Beyond the Blue Event Horizon Read Online Free PDF

promise we’ll do it tomorrow.” Or whenever one of the others was awake at the same time-the important thing was not to be alone with Janine. In a ship with the total cubage of a motel room, you’d be surprised how hard that is to arrange. Not hard. Practically impossible.
    But I really wasn’t tired, and when Lurvy was tucked alongside me and out of it, her breathing too quiet to be called anything like a snore, but diagnostic of sleep all the same, I stretched against the sheets, wide awake, counting up our blessings. I needed to do that at least once a day. When I could find any to count.
    This time I found a good one. Four thousand A.U. plus is a long trip-and that’s as the crow flies. Or, actually, as the photon fires, because of course there aren’t a lot of crows in near-interstellar space. Call it half a trillion kilometers, near enough. And we were spiraling out, which meant most of a revolution around the sun before we got there. Our track wasn’t just 25 light-days, it was more like 60. And, even power-on the whole way, we weren’t coming up to anything like the speed of light. Three and a half years. . . and all the way we were thinking, Jeez, suppose someone figures out the Heechee drive before we get there? It wouldn’t have helped us a bit. It would’ve been a lot more than three and a half years before they got around to doing all the things they wanted to do when that happened. And guess where on that list the job of coming after us would have been?
    So the good thing I found to dwell on was that at least we weren’t going to find the trip was for nothing, because we were almost there!
    All that remained was to strap the big ion-thrusters onto it see if it worked. . . start the slow return trip, shoving the thing back down toward the Earth. . . and, somehow, survive till we got there. Call it, oh, another four years; I went back to cherishing the fact that we were almost there.
    The idea of mining comets for food wasn’t new, it went back to Krafft Ehricke in the 1950s anyway, only what he suggested was that people colonize them. It made sense. Bring along a little iron and trace elements-the iron to build a place to live in, the trace elements to turn CHON-chow into quiche lorraine or hamburgers-and you can live indefinitely on the food around you. Because that’s what comets are made of. A little bit of dust, a few rocks, and a hell of a lot of frozen gases. And what are the gases? Oxygen. Nitrogen. Hydrogen. Carbon dioxide. Water. Methane. Ammonia. The same four elements over and over again. CHON. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and what does CHON spell?
    Wrong. What comets are made of is the same thing you are made of, and what C-H-O-N spells is “food.”
    The Oort cloud was made up of millions of megaton-sized servings of chow. Back on Earth there were ten or twelve billion hungry people looking toward it and licking their lips.
    There was still a lot of argument about what comets were doing there, out in the cloud. It was still arguable about whether they even came in families. Opik a hundred years ago said more than half the comets ever sighted fit into well-defined groups, so there, and so did his followers ever since. Whipple said bullshit, there’s not a group you can identify that has more than three comets in it. And so did his followers. Then Oort came along to try to make sense of it. His idea was that there was this great shell of comets all the hell around the solar system, and every once in a while the sun would reach out and pluck one out, and it would come loping in to perihelion. Then we would have Halley’s comet, or the one that was supposed to have been the Star of Bethlehem, or whatever. Then a bunch of the guys began kicking that around, asking why exactly that should happen. It turned out it couldn’t-not if you assume Maxwellian distribution for the Oort cloud. In fact, if you assume normal distribution, you also have to assume that there isn’t any Oort