FUTURES RESEARCH

9094 - CAT'S EYES - 1998

The most important thing in my life is my skin. For one thing it is worth more than me. Even with all my years of training in simulators, and gaining experience on the ground or should I say more accurately in space, I doubt that I am worth much more than a million creds to the company. The skin I wear has cost them two and a half million; as they often remind me. It seems so insubstantial when you put it one, nothing more than a lightweight fishnet mesh covered in aluminium foil. The helmet looks rather more substantial, rather like those the drivers in the space derby affect to wear. But appearances can be deceptive. Every inch of the skin is made up of intelligent elements. The saying that I have more intelligence in my little finger than … might just be true in this case! Even the minute pieces which make up the outer foil each expand and contract, flex and stiffen, under local control - working in conjunction with the central controller built into my helmet. Thus, the mesh is a miracle of microscopic sensors and muscles, without which I couldn't exist in space; nor could I control the vast machines I ride.

You can see why I and my buddy, Jon, took such good care of our skins; and of the technician who looked after them - testing and re-testing every inch of them. My buddy? Despite the miracles built into our skins, space is still the most dangerous environment, even if you are not an asteroid miner. You always have a buddy, and are as close to him as any Siamese twin. Some day you will need him to save your life. In any case, he will join the technician in checking the skin whenever you put it one; despite its other high-tech features it doesn't offer extra eyes in the back of your head! The resulting activity looks rather like one of those biodoc scenes of monkeys grooming each other, but it has a far more serious purpose. Once you have seen one blowout, and I have seen several in my time with blood frothing out of a broken skin, you will never cut corners on that aspect of your life. Besides, paid on performance as we are, it makes financial sense to be in tip-top form; and the form you count on above all is your skin.

After that time-consuming ritual, you don't want to waste any more time; not in getting into your rig, or powering it up. Still, you never take unnecessary risks. Once inside the cab, you unplug the umbilical from the portable pack, and plug it into the rig's system; but you always keep the portable where you can reach it in an emergency - and, believe me, our lives are full of emergencies. And then you run the gamut of diagnostics, on every bit of the rig and once more on your skin. You don't just check that everything shows green, without any yellow let alone red in sight, you check every individual figure. Computers have their place, but it isn't their life on the line. Only when every life support system, and its backup, check out  - after perhaps ten minutes even for the most expert of us - do you actually start to wind up the rigs power systems. Those ten minutes can cost you a hundred creds in productivity, but they may save your life.

Once all the systems are powered up, though, you become a different being; the animal names, their origins now lost in time, which are given to the various machines are very apt. The rhino is a real brute. With its massive tools, rotating grinders that are more than ten metres across, it can demolish a small asteroid in a matter of minutes; carving out hundreds of house sized pieces which the scurrying mice can then push into the hoppers of the nearest smelter. It is a great feeling to stretch your muscles, and see - in the vidtubes in your helmet, these massive tools respond to your every shrug; to pound these floating giants into submission. There is almost a cathartic release of aggression as you beat them to pulp.

A tiger is a more subtle experience. For one thing, it is smaller; the whole thing is no more than ten metres across. But it can still be up to a hundred metres long, with all its appendages added; for it still needs to be as powerful as a rhino, but that power must be focused into the narrow passage it is carving. The cat, the smallest of all but the aristocrat of them, uses that passage to place its load. It depends upon the most sophisticated of positional sensors, to place that precious cargo within the nearest centimetre; whilst, at the same time, probing the densities of the surrounding rock and calculating the exact effect on the fracture planes within this. Driving it, we call this stroking the cat, is not a mechanical action, but a sensuous experience when you merge with its systems.

The day of this story we were not, however, in the asteroid belt. We were chasing what we thought of as the dragon; a small comet which was being redirected to impact on the North Pole of Mars. You have probably forgotten the time when we first had colonies on that planet, eking out a precarious existence under their fragile domes. But the time we are talking about was just a few months after these colonists had been evacuated temporarily, albeit for a couple of decades, to a score of space colonies clustered around their home planet.

