Tears of Selene

by Bill Patterson

  Fewer than two hundred were from the Collins, but were nearly useless for any sort of work. Their Moon diet lacked certain micronutrients, and by the end of their fourth year of exile, most of the crew suffered from several deficiency diseases. Recovery took weeks, and the more complete diet aboard the Perseus helped.

  The other two hundred were the sleeping crew of the Mars Expedition, awake just a couple of months shy of five years spent in hibernation. The awake crew, all twelve of them, were nearly worn out from five years of unending toil just capturing the comet and asteroid and flying them back home.

  Mickey finally floated out of his hammock and stowed it. He looked at Ragesh who was shaking his head at him.

  “Still, screw around for a month in zero G, and all the workouts just vanish,” said Ragesh. “Word's out that Standish is looking for you. I thought to myself, if I were Mickey, where would I be? I wandered up here and poked around where the antennas used to be, and voila—a hammock.”

  Mickey grumbled good-naturedly. He and Ragesh had spent years working on this huge blob of once molten metal. That kind of grinding pressure produced either mortal enemies or a friendship closer than twins.

  “Thanks for the warning. After all we've been through, I don't need to be today's object lesson. Let's go see what Standish wants.”

  “Bet it's about The Question,” said Ragesh, heading for the common catwalk that ran the length of the central axis.

  ###

  Mickey smiled as he pulled on the rails lining the helical slide. It was a tricky thing, sliding down the five hundred meters from the center of the Perseus to the inner surface of the outside shell. There were other ways to get down to the inner surface, such as an elevator, and a knotted ring of woven fiberglass rope passing through a pair of pulleys, but where was the fun in that? Everyone took The Helix—some crew took elevator rides to the central axis on the flimsiest excuse just so they could ride The Helix down.

  The Question, thought Mickey, as the incline of sheet steel slanted steeply into the first hundred meter drop. Who goes back to Earth, and who stays? The natural fiber pad warmed underneath him as the slope gradually flattened out and its radius of curvature widened.

  He grabbed onto the pad loops and ensured his feet were set on the leading loops. Can't have the pad rip away from under me. Tosi, one of the sleepers, still has raw patches from his ride. Centrifugal force pressed him up the side wall as the g-forces built up to twice Earth’s normal. The pad's really getting hot from the friction. One of these days, I'm going to regret using this hell ride.

  Gradually, though, friction slowed them down, and the last twenty meters turned into a flat runout track. Mickey picked up the pad and dropped it on the stack next to the elevator back up to the central axis. The next time he went up, he usually grabbed a couple of pads and returned them to the launch point.

  Still doesn't solve The Question, but at least I'm back on the ground. Or what passes for ground hereabouts.

  Ragesh was a few meters away, waiting. Mickey rejoined him.

  “The Question, eh?” asked Mickey. “So, what are you going to do?”

  Ragesh looked at Mickey and snorted. “Same thing you're going to do, head home. On the second ship, of course, not the first. And don't give me any crap about those ERVs from the Chaffee. They had twenty years for test and retest tasks. That first one's going out as soon as it will hold pressure and the tiles keep it from burning up. McCrary's wife must be some number—I can feel him itching to get home something awful. If he didn't have to wait here, he'd already be rebuilding the water system in his hometown, or realigning the roads, or something like that.”

  Mickey snorted. “Have you ever met the man? No? You're lucky. He caught me on the axis once. I was floating by the radio console, headphones on, spaceman's crouch, had a few light tethers on so I didn't hit switches.”

  “Let me guess, volume up, lights down, eyes closed,” said Ragesh.

  “Yeah. I woke up to see his ugly mug about five centimeters from my own. He had one of those air horns in his hand, but didn't blast it.” Mickey's ears turned a light pink. “'Wake up,' he said, in the quietest, most dangerous voice I'd ever heard. 'If your hearing wasn't so important, I'd have set this thing off.' He was looking for Commander Smithson, but knew better than to ask me.” Mickey rubbed his neck at the memory.

  Ragesh chuckled. “Thanks for the warning. I guess I'll have to set alarms or something.”

  “I did. He disabled them somehow. Never slept on watch again. No wonder the engineers under him are so sharp.” Mickey started walking towards the ground-based command huts. “But that's not the most important thing about McCrary. He's going down in the first one, true. You know he'll inspect the hell out of that one. He's also going to inspect the hell out of all four. He doesn't want to make it this far, then have some of the people he's worked with for so long die over an engineering failure.”

  “But—” started Ragesh.

  “No buts, Ragesh. If McCrary designs it and builds it, you can bet he's going over it with a fine-toothed comb. He wants no accidents.”

  “So, are you going?” asked Ragesh.

  “That's a good question,” said Mickey.

  Purpose

  Aboard Perseus, High Earth Orbit, April 24 2087, 2052 GMT

  McCrary didn't even have to think about the question. His entire purpose in life since he woke up inside a dented ShelterCan in a Lunar cave was to get himself and as many of his fellow crewmates as he could safely back to Earth. The temporary oasis called Perseus could not sway him from that mission, as much as some of the Moondogs and Expedition members would like nothing more than to rest amidst the green fields that arced up and over his head.

