The Precipice gt-8

by Ben Bova

  “I’d like you to work with Pancho here. She’ll explain the problem.”

  George looked at her. “Okay. When do we start?”

  “Now,” said Randolph. Then, to Pancho, he added, “You can tell George anything you’d tell me.”

  “Sure,” Pancho agreed. But in her mind she added, Maybe.

  factory #4

  “This is more like it,” said Dan.

  He heard Kris Cardenas’s nervous laughter in his helmet earphones. There were five of them standing on the factory floor, encased in white spacesuits like a team of astronauts or tourists out for a jaunt on the Moon’s surface. Before them, on the broad, spacious floor of the otherwise empty factory, stood a set of spherical fuel tanks, the smaller sphere of a fusion reaction chamber, and the unfinished channel of an MHD generator, all connected by sturdy-looking piping and surrounded by crates of various powdered metals and bins of soot: pure carbon dust. Dan, Cardenas and three of her nanotechnicians stood in a group, encased in their spacesuits, watching the results of the nanomachines ceaseless work.

  It was daylight outside, Dan knew. Through the open sides of the factory he saw the brilliant sunlight glaring harshly against the barren lunar landscape. But inside the factory, with its curved roof cutting off the glow from the Sun and Earth, the components of the fusion system looked dark and dull, like the unpolished diamond that they were.

  “We start on the pumps next,” Cardenas said, “as soon as the MHD channel is finished. And then the rocket nozzles.”

  Dan heard an edge in her voice. She did not like being out on the surface. Despite all her years of living on the Moon — or maybe because of them — being outside bothered her.

  Selene’s factories were built out on the Moon’s surface, exposed to the vacuum of space, almost completely automated or run remotely by operators safe in control centers underground. “You okay, Kris?” he asked. “I’d feel better downstairs,” she answered frankly.

  “Okay, then, let’s go. I’m sorry I dragged you out here. I just wanted to see for myself how we’re doing.”

  “It’s all right,” she said, but she turned and started toward the airlock hatch and the tractor that had carried them to the factory.

  “I know that the vacuum out here is great for industrial processing,” she said, apologizing. “It just scares the bejesus out of me.”

  “Even buttoned up nice and cozy in a spacesuit?” Dan asked, walking across the factory floor alongside her.

  “Maybe it’s the suit,” she said. “Maybe I’m a closet claustrophobe.” Contamination was something that flatlanders from Earth took for granted. Living on a planet teeming with life, from bacteria to whales, thick with pollution from human and natural sources, and deep within a turbulent atmosphere that transports spores, dust, pollen, smog, moisture and other contaminants everywhere, cleanliness for Earthsiders was a matter of degree. That was why Dan, with his immune system weakened by the radiation doses he’d been exposed to in space, wore filter plugs and sanitary masks when he was on Earth. In the hard vacuum of the lunar surface, a thousand times better than the vacuum of low Earth orbit, not only was the environment clean of external pollution sources, the contaminants inside most materials could be removed virtually for free. Microscopic gas bubbles trapped inside metals percolated out of the metal’s crystal structure and boiled off into the void. Thus Selene’s factories were out on the lunar surface, open to the purifying vacuum of the Moon. “We don’t need to go through the carwash again,” Dan said, touching the arm of Cardenas’s suit. “We can go straight to the tractor.”

  He walked around the bulky airlock and hopped off the concrete slab that formed the factory floor, dropping in lunar slow-motion three meters to the regolith. His boots puffed up a little cloud of dust that floated lazily up halfway to his knees. Cardenas came to the lip of the slab, hesitated, then jumped down to where Dan waited for her.

  Like all the lunar factories, this one was built on a thick concrete platform to keep the factory floor above the dusty ground. With no winds, there was little danger of contaminants blowing in from the outside. A curving dome of honeycomb lunar aluminum protected the factory from the constant infall of micrometeoroids and the hard radiation from the Sun and deep space.

