Lunar Descent

by Allen Steele

  BRANDENSTEIN: If this is indeed the case, then it’s bad news for Skycorp, because if they can no longer extract water directly from the Moon, it means they will have to import all their water from Earth. That means the overhead costs of operating the base could reach beyond the point of profitability. It’s no big secret that Skycorp has been considering selling the base to the Japanese. The chief executives at Uchu-Hiko are probably doing handsprings right now … but it’s a black day for the American space industry.…

  (CUT TO Garrett Logan, standing in front of Skycorp headquarters.)

  LOGAN: Corporate officials at Skycorp have refused to comment on what this development means for the future of Descartes Station, other than to say that the company is still studying its options. Spokespersons for Uchu-Hiko in Tokyo have likewise declined comment. However, Skycorp’s price-per-share on the New York Stock Exchange fell by 15.2 points just before closing today, which may be a harbinger of worse things to come. As one market analyst told us, “Just wait till the market reopens on Monday, and you’re going to see some big changes.” This is Garrett Logan in Huntsville, Alabama.…

  17. The Birth of a Scam

  Elizabeth Sawyer slipped her keycard into the slot next to the greenhouse hatch and shifted her slender body so that Willard DeWitt couldn’t read the six-digit string which she tapped into the lock’s keypad. With a metallic grinding sound, the hatch irised open. “Harry’s waiting for you,” the middle-aged hydroponics chief said stiffly as she stepped out of the way. “Fifteen minutes … and you better think twice about pilfering any veggies while you’re in there.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.” DeWitt flashed her his most winning smile, but Sawyer wasn’t having any of his sweet-talk. Folding her arms across the front of her grimy jumpsuit, she gave him a sour look which suggested she would just as soon go after him with a pair of gardening shears.

  “Wipe your feet,” she added as DeWitt stepped through the hatchway. There was a disinfectant mat on the floor just inside the hatch; DeWitt stopped and briskly wiped the soles of his sneakers across the mat and smiled again at Sawyer. She absently brushed back a lock of her graying red hair, pursed her lips distrustingly, and touched the button that closed the hatch behind him. “Fifteen minutes,” she said again just before the hatch resealed.

  “Ornery old biddy, aren’t you?” DeWitt murmured. On the other hand, he reflected, as he turned and gazed upon the vast greenhouse that lay before him, she had every right to be protective about this place.

  Descartes Station’s greenhouse was a separate structure, adjacent to Subcomp A and almost as large as one of the dorms. Made of dense, inflated Kevlar and buttressed by hemispherical aluminum struts, its domed roof rose thirty feet above the floor, easily making the greenhouse the largest interior space anywhere on the base. The outer shell of the dome was covered with a this shell of regolith fines, salvaged from the mining operations, which protected the crops from cosmic radiation. Suspended from the rafters were racks of track-lights and nutrient bottles whose feedlines dangled down into the long rows of waist-level hydroponics tanks on the floor. More than half of the tanks were given over to the farming of wheat—an efficient oxygen producer which also doubled as a good source of raw grain, which meant that one thing the moondogs’ diet never lacked was wheat bread—with the back rows devoted to the cultivation of tomatoes, celery, bean sprouts, and an exquisitively small and precious (albeit experimental) crop of strawberries.

  DeWitt walked slowly down the central aisle, relishing the enormous space, the warm humid air which smelled of green and growing things, the vague heat of the overhead lights. The greenhouse was like a Kansas farm field which had been miraculously transplanted to the Moon. It was no wonder that the greenhouse was closed to most of the moondogs; prolonged exposure to this much simple beauty could make anyone homesick in hurry. And besides, the greenhouse was a delicately balanced ecosystem of its own; to have people constantly tramping through the dome would invite damage to this miniature biosphere. But, DeWitt mused as he paused to run his hand through the high stalks of wheat thrusting up from a tank, I could easily move my bunk in here.…

  “Enjoying yourself?” Harry Drinkwater’s voice said from behind him.

  DeWitt turned to see Drinkwater strolling toward him down the central aisle, his hands shoved in his pockets and a rare uncynical smile on his face. “Thought you might like this,” he added. “Liz lets me in here from time to time, as long as I play an occasional k.d. lang or Randy Travis oldie for her at the station.” He nodded meaningfully at the wheat stalks DeWitt had been stroking. “And as long as I don’t touch her crops.”

