by Ben Bova
Before Greg could reply, Doug opened the door and stepped through.
“It’s always darkest just before the dawn,” Doug muttered to himself. It didn’t cheer him one bit.
Surprised and stung by Greg’s stubborn refusal to listen to reason, Doug did what he often did when he felt troubled. He went to the main airlock, pulled on a space suit, and went out for a walk on the crater floor.
The Sun was down; dawn would not come for another several hours, but it was never truly dark at Alphonsus’ latitude. The Earth hung up in the sky, glowing warm and bright, deep blue oceans and swirls of clean white clouds. Doug saw mat Earth was nearly at its full phase. He could clearly see the southwestern U.S. desert and the cloud-shaded California coast. On the other side of the Pacific the tight spiral of a powerful typhoon was approaching the Philippines.
Greg’s acting like he’s brain-dead, Doug told himself. He’s made up his mind and he doesn’t want to be bothered with the facts.
A tractor trundled past him, kicking up dust.
“Need a lift?” Doug heard in his helmet earphones.
“Thanks, no.”
The tractor lumbered past him, on its way out to the mass driver site. Doug walked slowly in that direction, thinking that up until a few months ago you could walk almost anywhere you wanted to out here on the crater floor and be happily alone. Except for the rocket port, of course, but you could avoid that easily enough if you wanted to.
Not anymore, he saw. The mass driver project was turning this part of the crater floor into a busy, bustling conglomeration of tractors and nanotech crews in dust-spattered space suits.
The mass driver. An electric catapult more than two miles long that accelerates packets of lunar ore to more than a hundred gees injffew seconds. With luck, they’ll finish it just in time to close down the whole base.
Tractors with bulldozer blades on their fronts were smoothing a road between the main airlock and the mass driver site, scraping aside the dark top layer of the regolith to reveal the bright, new-looking stuff beneath. Doug followed the churned-up turmoil of their tracks until he could clearly see the driver itself rising from the dusty, pockmarked ground like a low metal finger pointed at the horizon.
They were having trouble with the nanomachines, Doug knew. Not enough iron in the regolith to process into the structural steel they needed. And every atom imported from Earth raised hell with Greg’s quarterly profit-and-loss figures.
What a waste, Doug thought sadly. Finish the job so we can sell it to Yamagata. What would the men and women working on this mass driver think if I told them Greg’s going to close the base? That all their work is for nothing. That the best they can hope for is to sell the fruit of their labor to Yamagata.
It’s not right, he knew. It’s just not right. We ought to be building for the future, reaching out to the asteroids, the other planets, eventually to the stars. Not retreating, not slinking back to Earth as if we can’t meet the challenges out here.
Briefly Doug wondered what it’d be like to be launched off the Moon by the mass driver. A hundred gees. He laughed to himself. In the first second you’d be smeared into a thin bloody pulp. Take the nice slow rocket; it’s safer.
He could see the driver clearly now, its dark metal bulk marching straight as an arrow off into the distance while machines and spacesuited figures crawled over and around it like mechanical acolytes at some vast alien altar.
Greg doesn’t have the vision, Doug knew. He just doesn’t see the future at all. To him, tomorrow’s just like today. He’s making the deal with Kiribati so the corporation can become more profitable by using nanotechnology on Earth. He doesn’t even see the forces down there that’ll try to crush him and nanotechnology, together.
Okay, Doug said to himself. Do you see the future? Are you so dead-certain that you know what’s right?
He answered himself immediately. Yes. I know what we’ve got to do. I can see the path the human race has to take. Grow or die. It’s that simple, that stark. If we don’t grow beyond the confines of Earth we’re going to’sink into an overcrowded, overpolluted fishbowl of a world without freedom, without hope, a world of poverty and despair and global dictatorship.
As he trudged along the dusty crater floor, Doug tapped a gloved finger into the palm of his other hand, ticking off the points he wanted to make.