  The most worrisome source of pollution came from the humans who occasionally entered the factories, even though they had to wear spacesuits. Before they were allowed onto the factory floor, Dan and the others had to go through the “carwash,” a special airlock equipped with electrostatic scrubbers and special powdered detergents that removed the traces of oil, perspiration and other microscopic contaminants that clung to the spacesuits’ outer surfaces. As the tractor slowly trundled back to Selene’s main airlock, Dan thought about what he had just seen. Before his eyes, the MHD channel was growing: slowly, he admitted, but it was visibly getting longer as the virus-sized nanomachines took carbon and other atoms from the supply bins and locked them into place like kids building a Tinkertoy city.

  “How much longer?” he asked into the microphone built into his helmet. Cardenas, sitting beside him, understood his question. “Three weeks, if they go as programmed.”

  “Three weeks?” Dan blurted. “Looks like they’re almost finished now.”

  “They’ve still got to finish the MHD channel, which is a pretty tricky piece of work. High-current-density electrodes, superconducting magnets and all. Then comes the pumps, which is no bed of roses, and finally the rocket nozzles, which are also complex: buckyball microtubes carrying cryogenic hydrogen running a few centimeters away from a ten-thousand-degree plasma flow. Then there’s—”

  “Okay, okay,” Dan said, throwing up his gloved hands. “Three weeks.”

  “That’s the schedule.”

  Dan knew the schedule. He had been hoping for better news from Cardenas. Over the past six weeks his lawyers had hammered out the details of the new Starpower, Ltd. partnership. Humphries’s lawyers had niggled over every detail, while Selene’s legal staff had breezed through the negotiation with little more than a cursory examination of the agreement, thanks largely to Doug Stavenger’s prodding.

  So now it was all in place. Dan had the funding to make the fusion rocket a reality, and he still had control of Astro Manufacturing. Astro was staggering financially, but Dan calculated that the company could hold together until the profits from the fusion system started rolling in.

  Still, he constantly pushed Cardenas to go faster. It was going to be a tight race:

  Astro had already started construction of its final solar power satellite. When that one’s finished, Dan knew, we go sailing over the disaster curve. No new space construction contracts in sight.

  “Can’t this buggy go any faster?” Cardenas asked, testily.

  “Full throttle, ma’am,” said the imperturbable technician at the controls. To take her mind off her fears of being out in the open, Dan asked her, “Did you see this morning’s news from Earthside?”

  “The food riots in Delhi? Yeah, I saw it.”

  “They’re starving, Kris. If the monsoon fails again this year there’s going to be a monster famine, and it’ll spread a long way.”

  “Not much we can do about,” Cardenas said.

  “Not yet,” Dan muttered.

  “They got themselves into this mess,” she said tightly, “breeding like hamsters.” She’s really bitter, Dan thought. I wonder how she’d feel if her husband and kids had decided to stay on the Moon with her. With a sigh, he admitted, she’s got plenty to be bitter about.

  Big George was waiting for Dan in his private office, sitting on the sofa, a sheaf of printouts scattered across the coffee table.

  “What’s all this?” Dan asked, sitting in the chair at the end of the coffee table.

  When George sat on the couch there really wasn’t much room for anyone else. “Stuff I lifted from Humphries’s files,” George said, his red-bearded face wrinkled with worry. “He’s out for your balls, y’know.”

  “I k
now.”

  Tapping a blunt finger on the pile of printouts, George said, “He’s buyin’ every share of Astro stock he can get his hands on. Quietly. No greenmail, no big fuss, but he’s pushin’ his brokers to buy at any price.”

  “Great,” Dan grunted. “Maybe the damned stock will go up a little.”

  George grinned. “That’d be good. Been in free fall long enough.”

  “You’re not thinking of selling, are you?”

  With a laugh, George replied, “The amount I’ve got? Wouldn’t make any difference, one way or the other.”

  Dan was not amused. “If you ever do want to sell, you come to me first, understand? I’ll buy at the market price.”

  “Humphries is buyin’ at two points above the fookin’ market price.”

  “Is he?”

  “In some cases, where big blocks of stock are involved.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Dan said fervently, pronouncing each word distinctly. “He knows I don’t have the cash to buy out the minor stockholders.”

