by Ben Bova
“Hi, Hi!” Paul said brightly as he helped Joanna into her chair. Everyone called the man Tink, but Paul always made a pun out of his first name, even though he dreaded the flood of puns Tinker poured out in return.
“Hello boss boss.”
Paul slid into his own chair, across the ladderway from Joanna, and started strapping in before lowering the chair to its full reclining position. “Boss boss?” he asked Tinker, over his shoulder. “You stuttering?”
Tink had always called Paul the boss, since he worked in Paul’s space operations division.
“Well, now you’re my new boss’s boss, aren’t you?” Tink countered. “That makes you boss boss.”
“Boss squared,” said one of the other technicians, from a back row.
“Running dog capitalist expropriator of the workers,” came another voice. Paul knew whose, without having to turn around: Alex Wodjohowitcz, tractor teleoperator and technician, on his way to a three-month tour of duty on the Moon.
Paul jabbed a finger toward Joanna. “Here’s the real boss,” he said. Then wondered how humorous the remark really was. Joanna cocked an eyebrow at him, barely smiled. Once he was settled in the seat next to her, Joanna leaned I across the aisle separating them to ask in a whisper, “Who are those people?”
“Our employees,” Paul whispered back. “Some of the best people in the world. In the whole Earth-Moon system, as a matter of fact.”
“And that one who called you a running dog? Why do you let him speak to you like that?”
“Wojo?” Paul laughed. “Wojo’s the most creative cusser I’ve ever met. I’ve known him more than six years now and I’ve never heard him resort to profanity or repeat himself. But he sure can bum your ears off.”
“Liftoff in two minutes,” came a voice from the cockpit, over the intercom speakers.
Paul knew that the astronaut pilot and co-pilot were in the cockpit strictly as redundancies. The Clippership was preprogrammed and monitored from the ground, just as it would be if it were carrying all freight and no people at all. Only if something went disastrously wrong would the human crew have anything to do. And then, Paul thought, it would probably be too late. But the government agencies had insisted on a human crew when human passengers were going aloft. Takes two paying seats out of our cash flow, Paul fumed whenever he thought about the outmoded regulation.
Then one of the astronauts came clambering down the ladder to check that all the passengers were properly strapped in and had cranked their seats back to the full reclining position for takeoff. He said a brief hello to Paul, smiled at Joanna, and then climbed back up into the cockpit and closed the hatch above Paul’s head.
Paul glanced across the narrow aisle and saw that Joanna looked pale. She’s never been in space before, he knew. He reached out his hand and touched her shoulder. She clasped his hand in hers. Her palm felt cold, clammy.
Grinning at her, Paul whispered, “You’ll love it.”
She nodded, but looked extremely dubious.
LANA GOODMAN
She was the first person to suffer a heart attack on the Moon.
Dr. Lana Goodman was a tiny wisp of a woman, a brilliant fifty-two-year-old with degrees in medicine, physiology, and biophysics. She was rumored to be on track for a Nobel, and could have had her pick of any university in the world. Indeed, she was teaching and conducting research in low-gravity physiology at Johns Hopkins when she applied for a position with Masterson Aerospace.
“I want to go to the Moon,” she told the corporation’s astonished personnel director. “I’ve always wanted to go there. I’ve had experience aboard space stations, but I haven’t gotten to the Moon yet and I want to do it before I get too old.” : Masterson took her on as a consultant, making maximum public relations mileage out of it, and sent her on a well-publicized tour of duty at Moonbase.
Dr. Goodman was expected to look after the medical needs of the twenty-eight men and women who happened to be working at Moonbase at the time, as well as continue her own research on how the human body adapts to low gravity. Her heart attack was totally unexpected, caused by a clot thatlodged in one of the smaller coronary arteries. She was eating breakfast when she felt a terrific pain in her chest, vomited up everything in her stomach, and half-collapsed on the galley table. Her skin turned gray and sweaty.
Since she was Moonbase’s resident doctor at the time, she was attended by two of the base’s paramedics — both of them engineers with other duties who stood by for medical emergencies. They slapped an oxygen mask over her nose; one of them shot a load of clot-busting tissue plasminogen activator into her arm, while the othef pushed aspirin and nitroglycerin tablets through her pain-clenched teeth.
The paramedics contacted Masterson’s medical staff in Savannah, who plugged them in to the finest cardiac centers in Boston, Houston and even Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Within hours Dr. Goodman was out of danger, thanks mainly to the clot-dissolving properties of the TPA.
Within three days she could walk around almost normally, in the gentle gravity of the Moon.
But she could not return to Earth.
Part of the problem was the acceleration of the rocket boost from the lunar surface, she knew, although that was only a minor part of it, since the liftoff was much less stressful than a takeoff from Earth would have been. There were gee stresses in re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, too. They were greater, but she felt confident that she could handle them.
The real problem was the condition of her heart, weakened by weeks of living in low gravity and now damaged by the infarction. She feared that she would be a cardiac cripple on Earth, with its high gravity.
