Dead Men Flying

by Bill Patterson

  Duane replied, “Well, we had a nice long talk about that with McCrary on the Moon. He was able to demonstrate that an asteroid with a high metal content would conduct the welding heat away far too quickly, and any bond that formed would not be strong enough nor deep enough to resist the steam pressure from the inside. 'Did you want your molten asteroid to go whooshing away on a huge cloud of steam?' he asked, and that image was enough for us to look for an alternative.”

  “But this, man, I don't know.”

  “Ever done any glass blowing? Same concept, just on a massive scale. The first gas we're going to blow into this mother is going to be hydrogen, cracked from the water of the comet. We're going to use that to inflate the asteroid.”

  “Wait. Hydrogen? Isn't that dangerous?”

  “Not if it's the only gas in there. If we inflate with oxygen, then the iron will immediately rust, and we really don't want that to happen. Not for aesthetic reasons, but because we don't want the oxygen to be bound with the iron.”

  “But you put in oxygen eventually,” said Harlan.

  “Yeah, when the iron cools down. But first, we blow in actual steam but laced with potassium nitrate and iron phosphate.”

  “Ah!” said Harlan. “I was wondering how you were going to protect the surface. You're going to blue it like a rifle barrel.”

  “Right.”

  “But where did you get the potassium nitrate? It's not like there's huge deposits of bat guano around.”

  Duane laughed at the joke. “You'd be surprised at what we've got laying around here. You know about the KREEP material, right?”

  “It's that stuff the Moon sent up here. There's some giant furnace going in a cargo hold, something about making laser crystals.”

  “Correct. The K is for potassium, and the P is for phosphorous. Now, they could have been after us to collect all of our urine for the urea and done chemical wizardry to bond it to the potassium, but Jeff had a better idea.”

  Harlan pulled himself back to an optimal position in front of the monitor. “Damn airco keeps blowing me out of position. How can you stand microgravity?”

  Duane stretched hugely and offhandedly spun himself upside down. “I love it. I feel like a new man.”

  “Go back the right way,” said Harlan. “I feel like I'm gonna barf if I have to talk to someone who's upside down for long.”

  Duane lightly tapped a stanchion and rotated back to the same orientation as Harlan. “Anyway, Jeff figured, we have to decant you guys anyway, why not scavenge the liquid nitrogen your hibernation cells were using? So he siphoned it off, about fifteen hundred liters of it, and somehow reacted it with potassium and, voila, potassium nitrate. The iron phosphate was formed out of its elements the same way.”

  “You guys are a bunch of wizards. Fine, we get the inside of the Perseus blued up...”

  “Only the front end,” said Duane. “I hear we're only going to occupy the front half or so.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “The commanders haven't told us why. I suspect it's for the same reason that the Burroughs and the Bradbury have their front half as living space.”

  “But that's because of the engines and all of the hibernation cells,” said Harlan. “You've got to put them somewhere, and it was a lot easier to detach the front half when you guys were spinning in the array.”

  “That's true. Still, I suspect that we're going to be doing something with the back end, otherwise, why drag it around? How's the mirror placement going?”

  Harlan tapped the monitor. “Everything's so slow in space. It seems to be going fine. Nobody's saying much on the radio, or else it's all low-powered and we're just not picking it up.”

  “Both. You don't want to be doing too much chattering when you're spacewalking.”

  “So, when do you think we're going to start heading home?” asked Harlan. “I would think you guys would be climbing the walls to get going.”

  “Got no clue. Have to heat up the asteroid first. Then blow the bubble. Then blue it, then cool it, then fill it with air. Then figure out how to outfit it. Do we build decks, or do we just operate on the inside surface? Go for wide-scale farming, or do we just extend our hydroponics? I wouldn't be surprised if we're still here in a year. But I do know the Commanders want to get going soon. We can always outfit on the way home. Give us something to do.”

  “There is that. Well, I think they're just about done out there. I better get back to my work, or Jeff's going to beat me with a pipe when he gets back in.”

