Little by little, Horst advanced his argument. Around the fourth day of the lunar day, commonly called a 'light', McCrary agreed to send up an instrument team, perform a quick survey, and get back below the surface.
***
He smiled at the runner. “McCrary wanted to see me personally?” asked Devore. “I'm surprised he remembers me at all.” He moved to change his tunic and leggings. “I have to make myself presentable,” he explained to Horst. “McCrary only cares about life safety items: Are you suited correctly, do you have fresh oxygen and power and water loaded? All of those things.”
Horst smiled. “I remember you with the smoke punks, when McCrary first joined our little band.”
“Oh, yeah! I'll never forget the slow stares at McCrary as he tried to find a leak in his office. Then the sudden realization that perhaps he was going to ask them about the air-tightness in their own cabins. They about stampeded the cage where I kept the test supplies. It was like stockbrokers at the first bell. Then McCrary made me lock up my storeroom. I wonder what he wants now.”
***
McCrary looked gloomily at a map of the Moon. What he really wanted was a shuttle craft that could circle the Moon. What he got was a four-man team with handheld scanners.
“It's pretty simple, really,” he said. “I want you to head out on the four cardinal points of the compass, scanning for water vapor. Head out about one third of your suit supply, then come back.”
“Don't you mean half, sir?” asked Devore. “There is an auxiliary tank of oxygen.”
“I meant what I said. One third, and not a bunny-hop further. That auxiliary tank is not enough, not in my book. Also, as you head out, take a look at any ShelterCans that you might run across and let me know their condition.”
“One more question, sir,” asked Devore. “If we find one with LOX in the tank, do we fill up from it?”
“No. Leave the ShelterCans just as you found them. We might need that LOX for something more important. Get going.”
***
Devore loved being on the surface of the Moon. The harsh conditions never seemed to faze him. He flexed his knees and gave a little hop, feeling that soaring flight that only one-sixth gravity can provide. The other three Moondogs didn't say a word. Nobody ever confessed to it, but many of them shared Devore's child-like joy in bouncing around on the surface.
“Let's go, we're burning LOX,” he said. “I'll head East, you three sort it out amongst yourselves. Remember, five hops, a one-eighty wave, and repeat. Everyone will, and I mean WILL, turn around at the one-third mark on your tanks and do the same coming back. Don't try to look at the sniffer and hop at the same time, that's how you run into a rock.”
He was soon soaring along the maria. Collins was situated in the Mare Crisium, the Sea of Crises, where it was relatively easy for the Mass Driver to put the MoonCans on a transfer orbit to the Chaffee. He had chosen a direction that was moderately difficult, just so he wouldn't be accused of taking the easiest one. He had to keep a sharp eye on the terrain, or else he would turn an ankle or worse. His fifth-generation spacesuit with carbon-Kevlar armor could take a lot of abuse, but he certainly didn't want to come back covered in Moondust, a sure sign that he had fallen.
The detector remained stubbornly pegged on zero. Devore knew it was working; he had tested it in the airlock on the exhaust of one of the other Moondog's suits. Well, that figured. He never thought that there would be much ice in the sky anyway. He had heard McCrary talk about the sight of the explosion, or whatever it was, and it was pretty certain that the ice was completely vaporized.
A twinkling caught his eye. A hunk of something in a new crater ahead was reflecting light at him. On the Moon, it was impossible to tell the age of any but the newest of craters. In this case, it was easy—the rock was dust-free. It had to be a piece of ejecta from the explosion. Devore bent down to pick it up.
He straightened just as quickly when his radiation detector began to scream. He hopped away from the deadly fragment as fast as possible. The detector fell back to its normal background mutter. He stopped and checked his dosimeter. Ten sieverts on the outside, which meant about 100 millisieverts on the inside. Jeez! Another couple of minutes near that thing, and they'd have to come after him with a remote and bury him in a lead-lined casket.
“Attention! Sniffer party, this is Devore. Don't get anywhere near the new craters. I got a ten-sievert dose just reaching for a piece of ejecta. Deadly.”
