Come In, Collins (Riddled Space Book 2)

by Bill Patterson

  The Moon appeared on the screen. “Image stabilization was used to reduce image jitter in the night air,” he said as the seconds counted down from ten to zero.

  A brilliant line sprang to being across the face of the Moon. A second after first light, a blob on the end of the line sprang into being. The blob flew across the face of the Moon, describing an arc that began at the southwest side of the body and ended at the northeast limb. The line swept along, like the luminescent hand of a hyperactive clock. The entire display could not have taken more than one minute, and when it ended, the astronomers in the room were shaken.

  “What the devil was that?” murmured one to the woman beside him. “I've never seen anything like it!” Other comments were similar.

  Billy waited for one more run of the sequence, then took up his narrative once more.

  “I'll run it one more time, but this time, concentrate on the shadows in the southeast. To assist in visualization, we have set the pixels at the highest saturation to zero.

  This time, the shadows were clearly evident. They swept around the mountains that created them with unusual swiftness.

  “Basic triangulation, based on known landmarks at known heights, have given us a solution that it somewhat hard to believe.” Billy paused to sip from a bottle of water. Here it goes, buddy. Your whole scientific career in one sentence.

  “The light is from fluorescing debris, energized by a laser in the gigawatt class, fired from the surface of the Moon at a location no more than two kilometers from the position of Moonbase Collins. They're alive!”

  ***

  The laser looked the same as before, perched on the mooncrete pedestal. The Moondogs removed the dust cover, the new targeting program loaded, and the observers were in the bunker once more.

  “This is going to be a bit more of an extended test,” announced Horst. We are going to initially target a similar piece of slag as we did the first time. However, we will pick one that will skim the Earth disk. It will be within the two-degree exclusion zone, and thus hundreds of kilometers above the Earth. After we have verified that the laser did not in fact fire at the Earth, and all of the Phase I parameters have been met, we are going to let it target as it sees fit. This should give us a good idea of how quickly it can acquire, track, and vaporize lunar debris in orbit.”

  Irma grumbled, but kept her silence. She wasn't too sure it was a good idea to test the system by choosing a path that deliberately aimed at the Earth, but she also knew enough about programming to realize the laser system was perfectly capable of missing the Earth.

  “Laser control, you are cleared for phase I,” Horst announced.

  The laser suddenly came to life, its tube snapping up, its barrel slewing around to a new heading. The firing of the laser beam once again resembled a finger of fire pointing at the heavens, with a blindingly bright dot at the end of it. The finger abruptly winked out as the rock sailed in front of the Earth. The barrel of the laser tracked it like a skeet shooter, the rock still glowing, but cooling as it traversed the blue marble of the home planet. As soon it cleared the exclusion zone, the finger winked on again, holding its fire on the rock until it sailed beyond the horizon.

  “End of trial,” announced Ops. “Working on the data now. Two minutes.”

  Horst turned to Irma, there in the bunker. “Looks OK. Did you see a problem?” She shook her head. “As soon as Ops gives us the word, we'll go to Phase II.”

  The minutes crept by. Finally, Ops came on the line.

  “We've got an issue in the telemetry. The laser switching went off without a hitch, but the tracking was wobbly at the end of the traversal, close to the horizon. We'd like to postpone Phase II until we can look at the laser some more. There might be some lunar dust in the bearings.”

  Horst sighed, but acknowledged the call. The observers trooped through the newly installed scrubbers and back into the Collins.

  ***

  The news that the crew of the Collins was alive hit the ravaged Earth like a shot of adrenaline. Much like people will obsess over the fate of a couple of whales trapped in the only open water in a sea of ice, the world fixated on the idea that their fellow humans were trapped on the Moon.

  Meanwhile, every day or so, a sizable piece of moon rock landed on the Earth at a few miles per second, propelled by whatever force had caused The Event. There were loud screams to do something about the devastation from rabid environmentalists to smarmy seaside developers whose properties were getting tsunami'd, but all the choices they had were bad. The only possible solution would be to fire nuclear-tipped missiles at the rocks, but the electro-magnetic pulse that comes with nuclear weapons has a devastating impact on any electronics that were in line of sight to the explosion. Besides, how could a nation's foes be certain that the missiles were actually going to be used against a piece of Lunar crust and not against a city?

