observation of the day they lopped off Mop's tail.» «A truly significant day.» «You've been up over twenty-four hours. I'm beat, too. I think we both need a good eight or ten hours' sleep, and then we can settle down to serious work.» «You talked me into it, Cap'n.» She was asleep moments after she pulled the light coverlet over her. At some time during the «night» she heard or felt the vibrations caused by the mining machines, thought about getting up to see why Dent had gone back to work, turned over and was fast asleep again. When she woke again, she'd been asleep for over nine hours. She had a solid breakfast before going to the cabin that was a combination of Dent's quarters and the mining control room. Mop greeted her at the door, leaping up joyfully, acting as if it had been months since he'd last seen her. Denton was seated in the control chair. The weight gauge showed that he'd loaded several tons of ore. «Looks as though this vein is about to play out,» he said. «Couldn't sleep?» she asked. «Slept for a couple of hours. I'll have twelve hours to catch up now.» «I'll take it, then.» «I think if we moved ship about a hundred feet toward that sharp extension—» «Readings are good in that direction?» «Yep.» «Well, if you've pretty well exhausted the vein—» «You're going to trust me with moving her?» «You'll have to do it sooner or later,» she said. «Okay. Just check behind me before I do anything,» he said. She watched closely. He used the remote control panel in the mining room to lift Mother with her flux drive and lower her without so much as a jar to a spot just over a hundred feet away. «Well done,» she said. He nodded, positioned the biter, and sampled the rock. A gleam of gold appeared in the viewer. Gold and something else. «Damn,» Erin said. «What? What?» he asked, startled by the tone of her voice. «On the surface,» she said, «just to the right of the trench.» It took him a while to see it. The telltale was a difference in texture more than shape. She pointed it out to him on the viewer. «Two separate pieces,» she said. «That jagged end there—» «Ah, yes,» he said. Mop protested loudly when both of them left him alone and disappeared into the air lock. Once again Erin had that feeling of disorientation as she stepped out of the lock onto the asteroid, but since Dent was directly behind her she did not have the sense of almost panicky loneliness that she'd experienced while going extravehicular on her first trip to the belt. She demonstrated the use of the laser cutter to Dent, adjusting it to flow away rock and leave the fossilized bones intact. One bone had a large knob extending just above the surface. As the matrix stone melted away it was apparent that the knob was part of a knee joint. The small bones of the feet of the two partial legs were scattered, but seemed to be complete. «When the crust of the planet was shattered,» Erin said, as Dent put the specimens into separate bags, «the break occurred just here.» Her voice was made slightly metallic by the radio. She indicated the jagged end of one leg bone. «The rest of him might be in one of the other asteroids,» Dent said. «I'm no expert,» she said, «but they look humanoid to me.» «Yep,» he said. «We'll have to watch very carefully.» «We could mark this one and move on.» «No. This is a rich ore field. Let's work it.» Once they were back inside the ship she had to insist that Dent go to bed. He took one last look at the fossils, grumbled a bit, went into the bath and stayed half an hour before closing off the partition around his bunk area. Mop leapt into Erin's lap and climbed up onto the console to take his place beside the main viewer. Erin scratched him behind the ears and whispered, «We have to keep quiet, Mr. Mop.» Mop curled up and closed his eyes. Erin began to hum softly. The hours passed. The weight of ore grew in Mother's storage areas. Denton emerged, pulling down his jumper, after only six hours. «Can't sleep?» she asked. «You're going to have to learn another tune.» «Oh?» She made a face. «If you're going to hum throughout your watch, you're going to have to learn a few more songs.» «Oh, hell,» she said. «I'm sorry. I didn't realize that I was doing it. It's habit, I guess.» «Not that I don't like music—» «All right,» she said. «You've made your point.» «Maybe I can insulate the partition.» «No, I'll be quiet.» «Maybe I could sleep in the other cabin.» «No,» she said quickly. Then, «Look, I'm sorry, Dent, but I have a thing about that. I think a bed is just about as personal as underwear.» «Your skivvies wouldn't fit me,» he said. «Much too small.» In the next week, Mother mined surface ore fields on three different asteroids. No more fossils were found. The relationship between Erin and Dent was unchanged. He had apparently adjusted to sleeping behind his partition while she was at work, and she remembered, most of the time, not to hum as she manipulated the biter and the extractor. It was Mop who brought about a change in the routine. The little dog's stub of a tail was the barometer of his feelings. Usually it was perky, a cocky little spike pointing stiffly upward and slightly forward. It was a sturdy stump of a tail, and it was lowered only when Mop was asleep. When he started carrying it tucked under, Erin was concerned. «Come to think of it, I haven't seen him punch out a nibble for himself lately,» Dent said. Erin pushed the button and offered Mop a tasty little artificial bone. He sniffed at it, lowered his head, lay down with his muzzle between his paws. «What's the matter, partner?» Erin asked, picking him up. He