Come In, Collins

by Bill Patterson

  “OK,” said Bubba. “Fun's over. Time to git back inside. Everyone convinced we're stuck? All y'all? OK, follow me.” Bubba set a brutal pace back to the Collins, forcing the scientists to nearly jog to keep up. This had the side effect of keeping them out of breath and thus, blessedly quiet for a change.

  The End of the Beginning

  UNSOC Lunar Colony Michael Collins, June 18 2082, 1025 EDT

  “I tell you, we're doomed,” said Irma Huertas. “There's just no way we're going to get the Works up and running before the LOX runs out. I don't even know if we've got the food to keep going at all.”

  “Just shut it, Irma,” said Frank Maleski. “It's doom and gloom like yours that's going to be the death of me yet.”

  “But you're living in a dream world.”

  “OK, smartie. What's your solution?” Frank turned away to move some debris off the floor to a spot closer to the wall of the bunker.

  “I don't have one,” said Irma. “I mean, even if we get The Works running, there's no way to get back to Earth. Even if we had a working OTV, which we don't, how are we ever going to get back to Earth? An OTV is just going to burn up in the atmosphere. No, I say we all find any champagne, get hammered, and take some little black pills.”

  “Nuts to that,” said Frank. “When the black camel comes for me, he's going to have to drag me kicking and screaming. There's no way I'm going to off myself.”

  “Hey!” sounded a voice in their ears. “Can the chatter. You're wasting oxygen. If you've got so much energy to yap, how about getting over to compartment NW-45 and start looking for holes? We're going to try it for pressure.”

  “Wilco,” said Frank Maleski. “Irma, just shut it, OK? Let's go.”

  ***

  “Keep your hands to yourself, Maurice,” said Ashley Boardman as she wrestled a chunk of wallboard free from a debris pile. “I don't need help, thank you.” She stalked away from the larger man over to where more wallboard pieces were stacked, placing her piece atop it.

  “Hey, baby, I didn't mean anything by it.”

  “Sure, sure,” she said. “God, I hope I don't have to fight off all the men all over again. I sure don't want to turn into Celine Greenfield.”

  Beverly Jones lent Ashley a hand with a large piece of aluminum. “Did you hear? There's a rumor going around that McCrary got back inside. You know he won't put up with any of this 'desert island' nonsense.”

  “Oh, I hope so!” said Ashley. “It's bad enough that we're still trying to fight our way into the Astronaut Corps, even after a hundred years.”

  “Let's go, dearie. Much more debris to clear away,” Beverly said.

  ***

  The work crews had several missions to accomplish. First, they had to ensure everybody was found and accounted for. The dead had to be collected. All oxygen, food, and other consumables had to be found, cataloged, and consolidated. Lastly, the various compartments had to be pressure-tested.

  It took about eighteen hours after Bubba and Travis first woke up before Operations completed a full roll call. Some of the initial numbers had changed, particularly in Sick Bay.

  “It's bad,” reported Peter.

  “Tell me,” said McCrary.

  “Twenty-five known dead. Ten might as well be—doc says they're in a coma from oxygen deprivation, and he doesn't know when or if they’ll be coming out. We've got about forty in various difficulties, from regular broken limbs to perforations of some kind. They're going to be stuck in Sick Bay until they can get into a spacesuit, or we get some other kind of facility for them.”

  McCrary digested the figures in his head. “How many are 'walking wounded'—able to do something, but just limited? For example, someone with a busted wing can still plant seedlings in hydroponics.”

  “I don't have that information, but if I had to guess, just from my walk-through of Sick Bay, I would say that about sixty percent have some degree of usefulness.”

  “Well, we'll just have to figure out ways to exploit that usefulness. Spread the word, Brinker. We're alive. Now the mission will be to bring the Collins back to life and survive long term.”

  “Already happening. It's pretty amazing the effect you have on the Moondogs. I do have to say, sir, that there are a number of folks who don't think we'll be able to make it.”