  The United Nations was a frantic place.

  ***

  Billy John Dels was lucky enough to be at the eyepiece of Cyclops when the Collins crew ran their second laser test. The sudden cessation of the laser beam, and its reengagement, gave him yet another bombshell to drop on the world. The Collins was not only alive, but it was not going to fire on anything that would cross in front of the Earth.

  Other observatories had made the same observations that he had, but those were just automated, unattended observations—robotic cameras recording Lunar debris returning to the Moon—and no humans were available to puzzle out the anomalous threads of white fire scratching across their images.

  That meant that the Spartanburg Observatory were the first ones to make the observations, and the first to correctly interpret their data. Billy John would have been famous if Jama Fenester had not stepped in to shield him. She took all questions, called out campus security to keep the media out of the campus, and tried to shield her workers from media scrutiny—even going so far as to put them up in an extra student dorm so they were safe from the hordes of citizen journalists camping out at their homes.

  All Billy John knew was this: his thesis was further away from completion than ever.

  ***

  The first laser was eventually approved for full-time use, and a portion of Mighty Thor's output was allocated to it. McCrary, ever vigilant for unintended effects, asked to see Vito VonShaick, Chief of Nuclear Power.

  “We've got a shiny new laser, blasting away at debris. How many can we field without straining Thor?” he asked.

  “Couple of hundred,” said Vito. “Sure, they're gigawatts class, but that doesn't mean they're blasting one billion watts up into the sky per laser. They're actually firing in pulse mode, extremely fast, on the order of five milliseconds on, twenty off, just to get the crystal energy pumped up high enough. Each pulse is about a gigawatt per square meter, but the beams are only about a tenth of that in area, and the cycling means that they're only using power twenty percent of the time. Call it twenty megawatts per laser, on average.”

  “Wait—Thor's rated to be one gigawatt, isn't it?” McCrary punched numbers into his commpad, frowning at the result. “Seems to me that it can only deal with fifty, if that's all it ever did.”

  “I shouldn't play gotcha,” confessed VonShaick. “But I can tell you didn't look too closely at the lasers.”

  “What's to see?” asked McCrary. “It's a box on a tripod.”

  “The main part, sure. Here, I've got to hand it to my friend Roque Zacarías again. He went nuts over the KREEP terrane material we sent him. He decided to see just how big a crystal of lasing material he could grow. Turned out to be something the size of a baseball bat.”

  “Hey—that's about how big that one out on the pad is.”

  “Right! He sent me the specs when I asked him to. I was screwing around with Helium-3 fusion in my spare time, and needed something big and powerful to fire up the plasma. He also sent me everything he had on laser theory, materials, everything. I dug up some of the state of the art info from Earth, as well.”

>   “You put a lot of time into this,” McCrary thoughtfully said. He twiddled with a lump of olivine on his desk.

  “Thor never really required a whole lot of hand-holding. Sure, you had to keep an eye on her. But some of that stuff was so damned thick I had to put it down every paragraph or so. Kept me sane during the watches.”

  “OK, cut to the chase. How can we run hundreds of lasers when I can only figure fifty?”

  “The sun,” said VonShaick. “There's a whole section on sun-pumped laser media.”

  “Solar cells?” asked McCrary in amazement. “I didn't think they were powerful enough to run a big one.”

  “They're not. No, I mean the kind of lasing material that you keep at the focus of a solar mirror. Let the sun shine in, and the energy pumps up the laser for you. It's a special blend of the kind of crystal that Roque was making, along with a sprinkle of other elements that we've got up here in abundance.”

  “I didn't see any mirrors on the lasers,” said McCrary.

