Mining the Oort Read Online Free PDF Page B

resignedly, measuring out enough water in the bowl to wash his face and run a comb through his hair. "We're going to eat here?"
    "We're going to cook our own dinner," Tinker said, offering good news as a gift. "Just the three of us—I wish Tsumi could have been along, but he has to be with his dad tonight. Now, give me a hand while I braise the cappy for the stew."
    Decker did as he was told, helping get the dinner ready. The killed-meat animal smelled good as it began to sear, which left Dekker with mixed feelings. It really was a treat for him and his mother to cook something up together instead of going to the community dining hall—but not necessarily with Tinker Gorshak sticking himself in. Dekker would have been almost as happy to go to the hall. Their tiny room was somewhat gloomy—everywhere in Sunpoint was gloomy now, with only one light allowed per room to conserve power in case of accident, and hot, too, with all the climate machines turned down to barely tolerable levels—but it was an occasion, and so they were allowed to have the news screen on.
    Naturally the screen was relaying the satellite observations, as they followed the comet. When Dekker looked up to the screen he could see the comet's core; it was the grayish-yellow color of old Tinker Gorshak's beard, lumpy as a Jerusalem artichoke. It was spinning slowly, with the drive jets now spitting out slow-down correction burns every few seconds.
    He checked the time. There was still a long way to go. The actual impact was scheduled to take place in midmorning—midmorning according to the time it would be at the impact point, that was, though it would be nearly noon at Sunpoint in its position to the east. "That's so it will be a kind of grazing hit," Tinker Gorshak informed the boy as they were preparing their meal. "There'll be less kinetic energy released that way, they think, so maybe less ground shock. How are you doing with those onions?"
    "They're almost chopped," Dekker reported, rubbing at his stinging eyes with the back of his hand.
    Gorshak dumped the chopped onions into the stew, stirred it, sniffed it critically, then put the lid on. "It'll be ready in twenty minutes," he declared. "Gerti ought to be back before then, and if she isn't, it'll just get better the longer it simmers. What do you say, Dekker, do you want something to drink? Tea? Water?"
    Dekker shook his head, and watched the old man carefully measure out a "highball"—straight alcohol, diluted with water one to three, flavored with a little mint extract. Dekker wrinkled his nose. That was one of the other things Dekker didn't like about Tinker Gorshak. Dekker's father had never been known to drink alcohol, or at least as far as Dekker remembered he hadn't. Nor had his mother, as long as his father was around. "So," said Gorshak, swallowing the first half of his drink. "Have you been thinking about what you want to do when you grow up?"
    "Not much," Dekker admitted.
    "I mean," Gorshak explained, "it's all going to be different, now that it looks like the crystal plants are a dead end." He got that discontented look he always had when the subject of the purpose-built Martian plants came up. "I always hoped—"
    He stopped there without saying what he had hoped, but he didn't have to. Dekker knew what it was. As a geneticist, Tinker Gorshak's main job on Mars had been tending and crossbreeding the artificially produced photo synthetic plants—well, organisms: you could hardly really call them "plants," because they certainly didn't look like anything that had ever grown on the Earth—that the Martians had hoped would produce some sort of natural crops for them. They were pretty little things, mushroom shaped, with parasols of ultraviolet-opaque crystal on their tops. The crystal let the light necessary for photosynthesis in, but screened out the deadly ultraviolet—a very necessary precaution on Mars, where there was no ozone layer to protect them. The mushrooms were most