Moonrise gt-5

by Ben Bova

  “How soon?”

  I’ll talk with the medical people. Tomorrow, I imagine, would be good enough.”

  I’ll be there. I’ll get the word out, a lot of the old-timers will want to come.”

  “Old-timers,” Brudnoy echoed. “Yes, that’s what we’ve become.”

  Anson quickly changed the subject. “How’s the farm doing?”

  “Lunar soil is very rich in nutrients,” Brudnoy said. “What we need is more earthworms and beetles.”

  She took a sip of her drink, then replied slowly, “We’ve got to be very careful about introducing any kind of life forms here. That’s why I brought that team of biologists up here. I don’t want any runaway populations of any kind.”

  Brudnoy sipped also. “Your biologists spend more time at my little farm than I do.”

  “That’s what they’re paid to do.”

  “All I wanted was to grow some beautiful flowers.”

  “Yeah, but we should be growing more of our own food.”

  “Someday.” He winked mischievously. “Once we have enough worms and beetles.”

  “Ugh,” said Anson.

  “How long will you be Earthside?” he asked.

  Anson took a breath. “I don’t think I’ll be coming back, Lev.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “I’m going to get married,” she said. “Would you believe it?”

  “You mean you’ve been carrying on a romance Earthside? For how long?”

  Two years now.”

  “Two years! And you never told me.”

  “You’re the first one I have told,” Anson said. “It’s time for me to settle down. No more gypsying. He’s a university professor with two daughters from his first marriage. Very stable guy.”

  “Well… good luck.” Brudnoy said it with enormous reluctance.

  “Thanks.” She took a larger swallow from her cup. “I just wish this Brennart trip had started sooner. Hate to leave while they’re out on their own.”

  “Who will your replacement be?”

  She shook her head. “Should be O’Rourke.”

  Brudnoy made a sour face.

  “He’s good at his job,” Anson said.

  “Yes,” Brudnoy said. “And about as much fun as a flat rock.”

  Anson laughed. “He’s not a high-flier, that’s for sure.”

  “Perhaps you should stay until the expedition returns,” Brudnoy suggested.

  “No can do,” said Anson. I’ve got a husband to catch.”

  “Ahhh,” Brudnoy sighed. “Too bad. We used to have such good times together.”

  “Well,” she said, drawing the word out languidly, “we have two weeks before I have to leave.”

  Brudnoy’s brows shot up. “But you’re about to be married!”

  “For old times’ sake,” Anson said, leaning toward him. “Besides, I don’t want to be out of practice.”

  It was more than an hour later when Brudnoy finally left her quarters. Out in the tunnel, blinking in the overhead lights, he smiled to himself. For an old dog you performed rather well. But then he saw that the people striding along the tunnel all looked so young. So fresh. When Jinny leaves I’ll be the only old dog left here. He realized that there were hardly any people left in Moonbase that he knew very well. All the old friends have gone, Brudnoy said to himself.

  He felt very old and tired as he walked slowly toward the farm.

  “We leave tomorrow,” Doug said happily.

  Even from a quarter-million miles away, Joanna could see his excitement. She leaned back in her embracing leather chair and studied her young son’s smiling face.

  “The expedition shouldn’t take longer than two weeks,” he was saying, not waiting for her to reply. “We’ve got the nanobugs all set, all the equipment’s checked out. Of course, we’re carrying supplies for a month, just in case. And we can always be resupplied by rocket Jobber.

  As he prattled on eagerly, Joanna wondered if it would be wise to tell him about Greg now or wait until he was safely back from the polar expedition.

  “… so this time tomorrow we’ll be at the south pole,” Doug finished.

  “Your brother’s coming up to Moonbase,” Joanna heard herself say. “He’s going to be the new director when Anson leaves.”

  Then she held her breath for three seconds until her words reached him.

  Doug’s eyes widened slightly. “Greg? The new director?”

  “Yes,” said Joanna. “He asked for the position and I think he’s earned it”

  She could see the wheels spinning in Doug’s head. “He’s coming up here to close down Moonbase, isn’t he?”