  “Thanks for the chat, Harlan. See you around.”

  ***

  Jeff was very carefully setting the attitude adjustment system on the mirrors. It was a funny thing. The mirrors were made of some pretty light stuff—thin plastic sheeting, sprayed aluminum, and something akin to Styrofoam to help keep its shape. When it opened to the sun, and the rays of that distant star bounced off of the cylindrical mirror onto the surface of the slowly rotating asteroid, heating it up. But that same reflection would rob a bit of the momentum from the rebounding photons, accelerating the mirrors away from the asteroid. Thus, the need for constant correction to hold the mirrors in the most effective position.

  “Test attitude thruster fifteen,” he said.

  “Fifteen, tenth-second burst,” said Mickey. A sudden bloom of cold oxygen gas flared briefly, exerting a slight push on this section of the mirror.

  Next to him, another crewmember tested another mirror thruster, and so on down the line. Satisfied, Jeff pulled back a hundred meters and awaited pickup by Lima Donnelly, who was adamant about learning to fly a broomstick. He had some natural aptitude, enough to make it a good use of his time.

  The mirror was ready for the final positioning. Lima flew all the crew back to the marshaling area, and Jeff took roll, accounting for everyone. Jeff switched radio channels to the one connecting him to Ragesh Puna on the Bradbury.

  “Jeff here. We’re ready for final positioning. Request permission to turn on the barbecue.”

  Ragesh snorted and relayed the request over to Commander Standish, who bounced it up to Commander Smithson. Approval tripped down the chain in reverse.

  “You are clear for final positioning and focusing.”

  “Mickey, you heard the man. All attitude thrusters, five second burst, then swivel them one eighty for the braking pulse.”

  “Five second then reciprocal on your orders, Jeff. In three, two, one, firing.” All along both half-segments of the mirror, brief clouds of oxygen bloomed, then the rockets turned around. The mirror crept closer to the asteroid, already noticeably brighter on the side away from the sun than the nominally sunlit side.

  “Three second retro, Mickey, go,” said Jeff. The thrusters allowed pressurized oxygen to escape, slowing the mirrors. On the asteroid, the brightness acquired upper and lower borders, which slowly crept towards the center of the dark side. Jeff watched critically as the focus narrowed. Eventually, the mirror overshot its optimal distance, and the bright patch began to defocus.

  “Two point five, Mickey, go! Then another one-eighty and ready a point five.”

  “Firing.”

  The optimal patch was forming again, but Jeff was ready. Mickey performed the final firing, then engaged the range-finding program that would keep the mirror at this exact distance from the surface of the asteroid.

  “And now we wait,” said Jeff. “What does the bolometer read?”

  “One hundred and seventy-three Kelvin,” said Mickey. “I'll set an alarm when we get to fifteen hundred Kelvin.”

  “Good, right below the melting point. All right, everyone, great job. Now, let's go have a food bar.”

  A chorus of groans greeted him. The iron rations were famous for their full nutrition labeling and their complete lack of taste.

  “I know you love them, but I've been promised some tomatoes out of hydroponics. So, we're going to have some excellent salads to keep the innards moving.”

  There was a weak cheer at that. The zero-gee
toilets, even one hundred and twenty years after the first man in space, still left a lot to be desired.

  Slow Cooking

  Aboard 'Eighty-Two', June 7 2084, 0753 GMT

  The crew was exhausted, so the Commanders decreed a two-day holiday. Shifts still had to be manned, but all other work was to be suspended. Many of the men elected to sleep in. Others just read some of the ships' ebooks. A few stared out at the stars or wrote letters home to be broadcast to the Moon then to Earth.

  UNSOC and JPL still maintained a strict quarantine with the Expedition, but news still filtered up, courtesy of McCrary and the crew of the Collins.

  “Heh. This is a good one,” said Mickey as he wandered through some of the periodicals that came in via photophone. “You can always rely on the British tabloids to go for the weird and wacky.”

  “What are they accusing us of doing this time?” asked Scott, who was one meter above him and floating belly-side down to the deck.

