Ben Bova - The Precipice

“Five point three billion tons,” Freiberg said, almost angrily.

Dan grunted.

Pointing through the van’s window to the massive trucks rumbling by, Freiberg grumbled, “Yamagata’s trying to convert their whole fleet of trucks to electricity, but the Chinese are still using diesels. Some people just don’t give a damn! The Russians are starting to talk about cultivating what they call the Virgin lands’ in Siberia, where the permafrost is melting. They think they can turn the region into a new grain belt, like the Ukraine.”

“So something good might come out of all this,” Dan murmured. “My ass,” Freiberg snapped. “The oceans are still warming up, Dan. The clathrates are going to break down if we can’t stop the ocean temperature rise. Once they start releasing the methane that’s frozen in them…” Dan opened his mouth to reply, but Freiberg kept right on agonizing. “You know how much methane is locked up in the clathrates? Two limes ten to the sixteenth tons. Twenty quadrillion tons! Enough to produce a greenhouse that’ll melt all the ice in Greenland and Antarctica. Every glacier in the world. We’ll all drown.”

“All the more reason,” Dan said, “for pushing out to the Asteroid Belt. We can bring in all the metals and minerals the Earth needs, Zack! We can move the world’s industrial operations into space, where they won’t screw up the Earth’s environment.”

Freiberg gave Dan a disbelieving look.

“We can do it!” Dan insisted. “If this fusion rocket can be made to work. That’s the key to the whole damned thing: efficient propulsion can bring the cost of asteroid mining down to where it’s economically viable.” For a long moment Freiberg said nothing. He merely glared at Dan, half angry, half sullen.

At last he mumbled, “I’ll make a few calls for you, Dan. That’s all I can do.”

“That’s all I ask,” Dan replied, forcing a smile. Then he added, “Plus a ride to the airstrip for George and me.”

“What about your cook?”

With a laugh, Dan said, “She goes with the van, old buddy. She only speaks Japanese, but she’s terrific in the kitchen. And the bedroom.” Freiberg flushed deep red. But he did not refuse Dan’s gift.

The customs inspector looked startled when he saw the plastic cage and the four live mice huddled in it among the loose food pellets. He set his face into a scowl as he looked up at Pancho. “You can’t bring pets into Selene.” The other astronauts had sailed through the incoming inspection without a hitch, leaving Pancho to face the grim-faced inspector alone. They had cruised to the Moon without incident, none of the others realizing that Pancho had milked each of their bank accounts for a half-hour’s interest. Pancho figured that even if they eventually discovered her little scam, the amount of money involved was too small to fight over. To her, it wasn’t the amount so much as the adroitness of the sting. “They’re not pets,” she said coolly to the inspector. “They’re food.”

“Food?” The man’s dark eyebrows hiked halfway to his scalp line. “Yeah, food. For my bodyguard.” Most of the customs inspectors knew her, but this guy was new; Pancho hadn’t encountered him before. Not bad-looking, she thought. His dark blue zipsuit complemented his eyes nicely. A little elderly, though. Starting to go gray at the temples. Must be working to raise enough money for a rejuve treatment.

As if he knew he was being maneuvered into giving straight lines, the customs inspector asked, “Your bodyguard eats mice?” Pancho nodded. “Yes, sir, she does.” The inspector huffed. “And where is this bodyguard?” Pancho lifted a long leg and planted her softbooted foot on the inspector’s table. Tugging up the cuff of her coverall trouser, she revealed what looked like a bright metallic blue ankle bracelet.

While the inspector gaped, Pancho coaxed Elly off her ankle and held her out in front of the man’s widening eyes. The snake was about thirty-five centimeters long from nose to tail. It lifted its head and, fixing the inspector with its beady, slitted eyes, it hissed menacingly. The man flinched back nearly half a meter. “Elly’s a genetically-modified krait. She’ll never get any bigger’n this. She’s very well-behaved and wicked poisonous.”

To his credit, the inspector swiftly recovered his composure. Most of it, at least.

“You… you can’t bring a snake in,” he said, his voice quavering only slightly.

“That’s against the regulations and besides—”

“There’s a special exception to the regulations,” Pancho said calmly. “You can look it up. Paragraph seventeen-dee, subclause eleven.” With a frown, the inspector punched up the relevant page on his palmcomp. Pancho knew the exception would be there; she had gone all the way up to the Selene health and safety executive board to get it written into the regs. It had cost her a small fortune in time and effort; many dinners with men old enough to be her grandfather. Funny thing was, the only overt sexual pass made at her was from the woman who chaired the executive board.

“Well, I’ll be dipped in…” The inspector looked up from his handheld’s tiny screen. “How in hell did you get them to rewrite the regs for you?” Pancho smiled sweetly. “It wasn’t easy.”

“That little fella is poisonous, you say?”

“Her venom’s been engineered to reduce its lethality, but she’s still fatal unless you get a shot of antiserum.” Pancho pulled a slim vial from her open travelbag and wagged it in front of the inspector’s bulging eyes.

He shook his head in wonder as Pancho coaxed the snake back around her ankle.

“And he eats mice.”

“She,” Pancho said as she straightened up again. “When I stay up here for more than a month I have to send Earthside for more mice. Costs a bundle.”

“I’ll bet.”

“The mice never get out of their cage,” Pancho added. “Once every other week I put Elly in with them.”

The inspector shuddered visibly. He took Pancho’s entry forms and passed them in front of the electronic reader. The machine beeped once. Pancho was cleared. The inspector put the transparent mouse cage back into her flight bag and zipped it shut.

“You’re okay to enter Selene,” he said, almost as if he didn’t believe it himself.

“Thank you.”

Before she could hoist her bag onto her shoulder, he asked, “Uh… what’re you doing for dinner tonight?”

Pancho smiled her sweetest. “Gee, I’d love to have dinner with you, but I already have a date.”

Dressed in a crisp white pantsuit set off by the flowery scarf she’d tied around her neck, Pancho followed the directions Martin Humphries had videomailed to her. In Earthside cities, height meant prestige. In hotels and condo towers, the higher the floor, the higher the price. Penthouses were considered the most desirable, and therefore were the most expensive. On the Moon, where human settlements were dug into the ground, prestige increased with depth. The airless lunar surface was dangerous, subject to four-hundred-degree temperature swings between sunlight and shadow, bathed in hard radiation from deep space, peppered with meteoric infall. So in Selene and the other communities on the Moon, the deeper your living quarters, the more desirable it was, and the more expensive. Martin Humphries must be rotten rich, Pancho thought as she rode the elevator down to Selene’s lowest level. According to the biofiles on the nets Humphries was supposed to be one of the wealthiest men in the Earth/Moon system, but that could be public relations puffery, she thought. The tabloids and scandal sites had more on him than the biofiles. They called him “Hump,” or “the Humper.” He had a reputation as a chaser, married twice and with lots of media stars and glamour gals from the upper crust to boot. When Pancho looked up the pix of his “dates” she saw a succession of tall, languid, gorgeous women with lots of hairdo and skimpy clothes.