A chorus of confirmations followed his announcement. He keyed into the suit computer. For the thousandth time, Devore wished they had equipped the damn things with an audio interface, instead of the clumsy typing on its left sleeve. The suit makers kept citing radiation and the need for hardening. All the redundancy took up circuitry, thus, there was nothing left over for fancy audio interfaces.
Devore snorted. The pencil-necks that were making those decisions were sitting in their richly appointed offices, working their computers with audio interfaces. They weren't up on the Moon, dodging random death from a hundred different sources.
A sudden shower of gray dust in the distance punctuated his musing. The ejecta from the event was still around, ready to smack into him. He’d better keep moving. He detoured around the new crater, anxious to avoid another blast of radiation, when another alarm went off in his suit.
The water vapor detector read off-scale high.
Devore thumped it with his free hand. The reading persisted. He turned it off, waited thirty seconds, and turned it on again. It calibrated, then went off-scale high once more. Devore bounced five hops and looked again. 800, read the meter. He turned left and repeated the maneuver. 759. He took his time, carefully hopping around the impact crater, mapping out the extent of the source. He radioed his findings in, then continued his outbound trek.
He made it out almost two kilometers before he was forced to return. On the return journey, he carefully snuck up on his previous find. The alarm blared before he got to the last positive reading he took. Startled, he looked down at the instrument. He didn't have to measure much to realize the truth.
Something was pumping water vapor into the sky.
***
Bubba was all alone in the control room of Mighty Thor. He was assigned permanently out there now, having impressed Vito with his quick study and intuitive grasp of nuclear reactor physics.
“Remember, reactivity is exponential,” Vito stressed, over and over. “This is not like a car engine beginning to race out of control. Your first warning will be when you realize you are a cloud of ions. So, keep an eye on the reactivity meters. I'd rather have to restart this thing than drift my ion cloud over to yours, capiche?”
Bubba chuckled. He already had a feel for Mighty Thor. The reactor was the latest from American Atomics, a Gen IV reactor design that was at least fifty years old, proven, and fail-safe. Oh, sure, it was possible to make the reactor go supercritical, but the liquid fluoride design meant that excess reactivity was harmlessly accommodated.
He thought about the elegant design. All nukes worked on the heat of fissioning atoms. In this case, this reactor was transmuting thorium atoms extracted from the Lunar crust into protactinium, which decayed in about a month to uranium-233, which was fissile. Uranium in a fission reactor splits in two, the reaction creating neutrons, some of which found other thorium atoms, causing them to transmute to protactinium, and so on.
The neutrons that came out of such a fission event were fast movers. In fact, they were so fast that they had to get slowed down so they would stick when they hit a thorium nucleus. There were two ways to do that. The first used a combination of water and/or graphite blocks to slow down the neutrons, the other took a 'mirror' of beryllium to reflect the neutrons back into the core.
The reactivity that Vito went on about was the chance that the neutrons would find and fission more uranium atoms. When there was excessive heat, the old-style reactors would just get hotter without any change in the geometry of the core. Mighty
Thor was a different design. It was a molten salt reactor. When the thorium fluoride salt heated up, it would expand in the piping, reducing the number of fissile atoms in the reaction zone. Even if there was a major power excursion, the salt would vaporize, forcing the rest of it out of the reaction zone.
There was more to Mighty Thor than the core. The heat exchangers and electrical turbines also required Bubba's attention. He had developed a feel for them, too.
The temptation to twirl a dial, lower a control rod a half inch, or slow down the salt pump by a percent or two, just to see how Thor would react, was always in the back of Bubba's mind.
“You're a seductive lady, ain'tcha?” murmured Bubba, as his eyes scanned the dial. “But I ain't Pandora, to release the evils you're urging on me.” He watched a display intently, catching a slow, minutes-long, cyclic wave in the reactivity of the core, and tapped the control rod a bit further in, noting the action in the log.
