by Ben Bova
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To dearest Rashida, who is not only a knockout artist but a lifesaver
My heartfelt thanks to Peter Wehinger, of the Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, for his kind and unfailing help
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
1. Lobber
2. Data Bank
3. Farside Observatory
4. The Large and the Small
5. Dossier: Trudy Jocelyn Yost
6. Mirror Lab
7. Outside
8. Recovery
9. Professor Uhlrich’s Office
10. Job Descriptions
11. Nanomachines
12. Dossier: Grant Philip Simpson
13. Broken Mirror
14. Spaceport
15. Selene
16. Dinner for Two
17. Mare Moscoviense
18. Professor Uhlrich’s Office
19. Cafeteria
20. Dossier: Carter Nelson McClintock
21. Anita Halleck
22. Dinner
23. Accident
24. “Time Is of the Essence”
25. Uhlrich’s Quarters
26. Dossier: Jason Maximillian Uhlrich
27. Teleoperations Center
28. In the Corridor
29. Medical Report
30. Nanotechnology Laboratory
31. Dossier: Anita Marie Halleck
32. The Earthview Restaurant
33. Visits
34. Dr. Frederic Palmquist
35. Return to Farside
36. Work Agenda
37. Crater Mendeleev
38. On the Road
39. Failure Mode
40. McClintock’s Office
41. Mirror, Mirror
42. One-Way Street
43. Eight Weeks Later
44. Collapse
45. Inquest
46. Maintenance Center
47. Nanodeath
48. Denial
49. Argument
50. McClintock’s Quarters
51. Confessions
52. To Mendeleev Crater
53. Installation
54. Dinner for Two
55. Return to Farside
56. Alternatives
57. Cafeteria
58. Investigation
59. Teleoperations Center
60. Racing Against Time
61. A Plague of Nanomachines
62. Quarantined
63. Nanofear
64. Selene
65. Investigation
66. Summoned
67. Ménage à Quatre
68. Tête-à-Tête
69. Flicker Rate
70. Basking in the Light
71. Mirror Lab
72. Under Siege
73. Fears
74. Countersteps
75. Prisoner
76. Flight
77. Escape
78. Maintenance Center
79. Korolev Crater
80. Confrontation
81. The Truth
82. Farside
83. Korolev
84. Back to Farside
Epilogue: Six Years Later
Tor Books by Ben Bova
About the Author
Copyright
Character determines destiny.
—HERACLITUS OF EPHESUS, circa 500 B.C.
Yes, we, said Maera. We kill the savage’s bulls, and the drunkard’s bulls, and the riau-riau dancer’s bulls. Yes. We kill them. We kill them all right. Yes, yes, yes.
—ERNEST HEMINGWAY
LOBBER
Trudy Yost was understandably nervous as the ballistic rocket hurtled high above the barren, pockmarked lunar plain.
The liftoff had been a shock. Trudy had dutifully strapped herself into her seat and lowered it back to the full reclining position, as instructed in the safety lecture that played on the screen set into the passenger compartment’s overhead paneling.
Then the rocket engines had lit off and the ship hurtled off its launchpad with a deafening roar and bone-rattling vibration. The launch from Earth had been much gentler, and she assumed that a liftoff in the Moon’s light gravity would be just as easy.
Something’s gone wrong! Trudy thought. The g-force pushed her down into the reclined seat like a ton of cement on her chest. And it wouldn’t stop. She thought of the earthquake she’d experienced in Palo Alto, when she’d been a grad student. It went on and on, the whole world shaking and grinding, the dorm building swaying like a ship in a typhoon. Afterward, she was told that the tremor had lasted seventy-eight seconds. But it sure felt like hours.
The rocket engines stopped abruptly, leaving Trudy’s ears ringing and her arms floating off the seat’s armrests. Her stomach crawled up into her throat. She swallowed bile and swore to herself that she would not upchuck.
The pilot’s grinning face appeared on the overhead screen. “Well, we’re well and truly launched. We’ll be at Farside in thirty-two minutes.” Almost as an afterthought he added, “You can crank your seats up now and enjoy the view.”
Carefully Trudy raised her seat. She swallowed again and told herself that she’d experienced zero gravity on the flight up from Earth and there was absolutely no reason why she should get sick from it now.
Besides, there was this awesome hunk of a guy in the seat across the aisle from her and she’d be damned to hell and back if she was going to make an ass of herself in front of him.
He was smiling at her. “Quite a takeoff, wasn’t it?”
Trudy nodded weakly.
“These ballistic flights,” he said, “they slam on all the power at liftoff and then let the bird coast the rest of the way. No atmosphere to worry about, we just fly along an arc like an old-time artillery shell.”
He’s an Adonis! Trudy thought. Handsome, chiseled features; sparkling light brown eyes; thick dark hair long enough to tickle the collar of his expensive-looking jacket. Good broad shoulders, flat midsection. The kind who never looks at mousy little me, she told herself. And here I’m wearing this drab old pullover and jeans. Should have dressed better, should have thought of looks instead of comfort.
