Rehearsals for Retirement

by Jeff Hecht

The captain of the spaceship Ronald McNair ran through the calculations again, but the results still were not encouraging. After eleven years in the Air Force and twenty-five in the Astronaut Corps, Marty Allen felt entitled to a decent pension, but the bureaucracy had other ideas. His last time back on Earth, the offensively officious young woman who ran the Benefits Department had only frowned and reminded him, "You should be grateful you people in the Astronaut Corps can retire at 57 with a pension. People here on the ground can get laid off with nothing."

He shut down the little portable computer, swearing under his breath at the politicians who had privatized the International Space Cooperative, and at the managerial bureaucrats who ran it from the ground. He looked away from the flatscreen display as it flipped between normal and reversed polarity, fading to its neutral gray off color. His machine was only five years old, but the McNair's main cabin showed its age. It had been built over 20 years earlier, in the Cooperative's last boomlet of activity, after an asteroid missed the earth by 40,000 miles in 2024. The Asteroid Hazards Commission's estimates of impact probabilities had stimulated vast infusions of cash from paranoid American, European, Japanese, and Russian groundlings. Marty had joined the Corps then, eager to escape the stagnation that disarmament had brought to the U.S. Air Force. He had had no idea that would be the last major investment in manned space flight.

"Have you looked at this one yet, Marty?" asked his sole companion, mission scientist Fern Ky.

The question took Marty away from his rehearsals for retirement, and back to the job at hand, the obliteration of potential asteroid menace number 18 out of 20. Fern was four years older, but packed more energy into her 90 pounds and 4 feet 11 inches than Marty did in twice the mass. She was going to fight the retirement that awaited them when they returned to Earth; he had come to welcome the idea. Marty admitted he hadn't paid much attention to the two kilometer rock that appeared as a digitized blob on his viewscreen.

"It has unusual spectral signatures." She copied a display from her screen onto his. It showed a series of spectral peaks as a function of wavelength. "These are the standard lines from the solar spectrum," she explained, as faint white labels appeared on the screen. "If we subtract the solar lines, by comparison with a direct readout from the sun, we can isolate the asteroid's absorption." A spectrum appeared, with red labels giving absorption wavelengths. "It shows all the usual rock lines, but it also has some surprisingly strong metal lines." Bold yellow labels appeared and began flashing beside several peaks.

"So we got a nickel-iron this time." They had been blowing up rocky asteroids, along with a couple of dead comets.

"Not exactly, Marty." She took remote sensing far more seriously than anyone else left in the Space Cooperative. A decade ago the groundling managers had tried to drop remote sensing as not cost effective, until the engineers had pointed out that the asteroid ships already had the equipment and had to have two people on board. Now the managers were automating the whole fleet, to save money and get rid of the troublesome people who wanted to spend money on science and exploration. Data supposedly would be recorded automatically. If it was, Marty expected it would be consigned to the same bureaucratic oblivion that awaited Fern's data when they got back to earth. "Compare it to your standard nickel-iron spectrum," she said. Another plot appeared on the screen, this one blue with blue labels. "A difference spectrum shows what's really there."

A green plot appeared midway between the blue line and the spectrum with the red labels. Fern played with her keyboard and controls, and three labels on the green plot turned bold yellow and flashed slowly on the screen. Marty stared at the words: "ALUMINUM," "COPPER" and "TITANIUM." "Metallic?" he asked, doubtfully.

"Yes," she said, "elemental. Shiny enough that the sensors have recorded several glints. We've got something funny out there."

Marty didn't welcome the challenge of something new. After blowing three more asteroids to non-threatening bits, he could retire from the Cooperative's demolition derby. He had spent too many years pretending to protect humanity from the type of asteroid impact that got the dinosaurs. He was tired of worrying about managers, corporate bureaucrats and half-crazed dreamers with PhDs. "I doubt it's anything much, Fern. It must have accreted from somewhere...."

"That is unlikely. I need to run more readings, but the computers can't match it with anything in the memory banks. I've registered it as an anomaly."

