All in Good Time

by Mackey Chandler

  From the cargo hold hatch, the crane deployed again. Deloris could do that from the flight deck. Barak fitted the hook to an eyelet on top of the machine making sure the mouse was clipped all the way shut and stood well back.

  “Lift it very slowly and let me watch from the side to make sure the ship doesn’t tip,” Barak told her. The cable slowly got straight and the nearest landing jack did sink a half-centimeter or so before the machine started to lift at one end.

  “Whoa! It’s lifting on the front first. Tap it just a couple of centimeters at a time,” Barak requested. “I want to make sure it isn’t going to swing back and forth and tap the ship. It’ll be a really slow pendulum with such a long cable in such weak gravity.”

  When it lifted clear it did swing ponderously, but to the side not toward the ship.

  “It’s only swinging a couple of hundred millimeters and not toward the ship. I’d haul it up slow and when it gets higher the period will shorten and the energy bled off flexing the cable,” Barak said.

  They watched it rise until it was about three-quarters of the way to the open hatch.

  “I’m stopping right there for now,” Deloris informed them. “I can feel the top of the ship wiggling back and forth in time to it. If you guys want to come on up to the hold you can be waiting there to strap it to the deck when it settles down and I can run the boom in.”

  They pulled themselves up the take holds although the hold opening was easily in jumping range. If they missed they might fall back and foul their suits even worse.

  “So, how do I clean my suit?” Laja asked when they had the machine strapped down.

  “Command decision,” Deloris said before Barak could speak. “We will be returning to the Moon early. I know they have analyzed the soil here for resources, but I have no idea what hazards it has for toxic compounds. We have four one-size-doesn’t-fit-anybody emergency suits. You two can leave your dirty suits in the lock and put emergency suits on for our return. The next modification I’m going to request for future explorers is a lock that can be used as a decontamination booth to spray down somebody in a suit and flush the waste outside.

  “I won’t ask you to continue our planned stops wearing emergency suits. They’re for emergencies not normal duty and lack too many features. We have nothing critical to accomplish to make it worth risking any of us. Please think through how you will remove your suits to avoid getting contaminated touching the outside. If you get smeared beyond what can be cleaned with a couple of sani-wipes remove your suit liner and toss it back in the lock before you seal up too. We don’t need that stink inside the ship proper. I have no idea how long it would take the air system to get it all filtered out.”

  “Oh man, that stuff stinks worse than the ice ball did,” Barak complained. It was drying and caking up already in the warmth of the lock but still made their eyes water.

  “Next time, we sit for awhile and then flush the first fill of air out to get rid of the volatiles before we get out of our suits,” Barak vowed.

  “You probably wouldn’t know, but it smells like cat pee,” Laja told him.

  * * *

  Joel’s official residence was garish to a Spacer. It wasn’t anything like the lavish architecture and gilded furnishings for which French kings were famous. It was comparatively modest as befitting a modern democracy. There were still patterned carpets and drapes and free standing furniture that were alien to the compact way people lived on Home. Worse, there were all sorts of objects sitting out unsecured. Home was long past being able to move fast enough for knick-knacks to become missiles, but the custom endured.

  The junction of bulkheads and overheads on Home didn’t have fancy crown moldings and there wasn’t fancy millwork around ports and hatches. Even though it wasn’t fancy carved work with leaves and flowers to spacer eyes it was busy.

  The bedroom to which she was taken had something she’d never seen before, wallpaper. It was pale blue with texture and striped vertically with pink satin ribbons. The bed was so high she’d have to jump to get on it, and the shower absolutely dazzled her with a rainbow of metallic glass mosaics. It was all a bit much.

  April hadn’t brought a formal gown or fancy shoes along though she owned some. She was wearing a suit liner, the armored tunic that made the pressure suit an uncomfortably snug fit, and only had two casual outfits in her soft bag.

