Mining the Oort Read Free Page B

offers of help was the fact that, although Dekker did his best in struggling with the covers for the photovoltaic cells, the job really called for adult muscles. It required wrestling huge sheets of film over the long mirrors and the troughs of photocells that turned the sunlight into electrical power. It was also, the people from Sagdayev muttered to each other, pretty much a waste of time. True, it was only common sense to protect your power supplies. If anything happened to the photovoltaic cells, the city of Sunpoint would be in desperate trouble. But what could happen to them? No pieces of the comet would stray so far as to destroy Sunpoint City's mirrors. There might well be some hellish huge dust storms, but those were always a problem on Mars, and every deme's photovoltaic arrays had survived plenty of dust storms before.
    So Dekker wasn't much help to the suited, sweating men and women unfurling the great film sheets, and it didn't make things easier when he could hardly keep his eyes on the ground because so much was fascinating in the sky. There was the great comet itself, its glowing, milky tail spreading almost from horizon to horizon even in the bright midday sunshine. Even more exciting for the boy from the back hills, there were the skinny spiderweb cables that stretched up to invisibility where the Skyhook did its work of lifting capsules from surface to orbit.
    It was also true that the heat of the Martian day sapped much of what strength Dekker could muster for the job. Where Sunpoint sat on the Martian equator, in the middle of this summer day, the temperature was over twenty degrees Celsius. When Dekker dropped his end of a sheet for the third time, Tinker Gorshak hand-signaled to him angrily, and his mother came over and pressed her facemask against his own.
    "Better give it up, Dekker," she advised, her voice thin and faint. "Go find something else to do. We'll finish this without you."
    Dekker signaled agreement gladly enough. There was indeed something else that he preferred to do, and he had only been waiting for the chance.
    Deceitfully, he started back in the direction of the city lock, craning over his shoulder to see what the work party was doing. When he was sure they were too busy to be bothering with him anymore, he changed direction, hurried along in the shelter of the mirrors, and headed out for the open plain.
     
    The scenery before Dekker's eyes was all brand new to him. What he saw when he looked around the Martian surface were shadows like ink, boulders colored rose and rust, and a pink sky with the small, bright Sun overhead. It not only wasn't like Earth, it wasn't much like Dekker's familiar backyard, either. Sagdayev's soil was browner and grayer at this time of year; here at Sunpoint it was all pink windblown sands over the caliche. An Earthie might not have seen a difference between the two, but Dekker did.
    Of course, that was only natural. All Martians knew that no one but the Martians knew what Mars really looked like. The mudsuckers could never understand. There was an Earth TV show that Dekker and the other Martian settler kids sometimes watched, because it was funny. It wasn't meant to be funny. It was supposed to be a kind of soap opera about passions and perversions among the Martian colonists, but any Martian could see that it was a fake. The whole thing had been computer-shot in studios somewhere on Earth. Good enough to fool the mudsuckers, but an obvious fraud nevertheless.
    When Dekker had put a kilometer's worth of hillocks between himself and the work party, he stopped. It was as bright as daylight ever got on Mars, and the Sun as hot. Dekker turned down the heating coils in his suit and looked up at the sky.
    The comet was majestic above him.
    The thing was immense. Its tail now was forked into two streams of milky light, hardly dimmed by the sunlight. It spread from the western horizon, up past the midday sun and the spindly cables of the Skyhook, almost to the top