Lunar Descent

by Allen Steele

  “Uhhh …” Noonan glanced anxiously at the bust, then at Yuri, then at the bust again. “You? A self-portrait?”

  Yuri’s eyes clamped shut. His hands wadded into fists inside his pockets and he muttered something in Russian under his breath that was undoubtedly obscene. Then he took a slow breath and looked back up at them. “René Descartes,” he said with slow, drawling contempt. “The French philosopher-scientist after whom your base has been named.” He turned his head and looked at the sculpture. “I thought it might decorate your miserable rec room … but for all I know, the idiots there might think it’s some movie star.”

  There was a long moment of uncomfortable silence. “Sorry, Yuri,” Joe said apologetically. “Didn’t mean to insult you.” Annie looked suitably chastened.

  Yuri sighed. “I’ll get over it. I suppose you’re here for the fuel pump.” He picked up the bust and carelessly shoved it into Mighty Joe’s hands, then walked past him and Noonan to the connector sleeve. “It’s out back. I’ll get one of the robots to load it onto your truck for you.”

  Before he ducked through the sleeve, he peered over his shoulder and added, “That still you ordered is ready, too. I’ll have it loaded as well.” Then he disappeared into the adjacent module, leaving Joe red-faced and Annie gaping at him.

  “The still you ordered?” she repeated. “Did I hear that right? A still? As in …?”

  “As in homemade liquor,” Joe quietly admitted. “Yeah, you heard right. I asked him a couple of months ago to put one together to replace the still that the company tore out of here.” He grinned sheepishly and shrugged. “They don’t call it moonshine for nothing, sweetheart.”

  He started walking toward the sleeve, but Noonan planted herself in front of him, throwing up her hands to stop him. “No no no no no no,” she said, shaking her head vigorously. “René Descartes’ head, yes, but you’re not bringing back a still. You know the new rules.…”

  “New rules are just the same as the old rules. Just a matter of hiding it a little better this time, that’s all.” He looked down at her and let out his breath. “Look, darlin’, it’s already bought and paid for. I’m not about to just leave it out here, for chrissakes!”

  “Uh-huh. And I expect we’re just going to wheel into the base and unload it in front of Lester’s and Quick-Draw’s noses.” Her eyes widened in mock innocence. “Still? What still? It’s one of Yuri’s weird sculptures … ‘Ode to a Shot Liver.’”

  “Well, actually, I was planning to drop it off at the mass-driver on the way in. Tycho said he’d hide it in an equipment locker till we found a place in the base to set it up.”

  “Ohhhh …” Annie nodded her head in cynical agreement. “So now we have to trust our jobs to Tycho. Listen, Joe, I don’t think …”

  “That’s right. You don’t think.” Joe angrily pushed past her, carrying the heavy bust toward the hatch. “Listen. It goes back with us and that’s the end of it. Now let’s get going. This fucking thing weighs a ton and a half.”

  “Good. I hope you drop it on your foot.” She fell into step behind him, adding under her breath, “I’m going to cold-cock you for this, I swear to God.”

  In the next compartment, Honest Yuri had pushed some art books out of a chair and was seated in front of a computer terminal, typing instructions into the AI system that controlled the cargo robot. “The pump and the brewery gear will be on your truck by the time you get outside,” he said without looking up. “I’d invite you to have some coffee, but I have to get back to my work now. I have a new painting to complete before Uchu-Hiko buys this place and kicks me out.”

  Mighty Joe carefully placed René Descartes on the floor by the airlock hatch and picked up his gloves. “That’s not a foregone conclusion, Yuri,” he said as he shoved his left hand into a gauntlet and locked down the wrist joint. “We’re getting the production quota up again. The Korean project is right on schedule. I don’t think …”

  “That’s correct,” Yuri shot back impatiently. “You don’t think.” Joe winced, remembering that he’d just leveled this same unkind comment at Annie. “If the Japanese want something,” Yuri continued in a condescending tone, “they’re going to get it. That includes this base. Skycorp’s going to sell you and me and your girlfriend, too, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  He looked up from his keyboard. “Did I tell you that a wealthy art collector in Nagasaki has offered to buy the Night Gallery? Hmm? Five million dollars. He wants to place it in the rock garden behind his country retreat.”