  “It’s nice,” DeWitt said softly. He reluctantly withdrew his hand. “You got a good deal … but aren’t you supposed to be on the air right now?”

  “Lunch break. I’ve got a prerecorded tape and the CD racks playing DJ for me right now.” He glanced at his watch. “I’m due back on the air in a half-hour, and you can bet Liz will kick us out long before that. As long as we’ve got privacy, we ought to make the most of it. You said you had something for me?”

  “Umm-hmm.” DeWitt started to lean against a hydroponics tank, felt it shudder, and quickly stepped forward again. “You know about what they discovered at Byrd Crater?”

  Drinkwater’s smile faded into a frown. He nodded his head slightly. “And you know what the stock market’s doing?” DeWitt continued. “That Skycorp’s price-per-share on the New York exchange went down yesterday by …?”

  “Fifteen-point-two points at closing,” Drinkwater finished, pulling a hand out of a pocket and whirling it impatiently. “And probably down more when it opens again Monday. I’ve got an AP teleprinter in the studio, remember? Nobody here gets the news faster than I do. So what are you …?”

  “Bear with me a second,” DeWitt interrupted. “Skycorp’s stock is taking a power dive because the permaice well at Byrd Crater is drying up. That means that within a year at best, one of the two or three most valuable consumables at the base-plain, ordinary water—is going to have to be exported from Earth, increasing the cost by tenfold at the very least. Thus, the cost of operating Descartes goes up.…”

  DeWitt raised his thumb toward the ceiling. “And the interest of the short-term floating investors goes down.” His thumb cocked downwards. “And that drives the value of Skycorp’s stock down in New York, similarly influencing the Tokyo and London exchanges. At this rate, it means the company might suffer third-quarter losses. Clear so far?”

  “Crystal,” Drinkwater said drily. “And you don’t need to tell me the rest. Uchu-Hiko’s been interested in acquiring Descartes from Skycorp for a long time now. If Skycorp’s price-per-share softens too much, the company will cut its losses before it gets critical. The boys in Huntsville will dump this joint on the market, and guess who’s waiting to acquire a tasty piece of developed lunar real estate?”

  “Good prognosis,” DeWitt said. “I’d say that it’ll happen in less than a week. In fact, I’ll bet my next paycheck that Skycorp entertains a bid for the base from Uchu-Hiko by the time Wall Street closes next Friday. Even by Wednesday if it goes sour too fast.” He smiled and raised an expectant eyebrow.

  Drinkwater shook his head. “I’m not going to take that bet.” He shoved his hands back in his pockets and half-turned to gaze at the hydroponic farm surrounding them. “So what? You’ve deduced something any Harvard MBA could figure out in a minute. What’s your point, Willard?”

  DeWitt looked down at his shoes to hide his smug grin. He took a couple of steps closer to Drinkwater until he was standing next to his shoulder. “What if I told you,” he said in a soft, slow voice, “that there’s another source of water that’s readily available?” He paused, then added, “Up here. In space. And you and I are the only ones who know about it.”

  Harry Drinkwater slowly turned around and stared straight into Willard DeWitt’s eyes. “If you’re trying to bullshit me …”

  Unable to help himself now, DeWitt sh
ook his head. “Let’s go to my niche,” he said. He brushed past Drinkwater and started walking down the aisle. When the DJ hesitated, DeWitt twisted around on his heels and tipped his head toward the hatch. “C’mon,” he prodded. “Trust me. I’ve got something I want to show you. You’re going to love it.”

  The rock was roughly shaped like a potato. It was about one mile in length and a half-mile in width, and its former neighborhood had been the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter until, over the course of several millennia, the Sun’s gravity had gradually coaxed it out of its orbit and brought it spiraling toward the inner solar system. Because it had a medium-low albedo, it reflected light poorly; the optical telescopes at the Hawking Observatory on the lunar farside had noticed the rock only because it happened to occult a stellar cluster which was currently under observation.