After days of consulting with her Earthbound medical colleagues, Goodman decided she would have to stay on the Moon for weeks, perhaps months, while slowly building up her cardiac strength through exercises specially designed to strengthen her heart muscle.
She wanted to resume her medical duties, but the corporation had sent up a strapping young M.D. to replace her as medical officer — and to watch over her while she recuperated. Looking more like a football hero than a physician, the young man supervised her exercise regimen with ruthless tenderness.
Dr. Goodman continued her research, but this was not enough to fill her increasingly boring days in the cramped underground warrens of Moonbase. She had brought her camera with her, though, and started taking photographs. Not of the busy, harried, sweaty people who lived cheek-by-jowl in Moonbase. She got into a spacesuit and went out on the surface to take photos of the grandeur of the Moon itself.
She had no intention of showing her work to anyone but her fellow Moonbase residents. But one of them electronically relayed back to Savannah a few choice shots of the Sun rising over Alphonsus’s ringwall mountains. A minor executive in the public relations department showed them to an editor of a photography magazine. Within a month several other magazines were asking for her work.
She had started with ordinary color film, but soon asked her new-found friends in the world of photography to send her black-and-white film, instead. It seemed made to order for the black-and-gray world of the Moon.
With dizzying suddenness, Lana Goodman became an artist of global renown. Her photos of the Moon showed all the barren splendor of this new world in its rugged challenge. Her work adorned the covers of newsmagazines. Media personalities clamored to interview her, live, from the Moon. — The handsome young football hero of a physician left after his three-month tour ended. The next doctor was a woman, just as qualified, just as determined to see that Goodman continued her exercise routine, but nowhere near as emotionally interesting.
When medical tests showed she was physically able to return to Earth, she asked for a postponement. I’m not ready, she said. Psychologically, I’m not prepared to face the return trip.
On the first anniversary of her heart attack she decided to quit the subterfuge and asked her contacts in the corporation’s personnel office to allow her to stay on the Moon indefinitely.
She never returned to Earth.
Lana Goodman become the first person to live on the Moon permanently.
SPACE STATION
The Clippership took off with a thundering roar that was only slightly muted by the passenger cabin’s acoustical insulation. The ship rattled hard enough to blur Paul’s vision for a moment. Pressed flat against the reclined seat, he turned his head to see how Joanna was taking it. Her eyes were squeezed shut, hands clutching the armrests with whitened knuckles.
The vibration eased off a good deal, but the bellowing thunder of the rocket engines still shook his innards. Then a sharp bang! and the noise abruptly ceased.
Paul felt all sensation of weight disappear. One instant he was flattened against the chair, weighing three times normal, the next he was floating lightly against the restraining seat harness.
Joanna’s arms had lifted off her seat’s rests. Her gray-green eyes were wide open now, looking startled.
Paul grinned at her. “We’re coasting now. Zero gee.”
She smiled back at him, weakly.
Within fifteen minutes the Clippership made its rendezvous with the space station. The ship lurched slightly once, twice, a third time. Then the co-pilot opened the cockpit hatch and announced, “We’re docked. They’re attaching the access tube to the main hatch.”
“Can I come up and take a look?” Paul asked, unstrapping his seat harness.
“Sure, we’re all finished here,” said the co-pilot.
Paul floated up into the ladderway aisle. The other passengers were unbuckling their harnesses, bobbing up out of their chairs, opening the overhead luggage bins to haul out their gear. Straps snaked weightlessly, as if alive; travel bags and equipment boxes hung in mid-air.
Looking down at Joanna, still firmly strapped into her seat, he said, I’ll be right back.”
She tried to smile again.
The cockpit was cramped with two seats for the astronauts shoehorned into wall-to-wall instrumentation. But there was a wide transparent port for Paul to look through.
The space station was still unfinished. Paul could see a spacesuited construction team hauling girders and curved sheets of alloy into place along the station’s outermost section, so far distant that they looked like little toy figures. A welding laser flashed briefly. The construction workers all wore maneuvering backpacks so they would not need tethers to keep them from drifting off into space. The Earth hung off to one side, huge and bright blue with parades of pure white clouds marching across the face of the broad ocean. Paul could see specks of islands and, off at the curving horizon, the wrinkled brown stretch of California’s rugged coastline swinging into view.
The station was built in three concentric wheels with a docking area at the hub. Once the construction was finished the station would be spun up so that people in the widest, outermost wheel would feel a normal Earthly gravity. The inner wheels would provide one-third and one-sixth gee, while the docking hub would be effectively in zero gravity all the time. For now, though, the entire huge structure hung motionless against the utterly black sky. It was all in zero gee.
“They’re making good progress,” Paul said.
“Had an accident yesterday,” the pilot told him. “Boom operator got pinned between one of the girders and a new section of flooring they were installing.”
“Was he hurt bad?”
“She,” said the co-pilot. “Ruptured her suit. She was dead before they could get to her.”
Paul shook his head. “How many does that make?”
“Four this year. Six, altogether.”
“Christ, you think they’d be more careful.”
“It’s the new guys, every time. They start hauling big girder around and they’re weightless so they forget they still got mass. And momentum. Get hit by one and it can still cave in your ribs.”
