12
Dekker didn't get a good night's sleep after all, or at least not as much of it as he really wanted; it seemed only minutes had passed before his mother was shaking him awake. "Are you all right, Dekker?" she was asking anxiously. "I didn't think you'd want to miss seeing the impact."
He fended her off, wincing. Someone was pounding nails into his head. Tinker Gorshak was standing over him with a cup of something hot. "Strong tea," Gorshak muttered. "Go ahead, drink it. You'll be all right in a while, hangovers never kill anybody."
And after a few scalding gulps and an eternity of throbbing temples, it began to seem that Tinker Gorshak was right. When the pounding behind his eyes began to subside Dekker bundled up in a robe before the news screen and watched what was happening. The time was impact minus thirty minutes, and on the screen he could see the comet's drive jets detaching themselves and hurling themselves away, bright and tiny shooting stars, to be captured and salvaged by the workers in the tender spacecraft. There weren't any additional burns after that; now the comet was purely ballistic.
Dekker sipped his tea and began to feel almost human again—human enough to begin replaying the scenes of the party in his mind. "You know," he announced, astonished at his discovery, "she didn't really like me. She only invited me to make that other guy jealous."
"Earthies," Gorshak grumbled, looking at his watch. "In about two minutes now—"
"I don't think they even like each other," Dekker went on, thinking it through. "Evan was always making jokes about the Japanese and the Brazilians, and they were mean kinds of jokes, too."
"Of course they don't like each other. Don't you know yet what Earthies are like? They used to have wars," Gorshak informed him. "They probably still would, except nobody dares anymore. Now they just try to take each other's money."
"Oh, yes, the money," Dekker said, remembering. "What's an 'underwriter,' Tinker?"
"An underwriter! An underwriter is somebody who sucks your blood, and wants you to thank him for it."
"Tinker," his mother said gently. "Dek, it's how they do things on Earth. We borrow money by selling bonds—you know what the Bonds are. But we don't sell the Bonds directly to the people who want to invest in them. That would take too long and, anyway, we don't really know how to do that sort of thing. So somebody 'underwrites' the bonds. He buys the whole lot from us, and then he sells them, a few at a time, to the people who really want them."
"Stealing part of the money along the way," said Tinker Gorshak.
"You know it isn't stealing, Tinker," Gerti DeWoe said crossly. "There's no Earthie law against it. Besides, we agreed to it. If the bond is supposed to sell for, say, a hundred of their cues, then the underwriter gives us, say, ninety. So every time he sells one he makes a ten-cue profit."
Dekker puzzled that over for only a moment before he saw the flaw. "But what if he can't find anyone to buy it?"
"Then," Tinker said, "he has our bonds at a bargain rate. But don't worry about that, Dek. They'll always find somebody to buy. Any way they can."
The boy nodded, thinking about the glamorized pictures on the Cauchys' wall, deciding not to mention them to Tinker. He thought of something else. "Ina said . . . was saying something to Annetta. It was really quite unpleasant, about 'unloading' their bonds if the comet impact was successful—"
"If it was successful!" Gorshak said indignantly. "What a way to talk! And if it's successful, then you know what will happen. We're going to be swamped by immigrants from Earth."
"We're all immigrants from Earth," Gerti DeWoe reminded him, "or our parents were."
"But our roots are here! It isn't just money with us. It's freedom."
Dekker refused to be distracted into that familiar argument. "But what did they mean about unloading?"
"It's just another thing they do, Dek," his mother said. "They have a kind of saying, 'Buy on bad news, sell on good.' A successful strike tonight will be good news, so that means the price of the Bonds might go up a little."
"But everybody already knows the comet's going to land. Why would just seeing it happen make the Bonds worth more?"
"It wouldn't really, Dek. It might make people think they were worth more, though, and that's how Earthies act. They go by what they think things are worth. So if any of the people that owned the Bonds now wanted to get out—I don't know why; maybe because they want the money to invest in something else—I suppose this would be when they'd sell."
"That's foolish," Dekker pronounced.
"That's Earthies for you," Tinker Gorshak said. "Hey, look! It's going off!"
And indeed it was. On the screen they saw the sequenced charges inside the comet mass doing their job. A lump flaked off one side of the comet, then another. The main mass split in two, then the demolition charges in each section blew up, all at once, and the comet became a mass of rubble, all falling together toward Chryse Planitia. The scene shifted swiftly to a quick shot from the surface cameras atop Sunpoint City. The churning mass of the comet was now visible to the naked eye, moving perceptibly down and to the east. The comet didn't have a tail anymore. Rather, they were now inside the tail. All they could see was a general unnatural brightness of the sky.
"I hope it works," Gertrud DeWoe said prayerfully.
Tinker Gorshak grunted. "I hope we can pay for it," he grumbled. "Those bloodsuckers from Earth are charging us plenty for the capital. Do you know what it costs, Dekker? I'm not talking about the whole project. I'm just talking right now about that party you went to—who do you think is paying for it? And all they're doing is watching to see it fall—at a thousand cues a day apiece, and we have to pay—"
"Look!" Dekker's mother cried.
Because—back to the cameras in orbit—all those myriad chunks of rubble turned dazzlingly bright at once as they struck the thin Martian atmosphere, the heat of friction producing a thousand blinding meteors. Switch again, this time to the remote ground-based cameras in their dugouts on the slope of Olympus Mons. . . .
And the fragments hit.
They were not tiny. The biggest was more than ten million tons. Even some of the smaller ones were the size of a skycraper. When they struck, they made H-bomb-sized fountains of cloud, red-lit and white-lit and yellow, with all that kinetic energy transformed at once into impact heat.
The people in Sunpoint City never did feel the shudder of that impact—they were too far away—but the needles of their seismographs jumped right off the tapes.
When Gerti DeWoe tucked her son in bed at last he said drowsily, "I guess we won't see any difference right away?"
His mother didn't laugh at him. She just shook her head. "Not right away, no. It'll be years before Mars has any decent atmosphere. And then we won't be able to breathe it directly, you know. There'll be too much carbon dioxide, not enough free oxygen, not much nitrogen at all. We'll have to find the nitrogen somewhere else. And then we'll need to seed the blue-green algae, and some kind of lichens, to start photosynthesis going so we'll have free oxygen, and then—But, oh, Dekker," she said, looking more excited and young than he had ever seen her, "what it's going to mean to us! Can you imagine crops growing under the naked sky? And the climate getting really warm?"
"Like Earth," he said bitterly.
"Better than Earth! There aren't as many of us, and we get along better!"
"I know," Dekker said, because he did know. Everyone on Mars had been told over and over why they needed to borrow all that money to get all those comets—water for the crops, water to make oxygen for animals and themselves. Lakes. Maybe even rain. The warming greenhouse effect that the water vapor would provide. The kinetic energy of each cometary impact transformed to heat, doing its part to warm the planet up.
He asked, "Do you think we'll live to see it?"
His mother hesitated. "Well, no, Dekker. At least I won't, or at least not to see the best part of it, because it'll be a lot of years. But maybe you will, or your children, or your children's children. . . ."
"Hell," Dekker said, disappointed. "I don't want to wait that long!"
"Well, then," his mother said, grinning fondly, "then when you grow up you'd better get out there and help make it happen faster!"
"You know," Dekker said, beginning to yawn, "I think that's what I'll do.