The Second Science Fiction MEGAPACK®. Robert Silverberg

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СКАЧАТЬ foxes did, or something.”

      “No! I was trained for it, but I never liked it!”

      “Well, did I ask you to keep the place so spotless?”

      “No, but I thought you liked it!”

      “I did like it, but if you didn’t like doing it, it wasn’t important.”

      “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

      “You never asked!”

      She stared at him.

      He stared back, and in a much calmer, quieter voice he added, “There were a lot of things I never told you.”

      “Like what?”

      “That I love you.”

      * * * *

      An hour later they lay together on the floor, naked; he stroked her furry back, and she brushed her tail along his thigh.

      “Only an idiot would want to make your fur fall out,” he said. “Or cut off your tail.”

      She nipped gently at his nose. “I love you, Mas…I mean, Al.”

      “You can call me anything you like, in private,” he said.

      “And I can stay?”

      “As long as you like.”

      “That might be a long, long time—I’m really not sure.”

      “Whatever.”

      “I’m glad to be back. Except…”

      “Except what?” He stopped stroking.

      “Well, there’s one thing that’ll have to change, or I just can’t stay.”

      “What?”

      “Oh, don’t look so worried!”

      “I am worried! What is it?”

      “From now on,” she said, laughing, “you wash the pans that don’t go in the dishwasher! I hate what the detergent does to my fur!”

      THIN EDGE, by Randall Garrett

      CHAPTER I

      “Beep!” said the radio smugly. “Beep! Beep! Beep!”

      “There’s one,” said the man at the pickup controls of tugship 431. He checked the numbers on the various dials of his instruments. Then he carefully marked down in his log book the facts that the radio finder was radiating its beep on such-and-such a frequency and that that frequency and that rate-of-beep indicated that the asteroid had been found and set with anchor by a Captain Jules St. Simon. The direction and distance were duly noted.

      That information on direction and distance had already been transmitted to the instruments of the tugship’s pilot. “Jazzy-o!” said the pilot. “Got ’im.”

      He swiveled his ship around until the nose was in line with the beep and then jammed down on the forward accelerator for a few seconds. Then he took his foot off it and waited while the ship approached the asteroid.

      In the darkness of space, only points of light were visible. Off to the left, the sun was a small, glaring spot of whiteness that couldn’t be looked at directly. Even out here in the Belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, that massive stellar engine blasted out enough energy to make it uncomfortable to look at with the naked eye. But it could illuminate matter only; the hard vacuum of space remained dark. The pilot could have located the planets easily, without looking around. He knew where each and every one of them were. He had to.

      A man can navigate in space by instrument, and he can take the time to figure out where every planet ought to be. But if he does, he won’t really be able to navigate in the Asteroid Belt.

      In the Nineteenth Century, Mark Twain pointed out that a steamboat pilot who navigated a ship up and down the Mississippi had to be able to identify every landmark and every changing sandbar along the river before he would be allowed to take charge of the wheel. He not only had to memorize the whole river, but be able to predict the changes in its course and the variations in its eddies. He had to be able to know exactly where he was at every moment, even in the blackest of moonless nights, simply by glancing around him.

      An asteroid man has to be able to do the same thing. The human mind is capable of it, and one thing that the men and women of the Belt Cities had learned was to use the human mind.

      “Looks like a big ’un, Jack,” said the instrument man. His eyes were on the radar screen. It not only gave him a picture of the body of the slowly spinning mountain, but the distance and the angular and radial velocities. A duplicate of the instrument gave the same information to the pilot.

      The asteroid was fairly large as such planetary debris went—some five hundred meters in diameter, with a mass of around one hundred seventy-four million metric tons.

      * * * *

      Within twenty meters of the surface of the great mountain of stone, the pilot brought the ship to a dead stop in relation to that surface.

      “Looks like she’s got a nice spin on her,” he said. “We’ll see.”

      He waited for what he knew would appear somewhere near the equator of the slowly revolving mass. It did. A silvery splash of paint that had originally been squirted on by the anchor man who had first spotted the asteroid in order to check the rotational velocity.

      The pilot of the space tug waited until the blotch was centered in the crosshairs of his peeper and then punched the timer. When it came around again, he would be able to compute the angular momentum of the gigantic rock.

      “Where’s he got his anchor set?” the pilot asked his instrument man.

      “The beep’s from the North Pole,” the instrument man reported instantly. “How’s her spin?”

      “Wait a bit. The spot hasn’t come round again yet. Looks like we’ll have some fun with her, though.” He kept three stars fixed carefully in his spotters to make sure he didn’t drift enough to throw his calculations off. And waited.

      Meanwhile, the instrument man abandoned his radar panel and turned to the locker where his vacuum suit waited at the ready. By the time the pilot had seen the splotch of silver come round again and timed it, the instrument man was ready in his vacuum suit.

      “Sixteen minutes, forty seconds,” the pilot reported. “Angular momentum one point one times ten to the twenty-first gram centimeters squared per second.”

      “So we play Ride ’Em Cowboy,” the instrument man said “I’m evacuating. Tell me when.” He had already poised his finger over the switch that would pull the air from his compartments, which had been sealed off from the pilot’s compartment when the timing had started.

      “Start the pump,” said the pilot.

      The switch was pressed, and the pumps began to evacuate the air from the СКАЧАТЬ