Moonrise gt-5

by Ben Bova

  “That could work,” said Joanna.

  “It’s an obvious attempt to circumvent the treaty,” said Greg.

  “But it’s legal,” Doug replied. “I checked it out with both the federal and international law programs.”

  “Did you?” Greg grumbled.

  Joanna smiled a little. “Rashid won’t like living in Tarawa, though.”

  Doug replied, “He can stay in Savannah and be in Tarawa with a virtual reality connection any time he wants to. Just the same as you attend board meetings without leaving here, Mom.”

  Greg objected, “The board of directors would never go for it.”

  “Setting up a dummy corporation and selling the space division to it,” Joanna mused. “It would take some explaining.”

  “It’ll never work,” said Greg.

  “Why not?” Doug challenged. “You spent all those years out there in Kiribati. Don’t you think you can get them to play along with us?”

  “Of course I could, but—”

  Joanna interrupted with newfound enthusiasm. I’ll call Carlos right away.”

  “Why not the board chairman?” Doug asked.

  Greg answered sourly, “Because Quintana is the real power on the board — present company excepted, of course.”

  “Of course,” Joanna agreed. “Can you put the call through for me, please?”

  Frowning slightly, Greg touched the keyboard built into his desk with one long slim finger and said merely, “Carlos Quintana.” The comm system’s voice recognition circuitry searched automatically for Quintana’s number and made the connection.

  “Johansen is just a figurehead,” Joanna was explaining to Doug as the communications computer established the link with Savannah. “He looks good for public relations, but he’s—”

  The wall screen showing Monet lilypads changed abruptly to display a harried-looking young woman brushing at her dishevelled hair.

  “I want to talk to Carlos,” Joanna snapped, unaccustomed to having underlings answer her calls.

  “He’s dead!” the young woman bawled, bursting into tears. “He’s been shot!”

  Joanna fell back against her chair’s webbing, feeling almost as if a bullet had hit her heart.

  Ibriham al-Rashid felt perspiration beading his brow and upper lip despite the nearly-frigid air conditioning of the small control room.

  Beyond that window, he knew, inside that gleaming metal sphere is a small man-made star, so hot and dense that its very atomic nuclei are being fused together.

  The plasma physicist tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to the power gauges lining the control room’s side wall. Rashid nodded, too awed to speak.

  The control room was almost silent Nothing but the faint electrical hum from the monitoring consoles.

  “How long has it been running?” Rashid asked in a whisper. It seemed the proper tone of voice, this close to a miracle.

  “Tomorrow will make four months, exactly,” said the plasma physicist. Even he kept his voice hushed.

  He was a fellow Moslem, even a fellow native of Baltimore; a man Rashid had known in his youth. Now he was a paunchy overweight academic with thinning hair and a light brown beard and eyes that blinked behind oversized, tinted glasses. Now he was a plasma physicist at Johns Hopkins University who just happened to have invented the world’s first practical nuclear fusion generator.

  “And it has been producing power like this for all that time?” Rashid whispered.

  The plasma physicist nodded. “As long as we keep it supplied with helium-three.”

  Rashid stroked his beard and turned back to stare through the safety glass at the small metal sphere. It was almost hidden inside a maze of magnet coils and cooling pipes and heavy tangles of multi-colored electrical wires. In his imagination, Rashid could see inside tьe sphere, see the blinding hot plasma that was fusing atomic nuclei together, forcing mass to transmute into energy, imitating the processes that made the stars shine.

  By the Prophet, Rashid thought, Allah is offering us a gift beyond price.

  But not beyond cost.

  The plasma physicist gestured toward the door and, once out in the laboratory’s hallway again, Rashid drew a deep breath. “It really works,” he said, almost in a normal tone.

  “It really works,” the plasma physicist echoed. “And much better — and cheaper — than that monstrosity up in Princeton.”

  “But it requires helium-three for fuel, which the Princeton machine does not.”

  “The Princeton machine is designed to produce new Ph.D.s,” the plasma physicist grumbled. “My generator is designed to produce megawatts.”