  “Nuts to them. How are we doing on the large pressurized space? I don't know about you, but some folks are going to be overfilling their suits, if you know what I mean.”

  “Still working on it, sir. We have four candidate spaces. We've got work crews going over them now with punks and air bottles.”

  “That reminds me, does the roll call show if Devore made it?”

  “I just have the summary—no names. Anything urgent?”

  “No, he was the first guy I met when I arrived. He was in charge of the pressure testers and punks. Just an association, that's all.”

  “Got it, sir,” said Brinker.

  “Let's go survive.”

  The Big Cold Dark

  UNSOC Lunar Colony Michael Collins, June 19 2082, 0915 EDT

  The work crews fanned out throughout the base, testing, clearing debris, and lugging ShelterCans to central points in order to have their LOX tanks emptied.

  “McCrary, uh, maybe we ought to sequester some of these ShelterCans,” said Horst Nygaard. “After all, we've seen crewmen topping off their suits. Pretty sneaky about it, too.”

  “Let them. After all, aren't the major LOX tanks still full down in the Engineering area?”

  “Yes, sir. We've got about a month of LOX in them. More, probably. Enough for about 200 man-months, at a moderate usage rate.”

  “Don't forget, Horst, we're working at more than a moderate rate. That's balanced against the ones that are in Sick Bay. Then there's the dead who aren't using anything, so I guess a month is about right.”

  “But what do we do about the ShelterCans?” asked Horst.

  “Nothing. Right now, consolidating them means that we're projecting order. If we had left them where they were, willy-nilly, then there would be a Wild West aspect to it. The strong would depot them, and the weak would be driven away. I suspect the women would be blackmailed into doing things just to fill their suit tanks. No, this way, we remain civilized.”

  Horst looked at McCrary with a newfound respect. “That's...amazing. I would never have thought that far ahead.”

  “Just read your history. It's a classic water empire scenario. Oxygen is only a bit more urgent than water. Still, the principle applies.” McCrary resumed pecking at his commpad. Just as he suspected, there had been spare screens in stores.

  “Right,” said Horst. “Well, as for food, we've completed the cafeteria inspection. It will take about a week, but we should be able to get that pressure-tight and running, if there aren't any bad aftershocks.”

  “We're betting against any bad aftershocks, aren't we?” said McCrary. “I think there will be some, but nothing major. The Moon had some seismic stress frozen into it when it cooled, but that's had a few billion years to work out. No, I think the initial shock was as bad as it's going to get.”

  “We have to make some kinds of assumptions,” said Horst. “I need you to authorize issue of the large sealing patches. We don't have too many of them, we never thought we'd need them.”

  “Do it. We have to have that large pressurized area. Oh, while you're at it, you might want to check out some of those pressure-tight bunkers where we can stock some honey buckets and changeout areas for the suits.”

  “Already working on that, sir. Also, we've got a spot where we're going to store the organics after we freeze-dry the contents.”

  “Recover the water, you know,” said McCrary. “Water is one of the critical materials here.”

  “Understood. Engineering spaces are the next area we’ll be working on after we clear out the central area.”

  “Good. Hey, did Devore survive?” asked McCrary

  “Yes, sir. Why?”

  “I need him
for a special mission.”

  ***

  The surface of the Moon never seemed so dangerous before. To Devore, who had been on the surface countless times, it was like walking around one's house after the lighting has failed. Everything was still there, but suddenly unfamiliar. A single item out of place became a danger, an unknown factor in an already hazardous place.

  The sun was lowering in the sky, throwing all of the shadows in high relief. The surface, once almost smoothed through the constant traffic in and around the Collins, was as freshly cratered as if he had just stepped off the LEM, like Neil Armstrong.

  He looked up to see Bubba leading the dejected column of struggling scientists back to the Collins. He raised a hand to him, and got a wave in return. He had heard of the magical mystery tour that Nygaard had sent them on, and heartily approved of it. Devore despised those who would refuse to look reality in the face, but persist in living in fantasy-land. To have scientists do it, men and women steeped in rigor and fact, was doubly disappointing. He hoped the brutal reality shocked the scientists back into usefulness.