  The AI system which controlled the lunar observatory routinely logged the discovery of the new Apollo asteroid. Following a preset program, one of the optical telescopes tracked the asteroid for a couple of days, making the usual spectrographic analysis and estimate of its probable trajectory before the master computer filed the information in its memory, which in turn was transmitted to the computers at Byrd Station for eventual downloading by human hands. The discovery of a new Apollo asteroid, after all, was an item of little interest and low priority. Thousands of new asteroids that crossed Earth-orbit had been found since the first Hubble space telescope had been launched in 1990, and as long as asteroids didn’t threaten to collide with Earth or the Moon, there was hardly any reason to red-flag it for anyone’s immediate attention. The Hawking computer had even been free to give it a name; it designated the rock 2024 Garbo—it was currently working its way through a list of classic film stars; the last Apollo asteroid it had found had been named 2024 Fairbanks—and returned its attention to more important things.

  Willard DeWitt pointed at the dotted line which was slowly inching along his computer screen. “And there it is,” he said proudly. “Now look where it ends up.…”

  He waited until 2024 Garbo’s trajectory crossed the ellipse of the Earth-Moon system, then tapped the PAUSE key on his keyboard. He had loaded the data he had hacked from the science lab’s mainframe into his own computer, merging it with a simple astronomical program he had also filched from Butch Peterson’s computers. As the trajectory froze, he typed in another command, and a red line lanced between the Apollo asteroid and the Moon; at the bottom of the LCD, a set of numbers appeared. DeWitt sat back in his seat and looked up at Harry Drinkwater.

  “See?” he said with just a trace of smugness.

  Drinkwater leaned over the back of DeWitt’s chair and looked at the screen. “Okay. It makes a close approach at six hundred twenty-seven thousand miles on January 3, 2025.” He shrugged. “So what? Five months from now a big dumb rock comes sailing past us.” He glanced at his watch and eyed the closed door of DeWitt’s niche. “Listen, I gotta be back on the air in about fifteen minutes, so if you’ve got a point to make …”

  “Cool your jets a minute and check this out, okay?” DeWitt hastily punched in a new set of commands; the screen split in half, displaying a computer-generated image of 2024 Garbo and a column of specific information which had been collated by the Hawking computer from the raw data its telescopes had collected. He ran the cursor down to one line in particular and highlighted it. “See that? Type-C carbonaceous chondrite …”

  “Big deal …”

  “… with an estimated H2O content of nine-point-three percent.” DeWitt jabbed the screen with his forefinger and stared straight at Drinkwater. “Run that through your noodle for a minute. That baby’s almost ten percent ice!”

  Drinkwater, who was about to protest that he had a zillion requests to deal with once he got back on the mike, found himself gaping at the screen. The pixel-silhouette of 2024 Garbo slowly rotated on its long axis; he rested his hands on DeWitt’s fold-down desk and bent closer to study the screen. The numbers did not lie.

  “Ten percent … ice?” he said slowly. “Hell, that’s almost as much as they found at Byrd Crater in the first place.” He looked at DeWitt. “How did you know about this?”

  DeWitt grinned. “I didn’t. I was just taking a shot in the dark.” He coughed into his fist and turned away from the screen. “I was on my watch in MainOps when Peterson transmitted the data back from the LRLT crash site. I figured that given the situation they were in, it must have been something important. So after I downloaded it all in her computer, I came back here after my shift was over, sneaked into her system and took a peek. The data from Byrd Station was the most important stuff, of course, but once I had seen that, I decided to run through the latest from Hawking. Just for the hell of it, really.” He snapped his fingers at the screen. “Jackpot … that’s when I found our friend Garbo here.”

  Drinkwater nodded his head. He straightened up and thrust his hands into his back pockets. “All right. You’ve found an Apollo asteroid that’s loaded with ice and it’ll be swinging by in a few months. Sure, they’ve talked about asteroid retrieval missions before, but …”

  “Who’s they?” DeWitt asked, blinking but otherwise keeping a completely straight face.