  No sense trying to lie to him, she thought. “He’s going to spend the coming year trying to find some way to make Moonbase truly profitable. But if he can’t, then, yes, we’ll have to shut it down.”

  Doug’s smile had faded but not disappeared. He seemed to be mulling over the possibilities. “If we can come up with a profitable product, then he’ll keep the base open?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  In the three seconds it took for her reply to reach him, Doug seemed to brighten. “Clipperships are still the corporation’s most valuable product, aren’t they?”

  “They’re just about our only profitable product,” Joanna admitted. “And the Windowalls, of course.”

  But Doug didn’t wait for her answer. He went on, “Then why don’t we start to build the next generation of Clipperships here at Moonbase?”

  “That’s foolishness, Doug,” she said. “Why build the ships on the Moon when we can build them perfectly well at our plants here in Texas and Georgia?”

  He waited, grinning, as if he knew what she would say. Then he replied, “Because here we can build them out of pure diamond, using nanomachines.”

  “Diamond?”

  “Diamond is lighter, stronger than any metal alloy,” he said, without pausing. “We can build Clipperships that will outperform anything you can make on Earth, at a fraction of your manufacturing costs.”

  “Using nanomachines,” Joanna murmured. Then she thought aloud, “But to make diamond you need carbon. There isn’t any carbon on the Moon, is there?”

  “Not much,” Doug admitted. “Nowhere near enough. We’ll have to snag one of the Earth-crossing asteroids and mine it for carbon.”

  “Mine an asteroid?”

  Doug rolled right along, hardly drawing a breath. “We can convert one of the transfer ships to make a rendezvous with a carbon-bearing asteroid. There’s plenty of them in orbits that come close to the Earth/Moon system; no need to go out to the asteroid belt, that’s ’way out past Mars.”

  “Do you really think you can build Clipperships out of diamond?” Joanna asked.

  When her question reached him, Doug replied easily, “Why not? It’s just a matter of programming nanomachines.”

  “And a diamond ship will be better than the ones we’re manufacturing now?”

  Doug waited patiently, then answered, “They’ll be lighter, much stronger, capable of carrying heavier payloads with the same rocket thrust, safer, more durable. What else can you ask for?”

  “Cheaper to manufacture,” Joanna replied.

  He nodded once he heard her response. “Not only cheaper to manufacture, but the aerospace lines will be willing to pay more for them, since they’ll perform so much better than today’s ships.”

  Despite herself, Joanna felt almost breathless at the sweep of Doug’s vision. “We could use nanomachines to manufacture other things, too, couldn’t we?”

  “Aircraft,” Doug said.

  “Automobiles!”

  “Houses,” Doug added, grinning hugely.

  “All by using nanomachines for manufacturing,” said Joanna.

  “Masterson Corporation could become the biggest, most powerful company in the solar system.”

  Joanna felt the same excitement her son did. But then she remembered the realities. “People are afraid of nanotechnology, Doug. There ar
e powerful forces opposing it”

  His cheerful grin didn’t shrink by a millimeter when he heard her doubts. “But don’t you see, Mom? This will show everybody that nanotechnology works! It’ll knock the opposition flat!”

  “And it will save Moonbase,” Joanna said.

  “Right!”

  If it works, Joanna thought If the nanoluddites don’t prevent us from doing it If Greg doesn’t try to stop his brother from trying.

  BALLISTIC VEHICLE 1

  The liftoff wasn’t exactly silent. When the rocket ignited Doug could feel a surge of vibration in his bones that rumbled in his ears almost like sound. Still, the lack of thundering noise made Doug feel slightly eerie. And of course the thrust he felt was minuscule compared to a Clippership liftoff from Earth.

  The excitement of the previous night’s conversation with his mother hadn’t worn off, exactly. The thought of going out to capture an asteroid and then using its carbon to build Clipperships out of diamond still tingled in the back of Doug’s mind. But that was for the future. This flight to the Moon’s south pole was now.

