Mining the Oort Read Free Page A

Some of its gases were making its spectacular tail, and even its core was growing fuzzy.
    Watching the thing grow on the news screens didn't satisfy Dekker. It was not anything like being up on the surface itself, in facemask and thermal suit. So when Dekker's mother was detailed to go outside to help secure the city's all-important solar power cells, Dekker invited himself to join the work party. The brat would certainly not be there. It was going to be fun to be out with the workers, even though Tinker Gorshak would be there, too.

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    Mars isn't entirely without water. But neither is the sand of the Sahara Desert, if you are willing to work hard enough to get the bound water of crystallization out of the sand grains, and if you're content with a tiny reward. Most of the accessible water Mars has is frozen in the polar ice caps—much good may that do anyone. There's also a certain amount of water that is frozen in mud, under the surface caliche, but it stays there because the distant Sun isn't able to heat the surface enough to melt much of it out; Mars gets only about half Earth's sunshine. Some parts of Mars are marked with the evidence that there once was real flowing water there, namely such scarring as floodplains, and the dendritic riverbeds called lahars. Perhaps streams once did flow in the lahars, when some brief volcanic flurry melted some of that frozen mud and forced it to the surface, so that it flowed downhill until it evaporated into the parched air. It doesn't do that anymore. When people first came to Mars some of them tried to melt out the icy mud under the hardpan. If, they thought, you could drive out some of those volatiles you could increase the density of the atmosphere, which would warm things up, which would help drive out more volatiles. Or, to put it in another way, if you had some eggs you could make ham and eggs, if you had some ham.

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    The grotesque, rusty landscape of Mars was the only landscape Mars-born Dekker DeWoe had ever known. He would not have tried to tell anyone it was beautiful. Few youngsters think of such things as the beauty of a landscape in the ordinary course of their lives, and Mars was very ordinary to Dekker. He found the scenery he lived in unsurprising and, actually, quite homey.
    Going out with the work party onto the rubbly plain was a welcome break from the tunnels of Sunpoint City, especially since Tsumi Gorshak hadn't been allowed along. Tsumi's grandfather Tinker, though, kept getting on Dekker's nerves. Tinker insisted on helping . Every time Dekker picked up one edge of the great sheets of protective film, Gorshak materialized beside him to lend a hand, grinning silently through the faceplate of his suit. Dekker hated that. The old man treated him as though he were a child .
    Dekker generally spent a lot of time trying to stay away from Tinker Gorshak, and it wasn't only because of his pesky grandkid. Tinker had faults of his own. To begin with, he was an old, old man. He was nearly forty in Martian years, or over seventy by Earth's standards; after all, he even had grandchildren. Tinker Gorshak was, in fact, one of the very earliest Martian settlers. For that reason, Dekker had a certain amount of respect for Tinker, but he was wary of the man, too, because he knew why the old man was always trying to be his friend. Gorshak kept on doing things for the boy—taking him along on survey trips, or to check the slow growth of the crystal mushroom plantations; bringing him little presents of apples and strawberries as the aeroponic crops grew in the hothouses; asking him how he was doing at school. Dekker wasn't flattered. He didn't want Gorshak's gifts, and he didn't think Gorshak specially cared about how he was doing. What Tinker Gorshak actually wanted was to marry Gertrud DeWoe, and Dekker really didn't want his mother getting married again—even if his father had been actually dead instead of only divorced.
    What made it hard to rebuff Gorshak's