The scale of the operation was, indeed, in complete contrast to the terraforming of Venus, which was taking place at the same time. But the work on that was almost invisible; just the scattering of quantities of specially engineered organisms into its upper atmosphere. There you will still need the patience to wait for a couple of centuries, until they have finally done their work - maybe your own children will live to see the second stage work begin on that planet. On the other hand, the process on Mars, which would take less than a quarter of that time, involved the use of awe-inspiring forces; of which the impact of several ice comets on the surface, ours was just one of these, was perhaps the most spectacular. We, though, were almost the whole solar system away, for these comets move at incredible speed and even at that distance we were having to work at break-neck speed to complete our work before the comet moved beyond the critical points. Just getting to it would have been a major achievement for one of our fastest inter-planetary cruisers. We had to do the same thing accompanied by our caravan of vehicle tenders, workshops and the obligatory mini-space habitat. It was touch and go but, with the aid of space tugs borrowed from across the solar system, we just made it in time. But we did make it, and in our business 'just' is good enough. To be productive we have to work to the narrowest of safety margins.

So, there we were; hanging in space, dwarfed by the comet. The main part of our repetitive task was to scoop out one hole after another. We were using modified rhinos to scoop out vast quantities of icy slush, and tigers to do the final shaping, which had to be accurate to within a metre; and, in three dimensions, that was no mean feat. For, here, the shape of the hole was all-important. We were not just drilling it to place a charge which would split an asteroid into the pieces we wanted, we were in effect creating a propulsion nozzle on a gigantic scale. We had a number of teams working on each excavation, but even then it took several days to complete. But the accuracy had to be maintained, for misdirection could place the comet on the wrong trajectory and perhaps even threaten Earth. And, with its teeming billions, that planet could not be so easily evacuated!

On that day, Jon and I were, for once, in different cats. There was not just one charge, but several, to be positioned and our special skills were needed in several different places at the same time. So with a temporary buddy, who only had experience on tigers, I was inching the load from its bay in the munitions barge. The charges we normally used, to fragment rock, were the size of a football. This was much bigger, a monster as big as a ground effect vehicle, and that made it more unwieldy to start with. Then, the harness it sat in was clearly makeshift. Indeed, it was a lash-up. The bomb itself, for that was what it was, was a relic of the cold-war; to be dropped from a 'bomber' - as the crude delivery vehicles of those days were called. Nobody had ever had the incentive to miniaturise it; for, after Cuba, nobody had even dared threaten its use. So I was faced with an over-sized, ante-deluvian monstrosity, which I was expected to position - as usual - within the nearest centimetre or so. Mind you, they kicked out a hell of a blast, maybe a thousand times larger than our own rock-breakers, and that was exactly what was needed if you were going to shift the trajectory of something as large as a comet.

This was, in fact, the fifth site we had developed on this comet. By now I was accustomed to the work; perhaps too accustomed. The first time we had completed the hole, and then detonated the charges, I had watched fascinated; from the safety of more than a hundred miles away and, even then, well out of the line of fire. The plume of ice, many kilometres across, surged out of the hole looking like some primeval avalanche. I knew, though, that the principle was much more like that of the ancient firework rocket - where the plume was its tail and the comet was the head soaring away into the sky, except that comets don't shift that easily! Blow millions of tonnes of ice out into space at colossal speed, though, and even a comet changes direction somewhat; and the full recipe just called for this process to be repeated as many times as was necessary to shift to the trajectory we wanted. Enough shoves like this, and we would land it on the Martian ice cap. There it would release some part of the carbon dioxide and water vapour needed to build the new atmosphere. It would also start the core of the planet ringing like a bell. This effect, together with the many underground charges designed to unlock the gases locked there, was expected to result in seismic events across the face of the planet which would last for decades - the main reason why the population had been evacuated. This was, in fact, only the first comet of a number which would be redirected in this way. Even then, the final atmospheric pressure would only be a tenth of that on Earth. Yet that would be enough for the returned colonists to work 'out of doors' with just breathing masks; and for their crops to start the final stages of terraforming.