  But his might be a minority position at the moment. Both crews, with the exception of the sleepers from the Mars Expedition, had been through five years of unceasing toil, danger, radiation, and privation. Their lives hung from a thread ever since that dark day in June of 2082, when the Moon exploded. Now, they dwelt in an almost magical land, safe from almost anything that could cause them harm. Safe behind fifty meters of solid nickel iron, they went from the very real threat of explosive decompression at any moment to a nirvana where they were actually safer inside the Perseus than any person on the surface of the Earth. Fist-sized meteors that could kill you on Earth just could not breach the Perseus.

  No wonder the crews wanted to rest here. McCrary found himself sitting down rather more often than he had on the Moon, but he blamed the increased gravity on board the Perseus. Right now, he was resting on a knob of iron left over from the original melt that turned an iron-nickel asteroid into this cocoon in orbit around the Earth.

  McCrary felt the pull of this particular siren. To rest, to sleep, to throw off the burdens they’d shouldered just to survive ever since The Event. If he let it continue for too long, they might never rouse themselves to complete the final leg of their trip back to Earth.

  For Montgomery Scott McCrary, that was intolerable. He missed Lynn with an aching he kept well hidden from the rest of the crew. She inhabited his dreams, and her video messages when he was Chief Engineer on the Moon only sharpened his drive to see her again. To the rest of the astronauts, he might seem a cold, mission-driven, right-stuff sort of man. But he had two desires in life: to keep everyone in his charge safe and to return to the one woman he loved.

  He looked up from his commpad to see Commander Smithson approaching across the ground in the peculiar loping gait half-gravity gave everyone. He toggled his 'pad off and looked up expectantly. “Sir?”

  “McCrary. How are you doing?”

  The question was not an idle one. Everyone that came off the Tank was sick in one fashion or another. People still suffered from injuries incurred in the original Event, when the seismic wave crashed through the Collins. Captain Lee, still coping with the years-long consequences of a stage four concussion, was one such. McCrary was shaken up by the Event, but had escaped serious injury. As the senior member
of the crew, the one who was still fully functional, he had assumed command of the Collins crew.

  “I am recovering, sir. I should be back to full duty within a couple of weeks.”

  “Don't rush it, McCrary. You've been through hell.”

  McCrary looked at the overall commander of the Mars Expedition and frowned. “And you haven't?”

  “Not like you Collins folks. Got a few minutes? Lee, Standish and I want you for a pow-wow.”

  “Certainly,” said McCrary, standing up quickly. He swayed slightly as his body fought to pump blood into his brain.

  Commander Smithson looked away as the man regained his feet. A fall here would not be serious, but putting out an arm to steady him, especially where other crew could see it, would start rumors. It would also shame McCrary, which Commander Smithson wanted to avoid at all costs.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Lead on, sir,” said McCrary.

  “Vitamin B12,” said Smithson.

  “Sir?” asked McCrary, missing the connection.

  “I've read Doctor Kumar's reports. You were missing cobalt in your diet, and you couldn't trust any of the regolith to supply it once the ejecta was found to be radioactive.”

  “Cobalt-60 was in every soil sample. No isotope separation, so we just did without cobalt. So?”

  Smithson snorted. “It's one of those micronutrients you were missing. Cobalt is necessary to make vitamin B12. Without that in your diet, you've got about a year's supply in the liver. Colon bacteria make B12, but you've got to run your sewage through the hydroponics to get plants to take it up. You need new cobalt to make more B12 to replace cobalt lost in the recycling loop. As time went on, your crew lost more and more cobalt, and it shows.”

  “And now?”

  “Well, the soil here is regolith, comet mud, and everyone's poop. The comet mud's got enough cobalt, and very little of it is radioactive. So you're getting B12 again. Other deficiency diseases are disappearing, too.”

  “Good. When do we start building the ERVs?”

  “Let's join Lee and Standish. That's item one on the list.”

  ###

  Sheila Feinstein watched the pair walking off towards Mission Control. A group of ten huts—unofficially named Mission Control—contained the senior staff of the two UNSOC missions. She went to find Frank Maleski. Like all of them, she moved slowly and carefully since the increased gravity was hard on the Collins crew, who were used to the one-sixth gravity of the Moon.

  “Frank, I just saw McCrary head over to Mission Control with one of the Mars Commanders.”

  Frank looked up from his cot, the fiberglass cloth screeching slightly as he moved. “So? That happens all of the time.”

  “Yeah, but I saw the other Mars Commander go in there, and Commander Lee hobbled in there about ten minutes ago. I think it's some kind of conference.”

  “Again, so? It's not like they don't get together all the time. It's what commanders do.”

  “Yeah, but all four?”

  “Courtesy, Sheila. You can't expect Commander Lee to take the full load yet.”

  “I bet they're talking about The Question.”

  “Who isn't?” asked Frank, reaching for his commpad. “I already know my answer.”

  “Me too. Five years of danger is enough. You know who I feel for? The sleepers. It must purely suck for them.”