  He rounded the same mountain that protected the Collins from The Works, stepped up on the berm that surrounded the industrial heart of Moonbase Collins, and looked with horror on the devastation beyond.

  ***

  “The reactor appears to have shut down safely, sir,” he reported to McCrary upon his return. “There's no excessive radiation that I could detect. The meteorite shield seems to have done its work well. It's going to be difficult to start, though.”

  “The salt froze?”

  “Yes. Infrared imagery shows the heat-exchangers down around three hundred C, far too low for liquid salt. We probably don't have the means to re-melt the salt easily, with night coming on, sir.”

  It was a dilemma. When the UN agreed to use a nuclear reactor on the Moon to power the Moonbase, it chose a thorium-powered reactor as the least objectionable solution to the unique problems of operating a reactor on the Moon.

  The member nations insisted that the colonists on the Moon would never be able to construct a nuclear weapon from the reactor fuel. Thorium, unlike uranium-powered fission power plants, couldn’t make easily separated fuel to be used to construct nuclear weapons. Thorium was relatively plentiful on the Moon, while uranium wasn’t. A molten salt thorium reactor design from the turn of the century had already been shown to remove or burn up the decay products that were so troublesome on Earth.

  Best of all, a reactor meltdown was almost eliminated by design. The thorium is mixed with fluorine and other elements to make a high melting-point salt. It is that liquid salt, easily pumped around the core, that is the heart of the reaction. When the emergency was declared, all liquid salt was shunted into individual cells for cooling and storage. The nuclear reaction stopped, and the reactor was safe.

  “The biggest issue, sir, is that nobody shutdown the reactor—probably too busy getting into skintights and helmets. The core shut down safely, but all of the piping is filled with frozen salt. We're going to have to melt all the salt out of the pipes before we can reestablish normal flow in the reactor.”

  The downside of the design, though, was the need to re-melt the salt in order to get the reaction running again. Until a certain amount of thorium salt was melted and running through the core once more, the reactor was going to require energy instead of giving it off. The reactor was never going to get restarted with just battery power. They would need a solar-powered turbine and re-melter, and the sun was going down for the two-week long Lunar night.

  “Do you think we've got enough power to last the night?” asked McCrary. “We're spending battery power like crazy already.”

  “No. We're going to freeze about ten days in.” Devore said. “I don't have a good solution for you.”

  “Tell no one. Get me Horst. And come back yourself.”

  ***

  Frank Maleski noticed the changed air immediately. Horst and Devore were suddenly busy, highly occupied. He thought about it as he cleaned out the Engineering spaces in the central cavern.

  “What do you think?” he asked Sheila Feinstein. “Dollars to donuts, it's some crisis.”

  “No sale,” she said. “Right now, the only thing that would get them crazy like this is some problem in the basic triad.”

  “Water, power, oxygen,” recited Frank. “One of them is kaput. Which one?”

  “Not oxygen,” she said. “You said it yourself. There's plenty of LOX, especially in those big operating tanks over there.” She pointed to the huge green-painted tanks that were in every corner of the large cavern. “The ShelterCan fill before the shockwave didn't come from them, but from a different tanking system they called the Disaster Fill Stores. That fill only used up a third of those stores.”

  “Water, then? We don't really have any way to get more. That asteroid we've been mining for organics is pretty bad—not enough hydrogen.”

  “Possible. I'm betting on power.”

  “We've got...oh.” Frank stopped, a five-meter bar of reinforcing steel in his hand.

  “Yeah,” said Sheila. She pushed the rebar on the stock shelf back for Frank. “Sure, we're not using much power now, but I betcha Mighty Thor's safed and cold. All the solar panels are smashed, and the only thing left is the big battery packs down here.”

  Frank picked up more rebar and looked at her, his eyes troubled behind the clear plastic faceplate of his spacesuit. “They're only rated for ten days. We've always used Mighty Thor to run throughout the night.”

