April 8: It's Always Something

by Mackey Chandler

  "Please. You don't have to invest a huge amount," April allowed. "Maybe cap it at a few hundred hours for one of his designers. But I think it's worth looking at now, with the changes in engines."

  "I'll do that," Jeff agreed. "It might make a difference in building other habitats, but it's not going to change the fact it's still going to be expensive relative to the moon. Home, and any companion habitats, are still going to be like an Earth city with cheaper suburbs. Like London or New York. I don't think it will suffer the same fate of decline some Earth cities have. It's a different dynamic to maintain things."

  "Some of the decline of Earth cities was sheer stupidity. People made a conscious decision at some point that the city was in decline, and decided to basically mine the value of their buildings and property. Once such a mentality takes hold it's self fulfilling. I don't think we have the exactly same social forces either. But there's a lot more room on the moon and tunnel machines have a long life. The number of tunnel machines will increase steadily so the new kilometers of tunnel bored will go up each year.

  "What I'm trying to get around to saying is that we should shift our investments towards the moon somewhat, and also, we're making enough income now that if you or Heather want to take a bigger dividend just say so, and we can afford it."

  "I'll read the numbers, but I'm pretty content to let the money ride to make more money," April decided. "I do think if we're doing that well, I'll feel safe to use a bit more of the funds I'm holding to improve my property on the moon."

  "You know, a couple families are making apartments available if you wanted a place all ready to stay with access to pressure and utilities," Jeff said.

  "To rent or to buy?" April asked.

  "Both, but they aren't unlimited in depth like your ranch. They're a defined cubic."

  "Maybe. If I can get something close enough to Heather's offices and cafeteria," April allowed.

  "The longer you wait the further away they will be, unless somebody resells. Or you can buy way out, beyond public pressure, and try to guess where new commercial development will take place."

  "How about you?" April asked. "You're living in your office with a hired man. Would you want to work from the moon?"

  Jeff shook his head. "I think Home is going to be the center of business and banking for a long time. The moon will have a lot of production, of things like food and heavy manufacturing. But shipbuilding and high tech needs zero G. I still want to be where the heavy action is, and be able to see people like Dave, and Irwin, and Larson face to face without taking a shuttle."

  "If we just want to see Heather we're welcome to stay with her," April pointed out. "She plans on moving periodically until they reach a depth where the rock is a shirt-sleeves comfortable temperature, and then they will spread out. I think I'll wait until they hit that depth before investing in anything. Otherwise she'll move away from me vertically anyway.

  "OK, that makes sense to me," Jeff agreed. "Do you want to do dinner tonight?" Jeff asked, which signaled he'd run out of anything to say on this topic.

  "If you don't mind my house guest tagging along. My neighbor Diana from Hawaii is here to get gene mods and I wanted to take her to the Fox and Hare."

  "We were just there," Jeff said surprised. "I thought you didn't want to go too often, because they write the owner's visits off and won't charge you?"

  "Our profits for the club are as healthy as what you are telling me Singh Technologies is experiencing. That, and none of the other owners seem to be showing any restraint with the surge in money pouring in. I can't feel too guilty to take my share. It's seems that's how they decide to take their dividend, instead up upping the cash payout."

  "Fine, let's do it then. You've said before she's a character. It'll be fun."

  * * *

  "A quiet banquette along the wall?" The maitre d', Detweiler, asked. He was appraising Jeff's lack of flashy clothing and a second guest this visit, correctly.

  "That would be perfect," April agreed. Detweiler didn't fool her. Most people would think him poker faced, but she'd seen the smile around his eyes even if his lips stayed straight. Her use of public appearances probably paled beside some of the shenanigans he saw, and was more effective, she hoped.

  Diana turned a few heads more than Jeff or herself, April noticed. It was getting to the point an Earthie stood out and caught people's eye as an oddity. The wave of immigration had slowed from sheer lack of capacity long enough for people to start to assimilate. People liked to fit in and some styles like hard soled shoes just made no sense in an environment that was all indoors by Earth standards.