He nodded grimly, knowing what that meant. The mission scientist had the option, or perhaps it was the duty, to notify headquarters if they discovered anything. The regulations were 40 years old and nobody back on earth gave a damn, but that wouldn't stop Fern. She would use this excuse to try to stretch the mission so she could explore the asteroid. He knew the managers back on the ground would chuckle at "Crazy Ky," and deny the request. They would put the incident on the long list of human problems that would end with the automation of the McNair, the last of the old manned ships. Never again would astronauts discover something managers didn't want to know.

Marty stared at his viewscreen as Fern copied enlarged images of the asteroid onto it. It was bright against the blackness of space, but it would have been black against his own dark skin. "Mean albedo 0.070," announced the display in the lower right corner; it would have said so out loud if Marty hadn't turned off speech synthesis to keep from going mad. Something flashed on the screen momentarily. Fern ran her fingers across her keyboard, and the flash returned to their screens in freeze-frame. "Mean albedo 0.083," read the display.

"There was another glint. It must have been a good-sized area, too," she said, studying the screen. "It increased net reflection by nearly 20%. I'm going to signal the base."

Marty didn't bother telling Fern it wouldn't do any good. The radio message would take 15 minutes to travel to distant earth. If the bureaucrats deigned to reply, their message -- inevitably a lengthy variation on the word "no" -- would take another 15 minutes to return. That would take the Ron McNair half an hour closer to its target, and bring Marty half an hour closer to checking off asteroid number 18.

* * *

The reply took over an hour to arrive. Marty wondered if anyone in the control room was authorized to reply. Doubtless, the managers would prefer that no one could. The controllers would have to fill out forms in quadruplicate, to guard against responses outside of the organizational norm. It was necessary to follow the proper chain of command to assure proper coordination and a most cost-effective mission, as the policy book said.

When Marty had joined the Astronaut Corps, Earth Control still communicated with spacecraft via video links and television cameras. The video had gone when some bureaucrat had decided the bandwidth cost too much to maintain. Pure audio lasted for a few years, then someone else decided they could save a few nickels by sending all messages as text. They claimed it fit better with the computer controls, and allowed better error-checking protocols. The managers didn't care that an astronaut 270 million miles from home would rather hear a human voice trying to break through the crackle of static; money could be saved.

The message read as if it had been written by a lawyer. Perhaps it had; law degrees were the right credentials for management positions, even for the Russians. The block letters appeared on both of their workscreens: "In response to your message of 1300 hours, 21 July 2053: You are to archive all sensor data regarding Asteroid 12876 in permanent form on a standard Lightfile data disk. Follow standard procedure A7 in Astronaut Handbook in collection of aforementioned data files. However, as stated in your mission charter, in order to successfully meet the objectives of your mission, as specified in performance review parameters, demolition of Asteroid 12876 must be completed on schedule by 1200 hours 22 July 2053. Anomalous sensor data does not cost-justify alteration of this objective. Scientific objectives of mission are secondary to securing safety of Planet Earth by destroying potentially hazardous Asteroid 12876."

"I don't believe them, Marty!" Fern exclaimed. "Can't they see this is something we have to handle differently? Dammit, my orbital model shows no chance of impact for 10 million years, and that's as far as it can go. I sent them all that data . . ."

Marty shrugged. No new managerial idiocy could shock him. "What did you expect? Nobody back on Earth gives a damn about what's up here. All they care about is having nice soft jobs, good pay, and lots of security. They fooled the public into thinking all these asteroids were bullets with 'EARTH' written all over them. Maybe they fooled themselves as well. They just want us to follow orders, no questions asked."

Fern didn't respond, so Marty went back to the game he was running on the viewscreen. He was tiring of seeking his way through the Levels of the Pyramid. Some new monster seemed to pop up at each turn, each more frightening than the last. Killing them used energy points, and he was running low on food. This time he had made it to the eighth level, but there were five more to go before he reached the peak of the pyramid. He didn't think he would make it this time, but someday he was sure he would beat the damn game.