  Annie paused in putting on her own gloves. “Are you going to sell it to him?”

  Yuri’s eyes went to her face. All of a sudden, he looked less like Peter the Great or Rasputin than an insecure artist, salvaging space junk while trying to pursue his vision in a lonely land. “What do you think I should do?” he said softly. “Five million dollars could buy me a lot of bronze instead of some beat-up pieces of aluminum. And I can’t stay here forever.”

  Yuri looked away again, staring at the Renoir poster tacked above the work station. “I’ll have to go home sooner or later.” He closed his eyes for a second, then looked at Annie again. “Did you like my Night Gallery?”

  Annie thought about it for a few seconds. “Yes,” she said at last, with utter sincerity. “It frightened me … but it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen on the Moon.”

  Then, impulsively, she walked to him, bent over, and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered in his ear.

  He nodded his head gravely as she backed away. There was another long moment of silence. “Yuri,” Joe asked quietly, “when was the last time you sent your dosimeter to Monk for a check?”

  Yuri said nothing for a minute. He stared straight ahead at the green type on his computer screen. “Take Mr. Descartes back to the base,” he said finally. “Find a good place for him. It’s a gift … and so is the brewer. No charge.”

  Mighty Joe looked down at the floor. “Thanks, Yuri,” he mumbled. Then he suddenly looked up as a suspicious thought crossed his mind. “Hey, that pump works okay, doesn’t it?”

  Yuri’s head whipped around. Yuri the tortured artist was gone and Rasputin was back. “Yes!” he yelled. “It works! Now go! I have art to make!”

  They were in the truck again, driving back through the Night Gallery, with the fuel pump and other gear lashed down on the tandem-trailer, before Annie put forth the thought that had been bothering her. “Joe,” she asked, “what did you mean about the dosimeter?”

  Mighty Joe didn’t answer at once. His hands gripped the steering column as he gazed straight ahead, ignoring the Night Gallery statues on either side of the trail. “Think about it a second,” he said at last. “Look at this place and ask yourself how much time he’s spent out on EVA, building these things.”

  Noonan glanced through the window at the statues of the phantom army. “Out here?” she asked. “Well, wouldn’t he bring them into the studio and assemble them there?”

  “Did you see an airlock big enough for any of this stuff?” he snarled. Annie jerked back, startled by the force of his question. “They weren’t made in there! Do you think he just putters around in his studio all day? Chrissakes, Annie, he—!”

  Joe stopped himself. He sighed and waited a few seconds for his rage to pass. “The Night Gallery was built right where you see it,” he continued in a calmer tone of voice. “That’s the only way he could do it. And not just during the night, either, and not just for a few hours at a time. Now think about it. How much radiation exposure do you think he’s received over the last couple of years, working like this? How many REMs you think Yuri’s collected?”

  She didn’t have to think about it for very long. At Descartes Station, at least, there was Monk Walker to keep track of everyone’s suit dosimeters, to make certain that no one exceeded OSHA standards for beta and gamma-ray exposure. At Descartes, at least, moondogs on EVA went straight from the ready-room to the vehicles or the Dirt Factory or the
mass-driver plant; no one stayed out on the surface, with only their hardsuits between them and the radiation, for very long. But you can’t do that if you’re assembling the Crucifixion from pieces of scrap metal. The hours, the long hours …

  She buried her face in her hands. “Oh, my God …” she whispered. “Cancer.”

  “If he doesn’t have it now,” Joe said, “he’ll have it soon. And he won’t do a thing about it either. If he tells anyone … if he shows Monk his dosimeter … they’ll make him leave.”

  He was silent for a few moments. He listened to Annie quietly sobbing in the seat next to him; then he angrily slapped his fist against the dashboard. “God damn you,” he said. “Stubborn son of a bitch.”

  They said very little to each other during the long ride home.

  The Importance of Ice (Video.2)

  (From High Enterprise: A History of the Private Space Industry; Simon & Schuster Hypertextbooks (version 3.1), New York, 2031).

  (SCREEN: a Japanese rocket lifting off from a launch pad; a mock-up of a small space probe; images of the first American and Soviet lunar probes; an animated schematic diagram of the trajectory of Japan’s first lunar probe on its way to the Moon.)