  Diana was not oblivious. "Got a few stares," she said when they sat down, quietly for her.

  "Your blouse has buttons, and the shoes, although they aren't leather are still uncommon here. People tend to footies and what look like house slippers to you. And the floral print and the bright stripes on the shoes really stand out."

  "What's wrong with buttons?" Diana asked, fingering one thoughtfully.

  "Enough people work in zero G that the styles carry over," April explained. "Buttons gap when your clothing floats loose away from your body. You can put them closer together, but that has its problems too. The sort of cut that works in gravity doesn't even look nice in zero G, so they tend instead to stretch fabrics and elastic. If you get on a shuttle and loose a button, or any other small object, a lot of pilots would refuse to lift and charge you for the delay until it is found."

  "Gum up the works somewhere huh?" Diana figured out. "On Earth people would just keep their mouth shut and hope nobody noticed."

  At the look on April's face she said, "And so we are back to Earth Think I believe."

  "Exactly. You'd be playing games with your life, and those of everyone else. Spaceships are hard enough to build without making them button-proof. Not only fans and other moving things that need internal clearances, you have circuit boards and chips that can't have a small random object touch them. You'd have to add screens and ways to get to the screens and clean them. There would be a weight penalty and add hours of maintenance."

  "I have screens on my doors and windows at home," Diana said. "It doesn't seem burdensome."

  "Yes, but in a spaceship it isn't just the ventilation. Back home, do all your electrical appliances have screens and filters? Your TV and your computer? Printer and monitor? Your refrigerator? Your lighting fixtures? Because in zero G things float. The vents being on the bottom of your blender won't mean anything in zero G, because it has no bottom side any more. Down has no meaning. If there is a staple or paper clip or coin, they can float in and short out electrical contacts or circuit boards. Even a piece of broken off lead from a mechanical pencil. Jewelry can break and have rings and pins and stones float away. The little piece of plastic that held the price tag on your clothing, or a cap off a pen, or the little plastic closure for a bread bag can jam a motor or solenoid or get under the seal on a hatch."

  "No wonder you folks are paranoid," Diana admitted. "I had no idea. I'll stash the stuff with buttons away for my trip home, and look everything else over to make sure no little bits can come off. You know, stretchy stuff can be pretty unflattering for people my age, but I do have a few things with elastic waists."

  "You look very nicely trim and in shape for any age," Jeff insisted. "But, you'd be better off to sell your personal items before going home, rather than take them back."

  "If clothing with buttons isn't favored why would people buy them?" Diana asked. "At home I usually drop off old clothing I haven't worn in awhile for charity. It's not worth selling."

  "The freight cost to lift anything makes it worth selling," April assured her. "There's a couple people who keep an ad in 'What's Happening' to buy your used clothing. They'll buy it as a lot instead of piece by piece if you want, and some will buy your return allowance to fill the bags and drop them. They'll cut the buttoned clothing down and alter it, or sell the fabric. Some might even end up in the charity bin."


  "You have people who need charity?" Diana asked surprised.

  "Indeed we do. There's a fellow who conducts religious services for a small private group who organizes it. Pretty decent of him to volunteer some of his precious cubic for that. It pretty much leaves him without a living room," April said. "He could sell sleeping space and make money instead."

  "You realize that sounds crazy to me?" Diana asked.

  "You just told me you give clothing to charity," April said, confused.

  "Not the charity, the renting your living room for sleeping.. Where do these people go when they aren't sleeping? Do they share the bath and leave their things there in the day?" Diana demanded.

  "It depends on the landlord," April said. "There are storage lockers a couple places, but they tend to all be as full as living space now. When one comes open there is somebody standing there ready to grab it. If you see somebody every day with a duffle bag they probably sleep on a floor or in a hot slot and keep everything they own in the bag. Some of them go to the gym and pay for a day to use the shower. Some just go in the restroom at their work or one of the few public ones and do a hand bath."