  “Correct. It's on the base of the tripod. We run a nice wide light-pipe up from the focus of the solar mirror into the main laser itself. When the sun’s at its worst, we can get a big chunk of our power from the sun and only about ten percent from Thor.”

  “Ten percent of twenty is two megawatts. Yeah, I guess you could run a couple of hundred. But not during the lunar night.”

  “Yeah, you got me there, boss. We're reduced to twenty-five then.”

  “Half of Thor's power,” said McCrary, frowning in thought. “OK, I can live with that limitation. Thanks for dropping by.”

  ***

  The lasers weren't the only thing that was advancing at Moonbase Collins. It was the most spectacular, but it was by no means the only thing.

  The second greenhouse was ready for bag placement. McCrary's cave had just finished getting cleaned up and ready for operations when Jimmy Fields suggested it as a good place to create the outer shell for the second greenhouse. With the return of The Works to full operation, heaps of pure silicon dioxide sand was available for formation into fiberglass. Solar mirrors focused on a central titanium vessel full of sand, and in very short order, a liquid glass was created. Sprayed through fine holes in a tin plate, the glass formed fibers that were spun into fiberglass cloth. This cloth was impregnated with a resin formed from the carbonaceous chondrite asteroid that Pilot Zanger discovered years previously, and it was ready to be hardened into the outer shell of the new greenhouse.

  But they needed a space to fabricate the shell. The previous shell had been made on Earth, where there were machines and huge interior spaces that can easily fabricate a precisely measured shell. No such machines or space existed on the Moon, otherwise, they'd be already using it as the greenhouse.

  Then Jimmy thought of the cave.

  Irma was on a ladder, carefully sealing a lap joint at the ridge of the greenhouse bag, when one of her lieutenants came to her.

  “They're putting in laser number fifty today,” he said. “Aren't you going to do anything?”

  “What is there to do?” she asked. “They've got their programs down pat. Those lasers aren't going to fire at the Earth, and even if they did, they're defocused enough that they'd never damage the globe.”

  “They could always refocus them,” said the lieutenant. “Or at least, that's what you had said.”

  Irma sighed and climbed down the ladder. “I was wrong. They showed me how the crystals were shaped so that it couldn't happen. The beam is tight enough for about 200 klicks, then it spreads out. They don't want us lasering Earth any more than we want them doing the same thing.”

  “So, that's it, eh?” said the fellow traveler.

  “Right now, it is. But think—if we hadn't put up a fuss, who knows whether they would have defocused those lasers on their own. We've won this fight, and we'll win others. The important thing is to keep looking, keep them honest.”

  “Right,” said the lieutenant, clearly disappointed. He clumsily tapped his helmet with his gloves. “See you inside.”

  Irma waved goodbye, then climbed the ladder to resume her sealing of the lap joint. If there was going to be an accident in the new greenhouse, it was not going to be from anything that she worked on. After all, it might be her working in the greenhouse.

  ***

  It took a full solar cycle before the greenhouse was erected, the fiberglass cloth shells fully cured, and the entire structure buried under three meters of carefully compacted regolith.

  It seemed incongruous, burying a greenhouse, but this was the Moon, where common sense was usually apt to get someone killed. Burying a greenhouse, or indeed, any structure, was just smart. The three meters of rock and dust wasn't just to keep the magnificent desolation pristine. It also served to filter out all of the space radiation that rained down on the Moon at all hours of the day and night.

  It also allowed for easy temperature regulation, since the temperature under a blanket of rock and soil was nice and even, whereas up on the surface, it could vary from over one hundred centigrade at high noon to minus one hundred at night.

  Once the structure of the greenhouse was in place, it was time for the fun part—mixing the lunar soil with water and organics, and grinding the mixture to a fine mud. This was essential, since most of the regolith was not the nice, rounded grains of typical Earth soil. Rather, it was more like a collection of shattered glass, with razor-sharp surfaces all around.

  Most of the fine-grained soil of the Moon was the result of rock shattering under an impact event. These highly energetic events splashed fragments of rock and sprays of melt in all directions. Without resistance from an atmosphere, these blobs assume fantastic shapes and land amongst other fragments, where they stuck together. Until the next impact, when they would shatter like a piece of plate glass.