  The plasma physicist led him up the hallway toward his own cluttered office. “Helium-three and deuterium,” he said. “The deuterium is easy to get from ordinary water. There’s enough deuterium in an eight-ounce drinking glass of water to equal the energy in half a million barrels of oil.”

  Rashid smiled wanly. “Our brothers in OPEC will not be happy with you.”

  The plasma physicist shrugged his soft shoulders. “They’re busy building receiving farms for the solar power satellites. The deserts will still be energy centers.”

  “But once fusion comes on line…”

  “It never will.”

  “What? Your work—”

  They reached his open office door. The room looked just as chaotic as when they had left it, an hour earlier.

  “My work may win me a Nobel Prize,” the plasma physicist said, plopping himself in his creaking desk chair, “although the Princeton people will try to sabotage that.”

  Rashid took the only other chair that didn’t have piles of journals or reports on it.

  “But my fusion system will be nothing but a laboratory curiosity, I’m afraid.”

  “Why? How?”

  “For two reasons.” The plasma physicist raised two chubby fingers. Rashid noticed that his nails were dirty.

  “First,” he said, “is the matter of the fuel. Helium-three is vanishingly rare. We have to produce it in nuclear accelerators, which makes it cost more than the power that the fusion generator produces.”

  “Helium-three exists on the Moon,” Rashid said.

  “So I’ve been told,” said the plasma physicist, as if Rashid had said he could produce helium-three by rubbing a magic lamp. “But there’s a second problem.”

  “What is that?”

  “Energy conversion.” When he saw the puzzled expression on Rashid’s face, the plasma physicist added, “Converting the heat and particle energy of the fusion reaction to electricity. It’s electricity you want, not hot plasma and energetic neutrons.”

  His brows knitted, Rashid said, “But the gauges in your control room; weren’t they measuring electrical energy?”

  The plasma physicist smiled slyly. “The gauges are something of a trick, They show how much electrical energy the generator would produce, based on an algorithm I devised from the amount of heat and kinetic energy inside the reactor.”

  Rashid felt as if he’d been pushed out of an airplane without a parachute. “You mean that there’s no way for your generator to produce electricity? Then what good is it?”

  Raising a single finger this time, the plasma physicist said, “I invited you here because I think there is a way. Magnetohydrodynamic power conversion is perfect for this task.”

  “Mag… what?”

  “Call it MHD,” said the plasma physicist.

  “Tell me about MHD, then.”

  Hunching over his desk enthusiastically, the plasma physicist began, “Those dolts up in Princeton and the bigger dolts funding them in Washington, they’re all trying to make a conversion system based on turbines. Turbines! Just like Edison did, a century and a half ago.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Rashid.

  Impatiently, the plasma physicist answered, “They want to use the heat energy from fusion to boil a fluid, probably liquid sodium, Allah protect us. That would keep the overall efficiency of the syste
m down below forty percent; no better than a uranium-fueled generator and not even as good as a coal-fired one!”

  Struck with new understanding, Rashid blurted, “That’s why their fusion system is more expensive than ordinary power plants!”

  “Yes, exactly. They are using a man-made star as a tea kettle.”

  For hours the plasma physicist rattled on, jumping out of his chair to rummage through bookshelves for old reports, grabbing chalk to draw schematic diagrams on his board, making the chalk shriek so often that Rashid winced and felt his blood running cold.

  But slowly, Rashid began to see the picture. The fusion generator could produce electrical power with sixty percent efficiency or even better if it could be teamed with an MHD conversion system. And if it could obtain helium-three fuel…Rashid thanked his boyhood friend and promised him he would carefully consider funding his effort to match an MHD power converter to his fusion generator.

  “Keep this as quiet as you can,” his friend pleaded as he walked Rashid out to his waiting limousine. “I may have to leave the university once they find that I’m being funded by your corporation.”

  Rashid raised his brows questioningly.