  “Says we are going to crash Eighty-two into the Pacific off the coast of North Korea to wipe out the sixth generation of the Kim family. Can you imagine?”

  “Yes. Yes, I could. The danger with spreading rumors like that is if a chunk of the Moon actually does that, then the Kims will try to go to war again. I still don't understand why their people haven't thrown them out yet.”

  “They are deities,” said Mickey. “Generation after generation has been raised and taught to revere them as gods. Kind of hard to revolt against that.”

  “The world has gone crazy,” said Scott. “Anything else in the tabs?”

  “Um. Says here we're cloning women up here. Something to do with gene surgery—take out the Y chromosome, fuse in another X, and voila, woman. We're on the back side of Mars and doing this, remember. All that stuff we're doing that can be seen from Earth, like flying Eighty-two across the sky? No—that's not us, it's aliens who are doing some kind of master solar system reengineering. We're in the caves of Mars, breeding the perfect woman in huge numbers, and we're going to return to Earth and flood the market with perfect women. Heh—'totally pliant to men, gene-surgery has removed their vocal cords and trimmed back their frontal lobes'——I can't take this anymore—I can feel my brain cells dying off just reading this crap.”

  Scott laughed at him. “Serves you right. Why do you do it?”

  “Page Three Girls.”

  “You've got to be kidding,” said Scott.

  “And they have full coverage of football.”

  “What? Oh, you mean soccer,” said Scott. “I thought you meant real football. What real men play.”

  “Bullshit, you 'murican. Real men play rugby,” retorted Mickey.

  “Stupid men play rugby,” said Scott.

  “I didn't call a holiday so people could fight,” said Commander Smithson, stepping into the room.

  “We're not fighting, we go after each other like this all the time,” said Scott. “We haven't moved an inch.”

  “I can see that. Your voices carry, though,” said Roger.

  “Sorry, sir,” said Mickey. “We'll keep it down to a dull roar.”

  “When do we get to see the women?” asked Scott.

  “What women?” asked Roger.

  “The perfect, docile, brainless, mute women that Mickey here says you're raising on the back side of Mars.” Scott leered at nothing in particular. “Since we're doing gene surgery to make them, I'd like to put in a custom order.”

  “I thought you were married,” said Roger.

  “Oh, I am, I am. But a man can dream...”

  “You guys are totally nuts.”

  “No we aren't,” said Mickey. “The New News of the World says we're doing it, right here on page two.” He flashed his screen up on the big monitor. Of course, pages two and three displayed side by side.

  “Come on, Mickey, that girl is young enough to be your daughter.”

  “Oh, is there a woman in the paper?” asked Mickey. The Commander was reading the left side of the monitor and laughing.

  “I can't believe people get paid to put out this fiction,” said Roger. “Maybe I can join them under a pseudonym.”

  “No, I already asked,” said Mickey. “That was when we still had a link to Earth. Although,” he mused, running his hand through his hair, “the link was handled by UNSOC. I bet Subby stole my idea and is minting money with it from some cave in the Afghani mountains.”

  Roger laughed and kicked off the wall. “Thanks for the laugh, you two. No vocal cords. My wife would still dent my head with a pan.”

  ***

  The holiday was the best possible thing that could have happened to the crew, short of magically transporting them back to their own beds on Earth. Perseus had a small explosion on its surface. A constant rain of cosmic dust over the years had covered over a small collection of ices with a concretation of stones, more ice, and some kind of organic goo common to asteroids that spend long periods outside of Jupiter's orbit. When the heat of the reflected sun penetrated to the ices, they sublimated rapidly, forming a pocket of high pressure gas. The concretation held the pressure in, until a breath of oxygen from a thruster happened to touch it. The organic goo momentarily caught fire, losing tensile strength as it burned. This allowed the gas to burst forth. Fortunately, because of the holiday, all crew were inside and safe from the sudden cloud of stones that sleeted through the usual marshalling area.

  “So, what do you think?” asked Commander Smithson. “Do you think we should send a drone across Perseus, spraying oxygen on it? Do you think there are more of these pockets?”