The mass driver’s important. It can lower our launch costs and make us profitable. But only if the factories in Earth orbit can build products that we can sell.
We’ve got to get out to that asteroid. We’ve got to show them that we can make Clipperships of diamond and revolutionize the aerospace industry. More than that, we’ll be producing a product with nanotechnology that everyone on Earth will want. We’ll be striking a blow against the nanoluddites and the New Morality. And even more than that, we’ll be moving Moonbase from a mining operation to a manufacturing center. From a marginal town to a growing city. That’s the most important thing.
That’s what we’ve got to do! We’ve got to! And we’ve got less than six months to do it.
Doug stared off into the dark endless sky. I can’t let Greg shut down Moonbase. I’ve got to get Operation Bootstrap going despite him. Behind his back, over his head, any way I can. We’ve got to push Operation Bootstrap whether Greg likes it or not.
But how? How can I mobilize the people here when Greg’s dead-set against it? How can I move us toward the asteroid mining effort if the base director won’t permit anyone to work on the program? It’ll be a direct challenge to Greg, almost a mutiny.
Can I really fight him? Mom wants us to work together, but Greg doesn’t want that. He just doesn’t see what we have to do. He doesn’t have the visions He’s acting as if he’s still sitting in Savannah or New York. That’s where his mind is. That’s where his attitudes are.
Doug turned away from the busy work scene stretching out along the miles-long track of the mass driver, turned his back to all that and looked across the emptiness of the pockmarked crater floor toward the softly rounded old mountains of the ringwall.
“It’s always darkest before the dawn,” he repeated to himself. Scant consolation, he thought.
It certainly was dark out there. With the Earth behind him, the airless sky looked black as infinity, specked here and there by a few stars bright enough to see through the heavy tinting of his helmet visor.
Dark and empty, Doug thought.
But as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Doug realized that there was a faint glow rising above the tired old mountain that poked its head up in the middle of the giant crater. Out beyond the brutally close horizon, the sky was slowly brightening.
They’re wrong! Doug told himself. They’re all wrong! It’s not darkest just before the dawn. Not on the Moon, at least.
For out in the star-flecked blackness beyond the weary mountains, a pale hazy glow was beginning to light the predawn hours. The zodiacal light, Doug knew. Sunlight reflected off dust particles floating in space, the leftovers from the creation of the solar system. Here in the airless sky of Moonbase they light up the heavens long before the Sun comes into view.
Doug raised his arms to the ancient motes of dust that brightened the predawn hours. They’re like friendly little fireflies out there in space, he told himself. They bring us the message, the promise that the light is on its way, the Sun will rise, a new day will dawn. Have hope. The darkness will end. It’s a good omen.
Feeling excited again, energized, he said to himself, I’ve got to talk with Brudnoy again. And Bianca. Maybe they can get me together with a few people who can get Operation Bootstrap started.
And Mom? Doug wondered about that as he started trudging back toward the main airlock. No, Mom will side with Greg. She’s a businesswoman, and Greg can make a stronger case for the bottom line than I can.
Still, Doug broke into a broad grin as he hurried back toward Moonbase. Greg’s got profit-and-loss statements and projections of inventories and all that puke. All I�
�ve got is a broken-down former cosmonaut and maybe a few other people who might want to help me with Operation Bootstrap.
And a vision for the future.
He began to leap across the barren dusty ground, soaring in twenty-yard strides across the crater floor.
“Hey, where you goin’ in such a hurry?” a construction worker’s voice called in his earphones.
“Into the future!” Doug sang back.
BIANCA’S QUARTERS
“All right, quiet down!” Bianca Rhee shouted.
They all stopped talking and looked at her expectantly. Doug counted fourteen people crammed into Bianca’s quarters, five of them squeezed on the bunk, the others crowded on the floor. Most of them were long-termers, men and women on year-long work contracts. Several had been working at Moonbase for many years, shuttling back and forth to Earth.
