Bouncing Off the Moon

by David Gerrold

  "He rushes back to laboratory and invents Palmer tube. I explain. He slices solid-fuel rod of metallized hydrogen into little flat poker chips. Very thin. In between, he puts little polycarbonate separators, even thinner. Separating disks are made of several layers, perforated and corrugated and shaped to be strong on one side but weak on the other; crisscrossed with grooves so that weak side looks like business side of nail file. Strong side looks like mirror. Very clever, da?

  "Then Palmer gets even more clever idea. When he makes separator chips, he paints circumference with liquid conductor. When he makes rod, he glues insulated wires down each side. He makes whole thing in polyceramic tube, holds fuel rod like gun barrel.

  "Works like this. Turn on current, juice goes down wires, da? All the way to end of tube, to bare ends of wires—last separator in line has shiny side out, grooved side in. Conductive ring around separator chip completes circuit, ignites fuel chip in front of it. Creates ring-shaped ignition. Most efficient explosion. Fuel slice vaporizes, separator vaporizes—bing! Next separating disk in line is shiny side out, strong enough to protect next fuel slice—remember, separator only weak on grooved side, not shiny side; so when force of explosion hitsshiny side, next separator works like back wall of combustion chamber for just that moment. Da? So you get one little poof of thrust. Only one.

  "But explosion also heats ignition wires, melts insulation off—enough so that bare wires now touch next separator disk. If there is still current, that disk completes circuit and ignites fuel slice behind it—and whole process happens again. Fuel slice explodes and vaporizes separator disk that ignites it, but does not ignite next disk again. And just like before, next separator is back wall of combustion chamber and you get next little poof of thrust. And process starts again. Wires melt a little more, and if there is still current, next disk goes bing too. Everything happens very fast—bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing—like so.

  "As long as current flows through wire, disks blow off the end of the tube, one after other. Is like packing whole bunch of bullets in same barrel, but no bullets, only charges. When you burn enough fuel, you turn off current. Explosions stop. Thrust stops. Is beautiful clever, da? Da?

  "But firing tubes like this—bing, bing, bing, bing, bing—makes very unpleasant pulsing effect. Not a fun ride. Like sitting on machine gun. Not a problem. You bundle tubes together. Tubes not work in sync, all the little bing-bings average out. Instead of machine-gun feeling, you get corrugated road. More tubes, more average, more smooth—but smooth not needed for cargo, packages don't complain, so is still rough ride, but tolerable, da? Never mind. We get there. Palmer bundles guarantee delivery. Is simple brute-force brilliant. If one tube in bundle fails, no problem; others make up difference. Thrust monitor in bundle manages everything. You need this much thrust? Fire tubes until. Da!

  "Here is more brilliance. Palmer tubes can be any size. As thin as paper clip, as thick as elephant leg—we have elephant on Luna, you know, baby female; you must come to our zoo, see baby elephant bounce—much funny. Anyway, Palmer tubes and Palmer bundles can be made all sizes. Use different size bundles of tubes for all different purposes. Heavy lifting, braking, steering, attitude adjustment, lots of useful boost. Launch to orbit from Luna or Mars. Very efficient. Bring asteroids home for mining. Deliver cargo pods anywhere. Fling them off Line, steer them to destination, brake to match orbit.

  "This is why Palmer tube is so brilliant. Volume manufacture makes space travel cheap. Palmer tubes as easy to make as pencils. Put in red goop here, blue goop there, black goop over there, run the machine, stack the firing tubes here. Bundle together, plug in timing caps and thrust monitor. Da? Very cheap. You can put three sets of boosters and a thrust monitor on a pod for less than a thousand plastic-dollars. And whatever part of tubes are left over at destination can be used for other things.