“There hasn’t been much publicity about it back on th ground,” Paul said.
The co-pilot smiled grimly. “Rockledge has a damned tight public relations operation. No reporters up here at all.”
“Still… you’d think they’d be screaming about it.”
“Nah,” said the pilot. “Rockledge insures the workers, pay off the family plenty. Nobody complains.”
“Not yet,” the co-pilot countered.
“The work’s getting done on schedule and within budget from what I hear.”
Paul asked, “Even with the insurance costs factored in?”
The pilot nodded. “Rockledge must’ve factored in a casualty rate when they decided to build this wheel.”
Yeah, Paul thought, and our rental of space in the station must be helping to pay off their insurance premiums.
“It’s a tradeoff,” the co-pilot said, as if he could read Paul’s face. “The sooner they get this station finished and operating the sooner they can rent out all its space. They must’ve figured that the insurance costs are worth it if they can get the job done fast enough.”
“Pretty damned cold-blooded,” Paul muttered. “I don’t think I’d push an operation that way.”
The pilot grinned at him. “That’s why we work for you boss, instead of Rockledge.”
Masterson Corporation’s space operations division — Paul’s former bailiwick — had rented half the innermost wheel of the space station for research laboratories and an experimental zero-gee manufacturing facility. Once the station was completed and spun up, that innermost wheel would rotate at one-sixth gee: the gravity of the Moon’s surface. The labs would shift from zero-gee to a lunar environment. The manufacturing facility would be removed from the station and hung outside as a ‘free floater,’ where it could remain in the weightless mode.
Part of Masterson’s rented space was living quarters for its employees. Spartan at best, they were meant to house people who would spend no more than a few months aboard the station.
“It’s not exactly the Ritz,” Paul said to Joanna as he slid back the accordion-fold door to their designated quarters.
It was a cubicle about the size of a generous telephone booth. No window, but a small computer terminal built into one bulkhead. Otherwise the walls, floor and ceiling were covered with Velcro and loops for tethering one’s feet. A mesh sleeping bag was stuck to one wall.
“At least we’re close to the toilet and washroom,” Paul said, pointing along the corridor that sloped upward conspicuously in both directions.
Hanging onto the open doorjamb while her feet barely pouched the deck, Joanna lopked bleary-eyed at her honeymoon suite and said wretchedly, “I think I’m going to be sick.”
“It’s not that bad, is it?”
“No, Paul,” she said, her face pasty-white. “I’m really going-’ She clutched at her middle.
Paul grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her toward the toilet area. Joanna moaned and gagged. Pushing her weightlessly down the short length of the corridor, their feet barely touching the deck, Paul slid Joanna sideways through the open doorway. She bumped gently against the wall inside.
“Just let go,” he said to her, leaning over her bowed back to start the toilet’s air suction flow. “This happens to almost everybody. I should’ve realized it’d hit you. I’m sorry, I just didn’t think—”
He kept on talking while Joanna puked her guts into the zero gravity toilet.
“It’s all my fault,” he kept saying. “I’m so damned sorry. I never stopped to think that you’d be sick.” As he spoke and Joanna vomited, Paul fought to hold down the bile rising in his own throat.
Some honeymoon, Paul said to himself. Two days in orbit. two days sick as a dog. Joanna had tried to be brave, tried to fight down the nausea that assailed her, but whenever she moved her head it overpowered her.
I should have known, Pa
ul berated himself over and over She’s never been up here before. It gets everybody, one way or another. Damned idiot! You did your thinking with your balls Honeymoon in zero gravity. Upchuck city.
He spent the entire first day alternating between Joanna miserably sick in their cubicle, and the research labs anc manufacturing facility. The experiments on fabricating thin-film video screens and special alloys in zero gravity and the high vacuum of space were going well.
The director of the manufacturing facility was a sandy-haired bespectacled Australian with degrees in metallurgy and management from the University of Sydney. He patiently took Paul through every step of the zero-gravity smelting and refining system they had built.
There were hardly any other people in the area. The facility took up more than a third of the space station’s inner wheel, but Paul saw only a handful of technicians and other personnel, all in coveralls of one color or another, all of them busily ignoring them as the facility director conducted the mandatory tour for the new CEO.
“The board’s very interested in the Windowall development,” Paul told the director.
“That’s good, I suppose.”
Paul went on, “Better than good. If we can manufacture wall-sized screens on a scale big enough for the TV market, it’ll make this operation very profitable.”
The younger man shrugged. “Thin-film manufacturing is no great problem. Give us the raw materials and we’ll make flat screens the size of Ayer’s Rock, if you want”
Paul laughed. “Ten feet across should do, for now.”
The director remained quite serious. “We can do that. But what I really wanted to show you…” He led Paul to an apparatus that looked something like an oversized clothes drier.
Peering through a thick, tinted observation port, Paul saw an array of fist-sized molten metal droplets glowing red-hot as they hung weightlessly inside a capacious oven heated by concentrated sunlight. Tentatively, he touched the glass with his fingertips. It was hardly warm.
