The Precipice gt-8

by Ben Bova

  He frowned with annoyance. “About what?”

  “About Mandy.” She almost added, lunkhead, but stopped herself just in time. “She’s wonderful,” Humphries said, beaming. “Beautiful but brainy, too. You don’t see that very often.”

  Pancho thought, Women don’t let you see their brains very often, not if they can get by on their looks.

  Aloud, she asked, “So d’you think she’d be any good cozyin’ up to Dan Randolph?”

  “No!” he snapped.

  “No?” Pancho was astonished. “Why not?”

  “I don’t want her anywhere near Randolph. He’ll seduce her in a hot second.”

  Pancho stared at the man. I thought that was the whole idea, she said to herself.

  Get Mandy into Randolph’s bed. I thought that’s what he’d want.

  “She’s much too fine a woman to be used that way,” Humphries added. Oh, for cryin’ out loud, Pancho realized. He’s fallen for her! This guy who picks up women like paperclips and dumps ’em when he feels like it, he doesn’t just have the hots for Mandy. He’s fallen in love with her. Just like that!

  SELENE GOVERNING COUNCIL

  Dan couldn’t help contrasting in his mind this meeting of Selene’s governing council with the meeting of the GEC’s executive board he’d attended a few weeks earlier in London.

  The meeting took place in Selene’s theater, with the council sitting at student’s desks arranged up on the stage in a semi-circle. Just about every seat on the main floor and the balconies was taken, although the box seats on either side of the stage were all empty. Maybe they’ve been roped off for some reason, Dan thought. Must be two thousand people out there, he thought as he peeked out at the audience through the curtains screening the stage’s wings. Just about every voting citizen in Selene’s showed up for this meeting.

  As he stood in the wing of the stage, the council members filed past him, taking their seats. For the most part they looked young, vigorous. Six women, five men, none with white hair. A couple of premature baldies among the men; they must be engineers, Dan thought. He knew that membership on the council was a part-time task assigned by lottery; no one was allowed to duck their public service, although they could take time off their regular jobs to attend to their extra duties. “Nervous?”

  Dan turned at the sound of Doug Stavenger’s voice. Smiling, he answered, “When you’ve had to sit through as many board meetings as I have, you don’t get nervous, you just want to get it the hell over with.”

  Stavenger patted Dan lightly on the shoulder. “This one will be different from all the others, Dan. It’s more like an old-fashioned New England town meeting than one of your board of directors’ get-togethers.”

  Dan agreed with a brief nod. Often in his mind he’d spelled it b-o-re-d meeting.

  This one would be different, he felt sure.

  It was.

  Stavenger served as non-voting chairman of the governing council, a largely honorary position. More pomp than circumstance, Dan thought. The chairman stood at the podium set up at one end of the stage, only a few meters from where Dan stood waiting for his turn to speak. The meeting agenda was displayed on a wallscreen along the back of the stage. Dan was dismayed to see that he was last on a list of nine.

  The first five items went fairly quickly. The sixth was a new regulation tightening everyone’s water allotment. Several people from the audience shot to their feet to make their opinions heard in no uncertain terms.

  One of the council members was chairman of the water board, a chubby, balding, red-faced man wearing the coral-red coveralls of the Tourism Department. The student’s desk at which he sat looked uncomfortably small for him. “There’s no way around it,” he said, looking flustered. “No matter how efficiently we recycle our water, it’s not a hundred percent and it never will be. The more people we allow in, the less water we have to go around.”

  “Then why don’t we shut down tourism,” came an angry voice from the floor. “Tourism’s down to a trickle anyway,” the water chairman replied. “It’s less than five percent of our problem. Immigration is our big difficulty.”

  “Refugees,” someone said in a harsh stage whisper.

  “Don’t let ’em in!” an angry voice snapped.

  “You can’t do that!”

  “Why the hell not? They made the mess on Earth. Let ’em stew in their own crap.”

  “Can’t we find new sources of water?” a citizen asked. Stavenger answered from the podium, “Our exploration teams have failed to locate any other than the polar ice fields we’ve been using all along.”