  "You know story of Crazyman Tucker? He lived in old cargo pod. Very nice pod too. Much fancy. He collected unburned ends of tubes for years, he finally bundle them into big cluster, launch his pod into Lunar orbit. Another cluster of tubes sends him off to rendezvous with Whirlaway rock. He almost makes it too. What some people won't do to avoid export taxes, da? But rescue costs more than taxes. So he lose entire fortune anyway. He should have used Palmer tubes for more mining. Get more rich. But he say, 'What good is money on Luna? Nothing to do but throw rocks at tin cans. And you have to bring your own rocks.' Is very forbidding planet. But you will like, I promise. I teach you to fly at Heinlein Dome. You will have so much fun, you will never want to leave."

  At that, Douglas spoke up. "Thank you, Alexei. but we're going out to a colony."

  "I know that, gospodin," said Alexei. "But if you don't get a bid, you are welcome on Luna. I promise."

  "We have an insured contract for a colony placement," said Mickey. "And with all the money you say we've earned, we should be able to buy our way onto the next outbound ship."

  Alexei grinned. "I will miss you, Mikhail. And if you change mind and decide not to go, I will enjoy not missing you even more." His PITA beeped then. "Oops—here we go. Everybody hold on tight, please."

  CHOICES

  Mickey knew a lot about the colonies; working as an elevator attendant, he'd met a lot of outbound colonists. And Alexei knew most of the starship crews; he knew all the best gossip about the different worlds.

  "You stay away from both Rand and Hubbard," Alexei warned. "Not very happy worlds. Not at all. The sociometrics don't work. Not like promised. The Randies had to turn themselves into a cult. The Hubbers had to invoke totalitarian control—or was it the other way around?" He scratched his head. "No matter. I tell you how bad it is—the brightliner crews won't go dirtside anymore."

  "I heard they weren't allowed to," said Mickey. "It's prohibited now. So they can't report back."

  "That too," agreed Alexei. "The smart thing is, stay away from colonies founded on political or religious ideology."

  Douglas nodded. "I'd already figured that out." He turned his clipboard around so we could all see it. Half the names on it were already crossed out.

  We'd taken time to sleep and eat and give ourselves deodorant sponge baths before we got too smelly. I helped wash Stinky when he finally woke up, and even he smelled tolerable when we were done.

  I told Stinky that we were in the cargo pod, but apparently it didn't sink in, because midway through the breakfast, he started complaining. "How come we don't have a real bathroom? How come we can't go to the restaurant to eat? When are we gonna get there? I thought you said we'd be there when we woke up. How come we don't have any real beds?"

  Oops.

  So Douglas and I told him that we were hiding in the baggage compartment, because we were playing hide-and-seek, so Howard-The-Lawyer wouldn't find us. That he understood immediately. And it was a lot easier than trying to explain Whirlaway to him.

  We endured two more course changes—Stinky thought they were fun—and then we finally settled down for a family meeting about where we were going.

  Very quickly, we decided that if any one of us had a strong objection to a specific world, we'd take it off the list. Mickey immediately vetoed Promised Land, New Canaan, and Allah. "They're all orthodox," he explained. "You can immigrate only if you convert."

  Douglas was already checking them off the list. "The sociometrics for religious colonies aren't good anyway. Long-term instability, almost always leading to schisms, holy wars, revolutions, and pogroms."

  "So let's just eliminate all of the ones with sociometric liabilities," I said.

  "They all have sociometric liabilities," said Mickey. "We have to consider them each on their own merits and then decide what set of problems we're willing to take on."

  Douglas agreed. "You want to do this alphabetically?"

  "Urn, wait a minute—please?" They both looked at me. "Maybe we should make a list of things that we want. That way we'll have something to measure each planet against. Then we can give each colony a score, and th
at way we can—what's the word?—prioritize them."

  Mickey and Douglas exchanged glances, nodded. "Sounds like a plan."

  Douglas said, "You start, Chig. What do you want?"

  The picture in my head was Mexico. The Baja coast. Our one short day at the beach. A bright blue sky over a wide emerald sea. Yellow sand and tall green forests. And wind—breezes that smelled good. Real flowers.

  But first things first. "Normal gravity," I said.

