by Ben Bova
“The vacuum is a fine insulator,” the younger man said, with just a hint of an Aussie accent. “Just open the far side of the oven to space and we don’t have to worry about heat transfer much at all.”
Still, Paul thought it looked damned hot in there. The place smelled hot, liked a foundry or a steel mill. Paul realized it was all in his imagination; his brain was linking what he was seeing to memories associated with blast furnaces and smelting forges. Yet imaginary or not, he felt beads of perspiration trickling down his ribs.
The director looked youthfully cool. No perspiration stained his light tan coveralls.
“By focusing the incoming solar energy,” he was explaining, “we can generate temperatures close to the black-body theoretical limit — better than five thousand kelvins.”
Paul already knew that, but he let himself look impressed. “I’m surprised that you keep the droplets so small. I always pictured a big ball of red-hot metal hanging in the vacuum chamber.”
The youngster smiled tolerantly and nudged his rimless glasses back up his nose. “It’s a lot easier to handle a bunch of small spherules than one big glob. We can spin them up quicker, make them flatten out into sheets.”
“How do you spin them?” Paul asked.
“Magnetic fields. Dope the molten mix with a little iron and we spin the spherules, flatten them out into sheets, meld them together. It’s straightforward and it doesn’t take all that much energy.”
“So you’re using centrifugal force to produce sheets of alloy.”
The kid nodded and his glasses slid slightly down his nose again. “Then we turn off the heat and let the sheets outgas in vacuum. That drives out all the impurities while the alloy’s hardening.”
“All the impurities?” Paul asked.
The director gave him a lopsided grin. “Enough,” he said. “Come on over here, I’ll show you.”
He pushed off the oven wall with one foot and glided past a trio of woriters bent over a piece of equipment that Paul did not recognize. Its access hatch was open and one of the workers — a slim Asian woman — was reaching into its innards while the two men with her muttered in low, exasperated tones. Paul didn’t understand what they were saying, but he knew the tone of voice: something had broken down and they were trying to figure out how to fix it.
“Here’s the final product,” the young director said, coasting to a stop in front of a long workbench. He slid his feet into the restraining loops set into the floor and pulled a thin sheet of metal, about a foot square, from a stack that was tied to the workbench with Velcro straps.
Paul flexed the thin sheet of shining metal in his hands. It bent almost double with ease.
“Higher tensile strength than the best steel alloys made on Earth,” said the director proudly, “yet it weighs less than half of the Earth-manufactured alloys.”
Paul felt impressed. “Detroit’s going to like this,” he said. “With an alloy like this they can make cars that are half the weight of the competition, so their energy efficiency will be double anything else on the road.”
“And the cars will be safer, too,” the youngster said, “because this alloy’s stronger than anything else available.”
“Good,” said Paul, smiling with genuine satisfaction. “Damned good.”
“But there’s a problem.”
Paul’s smile evaporated. “Cost?”
The kid nodded. “When you figure the cost of bringing the raw materials up here to orbit, this alloy costs ten times what groundbased alloys cost.”
Paul looked around the facility. It’s all here, he thought. We’ve got a new industrial base within our grasp. Almost. We can make billions. If…
Turning back to the earnest young director, he said, “Suppose I could provide you with the raw materials at a cost twenty times lower than they cost now?”
The youngster’s eyes widened behind his rimless glasses. “Twenty times cheaper? How?”
“From the Moon.”
The kid looked as if Paul had just offered to put the Tooth Fairy to work for him. “Sure. From the Moon.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know, Mr. Stavenger. Everybody knows you’ve been pushing to set up a mining operation at Moonbase. But that’s years away, at best.”
Paul smiled tightly. “It wasn’t all that long ago that people said we were years away from zero-gee manufacturing.”
“Well, yeah, maybe. But—”
Stopping him with an upraised hand, Paul said, “Orbital manufacturing doesn’t make economic sense if you have to lift the raw materials from Earth. We both know that. But if we can provide the raw materials from the Moon it’ll reduce your costs by a factor of twenty or more.”
