The Golden Globe

The answer was obvious, even when the destruction was going on, so nobody mentioned it, or if they did, they were sure no problems would be evident for thousands of years. The reality took less than fifty. Finally the mining companies were losing so many ships that something had to be done. They changed their mining practices, but that was far from enough.

Tailings, as defined on Old Earth, was that monstrous pile of crap you can see sitting beside the ore refineries in old photographs. Tailings was what you had left after you'd taken out what you were digging for. In gold and diamond mines, that could be 99.9% of what you dug up. But ugly as it was, on Earth, when you were through with a bucket of rock, the tailings just sat there, seldom harming anybody. The big deal was the air pollution produced by the refining process, or the contamination of water that ran off the pile of waste. At Uranus, and Neptune, things were different.

Don't imagine this mining was done by grizzled old desert rats leading space donkeys at the end of a rope, pickaxes in hand. You think mining, you visualize either that, or men with soot-blackened faces riding a cart down the shaft of a coal mine. The reality of mining back on Old Earth was usually different from that. There was strip mining, in which the topsoil and everything else was scraped away with bulldozers until the coal seam was reached. There was placer mining, which involved leveling fair-sized mountains with streams of high-pressure water. And there was open pit mining, which depended on blasting away entire cliffs of virgin rock. The easiest, quickest, cheapest way to mine the Uranian moons was by blasting. They used plastic for the smaller veins, mini-nukes for the major digging.

Because of the negligible surface gravity of even the largest moons, each of these explosions hurled thousands, millions of rocks into space. The rocks varied from no larger than a grain of sand up to some fairly hefty boulders. Up into the sky and... gone. They never fell back to the ground. Some ended up in orbit around one of the moons, others took up every variety of orbit around Uranus itself. The mining companies had no problem with this. Every chunk of useless rock that achieved escape velocity was a chunk of rock that wouldn't have to be shoved out of the way to get to the valuable ores. It just vanished into the blackness, and good riddance.

Actually, no. The stuff was gone, but far from forgotten.

A certain small percentage of debris achieved Uranus-escape velocity, and could more or less be ignored. An even smaller portion went solar-escape, and was even less of a worry. But the great bulk of all that junk took up orbits that crisscrossed the space lanes from every direction, and usually at an alarming relative speed. A grain of dust could leave a pit the size of your fist in the foam insulation that covered the hulls of most ships. Something the size of a pea could ruin your whole day, punching right through the thin skin and entering the life support or engine as a burst of blue-hot plasma. With luck, you might have time to patch and repair. Anything bigger than an apple might as well be an atomic bomb.

There were an estimated six hundred trillion apples in orbit around Uranus and its major moons. That sounds horrific until you realize the Uranian system is about fourteen quintillion cubic miles. That's one apple for each twenty-two thousand cubic miles—one heck of a lot of nothing, with a rock lurking somewhere. Which sounds great, until you realize that's a cube only twenty-eight miles on a side. Now add in the fact that most ships are themselves several miles long, quite a large target, and on approach and departure will pass through many millions of cubes that size. If that doesn't make you squirrelly, nothing will.

Not to worry. Sparky's on the job!

The Oberon Chamber of Commerce and Tourist Bureau claims that, left to itself, the situation would result in one major hit for every ten thousand trips. That figure is in great dispute, but it really doesn't matter, since the situation has not been left to itself. Each ship that enters this solar pinball field carries good radar and good lasers, and fries an average of six rocks on the trip in and out. Most of those would, of course, never have troubled the ship, but ship's captains hate tailings with a mighty passion. They never let one go.

This would actually be enough to reduce ship/tailings encounters to one every few decades. But it's not enough for the Oberoni, who hate tailings even more than captains do. For one thing, they are a hazard to the great structure of Oberon II. For another, they give the system a terrible black eye in the minds of the traveling public, one hit per decade or not. So the Great Wheel bristles with radars and lasers, which clear a thousand rocks an hour... or was that per second? Go look it up. It's a bunch.

And that's still not enough for the fifteen moons of the Uranian League: Oberon, Titania, Umbriel, Ariel, Miranda, Peasblossom, Cobweb, Mustardseed, Pyramus, Thisbe, Snug, Bottom, Flute, Snout, and Moth. (I once met a fellow who hailed from Bottom; he said his people called themselves Bottom-dwellers, but the neighbors, naturally, referred to them as Assholes. I always wondered what inhabitants of Snug and Snout were called.) The League aims to clean up the system in a few centuries, and their main weapon is a genengineered cyborg critter called a snark.

You're unlikely to see a snark during your trip to Uranus. Though they number in the billions, they're not very big and they cover a lot of space. (Spacers believe sighting one is very bad luck.) But they all look like lengths of pipe, ranging from a few feet long up to about fifty feet. They have gossamer "wings" that they spread to soak up solar radiation. They have radar eyes and a system that generates gas for propulsion: hydrogen + oxygen = bang! They survive on a meager diet of ice and rock, which they get by dipping into the rings. They are alive, semi-intelligent, self-reproducing, and their mission in life is to destroy tailings. They drift, ever-alert, conserving their strength by using their thrusters only at orbital points where it can be used most economically, like eagles soaring on a desert thermal. When they spot a rock, they vaporize it.

Like most perfect solutions, the snarks revealed a few problems not long after they were let loose. One toasted a group of seven spacedivers during the first month postrelease. A viral program had to be devised and broadcast on the wavelength they used to talk to one another, making sure they only attacked objects smaller than a basketball. Anything larger would be reported to human agencies which would track it down and dispose of it.

And a few decades after that they began showing up at Neptune, Saturn, Jupiter, all the related Trojan points, and the asteroid belt, where they were about as welcome as rabbits in Australia. But they did no real harm.

I mention all this for two reasons. One is that, during the fifth season, Sparky found an injured snark and nursed him back to health. B.J. the Snark became one of the most beloved members of the Gang, along with Toby the Dog, sometimes outselling Sparky in action-figure totals. Of course, B.J. had a friendly face—real snarks have nothing that looks like a face—and had no trouble flying around inside municipal pressure, which would have made a real snark helpless as a butterfly in a blender.

The other reason is to explain the glorious, continuous fireworks show surrounding Oberon II as my ship began her final approach. The black sky was alive with a thousand points of scintillating light, light that was all the colors of the spectrograph as the mostly sand-sized particles were vaporized, a