  He had spent an hour in the main airlock, big enough to accommodate full-sized tractors and dozens of people, prebreathing the oxygen-nitrogen mixture that they would be using throughout the expedition. Moonbase ran on ’normal’ air: almost eighty percent nitrogen and twenty oxygen, with traces of carbon dioxide and water vapor, all at 14.7 pounds per square inch, almost exactly like the clean dry atmosphere of a desert region on Earth. The surface suits still worked at five psi, with a 72/28 ratio of oxygen to nitrogen.

  Moonbase safety regulations called for prebreathing the spacesuit mix for an hour before going outside, to get the excess nitrogen out of the blood stream and prevent the bends.

  Now, strapped into the bare metal seat in the ballistic lobber, his suit buttoned up tight, Doug felt weird as the rocket engines blasted them off the floor of Alphonsus in almost total silence.

  The lobbers were modified versions of the transfer spacecraft that shuttled passengers and freight from Earth orbit to the Moon. There was nothing aerodynamic about them, since they never flew in an atmosphere. They were utilitarian assemblies of silvered tankage, rocket engines, bulky cargo containers, pressurized personnel pods, and spindly legs that jutted out from the four corners of the spacecraft’s main platform.

  Doug felt the rockets’ vibration through the metal frame of the vehicle; it was almost sound, like a thunder so distant and faint you wonder if you’ve heard anything at all. The spacecraft rose quickly enough; Doug could see through the transparent bubble of the passenger pod the slumped mountains of the ringwall whiz past and then nothing but the darkness of space. But there was hardly any palpable acceleration, none of the heavy forces that pushed you down in your seat when you lifted off from Earth.

  And then all sense of thrust disappeared. The vibration ceased, too. Engines have cut off, Doug knew. We’re coasting on a ballistic trajectory now, like an artillery shell.

  His suit helmet cut off his view of Bianca Rhee, sitting beside him. There were four others crowded into the plastiglass bubble of a passenger module, plus Brennart and Killifer up in the cockpit module. The eight other expedition members were in the second lobber. The other two rocket vehicles carried only cargo; unmanned, they were guided remotely.

  “How do you like it?” he asked Bianca.

  Her voice in his helmet earphones sounded strained. “If I could walk, I’d do it.”

  Doug laughed. “This is a lot easier than walking. And safer.”

  “It’s the free-fall,” said Bianca. “Makes my stomach want to turn inside out.”

  “Well, try to relax. We’ll be back on the ground in about half an hour.”

  “Can’t be too soon.”

  The spacecraft tilted forward a few degrees, enough so that they could look down at the cratered mountains sliding below them, dwindling as the lobber headed for the peak of its ballistic trajectory. Bianca groaned aloud.

  “Isn’t that Tycho?” Doug said, tapping a gloved finger against the plastiglass canopy. “Over there, near the horizon.”

  The crater was unmistakable: big and sharp, with bright rays of debris streaking out of it for hundreds of miles. One of the newest big craters on the Moon, Doug said to himself. Not even a billion years old.

  “Tycho,” Bianca said, awed. “Wow, I’ve never seen it so close.”

  “It’ beautiful, isn’t it?” said Doug.

  “Sure is.”

  She leaned over until her helmet visor was touching the canopy’s plastiglass. Doug knew that Tycho marked the midpoint of their half-hour flight. He hoped it would keep Bianca fascinated long enough to make her forget about barfing.

  Foster Brennart sat up in the Jobber’s cockpit, a separate and smaller bubble that projected out to one side of the lobber. Jack Killifer was in the co-pilot’s seat. Panels of instruments and controls surrounded them at waist height. Above the panel the bubble was clear plastiglass.

  Killifer took a wire from one of the pouches in his spacesuit’s belt, plugged it into an access port in the side of his helmet, then plugged the other end into the similar port in Brennart’s helmet. Now they could talk to one another without using their suit radios, which might be overheard.

  “Smooth liftoff,” Killifer said.

  If Brennart was flattered by the praise, his tone failed to show it. “Check the other craft, see how their takeoffs went.”