  If you just threw poop into the dust and added water, you might be able to sprout some seeds. But as they continued to reach down for both minerals and support, the roots would wedge against these shards of glass, resulting in cuts to the structure, damage to the roots, and eventually, a failed and dead plant.

  ***

  Jeremy thought of all these things while he was scooping more processed sewage into the dampened dust of the Moon and feeding it into the grinder. It was nasty, dirty, smelly work, but it had to get done if anyone was going to get a diet more varied than those heinous iron ration bars.

  He was mindlessly poking seeds into the hydroponics tray and thinking about his lot in life. The greenhouse still smelled like plastic and feces, but that was bound to change as the plants took hold and filled the air with their scent.

  Sure, he still didn't see the whole point of survival here on the moon, but he had to admit that life was certainly starting to look better. With the second greenhouse came a new perspective. The sight of the seeds sprouting and reaching for life had a subtle effect on Jeremy.

  He pondered the latest bit of news, filtered out of the noise at the mess hall. The laser field was coming along nicely. The thirtieth laser had completed its testing, and the other twenty-nine were continuously firing at debris in orbit above the Moon. Currently, they were concentrating on small debris, fist-sized and smaller rocks, with the idea of reducing their population onehundred-fold.

  It seemed an audacious project. Jeremy was a Moondog, one of those men who were intelligent enough to work in the specialized environment of space, to foresee the results of their actions and avoid the stupid ones. Not everyone in space was a rocket scientist or a high energy physicist. They did have to be college graduates, at a minimum, with at least a B.S. degree with a high quantity of science.

  All this meant was that Jeremy could hold his own in the discussions that swirled around the higher ups about such topics as size distribution charts, laser ablation of stony debris, radar cross section and backscatter, and the other related topics to finding, tracking, and destroying the rocks floating up in the sky.

  Here I am, a college grad, a relatively smart guy. Shoveli
ng poop into a grinder. But I'm on the Moon! Still, I'm better off than most of the population of Earth. It really would be nice to get back home. Funny, I don't feel as hopeless as I did a few weeks ago. I might get back to Earth yet.

  ***

  One of the more interesting methods proposed for locating debris was by way of their induced radioactivity. Every piece of impacting debris seemed to be radioactive. Vito VonShaick examined some of the smaller pieces, and determined that the radioactivity was primarily from Sodium-24, produced from intense neutron bombardment of normal sodium atoms in the minerals that made up the rocks of the Moon. Many of the minerals in Lunar regolith contained sodium.

  “There's no way that any simple impact can generate radioactivity in moon rocks,” said Vito, briefing McCrary. “Otherwise, the Moon's entire surface would be glowing—it's nothing but impact craters. I'm guessing that something like a H-Bomb went off at the South Pole.”

  McCrary scratched his head. “I just don't see who would do that, or what they would gain,” he said. “Unless they wanted to erase mankind from space, which is what the debris cloud is doing.”

  Vito shrugged. “It's the US, Russia, or China,” he said. “They're the only powers who can make a bomb large enough to create a debris cloud that size.” He motioned over to the chunks of rock in a thick glass jar. A cube of what looked like salt glowed ominously in the container. “But even Tsar Bomba, that 100-megaton monster, isn't enough to make so much rock radioactive. Worse, I don't see any other decay products that should be in there. No uranium, plutonium, strontium, iodine—none of the things that a nuke always creates.”

  “Wasn't there something once called a neutron bomb?” asked McCrary.

  “That's just a regular nuke whose design emphasized the production of neutrons,” said Vito. “You'd still get all the fallout. No, something weird happened out there.” He nudged the container with a finger. “Something dumped a whole lot of neutrons into a very small space.”

  He mumbled that line once more, then sucked in his breath. His eyes unfocused, then rolled back into his head. He fell backwards, slowly at first, but with increasing speed. McCrary caught the man before his head could strike the ground.