Bull and Young-gai are having dinner. Bull looks a lot better now, the shabby jumpsuit has been replaced with an expensive shirt and slacks. Young-gai looks a lot better, too. She's taken time to enhance her makeup, hair, and now is wearing an evening outfit. Bull is talking, Young-gai is eating.
"Deep Spacers all have their hobbies," Bull said, “Some are pretty strange, but almost all are tolerated because ... " switching to an old farmer accent, “How else are ya gonna keep us off the farm?
"Legend has it that more than one deep spacer is a serial killer, but if he or she is a million miles from another person, who cares? We spend years in space, we spend days on a transfer satellite, then we spend years in space again. That is, if we come back. Deep spacing may be the dullest thing mankind does, but it's not the safest. Those of us who are old deep spacers get treated pretty well, as long as it's clear we're going back out again soon, or that we've saved up a big bankroll."
Bull leaned forward and said quietly, “But there's nothing sorrier than a deep spacer who's lost his nerve and his bankroll."
Young-gai nodded, and kept enjoying her meal.
"Anyway, one of my hobbies is finding the Honeycomb Comet. What is the Honeycomb Comet you may ask?"
"I'll ask," She said between gulps.
"Well, it's what I call the mother of those rare honeycomb meteors that have been found a couple times now."
"Honeycomb meteor? Never heard of it."
"There aren't many, and they're considered a minor curiosity by everyone else who knows about them. Most people think of meteors as solid rock or solid metal. Well that's not completely true. Now that we can catch meteors before they hit the Earth's atmosphere, we're finding more variety, and that makes them good prospecting tools.
"Meteors are chips off of something bigger. If you find a meteor with lots of lithium, for instance, it came from a lithium rich asteroid. Backtrack its orbit to the point it was blasted away from the asteroid, then run time forward with your best guess at the asteroid's trajectory, and you find the asteroid. Jonas 4 was found that way, Jonas was one hot prospector, and lucky too ... but then any rich and alive deep spacer is lucky.
"Now to do this hot-prospect-asteroid finding right, you need to find a couple fragments that came flying from the same asteroid, and that got blasted off at the same time--preferably recently. You track their orbits carefully, mix in a whole lot of computing power, provided by Trajectory Central, for a price, and Voila!, a location and vector for the mother asteroid comes out."
"It's as easy as that?"
"Well, the location is a probability spheroid, and if your data is fuzzy, or the collision is old, or something deflected one of the meteors, or they came from different collisions, the spheroid can extend from Jupiter to Mars, and you’ve spent a lot of computer power and cash for not much help.
"Bummer."
"Looking too long for answers from the TC has bankrupted more than one deep spacer. We all keep our fingers crossed, and we keep close tabs on how well it's going so we know when to cut bait.
"However, I feel real good about what I've got. There have been three recorded honeycomb meteors. Honeycomb is very light weight meteor. Those exominerologists who have bothered to look at one say it's just a pumice or volcanic foam from a proto-volcano on some proto-asteroid, so they're interested in it, but not excited about it. I look at the honeycomb and I see a cheap, lightweight construction material. If these meteors are coming from a honeycomb planetoid, it would be a mountain of the cheapest, strongest construction material available in deep space. Any of the Belter construction companies would be very interested in the find.”
Bull leaned over again. “But even more important to me, I've looked at the honeycomb carefully. It's more like bone than foam, Young-gai. Besides, how are you going to get rock to foam without gas being rapidly depressurized? And depressuring gas means gravity, planetary-size gravity, not asteroid-size. No, the Honeycomb is a genuine mystery, and I aim to solve it.”
Bull leaned even closer. “Young-gai, there are two unrecorded finds of honeycomb. I found them! That's my secret, and I got good trajectories on them. The way I figure it, anyone lucky enough to find two honeycombs is lucky enough to find the Honeycomb Comet. I call it a comet because my preliminary extrapolations put it out in the Kuiper Belt. And that's why I’m going there."
"You've got only two trajectories?"
"Three. A friend of mine who knows about this hobby of mine just found another. He didn't bother to collect it, but he sent me some careful trajectory measurements."
"So now you're burning up the seconds on Trajectory Central?"
"Even as we speak."
A shadow came over Young-gai's face. "So, you're asking me to sign up for a six year voyage to the Kuiper Belt to help you with your hobby? Which is to find a strange comet that may or may not exist?"
"Six or seven years, yeah. This is no space tanker run, Young-gai, this is real deep spacing. It may be for you, it may not."
"How come you're telling me about this ... secret comet?"
Bull looked confused for a second, “Secret comet? Oh ... the Honeycomb! Remember, I said this was a small community. Everyone here knows about my hobby, it's no secret, they're just not interested. Everyone has their hobbies, Van Cleeve is into watching girl-on-girl wrestling, and he sincerely believes there are Dark Ones waiting for us beyond Pluto. That's one reason I can't take him on this expedition. He's a good deep spacer, but he does have his peculiarities.