  “Bring up a few loads from Earthside,” someone suggested.

  “Yeah, and they’ll gouge us for it.”

  “But if we need it, what else can we do?”

  The audience stirred restlessly. A dozen conversations buzzed through the theater. The water board chairman raised his voice to be heard over the chatter. “We’re negotiating with the GEC for water shipments, but they want to put one of their own people onto the water board in return.”

  “Hell no!”

  “Never!”

  “Those bastards have been trying to get control of us since day one!”

  The audience roared its angry disapproval.

  Stavenger, still standing at the podium, pressed his thumb on a button set into its control panel and a painfully loud hooting whistle rang through the theater, silencing the shouters. Dan covered his ears until the shriek died away. “We’ve got to maintain order here,” Stavenger said in the numbed silence.

  “Otherwise we’ll never get anywhere.”

  Reluctantly, they accepted the fact that water allotments would be decreased slightly. Then the water board chairman held out a potential carrot. “We’ll have the new recycling system on-line in a few months,” he said, drumming his fingers nervously on his desktop. “If it works as efficiently as the simulations show it should, we can go back to the current water allotments — at least for a year or so.”

  “And what happens if this recycling system fails?” asked a stern-faced elderly woman.

  “It’s being thoroughly tested,” the water chairman answered defensively. “This is just a way for the people running the damned hotel to put up their own swimming pool and spa,” grumbled a lanky, longhaired citizen. He looked like a physicist to Dan. “Tourism is down so they want to fancy up the hotel to attract more tourists.”

  Dan wondered about that. Tourism is down because the world’s going down the toilet, he thought. Then he admitted, but, yeah, people running tourist facilities will try their damnedest to attract customers, no matter what. What else can they do, except go out of business altogether?

  In the end, the council decided to accept the water allotment restrictions until the new recycling system had been in operation for three continuous months. Then they would have a new hearing to decide on whether they could return to the old allotments.

  Two more items were swiftly disposed of, then at last Stavenger said, “The final item on our agenda tonight is a proposal by Dan Randolph, head of Astro Manufacturing.” He turned slightly and prompted, “Dan?” There was some scattered applause as Dan stepped up to the podium. Astro employees, Dan thought. Stavenger moved off-stage.

  He gripped the edges of the podium and looked over the crowd. He had no notes, no visual aids. For several moments he merely stood there, thinking hard. The audience began to murmur, whisper.

  Dan began, “Halley’s Comet will be returning to the inner solar system in a few years. Last time it came by, Halley’s blew out roughly thirty million tons of water vapor in six months. If I remember the numbers right, the comet lost something like three tons of water per second when it was closest to the Sun.” He waited a heartbeat, then asked, “Do you think you could use that water?”

  “Hell yes!” somebody shouted. Dan grinned when he saw that it was Pancho Lane, sitting up in the first row of the balcony.

  “Then let’s go get it!” Dan said.

&nb
sp; He spent the next fifteen minutes outlining the fusion rocket system and assuring them that it had performed flawlessly in all its tests to date. “A fusion-driven spacecraft can bring in all the water you need, either from hydrate-bearing asteroids or from comets,” Dan said. “I need your help to build a full-scale system and flight test it.”

  One of the women councilors asked, “Are you asking Selene to fund your corporation? Why can’t you raise the money from the regular sources?” Dan made himself smile at her. “This project will cost between one and two billion international dollars, Earthside. None of the banks or other funding sources that I’ve approached will risk that kind of money. They’re all fully committed to rebuilding and mitigation programs. They’ve got their hands full with the greenhouse warming; they’re not interested in space projects.”

  “Damned flatland idiots,” somebody groused.

  “I agree,” Dan said, grinning. “They’re too busy doing what’s urgent to even think about what’s important.”

  “Out of all the corporations on Earth,” someone called out, “surely you can make a deal or two to raise the capital you need.”

  Dan decided to cut the discussion short. “Listen. I could probably put together a deal that would raise the money we need, but I thought I’d give you a chance to come in on this. It’s the opportunity you’ve been waiting for.”

