The center path was lined on both sides with small dome-like structures housing the hotels, restaurants, and other facilities used mostly by tourists and visitors. Some of the lunar residents also lived and worked here; most of them could be found in the mazes of rooms lining the corridors that led away from this cavernous place. Al and Simone approached one of these corridors and bounded lightly though it. The hall was soundless; Al heard nothing but Simone’s breathing and the muffled thud of their feet on the floor. They stopped before one door, opened it, and were met by a multilingual roar.
The large room they entered functioned as a recreation area, cafeteria, and meeting room. One group in a corner was eating; others were playing chess or sitting at tables piled high with computer runs. Al waved at Menachem Alon, a big Israeli who was explaining something in Arabic to Ahmed Maheib, a small slender engineer. Ahmed, in spite of his size, had a deep resonant voice which was solemnly overriding Menachem’s comments.
One had to speak at least four languages in order to socialize among these people. Most of the scientific work was done in Russian or English and everybody knew at least one; most spoke both. It was useful to know Chinese as well; although the Chinese tended to keep to themselves, they did exchange information with the others. Socializing was done in any language the parties could agree on. The more languages a person knew, the more friends he was likely to make and the more chance insights he might acquire into his own work. Al, in addition to a good command of Russian and French, had undergone hypno-training in German, Japanese, Chinese and Swahili, all of which he spoke with widely varying degrees of fluency. The hypnotic techniques were useful, but there was no substitute for frequent practice. Al, like most of the Americans, was occasionally at a disadvantage compared to the other scientists. He wondered sometimes how Tom Abijah must feel; the man from New Guinea had found no one who spoke his tribal tongue and was in danger of forgetting it altogether.
He and Simone sat down next to Menachem and Ahmed, who politely switched to French. The two had been discussing the one thing that was uppermost in the minds of all those on the moon; the starships under construction in lunar orbit.
Three of the huge ships were being built. Work on them had begun only five years before; it had taken three years of intensive negotiations before all the governments and industries involved had come to an agreement. Luckily, there had been little public resistance to the project. Anyone who was not excited by it was apathetic, as long as he did not have to suffer economically. Tradespeople and other workers saw the venture in more pragmatic terms. There were jobs to be had, and higher pay plus more vacation time for anyone who worked in orbit. The workers, with these incentives before them, had managed to arrive at agreements among those who were members of established unions, those who had joined newer unions in opposition to the old ones, and freelancers who belonged to neither group.
Some officials had wanted to wait until signals indicating the presence of habitable planets were received from the unmanned probes that had been sent out long before. But they had been won over by a group of astronomers who had presented a lecture on stellar evolution and the probabilities of habitable planets being within twenty-two light-years of the solar system. In addition, space travel, as opposed to local travel within the solar system, held an appeal for the more adventurous.
Fortunately, by the time the star ship designs had been ironed out and construction had begun, a signal was received from Epsilon Eridani, twelve light-years away, indicating the presence of a gas giant. Although this did not mean a habitable planet was present, it did mean that the system was worth a look. Other planets were undoubtedly circling the star. The news had been greeted with enthusiasm and some relief, then quickly forgotten by those uninvolved in the project. As it was now, Al thought, the project was sustained by the tradespeople’s desire for jobs and the fact that so much had already been spent that no one wanted to disband the project. It had at last acquired its own momentum, held up at times only by engineering problems and disputes among the workers about how many nationals of each country would be hired to build the ships. That debate had centered around whether or not the tiny but growing number of people claiming allegiance to no state should be counted as citizens of their birthplaces; it had been decided to consider them as a separate group. The most serious incident, which had resulted in a strike by technicians from India and the Soviet Union who wanted fewer Chinese on the project, had been overcome within a month.
Al forced his attention back to the conversation around him. Ahmed was expounding on a minor flaw, recently ironed out, in the engine of the starship design. The engines were nuclear-pulse models, fueled by frozen deuterium. The fuel itself would make up most of the body of the ship, being contained in a huge “snowball” about one thousand feet in diameter. The living quarters, attached to this large globe, would be inside a cylinder three hundred feet in diameter and one thousand feet long. At the end of this cylinder three smaller globes, each two hundred and fifty feet in diameter, would house engineering compartments; thrust units would be attached to these compartments.
The ships, Al thought, would resemble halves of barbells from a distance, with the large globular snowball reflecting images of stars from its metal surface. Each of the three ships would house at most three hundred passengers and it was expected that this population would increase to about two thousand during the journey.
For it would be a very long journey, perhaps a lifetime for many of those on board. The secret of faster-than-light travel still eluded them. Even though the ships could travel at thirty per cent of light speed, years might be spent in exploring Epsilon Eridani. After replacing the supply of deuterium, using the gas giant known to be there, the travelers might decide to go on rather than return. And those born on the ship might have no desire to come back to Earth, which would be for them only a name.