  “It’s not all that bad,” George said. “I did a calculation. At the rate he’s acquiring Astro shares, it’ll take him two years to buy up a majority position.” Dan stared off into space, thinking hard. “Two years. We could be making profits from the Asteroid Belt by then. Should be, if everything goes right.”

  “And if it doesn’t go right?”

  Dan shrugged. “Then Humphries will take control of Astro and throw me out on my butt.”

  “I’ll take his head off his fookin’ shoulders first,” George growled.

  “A lovely sentiment, pal, but then we’d have to deal with his lawyers.”

  George rolled his eyes toward heaven.

  GRAND PLAZA

  This is getting silly, Pancho thought. Humphries doesn’t trust phones or electronic links, too easy to tap, he says. So we have to meet face-to-face, in person, but in places where we won’t be noticed together. And he’s running out of places. He had stopped inviting Pancho to his home, down at the bottom level. Worried about somebody seeing her down there where she doesn’t belong, he claimed. But Pancho knew he’d stopped inviting her down there once she’d introduced him to Mandy. So his house was now out.

  Going outside on tourist jaunts is dumb, she thought. Besides, sooner or later some tourist is gonna recognize the high and mighty Martin Humphries on his bus. And how many times can an Astro employee take an afternoon off to go on a bus ride up on the surface? It’s silly.

  So now she was strolling along one of the paved paths that meandered through the Grand Plaza. Lots of grass and flowery shrubs and even some trees. Nothing as lush as Humphries had down at his grotto, but the Plaza was pleasant, relaxed, open and green.

  For a town that’s only got about three thousand permanent residents, Pancho thought, there’s an awful lot of people up here sashaying around. The walking paths weren’t exactly crowded, but there were plenty of people strolling along. Pancho had no trouble telling the Selene citizens from the rare tourists: the locals shuffled along easily in the low gravity and dressed casually in coveralls or running suits, for the most part; the few tourists she spotted wore splashy tee-shirts and vacation shorts and hopped and stumbled awkwardly, despite their weighted boots. Some of the women had bought expensive frocks in the Plaza shops and were showing them off as they oh-so-carefully stepped along the winding paths. The Selenites smiled and greeted each other as they passed; the tourists tended to be more guarded and uncertain of themselves. Funny, Pancho thought: anybody with enough money and free time to come up here for a vacation oughtta be more relaxed.

  The outdoor theater was jammed, Pancho saw. She remembered a news bulletin about Selene’s dance club performing low-gravity ballet. All in all, it seemed a normal weekday evening in the Plaza, nothing out of the ordinary. All the paths winding through the greenery led to the long windows set into the far end of the Plaza dome. Made of lunar glassteel, they were perfectly transparent yet had the structural strength of the reinforced concrete that made up the rest of the dome’s structure. It was still daylight outside, and would be for another two hundred-some hours. A few tourists had stopped to gape out at the cracked, pockmarked floor of Alphonsus.

  “It looks so dead!” said one of the women.

  “And empty,” her husband muttered.

  “Makes you wonder why anyone ever came up here to live.” Pancho huffed impatiently. You try growing up in Lubbock, or getting flooded out in Houston, see how much better the Moon looks to you. “Good evening,” said Martin Humphries.

  Pancho had not seen him approaching; she’d been looking through the windows at the outside, listening to the tourists’ comments.

  “Howdy,” she said.

  He was wearing dark slacks with a beige pullover shirt. And sandals, no less. His “ordinary guy” disguise, Pancho thought. She herself was in the same sky-blue coveralls she’d been wearing all day, with an Astro Corporation logo over the left breast pocket and her name stenciled just above it.

  Gesturing to a concrete bench at the edge of the path, Humphries said, “Let’s sit down. There are no cameras out here to see us together.” They sat. A family strolled by, parents and two little boys, no more than four or five. Lunatics. Selenites. The kids might even have been born here, she thought. “What have you been up to lately?” Humphries asked casually.