  After cleaning up, she put on chocolate brown slacks of synthetic wool with a gold and green embroidered side seam, darker matte slippers with thin socks, and a pale lemon blouse her tailors on Home made to her specs with just a slightly taller banded collar than usual. The blouse had a single stitch line of pale green near the edge of the collar and cuffs to avoid being dead plain. The color worked better than plain white as a background to the yellow gold and diamond necklace she had made on her Hawaiian visit.

  The blouse also had French cuffs to show off the most recent jewelry she’d received from her hosts, a pair of rectangular flat, gold cuff links capped with a dome sheltering a single brilliant cut diamond in each dome.

  April wore her hair Spacer short with just a little brushed up in front. She wore earrings inherited from her brother that had a triangular diamond to rival the cuff-links paired with a large emerald. The colored stones worked fine next to the lemon blouse and green accents. She rarely wore any of the jewelry alone, but the cuff links were only polite to wear since they were a gift of the French. The other items made sure they knew she wasn’t impoverished and overawed by their gift.

  She wore her spex and adjusted a new feature of this recent model, the ability to pick a lens tint and have it bleed in from the side leaving the center clear to see through. April looked in the mirror and adjusted them until the gold-tone speckles near the edge were a fair match for her jewelry.

  Her only weapon was an antique aikuchi stuck in her waistband, gifted to her by the media star Genji Akira. It just wasn’t possible to carry more as a gracious guest of France. In North America, she would have demanded more as her treaty right.

  Jeff came in and raised his eyebrows. April was dressed and ready to go to dinner early. It wasn’t like her.

  “The jewelry is kind of over the top. I know I don’t always get social things. Instruct me, please. What are you trying to say with it?”

  “We are very different societies already,” April said, frowning and trying to say it well. She was also aware their rooms were probably bugged. Jeff was probably too polite to leave behind little snoopers of his own, seeing it as a breach of their hospitality.

  “Being peers of Heather doesn’t mean much here. The few monarchs left are more national pets and vestiges of the past than actual rulers. The few who technically have a voice in politics use it with a great deal of caution, because it might lead to the final removal of what powers they still retain.

  “Being able to stand up in the Assembly and get a serious hearing from the other taxpayers of Home is a kind of influence they would understand, but I really doubt they have an understanding of the metrics other Homies apply to us.

  “Military power is also something to which they can relate, but they already know the ability to apply violence is a very crude tool. When everybody has the ability to destroy their enemies but dare not, then it’s useless for subtle work. They’ve seen we are willing to hit China and North America more than they would dare, but France and the other countries that don’t fancy themselves super-powers have no desire to shoot at us or make grandiose declarations of how we are pirates and outlaws. So we’re no danger to them that way because they don’t intend naked aggression.

  “Indeed, Broutin said Joel affectionately describes me as a little pirate!

  “We are relatively rich, thanks to you, but our companies publish no reports to stockholders and no public tax returns. They have no solid idea of how rich we are. Nevertheless, wealth is something they can understand across all the cultural and political spectrums and that is the message.

  “Wearing my best jewelry se
nds the best signal I know to take us seriously. This is the sort of jewelry only royalty wear on special occasions and it is regarded as a possession of the state, not their personal property. It’s returned and locked in the treasury or a museum after it is worn. Or the very rich such as video stars may wear similar pieces. Often they wear copies and the real ones are kept in secure storage.

  “They paid me a huge compliment to gift me with the cuff-links because it acknowledged I was the sort of person to own such things. To not wear them would be like not putting out the throw your favorite aunt knit for you when she comes to visit. But I don’t want them to think it’s the only nice thing I have. The whole ensemble is probably worth twenty or thirty million euromarks right now but I’ve deliberately avoided having them appraised. If anyone is ever so gauche as to ask their worth I can honestly say I don’t know, it doesn’t matter because they aren’t investments, and would never be for sale, they are to wear.”

  “Then… the plainer clothing is to not steal attention from them?” Jeff asked.