"Richards loves horses, and he's trying to bring back Voyager 10. Van Cleeve thinks that's a great idea so the Dark Ones can't find us. Richards knows Van Cleeve is playing with a short deck upstairs, so he won't ask Van Cleeve for help. ... We all have our hobbies.
"No one thinks much will come of any of them. Hobbies are tolerated. I'm back from my seventh run, I've been modest in my port spending and lucky in my prospecting. Searching for the Honeycomb is a hobby I can now afford. That's what everyone thinks. Everyone knows I'm outfitting for it. In fact, I’ve invested heavily in getting this constant acceleration drive technology developed so that getting to the Kuiper Belt becomes feasible. The drive supports my hobby, and the company developing it should be a good investment in the long run. People know these things about me, that's why it's not a secret comet.
"No, I'm not trusting you with any deep secrets, yet. We work together awhile before that happens, if ever."
"If ever?"
Bill looked at Young-gai, “We don't have many secrets up here, Young-gai, but those we do have are dearly kept. We may trade some at some later date, we may never feel that close. We'll see.
"In the meantime, that's about all there is to say about this Honeycomb expedition. We'll be out there searching, and we may come back by way of Pluto. Does this still sound like your cup of tea?"
"Pluto?"
"Yeah, there hasn't been a manned expedition there in twenty years. I should get a fair chunk of change from the government for a manned Pluto expedition. This may be a hobby, but that doesn't keep it from being a paying hobby."
"Isn't it out of the way?"
"That, my dear, will depend on what Trajectory Central comes up with, but when you're that far out, the gravity well is essentially flat and orbits are really slow, so it's simply a matter of point-to-point distance. There's nothing complicated about the math. If it's on the way, we stop by, if not, we don't."
"When do we find out anything?"
"TC will have a first pass tomorrow morning. In the meantime, would you like a tour of the ship?”
“Sounds good.”
Bull and Young-gai tour the ship, the Blue Yonder. He introduces Honey, the ship’s computer, and shows her the control room, the workshops, and labs. They peer into the cargo area, but don’t go to the bother of suiting up to go in it. Instead, through the monitors in the control room, they see stored there the various un-manned probes, the legged, crew-carrying walkers that can crawl on a planetoid surface, and the jetted rovers that can shuttle the walkers between ship and planetoid.
As they tour, Bull talks.
“This is no space yacht, Young-gai, but it is designed to be comfortable for long journeys. It’s a prototype, the company I invested in is making more of these constant acceleration ships for commercial application. This one is shaken out, it’s broken several speed records going between different places here in the Belt, so it’s not going to surprise me with an unexpected breakdown on a journey well beyond mankind’s usual stomping grounds. I don’t need surprises out there... not from my ship, anyway. Do I, Honey?”
“No you don’t,” agrees Honey from one of the speakers in the control room.
Finally, he shows her the galley and the exercise room with its cleaning booth and his virtual reality suit in it.
“We’ll fit your suit in here, if you’ve got one. If not, I’ll get you one. You pick, I’ll buy, my treat.”
Having said that, Bull stops and faces Young-gai, when he has her full attention, he pops the question.
“So, are you in?"
Her answer surprises him. It’s a question, not a “Sure!”
"Why did you pick me, Bull?"
Bull grins, “Easy. Like you, I did some research. You're the best available crew mate who might take the challenge. Everyone one else here has a place in the planetary system. We're about to take a step beyond, to the edge of the solar system itself. That calls for someone new. Is it you?"
Bull smiles.
Young-gai smiles at first, but it quickly turns to a frown of sadness, “It's not me," She shakes her head, “It's too far. It's too long. But thank you very much for honoring me with this offer."
It takes Bull a moment to answer, but he finally smiles and says, "Suit yourself."
He takes her back to the bar. As they walk he says, “Young-gai, what I said about secrets is not quite true. People know I'm going, but they don't know how much information I'm sending to TC. You can talk all you want about our evening, and I'll try to help you get on with Richards, but please don't mention my Honeycombs, OK?"
"OK." She smiled, “Those are our secret."
They finished the walk with little else to say.
At the bar entrance they said good bye and Bull went over to the bar after she left. Without a word, Ivan poured him a fine Australian Muscat.
"I take it she never heard about my second hobby." Said Bull.
"Not from me, she didn't," Said Ivan.
"Smart, resourceful girl. Too smart for deep spacing, she'll be headed back to Earth in a couple weeks."
"Well, there's lots of fish in the sea."
"Which is a long way from here. No, it's just another deep spacer fantasy--having an attractive partner on a long voyage."
"Keep trying, you'll get lucky one of these days. Personally, I really thought she might have been the one."
"Yeah ... " Bull finished his drink, “Well, there's an expedition to plan. Catcha later, Ivan."
And thus it was that Bull Burnmeshorts did not have a codiscoverer of the Honeycomb Comet.