Lev Brudnoy had appropriated the desk chair and placed one of the female student-workers on his lap. He sat there with a satisfied smile on his grizzled face, one long arm around the young woman’s waist, his other hand grasping an insulated flask of rocket juice. The others clutched a motley assortment of cups, glasses, bottles, even zero-gee squeeze bulbs. It was a BYOB party.
The ostensible reason for the party was to show off the new wallscreen that Doug had bought for Bianca. It almost filled the wall opposite her bunk, turning the blank stone into a window that could look out on the world, wherever vidcams could go. For the first hour of the party they had hooted and catcalled through a production of a Masterson Corporation-sponsored drama set on a corporate space station where romance and intrigue flourished in zero gravity.
Now the video was finished and the Windowall showed a satellite view of the great rift valley of Mars. Bianca perched herself on the desktop, her legs too short to reach the floor. She asked Doug to come up and sit beside her. They all wore workers’ coveralls, color-coded to show their departments. Doug saw mostly the pumpkin orange of the research department and the olive green of mining, although there were a couple of medical whites in the crowd; one of the women medics wore hers unbuttoned almost to the waist, showing plenty of cleavage. He wore the only management blue.
Seeing that she had their attention, Bianca said more softly, “Doug’s got something important to tell you.” And with that, she turned to him, grinning.
“Thanks for the glowing introduction,” Doug joked weakly. A few chuckles from the people looking up at him. He knew most of them, at least the long-termers. Of course, each coverall carried a nametag.
“I need your help,” Doug began. “I want to start moving Moonbase along the road to self-sufficiency as rapidly as we can manage it.”
As he began to outline his plans for Operation Bootstrap, Doug studied their faces. At first they looked amused, as if they expected this to be an elaborate joke of some kind. But then they started getting interested, and began asking questions.
“You really expect us to modify an LTV in our spare time?”
Doug answered, “A couple of extra hours a day from five technicians who know what they’re doing can get the job done in ten weeks, from what the computer estimates tell me.”
“But we won’t get paid for the extra work.”
“No, it’ll be strictly voluntary. Your pay will come as a share of the profit we make from the asteroid ore.”
“Work first, pay later. Huh!”
Bianca said, “Hey, you’re always complaining there’s nothing to do up here except drink and screw around.”
“What’s wrong with that?” one of the guys piped up.
Everyone laughed.
But Doug went on seriously, “I know it’s a lot to ask, and you might put in a lot of work for nothing if the mission isn’t successful. But if we do succeed…”
“How much money we talking about?”
“The calculations work out to about five times your hourly wage, if we get the amount of ore we’re hoping for.”
“And the corporation’ll give us this money as a bonus?”
“Right.”
“But the corporation doesn’t even know we’re doing this… this Bootstrap thing? How does that work?”
Doug replied, “We’re all taking a chance. You’re risking your time. Once we’ve got the ore from the asteroid, though, the corporation will pay you a bonus along the lines I’ve calculated.”
“How can we be sure of that?”
“You have my word on it,” Doug said.
“No offense, pal, but how much weight does your word have with the management?”
Doug smiled. “Good question. Let me put it this way: If the corporation won’t come up with the money, then I will. Personally.”
“Or we can sell the ore to Yamagata,” one of the women said.
No one laughed.
Lev Brudnoy said, “I hate to be the bearer of evil tidings, but there is a rumor that the base will be shut down at the end of this director’s term.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that buzz.”
Several others nodded.
Doug had to admit it. “That’s the director’s current plan. I’m hoping we can make him change his mind.”
“He’s your brother, isn’t he?”
“My half-brother.”
“Does that mean he’s only half as heavy?” asked one of the women. “You know, “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.”
Doug made a rueful grin for her. “He’s twice as heavy, believe me.”
“So you want us to stick our necks out when the base director’s ready to shut down the whole humpin’ operation?”
“I want to save Moonbase,” Doug replied.
“Wait a minute. Where are you going to get an LTV to modify?”