  “And it shows we live differently,” April agreed.

  “Maybe I should have some sort of ornament to establish my status,” Jeff mused.

  “You are so sweet. To many of the Earthies when we walk in with my hand on your elbow that’s exactly how they will regard me and how I present.”

  “You are not an accessory,” Jeff protested.

  “Thank you, but that does remain a very persistent aspect of Earth Think, and that’s one more reason why you are sweet. Now you need to get ready too.”

  * * *

  “I’m not going to send you back out until we modify the hold and the airlock on the Hringhorni,” Heather informed the crew first thing. “Mo had a devil of a time figuring out how to clean the French mill and the mess it left behind in the hold. If we had anywhere in pressure big enough to hold the Hringhorni we wouldn’t have wanted to contaminate that space with Ceres soils.

  “He finally came up with a pressurized cleaning tool that uses a spray head on the end of a wand. The design is used for washing down vehicles and large equipment quite often on Earth. It uses way too much water but it does work. The alternatives would be even more ridiculous in using consumables. In a vacuum, the spray goes straight to steam. In any sort of dense atmosphere, it will just be warm water.

  “It took sixty liters to get the hold flushed to vacuum in its present configuration because you have all sorts of pockets and corners. The spray comes right back at you just like a radar reflector. It blows half the dirt back where you just removed it. We are eliminating all those recesses, smoothing over everything, and redesigning the hatch itself so you don’t have places that trap and hold dirt. The inside of the hold will be as seamless and slick as we can make it. Control panels will be flat touch screens. Tie-down recesses will be round channels below deck level with radiuses at both ends and no sharp corners. Things like power outlets for standard plugs will be behind flush-fitting plates so you can flush everything from back to hatch easily.

  “We’ll be doing the same with the airlock. There will be recessed storage in each with a wand and flush controls for the temperature and flow rate. The hose will be long enough to allow suits to be sprayed clean outside the entry hatch if that is practical. The suit room will also have a separate pressure hatch so it will be separate from the rest of the storage on that deck. You’ll be getting a lot more water storage in the Hringhorni to cover any need to use the system.

  “This is exactly the sort of thing that made us hesitate to land on Titan or Europa. By the time we attempt atmospheric landings in environments that can contaminate the ship, we’ll have the systems we need to deal with it, one hopes.

  “I may have a Mars mission coming soon, but the Hringhorni would be flying overwatch protecting the Chariot. It isn’t built as a planetary lander.”

  Deloris was listening intently, waiting for some hint of censure for her decision to end the mission early, but there was nothing at all. She certainly wasn’t going to engage in self criticism if Heather was happy.

  “How long will the Hringhorni be out of service?” Deloris asked her.

  “The fabricators decided it was easier to split the ship between the airlock deck and the hold. They’ll have much easier access to make major changes. A lot of things are still waiting on minor details. They are designing and fabbing models of things like the flush plates and lock controls, and then after they test them for release from suit remotes and for a functional seal with the new washer they can then integrate them into the new deck design. If they test well, some of the test components may see actual use. The larger structural pieces will take more than a day to print and cure. They told me to expect about two weeks out of service.

  “If you two wish to join Kurt and Alice on recreational leave that’s fine. If you want to stay on active duty and take assignments locally we can always find plenty for you to do. I read your report and it was factual and sufficiently detailed, but rather dry. If your mission was too short to make an evaluation of the apprentice I can understand that. If not I’d like some indication, no matter how tentative, as to her suitability.”

  “The apprentice showed maturity beyond my expectations,” Deloris said. “We revealed a lot of personal work history and she made perceptive, but not critical, extrapolations of how that would affect our command style and integration with others. She seemed to me to be sixteen going on thirty for social maturity. She stayed polite and helpful on EV when I’d have been laughing at Barak and cracking jokes instead of being solicitous and concerned for his well being.”

