Ben Bova - The Rock Rats

“Ooh, Randy,” gushed Cindy, “you’re so big .”

“And hard,” added Mindy.

Randall McPherson lay back in the small mountain of pillows while the naked twins stroked his bare skin. Some guys liked sex in microgravity, but Randy had spun up his ship to almost a full terrestrial g for his encounter with the twins. His partner, Dan Fogerty, complained about the fuel cost of spinning up the ship, but Randy had ignored his bleating. Fogerty was known to all the miners as Fatso Fogerty, he had allowed himself to blubber up so shamelessly, living in microgravity most of the time. McPherson spent hours of his spare time in their ship’s exercise centrifuge, or had the whole ship spun up to keep his muscles in condition. Fogerty was lucky to have a levelheaded man such as McPherson to team with him, in McPherson’s opinion.

The twins were actually back at Ceres, of course, but the virtual reality system was working pretty well. Hardly a noticeable lag between a request by Randy and a smiling, slinky, caressing response from Cindy and Mindy.

So Randy was more than a little irked when Fogerty’s voice broke into his three-way fantasy.

“There’s a bloomin’ ship approaching us!”

“What?” McPherson snapped, sitting up so abruptly that the VR images of the twins were still wriggling sensuously on the pillows even though he was no longer lying between them.

“A ship,” Fatso repeated. “They’re askin’ to dock with us.”

McPherson muttered a string of heartfelt profanities while the twins lay motionless, staring blankly.

“Sorry, ladies,” he said, pushing himself up off the pillows, feeling half embarrassed, half infuriated. He lifted the VR goggles off and saw the real world: a dreary little compartment on a scruffy clunker of a ship that badly needed a refit and overhaul after fourteen months of batting around the Belt.

Awkwardly peeling off his VR sensor suit and pulling on his coveralls as he made his way up to the bridge, McPherson bellowed, “Fatso, if this is one of your goddam jokes I’m gonna wring your neck till I hear chimes!”

He ducked through the hatch and into the cramped, overheated bridge. Fogerty overflowed the pilot’s seat, one hand clenching half a meat pie; most of the rest of it was spattered over his chins and his coveralls front. He was globulously lumpy, stretching the faded orange fabric of his coveralls so much that McPherson was reminded of an overripe pumpkin. He smelled overripe, too, and the additional spicy aroma from the meat pie made McPherson’s stomach churn. Reckon I don’t smell much better, McPherson told himself, trying to keep an even temper.

Fogerty half-turned in the creaking chair and jabbed a thick finger excitedly toward the main display screen. McPherson saw the two-kilometer-long chunk of rock they had just claimed, dark and lumpy, and a silvery spacecraft that looked too sleek and new to be a prospector’s ship.

“A mining team?” Fogerty half-suggested.

“Out here already?” McPherson snapped. “We just sent in our claim. We haven’t contacted any miners.”

“Well, there they are,” said Fogerty.

“That’s not a miner’s ship.”

Fogerty shrugged. “Shall I give ’em permission to come aboard?”

McPherson had to squeeze past his partner’s bulk to get into the right-hand seat. “Who in blazes are they? And what are they doing here? With the whole Belt to poke into, why are they sticking their noses into our claim?”

Fogerty grinned at his partner. “We could ask ’em.”

Grumbling, McPherson flicked on the communications channel. “This is The Lady of the Lake. Identify yourselves, please.”

The screen swirled with color momentarily, then a darkly bearded man’s face took form. He looked vaguely oriental to McPherson: high cheekbones, hooded eyes.

“This is Shanidar. We have a boxful of videodisks that we’ve viewed so often we can lip-synch the dialogue. Do you have any to trade?”

“What’ve you got?” Fogerty asked eagerly. “How recent are they?”

“Private stuff, mostly. Muy piquante, if you know what I mean. You can’t get them through the normal channels. They were brand-new when we left Selene, six months ago.”

Before McPherson could reply, Fogerty broke into a dimpled, many-chinned smile. “We can swap you one-for-one, but our stuff is older.”

“That’s okay,” said the bearded man. “It’ll be new to us.”

“What’re you doing out here?” McPherson demanded. “We claimed this rock, you know.”

“We’re not prospecting any more,” came the reply. “We’ve hit our jackpot and made a deal with Humphries Space Systems to process the ores. Got our money in the bank. We just thought we’d unload these videodisks before we head back home.”

“Sure,” said Fatso. “Why not?”

McPherson felt uneasy. But he saw the eager look on his partner’s fleshy face. After fourteen months in the Belt they had barely cleared the payments on their ship. They needed another week, at least, to negotiate a mining contract with one of the corporations. McPherson had no intention of accepting the first offer they received. And the prices for ores just kept going down; they’d be lucky if they netted enough to live on for six months before they had to go out again.

“Okay,” he said reluctantly. “Come on over and dock at our main airlock.”

Fogerty nodded happily, like a little kid anticipating Christmas.

Amanda thought again about how housekeeping on Ceres—inside Ceres, actually—was different from living on a ship. Not that their living quarters were that much more spacious: the single room that she and Lars shared was a slightly enlarged natural cave in the asteroid, its walls, floor, and ceiling smoothed and squared off. It wasn’t much bigger than the cubic volume they had aboard Starpower. And there was the dust, always the dust. In Ceres’s minuscule gravity, every time you moved, every time you took a step, you stirred up the everlasting dust. It was invisibly fine inside the living quarters, thanks to the air blowers. Once they moved up to the orbiting habitat, the dust would be a thing of the past, thank god.

In the meantime, though, it was a constant aggravation. You couldn’t keep anything really clean: even dishes stored in closed cupboards had to be scoured under air jets before you could eat off them. The dust made you sneeze; half the time Amanda and most of the other residents wore filter masks. She worried that her face would bear permanent crease marks from the masks.

But living in Ceres offered something that shipboard life could not duplicate. Company. Society. Other people who could visit you or you could drop in on. Strolls through the corridors where you could see neighbors and say hello and stop for a chat. The corridors were narrow and twisting, it was true; natural lava tubes through the rock that had been smoothed off enough for people lo shuffle through in a low-gravity parody of walking. Their walls and ceilings were still curved and unfinished raw stone; it was more like walking through a tunnel than a real corridor. And there was the dust, of course. Always the dust. It was worse in the tunnels, so bad that everyone wore face masks when they went for a stroll.

Lately, though, people’s attitudes had changed noticeably. There was an aura of expectation in the air, almost like the slowly building excitement that the year-end holiday season had brought when she’d been a child on Earth. The habitat was growing visibly, week by week. Everyone could see it swinging through the sky on their wallscreens. We’re going to live up there, everyone was saying to themselves. We’re going to move to a new, clean home.