Hayford Peirce: The Ore-Ball Express

Illustration by Kelly Freas

“You’re fired!”

I’d heard J. Davis Alexander scream those words so often that I no longer paid any attention to them. So now I jumped hardly more than two meters in the 4 percent Cerean gravity, saving my head from a painful collision with the ceiling only by hooking my toes under the edge of my desk at the very last moment. Cursing myself for not always using the footbar beneath the desk, I slowly subsided into my chair while pondering the ominous words. Now what had I done to—

It was only when I heard the equally enraged screams of J. Davis Alexander’s benighted nephew emanating from the office where the lord and master of Hartman, Bemis & Choupette presided over the fortunes of the largest brokerage house in Ceres, that I realized that for once it was not the neck of Jonathan Welbrook White that was getting the chop.

Could it really be the obnoxious Hooten Delahooty who had finally strained his equally obnoxious uncle’s patience to the breaking point?

Apparently yes. “—Latest idiocy has cost us 217,000 Belter buckles,” came J. Davis Alexander’s anguished voice, “not to mention the dozens of clients you’ve driven away since I was stupid enough to hire you and your equally idiotic twin brother. Horton’s already gone, thank God! Now you have fifteen minutes to gather your affairs and get out of my life forever!”

Melodramatic, of course, but when you’re dealing with someone as intrinsically lazy, stupid, and dishonest as Hooten Delahooty had proven himself to be in the three years he had gone through the motions of pretending to be an ethical broker & bourse-man, a certain amount of pyrotechnics is sometimes necessary to get your message across.

After a few more shrieks of heartfelt fury by each of the parties concerned, I caught a brief glimpse of Hooten’s skinny frame streaking past the door of my modest cubicle on his way, I hoped, to the far more imposing door that led to the outer world. As much as I normally commiserated with all the other unfortunates constrained to slave for J. Davis Alexander, I could hardly contain my relief at finally being rid of his loutish nephew. Three years of—

“White!” My reveries were interrupted by J. Davis Alexander in full voice. “Get in here at once!”

The manager of Hartman, Be mis & Choupette had a fine corner office overlooking Clarkeville’s choicest piece of prime real estate, Westlake Park. Twenty meters above the park’s celebrated duck pond, we were another 20 meters below the realistic-looking blue and white sky that hid the carbonaceous chondrite rock ceiling separating our town and its 300,000 underground inhabitants from the hard vacuum of Ceres’s surface. As I half-bounced, half-floated into J. Davis Alexander’s office I caught a glimpse of a family of ducklings practicing their landings in the middle of the pond.

“White,” growled J. Davis Alexander, “I’ve just fired that idiot Hooten for pure, unmitigated incompetence.

Let that be a lesson —you could be next.”

I nodded, trying to keep my eyes focused on a spot just beyond his left shoulder. Unlike most Belters, who are long and lean in our almost nonexistent gravity, J. Davis Alexander was round and short and as hairy as a wolverine—with a disposition to match. For reasons of ideology or religion his parents had refused to give him his gravity pills during his childhood years. The result was the unpleasant spectacle that I was trying to avoid looking at.

“Now, then,” continued J. Davis Alexander, squinting at me fiercely with his baleful black eyes, “for all your faults, White, I have to reluctantly concede that you’re the least incompetent of all the many incompetents I’m burdened with. I’m therefore giving you a bonus: I’m turning over all the accounts my worthless nephew was supposed to be handling. Naturally, this means we’ll have to reduce your commission on all your other accounts, but overall your income will increase to—”

“Then fire me before I quit,” I said, glancing at the appointment schedule on my wristwatch. “Hooten’s accounts are worthless—unless you count all the million-buckle lawsuits for fraudulent malfeasance that have been filed against the firm because of him.” Tapping my watch pointedly, I now focused my vision clearly on J. Davis Alexander’s disagreeable features. “According to this, I have an appointment at the Ritz-Carlton in twenty minutes with those characters from Earth who’re backing the Ore-ball Express.” I scowled as ferociously as I could. “So either fire me now or let me go to my meeting—and we’ll say no more about me taking over Hooten’s accounts.”

The malignancy of J. Davis Alexander’s answering scowl was enough to stop a 50,000 ton ore shipment dead in its trajectory. For the thousandth time I marveled that so hideous a troll could be the blissful husband of Miss Grain Harvest of 2273, a creature half a meter his superior in height and the tallest, slimmest, blondest, and flat-out most beautiful woman in the entire Belt. “The Ore-ball Express,” he growled, “that’s this goofy venture Old Man Choupette has got us in for 14 percent of?”

“That’s the one,” I said evenly.

“And you’re the only one who knows what it’s all about?”

I shrugged. “Except for Mr. Choupette, of course.”

“Blackmail, White, sheer blackmail! I won’t forget it. Now get to your meeting!”

The ore-ball floated in the diamond-filled blackness of space like a giant orange from which a titan had taken a single enormous bite.

“This,” I said, gesturing at the hologram that filled one side of the conference room from floor to ceiling, “is what the Express looked like three days ago. It’s not really orange—that’s just the lighting we used to shoot these pictures for you.”

Tamuela Tetuanui, Minister of Development of the Queendom of Tahiti, pointed a thick brown finger at the ore-ball. “How much longer before they’ve finished the ball? It’s absolutely vital that it arrives on Earth in time for our Independence Day celebration.”

I gestured at the project’s lead engineer.

“Another week at the most,” said VettiLou Propokov, a pale blonde girl with prominent cheekbones who looked hardly old enough to be out of high school and who was the Belt’s leading engineer in the field of experimental virophage mining. “Using the usual rock-eating bacteria, two standard mining blocks of approximately 190,000 tons apiece have yielded about 55,000 tons of nickel-iron ore, just about the same weight as the standard 32-cubic-meter shipping blocks presently being sent to Earth. We’ve taken the refined ore and mixed and compressed it with the binding agents of our new technique to make our patented slurry. Then it’s just a question of spraying it all into place.”

She pointed at the orange ball and it immediately expanded to fill half the room. Now we could see half a dozen powersuits floating in space around the ball and its true size snapped into focus. “You can see the hoses they’re using to spray the slurry against the mold. When we go into full-scale production the process will be mostly automated. Right now, with this demonstration model, we re using far more manpower than we will in the future.”

“I can’t see any mold,” objected the only woman in the four-person delegation of Polynesians who had made the 538 million kilometer trip from Earth to check on the status of their project.

“It’s only transparent from a distance,” said VettiLou Propokov. “Where they’re working, spraying the slurry, they can see a network of light yellow veins throughout the mold. When the ore-ball’s complete, we’ll dissolve the mold with a solvent.”