“Ya better behave yourself at full power, ma'am,” he said to the control panel. “Or McCrary's gonna bend your circuit boards and let you freeze.” The cyclical wave damped out and the amount of power coming out of the generator fell slightly to a smooth, linear output.
***
Reengagement
UNSOC Lunar Colony Michael Collins, August 12 2082, 1433 EDT
Jeremy had basically had it. He had done his part, cleaned up the moonquake mess, spent his time binding up the broken in the Sick Bay, and got his hands dirty in reviving the sewage treatment system. One day, the whole fight for survival just got to him. It wasn't anything special, either.
He was walking down the corridor, trying not to hop too high and bang his head on the rough plastic liner of the tunnel, when someone came through one of the cubicle doors and collided with him. It wasn't a violent collision, but it knocked him off of his feet. On the Moon, the one-sixth gravity gave every mishap a stretched-out time feel to it. Jeremy cartwheeled through the air, impacted off the liner anyway, and rebounded off the hard plastic towards the floor. He had long seconds to anticipate the impact. Somehow, that just made it worse. He had plenty of time to appreciate the fact that he wasn't carrying any coffee or something sharp. He was trying to save himself, of course. Everyone did. Still, this was not the Moon of the previous spring. This was a dirty, messy Moon, with random bits of junk scattered about. As he landed, he tucked and rolled, absorbing most of the impact on the trapezius muscles along his back. As he did so, though, he felt a sharp pain just adjacent to his spine.
His roll stopped with his back to the man who had come through the door. He stood and turned to confront him, but the look of horror on the man's face stayed him.
“Get to Sick Bay! Fast!” he shouted, while punching his wrist communicator to relay the emergency call ahead. Jeremy had barely gotten inside the doorway of Sick Bay when he was pulled face-down onto a gurney. Doctor Kumar was ready to cut away his skintights when he stopped.
“If you can stand up, you should,” the doctor said. “No use cutting up a set of tights just because of a little hole.” It was that little change in procedure that brought it all home to Jeremy.
No more spare skintights. No more anything. There was never going to be resupply. They were going to live and die on the Moon.
He waited patiently while Doctor Kumar worried the steel rod out of his back. The doctor washed out the wound with water and applied a stingingly strong alcohol spray. That was another bit of change. Gone was the usual local anesthetic and the non-caustic antiseptic. They were the product of a world that was never going to impact their little bubble of humanity again.
Jeremy accepted the apology of the man who collided with him, and left the Sick Bay in a thoughtful mood. He was one of those men who never let his feelings show on the outside.
“Never let them see you cry,” his father had beaten into his head when he was a youngster. “It's OK to feel like crap, just never give the bastards the satisfaction of knowing they got to you.”
Jeremy had taken the lesson to heart. He was secretly pleased to be able to reflect any mood he wanted to the outside world. Sometimes, no, often, it was at a complete variance to how he felt inside. In the past, when revenge came to those who crossed him, his lack of gloating always deflected suspicion.
Here, though, that same talent was a handicap. Those who could have reached out to help had no idea that he was broken inside.
Jeremy maintained his stoic exterior, but inside, he was seething with anger and resentment. He was due to rotate back to Earth two weeks before The Event. Now, there was no chance that he would ever see the green hills of Earth again. He was polite as any Moondog, but he noticed the slow hoarding of anything Earth-related everywhere he looked.
Medical items were just the most obvious. There would be no drugs any more sophisticated than those from the 1900s before long. Like all the rest of the crew, he had seen the blackened areas on Earth, where the major chunks of the Moon had landed after The Event had blasted them away. Earth was too busy dealing with their own problems to waste time worrying about the two hundred or so souls marooned on the Moon. In fact, there had been no communication with the Earth since The Event. Even if the radio antenna was returned to service and the transmitters powered up, a hail of stone had destroyed the comsat network around both the Moon and the. McCrary rated getting back in touch with Earth as far below getting the sewage pipes unclogged.