The kid made a half-hearted nod. “Okay, so the Moon’s got low gravity and no air and you can shoot payloads off its surface with an electric catapult. That makes it real cheap.”
“And the raw materials are there. Aluminum, silicon, titanium, iron…”
“But how much will it cost to set up a mining operation on the Moon?” the youngster asked. “How long will it take? How much will that electric catapult cost and how soon can I you have it in operation?”
“As soon as I goddamned can,” Paul said. Meaning, As soon fas I can get the board of directors to put up the money I need to get Moonbase up and running.
The younger man nodded, unimpressed.
“In the meantime,” Paul said, “I want you to get the Windowall operation through development and into production. We can make enough money off that to keep your alloy processing going.”
Joanna was still in the sleeping bag when he returned to their quarters. She was awake, though, and looking almost healthy.
“It’s all right if I keep still,” she told Paul. “But as soon as I move my head, even a little bit, everything starts spinning.”
“I guess this was a lousy idea,” he said, hovering a few inches from her. For a moment he felt as if he were floating above her as she lay cocooned in the mesh sleeping bag, and a shudder of erotic heat flashed through him. He forced his feet into the restraining loops on the deck and his perspective shifted immediately; he was standing in front of her and she was pale and despondent.
“No, it was a wonderful idea. I’m just not cut out to be an astronaut.”
Paul disagreed. “It’s only a matter of adjustment. If we stayed up here for a week you’d be fine.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Your body’s already adjusting to zero gee. You’ve grown at least an inch taller.”
“Have I?”
“Look at the cuffs of your pants,” he said. Then quickly, “No, don’t bend your head down. But your sleeves are shorter now, too. See?”
“I really have grown taller,” Joanna said.
“Everybody does in zero gee. The spine unbends and you gain an inch or two. Your waist gets slimmer, too.”
“But my head feels so stuffed.”
“Mine too. The sinuses can’t drain the way they do on Earth. Zero gravity means no post-nasal drip.”
“I wish there was something I could take to make me feel better,” she said.
“The transdermal patches haven’t worked?”
“I don’t think so,” Joanna said, fingering the flesh-colored circular patch behind her ear. “Or maybe they are working and I’d feel even worse without them.”
He sighed. “I could call for a Clippership to take us back tonight.”
“No,” Joanna said firmly. “You’re not going to spend a few million dollars just to pamper me.”
He grinned at her. “Who else should I pamper?”
Before she could answer the phone buzzed. Paul reached across the tiny cubicle to the computer keyboard built into the bulkhead and tapped a key.
Bradley Arnold’sflorid face appeared on the display screen.
“Ah, I got the two of you together,” he said, smiling widely. “Good.”
“What is it, Brad?” Joanna asked. Paul was surprised
at the sudden strength in her voice.
“I’ve had a long talk with Greg. Did you know he’s been — ah, seeing — Melissa Hart?”
“Is that why you called?” Paul asked, annoyed.
“No, no, no. Not at all. But Greg and I had a long talk, almost a father-son talk, you might say.” The man is a monument to poor taste, Paul thought.
“How is he?” Joanna asked.
Arnold blinked his frog’s eyes twice. “He seems to be bearing up well. Physically, he’s fine.”
Sure; he’s getting physical therapy from Melissa, Paul growled to himself.
“He wants to have a meeting with you, Paul,” Arnold went on. “To discuss the videodisk.”
“Discuss it? What do you mean?” Paul asked.
“Greg hasn’t decided whether or not to take the disk to the police. He wants to talk it over with you before he makes that decision.”
Paul felt alarmed. There’s more going on here than Brad’s telling us. But Joanna smiled tightly and answered, “We’ll be glad to sit down and talk it over with him. Just as soon as we can. We can leave the station right away, can’t we Paul?”