There would be so many possibilities on such a voyage, Al thought. While traveling at thirty per cent of light speed subjective time aboard ship would pass more slowly than time on Earth. Even if they returned, it would not be to the earth they had known. Although anti-aging shots were now being given to those in their fifties and there was talk of lifting restrictions altogether, those alive now might not live to see the ships return. If one went on the trip, he would have to assume, barring any exceptional circumstance, that he was cutting all personal ties with those on Earth.
“One of your brothers is working on the engine, is he not?” Ahmed said in English to Al. Al felt slightly irritated; even after all this time some of the personnel, especially newer ones, took care to address most of their social remarks to Americans in English. Some justified this on the ground that it was difficult to discuss certain concepts in their own languages, and that fluency in English was almost a necessity here, but others no doubt thought of the Americans as backward children. Not surprisingly, this kept the Americans less fluent in other tongues, thus feeding the prejudice. The Japanese suffered from a similar prejudice; it was widely believed that the Japanese learned other languages only reluctantly. Some of Al’s compatriots, annoyed with this state of affairs, had taken to speaking different languages among themselves.
“Mike did some work on it,” Al replied. Not much, as I recall, just a small design suggestion.”
“I have been thinking,” the engineer continued. “The engines on these ships might be capable of going much faster than anyone has yet anticipated. We shall not realize, possibly, how powerful they actually are until we are in space. We may exceed fifty per cent of the speed of light. I have been considering this, doing some calculations.”
“Everybody’s been doing calculations,” Menachem said, “and everybody’s coming to the same conclusion. Frankly, I don’t know if it’s because they really believe it to be the case, or because they’re hoping they might be able to return to an earth that hasn’t changed that much, that they’ll be able to get back sooner.” The big Israeli pulled at his red handlebar moustache thoughtful
ly. “Seems to me people should be satisfied if they get picked to go. We’re better off than those poor wonderful bastards that worked on the probes, or the plans for the probes, spending their whole lives on something when they might not live to see the results.”
Menachem, as usual, had been too blunt. No one among the scientists wanted to think about not being chosen to go. There was room for at most three hundred people per ship; room had to be allowed for an expanding population as little more than two thousand people could get along comfortably in the quarters. And not all of the nine hundred passengers would be chosen from the physicists, astrophysicists, selenologist, and engineers that dominated the lunar population. There would have to be crews for the ships, doctors, biologists, anthropologists, other specialists and perhaps a few simpler souls with a talent for mediating disputes and just getting along with people. Everyone knew that old-timers on the moon or Mars probably had a better chance than most. After all, they had at least proven they could get along in an environment different from that of Earth. But most of them would be left behind.
Choosing the specialists would not be the only problem. Every nation would want to be sure that the travelers represented a cross-section of Earth’s citizens. The silliest of the demands would probably be rejected. It would be almost impossible to get an exact representation of all nations. The committee which would make the selection, moreover, was composed of a fairly sensible group of scientists, psychologists, and others, with a sprinkling of politicians who could be outvoted and some literary and artistic people, who would select a small group of poets, writers, actors, and artists. Someone, Al could not remember who, had pointed out that this group would provide needed entertainment and cultural activity during the flight, as well as recording a different perspective on the journey and perhaps creating new artistic forms. There would be ample time to explore the tapes and microfiche books during the trip, and the voyagers might well need new pursuits created by those on board. The artists would also be able to take on technical tasks; most of them, because of the limitations on the number of people chosen, would be people who had some knowledge of scientific disciplines.
Given all this, Al thought acidly, it probably meant that both Menachem and Ahmed had a better chance of going on the trip than he himself did. And if they were looking for as many representatives of each ethnic group as possible, Tom Abijah had the best chance of all. Al found himself pondering how unfair all of this was, then forced himself to ignore the feeling. Ultimately, they would pick the best, they had to for anything this important. And anyone here on the moon was the cream of the crop. If I don’t measure up, it’s just too damned bad.
“What are you glaring at, chéri?” Simone murmured. Ahmed and Menachem, seeing that Al had dropped out of the conversation, had switched back to Arabic.
“I’m feeling ashamed of some idle thoughts.”
“You and these two, you are all alike.” Menachem glanced at Simone, lifted one bushy eyebrow, then turned back to Ahmed. “Whenever you are together, one of you always slips into a private world. I know it does not bother you, but I await the day when you three will be together and one of you does not lose himself in a reverie.”
“We’re just moody sons of bitches,” Menachem said. “You go ahead and ponder if you feel like it Al.” The big man stood up. “I’ve been doing too much pondering myself, I’m overdue for a workout and a turn in the centrifuge. You know, I was thirty pounds heavier before I came here. I don’t know how the hell I carried all that excess blubber around.”
“And even now,” Ahmed said, smiling, “if you were to return, you would most likely be crushed under your own weight.”
Menachem tried to take a friendly poke at the smaller man. He bobbed a few feet off the floor, nearly knocking over the table with his leg.