  "I can't imagine living out of a bag like that," Diana admitted. "It wouldn't hold my shoes."

  "You made me remember something," Jeff said. "We recently hired crew for a ship, a big wet water, ocean going ship in the Pacific. The fellow doing our hiring mentioned he'd received a couple crew member's bags already, sent ahead as freight, because it's cheaper than what the airlines charge to carry it as luggage. So it's a similar thing for them down on Earth in their work culture. These aren't menials either. The jobs are considered pretty high end."

  "Interesting. I forget not everybody lives in big houses," Diana admitted.

  The server arrived to take their drink order. All the drinks were on a daily special card. Jeff ordered a mint vodka, and April a mug of beer.

  "We have an Australian amber tonight," the server said. "not too bitter and very smooth."

  "You've had that before?" Diana asked.

  "No, but we're still a bit behind on shipping luxury goods and some nights we don't have a choice of two beers. I'll take whatever we have," April said. "They are getting kegs again, but bottled beer is still too dear for shuttle space. The bottles you see. They're so heavy."

  "Silly me I thought this was just the specials and there were other varieties," Diana said.

  "The beer is still from Earth," Jeff told her. "We don't have brewing, yet. The vodka is from the moon and much easier to get. I have an interest in producing that, and so far we're keeping up with the demand."

  "I'll have the watermelon vodka," Diana decided. There were no prices on the drink card, and local had to be cheaper. She had no idea what things cost yet.

  The drink was surprisingly big. It had an actual slurry of watermelon and didn't appear to have extra sugar added, but it had a little garnish of actual melon rind. Jeff's drink had real mint leaves in it.

  "We've only had water melon for about a month now," Jeff said. "It's still pretty rare because the production is only a couple dozen a week. They are grown hydroponically and the racks to support them are rather interesting."

  "You grow them here on Home?" Diana asked shocked.

  "Heavens no! The cubic is too expensive to grow things here no matter how dense you pack it. They're grown at Central on the moon. The racks are vertical against the tunnel walls to avoid the expense of making them mobile to get at the melons when grown. They're too heavy to move easily and don't stack well at all," Jeff said.

  "The racks for other things like salads greens and turnips, radishes and cabbages are in flat racks stacked one on top of another," he illustrated with his hands. "When we need to get to the melons the racks are pushed into the center access aisle to open up room along the edge to get to the fixed melon racks. Nobody has figured out how to automate harvesting watermelons, yet. They only take about a half meter along the wall. It is some of our first mixed growth in the same cubic. We're going to try doing grape tomatoes along the edge of another tunnel too."

  "I had no idea," Diana said. "I assumed it was all lifted from Earth."

  "The moon is much cheaper from which to transport, because it take less reactive mass to lift things. Earth is such a deep gravity well it's always expensive, even with fusion power, and a lot of shuttles still get carried aloft with chemical fuels on a mother ship to be released. Of course with fusion power you can make chemical fuels cheaper than fossil fuels. It's a shame to burn them. Even methane. I imagine they'll stop burning it locally in time, it's just too valuable. With water as a source for reactive mass at least you are recycling it leaving Earth. Shooting it straight back where it came from."

  "I never thought of it that way before," Diana admitted.

  "We're getting more volatiles soon from regolith, and it appears we'll soon have an ice ball coming in more than annually from out system. Our next design for automated freight shuttles from the moon will use waste mass from processed regolith, the leftover stuff with the carbon and water and other valuables extracted, to bulk out the exhaust," Jeff said.

  "Everything here is so complicated," Diana said. "At home in my yard we clear an area for a garden, put down some plastic and plant. It pretty much grows on its own. Most of the time we don't even have to water it. You can easily get three cycles of growth and harvest in a year."