  The plasma physicist smiled unhappily. “Oh yes, there are lots of knives in the dark here. Even the New Morality people have questioned what I’m doing. They say it’s against God’s will to try to imitate the stars.”

  Rashid snorted disdainfully. “What do they know of the One God?”

  “Believe it or not, there are Moslems among them.”

  Shaking his head, Rashid promised that he would keep very quiet about what he had seen and heard.

  Once in his plane and heading back to Savannah, Rashid smiled to himself. Very quiet indeed. I could channel some of my discretionary funding to him, to get him started on this MHD business while I begin to prepare the board of directors for a full-scale fusion development program.

  Helium-three, he mused. It’s imbedded in the lunar regolith, just like the hydrogen atoms they take up to make water. We could set up nanomachines to harvest helium-three and ship it to Earth easily enough. My division could open an entirely new line for the corporation: fusion power systems.

  Instead of simply supplying raw lunar materials to the corporations that want to build solar power satellites, we could have a monopoly on the fuel for fusion power.

  All the way back to Savannah Rashid dreamed about turning Masterson Aerospace into the world’s leading energy company. Fusion power. Enough energy to irrigate the world’s deserts, to light the world’s cities, to bring the poorest of the poor into the glow of the modern world. All based on helium-three from the Moon. All developed by Masterson Corporation’s space operations division. By me.

  He pictured himself as president and CEO of Masterson Aerospace. As the most important and powerful man in America; in the world; in the whole Earth-Moon system.

  One small cloud troubled his vision. The helium-three would be produced by nanomachines, and there was enormous resistance to anything touched by nanotechnology. Still, Rashid assured himself, if we have to we can extract the helium-three by older methods. It will raise the price somewhat, but not. too much.

  He smiled again, satisfied that even the New Morality could not stop his inevitable rise to wealth and fame and power.

  Doug left the meeting with Greg and his mother in a turmoil of conflicting emotions. They shot Quintana. Some New Morality fanatic gunned him down at the U.N. building. Because he was against the treaty. Or was it because he was living proof that nanotherapy can cure cancer? Maybe both reasons. Probably both.

  As he strode down the tunnel he realized all over again that he could not return to Earth. Even if they let me through customs I’d be a marked man. Every nutcase in the world would come after me.

  With a shake of his head, he tried to clear his mind of Quintana’s assassination and think through the idea of moving Moonbase’s legal ownership to Kiribati. With a half-bitter smile, Doug remembered an economics professor from his first year at Caltech telling the class, “Figures don’t lie, but liars sure can figure.”

  Let them make their treaty; we’ll find a way around it Kiribati will have the highest per-capita income on Earth, just from the bribes Mom and Greg will spread around.

  We can’t let them stop us from using nanomachines here. We can’t! It would be like stopping New York City from using elevators. The city would die.

  One way or another we’ve got to keep on using our nanomachines. Otherwise we’ll have to shut down Moonbase. And then what about me? They’d have to let me come back Earthside. But if I do I’ll be a target for every brain-dead New Morality zealot who can get his hands on a gun.

  Doug tried to push that fear out of his mind and concentrate on what had to be done.

  For the past six months Doug had worked on the Mt. Wasser power tower project and building the pipeline from the ice fields at the south pole back to Moonbase. Negotiations were under way to sell water to Yamagata’s Nippon One and the Euro-Russian base over at Grimaldi.

  But Doug knew that the ice fields were limited. He had helped to map them, down in the perpetual shadows of the polar mountains, and to probe their depths. There’s enough water there to provide for all three of the bases on the Moon; with recycling, the water should last for decades, maybe half a century, even. But there’s not enough to allow us to grow! That’s the problem. It’s a no-growth solution — which means no solution at all. Moonbase has got to grow. Or eventually die. Somehow, we’ve got to figure out how to get water and the other life-support volatiles we need from elsewhere in the solar system.

  Grow or die. Just like any living organism, any society. You either grow or you wither away and disappear.

  He realized his fists were clenched as he marched along the tunnel. Passersby were giving him strange looks. Doug tried to smile at them, tried to appear relaxed. But inside he was stretched tight.