  ###

  David McLeod was really sucking. He was a sleeper, one of the very few of thousands of applicants with a range of specialties ideally suited to control room operations selected for the Mars Expedition. He missed his girlfriend, although he knew that she must have moved on by now. At only twenty-eight, he was lucky to have been included in the crew roster at all. Now, he was on the horns of a dilemma.

  On the one hand, he had been paying back UNSOC for their selection of him with six months of back-breaking work as the Mars Expedition rounded the backside of the Sun, warped around Venus, and headed towards their rendezvous with Earth. He may not have been awake very long, not compared to the rapidly aged members of the awake crew, but it was long enough to realize several things.

  First and foremost, he missed women. Oh, not physiologically—UNSOC had graciously supplied the Mars Expedition with the newly developed anti-libido drugs that kept the men from the deleterious effects of their own testosterone. But he missed them in two ways—their complete absence for the six months he had been awake, and the very occasional glimpses of them he had when the Tank finally docked with the Perseus.

  He thought he was going to jump out of his skin when Lori Minelli passed him in the chow line. He knew the story of the children—this is one of the mothers! He locked up his mouth and said nothing, but inside, he was yearning to be with her, or any other woman from the Collins.

  Nor was he alone in this. UNSOC didn't really care about sexual orientation when it signed up men for the expedition. They kept women out of the crew for two reasons, both of which seemed reasonable at the time: first, they didn't want any sexual or jealousy issues intruding on a years-long mission; and second, they were very wary of just how much space radiation women would absorb during the trip.

  As the UNESCO Director-General, a Mrs. vanDeHoog, announced publically, “We are very concerned about the effects of radiation on women and any possible children they may conceive when they return.” Privately, though, she confided with the other DGs, “That's all we need, some brave babe comes back from conquering Mars and has some two-headed monster because she won't get her tubes tied. Then we're on the lawsuit hook! No way. Put nothing but men on it—they're completely expendable.”

  “Why so glum, chum?” asked Freddy Howlett. He squatted on his heels, easy to do in the half-gravity of the Perseus. “You're not mooning over that girlfriend of yours again, are you?”

  At David's nod, he continued. “Man, I get where you're coming from. Didya hear about Kumar? Remember—he's the guy over in agronomy? I shared a pod with him when the crew woke us up. Guy kept going on and on about his going-away party. Half the province sent along their hottest babes.”

  “I heard something about parties like that. Never had one. It was just Rita and me. Rita…”

  “Yo, buddy, snap out of it! Right, so Kumar was pounding half of the province's nubile women. Guess what that got him?”

  “Lots of traffic, I imagine.” David had stopped hanging around the comm relay on the ground when it became clear that Rita wasn't going to be sending him any messages.

  “Damn straight it did. Also three paternity suits. They tried to serve him notice over the radio to appear in court! Now he's talking about staying up here instead of heading back down.”

  David gave a wan smile. “I can imagine. Still, won't they dock his pay or something?”

  “He was talking about paternity tests, but they'll need his DNA, and guess what? He's stuck up here. I think a good lawyer will keep him out of court until the kids are out of college.”

  “Freddy, that's pretty crappy. Someone's got to raise the kids.”

  Freddy shook his head. “Man, you just don't get it.”

  “Get what?”

  Freddy stood up and slowly bent to touch his toes. He stood straight up. “These women—they're the cream of the crop in his province. They're probably all married off by now. The kids aren't going to suffer any. I just think Kumar's looking for a reason to stay up here. If it wasn't lawsuits, it would be something else. Guy just doesn't want to look like he's all jazzed up to be in space.”

  David stood up and stretched. “My brains must not be ticking over well. Nothing wrong with wanting to stay in space that I can see.”

  “Except everyone thinks it's crazy. Better stop talking that way, or people will think you're crazy, too.” Freddy clapped him on the back. “Come on, let's go. I hear the chefs have come up with something good for dinner.”

  David moved off towards the mess hall with Freddy. He loved being in space, sure. He was also safer than anyplace else in the Solar System. But
there were no women! He shook his head. Gamble on an early death downstairs, or a more certain death—no offspring—up here? His mind kept running around the track in his head.

  ###

  Duane Bebeau touched a control and sat back in the spidery-looking chair in the Bradbury. He idly spun a stylus and pulled his hand away, watching the silvery instrument spin slowly in the microgravity of the central core. The stylus would eventually wind down to rest from air friction, if he was careful enough with the initial flip. He tried to get it to come to a stop in mid-air at least once every shift. This spin didn't look like it was going to be the one; the stylus moved off towards the control panel for their reactor. He reached out to grab the errant item before it impacted the panel.

  “Duane,” burbled the communicator. “Standish on his way. Look sharp.”

  “Thanks, Ragesh,” he replied, straightening up in his chair and trying to appear industrious.

  “You don't fool me for a minute,” he heard behind him a few moments later.

  “Sir?” he replied, turning in his chair, only to encounter the laughing face of Scott Acevedo, the Deputy Chief Engineer of the combined expedition. They had been locked up in the same spaceship for years during the doomed Mars Expedition. “Bastard. You put Ragesh up to it.”

  “Guilty. Our fearless commanders are in some big meeting down on the surface. They've got everyone in a tent. We're probably going to start building the ERVs. How are we set for that?”