“Earth. Nice idea. Doesn't make a bit of difference, though. Sure, we could ask them for technical advice, but I don't think they have anything else to offer us. Anything they send up here, at least for the first couple of years, will be shot full of holes long before it gets close enough to land. And there's no way I will ever try to land something that crippled anywhere near the Collins. No, we're on our own for a bit,” McCrary had replied, during one of the sunrise meetings.
Jeremy took it all in, and noticed how the quality of life in Moonbase Collins, never very high to begin with, began its inexorable slide downward.
Raison d'être
UNSOC Lunar Colony Michael Collins, September 11, 2082, 1500 EDT
Bubba didn't notice things the way Jeremy did. For Bubba, the reactivation of Mighty Thor was the end of the beginning for getting the Moon back on its feet. Within another solar cycle, Mighty Thor was up to full power, supplementing the solar cells during the day, and taking the load off of the batteries in the long lunar night. With power, all things, almost, were possible.
The first order of business was returning The Works back to full production, including the oxygen furnace, though on a modified production schedule. True, they were no longer slinging LOX out to the Chaffee, but they needed the oxygen to repressurize the Collins, refill all of the suits, and, most importantly, all of the LOX tanks big and small throughout the colony.
“All it takes is one medium size rock, or a bunch of little ones, and we're going to be right back to where we were three months ago,” McCrary said to Horst. “I want every ShelterCan topped up. I want every spare tank filled, pressurized, and tested. Then I want them secured all over the station again, as well as outside it.”
The Moondogs, once they knew why McCrary was so hot on O2 production, pitched in. It seemed to McCrary that all he had to do was point out why something had to be done, and the Moondogs would fairly leap to get it done. Since their main job was survival, the Moondogs were just itching to ensure they'd live for another day. That would change, he knew, and he was too smart to believe that the Moondogs’ attitude would continue. In fact, McCrary was just waiting for the first signs of slackening amongst the workers. He just didn't know what form it would take.
***
Jeremy was on his way out to The Works when he reached the end of his rope. It was a simple burp, but it brought back into his mouth the taste of that morning's meal, and that was it for him. One more cup of reconstituted dried eggs, one more overly chemical tasting tomato, one more textured vegetable protein 'chopped steak', and he was going to start taking out
people until someone ended him. He just figured he'd save them the trouble.
“McCrary, we've got a problem,” called Operations to his commpad. “Better get up here, fast.”
Out on the Lunar surface, Controller Shiztu pointed to the white figure wandering aimlessly around, arms stretched out wide.
“Who is that?” asked McCrary.
“Jeremy Hoskins,” said Shiztu. “He was supposed to report to The Works twenty minutes ago. When he didn't, and we started looking for him, we saw this. Also, he's on the radio, spouting off the most incredible stuff. Here, listen.”
The knob on the radio was turned up, and the voice of the doomed man was piped into the control center for all to hear.
“...that's it, I'm done! I know we'll never see the Earth again, except as a big burning blue marble up in the sky. No seas here. No lakes. No moving the hut out onto the ice in the middle of January, all full of beer and dope and a saw and a couple of lines. Sitting around an ice hole, ripped to the gills on Jack and coke, wiggling a line into the freezing water, waiting for some dumb fish to take a drowned worm. Drowned.
“Heh, drowned. Yeah, I always thought that's the way I'd go. Under water, the air bursting in my lungs, trying to get out, then the first inhalation of cold, cold water. They say that it's not a bad way to go. What do they know? Anyone ever come back from drowning? No! Just like nobody ever came back from vacuum drowning. And that's how I guess I'm going to go.
“I betcha the guys in Ops are listening to me. Well, if you are, this is the way I want it. There's nothing left for me to do here on the Moon. One small step and all that. OK, I've done my bit for king and country, even if we haven't had a King since President Kuspadiq. That bastard sold us down the river to the UN. And now I'm working my ass off, just so Subby can get a gold-plated dick massager. Well, I hope he likes it. Cuz I'm done.
Come In, Collins Page 10