  Barak had wisely remained silent but Heather was pointedly staring at him. “I didn’t cover myself with a lot of glory on EV,” he admitted. “I think Laja wants to go out there,” he said, giving a wave at the overhead and by implication far beyond, “bad enough to put up with a whole lot of crap.”

  “Well, in all fairness we should endeavor to avoid testing her limits on that, don’t you think?” Heather suggested.

  “Sounds like a good program to me,” Barak agreed.

  * * *

  “Does it really have to be this complicated?” Alice asked.

  “It does if you don’t have that big factory you were talking about and trucks delivering exactly what materials you need all made to the size you need,” Vic assured her. “We were spoiled by having cheap miniature batteries you could just throw away casually when they wore out. We saw some for sale in Nevada and they aren’t cheap anymore. They wanted four times what we paid pre-Day.”

  Alice had seen him cut the stainless screen and prepare the rebar and charcoal so she had some idea what he meant about the labor in materials. He’d called her back to see him assemble the last cell and activate them.

  There was a line along the kitchen counter of quart jars with a roll of cardboard inside each. A roll of small opening stainless poultry wire held a charcoal electrode and a length of rebar sanded clean inside a paper separator. Small nuts and bolts served to connect wires to the wire cloth and rebar electrodes, all hooked up in series to boost the voltage.

  The chicken wire was bent over the top lip to hold it to the top part of the jar. The iron rod hung on a wood crossbar almost to the bottom. After he demonstrated assembling the last cell he poured saltwater in each jar until it touched the bottom of the charcoal electrode and would be wicked up into it. The center electrode hanging lower was immersed.

  Vic couldn’t find his multimeter. He was sure he had one somewhere from before The Day to check outlets. The LED Christmas light he’d cut off a rope of them started to glow within about thirty seconds after adding electrolyte, so he was getting something.

  “What actually makes it work?” Alice demanded.

  “That is one of those questions that you need to know a whole lot of other things to understand. You might as well ask me how my truck worked back when I could still buy gasoline. You do realize it has hundreds of parts all working together to make it go and can’t be explained v
ery simply?”

  “Yeah, but the simple version is it burns up gas to get the energy to move. I can’t see where these get the power to make electricity. I know there are generators people used to use when the power went out that burned gas too. But these don’t burn anything.”

  “In a way they do,” Vic said, “the iron rod will combine with oxygen from the air just like gas combines with air. Eventually, it will be eaten away and I’ll have to replace it. It just isn’t an open flame and it won’t happen fast enough to make it noticeably hot. If you want to understand this kind of stuff we can give you lessons in chemistry. At least the simple sort of chemistry I know and have a couple of books about that you can study.”

  “Maybe, show me the books and I’ll look at them a little myself. I never thought about how they worked when I could just get in the kitchen drawer and get a fresh battery from a whole box of them,” Alice admitted.

  The little LED seemed much brighter now. Vic took it off the output lines and attached two binder clips pressed into service since he didn’t have any alligator clips. They were wired to a charger cord cut off its wall plug. A big smile spread on his face when the tablet screen showed a battery icon and swirling circle to show it was charging.

  “I think another solar charger would be easier,” Alice told him.

  “Yes it would,” Vic agreed, “but it’s too late in the season to have Cal drop one to us, and you might be surprised how much the one we have already cost us.”

  Alice looked at him with an unguarded face that said she didn’t know whether to speak or not. After a thoughtful pause, she decided to risk it.

  “We passed several solar chargers you could have had for free,” Alice told him.

  Vic was completely stumped about what she was talking about. He said nothing but it was obvious he had no idea how that could be.

  “We passed several highway warning signs that light up at night with little flashing lights when a car approaches. The solar cells and a battery are up on a pole turned to the south. All you need to harvest them is a hacksaw. It’s not like anybody is going to come along and wreck now because it didn’t warn them of a curve or steep downhill is it?” Alice asked.