  Truthfully, Pancho reported, “We’ve started the detailed mission planning. Randolph’s picked out a couple of target asteroids for us to rendezvous with, and now Mandy and me are workin’ out the optimum trajectory, trip times, supply needs, failure modes… stuff like that.”

  “Sounds boring.”

  “Not when your life hangs on it.”

  Humphries conceded the point with a nod. “The construction of the propulsion system is proceeding on schedule?”

  “You’d know more about that than I would.”

  “It is,” he said.

  “That’s what I figured. Dan’d go ballistic if there were any holdups there.”

  “Amanda refuses to see me,” he said.

  For a moment Pancho was jarred by the sudden change of subject. Recovering quickly, she replied, “Mandy’s got enough on her hands. This isn’t the time for her to get involved with somebody… anybody.”

  “I want her off the mission.”

  “You can’t do that to her!” Pancho blurted.

  “Why not?”

  “It’d ruin her career, that’s why. Bounced off the first crewed mission to the Belt:

  how’d that look on her resume?”

  “She won’t need a resume. I’m going to marry her.”

  Pancho stared at him. He was serious.

  “For how long?” she asked coldly.

  Anger flared in Humphries’s eyes. “Just because my first two marriages didn’t work out, there’s no reason to think this one won’t.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  “Besides,” Humphries went on, “if it doesn’t work out she’ll get a very handsome settlement out of me. She’ll never have to work again.” Pancho said nothing. She was thinking, If it doesn’t work out he’ll use every lawyer he’s got to throw Mandy out into the cold without a cent. If it doesn’t work out he’ll hate her just as much as he hates his first two wives. “I want you to help convince her to marry me,” Humphries said. Pancho’s mind was spinning. You gotta be careful here, she warned herself. Don’t get him mad at you.

  “Mr. Humphries, that’s something I just plain can’t do. This isn’t a business deal, I can’t talk her into doin’ something she doesn’t want to do. Nobody can. Except maybe you.”

  “But she won’t see me!”

  “I know, I know,” she said, as sympathetically as she could. “It’s just too much pressure for her, what with the mission and all.”

  “That’s why I want her off the mission.”

  “Don’t do that to her. Please.”

  “My mind’s made up.”

  Pancho sighed unhappily.”Well, you’re ju
st gonna have to talk to Dan Randolph about that. He’s the boss, not me.”

  “Then that’s what I’ll do,” Humphries said firmly.

  “I wish you wouldn’t. Whyn’t you let us go out to the Belt. When we get back Mandy’ll be able to give you her full attention.”

  “No.” Humphries shook his head. “You might not get back.”

  “We will.”

  “You might not. I don’t want to take the chance of losing her.” Pancho looked into his eyes. They were still cold, unreadable, like the eyes of a professional card shark she’d known once while she’d been supporting herself through the University of Nevada in Las Vegas by working at one of the casinos. Not the eyes of a lovesick swain. Not the eyes of a man whose heart might break.

  “Better talk to Randolph, then,” she said.

  “I will.”

  Feeling weary and more than a little afraid of what was going to happen with Mandy, Pancho got to her feet. Humphries stood up, too, and she noticed that he was several centimeters shorter than she’d thought him to be. Glancing down at his sandals, she thought, the sumbitch must have lifts in his regular shoes. “By the way,” Humphries said, his voice hard-edged, “someone’s hacked into my private files.”

  She was genuinely surprised that he’d found out so quickly. It must have shown on her face.

  “Randolph is a lot smarter than I thought he was, but it won’t do him any good.”

  “You mean he’s the one who hacked you?”

  “Who else? One of his people, obviously. I want you to find out who. And how.”

  “I can’t do that!” Pancho blurted.

  “Why not?”

  “I’ll get caught. I’m not a chip freak.”

  His eyes bored into her for a painfully long moment. “You find out who did it.

  And how it was done. Or else.”

  “Or else what?”

  With a grim smile, Humphries answered, “I’ll think of something.”

  ASTRO CORPORATION OFFICES

  If he finds the account I set up for him to pay the rent on my sister’s dewar I’m toast,” Pancho said as she paced across Dan’s office.