“So Izzy is going to lose water,” Dinah said, “which is a scarce and valuable resource.”
“It’ll never be missed,” Rhys said blithely. “This isn’t the old days. Now that those people have made that announcement, rockets will be coming up here thick and fast.”
“Still, what Sean wants me to do is an Arjuna Expeditions project. A commercial thing. A private thing. And that water is a shared—”
“Dinah.”
“Yes?”
“Snap out of it, love.”
A long silence followed, concluded by a big sigh from Dinah. “Okay.” Rhys was right. Everything was different now.
“Now, what is it he wants, and how does ice enter into it?”
Her mild annoyance at his curiosity finally gave way. Maybe he could help. She turned her head toward the window and nodded at the familiar bulk of Amalthea, a few meters away. “That’s been my career, and my family’s career,” she said. “Working with minerals. Hard rock. Metallic ore. All of the robots are optimized for crawling around on a big piece of iron. They use magnets to stick to it. Their tools use plasma arcs or abrasive wheels to work it. Now, Sean’s basically telling me to shelve all of that. The future is ice, he says. That’s all he wants to hear about. All he wants me to work on.”
“There’s lots of it on Earth,” Rhys pointed out, “but you never think of it as a mineral.”
She nodded. “It’s an annoyance you have to clear out of the way.”
“Your colleagues down on the ground? Also working on ice?”
“Judging from email traffic, this is a company-wide directive,” she said. “They’re buying ice by the truckload, dropping it on the floor of the lab, refrigerating the building—fortunately it’s winter in Seattle; they only need to drop the temperature a few degrees. They’re all buying long underwear at REI so that they can work in a refrigerator.”
“What’s it like working for Mr. Freeze?”
“I was going to say the Penguin,” Dinah said, “but people in Seattle don’t carry umbrellas.”
“Nor do they wear top hats, in my experience. No, it’s definitely a Mr. Freeze scenario.”
“Anyway,” Dinah said, “yesterday’s shipment of vitamins contained a few of these.”
She opened a storage cubby next to her workstation and took out a bag made of the metallic gray plastic used to protect sensitive electronics from static electricity. Taped to it was a NASA business card.
“Nice to have friends in high places,” Rhys remarked. He had noticed the name on the card: Scott “Sparky” Spalding, the NASA administrator.
Dinah smiled. “Or low, as the case may be.”
It was a weak joke. Rhys didn’t respond. Dinah felt her face get a little warm. Not so much because of the failed attempt at humor as out of a kind of political defensiveness. “Scott told me a couple of weeks ago that he wouldn’t ditch me out. That he had my back.”
“What does that mean exactly?”
“That the robot work would keep going. That I would have a job. I didn’t believe him. But I guess he’s been talking to Sean Probst. Because Sean FedExed these to Sparky a couple of days ago, and now they’re here.”
She parted the bag’s ziplock closure, inserted her thumb and index finger, and pulled out a contraption about the size of a grain of rice. From a distance it looked like a photovoltaic cell, just a flake of silicon, but with a few tiny appendages.
“What are the dangly bits?” Rhys wanted to know.
“A locomotion system.”
“Legs?”
“This one happens to have legs. Others have things like little tank treads, or rolling cylinders, or slammers.”
“Slammers? Is that a technical term?”
“A mining thing. A way of moving heavy equipment around on the ground. I’ll show you later.”
“So,” Rhys said, “it would appear that the agenda is to evaluate a number of different ways that robots could crawl around on ice without drifting off and getting lost.”
“Yeah. Apparently all of these work, more or less, on the ground in Seattle. I’m supposed to evaluate their performance in space.”
“Well!” Rhys said. “How fortunate for you, then, that—”
“That I have my very own chunk of ice. Yeah. Thanks for that.”
“All the sweeter for being contraband?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.
The double meaning was clear enough. “Not as romantic as a dozen roses,” she countered.
“Still,” he said, “what is it that a man is trying to say with a dozen roses? Simply that he is thinking of you.”
Shortly after she’d arrived on Izzy she had rigged up a curtain that she could draw across the opening of her shop’s hatch. It wasn’t much—just a blanket—but it shielded her visually when she wanted to take a nap in her shop, and it sent the message that she was not to be disturbed, at least without knocking first. She reached up now and drew the curtain across the hatchway. Then she turned back toward Rhys, who looked very keen, and very ready.
“How’s your space sickness?” she asked. “You seem a little more, uh, sprightly.”