  SCROLL: The second era of lunar exploration began on January 24, 1990, when Japan’s Institute of Space and Aeronautical Sciences launched its Hiten spacecraft to the Moon from the Kagoshima Space Center on the island of Kyushu (see Chap.1). The launch of the small, unmanned probe was only barely noticed by the general public of the United States and the Soviet Union, the two global superpowers which had formerly been the only nations to send men and machines to the Moon. Yet the importance of the event was distinctly felt by the space community of the U.S., the U.S.S.R., and the European Common Market, all of whom thought that the Moon somehow belonged to them, yet were uncomfortably aware of the rapid strides Japan was making in space exploration. Suddenly, this complacency was disturbed; the idea that the world’s largest economic percapita, nation was sending its first probe to the Moon was unsettling, at the very least. Press “enter,” please.

  (SCREEN: Neil Armstrong climbing down the ladder of the Apollo 11 LEM; President George Bush making a speech at the Smithsonian Institution; a session of the U.S. House of Representatives; a session of the Japanese Diet.)

  SCROLL: Yet the launch of the Hiten probe, as seminal as it was at the time, was only the third-most important event of the era. Six months earlier—on July 20, 1989, the twentieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing—U.S. President George Bush announced during a ceremony on the steps of the National Air and Space Museum that the long-range goal of the revived United States space program would be to establish bases on the Moon and, eventually, on Mars (See Chap.2). Despite criticism that the new Space Exploration Initiative ignored fiscal practicality—at a time when the United States was dealing with a staggering fiscal deficit, it was estimated that such a program would cost more than five hundred billion dollars over the next thirty-five years—the realization was dawning on governmental and private-enterprise decision makers in the West that space exploration was necessary to maintain a technological lead over its rivals in the East, as well as a means of developing alternate energy sources to free the U.S. from dependence on foreign oil. The first era of lunar exploration had been brought about as the result of a political “cold war” between the U.S. and the Soviet Union; the second era was begun by economic friction between the West and the East, and by the harsh lessons driven home by Gulf War I in 1991. Press “enter,” please.

  (SCREEN: a meeting during one of the “Case For Mars” conferences in Boulder, Colorado; diagrams and sketches of advanced rocket engines, space shuttles, spacesuits, lunar landers; pictures of science fiction writers; movie stills; the huckster room of a World Science Fiction Convention; the exterior of the Arthur D. Little Company headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.)

  SCROLL: Yet even the Bush Administration’s recommitment of the United States to manned interplanetary exploration, in the long run, was overshadowed by theoretical work being done by space scientists around the world. In labs and offices, new technologies were being quietly explored by the next generation of dreamers, both in public and private circles. A whole new batch of basic-research scientists and rocket engineers and policy analysts—the kids who knew Peenemunde only as an item of interest from history texts, who had been weaned on Star Trek and who had read science fiction novels by flashlight under the bedcovers—were now huddled together in places as diverse as SF fan conventions (See Appendix.1), campus beer-and-burger hangouts, and the industrial think-tanks of the Rand Corporation and the Arthur D. Little Company. There were looking for ways, by hook or by crook, to get people back to the Moon. Press “enter,” please.

  (SCREEN: a chunk of ice; a frosted glass beer stein; still-photos of Watson, Murray, and Brown; an animated map of the Moon, rotating to display first the north, then the south, lunar poles; simulation of a comet striking the Moon.)

  SCROLL: In time, they found just what they needed: ice. When they located, in the dry depths of space, that same substance which encrusted the outsides of their beer mugs, they also found one of the most important resources of the reconquest of the Moon. The possible prescence of permaice in the Moon’s polar regions was first postulated in 1961 by scientists Kenneth Watson, Bruce C. Murray, and Harrison Brown (See Chap.1). They realized that the deep craters at the “top” and “bottom” of the Moon were never exposed to daylight. These permanently shadowed regions, therefore, could function as cold traps, collecting frozen water and carbon dioxide which might accumulate there. Thus, scientists theorized, if ancient comets had indeed collided with the Moon in its prehistory, ice sprayed out from the comets might have been buried deep beneath the regolith at the poles, never to have been evaporated by sunlight. Press “enter,” please.

