frigid emptiness, her fingers reminded her.
In one corner of her control console, a display screen showed how the comet looked from Earth: a big bright light in the sky, trailing a long blue-white plume that stretched halfway across the sky. It was beautiful, really, but every word she had heard from Earth was trembling with fear. The comet was pointed like the finger of doom, growing larger in Earth’s sky every night, getting so near and so bright that it could be seen even in daylight.
Other screens scattered across her console scrolled graphs and numbers. Cindy had slaved the laser control to the computer calculations beamed up from Earth. When the moment came she wouldn’t even have to press a button. It would all happen automatically.
If her laser worked.
The tanker was nowhere in sight, but Arlan Prince kept assuring her that it was on its way and would be at the rendezvous point on time.
Or else I’m dead, Cindy thought. And that voice inside her head scoffed, You’re dead anyway. You’ve been more dead than alive ever since your father left you.
The thundering howl of the power generator startled her. Looking through the narrow observation port, she saw a sudden jet of glittering white vapor spurt from the comet’s surface, like the spout of a gigantic whale’s breath blowing into the dark vacuum of space.
Cindy clapped her hands over her ears and stared at the readouts on her display screens. The laser had never run this long, and she feared that it would break down long before its job was finished.
When it finally shut off, Cindy glanced at the master clock set into the console above her head. Its digital numbers told her that the laser ran a full two minutes. Exactly 120 seconds, as programmed.
Was it enough?
Hours passed. The comet was drifting away, slowly at first, but as Cindy stared out through the observation port it seemed to gather speed and leave her farther and farther behind.
Not even the bleeding comet wants to be near me, she thought. She waved to it, a great oblong chunk of grayish white, still spurting a glistening plume of icy vapor. Good-bye, she called silently, knowing that she was alone once again.
When the call from Earth came on her comm screen, it was the secretary-general of the United Nations. The woman had tears in her eyes.
“You’ve done it,” she said, solemnly, like a worshiper thanking a god. “You’ve saved the world.”
Cindy’s spacecraft was so close to Earth now that they could talk with only a half minute’s delay.
“You diverted it into a trajectory that’s pulling it toward the Sun,” the secretary-general said, trying to smile. “It will break up into fragments and then fall into the Sun, if it doesn’t melt completely first.”
“You mean I killed it?” Cindy felt a pang of regret, remorse. The comet had been beautiful, in its way.
“You’ve saved the world,” the secretary-general said gratefully.
Cindy fished around for something to say, but nothing came to mind.
The secretary-general had more, though.
“The tanker . . .” The woman’s voice faltered. With an obvious effort, she went on, “The tanker . . . isn’t going to be at the rendezvous point. One of its rocket engines failed . . .”
“It won’t be there?” Cindy asked, surprised that her voice sounded so high, so frightened.
“I’m afraid not,” said the secretary-general.
Cindy felt her entire body slump with defeat. Numbers were scrolling on her data screens. The tanker would pass near the rendezvous point, but too far away for Cindy to reach it. She had no propulsion fuel left, only a bit of maneuvering thrust, nowhere near enough to chase down the errant tanker.
“Then I’ll continue on my current trajectory,” she said to the screens.