  "That's good thinking," said Mickey. "Most people don't think about gravity enough. Most people can handle a ten or fifteen percent boost. It's like gaining five or ten kilos. But it's extra stress on the heart, on the feet, on the bones; there's a higher risk of injury; and you age faster, you sag more. Also, your life expectancy is reduced."

  Douglas made a note. "Gravity, that's important. We'll give that one a lot of weight." And then he added, "Not just gravity, we have to think about the whole planet. What kind of star does it circle? What color is the light? How long is the year? How severe are the seasons? What's the atmosphere like, what kind of weather does it have? How long are the days? Is the air breathable? Or will it be someday? What kind of terraforming is possible?"

  And as he said that, all my visions of a tropical beach disappeared. We weren't going to Hawaii. We were going to Mars. Barren red rock, stretching off in all directions. Clusters of domes hiding beneath angling solar panels. Antennas sprouting like needles. Storage tanks huddling against the ground to withstand the enormous winds and dust storms. Agriculture domes. Tubes snaking from one place to the other because the atmosphere was too thin to breathe. Long ugly days. Cold dark nights.

  Tube-town again.

  Only this time, uglier than ever. Because there wouldn't be anyplace else to go.

  I knew what kind of planet we had jumped off. I was just beginning to realize what we might have to jump onto …

  Douglas must have seen the look on my face. He asked, "Chigger?"

  "I want a colony that has an outdoors," I said. "Breathable air. I want to go outside."

  "Mmm," said Mickey, frowning. "That does limit our options."

  "I don't care," I said. "I don't want to live in a tube anymore."

  "Nobody does. But sometimes that's all there is."

  "I don't care. That's what I want."

  "Would you accept a world that had garden domes? I hear some of them can be very nice."

  Alexei spoke up then. "We have garden domes on Luna. Very pretty. We put a dome over a crater and fill it with air. We bring in manure and water, seeds and insects, pretty soon we have garden. Well, not pretty soon. Sometimes it takes twenty years to get garden dome going. But for much people, garden dome is all the outdoors they need."

  I shook my head. "Maybe that's okay for Loonies. It's not okay for me. I want a real sky."

  Douglas made a note on his clipboard. "Outdoors. Very important."

  Mickey didn't look happy about that, but he didn't argue it either. He said, "There are a couple of other things we need to consider. Where we can live, what kind of work we'll have to do, what kinds of laws there are—y'know, every colony has its own idea of the way things should be. What you can believe, where you can live, who can marry who … Stuff like that."

  Douglas looked up. "I hadn't thought about that."

  "Well, we have to." He added, "There are some places that won't let us keep custody of Bobby. You'd better put that at the top of your list. In fact, we'd better limit ourselves to places that recognize 'full faith and credit' of other places' laws. Otherwise, Judge Griffith's custody rulings could be set aside by anyone who chooses to file a 'writ of common interest.' "

  Douglas frowned, but wrote. He stopped, looked across at Mickey. "You're trying to make a point, aren't you?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Go on."

  "I think we should limit ourselves to signatories to the Covenant of Rights."

  Douglas didn't say anything to that. I could tell he was thinking it over. He didn't like the idea, I knew that much, but he could see the point.

  It wasn't that we disagreed with the U.N. Covenant of Rights. Not in principle, at least. But back home, there were a lot of people who said the Covenant was a recipe for anarchy or totalitarianism—or both at the same time. So we had never ratified it.

  The Covenant recognized the basic rights of all people—that every human being was entitled to equal access to opportunity and equal protection under the law. That all people were entitled to freedom of belief, freedom of expression, freedom of spirit. That all people were entitled to access to food and water and air, access to education, access to justice. And most important, that all people were entitled to equal representation in their government. And that no government had the right, authority, or power to restrict or infringe or deny those freedoms. And so on. It was pretty dangerous stuff.

