Free Mining the Oort by Frederik Pohl

stop—though of a markedly different kind—and it was prospering therefrom.

15
     
     
    Getting to Earth was a blast for Dekker DeWoe, all of it. It was a dream come true.
    First there was the little Skyhook capsule screaming up the cable from the Martian surface to the transfer point, with all of Sunpoint City falling away beneath him and his heart dragged down into his belly with the acceleration—but buoyant, too, because he was on his way . Then there was the ship itself and the private cubicle they had given to him for his own—no bigger than a bathtub, maybe, but on a spaceship , with all the wonders that that entailed to thrill the heart of a quite mature twelve-year-old. No! Earth years, now! A twenty-year-old.
    Just to make it more exciting still there was even a solar flare alarm eleven days out. A solar prominence erupted, and its violent outpouring of particles radiated out from the Sun, which meant that everybody was stuck in the shielded core chamber for twenty-two hours until the ruddy loop of the prominence collapsed back on itself and the solar radiation died back down. The experience wasn't dangerous, really, but it was certainly something to tell Tinker's grandson and the other kids back in Sagdayev—if he ever got back to Sagdayev, and if, whenever that might be, the kids were still kids.
    Of course, Dekker himself wasn't really a kid anymore. But even a young adult like Dekker DeWoe could feel a special tingling in his heart when he was getting into a spaceship for the hundred-million-kilometer flight to Earth. By any standards at all, that was really special.
    But it took twenty-some days to traverse those hundred million kilometers, and with nowhere to go inside the ship and only the same eighteen people, passengers and crew, to talk to, the experience got old pretty fast.
    Being on Earth, though—that was something else entirely.
    Once Dekker had come down the vastly bigger Skyhook and first stood on Earthie soil, it didn't take him long to realize just how different it was. It was not going to be all fun. Earth hurt , hurt his bones at every step with its cruel pull. Earth was dirty . Earth was hostile—or the people were; or so it seemed to a skinny Martian kid who couldn't run or jump very well, and had a loser for a father besides. All the advice and warnings, all the calcium milkshakes and polysteroid injections, all the shipboard indoctrination hadn't prepared Dekker for the many ways in which Earth was nastier than Mars, but the thing he was least prepared for of all was Dad.
     
    Dekker limped out of the customs hall at the base of the Nairobi Skyhook, pulling his wheeled duffel bag behind him like a puppy on a leash, he looked for his father, but didn't see him. Instead, he saw a stooped, slow-moving old man hobbling toward him, and knew before the man spoke—but only half a second before—that this wreck of a man was indeed Boldon DeWoe.
    The man stopped to regard Dekker, half a meter away. When Dekker looked at him closely he could tell that the man had been a Martian once, because he had the slender, stretched Martian physique. But now he was bent almost to Earthie height, and he was leaning on a thick cane, besides. He did not look well. His shoulders were hunched forward, but his head was bent back and his chin thrust out as he squinted at his son. They didn't kiss, hug, or even shake hands. Boldon DeWoe nodded, as though he were getting just what he had expected and hadn't expected very much, and said, "Well. You're here. What's the matter with your ear?"
    Dekker saw no reason to go into the complicated story of the hydrogen leak on the dirigible and the pain of the transplant. He just said, "Frostbite."
    His father didn't comment on that. "That's all the baggage you've got?" he said. "Then come on. We've got a train to catch." He was turning away to limp down the ramp before he thought to add, over his shoulder, "Son."
    Dekker followed, moving not very much more quickly than