  “Skycorp,” Drinkwater replied. “Uchu-Hiko. Arianespace, NASA, Glavkosmos, and all the rest. Everyone. It’s an old idea, but nobody’s ever really …”

  “Nobody’s done it because they didn’t need to,” DeWitt finished. “When they found the ice deposits at Byrd Crater, it wasn’t necessary to talk about farming asteroids anymore. But now Byrd Crater’s drying up. And, just in the nick of time, here’s pretty Ms. Garbo, making her lonely way past the Moon.…”

  Harry was shuffling his feet. “Yeah, well, okay, maybe Skycorp can send out a tug or two to …”

  “Who said anything about Skycorp?”

  The DJ stopped and looked at Dewitt. “I did. Skycorp’s the only one that’s got the boats up here that can do it.”

  DeWitt shook his head, but said nothing. “Listen,” Drinkwater insisted, “they’re the only company that can …”

  Grinning now, DeWitt shook his head again. Drinkwater was feeling confused now. “But they own the tugs, so …”

  “Who owns the tugs?” DeWitt asked teasingly.

  “Skycorp!” Drinkwater said in exasperation. “I just said that!”

  “What about Lunar Associates, Ltd.?”

  “I never heard of … Who?”

  “Lunar Associates Ltd.” DeWitt was still smiling. “You know. The small start-up space company affiliated with Gamble, Hutton & Schwartzchilde, which has a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. When the bell rings on Wall Street Monday morning, they’ll be tendering their first stock.”

  He looked at the computer screen again, then slowly turned his eyes back to Harry Drinkwater. “An incredible new investment opportunity which only a few select insiders in the space-futures market will know about. Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘owning a piece of the rock,’ if you know what I mean.”

  “But the tugs …”

  “Screw the tugs,” DeWitt replied. He had the serene confidence of a man who had just tied a string around Wall Street’s testicles and was ready to give the line a good, hard yank. “Listen to me, my friend. There are only two kinds of reality. Money … and everything else.”

  Harry Drinkwater felt his heart skip a beat. He glanced at the screen, then at Willard DeWitt, then at the screen again. “Are you seriously saying you’re going to use this asteroid to …?”

  “That,” DeWitt replied evenly, “and so much more. I think I found a way to do what you want to do. Come back when you’re off the air. I’ll have something to show you by then.”

  He sighed with blissful anticipation, like a high-school kid who was about to take the local beauty queen out for a ride in the park, and turned back to his keyboard. “Oh, boy,” he said softly, more to himself than to his new partner, “will I have something to show you.”

  18. The Hidden Agenda
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br />   Lester assumed that he would be hearing from Skycorp before Monday morning. He was both right and wrong.

  When the call came, he was in MainOps, putting in a few extra hours during the Saturday second-shift. For the sake of privacy, he had the communications officer patch the call through to his office; then he left the tower and trotted down the spiral stairs to the second level. By chance, Butch Peterson happened to be in the central corridor as he was approaching his office. “C’mon with me,” he said without breaking stride. “This is something you ought to hear.” Peterson didn’t question him; she simply turned and followed him into his office, carefully shutting the door behind her.

  Lester wasn’t surprised to find that it was Arnie Moss who was waiting for him on the phone. The only surprise was that the vice-president of lunar operations wasn’t calling from the Huntsville headquarters. Judging from the background on the phone’s TV screen, his old NASA buddy was calling from home; Moss’s open-necked golf shirt suggested that he had just come from spending Saturday morning on the links. Perhaps Moss had suffered a sudden attack of conscience on the 18th hole at the Huntsville Country Club.

  Hiya, Les, Moss began. Good to see you again. He paused, then asked, Are you alone right now?

  Before he had picked up the phone, Riddell had carefully rotated the screen toward his desk chair so that the rest of the office couldn’t be seen through the lens. Peterson was standing silently near the door, where she couldn’t be picked up by the camera but could still hear everything that was being said. “Sure, I’m alone,” Lester replied easily. “Sorry for the delay, but I decided not to take this in MainOps. What’s on your mind?”

  You and your boys, for one thing. Moss sighed. I shouldn’t be calling you like Ms, you know. There’s a lot of paranoia right now at the office. Some of the top people would just as soon keep you guys in the dark. I hope that whatever’s said stays just between you and me. You copy me on that?

  “Paranoia?” Lester kept a poker-face; he laced his hands together and gazed innocently back at the screen. “What are you talking about?”