Patron of the Arts

to grab a thin guideline and heave ourselves into the transfer tube. Another efficient technician, this one a woman, met us at the other end of the short passage, keeping us moving on into the station. It was a busy place, and there was no time for gawkers. There would be plenty of time to be struck dumb by the vast beauty of space later on. The romance of going to Mars was reduced to

“Keep it moving, hombre,” and a commicator’s order that all passengers for the Balboa report to Decontamination at once.

“Don’t they trust the Decon Earthside?” I asked the tech who was hanging up my suit in the six-sided locker tube.

She didn’t even look around. “Don’t wait around, amigo, get your ass to E deck.”

“Have my cargo pods been transferred?”

“Routine transfer through Decon. C’mon, I have to cycle this lock!”

I moved from the weightless center of the big can out through the radial tubes to the Point Eight gravity of the exterior skin, along with the others, past the clearly marked signs to Decon.

I overcompensated in an attempt to avoid a pinwheeling neophyte and bumped my head, not on the padded sides, but on a hatch edge. But in the main the sailing feeling was delightful, somehow much more real than dancing in the big ballroom on Station One. There, I had always been carefully VIPed, but this time I knew the station commander would not give me a personal tour. Diego Braddock was just a hired hand, a nobody.

I was pushed through Decon along with a couple of Marines destined for the Ares Center police garrison who were ahead of me, and a Redplanet Minerals geologist named Pelf behind me. We were resuited and hustled through to the smaller, all-purpose shuttlecraft that ran passengers and cargo hundreds of kilometers out to where the asteroid ships were in parking orbits.

We sailed silently past several of the older extended-flight ships, which had long lost their original global shape beneath the additions of domes, extra pods, stasis cylinders, antennae, modifications, exterior storage tetrahedrons, spidery cargo waldos, and vacuum-welded lumps studded with sensors. Most of these ships were now research vessels or served in the Earth-orbit-to-Moon-orbit run. The obliging copilot pointed out the passenger ship Emperor Ming-huang, one of the sleek new moon ships.

Just past it was the President Kennedy, under construction, and beyond, President Washington, with a swarm of shuttles and tugs transhipping cargo and passengers from Luna City.

“That’s the Neil A. Armstrong over there,” the pilot said.

“They’re modifying her again.” He laughed and said, “Ships may get old in space, but they rarely die.”

“Old ships never die, they just modify,” the copilot grinned, repeating the old cliche.

Pelf leaned past me to point ahead, where we could just see an irregular blot against the half-moon. “There!”

The pilot nodded and thumbed a stud. “Two-seventeen to Balboa NE-five, request approach computation check. Over.”

“Two-seventeen, this is Balboa NE-five. Confirm on Fifty-six-five, over.”

“Roger, Balboa, out.”

“Look,” Pelf said, “more.”

Ahead of us were the asteroid ships, mountain-sized rocks brought in, mostly from the Asteriod Belt, by PanLunar or Transworld, or by free-lancers. Clusters of sealed living and power units are sent out, the asteroids are found, their center of mass determined, and the big central corings made. The cylindrical units are inserted and sealed, the trim is checked, and if need be, big bull lasers cut off chunks to ballast the rock, and a ship is created. Skeleton crews bring them back into Earth orbit, where cargo holds are scooped out of the ancient rock, tunnels drilled to the surface, for access and observation ports, and a more careful study is made of how the asteroid is to be cut up for efficient self-destruction.

The asteroid ships literally consume themselves. The rock is cut up and fed to the fusion torch for fuel, the cuts monitored carefully to preserve the ship’s trim. The asteroid provides fuel, storage capacity, and protection from meteorites and radiation.

They aren’t pretty, but they are big and work better and faster than anything yet devised. The old ships had to carry their own fuel, whereas with these bulky beauties the ship is the fuel. The seven or eight months’ trip has been reduced to four or five weeks, and commerce is still picking up.

The copilot pointed at a work crew fitting a cylindrical unit into a large pitted rock twenty times its size.