The word "INTERRUPT" flashed on the screen in red letters, and the game vanished, automatically saved. It was not a message from the main computer; Fern had pushed the override. The new display showed the asteroid in three colors. A key on the left showed that each color corresponded to an infrared waveband from the laser radar; red was 10 micrometers, yellow was 3 micrometers, and blue 1 micrometer. The display cycled through all three, then superimposed them. Labels appeared, most near bright spots on the surface, reading, "APPARENT METALLIC DEBRIS." Marty was annoyed. Normally Fern was the best of companions, spending her time working equation-puzzles, reading, or analyzing isotopic data she had collected from earlier asteroids. She never imposed herself on Marty and he had returned the favor. "Is this really necessary?" he asked.

"It sees metallic debris, Marty. Do you have any idea what that means?"

It was a rhetorical question; she left no time to answer. "The solar system didn't make shiny metals naturally. Something crashed there. We may have found what happened to one of the old solar system probes."

"Oh!" Marty nodded, mildly interested at last. He was a space history buff. His parents had grown up in a Detroit slum thinking that men on the moon were history, but they had lived long enough to see their son go there to fix a sick radio telescope. He longed for the good old days when the space program tried to make discoveries rather than a profit. His collection of space data included records on all the old probes that had gone beyond Earth orbit, dating back to the Voyagers and Mariners. He went to his private quarters, returning in a few minutes with an old-fashioned CD-ROM disk. The reader spit it out the first time, but recognized the format the second.

Fern's mind never rested. While Marty had looked for the disk, she had calculated the asteroid's orbit back to 1970, and was ready to compare it to last known trajectories for lost probes like Phobos 1. The CD-ROM data wasn't in the right format for that. Marty had to dump five-year chunks into memory and search for probes lost inside the outer limits of Fern's orbit. Few could have gone beyond Mars, and none came close to matching Fern's orbit.

She insisted on another search, and when that failed she borrowed the disk and ran her own. Nothing matched, even when she changed parameters to see if any outbound probes might have looped back, caught by the gravity of a planet. She went by hand through the whole list, stopping only when the controls began warning: "WITHIN 100-MINUTE ZONE."

It was time to fine-tune the rocket to stay near the asteroid. Marty hit a button to quiet the alert. "So what is it?"

"I don't have any idea. You're sure this list is complete?"

"It's supposed to be. SpaceData covers everything but some early Soviet military launches, where nobody ever found any hard data after things opened up." He paused to think. "They might have missed a few launches from countries that never got heavily into space. But none of those ever got beyond the Earth's gravity . . ."

Fern displayed the images on the screen again. They were larger but still unresolved and mysterious. She punched a few keys, saying, "I'll run some image enhancement routines to see if I can spot sharp edges."

At 5,000 kilometers, they couldn't expect much. Their telescope and array detector were small, designed to find asteroids, not to image them. They both stared at their screens as the software tried to massage the incoming image data, but nothing useful came out.

Marty turned his attention to maneuvering the McNair. Slowing to a kilometer per second as they approached the asteroid had been easy. Its gravity was so weak that he had to cut the speed to under a meter per second to orbit it. The computers were up to the job, but the mechanics were getting touchy. The years had worn the valves in the fuel and oxygen lines; what should have been a smooth power adjustment tended to fade or surge. As they neared the rock, he had to watch the sensors and the computers. The opto-electronic processor automatically homed on a distant bright spot, but it became confused once the disk got larger than half a degree -- about 200 kilometers away from a two-kilometer asteroid. When the engineers renovated the McNair, they would add newer processors that could handle the close approach automatically, but until then the ship needed a human pilot.

The challenge of hitting the right orbit was one of the few things Marty would miss on the ground. He had joined the Air Force to fly planes, and he still loved fine-tuned machinery. Motorcycles had given his father the same thrill, but they had been banned as unsafe for decades. The changes that crash-proofed cars and highways had taken all the fun from driving. He almost forgot Fern and her mysterious metals as he slipped the McNair into a near-perfect five-kilometer orbit, circling the asteroid so slowly that it hardly seemed to move. He lingered over the controls, almost wishing the job wasn't done. A few commands produced a display of orbital parameters: period 48,000 seconds, orbital speed 0.66 meter per second. It was no wonder the rock seemed to stand still beneath them. Its gravity was so feeble they circled it at walking speed.

A picture flashed on Marty's screen. "INTERRUPT, OVERRIDE," was printed on the top. It was a view Fern had taken through their small opto-electronic telescope, looking down on a pile of metal, rocks, and other dark objects. The metal was bright but irregular, like chunks of sheet-metal scrap.