  "Some of our crops we'll get ten cycles a year," Jeff said. "But we are growing at higher pressure and concentrations of carbon dioxide than natural air on Earth. The temperature is controlled, and the light constant or cycled shorter for those crops that benefit from it. We've also experimenting with tuning our lights to specific wavelengths for different plants."

  "I'm just a gardener not a farmer," Diana said. "I know they grow a lot of stuff indoor in Europe, but food there is more expensive too. I know they import a lot of grain from places that can grow it outside."

  "Yes, grain is difficult. We can't grow wheat cheaper than importing flour. We'd like to try amaranth, but people who didn't grow up eating it balk at the flavor and texture. Rice is difficult and corn, corn takes so much room. And we don't have enough uses for the rest of the plant. We have a variety that grows to a little more than a meter and has four ears per plant, but it still isn't efficient enough. It wouldn't survive at all, outdoors in your garden in natural conditions. I suspect a lot of our plants are going to become specialized that way."

  "We are in a similar situation on Hawaii," Diana explained. "We have a larger population to feed than cheap ways of farming will support. There are better economic uses for the land, and aesthetic and political reasons to limit a lot of farming operations. Nick has mentioned fertilizer run-off is a limiting factor. But all of that that leaves us at the mercy of disruptions in shipping and political blackmail. A large part of the population can't pay for more expensive food, and a lot of the people who returned to the mainland or Asia were those who could have paid more."

  Their server asked if they'd like to see dinner menus and Jeff nodded yes.

  "So, you don't have to worry about how secure coms are now, so tell us what is happening in Hawaii," April demanded. "And how thick my caretaker Nick is involved in it, and if I have to worry that people will come kick down my doors looking for him."

  "You probably can go online and find out more than I know," Diana admitted. "Anytime I got too nosy about it Nick always said I couldn't be blamed for anything I didn't know about."

  "Nor spill your guts about it to others..." Jeff noted. When Diana looked upset he added, "Not even under duress." He really hadn't meant she'd betray Nick.

  "That too. But I have no idea what their full platform is. I don't even know how highly placed Nick is in the organization. At least he thinks well enough of me that he suggested about two months ago I should start planning a cruise or vacation someplace safer. He's honest enough I think he'd have told me if it was going to be one way for sure, so I could take some keepsakes. He talked about t
aking care of Ele-'ele like he expected me to come back."

  Jeff raised an eyebrow, but with his head turned to April, not Diana.

  "Her dog," April supplied. "He's huge, and it would be cruel to have him on Home."

  "I've only seen a dog on Home once," Jeff remembered. "One of those tiny things a visiting tourist woman carried around in the crook of her arm, like a fashion accessory."

  "I missed that," April said.

  "It was back before the revolution," Jeff said. "She was some kind of celebrity."

  They were provided the daily menu sheet. Diana looked irritated. "There's no prices. I didn't expect to mooch off you guys," she objected.

  "You are giving us valuable international intelligence," Jeff explained. "Information that affects Home's status with Earth, our company's prospects to do business there, and the security of April's personal property on the island. That is not mooching. In any case, they won't show April a priced menu. It is their pleasure to serve her and her guests. She's a partner in the enterprise."

  "Wooo... I've heard the expression, 'Your money is no good here.', but I've never actually seen it before," Diana said.

  "So glad to extend the envelope of your experience," April said, wryly.

  "Don't get all frosty on me, Kiddo. I'm not easy to impress, but that managed it."

  "I've known April longer than you, and she still surprises me, frequently," Jeff admitted.

  "OK," Diana acquiesced, making a show of reexamining the menu. "Thank you for dinner."

  "The pasta is quite good with any sauce," April suggested. "I particularly like the bacon cream sauce. The petite filet is melt in your mouth good."

  "A hunk of beef must be worth its weight in gold the way you are talking about freight costs!"

  "The filet is from the moon," April corrected her."

  "You're running cattle on the moon?" Diana asked unbelieving.