It took an effort for her to find her voice. “The ship looks like the Clipperships they use on Earth. Only kind of smaller.”
“Most of the Clippers back Earthside are manufactured here on the Moon. At Selene. They use nanomachines to build ’em out of carbon dust. Soot gets turned into diamond structure, thanks to nanotechnology.”
Trudy knew that. Everybody knew that, but this hunk of a stud was talking to her as if he were a professor and she a freshman.
“I thought the liftoff would be easier,” she said. “Gentler. What with the Moon’s lower gravity…”
He shook his head. “No, they blast off at four gees. Then coast. Here on the Moon they call these ships ‘lobbers.’ They just lob them up and out, like artillery shells.”
“Yes, you told me that.”
He smiled at her, teeth dazzling bright. “So I did.” Then he extended a hand across the narrow aisle. “My name’s Carter McClintock.”
His hand engulfed hers. “Trudy Yost
.”
He cocked his head. “Trudy? Is that short for Gertrude?”
“No!” Trudy snapped. “Everybody thinks that. My parents named me Trudy. It’s on my birth certificate.”
“Okay. Okay.” He released her hand, then asked, “So what brings you to Farside?”
“I’ll be doing my postdoc work there. Under Professor Uhlrich.”
“Oh, you’re the astronomer,” said McClintock, looking impressed. “The professor’s new assistant.”
“I’ll be working with him on the optical interferometer. We’re going to image Sirius C.”
He nodded uncertainly.
“That’s the Earth-sized planet that was discovered about ten years ago,” Trudy explained.
“The one they call New Earth, right?”
“Right. It’s about two and a half parsecs from us, and it—”
“Parsecs?”
“Three point two six light-years. It’s the distance an object would be if it showed a parallax of one arc second. Parallax. Second. Parsec.”
“Oh. Yes. I see.” He leaned his chair back slightly and turned his attention to the overhead screen.
Stupid, stupid, stupid! Trudy raged at herself. Here you’ve got this hunk chatting with you and you bury him in jargon. Why do you have to show everybody how smart you are? It’s stupid. You just drive them away.
For several moments she sat rigidly in her chair, staring at the display screen, which showed the lunar landscape sliding by far beneath them.
The lobber’s passenger compartment was only half full. Six men and women heading for Farside.
Consciously refraining from biting her lip, Trudy turned back to McClintock and asked, “And why are you going to Farside?”
“I work there, same as you’re going to,” he said, brightening slightly.
“You’re an astronomer?”
He flashed that knockout smile again. “No. I’m … uh, I’m in management. I work with Professor Uhlrich, help him with administrative matters.”
“Oh,” said Trudy, glowing inside. “I guess we’ll see a lot of each other, then.”
“I imagine we will.”
DATA BANK
By the second half of the twenty-first century astronomers had detected several thousand planets orbiting other stars. Most of these exoplanets were gas giants, bloated spheres of hydrogen and helium, totally unlike Earth. But a few percent of them were small, rocky worlds, more like our own.
One in particular raised hopes of being really Earthlike: Sirius C. It was almost the same size as Earth, and although its parent star was a fiercely blazing blue-white giant, much larger and hotter than the Sun, the planet’s orbit lay at the “Goldilocks” distance from Sirius where its surface temperature was not too hot, and not too cold for liquid water to exist.
On Earth, liquid water means life. Beneath the frozen iron sands of Mars, liquid water melting from the permafrost hosts an underground biosphere of microbial life-forms. In the ice-covered seas of Jupiter’s major moons, living organisms abound. In the planet-girdling ocean beneath the eternal clouds of giant Jupiter itself, life teems and flourishes.
Sirius C was a challenge to the astrobiologists. It couldn’t possibly bear life, Goldilocks notwithstanding, not sandwiched between brilliant Sirius A and its dwarf star companion, Sirius B. The dwarf had erupted in a series of nova explosions eons ago. The death throes of Sirius B must have sterilized any planets in the vicinity. But there it was, a rocky, Earth-sized planet, the only planet in the Sirius system, orbiting Sirius A in a nearly perfect circle.
Might there be a chance that the planet did harbor some kind of life-forms? The astrobiologists worked overtime concocting theories to support the hope that the Earth-sized planet might indeed host an Earth-type biosphere. The popular media had no such problem. They quickly dubbed Sirius C “New Earth.”
Orbiting in a zone where water could be liquid did not necessarily mean that Sirius C actually had liquid water on its surface. Astronomers all across Earth—and on the Moon—strove to discover water, oxygen, other clues to the presence of life on the exoplanet.
Detecting the planet was not the same as imaging it. Sirius C was discovered by the minute gravitational tugs it exerted on its parent star. Then telescopes in orbit measured the tiny dip in light output from Sirius A when the planet transited across its star’s shining face. From these data the eager astronomers of Earth deduced the planet’s size and surface temperature.