  “Selene doesn’t have that kind of money at its disposal,” said one of the councilmen.

  “No,” countered Dan, “but you have the trained people and the facilities to build the fusion rocket with nanomachines.”

  A hush fell over the theater. Nanotechnology. They all knew it was possible. And yet…

  “Nanomachines aren’t magic wands, Mr. Randolph,” said the councilor seated closest to Dan, a lean, pinch-faced young man who looked like a jogging fanatic. “I understand that,” said Dan.

  “At one time we thought we could develop nanomachines to produce water for us by taking hydrogen from the incoming solar wind and combining it with oxygen from the regolith. It was technically feasible but in practice a complete failure.” Recognizing the councilman as one who loved the sound of his own voice, Dan said curtly, “If nanomachines can build entire Clipperships they can build fusion drives.”

  Another woman councilor, with the bright red hair and porcelain-white complexion of the Irish, spoke up. “I’ve been stuck with the job of treasurer for the council, the thanks I get for being an honest accountant.” Dan laughed, along with most of the audience.

  “But it’s a sad fact that we don’t have the funds to spare on your program, Mr.

  Randolph, no matter how admirable it may be. The money just isn’t in our hands.”

  “I don’t want money,” Dan said.

  “Then what?”

  “I want volunteers. I need people who are willing to devote their time to the greatest challenge of our age: developing the resources of the entire solar system.”

  “Ah, but that boils down to money, now, doesn’t it?”

  “No it doesn’t,” said a deep voice from the middle of the theater. Dan saw a squat, heavily-built black man get to his feet.

  “I’m Bernie James. I retired from the nanotech lab last year. I’m only a technician, but I’ll work with you on this.”

  A few rows farther back, a taller man, blond hair cropped short, got to his feet.

  “Rolf Uhrquest, Space Transportation Department,” he said, in a clear tenor voice. “I would be willing to take my accumulated vacation time to work on this fusion project.”

  Dan smiled at them both. “Thank you.”

  “And I believe,” Uhrquest continued, “that Dr. Cardenas would be interested also.” Turning slightly, he called, “Dr. Cardenas, are you here?” No one answered.

  “I will find her,” Uhrquest said, very seriously. “It is a shame she is not present today.”

  Dan looked expectantly out at the audience, but no one else stood up. At last he said, “Thank you,” and stepped away from the podium, back into the wings of the stage. Stavenger gave him a quick thumbs-up signal and returned to the podium for the final item on the meeting’s agenda: a request from a retired couple to enlarge their living quarters so they could have enough space to start a new business for themselves.

  Once the meeting broke up, Stavenger said, “If Kris Cardenas had been anywhere in Selene I would have introduced you to her. Unfortunately, she’s in a space station in near-Earth orbit, working on developing nanomachines to bring down the costs of the Mars exploration centers.”

  “Which station?” Dan asked.

  “The one over South America.”

  Dan grinned at him. “Nueva Venezuela. I helped build that sucker. Maybe it’s time for me to pay a visit there.”

  ALPHONSUS

  Pancho watched the safety demonstration very carefully. No matter that she had put on a spacesuit and done EVA work dozens of times; she paid patient attention to every word of the demo. This was going to be on the surface of the Moon, and the differences between orbital EVAs and a moonwalk were enough to worry about.

  The tourists in the bus didn’t seem to give a damn. Hell, Pancho thought, if they’re stinky-rich enough to afford a vacation jaunt to the Moon, they must have the attitude that nothing bad’ll happen to them, and if it does they’ll get their lawyers to sue the hell out of everybody between here and Mars. They had all suited up in the garage at Selene before getting onto the bus. It was easier that way; the bus was way too tight for fourteen tourists to wriggle and squeeze into their spacesuits. They rode out to the Ranger 9 site in the hard-shell suits, their helmets in their laps.