  Some of the folks back in tube-town said that the only way all those freedoms could be guaranteed equally would be to establish a totalitarian dictatorship. Then no one would have any freedom, but we would all be equal. Other people said that if we signed the Covenant, it would mean we'd have to repeal half our laws, and our civilization would break down. They said that men and women would have to share the same toilets and that rich people would have to sleep under bridges with poor people and everybody would have to share all their property so nobody had more than anybody else. And besides, only the One-Worlders wanted us to sign it because that would be another step toward ceding our independence to the U.N. And once there was a world government in place, the rest of the world would loot our economy. And so on.

  But the way it looked now, it didn't really matter after all. The last news we'd heard, nobody had an economy anymore.

  Douglas said, "I know you mean well, Mickey, but I'm not comfortable with the Covenant of Rights. It sounds like collectivism."

  Mickey looked at him expectantly. So did Alexei.

  "I mean, you can't just let people have rights without controls. You get a breakdown of society. You get corruption and immorality and fraud. The system breaks down, a little bit at a time. You get multi-generation welfare families, and parasites feeding at the public trough. You get teener-gangs and disaffected subcultures and dysfunctionals of all kinds. You get riots and crime and … and immorality. All kinds of degeneracy. You have to have some limits on what people can do; otherwise, it all erodes away and eventually falls apart." He gestured vaguely behind himself. "I mean, all you have to do is look at what's happening back there on Earth."

  Mickey replied, "I could just as easily argue the opposite side of it, Doug—that the meltdown is a result of too many oppressive controls."

  "I don't think so—"

  "Well, then let me put it to you another way. Do you want a place where you and I can stay together? Only a Covenant world will guarantee that. None of the others. If they haven't signed the Covenant, there's no evidence that they're committed to anyone's rights."

  Douglas sighed in exasperation. "Y'know, back in Texas, that kind of talk would be subversive."

  There was a long uncomfortable silence at that. Mickey and Alexei exchanged a glance, waiting.

  Douglas looked from one to the other. I could see he was struggling with it, trying to wrap his head around a whole new idea. Finally, he said, "Things really are different out here, aren't they?"

  "Yeah," said Mickey. "They are."

  Douglas sighed. He hated losing arguments. "All right." He scribbled something on his clipboard. "Mickey wants a Covenant world. Very important."

  MONKEYS

  There was a lot more than that too. I never realized there was so much stuff to consider.

  Like language, f'rinstance. What if the perfect colony was one where no one spoke Spanglish? We'd have to spend six months just learning to speak French or some other weird tongue, before we could begin to function like real people.

  And skin color. We didn't think of ourselves as racist, or anything like that, but we all wanted to go to a plac
e where we looked pretty much like everybody else, because we wanted to fit in.

  And food. That one was real important—especially after eating a few of those damn MREs. On some worlds, they grew their protein in big vats of slime. On others, they farmed insects. By comparison, even pickled mongoose sounded appetizing.

  Both Douglas and Mickey had a lot of information in their clipboards about all the different colony worlds, so we spent a lot of time talking about each one and scoring it on all the different things that were important to us. We crossed off some colonies immediately, with almost no discussion at all. Others, we talked about for an hour or more. I hadn't realized there were so many different kinds of colony worlds.

  Other than that, we napped and crapped—and got slapped into the aft bulkhead every time there was a course change. I can't say I ever got used to them; they were all uncomfortable; but at least I got smart enough to take a lot of deep breaths whenever Alexei's PITA beeped.

  Every so often, we'd climb around to one side or the other, to peek out one of the little windows, hoping to catch sight of either the Earth or the moon. We never did get a real good look at the moon; we were angled wrong, coming around behind the dark side, trying to catch up to it; but once we got a spectacular view of the crescent Earth. It was the size of a basketball held at arm's length—and it looked so big and so small, both at the same time, it was scary. And it was so bright it made my eyes water. It gave me a funny feeling inside to know that we would never go back.

  We'd never see Mom or Dad again either. And that felt strange too. Because I didn't feel anything for them, just gray inside. Like I didn't know what to feel. Maybe I'd feel it later. I just didn't know. I wondered if Douglas felt the same way—or if he was still so confused about his feelings for Mickey that he didn't have room for any other kind of feelings.