Al’s room was near the end of one of the underground corridors in a residential area. That section of the lunar city, newly built when Al had first arrived here years ago, had once been open to the rest of the complex, but the privacy of the residents had been disturbed by lost and confused tourists wandering into the area. Now, in addition to the standard locks on room doors, there was a door at the entrance to the section with a sign saying RESIDENTS ONLY in several languages. Eventually, Al supposed, that doorway would also be equipped with a lock, which could only be opened when a person’s thumbprint had been checked against those of people authorized to enter.
At the end of this hallway, just a few feet beyond Al’s room, there was a small sitting room with a large screen. The screen, with the aid of a camera on the surface, provided a view of the lunar plain and the steadily shining stars beyond.
Al had spent several evenings in the sitting room, or what passed for evenings inside the city which operated on a twenty-four hour cycle, oblivious to the two-week days and nights of the moon. He had gazed at those unwinking stars and told himself, I was meant to go there. Everything in my life has conspired to put me aboard one of those ships that hover around the moon, waiting to grow up and be loosed from their mother’s bonds. I must go.
Al was almost convinced that if he could observe the star ship engines in space, he might somehow find the elusive clues that would lead to the development of a star drive. If he could observe how certain materials behaved in space, if he could see what kinds of conditions must be considered firsthand— he had been approaching the problem by studying the behavior of space near certain types of dense materials. Chances were he could learn more by studying a neutron star or black hole at close range, at least as close as it was possible to get safely, than from years of work on Luna. One of the purposes of the journey was to work on a star drive, and it might be safer to carry out certain experiments in space rather than near inhabited worlds in the solar system.
Al’s rooms, like all living quarters on the moon, were small, making as efficient a use of space as possible. “Rooms” was actually too spacious a term; there were only two, and one of them was a closet-like bathroom with a plastic cocoon for a shower which he shared with the people next door. His living quarters, which he shared with Simone, consisted of a room with two small beds that were folded into the wall when not in use, two desk tops which could also be retracted, two folding chairs, two inflatable chairs, and a small table which stood in one corner with a metallic sculpture on it. The sculpture was a lunar scene taken from a novel by H. G. Wells; it depicted the Grand Lunar, head of an imaginary civilization of Selenites, on his throne. The Grand Lunar was surrounded by his over-specialized subjects, each holding the tools of his trade. A friend of Simone’s, Liu Ching, had created the sculpture. Liu Ching did not care, however, to have this fact generally known. The Chinese scientists frowned on the frivolous use of recreational time and Liu Ching had thought, not without reason, that they might regard this particular piece as a commentary on what they were doing here. The Chinese woman, like Al and Simone, had grown attached to the moon and hoped to be chosen for the exploratory space flight.
Liu Ching, like many of the Chinese specialists, walked a thin line. She could not afford to be rigid and dogmatic; those selecting the people who would go to the stars were not likely to select such personalities. Yet she could not alienate her more conservative colleagues here. She regularly attended self-criticism sessions and couched her discussions of her specialty, astrophysics, in careful language, aided by quotations from Mao where appropriate. She had voluntarily returned to China two years ago to work on a rural commune. According to what she had told Al and Simone later, that had been a boring time spent mostly in servicing the machines which did most of the farming.
Few people, in China or anywhere else, were engaged in agriculture now. This fact, combined with the movement of many Chinese to urban areas, the availability of more goods and services, and the freer exchange of ideas with other nations, had loosened Chinese attitudes considerably. That land now had its revisionists, dissenters, and skeptics, most of whom chose to remain in China, suffering only occasionally under fo
rced “re-education.” Practices such as self-criticism sessions were regarded as customs more than anything else; the quoting of Mao was ritualistic. Yet the Chinese still retained some Puritan attitudes, a willingness to work hard, a concern for their people as a whole, and a general seriousness of purpose. Those here on Luna, although generally more liberal than their compatriots on Earth, often kept to themselves and, during their time off, often helped to do some of the more tedious but necessary tasks here, not wanting to appear élitist or idle. As a result, the lunar cuisine, with the Chinese aiding the kitchen machines, had taken on a distinctly Chinese flavor.
Al knew that there were certain things one had to know if one was to get along in the international scientific community on the moon. One was that not everyone had to live in the same way, easy enough to accept as an abstract idea unless one was a fanatic; more difficult to accept when a person had to live with a widely varying group of people from day to day. Another was that as far as scientific work was concerned, everyone’s goals were pretty similar in spite of societal differences. This might produce a schism in the minds of some who came from more rigid societies, but humanity after all had long practice in devising different mental compartments in which to hold often contradictory ideas. As it turned out, those on the moon were more often in agreement than not. Al often thought that Luna, and those who went into space, would soon have a culture of their own quite different from any on Earth. How Earth, which regarded each national group in space as simply an extension of various national policies, would accept this, Al did not know. But he was sure that anyone or any group which could not successfully and peacefully deal with diversity was probably doomed.
Cloned Lives Page 25