rolled onto his back in the crook of her arm, closed his eyes, sighed. Erin ran the tip of her finger over his nose. It was dry, sandpapery. «He's sick,» Erin said, looking at Dent with her eyes wide and full of concern. It took them a couple of days to figure out why the dog was under the weather. The first clue was that when Erin went to bed Mop was not content to lie down and keep her feet warm. Instead, he barked to be let out of the cabin. «Dr. Gale has the answer,» Denton announced one «morning» when Erin entered the mining room. «The problem is that Mr. Mop has no one to relieve him.» Erin was still feeling a bit sluggish from sleep. «Huh?» «You work twelve hours and rest twelve hours,» he said. «Ditto for me. Our little buddy here has to keep you company while you're on watch and then he goes to work immediately to keep me company.» He spread his hands. «Not even a superior pooch like Mr. Mop can be on duty twenty-four hours a day forever.» «Oh, pooh,» she said. «Now you think about it.» She thought. When she was alone on the ship, Mop had slept at her feet for the eight hours or more she was in bed. «I'll be damned,» she said. «Well, I'll just force him to stay in the cabin with me during your watch.» But Mop fretted, paced, leapt on and off the bed, begged politely to be let out the door. «He's a very conscientious canine,» Denton said. «You're keeping him from what he sees as his duty.» «One more night like last night,» Erin said, «and I'm going to pull his hairy ears off.» «The only solution,» Denton said, «is to work a normal day.» Actually, Erin had been thinking the same thing. Most of the time the work of extracting ore from the rock would go faster with two people at the controls in the mining room, one operating the biter and the laser, the other working with the extractor. «I'm thinking of myself, too,» Dent said. «I'll sleep a lot better with some peace and quiet.» Mop had a few fitful naps during the first watch under the new arrangement. With two people working, the ore poured into Mother's storage with pleasing swiftness. At the end of the watch Erin took Mop to bed with her. He showed the same pattern of behavior as he had exhibited previously, so she opened the door to her cabin and left him free to roam the ship, checking out the mining room and Denton's bed when he cared to do so. When he saw that the lights were off and that Dent was asleep, he returned to Erin's cabin, jumped up on the bed, rolled onto his back with his legs in the air and slept for ten hours without so much as moving. The stub of a tail was a flag of cheerfulness when he joined Erin and Dent for breakfast. Extracting ore was a repetitive job that had become a matter of routine. As they worked they made comments about the density and color of the rock, speculated on the method of destruction of the planet that had once followed the orbit that was now a huge ring of debris. Since Erin felt guilty for not reporting Old Smiley and The Legs to X&A, she never mentioned the fossils. Dent asked questions about her time in Service and she recounted the routine of life aboard the Rimfire. Like Erin, Denton had been born on New Earth. Unlike her, he was not widely traveled. Before shipping with her on the Mother Lode, he told her, he'd made one trip to Delos to take a course on how to recharge the Verbolt cloud chambers that were at the heart of most computers. His childhood had been a happy one, as had hers. His parents had died within the same year when he was twenty years old. He had never owned a dog. «My dad always used to give me dolls when I was a little girl,» she told him. «What I wanted was a bicycle, or a pellet gun. One Christmas he gave me a beautiful baby carriage lined in white silk. Charlie Frink and I were playing road construction and I filled it up with dirt, pretending it was an earth mover. It was very, very black dirt.» It was a comfortable, easy relationship. There were no demands made from either side. When the working watch ended, Erin went to her cabin or to the gym. Now and then they had a meal together or watched a holo-drama sitting in the comfortable control chairs on the bridge. Mop was more than happy with the new system. Once or twice a night he'd leave Erin's bed to check on Dent. The doors to both cabins were left open so that the dog could perform his duty of looking after both of them. It seemed logical, since production had actually increased, to continue the system of working together. It seemed safe. After all, during her first trip to the asteroid belt, she had been alone and had left Mother to look after herself during her sleep hours. Each «night» before retiring one of them would check the ship's detection system and set the audible alarms. While they slept, Mother's little electronic gadgets sent out beams to confirm that the neighboring asteroids were keeping their distance, chuckled their way through internal checks of the recycling plants, measured the sleeping power in the blink generator, probed the temperature in the food bins, and performed dozens of other tests, checks, and analyses. But the Mother Lode was not equipped with the latest detection gear which would have enabled her to warn Erin and Denton that stealthy search beams were playing on and through her metal hide, beams that told the man who operated the originating instruments that the routine had changed aboard the Mule, that now the Alpha patterns of the two-man crew showed that both slept at the same time. Nor could Mother see through the considerable mass of the asteroid on which she was
Вы читаете Mother Lode