Paul nodded, thinking that the few million she wouldn’t spend to alleviate her own physical distress wasn’t even a consideration in her mind when it came to trying to patch it up with her son.
MARE NUBIUM
Dead reckoning. Paul tried not to think of the irony in the term.
With no navigational aids to help him, Paul looked across the glassy crater that he had fallen into and lined himself up with his own boot prints, shining bright against the dark lunar regolith. Turning, he looked for a recognizable feature on the sharp horizon.
Okay, he said to himself. You head for that big squarish boulder. March.
He started off again, checking his watch to see how much progress he had made. How the hell can I tell how far I’ve come? he fumed at himself. Pissing suit doesn’t come with an odometer. Three hours since I started. Legs still feel pretty good. No stiffness.
But his left heel hurt worse each time he set the foot down. Wonder if that’s the same heel that did in Achilles?
He struggled on, doggedly aiming for the boulder, big as a fair-sized house. When I get there I’ll take a break, he promised himself. Sit down in the shade and rest a spell. Just a few minutes. Don’t have enough oxygen to sit around for long. Don’t want the legs to stiffen up, either. Got to keep moving. But you’ve earned a little break. Just a little one. Just a couple minutes.
The horizon cut across his view like the edge of a cliff, much closer than on Earth, much sharper in the airless clarity of the Moon. Wonder what Columbus’s crew would’ve thought about the horizon here. They were scared they were gonna fall over the edge when they were sailing across the Atlantic. How’d they like to walk to the edge of this horizon?
Paul turned his head slightly inside his helmet and put his lips to the water nipple. Nothing. Fear flared through him. No, wait. A few drops. He sucked harder. Damn! It was dry.
The suit had a full water tank when I put it on, he told himself. He tried to remember. He had checked out the suit in a panicky hurry, but all the indicators were in the green. He Iooked at the indicators now. Still green.
But no water coming through the nipple. Maybe the tube got bent when I fell down. Banged my head pretty good, might’ve whacked the pipe. It’s only a small plastic tube. Maybe it’s just kinked a little. Just needs to be straightened out. But how the hell can I fix it from inside the suit?
Think! he commanded himself. Don’t make a move until you think it out. Remember what that old cosmonaut Leonov said: In space, think five times before you move a finger. In the meantime, keep moving.
Think. You can pull your arm out of the suit sleeve, you know that. Maybe worm your hand up past the collar ring and try to straighten out the tube. Maybe that’d work.
He closed his eyes to get a better mental picture of the inner workings of the surface suit. Hell, guys have smuggled women into these suits. Take a joyride up on the surface and watch the Earthlight. He remembered the first time he’d seen the night side of Earth, the glowing lights of cities and highways outlining North America. The fantastic shimmering of the aurora’s pale blues, reds and greens. Very romantic.
Keep your mind on your problem, butthead! he raged at himself. The suit’s loose enough to jerk off in, too, but that ain’t gonna help anything.
Wait till you get to the rock. Then lean against it, take some of the weight off your legs, and see if you can worm your hand out of the sleeve and up inside the helmet here. That’s what you’ve got to do.
It seemed as if he’d never get to the boulder. It loomed bigger and bigger, but it still seemed miles away. Until, all of a sudden, he was right in front of it.
Paul reached out and touched its stony side, smoothed by eons of meteoric sandpapering. “Hello, rock’ he said aloud, surprised at how dry and scratchy his throat fek.
He stepped across to the shadowed side of the boulder, then leaned back carefully. Now see if you can wriggle your arm out of the sleeve. Careful! Easy does it.
It felt as if he was wrenching his shoulder out of its socket, but at last Paul got his arm entirely out of the suit’s sleeve and started to work his hand up past the metal ring of the helmet collar.
He was sweating so hard his eyes stung. If you get your hand up here inside the helmet, he thought, first thing you do is wipe your eyes.
Then he realized that all this perspiration was merely draining his body of water. If I don’t get this damned drinking tube fixed I won’t make it much farther.
