It didn’t matter whether “football” for you was soccer or the American sport played by men in helmets. In either case you were meant to envision a player trying to weave a path downfield among defenders. A skilled player could succeed at this when running unencumbered but would fail if obliged to push a wheelbarrow with a boulder in it. The boulder, of course, was Amalthea, and the wheelbarrow was the asteroid mining complex that had been constructed around it. If this analogy were the one closest to the truth, then the wheelbarrow would have to be abandoned.
The image was sufficiently clear, and sufficiently alarming, that some had begun to argue for ditching Amalthea as far back as Day 30. More levelheaded analysts pointed out that if the ocean liner analogy applied, there was no need to take such drastic action, and if Izzy were a blind, crippled ox on a freeway, there was no point anyway.
Doob had his own bias, a bias frankly rooted in a certain frozen embryo, which was that the Mining Colony should be preserved at all costs. When he tried to filter out that bias and to look at the models and the data in a completely objective way, he concluded that the jury was still out. So, technical discussions of the matter tended to be unproductive, except insofar as they revealed the biases that the participants had brought into the room with them. And here was where it started to get difficult for him personally, because he couldn’t understand why anyone would harbor a bias different from his own. Why would anyone not want to keep the Mining Colony? What were they thinking? How could the Cloud Ark, and the human race, have a future without those tools and capabilities?
In any case the controversy had ramifications that extended into many seemingly mundane aspects of the Cloud Ark program. If Izzy was going to maneuver with Amalthea attached to it, then the structure holding the rock to the space station needed to be strong. To put it another way, the stronger it was, the more heroic maneuvers could be achieved without breaking it. The ability to perform such maneuvers made the survival of Izzy more likely, and so requests for additional structural work had a kind of self-justifying force. Conversely, a weaker structure limited maneuvering ability and increased the odds that they would have to jettison the Mining Colony in order to survive. And why dump scarce resources into beefing up a subassembly that was going to be abandoned anyway? A similar dynamic obtained in the case of propellant. More of it was needed to maneuver an Izzy with a big rock on it, which meant less of it for the arklets, limiting their autonomy and operating range. Thus physics drove politics to the extremes of “ditch the rock now” or “keep the rock at all costs.”
The Mining Colony now comprised eight modules, plus an inflatable dome that was attached directly to the asteroid. The robots had spent several weeks welding a three-meter-diameter ring onto a circular groove that they had prepared on Amalthea’s surface. The inflatable had been mated to it about a hundred days ago, and filled with breathable atmosphere. It was not quite a shirtsleeves environment, since the asteroid was cold and chilled the air in the dome. And many of the robots’ normal operations produced gases that were toxic, or at least irritating. But that wasn’t the point of having a dome. The point was to recapture and reuse the gases used by the robots’ plasma torches, making it possible to excavate and reshape the asteroid much faster than had been possible in the early days, when all of those gases had leaked away into space. Since then Dinah’s complement of robots had been heavily reinforced by newer and better versions of the same basic models that had been shipped up from Earth. And Dinah herself was now managing a crew of twelve, working in shifts around the clock. They’d been expanding the tunnel she had carved into the asteroid long ago to protect her circuit boards from cosmic rays, making slow progress on hollowing out the asteroid, carrying bits of metal away to a bigger and better smelter that was turning them into steel. Since there was no real place for it in Izzy’s master plan, they’d been putting that steel to work in reinforcing Amalthea’s structural connection to Izzy, feeding back into the political argument again.