  There’s going to be a split with Earth, Doug knew. This nanotech treaty is just the beginning. They must know, down there, that we can’t exist without nanomachines. It would’ve taken years to build a pipeline from the south pole, instead of months. The cost of building the power tower would have been out of sight if we didn’t have nanomachines to do the work.

  How can we prevent the split? How can we keep connected with Earth, at least until we’re fully self-sufficient?

  He pushed back the door to his room, forming a scenario in his mind: Okay, we establish the legalities that we’re a corporation based in Kiribati and the Kiribati government doesn’t sign the nanotech treaty. But suppose the U.N. or the World Court doesn’t accept that? Suppose they insist that we’ve got to give up our nanomachines? And we can’t, of course. Suppose they send Peacekeeper troops up here to enforce their demands!

  Doug sagged onto his bunk. Jeez, we’ve got to figure out a way to prevent that from happening. But how?

  Without thinking consciously about it, he flicked on the Windowall screen hanging opposite his bunk. Instantly the screen seemed to turn into a big picture window that looked out at the floor of Alphonsus. Doug stared out at the scene for a few moments, then went to his desk and pecked at his keyboard. The ’window’ showed Victoria Falls, then an underwater scene from a tropical reef. Not satisfied, Doug finally got a live view from the top of Alphonsus’ ringwall mountains that looked out across Mare Nubium.

  “Magnificent desolation,” he murmured. The barren plain was empty, not a sign that a human being had ever set foot on it, except for the faint glow of a handful of red beacons that marked the sites of the old temporary shelters marching off to the sudden horizon.

  If Greg looked out there, Doug thought, he’d see nothing but barren wilderness. But I see beauty. I see freedom. I see the opportunity to explore and learn and grow and build the future. How can I make Greg see it the way I do?

  He was still wondering about the problem as he put on his VR helmet and data gloves, booted up his computer and linked with his afternoon cl
ass from Caltech.

  ROCKET PORT

  Doug always asked permission to come into the rocket port’s flight control center. It was a tiny cubbyhole burned out of the lunar rock by plasma torches back in the earliest days of Moonbase, barely large enough for two controllers sitting shoulder to shoulder at their consoles. It always reminded Doug of an old-time submarine’s command compartment, compact and crowded, jammed with equipment that hummed and glowed and gave off heat. Despite Greg’s swath of new radiators, the flight control center was stuffy and sweaty.

  It even had a conning tower, sort of. There was a vertical tunnel that led up to a minuscule observation bubble, barely big enough for a person to stick his head up above the surface of the crater floor for a visual inspection of the rocket pads outside.

  The controllers had never refused Doug permission to come into the center, tight though it was. Usually Doug clambered up the ladder to the observation bubble, leaving the controllers to huddle over their glowing display screens.

  Traffic was seldom heavy. The lunar transfer vehicles plied the route between Earth orbit and Moonbase on a monotonously steady schedule. Rarely were there two spacecraft on the pads at the same time, even though Moonbase boasted four pads for LTVs to land on, spaced equidistantly from the observation bubble.

  Standing on the narrow platform of the observation bubble, his chin barely above the crater floor’s surface and his hair brushing the transparent dome, Doug watched the lander come down slowly, silently, its dirty-white rocket exhaust splashing on the smoothed rock pad, blowing dust and pebbles that rattled against the bubble’s glassteel dome. Doug could barely see the actual touchdown, when the big ungainly lunar transfer vehicle settled on its outstretched spindly legs like an old, old man sinking into a favorite easy chair.

  From below he heard the chatter of the controllers as they remotely manipulated the access tunnel to lock against the LTV’s personnel hatch. To Doug it looked like a giant gray worm blindly groping for its prey.

  The spacecraft that transited between Earth orbit and Moonbase had a human pilot aboard only when they were carrying passengers. Even so, the pilot was merely a redundancy required by archaic safety regulations. The controllers landed the craft remotely, as they did all the unmanned cargo carriers.