Slowly, desperately, he tried to worm his fingers up into the helmet.
SAVANNAH
Joanna recovered from her space sickness as soon as the Clippership lit its engines for the return flight from the orbiting space station to Savannah. Once they got home, she phoned Bradley Arnold and insisted that they meet with Greg at her house instead of in the corporate offices.
“It will be much more relaxed,” she said to Arnold’s image in the phone screen. “After all, it’s been his home, too.”
Arnold agreed. “I’ll have him there first thing tomorrow,” he promised.
They were in Joanna’s upstairs sitting room, next to the master bedroom suite. Joanna was reclined on the chaise longue. She reached out wearily to turn off the phone console on the table beside her.
Joanna turned to Paul as the screen went blank. “We’ll resolve everything tomorrow.” She smiled happily.
Sitting alone on the love seat beneath her portrait, Paul muttered, “I hope so.”
They met in the spacious parlor of the house. It had been decorated in what Paul had always thought of as mock Gone With the Wind style: frills and doodads everywhere; long sweeping curtains of heavy silk on the tall windows; overstuffed furniture; patterned wallpaper. The house was only a few years old. Gregory had built it in a fit of conspicuous consumption. The worse the corporate profit-and-loss picture became, the more lavishly he spent, it had seemed to Paul.
So now he sat tensely on the brocade-covered sofa while morning sunlight poured through the windows and Joanna fiddled nervously with the bric-a-brac on the fireplace mantle.
It was a gas-fed fireplace, and the architect’s drawing of the house that hung above the mantfe concealed the room’s big television screen, one of the first thin-film Windowall screens built in orbit.
Paul heard a car pull up on the driveway outside. Joanna stiffened, then hurried to a window.
“They’re here,” she said, looking pleased and apprehensive at the same time. Then her face clouded. “Greg’s brought Melissa Hart with him.”
Paul’s insides wound even tighter. This isn’t going to be a reconciliation, he knew. It’s war.
Greg still wore a black suit and tie. Paul thought his underwear might also be in mourning. Dark circles rimmed his reddened eyes. He looked somber, almost gaunt. Melissa, wearing a knee-length violet skirt and simple white blouse, seemed as tens
e as Paul felt. Bradley Arnold, in a rumpled gray business suit, was the only one smiling.
Greg had an attache case with him. The videodisk must be in there, Paul thought.
“I’m glad that we could all get together like this,” Arnold said as they sat down on the two sofas that faced each other across the carved cherrywood coffeetable. Greg and the board chairman sat on one sofa, Joanna and Paul on the other. Greg clutched the attache case on his knees. Melissa took the overstuffed armchair by the end of the coffeetable, facing the cold, empty fireplace.
The butler came in, carrying a tray of juices, coffee, tea, and a plate of toast. He deposited the laden tray on the coffeetable, then stood off to one side.
“Have you all had your breakfasts?” Joanna asked mechanically. “Would you like anything from the kitchen?”
They all said no, and Joanna dismissed the butler.
“Now then,” she said as the butler left the room, “I believe you’ve brought the videodisk, Greg?”
“It’s right here,” he said, his voice low.
“Before we do or say anything else, then, I think we should all see it.”
Arnold bobbed his head in agreement. Paul glanced at Melissa. Why did Greg bring her here, except to show me that he’s got her now?
Greg opened the attache case and took out a single, unmarked videodisk, about the size of a credit card. Paul thought it ridiculous to lug around the tooled leather case just to carry one slim disk; like using a heavy-lift booster to put a sugar cube in orbit.
Joanna started to say, “I’ll get the butler—”
But Greg got to his feet with a wintry smile. “I know how to use the TV, mother,” he said. “This has been my home, too, you know.”
Sarcastic bastard, Paul said to himself.
Greg flicked down the hidden access panel in the mantle-piece and powered up the TV. The architect’s drawing faded away and the wide display panel turned soft gray. Then Greg inserted the videodisk and returned to his seat beside Arnold.
