Mining the Oort
by By Pohl, Frederik
Category: Fiction , Science Fiction , General

Mars was harsh, arid, and unforgiving, but for Dekker DeWoe and thousands of others, it was home. And the future of the colony was as bright as the giant comet that hung in the Martian sky, a symbol of the red planet's coming rebirth. For out beyond the orbit of Pluto, in the swarm of comets called the Oort Cloud, miners were harnessing the vast potential locked in those icy bodies - and setting them on a long journey to Mars, where they would be used to bring water, air, and life to the barren colony.Dekker longed to become an Oort miner like his father before him. And so he worked for years to earn the expensive passage to Earth, the only place where comet miners were trained. But when Dekker finally arrived at the Mars Project's Colorado center, he discovered that he might be too late: The growing anxiety of the Project's backers and competition from orbital farm habitats were threatening to shut down the Oort miners.Dekker was not prepared for the dual pressures of culture shock and the looming loss of his dream. Only the docility and nonviolence of his Martian upbringing helped him to control his growing frustration. Then he began to hear rumors of a plan to force restoration of the Mars Project, and when a suddenly accelerated training schedule promised to get Dekker back to space, his hopes for the future rose. What he could not know was that the rumored plan would place him in an impossible dilemma - for its success meant the deaths of millions, and failure meant the death of his beloved Mars ...