Now the task was to get visual images of the planet, to photograph its surface and measure the constituents of its atmosphere—if it had an atmosphere. No telescope on Earth could produce such imagery at a distance of nearly eighty-four trillion kilometers.
Not even the telescopes in space could reveal much more than a blurry speck of a disc. But calculations showed that a set of very large telescopes, working together as an optical interferometer, might be able to resolve surface features on Sirius C. The telescopes would have to be in space, clear of the Earth’s murky, turbulent atmosphere.
Owing to the driving ambition of Anita Halleck, the International Astronautical Authority decided to build such an interferometer in solar orbit. Its segmented mirrors would be placed at opposite locations along the Earth’s orbit, producing an instrument with a baseline of two astronomical units: nearly two hundred million kilometers.
The lunar nation of Selene was already constructing a radio telescope facility on the far side of the Moon, where it would be insulated from all the radio chatter of Earth by more than three thousand kilometers of rock. Farside, the side of the Moon that is permanently pointed away from Earth, was the quietest place in the solar system for sensitive radio searches for intelligent life.
The radio telescope, dubbed Cyclops, was to consist of a thousand dish-shaped antennas, each one a hundred meters across, covering a total area ten kilometers wide.
When the IAA announced its plans for the space-based optical interferometer, one of Selene University’s distinguished astronomers, Professor Jason Uhlrich, proposed building a more modest optical instrument on the Moon’s far side. After all, the surface of the airless Moon was effectively in space. The vacuum at the lunar surface was actually a thousand times thinner than the vacuum in Earth orbit. Lunar materials could be used to build the telescopes, and the Moon offered a firm platform for them.
So the Farside Observatory became the site for an optical interferometer consisting of three interlinked telescopes, each with a main mirror of one hundred meters, slightly larger than an American football field, more than twice the size of any telescope mirror built on Earth. They were to be erected in three giant craters: the longest distance between them would be about eighteen hundred kilometers.
And in the midst of the optical instruments, the Cyclops radio telescope was being erected. Professor Uhlrich was named to head Farside Observatory. He enthusiastically proclaimed that the observatory would be the finest and most important astronomical facility in the solar system.
Yet, even in the gentle gravity of the Moon, building such large and complex structures was a challenge to the skill and knowledge of the men and women who came to Farside.
More than anything else, it was a test of their perseverance and their heart, a challenge that brought out the best in some of them.
In some of them it brought out the worst.
FARSIDE OBSERVATORY
“Farside Observatory coming up,” announced the cheerful voice of the lobber’s pilot. “We’ll be down in Mare Moscoviense in five minutes.”
Trudy thought that “down” could mean a crash as well as a landing, but she tried to keep the worry off her face as she tightened the straps of her safety harness.
“The Sea of Moscow,” McClintock said knowingly. “It’s actually just a big crater. Korolev is bigger. So is Mendeleev. Not like the Mare Nubium or Mare Imbrium on the nearside.”
“When a crater’s that big,” Trudy replied, “it’s called a ringed plain, not a crater.” There, she tho
ught, let him know I’m not a total ignoramus.
Unperturbed, McClintock went on, “Lots of features on the farside are named after Russians, you know. One of their early spacecraft was the first to observe the farside.”
Trudy nodded as she stared at the display screen above her head. She saw a curving range of worn-looking rounded mountains, then a flat plain pockmarked with small craters. It looked dusty, bare, utterly barren.
And then, “Look! The Cyclops array!”
Hundreds of round radio dish antennas stood lined up across the floor of the huge crater. The scene reminded Trudy of the segmented eye of an insect. And it looked as if the ship was hurtling down, straight at it.
She glanced across the aisle at McClintock; his handsome features were set in a tight grimace, as if he were trying to steer the ship himself by grim determination. His hands were gripping the seat’s armrests tightly.
I’m not the only one who’s nervous, she realized.
“Retro burn in thirty seconds,” the pilot announced, sounding much more serious than before.
The ground was rushing up to hit them. The array of radio telescopes slid out of the screen’s view; there was nothing out there now but empty, barren ground, strewn with boulders and pitted with craterlets. It looked very hard.
A roar and a pressure against her back, like someone slamming a two-by-four along her spine. Then it stopped as abruptly as it had started.
“We’re down,” said the pilot, cheerful again. “Welcome to the Farside Observatory.”
Trudy heard several sighs of relief, and realized that the loudest one was her own. Then everybody started to talk at once, unbuckle their seat harnesses, get to their feet.
We’re here, she thought. Now the work begins.
She stood up and reached for the overhead luggage bin. McClintock leaned across and opened the hatch for her, then pulled out her meager travelbag and handed it to her. He was tall as well as handsome: Trudy’s plain, lank hair barely rose to the level of his chin.
“Thank you,” Trudy said to him.
“You’re quite welcome,” he replied.
