After looking around to see if anyone else was dying to learn the steward’s job, Kibi sighed and dragged her feet to the lift, pulled on a space suit with a slight pout on her face, and stepped cautiously onto the metallic surface of fragment five-three-three. After several slow, deep breaths, the shaking in her legs finally relaxed.
The smooth landing site, not much bigger than the little ship, was surrounded by dark metal shapes, some low and easy to walk upon, others thrusting skyward with jagged points towering hundreds of meters above the ship.
Just then, Kibi happened to tilt her head back far enough to see the black sky. The countless points of light wheeling above quickly made her head spin, and a heartbeat later she fell over sideways.
To her surprise, she floated to the ground in slow motion and landed like a feather.
Those watching from the ship frowned with worry for a moment, until they heard through the intercom, “I’m not going to puke . . . I’m not going to puke
. . .”
After Kibi slowly picked herself up, the first step she took away from the ship propelled her nearly four meters, ending at a jumble of metallic crystals just outside the landing area. “Uff!”
“You okay, Kibi?” Sata asked.
“Um . . . yeah. Just need a few more minutes to get used to the place. No one comes out until I say so.”
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Inside the ship, several eyebrows were raised at their steward’s newfound strength of will.
“It seems to be pretty safe since it’s almost impossible to fall hard,” Kibi reported. “Just don’t look at the swirling sky unless you’ve got an iron stomach!”
Ilika smiled. “The micro-gravity does create one danger. It’s possible to climb one of the spikes, then jump so high you’d achieve escape velocity and float off into space.”
Boro frowned. “And because this thing is tumbling, the first asteroid you’d come to would smack you hard!”
“Fatally hard,” Ilika added. “I think Rini might have been tempted to try that . . .”
“Not
anymore!”
“Good,” Mati said with a tender look in her eyes.
Rini grinned at her.
Ilika gave the couple a moment before speaking. “We’ll explore our little Meat Grinder in pairs. Mati and Sata, Kibi and Boro, and I’ll keep Rini from floating away.”
Everyone laughed, then headed for the lower deck.
“I can walk!” Mati nearly screamed.
Ilika had insisted she leave her crutch behind in the ship. Now she knew why. It had taken a few steps to get used to the micro-gravity, but Mati soon discovered that the pressure on her right leg was below the pain threshold, and she could actually walk with both legs.
“This is so wonderful, Sata! I don’t care about jumping and floating and stuff, I just wanna walk around the landing site, so if I die before I get to Satamia Star Station, I’ll know what it’s like.”
The navigator smiled through her face plate, crouched down, and sprang upward. “Wee!” She ascended to about twenty meters, then floated down slowly.
Mati laughed, and kept on slowly walking.
Ilika, watching from a hundred meters up one of the metallic spikes,
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smiled.
“She’s gonna have fun once her knee’s fixed,” Rini said from eight meters higher up. “You coming?”
Ilika bent at the knees, then sprang right over Rini, landing near the cave entrance.
Rini laughed, and bounded to join his captain.
With bracelet lights shining, they crept into the darkness, finding an irregular tunnel about three meters across slowly tapering as it pierced deeper into the asteroid. From all sides, crystals of many colors jutted into the passage, sometimes half a meter in length.
Rini looked all around. “So pretty! Can we take one for our display containers?”
“Crystals grow very slowly, taking thousands, maybe millions of years to get to this size. If every ship took one, they’d be gone already.”
Rini frowned and nodded.
“But I see some broken pieces on the floor,” Ilika continued, “that would go nicely in our containers.”
Rini grinned and began to look around.
When Rini and Ilika returned to the landing site, Mati was still walking, almost skipping, while humming little tunes, mostly off-key. Sata was near, sometimes walking with her friend, sometimes jumping up to the top of the ship or one of the nearby jumbles.
Just then Boro and Kibi appeared over a rise.
Sata landed near Mati. “Didn’t you guys go off in the other direction?”
Kibi snickered. “Yeah.”
“We just walked around the world!” Boro announced proudly. “And I found a little piece of asteroid metal for the display containers.”
Rini arrived and pulled out three small broken crystals: deep blue, fiery red, and bright purple.
“Fantastic!” Kibi said with a grin.
The three crystals seemed to glow when placed in the display container in front of the dark metal of the asteroid. Memories now peeked out of five
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containers, most of them natural objects, from stardust to feathers. Only the display for Sonmatia Two held objects made by hand.
At dinner, Kibi talked about her initial discomfort with the asteroid, and Ilika nodded his understanding. Then he invited her to climb to the highest point with him. Her eyes nearly smoked for a moment, then softened as she agreed.
Mati declared her intention to walk all the way around the asteroid, and Rini asked if he could come. Boro and Sata planned to peek in the cave, then climb the second-tallest metallic spike.
A few hours later, after the last pair came in the airlock, the entire ship was soon very quiet with six exhausted explorers collapsed on their beds.
Manessa lowered the temperature a bit as Kibi had programmed any time they were asleep, monitored all systems for anything unusual, and watched the stars turn overhead.
Deep Learning Notes
An asteroid would have “micro-gravity,” much less than the one-sixth gravity our astronauts experienced on the moon (1969-1975). “Micro” is the Greek word for “small” and does not imply any exact amount, unless it is used with metric system units where it means one-millionth.
“Escape velocity” is the relative speed an object needs to escape the gravity of any body in space without using thrust. On Earth, it is about 11 km/sec or 7
miles/sec. If an asteroid had 1/5000 the gravity of the Earth, a person could literally walk (8 kph, 5 mph) into escape velocity. Luckily, the Meat Grinder had about 1/1000 the Earth’s gravity, so it wasn’t quite so dangerous.
The ethics of souvenir collecting is always relative to the number of visitors and the supply of souvenirs, and usually attempts to achieve sustainability.
Which is more sustainable, and why: taking pine cones in a forest, or taking crystals in a cave?
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