"That's your metal?" Marty asked.

"Some of it," she replied. "I found two other piles within a couple hundred meters. All three looked pretty much the same. Sun and shadow angles indicate each pile is twenty meters across and maybe ten meters high. That picture makes the pile look higher because the sunlight is coming in at a steep angle. Have you looked at the metal closely?"

Marty hadn't, but he couldn't see any special patterns on the screen. "I don't see anything . . ."

"Much of it is smooth; some of it seems to be plates . . ."

"But that's impossible. Nature doesn't make smooth chunks of metal. Any kind of shiny metal is rare enough out here . . ."

"You know what it looks like, Marty," Fern said. "We've both seen the Lunar Base scrap dump. I think we've been a little more careful than this, but whoever left it probably didn't expect visitors here."

"Nobody's been out here, Fern. We went through the whole damn SpaceLog archive . . ."

"I wasn't talking about humans. People have wondered why nobody came to visit if the galaxy was full of inhabited planets. This says that somebody did come, but we never noticed on earth."

Marty stared at Fern, open-mouthed. She had always seemed sane. Like most people he had long ago abandoned hope of finding intelligent extraterrestrials. A few crackpots still listened to old antennas, but radio noise had stopped serious work on earth, just as scattered light hid the stars in city and suburban skies. The new generation had never seen the heavens, and could hardly be expected to care.

"There is absolutely no evidence," Marty began. He could show Fern records from his space history files that debunked every claim of alien visitors as the work of crackpots.

She didn't dispute that. Instead, she pointed to the screens that showed the junk pile. In space, she said, metal plates could remain shiny for millions of years. Long before protohumans climbed down from the trees, she suggested, visitors might have stopped on the asteroid to repair something, then left. Spectral analysis gave mixed readings; some rock, some complex organics, and many lines that didn't match the modest list of compounds in its memory. What should the spectrum of a trash dump look like?

Marty shrugged, accepting her argument for the lack of a better idea or the will to argue. "It figures, doesn't it, that the first evidence of aliens would be their garbage."

"It's not that strange. Most things that archaeologists and paleontologists find are dead bodies or somebody's trash. There may be footprints down there, too, but we can't see them from here. We've got to investigate. I've already sent a message to Earth Control."

Marty doubted the ground-bound bureaucrats would be happy. He wasn't sure he was. He remembered his father grumbling one time construction was stopped because a backhoe had uncovered an old outhouse pit. The state had sent out an archaeologist, who spent months sifting through the rotting remains. His father had never gone back to that job.

"What have we got that can get down there?" Fern asked.

"Not much," Marty replied. The McNair was not designed to land anywhere; built in space, it could only dock with an orbiting Earth station. Their own tethered suits would take them only a hundred meters from the ship. The bomb-delivery robots were the only possibility, but they had been designed only to dig and to deliver bombs. Their vision systems were rudimentary; the only reliable guidance technique was direct human control. Their arms had a limited range.

Fern was guiding the first of the robots on its way when the message came from Earth Control:

You are to collect as much data as possible as quickly as possible. Record all data on archive files for later study. However, schedules must be kept, and demolition must proceed on schedule.

Marty was not surprised, but Fern was astonished. "How can they ask us to do that?" She raged for several minutes, forgetting the robot. Without external control, the machine slipped into a standard landing routine. It attached itself firmly to the rock, then began pinging it and reading the acoustic returns, searching for the rock's weak points. When Fern turned back to her screen, she reads: "FAULT MAPPING IN PROGRESS." Still angry, she hit the OVERRIDE button. The screen responded, "AWAITING INSTRUCTIONS."

Marty helped her shift the robot into surface mapping mode. No junk piles showed on the horizon, but they couldn't be far away. They ran the robot's descent recording through the pattern recognition computer until they found where it had last seen a metal heap. Then they pointed the machine in the right direction and sent it plodding on its way, gently so it would not launch itself free of the asteroid's weak gravity.