I’ll handle that,” said Doug. “None of you has to do a thing or commit yourselves to a minute of extra work unless and until I get an LTV for us.”
They glanced at each other, muttering.
“Whatever happens,” Biaьca said, without waiting for them to come to a group decision, “this little meeting here ought to be kept secret for the time being.”
“Secret? From who?”
“Whom,” corrected one of the students.
“From management,” said Doug. “I want to present this as a fait accompli before my brother knows what we’re doing.”
Someone whistled softly.
“Look,” Doug said, “we can’t expect any support from the corporation. That’s why we’ve got to do this on a volunteer basis and hope to get our payback at the end of the asteroid mission.”
“Sounds awfully risky.”
“Sounds like a good way to get fired.”
“You can’t be fired for working overtime on a voluntary basis,” Doug said. “Read your employment contracts.”
“Well,” said Bianca, “I don’t know about the rest of you turkeys, but I’m ready to put in a couple of extra hours for this.”
Brudnoy said, “It should be more interesting than spending your spare time in The Cave, waiting for the menu to change.”
They all laughed. Doug thought maybe half of them would actually volunteer to work on their own time. But this meeting would never be kept a secret. The word about Operation Bootstrap would spread through Moonbase with the speed of sound.
Which was what he was counting on.
“I’ve never been out this far before,” said Brudnoy.
His voice sounded strange in Doug’s helmet earphones. Subdued. Almost reverent.
“I hardly ever come out here myself,” Rhee said. “Just for these regular maintenance checks.”
The astronomical observatory was on the opposite side of Alphonsus’ central peak from Moonbase. It had been placed out there to shield it from any stray light or dust or chemical pollution from the spacecraft landing and taking off at the rocket port. This meant a two-hour doctor ride across the crater floor, but Doug and Brudnoy had decided to accompany Rhee to see the instruments she used to track near-Earth asteroids.
Now Rhee led them through a
jungle of metal shapes, all pointed skyward. Wide-angle telescopes, spectrometers, infrared and ultraviolet and even gamma-ray detectors. Doug easily recognized the wide dishes of the four radio telescopes off in the distance, but one shape puzzled him: it looked like a huge but stubby wide tub mounted on tracked pivots. It was easily twenty yards across.
“The light bucket?” Rhee said when he asked. “That’s the Shapley Telescope, two-thousand-centimeter reflector. The most powerful telescope in the solar system.”
“You use it for deep space observations?”
Rhee replied cheerfully, “I don’t use it all. It’s reserved for the Big Boys back Earthside. But yes, they use it for cosmological work. Quasars and redshifts, stuff like that”
Brudnoy asked, “Wasn’t there talk of building an even bigger “light bucket,” using liquid mercury instead of a glass mirror?”
“The Shapley’s mirror is aluminum,” Rhee answered. “No need for glass in this gravity.”
“But the mercury telescope?”
“Maybe someday. Probably be easier to make really big mirrors with mercury, but it tends to vaporize into the vacuum.”
Doug watched their two spacesuited figures as they spoke: Brudnoy taller than Rhee by more than a helmet’s worth.
“Couldn’t it be covered with a protective coating?” the Russian asked.
“Sure, but that cuts down on its reflectivity.”
“Ah.”
Doug asked, “Which ones do you use for tracking the asteroids?
“Over here.” Rhee pointed and Doug followed her outstretched gloved hand with his eyes.
“The two big ones are Schmidts,” she explained. “Wide field’scopes. Schmidt-Mendells, actually; they’ve been specially built for lunar work. And those over there are tracking individual asteroids, getting spectrographic data on their compositions.”
“For your thesis,” Doug realized.
“Right.”
“Don’t you use radar to detect asteroids?” Brudnoy asked.
Doug could sense her nodding inside her helmet. “Sure. One of the radio telescopes converts to radar sweeps twice a day. When we pick up something new we track it long enough to determine its orbit and then turn one of the spectrographic’scopes on it.”