  (SCREEN: Apollo astronauts walking on the lunar surface; Surveyor and Lukod probes in orbit above the Moon; spectrographic maps of the Moon; the outside of the SSI’s offices in Princeton, New Jersey; artist’s depictions of lunar mining operations; animation of comets moving through the Oort cloud.)

  SCROLL: The polar-permaice theory, though, remained largely ignored during the Apollo explorations. Spectrographic and geological mapping of the poles was never accomplished by the American and Soviet probes that visited the Moon in the 1960’s and early 1970’s Indeed, the question might have lain dormant except as an item of arcane astrophysical interest had it not been for the research of the nonprofit space research group, the Space Studies Institute (See Chap.2). SSI researchers realized that a need for water had to be satisfied before large-scale lunar mining could be started, and although harvesting comets from the Oort cloud which passed through the inner solar system was the obvious solution, the technological capability of rendezvousing with these relatively rare comets was impractical, at least for the near-term. On the other hand, transporting vast amounts of water from Earth was economically daunting. SSI began to look elsewhere and, in the late 1980’s, it rediscovered the old Watson-Murray-Brown theory of lunar permaice. Press “enter,” please.

  (SCREEN: a model of the SSI Lunar Prospector; footage of its launch from the Baikonur cosmodrome; model of the NASA Lunar Observer; footage of its launch aboard a rocket from Cape Canaveral; diagram of the Moon’s north pole; orbital footage of Byrd Crater; Admiral Richard, Byrd at the North Pole; diagram of subsurface permaice deposits at Byrd Crater.)

  SCROLL: in the 1990’s, two unmanned missions were sent to the Moon. First, the SSI’s Lunar Prospector—a low-cost package containing a spare Apollo spectrometer donated by NASA and funded by several American companies—was launched from the U.S.S.R. by a Molniya rocket. The SSI’s lunar probe became the first private-industry extraterrestrial probe in history (although Japan’s Hiten was privately funded, it was conducted under the aegis of a government science agency). Three years later, NASA’s more sophisticated Lunar Observer was launched by a Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral, but by then its most i
nteresting mission was to confirm the findings of the cut-rate SSI probe. The Watson-Murray-Brown theory was correct; permaice existed within the regolith of the Moon’s northern polar region—ironically enough, within the crater named after the legendary polar explorer, Admiral Richard Byrd. No such wellspring was found on the south pole, but one was enough: a source of lunar water had been located. Press “enter,” please.

  (SCREEN: animated diagram of the lunar north pole; NASA’s first base in the Descartes highlands: the digging of the first well at Byrd Station; orbital photos of the Skycorp permaice extraction facility.)

  SCROLL: This was the most important event of the 1990’s in regard to the industrial development of the Moon. It meant that if a well could be established at Byrd Crater, the moonbase would have a relatively inexpensive source of water; Nature had made a nice deal with mankind, but as is the case in any deal, there was some fine print at the bottom of the contract: no one knew exactly now much permaice existed in Byrd Crater, or how long the supply would last. The answer to that tricky question was not answered until 2024, long after Skycorp had established its Byrd Crater Permaice Extraction Facility. Key next chapter, please.

  15. Mighty Joe’s Jinx

  The lights on the airlock’s status panel turned green; Lester shoved down the lockbar and pushed open the heavy steel hatch. As he removed his helmet in the antechamber, he heard the metronomic clicka-click-click of Butch Peterson’s fingers on the computer keyboard in the lab module. “Find anything yet?” he called out.

  “Maybe,” she murmured distractedly as she continued working at the computer. Riddell was about to ask if she could help him out of his suit, but noticed that her own hardsuit was buckled into one of the racks. Nobody had been in the ice station’s control module to help her out, so why should he demand assistance? This was a matter of professional pride. Lester backed into the second rack, buckled the shoulder grommets, then slid back the recessed cover on his chestplate and flipped the toggles which popped the rear access hatch. Can’t be that difficult, he thought, as he ducked his head through the neck collar and began to pull his arms out of the suit’s sleeves. Just a simple matter of co-ordination …