  Benjamin scratched his head. “I haven't the foggiest idea. Personally, I'd ask some of those science guys on Collins. I'm just the astrogator because I have the math. I don't have some degree in astronomy or planetology.”

  “Good idea—I'll push it down the photophone. We can give them the latest temperature data and ask how long before we should start inflation, too.”

  “Better hurry, sir. We're going into superior conjunction with the Earth—we're on the far side of the Sun from Earth. In about three days, nothing is going to go through for the next couple of weeks.”

  The photophone was working well, despite the enormous distance between the sender and receiver. The only problem was with the signal delay, now up to thirty-five minutes. Fortunately, most of the questions and answers were transmitted in compressed form, so vast quantities of information filled the space between the Moon and the Expedition. But still, conversation suffered so greatly that nobody 'talked' anymore. Instead, long video monologs were the rule of the day.

  Roger was just finishing recording his monologue when Jeff stuck his head in. “Ask them to give me a full account of the thorium fuel cycle, please. I want to run an independent check.”

  Roger included the request, encrypted the video, and sent it to Mickey to stuff down the pipe.

  They got the answer within three hours. Two days later, the information superhighway to Earth closed its doors for two weeks.

  ***

  “Come in, Jeff,” said Roger. “Close the door.”

  “Uh-oh,” said Jeff. “Am I getting fired?”

  “Hardly,” chuckled Roger. “I just wanted to know why you wanted to know about the thorium fuel cycle.”

  “I am going to be charitable and say that I like and respect Duane because of all the time we've spent together. So, if he tells me X, I'll tend to believe him.”

  “Yeeesss,” said Roger. “Go on.”

  “But Ivan is a different matter. It has nothing to do with his nationality, but everything to do with his knowledge of ancient nuclear design. Frankly, if we hadn't needed him for moving Eighty-two, I'd never have agreed to revive him.”

  “So, what's the problem? I understand the reactor has been removed from Eighty-two, and the fissiles salvaged. The actinic waste is being burned in the thorium reactors now.”

  “All true, and yes, he's been a major contributor. But there's something off about that man,” said Jeff. “I j
ust get the feeling that something's just not adding up.”

  “So you ask for the fuel cycle because?”

  “I know you're going to think I’m nuts, sir, but I've been looking over the logs of the reactor operations on our way out. Pretty standard, you might say. Thorium is not the fuel, but it's the precursor to the fuel. It's like crude oil. You can't do much with it right out of the ground, but if you refine it, you get gasoline and such. We take thorium, react it with fluorine, and put it in the reactor. It floats around in there. While it's in the reaction chamber, it absorbs a neutron and becomes protactinium. We take out the protactinium. Then, about a month later, it decays and becomes uranium-233.

  “You could leave the protactium in there, and a lot of designs do just that, but we don't, and I don't understand why. The protactinium would suck up another neutron and then become the wrong kind of uranium, 234, I think, and we can't run the reactor on 234, but it does make the fuel more dangerous to handle. I still don't know why we'd want to handle the fuel anyway—the chemical processor module is supposed to do all that, and it's sealed.”

  “If you say so. Reactor physics aren't my bag. This is why we woke up those four when we were moving Eighty-two. Still, I don't see the problem.”

  “Like I say, I've been looking over the reactor logs. I know about how much thorium we'd normally use for the entire mission. Collins shipped up that much before The Event. Afterward, they started shipping up a hell of a lot more. Our original mission was for something like four years. Now it's a bit longer, true, but there's no reason to be getting ten times the amount of thorium than we need. That amount of energy would vaporize all of Eighty-two and about half of Perseus, too. I don't see any reason to have that stuff hanging around.”

  “Okay. You tell me what it's all for.”

  “Bombs. You are loading up with bombs. Why? I have no idea. Well, I actually have a couple of ideas, but they're all crazy.”

  Roger looked up at the ceiling. “Why don't you tell me some of these ideas. I'll let you know what I think of them.”