  “Right”

  Killifer dutifully called the second ballistic craft as he checked the instrument readouts for the two unmanned vehicles.

  “No problems. Just like four tennis balls,” Killifer said to the expedition commander.

  “Tennis balls?” Brennart sounded puzzled.

  “That’s where the term Lobber comes from, Foster. These ballistic birds go like a tennis ball that’s been lobbed up in the air.” He gestured with his gloved hand. “Up, up, up, and then down, down, down.”

  Brennart was silent for a few moments. “Never played tennis,” he said at last. “Never had the time.”

  “I used to, a little,” said Killifer. “Back when I was in California.”

  The memory ached in his gut. Nanotechnology had not expanded much in the eighteen years since he’d been forced out of the field. Still, he told himself, I could’ ve been an executive, a rich man, a leader in the field. I could have taken Cardenas’ spot when she left the corporation. Instead, here I am, a quarter-million miles from anything worthwhile, second-in-command on a loony expedition to the ass end of nowhere. With Joanna Stavenger’s son stuck into the pecking order ahead of me.

  Deftly, Brennart fired the attitude control jets, just a slight puff to tilt the craft enough so they could see the ground sliding by far below them. Rugged mountains, peppered with craters.

  “No one’s ever set foot on that territory,” Brennart said. “Not yet.”

  Killifer grunted. He was still thinking about his younger days in California.

  “We’ve only begun to explore the Moon. There’s a whole world waiting for us to put our bootprints on it,” said Brennart.

  Killifer smiled inside his helmet. “Wasn’t this expedition your idea?”

  “It certainly was,” Brennart answered immediately. “It took the better part of two years to convince Mrs. Stavenger to let us go. It wasn’t until I showed her that Yamagata’s preparing an expedition that she finally gave her okay.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Brennart turned toward him. In the spacesuit it required him to move from the waist, torso and shoulders, so he could look at his second-in-command. What he saw was the reflection of his own helmet in Killifer’s visor.

  “You know how hard I worked to convince her. Of course this expedition is my idea. Who else’s?”

  “Nobody,” Killifer replied. “Only…”

  “Only what?”

  “Why’d she send her kid along?”

  “Douglas?”

  “Yeah.”


  “He’s like a kid with a new toy, all excited about being on the Moon and working with me,” Brennart said happily.

  “Oh,” said Killifer. “Yeah.”

  It only took a couple of seconds for Brennart to ask, “Why, are you worried about the kid?”

  “Not about him.” Killifer put just the slightest stress on the word him.

  “Who, then?”

  “Aw, nobody. Forget it. I’m just being a geek.”

  “What do you mean?” Brennart insisted. “What’s eating you?”

  “It’s just that — well, do you think the Stavenger woman would send her son up here just to do a job that any brain-dead clerk could do?”

  Brennart did not answer for a while. Then, “Why else?”

  Killifer took a breath, then, with apparent reluctance, he answered, “Well… maybe, I don’t know…”

  “What?” Brennart demanded.

  “Maybe she wants him to get the credit for your work. Her son, I mean.”

  “Get the credit?”

  “Once we’ve established legal priority and we set up the power tower and everything,” Killifer said in a rush, ’he’ll get all the credit with the board of directors. And the news media. You do the work but he’ll be the hero.”

  “That’s crazy,” Brennart snapped.

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “How could he get the credit for what I do? I’m the mission commander. I’m in charge.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “He can’t take the credit away from me. That’s impossible.”

  “Sure,” said Killifer.

  Brennart lapsed into silence. After a few moments he muttered, “So that’s why he was so hot to get up here with me.”

  “Maybe it’s not him,” Killifer said. “Maybe it’s all his mother’s idea’.

  “Either way,” Brennart growled. “Either way.”

  Killifer smiled behind his helmet visor. He thought he could see smoke rising from his commander’s spacesuit.

  Joanna cast a knowing eye over the guests who filled her spacious living room. The party was going well; she could tell that with her eyes closed: the chatter of conversations and laughter filled the room and spilled over into the hallway and the library, as well. The clink of ice cubes added a background counterpoint.