Progress was agonizingly slow. The asteroid was too small to collect much dust or small rocks, but it had some rough spots and a few large rocks. The robot picked its way carefully, and it was several minutes before the screen showed the first sign of metal, a glint as the robot scaled a high point. It reappeared a couple of minutes later, a little closer, but still out of focus.

The robot had not been designed for remote sensing. Its vision system used the old 1125-line HDTV standard, and had no telescope and little data storage. Fern was storing the gigabytes in the McNair's central data archives, hoping later to make room for the rest of the trip archives. She stopped the robot when the pile occupied most of her monitor screen. Large flat metal plates with smooth and ragged edges stood out, bright in the distant sun. Near the top was something pinkish that might have been a chair. What seemed to be dull blue foam was scattered throughout the pile. Fern ran a quick spectral probe and asked if they could send the picture back to Earth.

Marty paused to think. Their digital link home had several channels, but most were for automatic monitoring of the McNair. All were crammed tightly into 50,000 bits a second. Their communication channel was just 4000 bits a second. Even with the best compression algorithms, it would take minutes to send the picture, with no assurance anyone would bother to decode it.

"Only with difficulty," he concluded.

"We have to Marty! It's the only way to convince them . . ."

He nodded, unconvinced, but nonetheless began the coding procedure.

Whatever happened, the bureaucrats were not going to be pleased.

This time it took an hour for the message to return. Marty could tell the ground-bound managers were not in a good mood. The message reminded him what one manager had said in an unguarded moment: human astronauts were considered a liability because they were not as predictable as robots. Astronauts are reminded not to obstruct communication channels with pictures. Telemetry was disrupted during video transmission. Picture is uninformative and correlates 99.7% with Lunar Scrap Dump 3. No evidence, repeat, no evidence, for non-human activity. Proceed with demolition post haste. Astronauts are reminded that schedule delays cost money and will result in loss of performance bonuses.

"They're insane!" shouted Fern, when Marty posted the message to her viewscreen. They had not waited idly for the message. Fern had studied the pile with the robot's limited sensors. The McNair's sensors could break the spectrum down into tenths of angstroms; the robot's sensor bandwidths were broader than a thousand angstroms apiece. The McNair's pulsed laser spectrometer let her measure fluorescence decay times from the ship on the dark side of the asteroid. It was slow going; she was learning only enough to realize that she needed to learn much more.

Looking up from his search of the robot documentation file, Marty grumbled, "you should have known that all along." The low bidder who had made the McNair's five robots had met the absolute minimum of Space Cooperative specifications. The documentation, for example, was only nominally in English; it seemed to have been translated from another language by people who knew less about robots than engineers knew about English. The robot's hands were shaped to match the standard handles the Space Cooperative had installed on the surplus bombs it had inherited during the final stages of global disarmament. That meant the bombs could not get loose -- and that the robots could not hold anything without a standard handle. Marty decided the lack of standard handles proved that aliens had left the debris, and began mentally composing a memorandum to that effect.

"What are we going to do?" Fern put the robot on PAUSE and released her seat belt to float across the tiny cabin. "We can't blow this up, Marty. I can't imagine why they want us to. This is an international treasure, the first proof of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe . . ."

"What alternatives do we have?" Marty's voice was suddenly cold. He looked at the floating woman, realizing how little they understood each other. "They gave us a direct order. We tried to explain why that order shouldn't be carried out, but Earth told us to carry out the order anyway. Do you know what they do in the military if you disobey a direct order?"

He paused for effect. "They court-martial you. If you're lucky, they kick you out with a dishonorable discharge and take away your pension."

"What do I care about your damned pension?" she snapped back. "I don't want to curl up and die somewhere counting dollars on a computer. Are you saying . . .." She stopped, out of breath. "Are you saying you would destroy these artifacts . . . Are you really saying that?"

"What alternative . . ."

"What alternative? Destroying them isn't an alternative. We've found something that the human race has spent hundreds of years searching for. And you want to destroy it?"

"I don't," Marty said flatly, hoping to defuse her anger. "I don't want to destroy anything."

She stared back, clearly not believing him. "What kind of game are you playing?"