As I have already hinted, the 'rocket-like' plume of ice was awe-inspiring. Not merely did the plume travel many kilometres in just a few seconds, but it was streaked through with hundreds of lightning flashes and multicoloured sheets of aurora. No Earth-bound fireworks display could have ever been so spectacular. Indeed, the netcast of the event recorded the largest audience ever; from the solar observatories on Mercury to the exploratory teams orbiting Pluto. The only thing missing, which we still instinctively waited for, was the bang. But, of course, no sound travels across space. The silence of space is absolute.

Clearing out the radioactive material after the explosion was the job we all hated most. We knew it was, like everything else, a carefully calculated process. Most of the radioactive debris had been ejected in the explosion itself; and was well on the way to its final resting place in the furnace that was the sun, and the rhinos we used for the job were lead-plated.

But, returning to describe the events of that day, and in particular the placing of the final charges, that part of our work shouldn't have been physically tiring. Our skins, following and amplifying our every movement, were supposed to do all of the work for us. Yet, in reality, it was immensely fatiguing, as we strained every muscle to guide those actuators with the utmost precision - beyond any accuracy their designers had ever dreamed of. And all the time there was a very real smell of danger. Whatever we did exposed us to danger. Mining has never been safe, but in zero gravity and in a vacuum even the slightest mistake could very quickly become fatal. Here, though, there was the added danger of the explosives themselves. They had never been designed for the accuracy we wanted, they had only been required to devastate whole nation - in the Third World War which fortunately never happened! But the worst aspect was their age. New ones were being produced, but these first charges had been pulled out of the stocks that had been put to rest many decades before. Time had not always treated them well, and it was rather like working with sticks of dynamite which were sweating beads of pure nitro-glycerine. In the case of these babies, though, the problems were hidden; in the quirky electronic circuitry under the covers. We couldn't even check this out in detail, nobody was brave enough to take those covers off! So we were limited to the basic timers which had been built in; and these only offered a maximum of sixty minutes; but that was plenty for us to get out of the blast zone.

It was not all work. We tried to relax as intensely as we worked; but there were limits on what the spinning mini-habitat could provide. Indeed, even with the extensive use of vid-walls, the environment was inevitably small and claustrophobic. I had never been in one, but I suspected our life was much like that of submariners of earlier times. Certainly the smells were just as all-pervading. No matter how much it was processed it still came back smelling ripely of human bodies. It was the first thing which we noticed when we switched back from the special mixtures which we breathed outside. It hit us like a wall when we entered the habitat, but within a minute or so we forgot about it. Our pleasures where just as limiting; especially so when many of the social drugs, especially alcohol and tobacco, which were more normally available were banned; as potentially affecting the senses which were essential for our survival in space. To be fair, we did still have a cornucopia of pills for every possible mood and we did, of course, have all the electronic facilities - they carried no weight penalties - so we could have imagined ourselves in any part of the universe doing anything we wanted. I suppose it was better than nothing, but these vicarious experiences soon palled. We knew they were imaginary, and we often longed for the real feeling of the wind in our hair. So, much as in past times, most of our rest periods were spent swapping ever more detailed descriptions of our previous lives. Thus it was that, over the years we had worked together, we had become more a close-knit family than a working group.

The day of the fifth blast had dawned much like any other; except that, in space, there was no such thing as a dawn, and indeed no day! Once more we had donned our skins, and checked and rechecked every aspect of our life-support systems. The day's operation was, in many ways, the least problematic of the whole process; but it still demanded considerable skill and, with those wayward charges, potentially offered the greatest risk. So, I had kept our distance as the cat ahead collected its deadly load from the munitions barge before collecting our own charge. As the cat's grapples finally locked onto the makeshift latches on the bomb's cradle, and we inched our way out into clean space again, I mentally heaved a sigh of relief. I always worried that I would drop it - which was silly, where there was no gravity to cause it to drop! Sweating slightly less, we smoothly made our way into the excavation and to the assigned site for our charge. The crater was criss-crossed with laser beams from the mapping stations, but even so it took considerable skill to inch the load to exactly where it was needed. Even then, the unlatching process, as always, displaced the bombs slightly, so that I had to gently knock it back into place with my cat's actuators. Only then, with the sweat once more pouring off me could we sprint for cover. The dangerous part was over, but all of us instinctively made that sprint - to get as far from the blast zone as possible. Perhaps it was the evil intent which had created these monsters which affected us, but we ran as if from hell.

