The Rock Rats

grandmother had done more than a century earlier: migrant stoop labor in the farms down in the rich valleys of California. The floods hadn’t reached that far inland, although prolonged drought was searing the orchards and vineyards mercilessly. It was hard, bitter work, picking fruits and vegetables beneath the hot sun while grim-faced men armed with shotguns kept on patrol against wandering bands of starving looters. They expected casual sex from the workers. Joyce quickly learned that it was better to please them than to go hungry.

When Joyce returned home that winter, she was shocked to see how much her parents had aged. An epidemic of dengue fever had swept the coast and even reached into the hills where they lived. Her mother sobbed softly at night; her father stared into the hot cloudless sky, racked with bouts of coughing that left him gasping for breath. When he looked at his daughter he seemed ashamed, as if all this devastation, all this ruination of the family’s plans, was his fault alone.

“I wanted you to become an engineer,” he told Joyce. “I wanted you to rise beyond my station in life.”

“I will, Dad,” she told him, with the careless assurance of youth. And when she turned her eyes to the sky, she thought about the wild frontier out along the Asteroid Belt.

CHAPTER 9

“He’s put in a call to Pancho Lane,” said Diane Verwoerd.

She and Humphries were strolling through the courtyard outside his mansion. Humphries claimed he enjoyed taking a walk in the “outdoors”—or as near to outdoors as you could get on the Moon. Humphries’s home was in the middle of a huge grotto down at the deepest level of Selene’s network of underground corridors and habitation spaces. The big, high-ceilinged cavern was filled with flowered shrubbery, profusions of reds and yellows and delicate lilacs blooming from one rough-hewn rock wall to the other. Taller trees rose among the profusion of flowers: alders and sturdy maples and lushly flowering white and pink gardenias. No breeze swayed those trees; no birds sang in the greenery; no insects buzzed. It was a huge, elaborate hothouse, maintained by human hands. Hanging from the raw rock ceiling were strips of full-spectrum lamps to imitate sunlight.

Verwoerd could see the enormous garden beyond the ornate fountain that splashed noisily in the courtyard. The house itself was massive, only two stories high, but wide, almost sprawling. Built of smoothed lunar stone, its roof slanted down to big sweeping windows.

Compared to the gray underground drabness of the rest of Selene, this garden and home were like a paradise in the midst of a cold, forbidding desert. Verwoerd’s own quarters, several levels up from this grotto, were among the best in Selene, but they seemed cramped and colorless compared to this.

Humphries claimed he enjoyed walking in the open air. The only other open space in Selene was the Grand Plaza, under the big dome up on the surface, and anyone could take a stroll up there. Here he had his privacy, and all the heady color that human ingenuity and hard work could provide on the Moon. Verwoerd thought he enjoyed the idea that all this was his more than any aesthetic or health benefits he could gain from walking among the roses and peonies.

But any pleasure he might have enjoyed from this stroll was wiped away by her announcement.

“He’s called Pancho?” Humphries snapped, immediately nettled. “What for?”

“She scrambled his message and her reply, so we don’t know the exact words as yet. I have a cryptologist working on it.”

“Only one message?”

With a small nod, Verwoerd answered, “His incoming to her, and hers outgoing to him immediately after.”

“H’mm.”

“I can guess what the subject was.”

“So can I,” Humphries said sourly. “He wants to see if she’ll better our offer.”

“Yes.”

“He’s playing her against me.”

“It would seem so.”

“And if she outbids me, then Astro gets full control of his Helvetia Limited.” He pronounced the name sneeringly.

Verwoerd frowned slightly. “He’s already using Astro as his supplier. What does Pancho have to gain by buying him out?”

“She keeps us from buying him out. It’s a preventive strike, that’s what it is.”

“So we increase our bid?”

“No,” Humphries snapped. “But we increase our pressure.”

Seyyed Qurrah laughed with delight as he gazed through the thick quartz observation port at his prize, his jewel, his reward for more than two years of scorn and struggle and near starvation. He feasted his eyes as the irregular chunk of rock slid across his view, grayish brown where the sunlight struck it, pitted and covered here and there with boulders the size of houses.

“Allah is great,” he said aloud, thanking the one God for his mercy and kindness.

Turning to the sensor displays in his cabin’s control panel, he saw that this lump of stone bore abundant hydrates, water locked chemically to the silicates of the rock. Water! In the desert that was the Moon, water fetched a higher price than gold. It was even more valuable at Ceres, although with only a few hundred people living at the big asteroid, the demand for precious water was not as high as that of Selene’s many thousands.

Qurrah thought of the contempt and ridicule that they had heaped upon him back home when he’d announced that he intended to leave Earth and seek his fortune in the new bounty of the Asteroid Belt. “Sinbad the Sailor” was the kindest thing he’d been called. “Seyyed the Idiot” was what most of them said. Even when he had reached Ceres and leased a ship with the last bit of credit his dead father had left him, even there the other prospectors and miners called him “Towel Head” and worse. Well, now the shoe was on the other foot. He’d show them!

Then he pictured how happy Fatima would be when he returned to Algiers, wealthy and happy at last. He would be able to shower her with diamonds and rich gowns of silk with gold threading. Perhaps even acquire a second wife. He was so pleased that he decided to take a full meal from his meager foodstocks, instead of his usual handful of boiled couscous.

But first he would register his claim with the International Astronautical Authority. That was important. No, before that, he must make his prayer to Allah. That was more important.

He realized he was nearly babbling out loud. Taking a deep breath to calm himself, Qurrah decided, prayer first, then register with the IAA, then celebrate with a whole meal.

He kept his ship spinning all the time, counterbalancing his habitation unit with the power generator and other equipment at the end of the kilometer-long tether. Not for him the long months in microgee, with his muscles going flabby and his bones decalcifying so that he would have to spend even longer months in lunar orbit rebuilding his body cells. No! Qurrah lived in almost a full earthly gravity.

So he had no trouble unfurling his prayer rug once he had taken it from its storage cabinet. He was spreading the rug on the one uncluttered area of his compartment when his communications receiver chimed.

A message? He was startled at the thought. Who would be calling me out here, in this wilderness? Only Fatima and the IAA knows where I am—and the people back at Ceres, of course, but why would they call a lonely prospector?

Fatima! he thought. Something has happened to her. Something terrible.

His voice trembled as he answered, “This is the Star of the East. Who is calling, please?”

A bearded man’s face appeared on his main screen. He looked almost Asian to Qurrah, or perhaps Hispanic.

“This is Shanidar. You are trespassing on territory that belongs to Humphries Space Systems, Incorporated.”

“This rock?” Qurrah was instantly incensed. “No sir! There is no registered claim for this asteroid. I was just