Marty shook his head silently, looking down briefly, then back up at her. "Only the kind of game I have to play to be here, Fern. You play it, too, though maybe you don't admit it. Just follow orders, do your job, and they'll put you on the next spaceship out. But there won't be any need for people on the next spaceship out." He paused, breathing deeply, as all the contradictions of life and space rolled over him. He loved space, but now he was tired and wanted to go home. He had always wanted the future, but now his only future was retirement, which worried him almost as much as managerial wrath. He put his head in his hands.

Fern started talking about the need to preserve the artifacts for the future. Marty didn't hear the words, but they irritated him. He looked up, snapping, "What future? Do you believe in the future, Fern?"

Looking puzzled, she muttered generalities about the people who would come after them.

"Nobody is ever coming here again, Fern. We are the last people out here. Can't you see what is happening? The only adventures the groundlings want are on the videoscreens and in the stores. Humankind doesn't want hard work or challenges." Marty was a little surprised at his bitter tone.

"You want to know why the folks in the States really supported their early space program? It was live entertainment . . ."

Fern said he was crazy, but his words blazed on, fueled by decades of futility. "You think all those rich white people in their big comfortable houses wanted adventure for themselves? No way. They wanted to watch adventure, safe in their living rooms. Safe where nothing could really scare them. Blow up a few astronauts and they hardly made a dent in the daily video body-count."

He paused, looking down at his screen, then around the cabin, and finally at Fern, who had strapped herself back in her seat. The first time he was in a spaceship, he had studied every feature in the cabin. Now they faded into a blur, pieces of furniture frayed with age. "Our ratings have been dropping, Fern. They're canceling the show. If there's a job, robots can do it cheaper. And you know as well as I do that there's really no job out here. It's just an insane demolition derby."

"Then why are you . . .?" Fern left her question hanging.

Marty shrugged his broad shoulders. "Maybe I wanted something better, once. Maybe I didn't understand at first. Maybe I don't care any more. Maybe because I had to do something. My parents were proud they never spent a day of their adult lives on welfare. They built things, and they wanted better for me. So here I am, the last player in the demolition derby, successful enough to live on welfare for the rich."

"Marty!"

"Let's just blow this damn thing up and get out of here!"

"I won't let you, Marty!" There was steel in Fern's voice, old-fashioned, rod-rigid steel. "I've disabled the bombs."

Marty knew Fern was not bluffing. She did not play games like that. That was why she had always been a staff scientist, never making even the tiny step up the ladder to spaceship captain when there had been more ships. Her face almost twinkled with triumph.

"You'll get us both fired!"

"I don't care."

"You wouldn't!" His anger showed in his voice. Why couldn't she let it slide? He had let her get away with things. Her surveys consistently took too much time; she had erased entertainment memory for data storage. He could have leaned on her for that; he probably should have.

"I will not let you destroy something that should be part of humanity's heritage." It was Fern's final statement as she turned back to her controls.

Marty started to step toward her, but changed his mind. It would accomplish nothing. The small woman with the short gray hair was not one to be intimidated by his 200 pounds and whatever power he carried as captain. More likely, she was taking over his controls, so she could steer the ship away from the asteroid and back home. He sat down hastily and began raising security levels and invoking password protection. The status display showed that Fern had taken the first steps toward departure. The electronic duel lasted just over a minute. Marty had the keys to all the system locks; once he closed and barred the doors, it would take Fern weeks to penetrate the layers of protection and access control. He had always been careful not to use the coding schemes when they were not needed. He had told Fern it would build trust between them, but he knew that it kept subordinates from learning enough to crack the codes.

"Damn!" Fern cursed, realizing that they were stalemated. The two were silent for a long, long time, staring at each other, not sure what to say.

Marty broke the silence, hoping to regain some initiative. "Can we find a way to compromise?"

"I doubt it."

"What do you want, Fern?"

"I want to save these artifacts and tell the rest of the world about them."

"And you think I want to destroy them?"

"You said as much."

"I don't want to destroy them, Fern. I want to do my job, and that job is to make sure the asteroid is not a menace to the Earth. And if the managers decide the only way to do that is to blow the whole damned asteroid to bits, that's what I've got to do."

"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 analyses 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 nobody 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 space 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. Space 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 space 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. Nobody 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 assigned 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 analyzed 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 quantitative 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."

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