On the way out we passed by Jon, carrying the last load into place. Just as we were abreast of him, I saw that one of the arms of his cradle had broken and the load was slowly working its way loose. Although my warning yell brought the attention of the whole flotilla, there was nothing I could do personally. So I accelerated our wild drive to safety; hoping that the device would not blow before we reached cover. However, once we were there, out of the crater and in relative safety - with the cat on auto-pilot - I watched his progress on the monitors, switching between the various cameras positioned on the rim of the crater to get the best view, and trembling with fear; no longer for myself but for him. Mission control should have handled the emergency, but with equal access to the data channels, and the experience developed in my years' of work with him, I was the one who guided him to his target. There was never any thought that his drive might be aborted; we all knew that might jeopardise the whole mission - and possibly millions of lives. In fact, we couldn't; for those antique timers were already running, and nothing could stop them. There was nothing like the electronic network we normally used, whereby we could explode the charges by the microsecond; and indeed, in circumstances like this, retime everything. Instead, all the bombs were set to explode at the same time; which was - despite their age - accurate to within a hundredth of a second. The focusing of the jet would be only by the shape of the excavation. The timers had started with the deployment of the first of the charges, so there were barely twenty minutes left. That was plenty for what we normally had to do; just another five minutes to placement and no more than ten to run to absolute safety. But none of that was now guaranteed. Jon was a superb driver, so I thought he could just make it - I prayed, as never before, that he would.

As I guided his cat's movements, my Jon concentrated on the gentle taps with which his actuators now guided the bomb; so much like a cat playing with a ball of string - the machine living up to its name in a way we had never expected. We nearly made the five-minute target but, of course, the cat had to be manoeuvred round to the opposite side to play another round of this obscene game of pat-a-cake in order to stop it. Then we had the exact positioning; gentle tap by gentle tap. We took liberties, it ended up half a metre away from its correct position. But we could correct that deviation in later blows. Even so, it took twelve minutes. Perhaps, though, with all burners and thrusters on maximum even though the cat would have to be rebuilt after such treatment, he could make it. My job was now finished, he could fly the cat better than anyone I knew, but that made the unbearable tension even worse. Around me I could feel the hundreds of eyes locked onto that desperate scene, counting the minutes and seconds down; seven minutes, five minutes, three, two, one. I was gasping for air, almost bending the controls held in my clenched fists; fifty seconds, forty, thirty, twenty, ten. I actually cheered when my own rear-view camera showed his cat finally rising above the crater rim; he might be knocked about by the sideways spew, but he would survive. But, even as I relaxed, the odious jet finally emerged; and swept his cat away. One minute the picture showed the cat with every jet blazing, and the next all I could see was the torrent and its fireworks; a white wall shot through with the after-glow of the thermonuclear fires below. He had been above the rim, but not clear of the blast. That was the last we ever saw of him. If anything remained of the cat, and it was unlikely it did, it was now being swept - at enormous speed - towards the sun. I remember thinking, almost calmly, that it was a fitting burial for a hero. He, like us, had known his responsibility - not just to the job, the company did not inspire that level of devotion - but to the millions who would otherwise have had to pay the price for the accident. He had done what was necessary, heroically.

We were used to accidents, even death; I had been involved in a number myself, and had counted myself fortunate to escape with minor injuries when my companions had died. But this one seemed somehow more personal, more intimate. We had all watched death creeping up on him. We had all known that he could have escaped that death. Yet we had also known that the tragedy would inevitably run its course. He would do what he had to; unto death. Most of us would have done exactly the same, and we did do something like it - albeit on a lesser scale - each day, without considering it heroic. But, by the standards of the rest of the universe, sitting comfortably in front of their vidwalls it was heroic. My only regret was the timing. A few weeks earlier, when the first blow had brought its blaze of media attention, he would have indeed been a space hero; his self-sacrifice celebrated across the solar system. Now, another four blows on, it was just another industrial accident; warranting only a footnote in the safety statistics. But that was the essence of our life - and death - and of the many individuals who opened up space for the rest of you!

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