  “That's the problem,” she said, smiling. “OK, smart guy, how would you solve it?”

  He was quiet as he continued re-shelving formed steel and aluminum channels into their racks. It wasn't so theoretical after all. This problem was literally one of life and death.

  “What about the solar panels we have here in stock?” Frank mused. “They've got all the electronic interconnects. We always replace them in a unit.”

  “How many do you have, and how much capacity was up there?”

  Frank's eyes scanned the shelves. They had finished restocking intact panels earler in the day. “Hmm. We've got about ten percent replacement here.”

  Sheila waved her arms, hands flat and palms facing the floor, a sign of negation. “Not enough. It's not going to keep the batteries charged. Even if it did, that only means we'd have ten days from sundown before we freeze solid.”

  “When is sundown?” he asked. Sheila was the last one up on the surface; he had been stuck in the colony for some time.

  “Another four days. No way to get Mighty Thor up and running in that time.”

  “Frozen, you say?”

  “Solid, I heard, like a block of ice.”

  “Hang on. Something's running around the brainpan.”

  She nodded. Frank was one of the smartest engineers up here. She knew her limits. It was something of a joke among the engineers, to see which one would come up with something out of left field that would work, either Horst, Frank, or Bubba. She bet on Frank all the time. There was something lovable about the big goof.

  “There's batteries, and there's batteries,” he said. “Do you mind if I scout around a little?” She waved to him, then watched him running around, checking various storage areas.

  “You know, we might just make it anyway!” she called to him.

  “I know. Belt and suspenders!” he called into the radio. He raced up to her. “Come on. Time to find Horst.”

  ***

  McCrary and Horst were huddled over a clear space, Horst was projecting a diagram on a screen with his suit light. Frank and Sheila walked up to them and searched the radio channels for the one they were on.

  “...there's no way to get the salt back to the reactor core from there before it freezes solid. Once that happens, then the whole pipe is blocked and everything in it freezes. We lose the sale and the pipe.” Horst looked defeated. “I just can't see how we manage to get Mighty Thor started up before sundown.”

  “Sir,�
� said Frank. “I might have a solution.”

  “Who is that?” asked McCrary.

  “Frank Maleski and Sheila Feinstein, sir,” said Sheila. “We guessed there was a problem with power, and it looks like we were right. Frank thought up something, and I agree you should look at it.”

  “Maleski. Maleski. Weren't you the one who figured out where that carbonaceous chrondite asteroid was a few years ago? I thought you had cycled back to Earth?”

  “I came back as soon as I could, sir. Earth is getting worse all the time,” he said.

  “Well, let's have it.”

  “As I understand it, the batteries won't take us through the night, and Mighty Thor is frozen solid.”

  “Right.” Horst was almost angry, as if he were responsible for not engineering a better system.

  “The solar panels are either shattered or their interconnections with the batteries in Engineering are broken, so the batteries aren’t charging.”

  “Right again. Get to the point.”

  “Yes, sir. The heart of the problem is generation. The secondary problem is storage. Engineering is full of replacement solar panels, so we can, in fact, generate some power.”

  “But not enough,” said Horst. “Even with the entire array at full, there just isn't enough storage capacity to last the whole night.”

  “That was true at the time before the moonquake,” said Frank.

  “Yes, but even now, we're using up juice at such a rate that we'll never make it through the night,” said Horst.

  Sheila walked around and stood right in front of Horst. “Sir,” she said. “I know you are under a great deal of stress. Please let Frank show you everything before you question him. I promise you won't be disappointed. By the way, I reacted exactly the same way you did. Frank answered my objections. Please let him finish.”

  Horst stared at her. Stared, then nodded.

  “OK. Get on with it.”

  Frank nodded. “OTV Sandy.” He stopped and let them think about that for a bit. “I talked to Bubba Cranford, and got his impression of the wreck. There's severe damage to the pilot cabin, but not so much in the engine area. I was in charge of the ships' stores for its launch. I signed off on the propellant reload. Its tanks are loaded with LH2 and LOX.