  After all these years, Pancho thought, they still haven’t come up with anything better than these hard-shell suits. The science guys keep talking about softsuits and even nanomachine skins, but it’s still nothing more’n talk. Even the teenagers went quiet once they cleared the garage airlock and drove out onto the cracked, pockmarked surface of Alphonsus. A hundred and eight kilometers across, the crater floor went clear over the horizon. The ringwall mountains looked old and weary, slumped smooth from eons of being sandpapered by the constant infall of meteoric dust. It was the dust that worried Pancho. In orbital space you were floating in vacuum. On the surface of the Moon you had to walk on the powdery regolith, sort of like walking on beach sand. Except that the “sand” billowed up and covered your boots with fine gray dust. Not just your boots, either, Pancho reminded herself. She’d heard tales about lunar dust getting into a suit’s joints and even into the life-support backpack. The dust was electrostatically charged from the incoming solar wind, too, and this made the freaking stuff cling like mad. If it got on your visor it could blind you; try to wipe it off with your gloves and you just smeared it worse.

  They’d had some trouble finding Pancho a suit that would fit her comfortably; in the end they had to break out a brand new one, sized long. It smelled new, like pristine plastic. When the bus stopped and the guide told the tourists to put on their helmets, Pancho sort of missed the familiar scents of old sweat and machine oil that permeated the working suits she’d worn. Even the air blowing gently across her face tasted new, unused.

  The tour guide and the bus driver both checked out each tourist before they let the visitors climb down from the bus’s hatch onto the lunar regolith. Pancho’s helmet earphones filled with “oohs” and “lookit that!” as, one by one, the tourists stepped onto the ancient ground and kicked up puffs of dust that lingered lazily in the gentle gravity of the Moon.

  “Look how bright my footprints are!” someone shouted excitedly. The guide explained, “That’s because the topmost layer of the ground has been darkened by billions of years of exposure to hard radiation from the Sun and deep space. Your bootprints show the true color of the regolith underneath. Give ’em a few million years, though, and the prints will turn dark, too.” For all the years she’d worked in space, Pancho had never been out on a Moonwalk. She found it fascinating, once she cut off the radio frequenc
y that carried the tourists’ inane chatter and listened only to the prerecorded talk that guided visitors to the Ranger 9 site.

  To outward appearances she was just another tourist from one of the three busloads that were being shepherded along the precisely-marked paths on the immense floor of Alphonsus. But Pancho knew that Martin Humphries was in one of the other buses, and her reason for being here was to report to him, not to sightsee.

  She let the cluster of tourists move on ahead of her while she lingered near the parked buses. The canned tourguide explanation was telling her about the rilles that meandered near the site of the old spacecraft crash: sinuous cracks in the crater floor that sometimes vented out thin, ghostlike clouds of ammonia and methane.

  “One of the reasons for locating the original Moonbase in Alphonsus’s ringwall mountains was the hope of utilizing these volatiles for—” She saw Humphries shuffling toward her, kicking up clouds of dust as if it didn’t matter. It had to be him, she thought, because his spacesuit was different from the ones issued to the tourists. Not different enough to be obvious to the tenderfeet, but Pancho recognized the slightly wider, heavier build of the suit and the tiny servo motors at the joints that helped the wearer move the more massive arms and legs. Extra armor, she thought. He must worry about radiation up here. Humphries had no name tag plastered to the torso of his suit, and until he was close enough to touch helmets she could not see into his heavily-tinted visor to identify his face. But he walked right up to her, kicking up the dust, until he almost bumped his helmet against hers. She recognized his features through the visor: round and snubby-nosed, like some freckle-faced kid, but with those cold, hard eyes peering at her.

  Pancho lifted her left wrist and poised her right hand over the comm keyboard, asking Humphries in pantomime which radio frequency he wanted to use. He held up a gloved hand and she saw that he was holding a coiled wire in it. Slowly, with the deliberate care of a person who was not accustomed to working in a spacesuit, he fitted one end of the wire into the receptacle built into the side of his helmet. He held out the other end. Pancho took it and plugged into her own helmet. “Okay,” she heard Humphries’s voice, almost as clearly as if they were in a comfortable room, “now we can talk without anyone tapping into our conversation.”